I’ve lately been experiencing something approaching depression regarding the prospect of meaningful communication between human beings. Even writing these sentences is something of a painful act, since what I’m feeling isn’t “depression” but some kind of disheartening feeling, and therefore just seeing the word “depression” depresses me further: I can’t even adequately express my frustration with my inability to express myself.
This isn’t meant to be a diary entry, but rather an entry into the concept of language. In my “melodramatic linguistic ennui” (best I could do) I have this past week broken down and paid $30.00 for Richard Rorty’s “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”. In his essay “The Contingency of Language” Rorty discusses language in a way that very much appeals to me. Rorty says that while many mistakenly believe that language can “fit the world” in a Platonic way that is representative of a deeper world of truth, still others make the mistake the Romantics made in rebelling against this hyper-rationalist, scientific worldview. According to Rorty, the Romantics claimed that words don’t represent an outward reality but rather are expressive of the individual. An individual can use language to create himself, perhaps most successfully through art, and in this sense language an artist uses to express himself accurately represents his inner world.
In a conclusion I find particularly compelling, Rorty finds fault with both the Platonic and the Romantic approach to language. Language doesn’t represent anything in a one-to-one correspondence, be it internal or external. Language is just a bunch of noises we emit that are somehow useful in our lives. Every sound is contingent on a host of variable factors, and nothing reflects anything solid.
I suppose the question I’ve been asking of late, is just how useful language can be when it is so ethereal and lacking solidity. One of the things I will always remember about my father is something he said to me along these lines about ten years ago. We were talking in the kitchen, probably washing dishes or making sandwiches. I forget how the topic came up, but my dad told me that he had no words to describe what he was feeling at that moment. He said he wasn’t happy, he wasn’t sad, and he really had no words that exactly summed up what he felt standing in the kitchen at that moment in time.
This concept shocked me at the time, this idea that we live in a sea of emotions that is untamed by language. Even then, it had the effect of making me feel very alone. I could not in any way know what my dad was feeling at that moment if he could not express it, and because of this I felt a tangible distance suddenly appear in our conversation there in the kitchen. I realized I would never truly know my dad, nor he me, and in a larger sense, we’ll never know anyone ever. My words, gestures, movements, none of these things are really me- they are just my clumsy attempts at expressing myself.
I think I have a self- I don’t buy the notion that we have no existence outside of language. But this self that I have, I have no way of expressing it in a way that satisfies the deep need for communication and understanding. I don’t claim to be forging new ground here. I have my own internal critic rolling his eyes and chastising me: “Get on with it, mate.” Yet for some reason, the gulf looms large of late.
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Forgive what I suspect will be the lackluster articulation to follow (I am at work presently).
We are having a strange synchronicity of sorts, because I had the same thought last night around five or six… I started this inner monologue in the hypothetical situation that someone asked me how I was feeling at the moment, and the further hypothetical that I would be honest with them. The word that first popped in my mind was ‘depressed’ but then the implications of the word felt entirely wrong. I have been depressed, I know what it means and what I was feeling was not depression. I mean there was no pressing matter to make me feel what I was feeling… and it was not quite ennui. It was not sadness either, because I have mentioned before I find comfort in sadness so how does one describe an event that is sad and pleasurable and defining in a way?
I really should delve into reading William James… I know he would have a lot to say about the psychology of the words we use. I have been reading a lot on linguisitic philosophy lately, some of it is sticking in my head, but it is very intricate, and every philosopher adds his own jargon and it really becomes harder than it probably should be.
Let’s stick with Wittgenstein’s language games. Let’s take them as literal, that we participate in games and it is not so much the words that bear the meaning but the context with which we place them as according to the rules of an implicit language game. We can feign understanding about the meaning of a particular word ‘love’ or ‘sadness’, but we do not feign understanding of the rules of the game we use it within. Which I think means we can understand one another in one sense… the intentionality can be surmised, and we can respond in accordance with what we expect is part of the complicit rules of engagement. Also it is not only through words that we suppose understanding, we take in the larger context, i.e. how these words had been used in the past by said person, how said person appears, the tone of voice, the facial gestures, all the tacit knowledge we take for granted. Language is crude, but I think our ability to understand one another is more sophisticated, and all is not lost.
This reminds me of how I interact with my wife, which is at times outwardly very strange. If you have ever seen the film ‘Iris’ you may get an idea of how we interact… but we purposely play with language, with expectations, not so much even for comical purposes but it has fused into an almost intimate language that makes sense only to us. This has a lot to do with having a shared history and a cache of meaning to work from, something I think much of linguistic philosophy does not fully appreciate. I find it hard to explain this language outwardly… because it loses something in translation… one thing I do know is I often communicate with her in full knowledge of how she would respond and so therefore I respond so as to upset that expectation, and this has become so commonplace that there is no event to it, and over time language has perumtated into something maleable, part irony, part intuition, an almost telepathic understanding out of sentences which have no external meaning…
Perhaps one of the reasons I am drawn to Karl Pilkington is he has this solipsistic relationship with language as well… he invents words and concepts and there is comedy derived from it, but for him it is natural.
When you really know someone the imperative of language ceases to be as careful, which makes sense the more general something needs to be the more structured the wording becomes… intimacy takes away this imperative, and without it lanuage can develop out of pseudo-intuitive revisions of meaning.
I am not of the Chomsky school of thought, thinking there is a universal syntax to language that can be uncovered. In the paper today there is someone who has codified four different types of sounds babies make supposing this has inherent meaning. For now I just don’t put that much stake in language, it is the crude outward projection of something unconsciously devised, to attempt a reduction back seems dubious to me.
If I may offer my own synchonicity moment, before I run off to dinner:
I took my remedial reading class to go see an AIDS quilt today, just to break up the 2 hour block period which is usually a long, hard slog. The teacher running the quilt presentation had us watch a 10 minute video about the creation of the quilt, a dull documentary meant to elicit empathy for those who have died of AIDS. I sat next to my most disuptive student to keep him on good behavior, and througout the entire film he kept making comments that forced me to stifle a laugh.
In light of your description, I am tempted to diagnose his comments as Karl Pilkingtonian. They weren’t nasty but they were socially taboo in a certain respect, and yet they evinced a naturalness of expression that me and my more standard relationship with language could never embrace. He was reacting to the images on the TV screen in a way that on a certain level was non-sensical, as though he were watching a completely different film, and yet I understood him on his own terms completely, and found a refreshing edge to his language.
The only example I can accurately recall is when the film cut to a shot of a speaker at a DC rally reading the names of people who had died of AIDS. The student in question blurted out something like: “Ah hell no! They gonna read everybody who died? That take hecka long!”
Maybe this doesn’t translate here, but the fact that my student even had a momentary thought that the makers of the documentary would read off the millions of people who had died of AIDS is both charmingly naive to me and profoundly funny. Is this the definition of Pilkingtonian?
That anecdote about your dad made me think about reading all the Lacan in undergrad, and then benefit it did me. the mirror stage – the moment a toddler sees itself in the mirror, recognizes its reflection and for the first time identifies ‘I’ is a loss of innocence of sorts. After “I” and “You” comes into play, we totally lose whatever state our infant minds were in before the mirror moment – a state in which an individual exists just to exist and interact with its environment without the mediation of pronouns or most other vocabulary… is that state a state of solipsism or a state of perceiving unmediated truth?
At any rate, the idea was that we are born with the ability to perceive the truth of our environment/circumstances, unmediated with the distractions and misleadings of language, but, as we learn to interact with others, and get in on all the civilized refinements of the social contract, we lose that ability.
I attribute my latest wave of writer’s block to enjoying the experience of existing/absorbing the environment, and then not wanting to beshit the experience trying to parse it into relatable chunks of language. because, yea, then it’s all about the language and not the experience.
I completely understand the language games you are talking about, by the way. Something similar was going on in what I consider my most vaaluable relationship w/the opposite sex, and something related has been going on, bilingually, between my aunt and I, when we used to relate at all.
Alternately, you cool your heels over at http://wordie.org/ where it’s all tags of words and word-geeks discussing the words they love, hate, or love to hate.
Let’s see if I can define a Pilkingtonian idea…
First it is unintentional comedy, or largely unintentional. I have to admit I have never understood the allure of joke telling… something about constructing a joke with a beginning middle and a pay-off punchline it feels like too much effort… to quote Pilkington in the Thanksgiving special ‘I don’t like fun… organized fun’. This goes back to my personal mythology I wrote about, how I have a problem with obligations, and the conventional joke is an obligation to laugh that does not appeal to me. I like comedy that is unintentional, and Pilkington is the exemplar of this.
Also it is about social taboo transgressions and like Nate said, not in a nasty way, but either because of a unconscious slip, or because of a lack of perspective, the individual plays with expectation not so much within the confines of ‘joke-telling’ but the broader world, the confines of how we are supposed to treat one another. I have heard the term meta-comedy, and perhaps that is what I mean, like the meta-racism of The Office, where the comedy comes out of how people deal with racism, the uncomfortableness of the taboos, as opposed to the punchline delivery directly on the topic. The comedy is framed a step back… and Pilkingtonian comedy is just that, the frame is pushed back and it is not about being funny or hearing jokes, it is about appreciating comedy on a meta-level. Monkey News is indicative of this, every single story is exactly the same, the punchline is always exactly the same, the enjoyment of Monkey news comes from the broader aspect of its delivery, how Karl exaggerates, how Ricky and Stephan break holes in his story, it is the anti-joke in a way.
btw Perc love that you are still using ‘beshit’. I would love these linguistic philosophers to use that term in one of their examples.
The question I have about language games is do we not over-estimate our ability to navigate within the game? How can we be sure that two people understand the same rules?
Furthermore, to what extent do our tone, facial expressions mirror our intent when we use these non-linguistic stabs at communication? I personally think my dancing ability doesn’t express my relationship with music, particularly this acute sense of rhythm I feel that I have trouble expessing with my body’s movements. I feel others express my relationship with music better than me, at least in a physical context. Perhaps one could say the same thing about facial expressions, or vocal tone. My scowl doesn’t necessarily mirror my internal irritiability, does it?
But I do see the overall point, that by combining the language game with facial expressions and tone and other intangibles we do get somewhere in the realm of communication between people. It might come down to a matter of personal preference, and some will feel served perfectly well by the existing language and language games, and others less so. If one is depressed and feels more of a burning desire to alleviate this depression via communication, it serves to reason that one would dwell on the inadequacy of language, because after all- you are depressed! If you are feeling magnanimous, who cares about all this fretting? Ha!
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the kind of language relationship Mike and Perc speak of, at least not in a way that I am cognizant of. It does sound fascinating…
Well I should retract somewhat, when I go all jazzy with language with my wife I am not employing a different syntax to language, I am still largely using the syntax commonly held… although fragmented, as one often does in the gutter sense of language-in-use. It is still english in that way, but often words are manufactured that dont exist… uh… this is interesting… it is hard for me to even come up with an example, an example of something I know I do all the time, but I am outside of it now, something is not connecting in my head (although it could be that I have been writing an essay on Dewey!)... ok… must think of one of the words… the jazz analogy is apt… how does one encapsulate a jazz riff, it sort of is and goes, and this language has something of that as well, ephemeral in a way. I refer to my wife as ‘face’ a lot, or ‘eyeball’, whatever aspect I want to garner my attention, i take it literally, at one time i think it was done as a joke but now it is habit. face becomes a proper noun in my solipsistic language. there is many many more examples but some are so obscure I do not even think I can explain them… it is almost embarassing because I understand how much nonsense it is outside of the confines of us, and we shift gears and talk normally around other people… but revert back in privacy.
wow. I am slightly awed by this sudden amnesia, it really is bizarre. But then again my memory has never been one of my strong suits, still, this is a daily occurence and most of it is not stored anywhere consciously, it seems to come out in the lived moment of interaction… like I am only one element and require the other element to create the intellectual property of this language. There also may be the somewhat unconscious resistance from exposing it, that I am now in a mode of thinking that suits this and just as everyone has their dealing with mom mode, dealing with beggars mode, dealing with attractive women mode, so do I have a cyber mode… and cannot seem to shake it.
A lot of my earlier blog writing… things which preceded Pagan was a struggle of my solipsistic understanding of self with this new medium of expression… and I was rattling the cage I felt around me, my inhibitions of saying things directly… but somewhere along the line I have conformed, I feel… for better or worse… adjusted to blog mode. I know in my heart of hearts I am only 50% honest with myself here, or focused, sometimes I hit it, that ephemeral ‘it’ that may not really exist, but it is rare.
In addition:
Something I have a lot of difficulty with is the binary either/or construct that runs indiscriminately through Western thought. I can think of no evidence to suggest our ethics, morals, feelings, thoughts have essential binary characteristics, rather we have imported the binary through habit, through a strand of thought uniquely Western, something that stands in opposition to much of the interconnected rhetoric of Eastern philosophy. A binary conceptualization of feelings seems primitive, yet we tend to it daily, we tell people we are sad with the implication that we are therefore ‘not’ happy. Insofar as we adopt this binary-as-concept blindly we may cease to understand the full potential of things we may be feeling, or the full expression of our ethical views, if left to either/or divisions.
I have two particular problems that I have yet to be able to articulate in a way satisfying to the english language.
1) to express the pleasure of sadness without fetishizing or marginalizing it from a normative, i.e. as sadism.
2) to express my peculiar strand of misanthropy whereby I respond to something amiss in people and avoid them. I cannot account for this behaviour as elitist or egotistical, it is not a characteristic lack of intellect or attractiveness or anything else that I can discern. I do not hate people yet my outward projection would suggest I do. If it is a fear of people it exists on an unconscious level. The social interaction with most people makes me feel weary, but I am not sure why. I fear psychological normatives come in to cover up the cracks in this understanding, but it seems like an anomaly… something intuitive that I am not able to put into words… my spidey sense about people. I do feel like I am working on a different level then most people but I do not even know what that means. Higher-level awareness? awareness of what? by this rambling one can clearly see how linguistically befuddled I am when it comes to this quirk of my personality… for years now I have been trying to categorize it but I get nowhere. What is the word or concept that encapsulates this tendency, a tendency that occurs daily, or seems to, something I can empirically account for by my avoidance of others. There is weighty connotations to ‘anti-social behaviour’ which excludes the mutually held sentiment of love for people, love for humanity. Dostoevsky talked of this dichotmy somewhat in Brothers Karamazov… how easy it is to love something in general and not specific.
With respect to your first point:
Rorty says: “We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there.” (The Contingency of Language, pages 4-5)
We have our feelings, but as to accurately representing the truth of our feelings, we can’t.
Now, I’ve been reading this Rorty book along with a book on the origins of Jews and how they evolved out of the Sumerian civilization circa 3000 BC. I’m not convinced the pre-Western and Eastern cyclical, less binary coneptualizations of ourselves and the world are necessarily more useful. I’m open to the idea, though there is so much to still learn that for I’ll have to remain agnostic as to which provides the preferable vocabulary.
On some level we are binary creatures. Despite the maelstrom of emotions we experience every morning, it boils down to things like “stay in bed vs. get out of bed” and “eat or skip breakfast”. Or at least, that’s how we conceive of our thoughts concerning much of our lives, though this doesn’t apply to other areas- we don’t sit and think: “I like my boss vs. I hate my boss”, but have much more nuanced views.
How exactly could our binary thoughts be beneficial? Perhaps because, at least in the Western tradition, the binaries in question are always changing, always being questioned. Rorty on Hegel:
“What Hegel describes as the process of spirit gradually becoming self-conscious of its intrinsic nature is better described as the process of European lingustic practices changing at a faster and faster rate. The phenomenon Hegel describes is that of more people offering radical reinterpretationsof more things than ever before, of young people going through half a dozen spiritual gestalt-switches before reaching adulthood.” (page #7)
What the West offers, if I understand this correctly, is in addition to a binary conceptualization, a kind of corrective self-criticism that means things are constantly in flux, and while individuals may think they are thinking in binary terms, we are always permeable, always searching. This in contrast to more traditional worldviews which may retain a certain elasticity as opposed to binary-based thought, yet are nonetheless weighted with a permanence that stems from their respect for traditional and ritual, and this permanance also limits their abilities to find vocabularies that might find more useful.
I think Rorty would call on you to create a new language that encapsulates your distaste for the old vocabularies which cannot accomodate something like sadness AND happiness, just as Saint Paul, Newton, William Blake, Aristotle, Freud, Dylan, and others have forged new vocabularies through their art and ideas.
(As for the other part of you comment, your articulation of this elusive misanthropy really struck a chord in me. Maybe you could make a new post with this idea, so as not to clutter up this comment thread. Or I could do something myself. I think it merits more discussion.)
I have talked about the misanthropy before, but you are right I really need to find the language to set it right, something I do piecemeal. It is a very difficult thing for me to do, I am admittedly in the dark about it, I feel much more confident talking about abstract ideas… when it comes to my motives things blur. But I suppose that is the same for everybody. Still I am convinced there is something not being addressed by my modern grasp of english, and that out of some sort of compromise or momewnt of weakness I concede to normative psychology to explain symptoms that do not match up from the inside with the external diagnosis. I feel insanely right in my convictions about people, like I smell something no one else does and this scent keeps me out of a lot of tedious experiences. I didn’t always have this extra-sensory awareness, if that is what it is, or I was not always aware of it, but over time I have become profficient in a way to steering myself through the social arena. I am sure Thoreau had the same awareness when he pursued Walden’s pond. I expect it is fairly common, but mostly unconscious, yet I think so damn much about these kinds of things that I have now given it a certain conscious attribute. I am not perfect in my execution, I do not always go with my instinct, but generally I do, and I find myself in a better place because of it.
Sartre said Hell is other people, and he is right, although Hell is not necessarily another person. In a person, in a moment, everything can bear meaning. The same cannot be said of people, or of history.
as for binary-as-essence… I would need an example, something I can taste. Not even life/death is binary really. We would have to know what death is. Black and white are not binary… unless off-black and eggshell white are binaries? To me life suits a sliding scale of meaning more than it does binary logic, irrespective of the fact that we employ binary logic from time to time (though not nearly as often as logicians would have us believe). The best that can be said about binary thought is it has contributed to successful scientific endeavours, though how and to what extent we can never fully measure.