I spent some time in my last post teasing apart one of the more straightforward arguments in Hegel’s Phenomenology: one takeaway was that the contents of our direct sense-experience do not really count as knowledge unless they can be articulated, communicated. Does the mode of that communication, the medium, perhaps, matter? I’m not sure it matters to Hegel—I read the argument in the sense-experience section as agnostic to the particular way in which immediate knowledge is communicated.
But I think the mediums of communication—the interfaces we use to consume ideas, the languages we use, our choice to use a phonetic alphabet vs ideograms—have a meaningful impact on certain aspects of our cognitive grammar. Immediate experience itself is not predisposed to a particular form, but our mode of communicating that experience makes structural demands on how we interpret that experience McLuhan makes this point well in his chapter on the written word in Understanding Media:
In Western literate society it is still plausible and acceptable to say that something “follows” from something, as if there were some cause at work that makes such a sequence… Neither Hume nor Kant… detected the hidden cause of our Western bias toward sequence as “logic” in the all-pervasive technology of the alphabet. (85).
The technology of the alphabet stands in clear contrast to the ideogram: an ideogram is a sort of inclusive gestalt. I would suspect that in societies where language largely consisted of ideograms, these pictorial representations allowed members of a community to draw on a shared participatory experience. The visual medium of expression, then, perhaps serves as an invocation of the immediate, inexpressible experience of sense-perception.
But the phonetic alphabet, composed of letters that are “agents of aggressive order and precision” (McLuhan 83), is a technology that communicates in a way isolated from non-visual senses, isolated from shared experience, isolated from community.
I wonder, then, how much we can say the claims made about cognition by Kant and later German Idealists—that cognition is fundamentally “reason-seeking” and understands the world according to the activity of reason—are an artifact of construction of our communicative technologies (phonetic alphabets, etc.).
It is indeed instructive that not all societies subscribe to the linearized concept of time so familiar to us in America. Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” also illustrates how our language and conception of time are intertwined.
You might begin to think about linguistic relativism / Sapir-Whorf at this point, and I think there is a useful parallel. McLuhan certainly doesn’t support linguistic determinism (I’d be pretty surprised at anyone who would), but he highlights an important way in which the structure of alphabets imposes an isomorphic structure onto our understanding and the way we consciously structure experience.
I have a lot of questions at this point. Julia Peters writes in “Proust’s Recherche and Hegelian Teleology” of the conflicts in Proust’s literary theory: Marcel juxtaposes an aesthetic theory that merely recounts the events of his life for the sake of the aesthetic quality of memory, and a confessional theory that seeks to interpret and pass judgement upon his past life.
the Recherche appears to be simply Marcel’s autobiography, a faithful account of the events of his past life. It is only by the end that we understand that the Recherche is also more than this: it is itself a fact of Marcel’s life, probably the most important fact of all, since it is the creation of the Recherche which brings Marcel’s life to “maturation”. (Peters 157)
While Finding Time Again does bring the events of the novel into a totalizing focus, much of the oeuvre is in some sense unstructured, meandering, aimless—let’s shed ourselves of the other half of this novel-as-dialectic interpretation for a moment. This feels… at odds with the imposition of structure and order enjoyed by languages composed of alphabets.
Is a language like English, then—ordered in space and time, offered through the visual sense and separated from others—an appropriate medium through which to expose the bare contents of life? Is it surprising that we spend hundreds of pages at Mme. Verdurin’s? Is it any wonder that Proust’s descriptions, a faithful recounting of a life, make Dickens’ sentence lengths look cute? Is it so out of the ordinary that Joyce has to twist and disfigure and enhance the English language to describe a day in the life of Leopold Bloom? I had the chance to speak to Ken Liu who pointed out that a sufficiently complex work of fiction is not something that you can properly boil down and summarise into a “point” the author wants to make. You don’t write a book like Ulysses or Infinite Jest if you’ve got a simple message to deliver—the complexity of the book, in my mind, delivers something of the irreducibility of the world in an author’s estimation, the difficulty of the questions that author must struggle with. A language that, as McLuhan will say, lends itself towards propositional content, then, has to be used creatively to get the This across.
I don’t think you recover language-as-communicating-gestalt by merely switching to a different language, however. Maybe you get part of the way there—when I first started learning Chinese, pinyin was a crutch for me to read basic passages. It remains a crutch when I have to learn new characters. McLuhan comments that “the effort of the Chinese to use our phonetic letters to translate their language has run into special problems in the wide tonal variations and meanings of similar sounds” (87). Translations of Chinese works do seem to disfigure the language into something permissible by the English-speaking tongue.
Pinyin doesn’t quite do this, and even correctly pronouncing words using pinyin requires quite a bit of work from the learner (I recall when learning to pronounce the “ü” in 绿 being told to make an “o” shape with my lips, then sound out “eee”). But it remains a version of the language composed of letters—a form of composition that may still have implications for how using it to express experience alters our cognition.
When the foreign learners transitions from relying on pinyin to read a character to “using” the character itself, does she experience a fundamental change in what the pictogram “means” to her? I’m not sure. I remember learning radicals that looked something like objects I was familiar with, 成语 borne out of parables. After a few weeks spent in immersion, I finally had the experience of speaking Chinese without constantly translating things back into English in my head.
But I think the fullness of a pictogram or ideogram is not just in the being-able-to-pronounce-it. As I gestured at earlier, language as I experience it serves up an impoverished sketch of experience. I don’t participate in the cultural history that manifests in languages other than my own, and I have to think there is some visceral quality to the “ideal” ideogram that communicates far more than propositional knowledge.
Earlier in Understanding Media McLuhan distinguishes between “hot media” rich in sensory data that completely engage a single sense, and “cool media” that demand more participation. The written word is a form of “cool” media, incompletely engaging multiple senses. A question I entertained in reading McLuhan’s commentary on the written word was whether a form of writing that could invoke aspects of experience, like we talked about earlier, would be less cool of a medium than the written word we ordinarily encounter. I think this doesn’t quite work, and perhaps McLuhan would make a distinction between the “ideal” ideogram and the reader’s internal experience abstracted away from the writing itself.
It’s worth noting that I addressed none of McLuhan’s prior chapter on the spoken word, which admits a sensuous involvement the written word does not. People are often encouraged to read poetry out loud because this mode of reading better allows the reader to “get” more out of a poem than just the words on the page. Poetry is written with lyricism and emotion in mind, and reading it aloud evokes these qualities in a way that staring at a page never could.
I think this suggestion offers important lessons for how we can improve our experience of reading in general. It’s interesting that there is never a shortage of people asking “how” to read a book like Infinite Jest or something similarly daunting and pretentious-sounding. I actually think this is pretty easy, and I can describe an algorithm for you in just a few steps:
Read the first word (“word 1”) of the book
For any word i, once you’ve finished reading word i, proceed to read word i+1.
Mechanically apply the procedure in step 2 until you’ve reached the last word of the book
But that’s not how you or I or anyone actually reads—if you’ve read any sufficiently complicated book, you find yourself re-reading passages multiple times, jumping around between pages, cross-referencing what you’re reading with information both in the book and out. But you’re still encountering the book as text-as-such: you haven’t lifted the content out of its written medium to experience it in a different form. I think Mary Ellen Bute’s 1966 attempt to create a “film” out of Finnegans Wake is an instructive example for how we might find different ways of encountering the novel. What if we read novels more like we perform plays? How else can we tinker with our experience of reading?
I’ll leave this post off with more questions than answers. Does a written medium employing a phonetic alphabet admit the communication of gestalt? Does Proust-as-confessor, in a way, need to be as verbose as he is in the declaration of his life? How much of our conception of cognition-as-reason-seeking is an artifact of our set of communicative technologies? Does the reader have to comply with the limitations of the written medium? Should you try to read Finnegans Wake by going from one page to the next? If we entertain the concept of communicative technologies that can transmit gestalt in its purest form, how does that concept interact with (and perhaps problematize) the Kantian/Hegelian ideas we (and McLuhan) gestured at earlier? How dumb do I sound right now?
word milk
All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet
the flowers don’t quit opening. I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom
of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.
(from “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Terrance Hayes, a favorite poem of mine :)) )
things I’m enjoying
“Misreading Ulysses” in The Paris Review
The Recognitions by Gaddis oh boy I just finished this and have a lot to say if you’re reading this pls remind me I have to actually write something on it soon
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (I’ve watched like 3 animes in my entire life but this was a wild ride)
Mango sticky rice why have I never eaten this before i think everything in life is going to be ok now
Besharam Rang is like okayish turn ur brain off classic-Vishal&Shekhar
Looking back at my college textbook I was reminded of the fact that there is also a song named 差不多先生 by a rapper named MC Hot Dog
A hike not too far from my family home:
this