Re: nettime Disordered thinking through the origin of language (I'm in quotation)
Again, this begs the question. It doesn't matter to whether songs or speech or for that matter hand-clapping; what seems important is where does the symbolic register originate? What constitutes symbolization. How songs lead to 'verbs' is just beyond me, and why songs instead of, say, foot-stamping or any other activity. And I'm thinking way before things like chipping or other communal cultural activities. It seems clear (again perhaps only to me) that primates tend towards culture, that there is a decisive break between human primates and other species. That this break isn't just centered on the relative plasticity of human vocal cords, but something that led to their development. I don't think there's any difficulty, once events and things are granted symbolic status, 'understood' by the group to _refer_ and operating among abstraction, memory, repetition, etc., to take the next step - which would be that of sounds associated with such symbolic status. Animals can learn different cries in relation to different degrees, say, of danger - I think it's chickadees that have (most likely instinctual) a variety of calls indicating the relative proximity of an enemy. These sorts of vocaliza- tions are already there; I think I also mentioned the mother-infant relationship and associated nurturing sounds. A mark of a bee sting on the face is abstracted - someone understands this has happened to an other, that there is danger - by repetition and memory, bee sting becomes associated with extra-symbolic units, a movement from the ikonic through the indexical, to the symbolic. I think this happens simply, and I think it happened all the time several million years ago, and eventually such signs as did develop, in terms of vocalizations or deliberate body markings or even the symbols on (much later) those pebbles - would be shared and remembered themselves, and it's the sharing that constitutes the origin of language. Language always already _is_ community (whether singing, which I doubt, or proto-syntax, which seems more likely and in fact is found in infant speech) what one is born-into; it's a register. I think that language also does develop innately (although I may be way out of date in this) among humans; obviously early humans that could organize and reproduce signs, that could memorize them, recombine them, would have a higher likelihood of survival. (Ah well, while I'm at it, perhaps neanderthals had body hair, and early homo sapiens (ha!) didn't - that would make all the difference in the world, and worlding.) So what I'm claiming might be the following - that the _human_ body is always already cultural or potentially cultural; that writing predates speaking (there's a parallel btw with video history predating film history); that spoken language grew out of a long series of associa- tions, gestures (only useful when two hominids can see each other); that language is obviously communal, communality; and that the simplest story of origins stems from (relative) hairlessness - that as hairlessness developed (for whatever reason, perhaps nothing more than a catastrophe in Thom's sense, in terms of mutation), so did the ability to read - and this ability and hairlessness were mutually reinforcing. I don't know re: below, again, enough about the physiology of singing, except that it stems from different mechanisms than spoken language. I don't know how it's organized in the brain, etc. etc. - Alan On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Michael H Goldhaber wrote: Alan's account seems plausible, but still leaves question of where # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Disordered thinking through the origin of language (I'm in quotation)
Alan's account seems plausible, but still leaves question of where spoken language came from. My earlier thought has been that singing was the essential step. Different songs for different activities would then lead, implicitly and directly to verbs. My back is turned but I hear the eating song or the chipping song, or the running song and I know what that other is doing. Nouns arise as verbs that go with persons or things. Then why songs? they help keep group together, provide solidarity, help group members find each other and cooperate. Best, Michael On Sep 4, 2006, at 3:43 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: (apologies for two posts in a row, but this has 'gone' somewhere of interest - Alan) Disordered thinking through the origin of language (I'm in quotation) - ... I know this sounds ridiculous - but I'm on to something. If ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Disordered thinking through the origin of language (I'm in quotation)
(apologies for two posts in a row, but this has 'gone' somewhere of interest - Alan) Disordered thinking through the origin of language (I'm in quotation) - ... I know this sounds ridiculous - but I'm on to something. If the body is hairless, then for example mud or blood will 'stick' to it - be obvious. Of course this is the beginning of symbolization - it would appear comical, or different, one person to another - it's a miniscule step - not even a step - to drawing something on the face, body, etc. So in this case, I'd bet that writing predates language, or at least the two were contingent / contiguous in origin. From writing on the body - it's not difficult to see how signs of that sort would be connected to sounds by mimesis - even if the original sounds were nothing more than laughing or crying. One possible 'gesture' in this direction - the markings on Acheulian pebbles... Even if spoken language didn't arise in this fashion, certainly writing did. (Think of proto-language). ... 'For me it's an originary story much like Freud's of the sons killing the father - but that remains a fornm of colonialism, assumption that it is somehow a-culture, that it is abstract from an event in a particular direction. I think of it as nothing more than perhaps mud or paste acci- dently in the form of a third eye or smile, something to be imitated; primates imitate, as do mocking-birds. From this would come the coagulat- ion of signs, repetitions; laughter would be the first word. With Tran duc Thao, gesture is out, away from the body, pointing towards the hills - _this_ is where you hunt, for example, _behind_ the hill, something more than pointing. But it's the other way around I think - pointing, gestur- ing, sounding, would be from one to the other. It's only natural that this would occur, and occur, often, and tend towards culture. Culture is dependent on memory, on transmission of memory; bird-songs are cultural in this sense. But in the case of the body, the skin of the body, it becomes a _sign,_ something which may be written on the body, off the body, in the sand, on a rock - those pebbles again - etc. What occurs at Lascaux etc. is peeled _off_ the body. I don't think anything 'more' than this is necessary to explain writing or language per se; spoken language would be a descendent of associated sounds, I assume beginning with laughter. Empathetic behaviour comes into play here as well; a wound and its figuration may be imitated as a form of healing - this relates to shamanism, etc. In other words, there is a constellation of behaviours, repetitions, intensifications, here - not only in the present (as in Lingis for example) but in the past as originary. And this plays into the writing, for that matter, that I did in Textbook of Thinking, etc., in which the obscene is analyzed, plays a role (it plays a role in the obscene itself) - the obscene and its obscene relation to the skin - think of the obscene as a form of _pun_ in terms of physiognomy - it has a relationship to linguistic puns, undermining transmissions through arousals, and so forth. I think all of this 'fits.' As a friend pointed out, human infants have a propensity for babble that becomes organized (one might say within a linguistic regime and commun- ality) into languaging; the infant grows 'into' language. I think this babbling - as well as the plasticity of our vocal cords - developed after writing, or subsequent but close to, writing - that hairlessness, with whatever survival value this might have given us - was prior, or that reading the body as written increased, became culturally instutionalized, with increasing hairlessness. It is not that 'the body is a text'; it is that 'a text is a body.' Re: Below - certainly dogs have faces, facial expressions (which may play into what you say; we should go back and look at Darwin's book on this. === On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Charles Baldwin wrote in response: It's not certain to me that animals have faces or they do only because we have faces. So the human hairless face is the first appearance - both face as features and other, and also as receptive surface (perhaps then becoming sand or bark). Comical: because it moves, because it expresses, because of its familiarity. Then, from this, writing other parts of the body too - so incisions, tatoos, etc. A face gets expression and to produce the sound, so there's a kind of mini-signifying machine there. All other body surfaces are in relation to it. So, a particular relation between inscription, surface, and depth. Laughing, crying, moaning, sighing at the origin: these are relations between very specific and irreducible bodily states and very specific expressions. They express but they are deep as well. === And later: Just back from hiking in the Otter Creek Wilderness. It occurs to me that the written face does not signify but expresses just as rock on dirt / or a river through a woods /
