Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0609041842060.19665@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Disordered thinking through the origin of language (I'm in quotation)
-
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 18:42:17 -0400 (EDT)
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 / express. I would be as comfortable saying the rock on the streamside writes face as I would the other way round. ======================= "As a footnote - this ties directly into the abject - in the sense that it's dirt, scars, wounds, smears, smudges, scratches, abrasions, feces, etc. that find their way onto the body - coding - incipient symbolization - not only tends towards memory and repetition/transmission, but also towards therapeutic - not that the body is cleansed by language, but that it's circumscribed (i.e. no longer fissured)."