Of course, to put language in a box, to categorize it, would be to commit the same offense that language routinely perpetrates. For language is more than a leveler. Language also forms the glue, the "and" that enables members of the same speciies, particularly humans, to cooperate. People use language to conspire to dominate all other things (and other people). Language is something that develops over time so that people can dominate or get a handle around more things. So we may see a cycle: the "and" uses the tool of language to further develop that tool, so it can subjugate more and more of the other. Or maybe the "the"(the person?), through language uses the "and" to cooperate with other thes, to further develop the tool of language, so it can get a handle around and dominate more and more of the other.
Most nonhumans use very little language, it is rudimentary, and if it is used to classify things, a big if, it classifies very few things. A dog doesn't see a CD as a CD. It sees something that is flat, shiny, may have a certain smell, is difficult to bite into, metallic tasting, and the dog likely makes no attempt to recognize that there are other CDs. If it recognizes a similarity between this and other CDs, it is just the experience that it is useless, not good for the teeth and has no nutritional value. And it is doubtful that the dog sees CDs as different from other worthless pieces of metal with similar smells. It is possible, however, that the dog's experience of the CDs, without the leveling, without the differentiation, is in a sense richer than ours. The animal does not feel a need to "box" things to the same extent that people do. And it likely has no interest in doing so. But humans use language to box everything in the universe. Language allows us to cast a wide net. We use language to subjugate all others. And then the "or" then goes to work, using language to separate things into different categories, and killing their individuality in the process. In creating these different categories, the "the" and the "and" create an artificial diversity among things, trying to undo the damage they had originally done to the "or" through the leveling process. Thus, language is both a leveler, a conqueror and an enslavor. And I, my friend, am turning language against itself, using language to level language. And I said I wouldn't do it, but I did.
Laurie Anderson says, and I think rightly, that we tell stories, and we tell the same stories over and over, in order to forget what we leave out of it. So we invent tolerable narratives in order to avoid the intolerable, which is, after all, everywhere.
ReplyDeleteIn this regard it is much like what a photographer does; carefully choosing what is in the frame so that it creates a cogent "inside" in the midst of an incoherent, indistinguishable "everywhere".
But I find your dog example unconvincing. Canines have evolved to have little survival need for "naming", but they, like every other cognizant being engage in pattern recognition, employing all the usual senses that we know about. If a speechless species has no "word" for an object, that doesn't mean it is incapable of memorizing it. What is necessary for memory is pattern storage and retrieval, and this can be in any number of formats.