Those discursive structures stabilize our metaphysical assumptions that, as Derrida remarked, we are never outside of and are most deeply enmeshed in precisely when we are critiquing someone else’s.
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was wandering one day over the lawns of Cambridge and looking at the sky, when one of his students saw him. “Professor Wittgenstein, are you all right? What are you doing…?”
The philosopher looked down and saw the student. (The novelist in me at this point always assumes Wittgenstein blinked.) “I’m trying to understand,” said the perplexed philosopher, “why, when the earth is turning and the sun is — relatively — in one place in the sky, it feels and looks as if the earth is still and the sun is moving around it.”
“Well…” said the student, perplexed now by the philosopher’s perplexity, “it’s because, I suppose, it just feels and looks that way when the earth is moving and the sun is standing still.”
“But if that’s the case,” replied the philosopher, “what would it look and feel like if the earth were actually still and the sun was actually moving.” And on that question, Wittgenstein turned, looked up again, and wandered off across the grass, leaving a very perplexed young man, now looking after him, now squinting toward the sun. Your words and mine evoke — rather than carry — approximate meaning, already there at their destination, meanings that the order of words alone will rearrange and that must be interpreted further by probabilistic approximation to mean anything at all. It is only the effect that feels as if they carry actual meanings from speaker or writer to hearer or reader. But if that’s the case, what would be the effect if they felt as if they only evoked meanings already there by probabilistic approximation…?
Life is made up of lots of “experience puns,” with an “obvious explanation” and several “not so obvious ones.” Enlarging on this property was the basis for much of the work of the surrealist artists, such as Pavel Tchelichew, Max Ernst, and M. C. Escher.
Our metaphysics arises from assuming perceived resonances are causal even though we have no evidence for it, but without doing so we would be left with solipsism — itself a limit-case metaphysical assumption, but an assumption nevertheless. In short, we can either assume that stuff is there — or that it isn’t. (Maybe it’s something else, energy, idea, or pure God…) We have no logical proof for any of them. What we have is effects that seem to make us comfortable or uncomfortable, but comfort and discomfort, remember, are also effects. (We can work directly with the brain to change them, both temporarily or permanently.) We seem to be most comfortable assuming the very complex world we live in is there, and that all the complex things that have developed in it over the last five billion years to deal with are, in fact, the case — and many of us feel even more comfortable when we can untangle contradictions in what appears obvious by means of other patterns we have been able to see in other places, with the aid of other techniques. (It’s called science.) Explore it, play, have fun, and try to learn and understand, even adjust — but is it really worth fighting with it to make yourself miserable about the way other folks want to explore, play, and learn? And most of us seem to feel better when we can help people who are suffering — because we all suffer.
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*7 Because the situations are so different — situations which always entail a worldscape with conditions unique to it — that individuals, pairs, smaller or larger communities of living creatures, find ourselves moving through or settling down in, it is not particularly efficient to wire in one set of responses to all situations. But it has been efficient since before the advent of language to wire in the ability to learn to adjust to different conditions, both by establishing habits and habit-systems and through more thoughtful responses; both always involve actions and inactions. To the extent these are always patterns, they are what rhetoric cuts the world up into and discourses stabilize, but have had very little to do — at least up until recently (say, since the development of writing) — with our understanding how the “process” works. Today, in the context of our hugely expanded world population, even over the last five hundred years — as the plurality of our cultures increasingly becomes the condition within which we must negotiate — our survival would appear to hinge more and more on understanding the process. Pollution is rampant. The climate has changed and not for the better. Because, as part of our cultures, we have already made such changes, along with our population expansion, in our so-varied worldscapes — the atmosphere, the ocean, the mined hills and fishable rivers, the arable lands and the slashed-back rain forests — it is imperative we do something about it or as a species we will suffer far worse consequences than we have already started to. Types of bees, certain species of starfish, as well as tigers and wolves — and dozens of fish, birds, and butterflies — have become endangered species over the last three decades. Our own human population numbers are out of hand and the inequities among us controlled by stupidity or mistaken for reason are only going to do us and the planet in. We need to bring the population down, slowly, over generations, and with consent, though genocides, direct and indirect — both of which seed our own destruction — become more and more prevalent.
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The evolutionary journey from blindness to the ability to visually recognize individuals and places is as amazing as the journey from deafness and muteness to spoken language, if not more so. (And neither journey has been completed. Consider the importance of the overlap in the past five thousand years.) But it couldn’t have happened if we — and I include all of humankind’s forerunners — hadn’t first developed our ability to recognize groups of us and individuals among them by smell, and all of which was innately entailed in the sexual imagination and — if people will let it be — still is.
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The indirect nature of communication, which we so easily mistake for direct exchange (because it is all we know), especially at the indistinct and misunderstood level of discourse, is the seat from which cultural misunderstandings rise up to rage and shake our fists against an uncomprehending Other. The understandings required are best gained by exposure and participation in the conditions of life (now covered — though clumsily — by the notion of social construction), rather than through observations and explanations of them. Lacking that, the best textual aid is description of the conditions in the form the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” where the scribe endeavors to avoid imposing her or his own notions of what’s important and what’s not. But even this hurls us into the realm of chance. Experience is still all important. But language must organize experience before experience can reorganize language. If that was not the case, there would be nothing or little to reorganize.
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Even communication of affection and the acknowledgment of the existence of others through touches and nuzzlings and lickings and caresses work the same way. Smell and taste are only slightly more direct, because they start out by depending on the shape of molecules that actually originate with the other, instead of wave functions that are not as material but more process, such as sound or light. But only slightly more so. And once within the thinking-experiencing-interpreting-feeling part of any creature (the brain), all are wave functions again. Smell is still our most intense memory prod. We fight it more and more; we use, it less and less. But before you die, watch it save your — and maybe someone else’s — life at least three times, i.e., it gives the group a survival edge, which is only one piece of evidence for its usefulness and efficiency. To have evolved, it has to have others. Brain structures have built up to take care of “meanings” at the level of the word, of the phrase, of the sentence, of the topic, and any kind of physical pressure in general for every other stage of interpretation. Primates — not to mention mammals in toto — learn them mostly by exposure and some evolutionary pre-wiring. But learning must precede the “reception” of communication of what has been learned, and in all individuals the associational patterns that comprise learning occur at slightly different times and at different positions in the world and thus the learning process itself is different for each one of us, particularly today among us humans; which is to say, communication by sound is primarily a vibratory stimulation of something already there, not a material (or ideal) passage of something that is not.