Yes.
Withought language, would Rian be infinite?
I have been thinking on language, through the night and the morning. It has not particularly occurred to Rian before, the constrictions words put upon thoughts and Self. Boxes and labels, of course.
We are born without language, and most of us do not have memories BEFORE langauge, as it is the langauge itself that begins to define stimulus.
What would we be without it? WOULD we be without it? There might be no 'time', no 'ending' and no 'beginning'. There might be no RIAN. Simply a brush of undefined nerve cells against the universe....
There would be no 'you' and no 'i'.
Consider 'yes'. How many inflections, meanings, and emotions are constricted into that one grunting agreement.
"Yes," said Rian, and meant something entirely beyond verbal conveyance.
I have been thinking on language, through the night and the morning. It has not particularly occurred to Rian before, the constrictions words put upon thoughts and Self. Boxes and labels, of course.
We are born without language, and most of us do not have memories BEFORE langauge, as it is the langauge itself that begins to define stimulus.
What would we be without it? WOULD we be without it? There might be no 'time', no 'ending' and no 'beginning'. There might be no RIAN. Simply a brush of undefined nerve cells against the universe....
There would be no 'you' and no 'i'.
Consider 'yes'. How many inflections, meanings, and emotions are constricted into that one grunting agreement.
"Yes," said Rian, and meant something entirely beyond verbal conveyance.
posted by La Tulipe | 1:40 PM
7 Comments:
If thinking about this makes my head hurt, am I finite? How could I think about it if there were no language?
See, right now I'm thinking about Seassure's (and Lacan's) signifier and signifier. Language is relative based on what we compare it to. There is no universal signified concept. A chair is only a chair because it's not a table, and so on.
So, every word we use has meaning only because we know what it specifically doesn't mean...
*pours a large glass of red*
Have you ever seen something to which you could attribute no word? Or something that defied any word you could come up with? Perhaps that's the closest we'll get to something that is entirely unconfined.
Hmm. Is there something within all of us that we cannot name? Surely on the surface, I am Emma. But am I Emma only because I'm not Rian? That takes care of the surface, at least... But what about the nameless part? The core... Surely we cannot lump it all under 'Emma.' That's just a meaningless sound that's been attributed to me.
*sips red*
I just confused this, didn't I?
Yes, I am an Arts student. *grin* Hate me if you want to...
Damn it! I meant signifier and signified. Not signifier and signifier.
My apologies.
But I have memories from before I knew language. Not many, but some. My earliest memory is one when I was nine months old. It is a memory of pretty things and wonder. Now, I am able to name the pretty things as 'confetti'. Then, they were just something that caught my nine-month-old eyes and held them in fascination.
And what of animals? They have no language. That doesn't make them less aware. My dogs understand some words, truly - quite a lot of words, in fact - but they do not use them as we do. My fish know no words at all... yet they understand their surroundings, each other, food. They can even distinguish me from other people. Some of them greet me when I approach. They are certainly aware - widely, busily aware - yet they have no language that we can relate to.
Perhaps I am missing the point. But I think language is merely a way to express our awareness. Not awareness itself.
'Language' and 'words' are perhaps two different things.
A fish, a dog, a cat, surely they have their own language. Twitches of the fin or a roll of the eyes or the rotatation of an ear.
It is the idea of 'words' that Rian is mulling over. Do they confine?
Great post.
I think they do confine but...we need confinement. Structure is all that enables us to survive. We divide time into days, space into areas.
There are truths so big that we cannot accept them all. The best we can do is fully appreciate small areas of them at a time.
I've gone a bit...arts studenty, haven't I? ;)
Yes we would exist and we would think without words. But we would be almost unable to communicate our thoughts to others, and I don't think our thoughts would seem as important. Words...coalesce the world into an understandable form.
Nice work, Skittledog. And what's wrong with being a bit Arts Studenty? *grin*
As I said before, the words themselves (the signifiers)are rather unimportant by themselves, yet...
Crap, I just lost my train of thought.
Ah, here we go. What's important is the signified, which is what the words actually mean. Words themselves only have the power that they're attributed.
I think... They're a structual necessity, as Skits was saying.
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