At 06:23 PM 7/08/2001 -0600, Phikl W wrote:
> odd, isn't it, that there's nothing about comprehension for words or
>sentences - oh, well. perhaps diane can explain this.
Phil's sparked a ramble:
I've been reading, when I can, a book called "Spaces between words: The
origins of silent reading" Paul Saenger, 1997. It's a nicely detailed
history of how we have come to believe the conceit that single words, and
smaller such units, having inherent meanings.
Before I done book lernin', I used to spend (at various times and among
various other activities) many hours in front of a computer screen
digitally editing voice overs for documentaries, adverts, etc in recording
studios. There are usually no breaks between words, even when your ear
"tells you" there is. If you spend long enough with a particular piece of
dialogue, listening to it (and "looking" at it), over and over and over,
you will fisrtly notice that there are all these other sounds: clicks,
gurgles, snorts, hisses, rumbles, breathing sounds, etc, etc. If you listen
long enough, you might suddenly have the strange experience of the sounds
emptying themselves entirely of semantic content. At that point all you can
hear is the clicks and buzzes and rumbles and melodies; the harmonics and
atmospherics; the heavings and huffings and squirmings of the human body in
the act of making meanings with the voice.
The smashing of human languaging practices into discrete particles,
efficient as it is for *individualised* written communication and recording
purposes, lends a great force to the belief that making meaning is a
building up of phonemes, words, etc, when in fact something entirely
different appears to be the case. As inefficient as the early mediaevalists
were at writing stuff down on books (made of as many as 100 animal hides),
they were not (at one time) overcome by the illusion that meaning is made
up of little bits that get built up into bigger bits that all of a sudden
make "sense".
I think that maybe Malinowski's "long conversation" is far more instructive
a metaphor for understanding meaning-making systems as organic environments
that we mold, walk through, "drink" from, and splash about, more often than
not unconsciously, in making our way through being human.
It's truly a marvel that we have ever understood anything at all, although
*it would seem* the reductionist project, "hyper"-ised as it is in
combination with a global, electronic, mass-mediated, binary-digitised,
mythologised, homogenised simulation of human "meanings", has the
progressive effect of obliterating, bit by bit, comprehension, sociality,
and memory.
If you think I'm being hyperbolic, ask people if they remember what they
were doing the same time a week ago, or a month ago. Ask them, for example,
(if they saw it) what the lead story was on national news was last night; a
week ago; a month ago -- and so on. Ask a group of people "how many of you
know your next-door neighbour?" The results of this kind of casual research
is remarkable, at least in my experience.
But then, what is it important that we remember? Who is important to know?
Regards,
Phikl G.
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