I was an early admirer of George Steiner's _After Babel_ which
presented the thesis of a hermetic rather than informative
central functionality for language. I'm generally of the multi-
functionality persuasion, but I think it's wise to beware the
dominant ideological view that the central organizing function of
language is representation for purposes of informative
communication. This tends, since 'communication' itself can be as
broad as simply joint meaning-making, to become an emphasis on
representation, on language as tool for telling someone
(including yourself) how the world is. 'Representation' is a
notoriously 'tangled' (Hofstadter's felicitous term for, roughly,
inconsistently self-referencing) notion, but makes most sense on
the assumption of a strongly knowable external reality that
'presents itself' and is cut-off from our efforts to 're-present'
it. Steiner also finds it rather incredible that, until recent
times in our/his local culture, people were all that much
concerned about sharing accurate information with others. More
likely, language functions to give us a sort of 'blind' or
protective-defensive smokescreen capability (cf. modern political
and burocratic 'deniability'), as well as to make us feel
alliance and kinship with some others and not with Other others.
Actually giving away one's personal or clan secrets is then seen
as a rather bizarre secondary development of language's more
basic functions.
My own view of this is that the interpersonal and intergroup
functions of language/languages have more to tell us about their
deep organization and role in social processes than the
representational-informative function, but that there are some
respects in which a revised version of the latter may be equally
fundamental, at least for adult language semantics. Many people
have speculated, and even seen supporting evidence, that the
inter-social functions are primary earlier in development (but
this is very complicated).
Rolfe takes that further in the direction of mimesis as
fundamental to meaning-making. There are some parts of this view
I like at lot. That our bodies are specifically relevant to how
and what kinds of meanings we make (though I would decenter this
a bit to a notion more like the ecological affordances for
meaning-making of larger systems of which our bodies are a part).
I find Lakoff's version a little too simplistic to be convincing,
but there is something interesting of this kind to be worked out.
I also credit that an aspect of 'sharing' meaning, to the limited
extent this makes sense as some aspect of joint meaning-making,
is some sort of extension of a notion like interactional
synchony, that is, some bodily 'analoguing' or 'homologuing': our
bodies try to do something (and not just 'mouthing') that is, for
our organism, some sort of analogue or homologue of what the
other organism is doing. I am not sure that 'similarity' is the
right notion, for 'mimesis' can suffer some of the same
difficulties as 'representation', but when two systems are
coupled by interaction, what happens in one sets up responses in
the other (or both simply 'inter-act'), and where the two
subsystems are physically similar, you can get a 'resonance' or
'sympathetic vibration' -- which for complex and individual
systems like us is never an identity. Mimesis is at root
automatic perhaps rather than intentional, and always imperfect
in terms of similarity, but perhaps more perfect in terms of
functional analogue. We do what for us corresponds to what the
other is doing.
There is a wonderful, and for me originally rather disturbing,
essay by Harvey Sarles from the 70s in a classic volume on
nonverbal communication (eds. Kendon, Harris, Key, also includes
well-known essay by Leontiev) which emphasizes the many cases in
which our bodies react rather directly to 'contagious' social
behavior (yawns, coughs) and speculates that the discomfort one
may experience on meeting someone who is disfigured may be partly
some level of the body 'trying on' the feeling of that different
body-conformation. Mimetics of the grotesque.
Sokal as predatory mimic is a wonderful construal. I will send
separately my private first comments to a friend on the Sokal
affair. One could say that my argument there was that if you are
too good a mimic you may find yourself making a kind of sense you
cannot yourself perceive.
The CMU-Simon group as creating mimetics that are mockeries, or
straw men, _out of themselves_ is also interesting. It is a
commonplace today of critical postmodernism that the West's
constructions of the Other (Asian, African, etc.) are mainly
about itself-in-reverse. When CMU-Simon, or many other
reactionary critics, construct postmodernism, or relativism, or
whatever Other, we see the inverted mirror reflection of the
naivete of their own positions. (Naievete is of course relative
to the uses to which a belief is put; technical professionals
don't actually have recourse to their philosophical beliefs much,
and their views are probably more sophisticated than what they
actually need 'at home', though as Phil Agre and others have
argued, newer fields like AI, as opposed say to physics, may need
more sophisticated philosophical models than they realize. Old
fields can often coast for centuries on the tools-and-problems of
previous philosophical paradigms. When Bohr pointed out that
quantum mechanics was fundamentally contradictory to prevailing
scientific objectivisms, not only Einstein, but most physicists
wanted no part of a philosophical revolution. They were able to
get by pretty well without one precisely because they had a
technical method that by-passed such deep issues most of the
time.)
Sokal's basic thesis is not ridiculous on its face. _Some_
physicists of every generation of the quantum revolution have
been quite clear that quantum theory does not make sense in terms
of available brands of objective realist epistemology, and have
flirted with everything from Buddhism and Taoism to postmodernism
in search of alternatives relative to which it would make sense.
Quantum gravity, or more substantially, superstring theory, are
not simply about the space-time-energy scales so far removed from
those of the human organism's characteristic functions. They are
about basic views of what makes the real real, what is or is not
in principle observable, what constitutes a contradiction or
impossibility and what does not, whether a theory can be its own
metatheory, how tight a linkage there needs to be between a
theory as an account of something beyond itself and whatever is
counted as 'beyond itself'. These issues are annoyances to
physicists, sources of amusement to mathematicians, and deadly
dangerous to the most basic beliefs of Western (and perhaps
other) cultures about 'reality', and so to the power of the
institutions whose claim to power is a notion of truth linked to
those notions of reality. Most physicists walk a mathematical
tightrope over the abyss and do not look down. A few imagine that
that abyss is a pleasant and familiar valley (so long as you
don't look down). Some get quite testy if you suggest it's a
black and hellish abyss, and, needing to justify not looking
down, tell you only a crazy person would imagine it's anything
other than that pleasant and familiar valley. Perhaps they are
right. JAY.
PS. For those seeking references, it was Dr. _Samuel_ Johnson and
the stone kick, I think, and Rolfe's signature file quotes _Ilya_
Prigogine.
-------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU