So I'm feeling very very good lately, in terms of my work. I'm slowly reaching that coveted moment of professional criticism of being able to perform a close analysis on something, which means, to relate a particular historical event to the material forces in history. I've been thinking a lot about love (because of the paper I have to write on Keats), and -- just to give an example of what I believe to be the aim of criticism.... ("If I were to write a paper on love--") -- Love should not be understood as some universal psychological thing involving psychological attraction, because that would be to ignore all that has been thought about love. Well, this is science, but not psychology. Nor, on the other hand, should we content ourselves with dividing up love into different forms based on different cultures. But rather, the critic engages in the particular thinkings of love closely as
thinkings, and not as results or necessities. What does it mean, for instance, to say that love should exist even if the loved one could not bear any children? What would it mean to assert that love should originate with dating (rather than with parental arrangement, status, etc.)? The task of the critic will be to answer these questions without referring to universal, cultural principles (such as individualism, and determinism) but rather, by relating these thinkings of love to non-idealistic things.
Well, it's hard to write a foward, so let me just start by talking about love. Well, let me write just one more foward ("If I were to write a paper on love...") by courteously attempting to lay out the stakes beforehand, and to kind of give an abstract form of my argument. ... I aknowledge the possibility that this foward will basically be the project... but, in any case, this project ... I don't claim it to be an original one ... but this project involves the thinking of the relationship of love to technologies of writing, especially the alphabet.
Of course there is attraction, but why does attraction think itself in that particular way? Have you noticed how love insists on being (in our culture) something extremely light, completely irresponsible? This is not at all a condemnation, it is because we expect love to complete us, to fulfill us, to make us happy, to motivate us. Love is not fundamentally a relationship to another -- we expect love to do something for us. And this is selfish but not really selfish -- because love makes us better people, socially. Love is that which allows the inventor to invent, the athlete to perform, the soldier to fight, the artist to create, and so on. Thus, love is that which allows us to be most ourselves, it gives us the will to live, and by doing so, allows us to be better, socially responsible, progressive people. Thus, love should be weightless, or at least transparent -- it does not alter us, but gives us focus.
2.
Love, in this sense, resembles a technology -- would it be too much to say that love becomes a kind of energy? Here is where I want to draw the connection between love and the alphabet. Let's examine the history of the alphabet, independently, and perhaps occasionally jump back to love as the connections strike us. The alphabet is a technology, it is used to facilitate the process of learning a language. But there is no difference between the person who masters, say, Spanish, versus the person who has mastered Chinese. Because we obviously don't make up new words, and furthermore, we don't even really think about how a word is spelled. This is not even to say that we think in words, but rather, that we simply write, and things kind of flow out, and writing occurs just as efficiently no matter what the supposed connection is between meaning, sound, and writing, whether alphabetical or not.
The argument here is that the alphabet it kind of extraneous, it is transparent. As such, it is a thinking of something. We are faced with conflicting characteristics of alphabetics: (1) That it is practical and (2) that it is expressive. The former would seem to indicate some profound understanding of the mind, it tends to naturalize our thinking of spelling, ie, make it seems as though spelling were in fact a necessary development in the history of language. At the same time, we can't deny pragmaticism altogether (for a sheer cultural-relativism), especially since alphabetics thinks itself as a development, which would seem to indicate that it's character is historical rather than practical, negative rather than positive.
Here's what I mean: We ask, is the efficiency of alphabetic intrinsic or external? In other words, is this efficiency or this development, an argument made by alphabetics itself, or is it merely justified by the results? We can argue that children learn alphabetics faster, but one could counter that, in learning Chinese, for instance, one is simply learning some different way of thinking -- pointing to, for instance, the way in which in a culture and a philosophy seems latent within the langauge (and thus, the Chinese fascination with writing) -- and they would be somewhat correct. And if were to argue, instead, that alphabetics facillitates technological or philosophical thought, then we fall into a kind of euro-centrism. I'm obviously not at all concerned with political correctness, but ... etc. etc.
Anyways, the efficiency or "superiority" of the alphabetic system is actually built into the technology itself, and this is not even an opinion or a ethnocentric claim. But rather, it seems to occur in the way in which alphabetics is aware of a (-what it defines as a-) "pre"-alphabetic stage. Alphabeticism is either the elimination of everything except for sound from a language, or it is the fascination with some ghost of sound -- two ways of looking at the same thinking -- and a thinking which for all of us, even if we had not thought it consciously while learning the alphabet in school, seems to lie in waiting. Because who is to say that the writer who wrote the book, or the speaker who spoke the thing, in real life, did not mean anything by their body gestures, or by the way in which they shaped their letters, or the way in which they arranged the words on the page? So alphabeticism -- which was once a way of life, I feel, something that people could die for -- was either the elimination of everything except for the sound, or a hearing of a disembodied sound apart from all ... other elements.
Well, in any case, alphabeticism was a thinking, a historical thinking, and as technology or as simplification, it seemed to mark a historical moment that exists only in relation to some earlier moment. We can imagine intelligent people theorizing about the significance of the alphabet, discussions over whether alphabeticism, with all it's relations to tradition, was a valid path, and so on. What else may be interesting here is that this thinking lies latent within us -- we learn the alphabet without really thinking about it, and it may aid us -- who knows. But it lies latent -- what does this mean?
3.
This is the moment in which our spelling will hopefully dovetail with love, this sense of latency. It seems as though self-awareness occurs only in the very final moment ...
TBC: LATENCY
Post a Comment