Have you noticed how there is more talking today, and almost nothing being said? Well, it’s true. Language has become trivialized in the modern world, stripped bare of its depth and power. Where words once were heard as rich and pregnant with signification, in our finessed, digitized, and fragmented vocabulary all that has changed for the worst. Now a strictly logistical principle holds sway. Words have been reduced to mere symbols in a mathematical equation, placeholders in a syllogism, each having a single unambiguously identifiable referent, and only one. A must equal A, and it can never equal B; let alone A, B and C all together at once. There must only be one precise “signified” for each “signifier” – everything disambiguated – following both the formal scientific ideal and legalistic requirements of our culture.
But if you look back into the obscure and shadowy origins of language, you will find that before the written word there was only speaking, with oral traditions passed down from generation to generation. The written word emerging a little less than six thousand years ago, only fully appeared coincident with the birth of cities – with civilization and history. We began making history only when we began to write that history!
This was another momentous invention of domesticated life. With the birth of cities on the heels of big agriculture, it was necessary to develop precise and uniform systems of social and political control to handle the gathering together of diverse and unrelated village, clan and tribal members, now as urban strangers – within and well beyond the city walls. This demanded a severe change in the nature of human communication, including the removal of polysemic ambiguity from primal speech, and the articulation of a strictly univocal, written code.
Such linguistic rationalization was only effected with the invention of the syllogism, early on perfected by the Greeks, and recast by legislators, scientists, and other specialists down through the ages. According to syllogistic reasoning, universal statements were to be related to particular circumstances within a coherent structure leading to logical legal and scientific conclusions. So it all came down to “precise words and correct syntax…that is where social laws [were] made and natural laws [were] made or discovered.” (Bram, The Recovery of the West)
Long before such sweeping linguistic changes took hold, however, our pre-historical speaking and proto-historical writing were much involved with myth. Passed on from originally oral sources, myth had a textural depth and resonance that was still packed with meaning. Not only did the mythic word call up multiple referents, but the copula between those diverse referents was extremely strong. To speak the name of something was in fact to invoke its existence, to feel its power as fully present. It was not then as it is now, where a metaphor or a simile merely suggests something else. To identify your totem for a preliterate gatherer-hunter was to be identical with it, and to feel the presence of your clan animal within you.
Even revisiting one of the earliest known written languages, Old Kingdom Egyptian, one finds oneself immersed within a poly-semantic, poly-textural world whose non-alphabetic characters bear precisely this sort of weight and significance. Hieroglyphic writing still retained almost as much multi-referential power as did the preliterate word of far-older, oral traditions. In fact, the hieroglyphs for various Egyptian divinities – Ra, Ptah, Isis, Osiris – would not only allow of multiple referents; they also embodied the power of the particular divinity symbolized on the sarcophagus or on the temple wall.
Such was the strength, the potency of primal languages. Over millennia of civilization, these languages were forced into univocity and impotence. Stripped of their resonant depth, words became flattened-out under the requirements of an unambiguous, linear history and a scientific requirement of syllogistic communication that eventually defined the direction of modern thought and life.
A key catalyst of today’s “global crisis” will be found in this emptying out of language, leading inexorably to an emptying of human experience – an emptiness that finds its only solace and fulfillment in the proliferation of artfully constructed distractions and diversions, as they consume and ravage all available resources and leave nothing of value in their wake.
By: Sandy Krolick, Ph.D.
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November 21st, 2011 by admin
