in search of metaphors

[premise: the battle (or just my battle) between languages doesn't show even an inkling of a truce, and i think that helps me inch a bit closer to the unlikely idea that i'd be vacillating as long as i live. so now the question moves from 'how to end the battle' to 'how to make this less tiresome.']

it’s a funny thing, this thing called language, and i’m afraid that i’ve become excessively aware of its presence. (hyper-awareness is only as bad as it is paralyzing.) the swiss linguist ferdinand de saussure mentions that one of the most puzzling things about the human faculty is the ability to constantly convert concepts into languages. one can only think through languages, meaning, our thoughts (or pre-thoughts) are only a glob of conceptual mass awaiting a kind of linguistic sculpting. “I think therefore I am” would sufficiently translate into “I speak, therefore I am.”

now, language is historical, social, cultural and all those descriptives people like derrida like to hurl at you. if language is so, then language is inherited, yes? if language gives formation to one’s thought (or better yet, gives birth to one’s thought), and if one’s thought is a representation of one’s identity, then, roughly speaking, language is one’s identity. then through a somewhat simple operation of logic, we can say we inherit our identity.

it’s not as disturbing as it can potentially sound, only because it would be ridiculous to assert otherwise. that is, it’s a difficult thing to argue that we are a-historical, a-cultural, a-social. but there is still an annoying remainder that’s more icky than reassuring, and it’s that we are not as distinct as we usually think we are. we think we speak things  that are original, fresh, and mind-blowing, but even we know we deceive ourselves. we know, especially  in the middle of the most impassioned vitriol against mundaneness, that it is probably only an echo of an echo. ignorance is not bliss in this case. it’s easy to blame society for producing cookie-cutter people, but tweak it a bit – don’t reverse it completely – and it would still make sense if we acknowledge that perhaps it’s because we don’t care much about the fact that we all speak in the same way.

then, the solution might start from active questioning. nothing more than just questioning whether or not what i say is actually my language.  if it isn’t, then we embark on finding a new way of speaking. to un-familiarize your commonplaces and engage in that strange domain called constant re-description. it’s really a search of a language that is mine, and maybe because we are all so distinct, we fail to ‘find’ but end up creating new ones. like metaphors. i love when richard rorty says that what marks people like nietzsche, nabokov, orwell as who they are now in history is their ability to create a new language, hence give birth to new thought. it’s a huge mandate, i know, but i’m convinced that it would be worth the pain.

for me, that is where art becomes relevant, because i feel like the bedrock of anything ‘art’ is and should be the very result of our need to re-describe. (somehow art being something about ‘expression’ never clicked with me, even though, when narrowly construed, it’s probably true). it’s a funny picture:  redescription somehow turns the notion of the self’s historicity from baggage to evolutionary, from enchainment to cooperation, from confinement to a kind of resourcefulness. (after all, the tools for redescription are going to be language in all its historical glory. )

we’re all collages anyway. won’t be a bad idea to take advantage of that.

Advertisement