Material Words: Language as Physicality

"Suppose I have an autistic spectrum disorder and severe learning disabilities. I cannot make sense of the kaleidoscopic world I live in. My environment swirls round me and noises boom in my ears. Sometimes I'm swept by painful surges from my own nervous system. When these are more than I can bear, I try banging my head or lashing out at the people or things that overload my senses, to stop the over stimulation. I retreat to my own world and focus on a particular sensory stimulation."
Phoebe Caldwell



Tópicos:
— What is uttered is received and followed
— What is fed back is not chaotic and threatening, but recognizable
— Mirror neurons
— Our conversational practice rests on a closely woven scheme of physical interaction

— Understanding autism is a powerful key to understanding language itself, and about ourselves as language users. One of these things is that, once again, contrary to any simple stimulus and response model of how language works, our communicative activity normally selects and organizes stimuli, and when overloaded, as in autistic conditions, narrows and focusses that activity in self defensive ways, and further, this communicative activity also normally functions by a process of reinforcing its own workings in relation to the reflections it perceives in others. A potentially overwhelming environment is made manageable through these two strategies. We select what to attend to and we're encouraged to depend on the viability of our selection by seeing it in some measure reflected in the selective agency of others. [min 8:00]

— The beginnings of language are simply in learning in how not to bump into things
— Language manifests a link between human agents and between agents and the world
—Speech has its origins in articulating and testing mutual recognition, inviting response of an evermore differentiated kind

— Language is something we do with our bodies
— Bruce Chatwin
— Pier Luigi Luisi
— We look to language to tell us what matter is
— The notion of the genetic code and the immensely sophisticated concept of the genome
— Song lines (the song becomes the landscape in the singer)
— The form that the object takes, in human experience

— Intelligence is literally the only phenomenon in the Universe that makes sense of the overall direction of material existence towards coherent, sustainable, innovative, adaptable forms. If, the story of the material world is one of negotiation, systems finding their way and interacting with one another and constantly refining and elaborating this, rather than settling in an eternal equilibrium, conscious life, the knowing subject, is a development entirely consistent with this story. Indeed we could not conceive of the story without the model provided by consciousness itself. The awareness of negotiation.

— We look to language to tell us what matter is
— It's not a coincidence that the vocabulary of the natural sciences [...] is littered with language-based metaphors (the notion of the genetic code and the immensely sophisticated concept of the genome)
— David Bohm
— Merleau-Ponty

— Consciousness is not a jigsaw puzzle. It is rather the business of absorbing and responding to the field in which I am located and which is acting in me as much as on me. Feeling my way, resetting my coordinates

— "to catch someone's eye"

— Routinely, we assume that a word or a gesture is automatically received as significant. What is disturbing in any human interaction is when my significant gesture makes no apparent impact on another's gesture, clearly important for them. Or when that gesture can't be deciphered as significant in my world.

— Wittgenstein

— Truthful speech is inevitably committed to metaphor in order to represent what we could call the overflow of significance, that we confront. Each of us, as an intelligent linguistic subject, stands at a unique intersection of symbolic action, simply in virtue of standing where we physically stand as bodies. And if this is so, we should be careful of any scheme of thinking that invites us to measure the acceptability or normalcy of another bodily presence, especially as regarding its communicative capacity. That another does not or cannot speak in ways we can digest, cannot render them ineligible to count as subjects with meaningful points of view.

— The important point is to resist normalizing simply what's easily accessible for us in ways that rule others out from the business of human exchange and engagement