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"I remember knowing about racism but
not yet knowing about institutionalized racism
-- wherein an institution is so permeated
with racism that people are not even aware
that what they say or do is racist.
But let's change the word 'racist' to 'species-ist',
since
1) racist doesn't exactly fit cross-species
issues except in the older meaning of "human
race",
2) species-ist points more clearly to our
anthropocentrism, and
3) I no longer like to use the current concept
of race because the history of its use over
only the past 100 years with this particular
meaning (check the OED) has not proven useful
to me for inclusion into any explanations.
... Let's next consider whether linguistics
may be guilty of not overt but covert and
institutionalized species-ism, embedded so
pervasively as to be invisible to some. Moonhawk's
Institutionalized Species-ism Hypothesis
predicts that unwitting species-ism will
be reflected:
a- in textbooks through the positing of such
processes as syntax and morphology (which
we claim animals don't have) as "universals
of language"
b- in the use of metonymy (part for whole)
to define "language" in terms of
these putative universals, syntax & morphology,
processes we claim only humans have, and
then in calling everything else without such
machinery "communication" (which
'true linguists' don't study or publish on.
N. B., it's not like you can go to a School
or Department of *Communication* to
study how animals communicate -- so this
is terminological limbo: few linguists really
care what animals do; it's seen as irrelevant).
c- such truisms as "there are no primitive
languages" in our intro classes -- where
primitive is tacitly understood to mean "with
reduced or without the machinery of morphology
& syntax".
(This automatically disallows what apes,
cetaceans and others do from being called
language, given our other claims above).
d- the omission of "Chimpanzee"
in the inventory of world's languages
e- such constructs as LAD (Language Acquisition
Device) and "innate predisposition to
language" applied uniquely to humans.
(Have you ever seen anyone positing either
construct for the great apes or cetaceans?)
... Look around with sensitive eyes and you'll
see the subtle signs of this species-ism
everywhere. No one has to plot or say anything
overtly species-ist because, given the totality
of our system, animals can never break through
our self-imposed cultural DEFINITIONAL language
barrier (as Sue Savage-Rumbaugh so aptly
notes). If a chimp and a child perform exactly
the same behavior, the child's is adjudged
*linguistic* and the chimp's is not, because
children, unlike chimps, are said to be "on
their way to language" (i. e., syntax).
" (*)
Dr Rossin tackles an even more subtly embedded
linguistic phenomenon: language as literacism
-- which we may call, more euphoniously,
"writism". 2500 years after Socrates
warned Phaedrus of the dangers of technology
(in particular, the intervention of writing
in human relations), we now begin to see
(if we look around with sensitive eyes) what
he meant. (**)
i- Education relies primarily on books. "Students"
"learn" from "teachers"
(each term, of course is book-defined), but
what they learn is not what the teacher knows,
but what the teacher points to as knowledge.
ii- No school or department of "communication"
*communicates* with ordinary people (the
"person-in-the-street" or PITS,
in R's shorthand). What such people really
do is seen as irrelevant except as "data"
for "studies" and "research".
iii- Writers routinely say, "hearing"
and "saying" when they refer to
reading and writing; "speaking"
is as likely to refer to scholarly reading
from "notes" as face-to-face interacting,
while "communicating" includes
not only any form (referred to in the literature
in terms of its "medium") of signaling
process -- pictographic, oral, written, telegraphic,
telephonic, or digital -- but any function
as well, be it unilateral, bilateral or collective.
The effect is to disallow what PITS "do"
from being meaningfully "called"
communicating -- everybody does it, from
cetaceans and chimpanzees to the "high-definition"
rasters of one's video terminal -- while
the only purposes for human interaction that
are identifiable will be those of the communicating
"subject," i. e. the individual
organism. Collective, cultural, social reasons
("values") are "bracketed
out."
Writing, as Socrates foresaw, separates content
from container (conduit, context), information
from insight, and experience from behaviour
(conduct, no?). Writism -- the idea that
people are no longer aware that their mediated
actions are only an "alterity",
makes the separation "inevitable"
or "paradigmatic". Literacy becomes
the frame of reference within which any discussion
is foregrounded, and thus "discussion"
cannot question the mechanism of literacy
itself without being 'prima facie' absurd.
Why, then, does Dr R suppose that Yet Another
Book (YAB) is appropriate? * What has changed
in two thousand-odd years? For one thing,
the Internet -- and I would leave it at that,
except that I'm a writer, too, and must obey
syntactical and morphological demands:
( *Editor's note: see Dr. Antonio Rossin's
many writings in this Athenaeum Library.)
For one thing, the Internet put 6 or 60 million
people in one place: idiots and savants,
tinkers and thinkers, are tossed together
like flotsam on the tide -- and since no
writist conceived of the possibility, the
defences were down. PITS began to talk with
one another, entirely ignoring the protocols
and decorums and the rest of the (metonymic)
machinery of being a writer, of being "literate".
The evidence (and it's out there, in the
lists and archives and IRC transcripts, for
anyone who cares to read) reveals, however,
that PITS no longer remember (in Socrates'
sense) how to talk; instead, they have writist
ideas of talking. The best they can do is
to write "as if" they are talking,
but with none of the collective values that
used to inform talking. (This view is supported
by the fact that too many people offline
speak - not as if they are writers, for that
would be presumptuous - but as if their listeners
are readers ; that is, "disembodied,"
disaffected, remote observers rather than
involved, immediate actors..)
The same dedication to cultural integrity
and societal functionality that took Dr R
into family medicine brought him to see the
opportunity, really the necessity, for "reinventing"
a socially coherent ethos. Regardless of
their numbers, those who are online are not
an *abnormal percentage of the population
at large. The absence of an Internet culture
is merely a symptom of a general malaise,
and (by poking and prodding the communicative
corpus in a number of ways), he has isolated
a syndrome; that is, a collection of related
phenomena which suggest a common etiology
or vector of propagation. If, he reasons,
the syndrome presents as writism, perhaps
the prime causative agent is "educationism"
-- the idea that fashioning children into
human beings can safely be left to institutions.
Certainly, nowhere within the social system
does he find natural resistance [antibodies?]
to this meme.
I am afraid it is a true pandemic, and Dr
R's warning may be too late to be heard correctly.
That parents are educators, that education
should inform parenting from ones earliest
days on the receiving end right through to
propagation, parturition and beyond, that
academia has social responsibilities, that
drug addiction in youth and stress-induced
disease in adults are not isolated malfunctions
or idiopathies but systemic patterns -- most
likely, none of these indicators will be
seen by those who can take action on them.
You have in your hands a poor imitation of,
but as ironic a record as, Plato's writing
down Socrates' wisdom, doomed to be preserved
for posterity.
As a writer, of course, I am familiar with
that outcome. As writists, of course, you
doubtless appreciate how effectively "publication"
channels large amounts of human motivation
and energy into harmless, ersatz, bookish
"containers". Who could predict
(that is, control) what would happen if PITS
*realised their potential?
(*). Found at www. emich. edu/~linguist/issues/6/6-61.
htm , 13 Jan 2000.
(**). Socrates ascribes his concerns to Tut-ankh-amun,
when Thoth reported his discovery of writing:
"Theuth, my paragon of inventors,"-
replied the king, -"the discoverer of
an art is not the best judge of the good
or harm which will accrue to those who practise
it. So it is in this case; you, who are the
father of writing, have out of fondness for
your offspring attributed to it quite the
opposite of its real function. Those who
acquire it will cease to exercise their memory
and become forgetful; they will rely on writing
to bring things to their remembrance by external
signs instead of on their own internal resources.
What you have discovered is a receipt for
recollection, not for memory. And as for
wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation
for it without the reality: they will receive
a quantity of information without proper
instruction, and in consequence be thought
very knowledgeable when they are for the
most part quite ignorant. And because they
are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead
of real wisdom they will be a burden to society".
(From Walter Hamilton, (trans.), _Plato:
Phaedrus & Letters Vii And Viii_. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973.)
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