Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 206

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WINDY WORDS: TOWARDS A PNEUMATIC LINGUISTICS
It is standard practice, in our world today, to reify concepts such
as ‘language’ to such a pitch of concretion that we can locate them
in time and space. The 20th-century insights into the enormous
complexity of human language and the almost incredible propen-
sity of small children to acquire it coincided – perhaps concomi-
tantly – with the invention of computer technology, and it became
almost inevitable that linguists would suggest that the human
brain was ‘preformatted’ to enable rapid language acquisition. The
predictive success of this hypothesis and the relative lack of coun-
ter- evidence has obscured the fact that it is hypothetical. Computers
retain configured states which are popularly known as ‘memories’,
and this metaphor has been so readily catapulted back on to our
understanding of ourselves that the most respected linguists of our
time commonly – and in all earnestness – refer to the linguistic
propensities of human minds as being the result of ‘hard-wiring’ of
neural circuits in the brain. This acutely painful notion is widely
accepted as a scientific fact, such is the vitality of uncritical techno-
logical metaphor.
Thus the observed fact of almost automatic human language
acquisition, the quasi-systematic nature of language structure, the
roughly spatial organization of apparent brain activity, and the
structure of modern computer technology, have coalesced in a
rigidly bounded tautology outside which no linguistic work is
perceived as valid. Let us pause to remember that this is an aspect
of what Heidegger called “the complete Europeanization of the
earth and of man,” whereupon his Japanese interlocutor rejoined:
“Many people consider this the triumphal march of reason”
(Heidegger 1982: 15).
Reason is, in the last analysis, a matter of faith; at least in the
validity of its foundations, the and, the if and the is. The computer
metaphor for the brain is not, in fact, particularly apposite, at least
for those who believe that natural systems are blind, that nature
builds forward rather than unfolds. For the metaphor suggests prior
design in the form of the entelechies that clearly reside in the
computer, which is a tool manufactured by humans for their own
purposes. This ubiquitous double-think occurs as a sort of conceptual
diglossia: we use metaphor as concrete reality until we change the
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