Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 210

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WINDY WORDS: TOWARDS A PNEUMATIC LINGUISTICS
tains the form of the human body, although it is itself in flux. Thus
our memories retain their form, at least to an extent, under these
conditions (whether hard-wired or trapped as humours). It seems
that our bodies are no more substantial than the waves of the sea; it
is form which survives its movement in time through the material
substrate.25 The linguist who would enmesh the phenomenon of
language wholly and solely in a net of brain cells is in fact doing no
worse than you or I who feel without a shadow of doubt that our
forefingers this year are the same ones we waggled seven years ago
– as, in many ways, they are, although their appearance may have
degenerated slightly. Our linguist accepts the acoustic transmission
of language as waves of air-pressure, relying on but not generated
by the atmosphere; but when these perturbations move on through
the ear and into the sparking synapses of the human brain, all this
delicate organization is seen as a creature of the brain itself.
This is actually a metaphysical stance. The linguist who would
refuse to grant language any degree of autonomy from the ‘brain’,
must do so on the grounds that this would involve a measure of
entelechy, or ‘vital force’, in language, a spirit in words. The suspi-
cion arises that our linguist has an underlying preference for keep-
ing the ‘vital force’ in the living human mind: hardly of course a
conscious preference, for it would admit a spiritual dimension to
reality. Our linguist rejects the very idea of a ‘vital force’ and re-
gards the human mind as a system which has evolved along com-
plex but ultimately mathematical-physical channels of sequential
cause and effect, and yet still finds it more difficult to see a princi-
ple of organization in language itself rather than in the structure of
the human brain.
Heidegger sees language as manifesting itself in the mind as a
wave in the sea: “Language manifests itself in speaking, as a phe-
nomenon that occurs in man“ (Heidegger 1982: 96). My proposal
in this essay is to admit both possibilities, and indeed see them in
synthesis.
25 Lynn Bry’s (1996) observation that non-human cells in the body are ten times more numerous
than the actual human ones gives added poignancy to our insistence on self-reifiction.
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