Grid in a River

… Language, like other cognitive structures, is useful for some tasks and worthless for others. I cannot tell you, because I do not know, what my language prevents my knowing. Language is itself like a work of art; it selects, abstracts, exaggerates, and orders. How then could we say that language encloses and signifies phenomena, when language is a fabricated grid someone stuck in a river? Or how can we even say that language communicates by agreed-upon convention, when people personalize symbols so readily, so that a word which means life to me may mean death to you, and we cannot agree?

We must grant, then, that words for things miss their marks, or at least, as I see it, obscure things here and there around the edges. And we grant, sighing, that we see through a cultural-linguistic glass darkly, and cannot tell snow from snow. Nevertheless, the plain fact is that language does serve literary purposes adequately.

To be quite precise, we must say that a writer’s language does not signify things as they are — because none of us knows things as they are; instead, a writer’s language does an airtight job of signifying his perceptions of things as they are. The term “salty” may hopelessly confine my perceptions — my sensations — when I taste saltiness, so that I miss a dozen accompanying sensations and taste only saltiness. You suffer the same loss. Well, then the term “salty,” which so dictates how we perceive, at least expresses what we perceive, very well, and also communicates it to those afflicted with the same language. Language need not know the world perfectly in order to communicate perceptions adequately.

Language actually signifies things transparently, in a way that paint must labor to do. The word “apple” signifies appledom (or our perception of appledom) to all of us, and we will politely suspend our private meanings for the word in order to hear each other out. If I write “apple,” I can make you think of a mental apple roughly analogous to the one I have in mind. But I am hard put to make you think of a certain arrangement of alphabet letters or phonemes. The word itself all but vanishes, like Vermeer’s paint.

The writer, then, composes with mental objects, actual or imagined; he composes with what Poe called “the things and thoughts of time.” Dickens drew his materials in Bleak House from the breadth of London society and from contemporary British legal usage; it were madness, or quibbling, to say he drew them from a dictionary.

The above is from Living by Fiction, by Annie Dillard (1982). It’s interesting to consider whether or not it applies to photography. For example, how much do we “compose with mental objects” since the camera will make a picture regardless? We will, after all, translate our view any resulting picture via mental objects.

From an earlier chapter in the book that loosely supports the above:

… John Dewey pointed out, that philosophy progresses not by solving problems but by abandoning them. It simply loses interest. The question of “epistemology” is one which thinkers of this century have not yet abandoned. On the contrary, everybody seems to be working on it.

… we in the West agree now that there is more than one way to skin a cat, or raise a baby, or help pain, or lilve. And no one is losing much sleep now over the idea that our tribal gods are not absolute. But we are having a slow century of it, digesting the information that our yardsticks are not absolute, our mathematics is not absolute.

Science, that product of skepticism born of cultural diversity, is meant to deal in certainties, in data which anyone anywhere could verify. And for the most part is has. Our self-referential mathematics and wiggly yardsticks got us to the moon. I think science works the way a tight-rope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes it is operating in midair. At any rate, the sciences are wondering again, as the earliest skeptics did, what could be a firm basis for knowledge. People in many of the sciences are looking at their feet. First Einstein, then Heisenberg, then Gödel, made a shambles of our hope (a hope which Kant shared) for a purely natural science which actually and certainly connects at base with things as they are.

… Even if we could depend on our senses, could we trust our brains? Even if science could depend on its own data, would it not still have to paw through its own language and cultueral assumptions, its a priori categories, wishes, and so forth, to approach things as they are? To what, in fact, could the phrase “things as they are” meaningfully refer apart from all our discredited perceptions, to which everything is so inextricably stuck?

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/