Another Way of Knowing

Laurel Thompson: Language is the Problem
and More Perception is the Solution

The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience.

~ William James ~

Human life without language is hard to imagine. We are so accustomed to turning everything we see or do into words, the thought of not talking or reading or writing, of being collectively dumbstruck the rest of our days is inconceivable. It would be like dying while we are still alive. Or living in a coffin. We could not do the work we are in the habit of doing because we could not think the things we are accustomed to thinking. A big part of our brains would disappear. We would no longer try to change things so that they are more to our liking because all our plans depend upon linguistic constructions for their framework and expression. We made the civilization we live in with language so if we no longer had it, we would lose everything. “We couldn’t live in the world without language and that is just how profoundly we must transform the world” (John Zerzan 2003, Language - Origin and Meaning).

With so much at stake, why even conceive such a loss? Because in spite of its many benefits, language is a mixed blessing and it is starting to look as if most of the problems we are having can be attributed to it.

First, the environment. We could not do the things we do to nature - bulldoze it, burn it, dissect it, poison it - if we did not somehow feel separate from it and superior. Consciousness of the potential for “improving” nature is a direct result of having language whose dualism shows us how to take things apart and use them to our benefit.

Then, ourselves. Once we became nature’s master we forgot that we are still part of it. Language conceals the fact that we are deeply physical beings whose survival depends upon staying in balance with nature. It does this by making it seem as if everything is a matter of having the right “idea.” With symbolic thought, it is easy to sublimate our true feelings and needs.

Thirdly, technology. Technology increased the number and variety of things we could do to the earth and each other and changed the ways we communicate and store information. However, it is now out of hand. We do not need many of the “things” that have been invented. They use up too many resources. Their upkeep is time-consuming. They damage the environment. Some technology is profoundly immoral and should never have been invented in the first place, e.g. atomic weapons, cluster bombs, napalm, electronic voting machines. Many of us now live in man-made arrangements that are unsustainable in the long run.

War. Hunter-gatherers fought with each other using hand-axes and spears but increased communication using symbolic thought brought agriculture and this required new forms of social control that made organized violence possible. A certain amount of inequality is inevitable because of genetics and circumstances, but agriculture institutionalized inequality by setting up caste systems where inequalities were legally enforced. The application of tight social control to weaponry meant that disputes between individuals or groups were magnified and extended over long periods of time.

Overpopulation. As we increased our control over the food supply, disease and livable space, lives got longer and not so many of us died. However, unless we pay close attention to the carrying capacity of the land, groups discover that their numbers outrun supplies of clean water, air and food and that overcrowding produces new social problems that are difficult to sort out, e.g. unemployment, crime.

This all happened because of symbolic thought?

Science and technology enjoy unlimited access to financial and social capital in our civilization, at the expense of the environment and people, particularly children. Not only that, we work in settings where the layers of images and symbols are so thick, it is often impossible to detect the realities that are underneath so the symbol becomes the reality. (Baudrillard 1994, Simulacra and Simulation) When the symbols for things are more important than the things themselves, then the relation between representations and their objects gets skewed. There may be other reasons why we have problems but when abstractions from reality take precedence over reality itself, the opportunities for mistakes increase. It is not that we should never use symbolic thought. It is that if you do not also remember to use your senses, the world as a physical phenomenon disappears from consciousness and you lose touch with where you are.

A new way to look at language

So how did symbols get into our brains in the first place? How did symbols first originate?

Recent work with computers has led researchers to conclude that the human brain processes information the same way a computer does and that symbols evolved out of the representational systems employed by other animals.

Every species has a unique view of the world because “knowing” the world means dividing it into the categories that have proved useful or beneficial to it over the course of evolution. When a deer sees a man with a gun, sensory cells trigger motor cells and the deer runs away. From the higher vertebrates on up, however, it is not just sensory cells triggering motor cells. There is another layer in there. Representations which summate and evaluate what the sensory cells pick up intervene and it is these representations rather than external events that trigger action. A chimpanzee sees a termite and knowing that there will probably be more of them below the ground, pushes a stick below the surface for them to crawl up on.

With us, the layers of processing are even more numerous for we map our categories onto language, which is a secondary representational system. Unlike motor cells, the secondary representational system or SRS, is not tied to the immediate environment. Free of obligatory input and output connections, it provides a place where we can rehearse actions and the relations between actions without having to do them - linguistic concepts.

However, the SRS is not just a repository for information about the world. It is also syntax, the rapid and automatic processing that enables us to string symbols together to form simple propositions. Not that long ago, someone found a way to link or dramatically strengthen preexisting links between those areas of the brain where vocabulary is stored, with those places where the structure of actions and events is analyzed (where we decide who did what to whom and when and where it happened,) and those places where concepts are represented phonetically. As a result, the random chaining of words stopped and a new rapid and automatic organization of our thoughts became possible. We could say more about what we wanted and how to get it (Derek Bickerton 1990, Language & Species).

Traditionally, people have thought of language as something we use to dress up our thoughts. We build a picture of the world and dress it out in words. The comparison with a computer introduces a different notion of what language does. Language is not words per se but the infrastructure that allows us to create meaningful sentences. It is more like a machine than a dress. It is a computational procedure that stores information and constructs complicated symbolic expressions, asks questions, talks about the weather, tells jokes. It is not something each individual develops in response to the events of his or her life, but something we all have and as such, operates automatically and somewhat independently from the external world.

For example, you may think you can say anything you like about your child or your chair but if you try it out you will discover that there are strict rules about different entities and constraints on which adjectives or adverbs you can use. It is not that what you say has to be realistic or true. It is that it must follow certain rules that have to do with language as a system. Similarly, only a few of our words express a concept that refers to something you could point at. At least half the words we utter are grammatical items devoid of meaning on their own, but essential for creating sentences that can be understood. For example, no language yet discovered can express the relationship between parts and wholes grammatically. They all require the addition of lexical items like “have” or “of” - the tree has leaves or the leaves of a tree. This unnecessarily divides an entity from itself since if you take away all the things that a tree “has” there is no tree left to “have” them. The enforced dualism, however, cannot be altered or replaced or even added to. “It’s as if nature provided us with a black box containing a machine that allows us to orient ourselves in the semi-simulacrum of the real world that language-as-representation creates. But the box is sealed; we can neither alter it nor (so far) explain it” (Derek Bickerton 1990, Language & Species).

Language is not a mirror. It does not exist in order to give an accurate account of the real world. It is a machine that functions for our benefit by showing us to analyze things so that we can take advantage of them. Its analysis continues irrespective of the weather, whether or not we are hungry, even if someone has a knife at our back. This does not mean that what goes on outside us is unimportant; only that it does not determine what we think. We can think around it. Language’s ties to the world are pretty loose.

Finally we have an explanation that illuminates much of what it is like to have language. By comparing it with a computer, the representational nature of language becomes more apparent. The word “shoe” represents that thing you (probably) have on your foot but it is nothing like the leather enclosure you usually wear and would not do you a bit of good outside. Its purpose is fulfilled in sentences not the back yard or street. And when you realize that language has a “program,” and that as with many software programs it is difficult to make language do things it was not programmed to do, it becomes easier to see that human behavior is very much a consequence of how we analyze the world mentally and language teaches us to analyze it in a particular way. It teaches us to analyze the world as an object that can be broken down into entity and behavior and there are strict rules regarding what you can say about it.

There is another aspect of language that is noteworthy. Derek Bickerton says that animals without language also create models of reality but the parameters for their models are set by their powers to perceive the world with their senses and to process what they perceive using the categories appropriate to the kind of animals they are. Our models, on the other hand, are not obliged to stay close to things as they are. This is because language is more abstract than animal communication. The vast majority of its symbols are arbitrary and lack any apparent connection to the objects they represent. Nor are its symbols gradient - we do not usually indicate the relative size, quality, intensity etc. of things by lengthening or shortening vowels - and they can be combined in a variety of ways indicating that they contain items of information not mirror images of the world. Linguistic symbols can be broken down into a list of more specific categories and these in turn into more specific ones because they are part of an ordered picture of the world, a picture that divides our view of reality into named and readily recoverable pieces. Words are capable of symbolizing not just the things around us but things in the next city or things in another country or even the whole world. Our models are not limited by our powers to perceive things with our senses. We can represent anything at all - even things that do not exist like unicorns or flying saucers - and thus are freed from the exigencies of the moment to enter the infinite freedoms of space and time. With language we acquired something that liberates us from the prison of immediate experience in which every other animal is locked (Bickerton 1995, Language and Human Behavior).

This is an important insight. What does it mean to be “freed from the prison of immediate experience?” Immediate experience is not a “prison” if you can maintain a balance with nature, find food and water, reproduce and save yourself from predators. But if your species is being wiped out or at least dramatically reduced in number because of predators or a sudden change in the environment, you might wish to trap or kill your enemies or to figure out another way to live. And yet, how can you do that unless you can step back and reflect on what is happening? Figure out how things work? Devise a plan? Being “freed from the prison of immediate experience” means we do not have to react to events right away. We can delay our response until we have figured out what it is that we want to do next. It also means just that - that we can contemplate things being different from what they are and so are not tied to reacting to events or preserving the status quo but can imagine alternatives that might be better for us; more comfortable, less dangerous, less inconvenient, less work. This ability to pull back from what is going on all around us and to reflect upon it - see how it functions, study its features, appreciate its beauty - is probably what made it possible for us to adapt nature to ourselves. Not being obliged to respond immediately to situations all the time, we take breathers. We see how things work so that when we go back into the fray we are not so much at their mercy.

Another form of knowledge

So how does language make sense to us if its rules are so peculiar and its ties to the world are so loose?

This is where I part ways with those who would compare our brains to computers because the mechanistic way that computers get “information” about the world is not what you or I do. Computers do not have senses because they do not have bodies. They can perhaps be given senses, but adding sensors to a machine so that it can report data on rain storms or chemical poisoning is not the same as going through an experience as someone with a history of living for say, thirty or forty years, as well as a history of thinking of him or herself as a subject, an I. Computers are all mind, which means they do not feel what you or I feel, or sense what you or I sense. For every new input into their databases they have to be programmed. They do not have a way to get details on their own. We, on the other hand, perceive things with our senses as living, breathing, mobile, subjective people with interior constructions of our very own based on our life experiences. As a result, we pick up on features that computers are oblivious to and what things are like to us physically and emotionally matters.

Language may work the way a computer does but human beings do not just consist of language. They also have eyes that see, hearts that beat and sexual feelings that are aroused. Because perception puts us into direct contact with immediate reality, it is actually a different form of knowledge from representational systems like language and ought not to be compared with a computer. Perception’s connection with reality is unmediated. There are no representations between us and the world. We interact with situations by seeing, smelling or feeling things that are “out there.” Human behavior may be a consequence of how we analyze the world mentally, but it also the result of how much and what we perceive. Language makes sense to us when it is realistic.

Recognizing perception’s role in how we think lets us see why the computer analogy is only partly true. It also lets us bring language into the discussion in a way that shows how it altered what we are capable of doing as compared with other animals. For if the development of prehensile hands with a powerful grip made it possible for us to manufacture tools that could be used to chisel rock or skin animals, the advent of a representational system as potentially comprehensive as language made it possible for us not just to pick up on what is “out there,” but to shape it into a picture, a model of reality full of insight into the nature of things and opportunities for human action. Not only that, the machinery language gives us to produce sentences allows us to manipulate and transmit our thoughts so that these models can be shared and used.

Language showed humans how to get control over the earth. Being the earth’s controllers, however, we no longer have much genuine contact with it because the representational system language provides is designed for dominance not connection. It can be made to connect with what is “out there.” I can deliberately try to describe what I see a la Annie Dillard but language does not do this automatically because its principle purpose is more practical. Many writers achieve extraordinary beauty and poetry with their language. No matter how artfully they stretch or cultivate their imaginations, however, they can never break out of the world as idea, the world in the form that language gives it to us which is as a scene filled with objects linked together by cause and effect and forever divided from their behavior. Language will not let us represent the world holistically. It forces us to express only a small number of all the things we could say about the world. If we want to express others we can, but it takes longer. We cannot build these things into the very structure of our discourse. Again, language artificially divides entities from their behavior. If there is a behavior, someone or something must perform it. A cow is grazing. A bird is flying.

This is not the world we see with our eyes. What we see with our eyes is a single stunning phenomenon, a total landscape, a creature-and-its-behavior. The earth is a whole when we look at it and constant behaviors of some sort are part and parcel of everything that is alive. If language mirrored reality, it would mirror this too. However, the subject-predicate distinction is so fundamental to language, it is so much taken for granted, it is easy to ignore the fact that it corresponds to nothing in nature. The world we see with our eyes is beautiful, mysterious, and seamless in its unity. Everything is connected to everything else in a display of infinitely complicated, integrated, functions that appear to be participating, at least from where I am standing, in a huge, gorgeous, mindboggling show before an audience I cannot see. There is nothing ideal about it at all. It is totally particular and concrete and though I can detect an intelligence within plants and rocks and lakes and mountains, it is not separated out from these things but deeply integrated into their being.

It is a mistake to think that perception is totally physical, however. Perception is not just physical contact with other physical things. It is also making sense of them. We orient ourselves with perception; which is to say, we experience our relationship to a larger whole. We undergo a different relationship with the earth than the one we have when we talk or read. First of all, it is physical not conceptual. However, we are also opening the door to something bigger than ourselves which puts us into a position of inferiority. This something we call “world” or “earth” or “external reality” or “universe” and we do not usually have much truck with it because our sights are focused much more immediately on our jobs, our homes, our family, our friends where we are much more likely to feel strong and capable. But it is still “out there” and every once in a while (or maybe constantly) we catch a glimpse of it and ask “What’s really going on?”

Language is “a powerful symbolic system for transmitting objective information - the first and only one to have emerged on this planet” (Bickerton 1990, Language & Species). By representing them in words, it turns the things around us into objects to be used or manipulated, and permits us create a map of the world which we then use to initiate and guide our action. Perception, on the other hand, is receptive. It acknowledges what is without trying to do anything to it; without trying to change it or ignore or represent it on a map. It lets it be what it is, whatever that is; which means it is an awareness of something outside ourselves, of existing places, objects, persons, animals, ongoing events. Instead of promoting the human species the way language does, it defers to what is.

This is not to say that language does not sometimes help perception; for example, after reading a book on plants or shells you will see more when you next look at real plants and real shells. However, it depends on the purpose or intent of the writing. If the purpose is to promote reception/perception; then if successful, language can help you to be more aware of what is “out there.” It can help you see what you would not otherwise see. On the other hand, if the purpose is to promote and support the map we have collectively made of reality, to show you how to do something with the map, to extend the map, to argue with the map, then language imposes itself between you and the world you perceive with your senses and makes it harder to pick up on what is immediately around.

Are language and perception opposed to each other? Not exactly. However, they do compete for our attention and so far, language has managed to win the contest. By using its models to control reality and shape it into environments and things that are good for our species, it has led us to focus exclusively on turning the planet into a human habitat. We have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. However, we are starting to notice problems and there is great confusion about the nature of reality. Is it something we create? Does it exist independently of our consciousness? How will we ever know if the only form of knowledge we recognize turns everything into a subject and a predicate?

So does that mean that because perception is buried, we are permanently cut off from immediate experience? That we are forced by language to live in little capsules or bubbles or cars, that move through the world taking from it what we want, altering it, traveling around it, admiring it, abusing it, overpopulating it, destroying it, but never actually connecting up with it and participating in the amazing show that it is? Because of language, are we now outside nature in a world of our own, the victims of an evolutionary aberration that might be biologically based and genetically transmitted, but may also be “terminally dysfunctional” since it has led us to take control of the earth in a manner that appears to be bringing us and many other forms of life to extinction? (Bickerton 1990, Language & Species) Though pessimistic, this is definitely a question worth asking as we contemplate our present predicament. Though it may be hard for us to see what is going on in front of our noses, it is increasingly obvious from the number of cancer deaths, the number of other species that are disappearing, the number of environment-related illnesses, the damage caused by global warming, that we are doing something deeply destructive to the planet.

Maybe we could minimize the ill effects of being in the thrall of language by reducing our dependency on it? How? By talking less? What will we do instead of talking? Sleep? That is not a bad idea when you think of all the people and animals whose lives have been made miserable by weapons too big to control or “improvements” too important to delay. The desire to impose quick-fix solutions on “problems” is one of the hazards of using a language-based model of reality for if you do not spend time studying situations, looking at the landscape, getting to know something about the animals or talking to the people who live there it is easy to jump from one boneheaded scheme to another.

So does that mean we are now stuck in language, like drivers in a traffic jam? Free to listen to the radio or read a newspaper but barred by all the metal walls around us from walking out into the crisp morning air? There is truth to Wittgenstein’s observation that language is a cage. Language helped us create the map that showed us how to get control over our circumstances and escape the prison of immediate experience in which every other creature is locked. However, now the reverse is true - we are locked inside language and have no control over what it makes us do. We sense that there is something else out there that language does not touch - the earth, the external world, the universe. We just cannot reach it. We cannot reach it because we do not know how to control what language does to us.

A new way to use perception

As long as people continue to think that language is the only way to know the world, the door will remain locked. We will not even try to leave it. We will always believe that representations stand between us and immediate reality therefore we can never be certain whether what we perceive is really out there. And we will be right, because language is the biggest, most complicated, most intrusive interface there ever was and we would have to lobotomize ourselves severely to remove its powerful network from our store. We would be a different kind of animal without such an integral part of our nature. Certainly, we would no longer be human.

Is this our only choice? Not really. We have another way of knowing the world that is wonderful and fresh and stunningly restorative to our language-hammered brains and if only we could get at it we might find that there is an alternative to the foggy picture of the world that language creates for us. We might find that reality is actually quite different from what we think it is. More beautiful. More stunning. More mysterious. More strange. And that we do not have to read about it. We can enter it in a different way. We do not have to treat it like an object all the time. We can be in it. We can experience the wonder and amazement of being part of an extremely beautiful whole.

How do we do this? How do we wake up from our models of reality, the world as idea, and re-enter the beautiful, astonishing, mystery we are in? As participants not observers? I do not want to spring this maneuver on readers suddenly because I think it is too interesting to treat in a cursory fashion and have therefore explained it more carefully in another place (Laurel Thompson 2002, “Things Are Not Us“). Put briefly, I have found that by studying the “things” in my life, the ordinary objects I use or live with or pass by on the road, it is possible to locate a doorway that is covered up by my usual way of looking at the world; and that when opened, this doorway reveals the world to be much bigger, more beautiful and more open than it is when I am locked inside language. I call it “the universe on earth” because I used my imagination of the universe to find it, but it is really the world without language. The world without language is mind boggling, beautiful, mysterious, too stunning to describe. It is not too stunning to be perceived. It is not too stunning to be witnessed. However, it cannot be represented symbolically because it cannot be represented. It cannot be abstracted. Language does not belong in this dimension. It is irrelevant. Useless. Confusing. It imposes a human framework on something that is blissfully nonhuman; that is so much bigger and more beautiful than we are or that we could ever make, it is pointless even to try to represent it.

I now think that this is where we need to go if we want to get some control over symbolic thought. We need to go into perception, our other form of knowledge. We need to explore the world with our senses, start looking at the “things” that surround us and use them as compasses to see where we are. Why will this help us get more control over language? Because where we are is beautiful beyond belief. It is so huge and powerful and strange, words are insufficient. Where we are is so hard to conceive that language shrivels up. The presence of the universe here is so shocking that once glimpsed, you admit something to your consciousness that redefines what the world is all about.

It is not that in order to transform ourselves we have to become laconic hunter gatherers again (laconic because you must be quiet to trap animals) who prowl around the backwoods living off berries and roots and small game, though that may be where a few of us are going and it would certainly reduce the amount of symbolic thought in their lives. It is that we have to start letting where we are have as much influence over our behavior as the computer does, or the textbook, or the tickertape. It is essential to start honoring the “things” in our lives, as opposed to their representation in books, movies, ads, because we are like them and they can help us perceive something we need to see. It is only when large numbers of us are more awakened to the magic we are in that we can successfully wrestle with the aggressive, controlling form of consciousness we call language. Only then will people realize that where we are is absolutely unbelievable and that we must be careful what we do, and what or who we do it to.

Laurel Thompson, 2004

(Laurel Thompson was born in Canada but has lived in the United States for the past twenty-three years. This essay is taken from Deep Perception in a Toxic World, a book-length exploration of the relationship between language and perception in western culture.)

References

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation: The Body in Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Bickerton, Derek. Language & Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Bickerton, Derek. Language and Human Behavior. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995

Thompson, Laurel. “Things Are Not Us But They Are Like Us,” Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter (Fall 2002): 9-15. Reprinted here.

Zerzan, John. “Language - Origin and Meaning” 9 December 2003. Reprinted here.

Zerzan, John. “Running on Emptiness: The Failure of Symbolic Thought”, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002. Reprinted here.