Part II -- Chapter Six

Language, Myth, and the Loss of the Interior Perspective

O if we but knew what we do
when we delve or hew--
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

I have spent much of my life as a logger and log-builder. I mention this at the outset of this concluding essay because the word I use to characterize more narrowly my former occupation as a builder -- the word 'log' -- happens to provide a useful approach to what emerges as a principal sub-theme of the above thesis: words evoke a mythic substratum of meaning which invariably challenges the conventional definition.

In the mind of the speaker of English a 'log' exhibits a degree of roughness, for example, and approximation to the 'natural', which no amount of processing and shaping of its external surface seems able to remove (and which no dictionary attempts to deal with). I can strip all the bark from a segment of the bole portion (of the felled tree) and spend many hours working its variable and uneven surface with a drawknife. I can notch it in numerous ways to achieve joinder with other logs. I can remove what the trade calls its 'wane', even its natural 'taper', by working the raw material with a broad-axe or by running it into the blade of a circular saw, producing a squared timber or what saw-millers call a 'cant' of relatively uniform dimension. But to me as a builder, and to those who regard the structure (into which it eventually finds its way) as their home, the object in question is still a 'log', their new dwelling is still a 'log house'. Nature is affirmed despite all else. The word produces an image of an object which is natural and 'unhewn', even when the referent, in the particular case, shows advanced processing and 'hewing'. Words convey meanings which fly in the face of common-sense understanding. Words have a history which subverts our practical perceptions.

In the language material which would congeal around the dialects of West Germanic known now as English, an earlier native designation for this 'bole segment of a felled (or fallen) tree' appears to have come out of use, coincidentally perhaps with the disappearance of the forests themselves in Britain and much of Europe. That word is now buried in prehistory (if it indeed ever existed -- a subject we return to as a general question in the final paragraphs of this essay). The English word 'log' may be an import from Scandinavia⁽¹⁾ where forests and a forest-based economy continued to thrive into historical times. Other language groups experienced the same 'loss' (of a word once common to the genus) but they 'corrected' the possible 'defect' through other means. Block (masculine noun) is the German designation for an similar concept, a borrowing likely from Old French by way of Dutch. Thus, in the collective perceptions of speakers of German the word 'Block' (as in 'Blockbau', for example, meaning 'log building construction' or 'method') retains a pronounced secondary association with the stone architecture of the Lowlands (and Southern Europe). It carries therewith the implication of flat surfaces, perhaps, but more significantly, a high degree of dimensional uniformity.

Thus the two loan-words -- one from the south, the other from the north -- tend to encourage (reproduce may be the better verb) the two rather different approaches to log-building we discover in German-speaking Central Europe, on the one hand, and on the North American Frontier, on the other, where English came to be spoken but Northern European traditions were preserved. English immigrants produced no log structures (and played, besides, a negligible role in the making of the material culture of the frontier). The traditional North American 'log cabin' is an importation by Swedes and Finns who settled Delaware early in the seventeenth (17^th) century. Characteristic of the form is the rough-hewn quality of the log-work, its easy accommodation of the natural properties of the material, its wane, its taper, the dimensional variation of the individual logs, etc. This in striking contrast to the equally impressive blockbau tradition of Central Europe in which the log components were sawn and milled to uniform sizes, pegged, notched, elegantly surfaced -- then carefully assembled, like hand-crafted furniture.

But the word 'log' has an additional semantic property which brings into much clearer focus the anticipated topic of the present essay. We visualize a log as existing in a particular orientation relative to the rest of our world. In the imagination of speakers of English a 'log' is not just as an elongate object having a certain natural character and definition but is envisioned as appearing in an essentially horizontal relation to the landscape. A 'log' comes into existence after the felling of the tree, and its subsequent limbing and 'bucking-up' into useful sections, but substantially in advance of any significant additional processing. It emerges at that early stage in production when the object in question still 'lies in the woods', to bring the imagery into line with the disputed North Germanic derivation referred to above. In other words, the two principal aspects of its meaning -- the log's fidelity to unprocessed nature and its parallel orientation (and close proximity) to the ground -- have as their source one and the same cultural moment, whatever the exact etymology and sources of the word in the English language. (When we up-end the same familiar object we have no longer a 'log' but a vertical 'post' -- a word which constitutes likewise a new form in West Germanic [cf. Latin postis], but this time a borrowing from the south. On the other hand, when the 'log' is allowed to retain, more or less, its horizontal orientation yet is raised above our heads, it becomes a boom or beam [cognates with German Baum] as in 'post and beam'.⁽²⁾)

It appears to be characteristic of the human imagination that we construct experience in terms of relationships which, in some variable sense, override the 'objective reality' of our mundane existence, relationships which have, in fact, provided the specific basis for cognition in eons past. (Recall the discussion of metaphor, in the previous chapter, and its presumed effect on human encephalization.) The word 'log' evokes a dimension of meaning which transcends the boundaries of the object itself. This meaning provides not only a cultural context of a specific kind but places the object in a certain spatial relation to the rest of our universe. It is perceived not in isolation but against a given physical backdrop. These circumstances must reasonably be included in a 'definition' of the word though they are not ordinarily thought to be important elements of its 'dictionary meaning'.

The sense of spatial relation (in the construction of mental images) appears to have been especially strong in earlier states of consciousness. It is said that the Zuni of the North American Southwest organized all of existence around the concept of the 'middle' which was clearly rooted in a sensory perception which had (significantly) also a temporal aspect -- thus the 'present' was highly affirmed in the Zuni construction of the world. Zuni placed the individual and community at the geographic center of the 'six directions' (which included 'up' and 'down')⁽³⁾, meanwhile celebrating 'mid-points' in all the cycles of nature, not just the perceived movements of the sun and the moon (and other heavenly bodies). In the striving Zuni consciousness these events were brought into a complex state of integration with all human action, collective and private. Space and time achieved a comprehensive psycho-social resolution within the framework of a single mythic precept which the Zuni called idiwana⁽⁴⁾.

Indoeuropean languages and consciousness show likewise a strong propensity to represent experience in terms of orientation in space. Moreover, in Indoeuropean (as in Zuni) common notions pertaining to relationship in space serve a metaphysical and transcendant purpose. (I use the term 'Indoeuropean' tentatively and in a cultural sense.) That is, they help to bring all experience and the production of culture into alignment with perceptions of value which transcend material reality. In Indoeuropean to strive 'upward' is culturally affirmed. It occupies a position, in 'Western Culture', which is comparable to the centrality (among traditional Zunis) of the need to work toward the 'middle' though these precepts are strikingly different in their meaning and social ramifications. As 'Indoeuropeans' we use the spatial designation 'high' to give emphasis to behaviors our culture regards as noble and ultimately deserving of social reproduction. 'Elevation' becomes an indicator of value in a sort of pantheon of virtues. We describe certain modes of culturally virtuous behavior as 'lofty', 'transcendant', 'towering', 'high-minded'.

In 'Indoeuropean', moreover, an additional characteristic is inevitably present: the cognitive systems, according to which we organize moral thought and conduct, have a strongly marked negative aspect which would be unfamiliar to Zuni consciousness. Preferences are formulated within the framework of well-defined dualities: the celebration of one pole in the opposition takes place at the expense of the other (a dynamic I reviewed in Chapter Five in association with the emergence of the Culture of the Open in its more blatant presentations). In Indoeuropean culture 'high', which rises 'above nature' and is extolled (as suggested above), exists in permanent contrast with 'low' which is, in like proportion, degraded and pejorated, an image which pervades vast areas of collective experience, including education and politics. (In Zuni the 'middle' was the focus of all community energy and possessed the greatest social value. Nonetheless, it presupposed no fixed mytho-conceptual 'opposite'. The 'middle' appears to have existed not by structural and moral contrast with some despised opposing element but in primary relation to the 'whole' which was itself esteemed.)

In the consciousness of Indoeuropeans 'high' is closely allied with a number of other preferences, chief among which is the concept of 'objective reality' (also extensively reviewed in previous chapters). Here we encounter the mythic proposition that an object can be properly assessed, experienced, evaluated, thought of, identified, etc., only from a vantage point outside its 'physical limits' (whatever these are supposed to comprise in the individual instance).

Recent thinking in 'generative linguistics' senses the primitive nature of such a preference. But it hopes to locate the origin not in the relatively recent culture of humans (as suggested in these pages) but in his/her genetic endowment. Thus Noam Chomsky on the phrase 'brown house':

What do we know about it? We know that it consists of two words; children have such understanding well before they can articulate it directly... We know further that if I tell you about a brown house, I want you to understand that its exterior is brown, not necessarily its interior. So a brown house is something with a brown exterior. Similarly, if you see a house, you see its exterior... The same is true of a wide range of objects: boxes, igloos, mountains, etc.... Over a wide range of cases, we think of an object somehow as its exterior surface, almost like a geometric surface... but we do not think of a brown house just as a surface. If it were a surface, you could be near the house even if you were inside it. So an object of this kind is at least an exterior surface with a distinguished interior.

A further look shows that the meanings of such terms are still more complex. If I say I painted my house brown, you understand me to mean that I painted the exterior surface brown; but I can say, perfectly intelligibly, that I painted my house brown on the inside. So we can think of the house as an interior surface, with the background circumstances complicated slightly. In technical jargon, this is called marked and unmarked usage... This is a pervasive feature of the semantics of natural language. If I say 'I climbed the mountain,' you know that I went up... But I can say 'climbed down the mountain,' adding extra information that permits the marked usage. What we know about such simple words... must be almost entirely unlearned. We are unaware of what we know without inquiry, and it could well turn out to be inaccessible to consciousness, so that we can learn about it only as we learn about circulation of the blood and visual perception. Even if experience were rich and extensive, it could not possibly provide information of the kind just barely sampled, or account for its uniformity among people with differing experience... Miracles aside, it must be that the child is relying on those 'parts of [its] knowledge' that are derived 'by the original hand of nature,' in Hume's terms--on 'memory from an earlier existence,' as reformulated within the framework of genetic endowment (in some as yet unknown manner). Powers and Prospects (1996), pp. 20-23.

In my opinion, structures of the type Chomsky produces belong to a certain class of preferences which, though primitive in character and probably antecedent even to the emergence of hierarchy in social organization, are not necessarily 'innate', i.e., there 'in the beginning'. I do not want to overstate Chomsky's commitment to the detail of his argument. He does concede that "all of this... [may be] mere artifact; [we may be] just not looking at things correctly" (ibid. p. 30).

The word 'house' is of ancient origin and evokes meanings which are derived across a wide spectrum of human experience. Although the word itself is a relatively minor item in the surface detail of the language, its meaning can be seen, upon inquiry, to emerge from a vast conceptual domain which stretches into the dim reaches of consciousness and the collective memory. It is possible (even likely) that this particular word revives events of striking transitional moment in our biological past -- these too becoming part of its meaning to the speaker of the language -- though the mechanisms through which such information becomes recorded in our genes, imprinted in consciousness, and made thus accessible to culture, are matters of mystery.

These meanings range from foreground images which are specific, quite concrete and detailed--maybe the 'house' I saw five minutes ago (along with numerous accompanying perceptions) -- to remote and increasingly abstractt levels of representation. In adjacency to the cumulative build-up of experience itself (which is their abiding center), these meanings appear, as we move to the edges of awareness (and in a Jungian sense back in time), to become increasingly comprehensive if less distinct in their conceptual profile; hence their power to attract and assimilate new material, as this comes into play at surface levels of representation. It is not surprising that Chomsky finds such structures intriguing. Their high level of generality, and their location in the distant periphery of human consciousness, bespeak an early origin. Somewhere, in the sketchier and more remote reaches of this imaginal realm, with its variegated array of intriguing structures, lies the topic which engages our immediate interest.

Language reveals aspects of meaning which are, at the same time, obstacles to communication. So the study of language is also the study of the failure of communication. The idea that language structures comprise a system of referential meanings, existing in some kind of logical association with items in the physical universe, and that the participants in the discourse are inevitably cognizant of the nature of this relationship, appears doubtful. First, the identity of the object represented is not stable (nor is there extensive shared experience among participants in the discourse). A word has meanings which shift with the circumstances in which the information is exchanged (as the extent of shared experience changes). A much studied phenomenon of natural language is the concept of 'deictic' relationship. There is no reason to add to the literature on this subject, except to say that the notion is useful and should be given greater prominence in language theory. Deictic categories are traditionally assumed to inhere in the location of the speaker (in space) and her/his personal identity (known only to those present). We know who 'I' is because we know (through visual observation or some other means) who is speaking. A deictic relationship (or 'deixis') is normally understood to be inherent in the use of common words such as 'here' and 'there' (and personal pronouns) where the location and/or identity of the speaker provides the only key to the meaning of a sentence. The concept is normally applied where information is transmitted through gesture as well. We 'know' what 'over there' is (as an object of interest) because the speaker points in 'that' direction. (The question of deixis was discussed in Part One -- Chapter Two.)

Examples are readily forthcoming which both illustrate and expand the relevance of this concept. The word 'out', to take a simple word, has no clear meaning beyond circumstances specific to the discourse. In one context the assertion 'I'm going out later in the day' may mean simply that the speaker intends to go some place (any place) 'outside' the particular building (or other enclosed setting) in which he/she happens to find him or herself at the moment in question. Its meaning in a given instance may depend on what the listener knows about the speaker's life, her habits, ideosyncracies, etc. Given certain circumstances the sentence may mean the speaker intends to launch a sailboat into the waters of a nearby lake. Here it makes no difference whether the speaker is located 'in' or 'outside' a building (or in or outside any other physical setting). All that is necessary -- but this is crucial -- is that the participants in the exchange share certain information, facts pertaining to the discourse which, though not necessarily stated in the language itself (or through gesture), are essential to the understanding of the message. The same words could mean the speaker intends to 'surf the internet'.

Such examples can be retrieved from anywhere in the language, which raises issues which are of more than ordinary interest to the specialist. Consider 'places' and 'languages'. Chomsky draws special attention to these categories, and for good reason.⁽⁵⁾ The objects which make up such groupings owe aspects of their meaning to relationships of varying kinds which arise from circumstances not ordinarily thought to be intrinsic to their constitution: political boundaries and history in the case of 'Chinese', the location of the speaker and her/his audience in the case of 'Boston'. If a man living in Chicago speaks about his 'community' he could mean, depending on the inhering relationships, the greater Chicago area (whatever that may be thought to constitute) if he is speaking to someone from a different state or country, for example, or his suburban neighborhood if he is speaking to a person from some other part of Chicago. Given the proper circumstances, the man's reference to his community could conceivably reflect a discursive relationship involving colleagues in far-flung places (Langley, VA, for example, if the man is a member of the so-called 'intelligence community' and the person he is speaking to is not). Such questions of contextual relationship invariably complicate understanding of language as a referential system involving objects in the world. Yet this is how language presents itself to inquiry.

Nor does this complication vanish when we turn to objects commonly believed to have clear physical definition such as an automobile, my doctor, a tree or (for that matter) a 'house'. Such objects also present themselves to experience and consciousness as the centers of relationships which shift, as the discourse itself shifts ground. They may not be separable in a meaningful way from a discourse in which they too serve (one is inclined to say) merely as points of reference. The objects in the world which language is commonly thought to represent are not easily defined outside discourse itself.

Objects fall into classes which must be treated as distinct because language treats them as distinct. Moreover, natural language shows striking inconsistencies in its willingness to assign objects physical status and definition. It should not be necessary to repeat: we are talking about language, and its propensity to represent experience in certain specific ways, not philosophy or the science of physics and the representational structures peculiar to these special modes of inquiry.

Varying degrees of willingness, on the part of our particular language, to grant physical definition to objects in the world become immediately apparent with respect to the quality of 'size'. In our various answers to the question 'how big', and in our assessment of the intelligibility of the query itself, we see something of the extensive nature of the problem. The question 'How big was the cop?' is instantly intelligible to almost everyone if we mean simply physical dimensions or weight. One immediately answers 'five-foot-eight', or 'a hundred-and-fifty pounds', or 'quite tall' (or 'short', or 'fat', or 'skinny', or 'heavy'), or one says simply 'pretty big' (or 'pretty small').

On the other hand, if I ask 'How big is Chicago?' it becomes apparent that physical size has no longer the same 'clear' meaning. Although one can still answer 'pretty big', which avoids the purpose of the attempted elicitation, typical answers will invoke the density of its human population, not the physical dimensions of the city itself, whatever these might be thought to comprise⁽⁶⁾. What does the city of Chicago weigh? It is hard to know what to do with the question because we do not know what to weigh. Do we include the soil upon which and in which the city rests? If so, how deep do we go? Do we include the gardens, trees, rivers, birds and other animals? Although it has houses, buildings, streets, and much concrete and steel, the city has (conceptually speaking) neither weight nor volume. Chicago stands apart from the afore-mentioned cop who has both. Though it contains features of the material world the city of Chicago has little material definition. And when I ask 'How big is Chinese?' as a language, the question which was merely shunted to another conceptual category in the case of Chicago becomes now entirely meaningless. Or the informant gives it the closest most reasonable meaning, which might be a kind of metaphoric restatement which asks 'How popular is Chinese [as a curriculum] among college students?' 'Chinese' as a language has clearly the least physical definition of the three objects. It is clearly the object of the three the language defines most in terms of relationship.

We appear to be talking about significant differences in the way language perceives objects which have connection or relation to the real world. Chicago, like the Internet or Chinese, has no surface exterior which permits descriptive measurement even in the sense that an island permits a descriptive accounting of its size. Its limits are hazy like the air its people breathe. It is not an object, like a car, which can be thought of as being so long and so wide and so high. On the other hand, like a living animal Chicago sprawls along the shore of the lake and has, in this respect, something conceptually in common with the above-mentioned 'cop', who can spread her body out on a couch at the end of a day on the street. Chicago, like Noam Chomsky's 'Boston', is a complex system of relationships in which physical objects--the pavement, buildings, people, parks--are mere points of reference in a network which has no surface or boundaries.

It is quite apparent that such a structure is perceived differently from within than from a thousand miles away. What constitutes 'home' when we are living and experiencing and talking in the midst of this complex relationship is quite unlike the notion of 'home' we convey to strangers when away. For one thing, perceived from within place needs and has no name. Nor does a language. The names for places and languages are inevitably 'objectively' determined, brought in from outside. The Navajo called themselves simply Dine (formerly an inclusive designation meaning 'people'). Sometimes the inclusive form indigenous to the group itself becomes the cultural instrument for its own exclusion (i.e. the name 'Tutsi'). The name 'Russian' may have come to English and the world community via some form of Uralic (Finnish ruotsi Estonian Rootsi) where it meant, however, not 'Russia' but 'Sweden', which is probably to be explained by historical Swedish involvement in 'Russia' (as viewed by their neighbors). Needless to say, what constitutes his/her 'language' to someone living in Beijing is something quite different from any concept of 'Chinese' derived from political-historical circumstances.

My Grandmother, who was born in Finnskogen, a forested region which straddles the political boundary between Norway and Sweden, spoke 'Swedish' (though she was of Finnish family background). When I was growing up she lived across the street from a Norwegian woman named Marin Anderssen, her close friend, who happened to come from a place in Norway perhaps twenty kilometers, or so, from my Grandmother's birthplace in Western Sweden. One would have to say, I suppose, that Marin spoke 'Norwegian'. In any case, the two sat for hours together, my Grandmother talking 'Swedish', Marin talking what she probably considered to be 'Norwegian'. Yet these two women were largely unaware of differences in their language. The distinguishing labels 'Swedish' and 'Norwegian' were merely part of the noise, so to speak, in the background of their relationship.

Two things should be obvious from the above. First, the referent in a system of discourse is not some well-defined object external to the consciousness of the participants.⁽⁷⁾ Like the participants themselves, and the language they know and speak, the referent is imbedded in the particulars of the discourse. Language emerges as one among several self-referring systems in a system of self-referring systems called human cognition and culture. The most one can say is that a word refers either to something in the language itself -- e.g. 'John wondered if he should leave...' where the pronoun 'he' can be said to have a lexical item 'John' as its referent -- or to some complex representation of a presumed object 'John' which is completely internal to the speaking and comprehending individuals and shared only in certain essential features, something existing solely in the mind. Secondly, because language systems are representations of experience, because experience varies among individuals, and because the circumstances of discourse are complex and varied, there is the possibility, even likelihood, that language will fail as communication.

I drink coffee in a room flooded with the light of the morning sun. Despite the apparent simplicity of the word 'coffee', the concept is a complex structure which draws meaning, in my case, from the room, the light, the sun, the time of day, the taste and smell, certain mild physiological responses, etc., and other circumstances (some shared with others of my species, most not) too numerous and complex for my conscious mind to detail or even fathom. I can not give linguistic shape to this basic concept in my life, no matter how I try. There is a complicating factor, moreover, in that patterns of ordinary thought appear to be 'laterally extensive', to invoke a useful metaphor, and significantly non-sequential, thus inhibitive of verbal expression as conventionally conceived. These patterns tend, in fact, to leave language out of the picture altogether, in some of its more formal aspects especially, though the materials of language, as objects of experience themselves, remain a significant input to conceptualization, language, even surface referential elements, being continuously turned back into consciousness as special imaginal material, a fact which bears significantly on the particular mode of conceptualization which, in sapiens sapiens, has been shaped to an extraordinary degree by structures specific not only to language but to writing. The animal mind can be characterized as a continuing metaphor in which all of reality consists in a compounding of relationship⁽⁸⁾.

This tends to throw the notion of language as com-munication or exchange, depending on extensive shared representations of experience, into an area of significant doubt, especially at times when human community and shared experience are in disarray. This leaves the collective process open to mythic representations in the form of simplifications which exploit disjunction in community. Myth provides discursive constancies which fill the breach where communication based on shared experience fails. Genuine communication runs back and forth. Myth is often one-directional in its actualization. More on this below.

'House' is one of a 'wide range of cases' (Chomsky says) which evoke similar meanings in one crucial respect: they are enclosed structures (my language) about which one can say that their interior is marked linguistically, for certain kinds of usage, and their exteriors unmarked. When we say we 'see' a house, or 'paint' a house, we intend people to understand that we are seeing or painting the house on the outside unless, of course, the speaker is a real estate salesperson or interior designer where contextual information reverses markedness. In such a case, 'looking at a house' or 'doing a house' or 'painting a house' might mean examining or seeing (or 'doing') its interior. To a specialist a 'brown house' may have brown interior walls. Such contextually specific 'reversals' are quite familiar and require little further discussion.⁽⁹⁾

However, markedness raises issues which are pretty much ignored in current theory of language, issues of wide scope. Many of the assumptions which underlie markedness at the level of semantics are no mere appendages to immediate discourse, though they can be and are manifest at this restricted level of representation. Markedness can be the reflection of assumptions which, while nowhere explicitly stated, underpin the entire discourse of the community and are surprisingly stable. These then have potential mythic value with everything this will be seen to imply. While our surface intent may be to say that we are painting the exterior surface of the house, and we may or may not expect a response dealing with this limited set of facts, we manage nonetheless to pass on important extra information to which a response would be unexpected and even inappropriate. Even in a relatively neutral context, to the doubtful extent that such exists, we manage to convey the additional idea that painting the outside surface of the house is a more usual or expected activity, in the experience of members of the community, than painting its interior walls.

It seems that structural imbalance, implicit at some significant level of meaning, is necessary to an understanding of the usage in question. But the meaning, which unmarked usage assumes, that houses are more usually painted on their outside surfaces than on their inside is based not on the actual fact that some such distributional imbalance exists but on the mere claim that this is so. This puts its structure, or meaning, in a radically altered perspective, in my judgment. The real message of the language, the part which neither expects nor allows a response, may be an entirely different proposition from the one which masquerades as the structural rationale. This is that painting the exterior of the house is more important than what goes on inside the house, more absorbing of the public imagination and thus more worthy of attention. This 'real' message is not brought forward for the purpose of discussion but intended simply to be accepted by the participants in the discourse. A response to this part of the message would be, in fact, (perceived as) inappropriate. Language experiences an exclusive mythic application... and begins commensurately to fail in its function as 'communication'. It emerges as an instrument, among many available to the culture, through which imbalance is preserved if not created.

Such expressions of simple preference have wide social and cultural ramifications. The phrase 'brown house' reveals a mythic undercurrent, or sub-text, which promotes a certain way of looking at the world. If the unmarked usage makes a tacit appeal to frequency, as the measure of what is usual or expected, this presumed 'objective part' of the message is really only the support set-up for a cultural precept which designates the milieu external to the house as the official vantage point for its inspection and, most important of all, for the fixing of its identity in the collective imagination.

But this leaves unexamined the other (and, from the perspective of inquiry, most important) side of the issue. The hypothetical bias which favors the exterior vantage point reflects a socio-cultural ambience in which the interior space has less value for the same purpose of observation and identification. The cultural context, in which a 'brown house' is taken to mean 'a house having a brown exterior surface', appears to pre-suppose a visually based sense of space in which value resides unevenly in the way individuals relate to objects in the world. We are talking not just about marked and unmarked usage but about an extensive derogating process which is culturally reproductive.

The concept of a derogated interior space was 'originally' revealed, we can imagine, in ways which were both more and less abstract than the formulation given in the preceding paragraph. At the level most distant from immediate experience, though not less powerful in its effect on consciousness, the concept was evident, we can perhaps assume, in the degradation of a particular state of mind, a particular mode of being and perceiving characterized by the capacity to sense, not necessarily 'see' (a distinction we take up below), the world from within, the ability to inhabit its structures, natural and artifactual, material and relational, animate and inanimate. The reputed power of the 'primitive' human being⁽¹⁰⁾ to inhere in the world, as reflected variously in the phenomenon the nineteenth century called 'animism', has been noted by ethnologists for two centuries and its loss, to moderns, much lamented through the years. In my view, indications (linguistic or other) of the derogation of such a faculty are themselves evidence for the existence of a prior cultural state in which the phenomenon in question was affirmed or, at least, fairly neutral with respect to value, a state which may have been, in fact, truly 'original' in human consciousness.

Tales of humans inhabiting the bodies of other animals are wide-spread indeed. They point, if we may be permitted to view them as 'literalizations' (of mythic material), to such a state of awareness as a common property of the early mind. (See paleolithic graphic representation reproduced below as Plate VII.) If the marked usage, in the case Chomsky cites, is really evidence of the 'original hand of nature', then these observations must be regarded merely as stories which have no larger relevance. They can be dismissed either as the romantic fantasy of moderns or as the anomalous delusions of cultural 'primitives'.

Plate VII

Less abstractly, the interior was the physical locus of much female activity in an early modern human division of labor; so the process of derogation can be seen as pervading the conceptual territory of ordinary domestic life. Moreover, it becomes quite impossible to separate this new direction in human perception from the social context of emerging 'patriarchy'. These new representations of experience can be seen as providing imaginal material for derogations in the culture at large. In other words, lying beneath the surface of the particular example is the mythic proposition that the world of the male, the world of visually perceived objective reality, takes precedence over the inner world of the female, whether this is understood to be the literal interior of the house or (more abstractly) the interiorization of experience as a specific way of relating (to the world).

It is an understatement to say that the traditions most of us know reverberate with this assertion of precedence by male culture and with its consequences. Its impact has been, in fact, quite overwhelming. Indoeuropean (and related) cosmogonies narrate the trauma of an original rejection of the closed environment (Pandora's 'box' or the forest setting of the so-called 'Garden of Eden' to pick familiar examples), but these accounts re-write the event in question, blaming its convulsive repercussions on nature and the human female. I bring the topic to the foreground at this particular moment in order to emphasize that such collective representations of the past are transitional in their very nature. They suggest (pre-suppose to my way of thinking) a prior socio-cultural state in which the interior, as sensory vantage point, was unmarked and underogated (but possibly also unappreciated relative to other modes of perception). The disagreement with Chomsky, if such exists, turns on this issue. The phrase 'brown house', which shows, in my view, simply the modern human preference for external vantage (but which Chomsky believes points to 'initial endowment'), implies an antecedent condition in a transitional process which affected much of human culture on the Eurasian continent (and beyond). Existing languages may yield important residue of this earlier state, a social and cultural condition which existed long before the terminal phases of the Pleistocene. Modern languages may turn out to be the principal sources of such information.

There is no reason in principle, I suppose, to imagine that a transition, culminating in some reversal of markedness (with implications even of derogation), was not initiated and brought to completion at some remote evolutionary stage prior to the appearance of sapiens sapiens (long before the appearance of humans in Europe and Asia) our genes having somehow recorded the complex sequence of this particular event (in a way not yet understood by science), along with its attendant trauma, so that it continues to remain vibrant in human awareness. One can scarcely deny that genetic structure pre-ordains certain other preferences which appear to be innate to the organism.

For example, the struggle of our biological antecedents toward a pre-dominantly visual representation of experience is evident anatomically in structures which form the bridge between so-called lower and higher primates, as Ian Tattersall has shown in his neat essay on the lemurs of Madagascar who offer, he believes, the best glimpse into our eocene past⁽¹¹⁾. Though already diurnal in their food gathering, and though their eyes are already essentially forward-facing, these fellow creatures do not yet show the extensive overlap of right and left visual fields which gives so-called 'higher' primates a wide depth perception. Lemurs apparently lack also the cone cells in their retinas which have endowed more recently evolved primates with an extraordinary ability to distinguish colors.

'Lower' primates exhibit, by contrast, the more complex array of those structures and mechanisms which are necessary to create a fundamentally olfactory representation of the world: a proportionately larger nasal cavity, for example, with greater capacity to examine air-borne particles plus internal sensing structures which are more complex. They retain, moreover, the primitive mammalian 'wet nose' which facilitates the efficient transfer of particles to the nasal cavity. These and other characteristics are reduced, or eliminated altogether, among higher primates, as is olfactory communication within the species in general⁽¹²⁾, higher primates having lost their scent glands and, therewith, their overt capacity to exude substances which identify the individual and mark its presence in a particular location.

The detail is insignificant for our immediate purpose. The important inference, to be drawn from Tattersall's glimpse into our evolutionary past, is that the heightened visual acuity of higher primates was likely accompanied by an increase in the value of the visual representation relative to other sense-based representations; and that this occurred at the apparent expense of smell. So we have a kind of markedness, which exists truly at the level of biological endowment, and one which has also an implied conceptual dimension. To assume otherwise (i.e. that the evolutionary sweep, evident in changing animal morphology, has no counterpart in cognition) is to argue from the mechanistic Cartesian perspective that animal behavior is mindless, that animals do not experience thoughts, feelings, desires, preferences, etc. Higher primates, the category which includes humans, prefer to examine unfamiliar objects visually rather than through smelling. Alone among mammals, the so-called 'higher primate' is aided in this by elongated and articulated fingers which are independently operable, plus a somewhat opposed thumb, an arrangement which permits a member of this sub-order to rotate small objects under its direct gaze, enabling it to study detail with a minimum of visual obstruction. Tattersall points out that lemurs, by contrast, tend to pick things up with the whole hand: "...an object held in this way is... more likely to be sniffed rather than inspected visually and turned in the fingers..."⁽¹³⁾

That Tattersall brings the visual and olfactory senses together, for broad evolutionary comparison, is especially significant because these two manifestations of function allow us to infer their respective conceptual dimensions. We are encouraged to posit the existence of two parallel and apparently competing structures (in the mind of the thinking animal) which mirror and perhaps influence, in an interesting way, these manifestations of function. Competing for dominance, in the long evolutionary period leading up to the arrival of our species in its modern form, these two systems of value or 'preference', can be imagined as coming increasingly out of balance as had the physiological functions they reflected and sought to influence, the imaginal structures associated with the sense of vision tending eventually to suppress those related to smell.

It goes without saying that something has brought the derogation of smell, in particular, to levels of intensity not experienced elsewhere in the animal world. I would like to pursue the topic a bit further because much hangs on when and how this seemingly natural sense became so degraded in the human imagination. It can be scarcely denied that the struggle of vision to gain dominance over smell has left a powerful conceptual residue in the mind. Smell looms as a structure so despised, in conceptualization, that the modern human evinces discomfort at the very thought. But because the olfactory image, though repressed, remains forceful and demanding of attention, it has become the source of strong taboo, it appears.⁽¹⁴⁾ The energies of the modern urbanized individual, disciplined since infancy to distrust and shun the immediately intangible (and the in-visible), seem taken up with the need to expunge, from place and person, most traces of natural odor and to create a representation of the self (and reality) which is purely visual. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the picture of the modern primate positioned motionless before a computer monitor, seemingly transfixed by a representation of experience which has been sanitized in accordance with this mythic ideal, a representation in which all traces of non-visual sensory input have been obliterated. In important contradistinction to the practice of our lower primate ancestors, and cousins, we learn to mark our presence in the environment by how we appear (to a more limited extent also by the noise we make), assuredly not by how we smell. It is significant that artifactual odors are marketed explicitly to mask all natural olfactory representations of the self.

Indoeuropean languages have developed an extensive lexicon to deal with an underswell of derogated olfactory sensation, and feeling, related to basic life process ('reek', 'rotten', 'rank'), which threatens to erupt and spoil the tranquil surface of a visually perceived reality. The capacity to detect and evaluate, through olfactory means, the physical presence of external objects encounters linguistic-conceptual derogation which is nearly total. Unlike the derogants which crowd around other forms of sensory perception, these tend to affect and contaminate the function itself, not just the object sensed. To 'smell' is, at the same time, to 'stink'⁽¹⁵⁾ (cf. German 'es schmeckt' and 'es riecht'). (To 'see', by contrast, is to possess wonderful comprehension.)

Yet, for all its intense meaning to the mature human being the sense of smell appears to be value-neutral in our earliest experience, which brings us to the question which began this discussion. Researchers have maintained that the perception of odors as 'good' or 'bad', as 'pleasant' or 'unpleasant', is a learned response which the individual begins, to be sure, to acquire in the first hours after birth if not already in utero. It has been observed that exposure of a fetus to odorants significantly influences the individual's postnatal response to olfactory signals.⁽¹⁶⁾

Be that as it may, while certain imbalances can be attributed to initial endowment, and while these imbalances may well be the reflection of structures which indicate preference, there appears to be no way to account for the great imaginal disparity in the mind of the modern human being between vision and smell, except as cultural artifact. Moreover, the sense of vision, having already come to dominance in the natural course of primate evolution relative to smell, became increasingly identified, in an evolving 'patriarchal' consciousness, with the human male. This may have been partly a consequence of a (possible) gender-based division of labor which placed, perhaps, special value on the greater height of the male scavenger and his ability to sight distant objects⁽¹⁷⁾.

To pick up the main thread of the previous discussion, the world which denied enclosure and the interiorization of experience also elevated visual sensation and its metaphoric extensions of meaning (what the older George Bush called, with uncharacteristic clarity, the 'vision thing') to a mythic pantheon which was the conceptual framework for an ideology of power. Thus, while the human preference for external vantage (in the representation of an object) may well have deep roots in human biology, the preponderance of signs are that frank derogation, in the framing of conceptual opposites, and the extension of these loaded dualities into wide areas of experience, is the work of modern culture itself. There is a familiar ring to the adduction of biological endowment as the principal causative factor in expressions of culture. It is reminiscent of the argument that nothing can be done to alter the course of human folly: it's in our 'nature' (Pandora's 'box').

At this juncture it may be wise to review the meaning of the phrase which initiated this discussion. When I tell you about a 'brown house' I expect you to understand that I am talking about its exterior surface. The interior is not normally of great interest to us (in the sense of the culture at large) because we attach no great value to what goes on in such places or, for that matter, to those engaged in these activities. Therefore, I expect you to understand, if I fail to make explicit reference to the interior, that I am assuming a vantage point outside such places which, in my (i.e. my culture's) frame of values, is the 'best' vantage point one can assume in talking about this or any other object in the world.

The presumption of relative value is intrinsic to the message I convey. I know, and the person I am speaking to knows also, that in a strictly 'objective sense' many of us (perhaps most of us), men and women alike, spend as much of our time inside such buildings as outside; so when I imply (through my language) that the one vantage point, from which to sense the 'house' for the purpose of identifying it, is more 'usual', I do not intend this to be taken as a statistically based assertion in some literal sense. I do not mean that the people of the community spend so much time outside these 'houses' that there is no need for me to specify the vantage point more precisely. When I tell you about a 'brown house', and assume you will understand I am talking about the outside surface, I assume also that you share the unchallengeable assumption of the discourse that the exterior vantage point, and vision itself as the sensory mode, is 'preferable', or 'more important', or 'more acceptable', or more 'worthy of mention', etc.

Let's consider another example. If someone says 'Smith came too fast around the corner', where the meaning normally intended and conveyed is that a man named Smith (not a woman) was driving too fast for the turn, the unmarked usage is invoked not because males, in our society, are presumed to constitute a statistical majority or are somehow 'more usual' or 'expected' (even as drivers). What markedness takes for granted, in such examples, is rather a shared perception of value as assigned unequally in the given social context.

When I was growing up in Northern Wisconsin it was accepted journalistic practice, in the reporting of traffic incidents and petty crimes, to refer to charged (or just ticketed) females not as 'Jane Smith', or 'Miss Smith', or 'Mrs. Smith', but as 'the Smith woman' (e.g. '...the Smith woman was turning right at Shore Drive...'), a humiliating attention which came to women alone due to certain formal properties of the culture and of the language. Such structures served as a continuous reminder of the 'derived status' of women in general. Like the 'Smith car', or 'Smith house', or any other item of property, the Smith 'woman' acquired her primary identity in her relationship to a man.⁽¹⁸⁾

The history of the word 'woman' illustrates this derived status most clearly. One hardly needs to ask how this came about.⁽¹⁹⁾ It had certainly nothing to do with frequency except in the special sense that the female, from the vantage point of the dominant male culture, did not exist. (Despite a slight statistical edge in the population, women are considered officially [and correctly] to be a social minority.) The unequal prominence, that markedness requires and ultimately reproduces in the social sphere, need not have a literally quantifiable aspect. Recall that it is merely the mythic claim which has structural meaning. Nor does the degradation necessarily go away when such egregious examples are deleted in the surface structure of the language, though any effort to bring this about is helpful, in my opinion, and praiseworthy. The mental images lying immediately adjacent to such structures have links to the most enduring formations of the mind and are not readily expunged.

Easily overlooked, in any examination of markedness, is the fact that the objects, or persons, or qualities, which surface linguistically as unmarked, owe their enhanced value not to any special elaboration of intrinsic virtues but to the degradation which takes place at the marked end of the spectrum where special elaboration is required by definition. The raising of certain structures of thought to 'high status', in the collective imagination, proceeds in a way which is indirect, as is much else in the instrumental repertory by which 'patriarchal myth' is propagated. So long as the marked category, represented overwhelmingly by images we draw into invidious association with nature and the human female, is sufficiently extensive and delineated, there is no special need to extol objectivity, for example, and the other virtues of our culture. Their enhancement comes as a free gift, so to speak, the consequence of their lofty status as unmarked values and of the degradation of their presumed opposites. We feel so 'good' about these virtues, they seem so 'right' to us. No further elaboration is necessary. (The category is 'unmarked'.) There seems every reason to imagine we were born with them, that they reflect the 'original hand of nature', to use Hume's phrase.

There are aspects of meaning, inherent in the phrase 'brown house', which Chomsky, for his purpose, had no reason to mention. They are specific to the concept house, can not be generalized over a very 'wide range of objects' and did not seem to bear directly on the finding of innate structure in the human understanding of language, the matter which was his immediate concern. Yet these additional dimensions of meaning merit discussion in the present context because they have possibly common origin with features discussed above. These elementary constituents of meaning shed further light on that transitional moment in the evolution of consciousness -- here hypothesized and narrowly amplified -- in which objectification (and visualization) of experience sought to replace and override other modes of being and relating (and sensing).

If I tell you about a 'brown house' I am not just saying that the outside provides the preferred vantage point in a culture dominated by special images of virtue. I normally expect you to understand that the color brown, assumed already to designate the exterior surface of the building in question, does not designate the color of its roof, even though the roof may comprise the larger and most visible part of the surface exterior of the building. The phrase 'brown house' conveys the specific information that the outside walls of the building are brown, not the roof.

So we must naturally inquire if this additional implied imbalance, according to which the latter comprises marked usage, and the former unmarked (as illustrated by the phrase 'a brown house with a grey roof'), might not have meaning within the same frame of values which informs the distinction between interior and exterior space as places of vantage. The answer, though by no means conclusive, has implications which are most provocative.

Of proximate interest is the fact that 'walls' and 'roofs' are not exactly on equal footing semantically, though the objects these words supposedly represent serve a similar technical function (i.e. to enclose space for purposes of privacy, protection from weather, etc.). Both 'roof' and 'wall' are architecturally conceived (in the modern Western state of the art) as flat, framed, sheathed and/or paneled structures which are brought together in various ways to provide shelter; so it is immediately puzzling to discover that the two words evoke quite contrasting images at levels of understanding where one would expect, naively perhaps, to discover extensive correspondence.

The broad differences between the two can be characterized as follows. Walls are structures which divide or separate: inside from outside, room from room, human from human, human from nature, 'us' from 'them', etc. They function figuratively and literally as a defense against something perceived as threatening: we build walls around ourselves (to cite a typical cliche). One can attempt to construct counter instances, phrases in which a roof, by contrast, is the barrier, or impediment, or obstacle to passage from one space to the other, but metaphoric extensions of such usage immediately belie the notion of a common imaginal derivation. In 'reaching for the stars', metaphorically speaking, does our knowledge of English allow us to 'break through the roof' of popular skepticism (or scorn)? (As one demolishes, for example, the 'walls which block opportunity'?) Such constructs meet stiff resistance from what one knows and feels about the language. A roof of 'opposition'? There is clearly something wrong. Fundamental elements of meaning appear to be at cross-purposes.

As an image, the 'roof' of a building emerges from terrain which is radically unlike what we know and feel to be the conceptual topography of 'walls'. In its capacity for total enclosure, a 'roof' is essentially integrative, assimilating, in its roughly horizontal orientation, important aspects of the natural landscape. By contrast, as the wall divides, so is it also divided. The wall structure of a building necessarily breaks down into segments which, though interconnected, are perceived as a multiplicity. We speak of necessity about the 'walls' of a building. Any use of the singular is marked.⁽²⁰⁾

By contrast, a 'roof' is a structure which is somehow indivisible--a conceptual unity--no matter what its complexity or the number of facets, instances of joinder, planes, angles, etc. (The multifarious 'House of Seven Gables' has a single 'roof'!) A roof integrates its various structural members and all else below and is assimilative. We bring conflicting things and ideas together metaphorically 'under a single roof'. Moreover, the word 'roof' has the capability to function in linguistic stead of 'shelter', 'dwelling', etc., as in the poor have no 'roof(s)' (meaning 'housing'), so extensive is its imaginal reach. For a sense of the contrast: ask yourself whether it is good or bad that the city poor know no walls?

These things should be of interest to cultural historians and linguists because such contrasts, emanating from the most shielded recesses of the mind, afford a glimpse into human cognitive process at great depths in time, at stages in cultural development which probably lie far in advance of writing. Apparently at issue are two broadly distinguishable representations of experience, contrasting clusters of assimilated meaning as it were, which have congealed around two seemingly everyday assemblages or objects: the one, the 'wall', providing a vertical or upright image of defense, division, and spatial separation (which recognizes, however, no inflexible claim of permanence in its setting of boundaries: one can and does break down 'walls' and barriers to gain access to the 'other side'), the other, of much more ancient derivation, having an essentially horizontal aspect which subsumes a diversity of allied elements (some alluded to in foregoing pages), chief of which is perhaps the concept of an enclosed universe bounded by clear limits.

A roof/ceiling has, from the interior perspective, no opposed space (metaphorically speaking), no 'other side'. I have conjoined the two words in the previous sentence because the current productive meaning of 'roof', as a lexical item in itself, appears to address the exterior of an object, which is predictable by reason of the cultural pressures in question. We evoke thus ancient meanings when we speak of the 'roof of the mouth' or the 'roof of a cave' where no alternative place of vantage exists, where the object in question has literally no opposed space, no outside surface. The medieval believer could still locate all of existence under the 'rof o crists heuen'. Here, too, the human imagination provided no external place of vantage. In some fundamental sense 'roof' meant, perhaps still means, upper limit, even ultimate closure. One can 'go through the roof', to be sure, but only in the hyperbolic sense of exceeding absolute limits. Having rejected the interior perspective, human action now literally knows to our collective dismay no ceiling (or limit), no boundaries.

One easily imagines that the interior of the 'house' with its enclosing roof was, in some probably early pre-Indoeuropean cultural context, nothing less than an artifactual representation of the universe: the 'house' can be seen as contained, like earth and nature itself, beneath an over-arching roof, or sky, which was visualized, in turn, as a protective lid or cover. The English words 'house', 'hut', 'hide' (both as verb and noun with their respective semantic divergences) and, surprisingly, 'sky' all point to such a construction. They are derivationally homogeneous with respect to meaning and form! They are cognates which designate enclosure at multiple levels of assimilation. The comparative study of languages has made all this rather clear.

However these structures may have presented themselves to the prehistoric mind, forces allied with hegemonic institutions soon undertook a vast cosmological transformation which swept across the cultural landscape, rejecting this hermetic unity and exposing human consciousness (and the earth) to the outside. The earth (and consciousness itself) suffered the removal of its outer 'hide' or 'skin'. Its protective cover -- this mythic 'sky/skin' -- was strippped away and discarded, as incursions of new images, bearing the false promise of an opening to the infinite, broke up and ravaged the interior imagination. It is difficult to envisage what this meant to the inhering sensibility.

It is significant, in any case, that 'sky' and 'house' were originally the 'same word' and may be presumed, at some level of understanding, to represent the same concept still. The reconstructed Indoeuropean base is *(s)keu-. Immediately interesting is the possibility that these semantic/lexical relationships, or equations, on the surface little more than ordinary 'metaphors', may be, in actual fact, remnants of a way of thinking which vanished with the advent of the Culture of the Open (previously developed [Chapter Five and passim] as a major watershed in recent human evolution) and the new organization of consciousness this entailed: a way of understanding the world, not as an array of distinct objects, but as aspects of experience against which the so-called 'objects' of the world were perceived as similar.

In this hypothetical scenario, the form underlying the two items in question, and their numerous cognates, was not the name of an object, in the sense we assign names to objects to distinguish them, but rather some feature, inhering in the moment of experience, which drew these objects (and others) into assimilated relation: the protective 'sky' above our heads, the 'hides' of animals, our own skin (German Haut), a 'hut hidden' in the woods, community 'housing' with its vaulted roof-ceiling. Properly, no single one of these can be taken as a metaphor for another, because the individual object, in what we are assuming to be the 'primitive' frame of reference, had no identity merely in itself. When we speak of 'literalization' of a mythic precept, as we did on an earlier page⁽²¹⁾, we speak out of the conceptual structures of the only culture we know as moderns. Like metaphor itself the notion of literalization implies a meaning which was once wholly alien to human thought. To the hypothesized sensibility the basis for identity was relation within a perceived whole, not the isolated literally constructed object and some companion set of metaphoric representations. The cultural 'primitive' knew neither the 'unreal' structure of the imagination -- the ostensible 'metaphor' -- nor its literal representation or enactment. There was no basis either for 'metaphor', in this narrow sense, or for literalization as a distinctive kind of mental image. Assimilated relationship -- i.e. metaphor which was comprehensive and somehow inclusive -- was all there may have been.⁽²²⁾

Such manifestations of assimilation have maintained a minimal existence in the language of poets and advertizers. Yet it defeats comprehension to consider the complex state of integration language and culture knew, in all probability, before the Mythology of the Open invaded human cognition, simplifying its structures and contours, bringing therewith division to the 'real world'. Another possible vestige of this pre-Indoeuropean mode of conceptualization may be the complex feature-based nomenclature for reindeer which managed somehow to follow the Sami, who were protected in their boreal environment from the worst of hegemonic encroachment, into Christian times. It has been estimated that Sami dialects -- assumed to be forms of Ural-Altaic -- knew over four-hundred 'names' for reindeer. (Linnaeus, who sojourned for a time in Swedish Lapland, was astonished by the ability of Sami to recognize individual animals among thousands.) Yet they refrained from 'naming' individuals (in the way we 'name' pets). They appear to have been so reluctant to 'name' animals (and risk isolating them and offending them), that they reserved, as the 'name' for the seven-year-old mature male (who was no longer perceived as acquiring new features of identity and could thus become nearly fully integrated into the herd) the designation namma-lappe: 'the one who has lost his name',⁽²³⁾ and therewith all separating aspects of his identity other than sex.

Chomsky calls attention to an additional property of the word 'house' which affirms the general direction of the foregoing discussion. We can say 'John's house burned down but he rebuilt it two years later' (on a possibly different site), where the pronoun 'it' can not conceivably be understood to designate John's original 'house', because that building now lies in ashes and rubble.⁽²⁴⁾

Such properties of natural language provide clues to prior cultural states. They help us to move certain structures of thought out of dark places in the mind which are normally not accessible to consciousness. The word 'house' appears to evoke meanings which transcend the universe of material objects. A house, owing perhaps to its great antiquity and familiarity as a concept, not to speak of its over-arching cosmological meanings (in the comparative linguistic frame of reference), exists apart from most other 'objects' which make up our material world. Conceptually, a house stands apart from an automobile engine, a wagon, a ceramic pot, an airplane or box, a piano or any number of other material 'things'⁽²⁵⁾ about which we are not able to say, except in a metaphysical sense, that they were rebuilt, having been demolished, destroyed, reduced to rubble and ashes, etc.

The items just listed belong, at the level of modern perceptions, to the larger class by far of material objects, a class in which physical continuity is the minimal requirement for continued existence. A 'house' is exempted from this sharp limitation. Almost alone among material objects (metaphysics aside) a 'house', and, by extension, a few other larger buildings which specify important collective functions of one kind or another, shares with structures of pure relation the property of being able to endure, in that it can be returned to 'its' original condition after being entirely destroyed, in the way that community, and other manifestations of collective action (including organizations and languages themselves), are thought able to be re-constructed following utter devastation. A house can burn to the ground and be built again for the comfort and use of 'its' old occupants. In the same manner (imaginally speaking) the city of Chicago was 'rebuilt' after the fire of 1871. And like towns, the human imagination appears to allow languages to 'die out', so to speak, yet be 'revived' at some favorable time; though we may be hard-pressed to cite specific examples (other than perhaps Hebrew) where such a resurrection has in actual fact taken place.

The possibility must be considered, as a topic for further inquiry at least, that such curious properties of the language are remnants of a state of consciousness which did not yet 'know' the object, material or other, as something separable in the world. Such properties may be vestigial elements of a culture in which the perceiver inhered in patterns of likeness which found reflection across the gamut of collective experience. This is what the evidence (outlined above) begins to suggest for human culture at some primitive evolutionary stage. Here human consciousness may have known no 'outside' and 'inside'. And perceived from within the object has, of course, no 'name'. The human mind may have not yet known this primary conceptual distinction which allows a construction of the world as so many "parts strung together," to quote Stafford Beer. On the contrary, theirs might have been a perception of the world as one regards a "whole... through different sets of filters⁽²⁶⁾" (or through what we have called 'assimilative features').

For finally, it is the sense of the whole which is lost with the derogation (and loss) of the interior perspective. As we have seen, this ancient sense of the 'whole' may have been preserved in places in the world (and in the mind) which were out-of-reach and thus protected from advancing systems of alienation. This has been my thesis. As followers of reindeer which numbered, in their great herds, in the tens of thousands, the Sami of arctic Eurasia remained peculiarly sensitive to the dangers of separation or alienation. They treasured and managed to carry with them into historical times, we have been told, the image of saivo, a mythic state of awareness in which the world tends to present itself as more whole, as more integrated than in ordinary perception.⁽²⁷⁾

Language may again be fertile ground for 'archaeological excavation' (as it was a hundred years ago). Common structures in the surface lexicon of English and other languages may reveal the same ancient meanings which surface in the experience of the now largely 'patriarchal' Sami. Words such as 'sky' and 'house' may not be so explicit (as Lappish saivo) in their evocation of the 'lost perspective' I speak of. Nonetheless, they show important traces of this early state of human awareness. These words afford a glimpse of a world which did not know the objectification (hence alienation) of nature, a world in which the sense of the whole was still intact. But it goes without saying that the diversity of images these surface representations once fetched to consciousness remains obscure to inquiry.

1. Old Norse lag from the verb liggia meaning 'to lie' (in the sense of 'to exist in a prone state'). But this seemingly obvious borrowing "stumbles on phonological grounds", in the words of my friend and former colleague Prof. Frank Banta (personal correspondence). In English the earliest attested form is Middle English 'logge' which, if a borrowing from Old Norse, would give the modern English form *low or *lough. If one assumes a later borrowing from Scandinavian, one still has the difficulty of explaining how (in ME) the vowel became shortened and the consonant lengthened. Perhaps the anomalous form came into being to avoid semantic confusion with 'low' or 'law', words which, in English, are similarly derived.

2. Prof. Banta has pointed out additionally that the Middle High German word rone (meaning 'log') has likewise no secure etymology and is now lost, replaced in NHG by 'Baumstamm' and 'Block' (personal correspondence). Intriguing is the fact that a Germanic word for 'log' is absent, or insecure, precisely in those areas in which forests were under heavy attack (and early brought under more or less centralized feudal control) and where, as a consequence, resource-conservative 'post and beam' methods of construction predominated in the architecture of ordinary people. Conversely, where forests were intact and widely accessible to commoners (the social condition Swedes call 'allemansrätt'), and where log-building technologies consequently thrived, there we find also well-rooted words for this portion of the fallen/felled tree (ON lag, Norwegian laag, Swedish dialect laga). Dutch boom, Swedish bom, German Baum reflect, by contrast, a root which is manifest across the wider range of Germanic, though its meaning seems nowhere to suggest specifically the fallen object, the object as it 'lies' on the surface of the ground. These forms have as their semantic sources either the living tree in its entirety (including its upper protective canopy) or some technical application in which the tree portion in question has been raised above our heads to provide a support structure, as in English beam (or boom). The latter group of cognates appears to have significant cosmological implications not only for Germanic but for an early circum-global arctic (or subarctic) culture which envisioned the universe and the vaulting heavens as parts of a living plant. See Uno Holmberg (Harva), Der Baum des Lebens (1922). This little-known but remarkable monograph is worth re-examining seventy-five years after its initial publication. It is to be found in Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian Toimituksia; Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Series B, Vol. XVI (Helsinki 1922-1923).

3. "...Zuni was conceptually divided on the basis of six divisions in space. These divisions corresponded to six directions... with a seventh--the middle--which became the synthesis of all the rest." Tom F.S. McFeat, "Some Social and Spatial Aspects of Innovation at Zuni," Anthropologica, n.s., 2 (1)(1960), p. 38.

4. Will Roscoe, "The Middle Place" in The Zuni Man-Woman, University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque (1991), pp. 7-28. I take the opportunity in this context to express my gratitude to Will Roscoe for cogent suggestions, too numerous to list individually, which have influenced the shape of the present essay, the first-written of the six included in this compilation. I wish to acknowledge that the other five essays were, in a real sense, a response to Roscoe's critical insights.

5. "...the notion 'common language' [to express a common store of thoughts] has no place in efforts to understand the phenomena of language and to explain them. Two people may talk alike, as they may look alike or live near one another. But it makes no more sense to postulate a 'commmon language' that they share than a common shape or a common area. As in the case of 'physical' or 'real', the problem is not vagueness or unclarity: there is nothing to clarify; the world does not have shapes and areas, or shared languages. Nor are the terms devoid of meaning; they are just fine for ordinary usage. It makes sense for me to tell you that I live near Boston and far from Sydney, or to tell a Martian that I live near both but far from the moon. The same holds for looking alike, and speaking alike. I do or do not speak like people in Sydney, depending on the circumstances of the discourse. Some such circumstances--pretty complicated ones--pick out what we sometimes call 'places' and 'languages'. From some points of view, the greater Boston area is a place; from others not. Chinese is a 'language' and Romance not, as a result of such matters as colors on maps and stability of empires. But Chinese is no more an element of the world than the area around Boston; arguably much less so, because the conditions of individuation are so vastly more intricate and interest-related." Chomsky (1996), p. 47.

6. To be sure, one can force a specific answer by elaborating the question. One can ask 'How large is Chicago in surface area?' This may send the informant to official statements of city limits etc. which can be converted to square miles. But any two-dimensional representation she/he comes up with begs the question of what the language considers Chicago really to be (as an object in the world). The respondent is apt to say the city 'covers' so and so many square miles. Imagine someone saying in response to a question about the size of a box (in its 'surface area') that it 'covers' four square feet (of ground). The problem is that the surface area of a box is the sum of all its faces, whereas the surface area of a city is the area of the ground on which it rests. If we ask an unelaborated question about the size of a box we get its volume (or dimensions which reflect such). As an instructive additional thought experiment consider the implication of saying a car (or a box) is 'spread out' over eighty square feet, as a city is 'spread out' over several square miles or as an animal is 'spread out' on a couch (or as a language can be said to have 'spread out' across a continent).

7. "In particular, there is no question of how human languages represent the world, or the world as it is thought to be. They don't." Chomsky (1996), p. 53.

8. "Concepts are stored in the brain in the form of 'dormant' records. When these records are reactivated, they can re-create the varied sensations and actions associated with a particular entity or a category of entities. A coffee cup, for example, can evoke visual and tactile representations of its shape, color, texture and warmth, along with the smell and taste of the coffee or the path which the hand and arm take to bring the cup from the table to the lips. All these representations are re-created in separate brain regions, but their reconstruction occurs fairly simultaneously... The cognitive economies of language--its facility for pulling together many concepts under one symbol--make it possible for people to establish ever more complex concepts and use them to think at levels that would otherwise be impossible." Antonio R. Damasio and Hanna Damasio, "Brain and Language," Scientific American (September 1992). I accept the Damasios' understanding of 'concept' and use the word interchangeably with 'image'. 'Conceptual' is here used interchangeably with 'imaginal', 'conceptualization' with 'imagination'.

9. The present exercise is concerned only with Chomsky's particular example (and by obvious extension one or two others of my own). It is by no means to be taken as an attempt to sketch the 'problematic' of markedness generally in the semantics of language. My purpose is not to define the phenomenon or to characterize it in general terms but, more modestly, to widen our understanding of the particular example Chomsky happened to choose to illustrate its operation.

10. One stumbles over the word 'primitive' only to the extent that one endorses the myth of 'progress'. In these pages the word 'primitive' is applied to cultural expression which is 'early' in the collective experience of sapiens sapaiens. 'Primitive' are also the mental structures of 'preference' which produced these 'early' cultural states.

11. Ian Tattersall, "Madagascar's Lemurs," Scientific American (January 1993).

12. Though fundamentally unassailable, this idea has been modified somewhat by recent work which suggests that chemical signals, or 'pheromones', transmitted between humans may still help regulate aspects of collective behavior at some basic level. It has been discovered, for example, that women who live together become synchronous in their menstrual cycles, a behavioral uniformity which has been attributed to 'pheromonal communication'. Linda M. Martoshuk and Gary K. Beauchamp, 'Chemical Senses', Annual Review of Psychology, January, 1994.

13. Tattersall (1993), p. .

14. Sigmund Freud viewed the 'fetish', in his earliest writings, as a repressed 'coprophilic pleasure in smelling'. The transformation of 'hair' and 'feet', etc. into objects of 'fetish' was, for Freud, a consequence of the fact that their strong smell has been repressed in individuals (by reason, I would argue, of their intense cultural derogation) and thus seeks expression in what Freud called 'perversions' in which only "dirty and evil-smelling feet [have] become sexual objects" (see Freud 105b, 155). Frank Banta has called my attention to the following passage from Gamkrelidze and Ivanov Indoeuropean and the Indoeuropeans, pp. 713-14: "In many languages the word for 'nose' is tabooed because of its associations and replaced with words originally meaning 'smell, sniff': Skt. ghrana 'nose' from ghrati 'smells, sniffs'; OE nosu (Engl. nose) from the root of OE neosian 'sniff, smell, smell out', which is cognate to Russ. njuxat 'sniff, smell'."

15. It appears that 'derogation', if sufficiently extensive, reverses expection and thus 'markedness'. With respect to 'smell' the meaning evoked by the 'unmarked' usage is 'bad'--'these flowers smell'--while the more elaborated structure is 'good': 'these flowers smell heavenly'. Note (in the former instance) that the mere presence of 'flowers' (normally assumed to have a 'pleasant odor') does not constitute sufficient elaboration to evoke the 'good meanings' associated (in this reversal of value) with 'marked' usage.

16. Bartoshuk, ibid. .

17. "Recent research increasingly supports the view that our earliest hominid ancestors, the Australopithecines, who lived about 1.5 to 2.0 or more million years ago, were anything but prodigious hunters, and in fact probably were limited to opportunistic scavenging of carcass remnants abandoned by carnivores." John D. Speth, "Human Evolution: New Questions" (Review of The Evolution of Human Hunting, Mathew H. Nitecki and Doris V. Nitecki, Eds. New York, 1987) in Science (January 13 1989). However, as an explanation for developing bi-pedalism in early hominids the 'open savanna hypothesis' has taken a beating in recent years. Increasing numbers of fossils which indicate early and transitional bi-pedal anatomy have turned up in areas of Africa now believed to have been largely forested at the time the fossils were laid down. These discoveries have led many researchers to adopt the reasonable alternative view that bi-pedalism developed in a mixed environment. Whatever the other contributing factors may have been, my conjecture is that the ongoing conceptual ascendancy of vision, and perhaps mobility too, would have been significant background circumstances in the emergence of bi-pedalism among our biological forbears.

However, division of labor did not necessarily characterize the society of the primitive European. Cornelius Tacitus reported as late as c. 2,000 B.P. that in the culture of the Fenni (a Latin word derived from Scandinavian meaning 'finders' or 'foragers'), the primitive Europeans assumed to be antecedents of the modern 'Lapps' (now known as 'Sami'), all food gathering was (still) carried on by women and men in joint effort: "Idemque venatus viros pariter ac feminas alit; passim enim comitantur partemque praedae petunt" ("The women follow the chase in company with the men and claim their share of the prey" to give an approximation of the meaning of the Latin). Germania (46).

18. M. J. Hardman has given the name derivational thinking to these structural patterns of English "that rank human beings such that man is the norm and all else... [is] seen as derivative therefrom." "The Sexist Circuits of English," The Humanist (March/April 1996). Hardman's essay is especially important, and seminal, because it sees the 'sexism' of English grammer against the strikingly different patterns of a 'pre-patriarchal' (and non-Indoeuropean) model, namely the Jaqi languages of South America.

19. No single lexical item better demonstrates the sources, in patriarchy, of certain kinds of linguistic markedness than the word 'wo-man' (out of the 'unmarked' form 'man' plus an elaboration having to do, apparently, with 'weaving' [<reconstructed Indoeuropean weip- meaning 'to twist' or 'wrap'; cf. Eng. wife Ger. Weib]. It is possible that the underlying meaning of the word is 'veiled man', as many believe. However, much of the derogated portion of the Indoeuropean lexicon appears to have arisen out of the division of labor, out of what the women of the community did. The word may have meant 'one who weaves' and was perhaps even underogated at some early cultural-evolutionary stage. In pre-patriarchal (and pre-Indoeuropean) consciousness the concept may have, in fact, carried no clear intimation of biological gender. It is well-known that gender, in many Native American cultures, had a strong and sometimes overriding cultural component. We'wha, the famous nineteenth century Zuni potter (an occupation the Zuni associated with the female), dressed as a woman though he was, of course, a 'male' in the limited biological sense. Nor was the compound nature of his social 'role' denied by his neighbors who, upon his death, clothed his body in both 'male' and 'female' attire, clearly indicating the status in the community of what Will Roscoe has called a "third gender." Nothing appears to be known of We'wha's sexuality. (Influenced by Western pre-conceptions outsiders invariably used the feminine pronoun in their accounts of male 'berdaches', sometimes referring to them erroneously as 'hermaphrodites'. Zuni, like Finnish, does not know 'grammatical gender'.) We'wha was also a 'weaver', an occupation the Zuni (in contrast to Indoeuropeans) associated generally with the male. Early European visitors were alarmed to discover ordinary Zuni men knitting leg-garments for their wives! In his dress and behavior, as in his various occupations, We'wha drew from a wider than usual spectrum of experience (even in this culture noted for its accommodation of diversity) and was shown, for this reason (we may assume), special deference by his community. They believed he possessed extraordinary 'strength' as, of course, he did despite the poor condition of his health. Soldiers sent to arrest the Zuni governor in 1892 were met instead by the imposing figure of We'wha. See the fascinating account by Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman (University of New Mexico Press; Albuquerque), 1991.

20. Note that I used, in a preceding sentence, the elaborated phrase 'wall structure' to give this concept the sense of a unity. One can not say that a building has one wall, even when this is clearly so (as in many 'round' buildings). In such cases one must elaborate the information and say the barn has a 'round wall' or 'single round wall' (or 'round wall system'). One can not refer simply to the 'wall' of a building, unless one means just a single 'wall' among several.

21. It seems quite obvious that the graphic artist of 'Les Troi-Freres' (Plate V) sought visual representation of a 'meaning' which was extensive indeed. Derived variously from the experience of 'nature', the object depicted is not just a 'human being' in the body of an 'animal', or just a human being 'inhabiting' some complex representation of 'nature' (as the composite structure--part cat [?], part reindeer, part goat [?], part bird [?], part horse--on a largely human frame suggests). Represented appears to be the very state of consciousness peculiar to the culture in question. Although it may be helpful to view this ancient material as the 'literalization' of the 'interior perspective' (doubly or triply such because of the hidden location of the representation on the wall of a deep cave in the interior of the continent), one must keep in mind that such an approach inevitably falsifies the meaning of an event which was, first and foremost, integrated (whatever the particulars of the meaning to the 'inhering sensibility').

22. Here we must at least footnote the thinking of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, the very title of whose important book Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981) captures, chiastically, the nature of this unity in 'primitive' thought and perception.

23. Bjoern Collinder, The Lapps (Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. .

24. Chomsky (1996), p. 22.

25. The word thing itself shows the transformation from a consciousness in which the 'whole' or the 'collective' (thus the 'internal perspective') was paramount (Old Norse thing meaning 'assembly', 'gathering', 'totality') to one in which the 'separated' constituent is the means by which 'reality' is constructed (cf. the Modern English form which, in common usage, means 'distinguishable entity').

26. Sir Stafford Beer, 'Preface' to Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (London: 1980), p. 63. Beer continues in the same vein: "Historically, synthesis seems to have been too much for the human mind..." I have quote this extraordinary passage at length in Part One -- Chapter Three.

27. Kari Yli-Kuha, "Sami Religion," soc.culture.nordic, FAQ, Part 2.1.4 (01/10/95).