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Part I Chapter Two:
Language and the Objectification of Experience
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On the principal bias of Western culture: “...’objectivity’ is the lens our industrial society employs to view the world. So exclusive is this perspective that it pushes other approaches to reality off the table. The ‘objective construction’ is, it seems, the only understanding Western culture aspires to (and allows).”

On the role of language in this process: “Despite its late appearance, the English language has played an important role in the strengthening and consolidation of certain features of meaning -- mythic primitives if you will -- the ultimate effect of which has been to inhibit discourse in social relations while perverting our understanding of life process in general. In association with what amounts to a comprehensive assault on the living organism ‘objectivity’ has been raised to the level of an unchallengeable article of faith... Meanwhile, the ‘individual’ has been enshrined as the end-all-and-be-all of natural process. These amount to twin pillars in a mytho-philosophical edifice which has been erected in place of discourse and in fundamental denial of its adaptive purpose. The contribution of the English language to this perversion of function is easy to point to in its surface aspects, though its roots in living community are ancient and multi-faceted...”

On the discursive parameters of the new sciences in the 19th century: “To better understand the transitional moment in question... let me ask you to conduct an experiment. Assemble a narrative in the ‘first person’ which describes that important person’s outward response to some sequence of events. However, try to avoid language which may seem natural to that person to communicate his/her feelings: nouns which reflect ‘experience’ or verbs which imply internally directed action. Adopt a perspective which is external to the reality described..., words such as ‘appearance’ and ‘conduct’ or, to test the meaning of the lexical item directly at issue, the word ‘behavior’. You can devise your own constructs but the following may serve to get you going:

My behavior, upon my second appearance in Paris, was startlingly at variance with my subsequent conduct in New York City in the closing days of September.

“Such an exercise proves immediately instructive. To adopt the external perspective in describing one’s own actions is to deny one’s experience, the basis of action in a universe of living relationships. The usage is marked in the first person and thus stands out. As a further experiment change the three occurrences of ‘my’ to ‘his’. The alienating effect is not noticeable in the third person where the denial of experience is unmarked, or expected! My appearance, my behavior, my conduct, startlingly at variance...? Used with the ‘first person’ as referent, such words and phrases inevitably create the sense of a dissociated reality. They assemble a world which lacks connection, even though connection is what the actions in question are presumed to be about. With them we concoct, it seems, the discourse of a zombie. The meaning of what the organism experiences as ‘life’ - its subjective relation to the world - is missing.”

On symbol and metaphor: “The terms are both useful. In conventional usage symbols denote ‘objects’ (typically in a one-to-one relation), whereas metaphors tend to delineate complex ‘relationship’. The lexical cognates ‘house’ and ‘sky’, for example, are to be derived historically-linguistically from a root metaphor which designates a particular relation of the organism to the perceived universe, though each is free to serve, naturally, as a ‘symbol’ for something else. The use of symbols may be more or less arbitrary, as in the language of mathematics (and in the letters of the alphabet), but may also be consistent with a body of metaphor which has wide recognition across a population of organisms.”

On the appearance of the ‘third person’: “It appears likely that the third person of human discourse made its effective appearance in the context of a major social transformation, a sweeping shift in consciousness which altered the collective construction of the world while greatly expanding the function of language. For with the appearance of the grammatical third person the world was/is no longer directly engaged. The world came/comes to exist outside the discursive reality of experience. It had/has the potential to become artifact entirely, something quite separate from the increasingly restricted universe of persons and objects which were/are directly available to the senses. Such a comprehensive (and progressive) alienation is certainly a worthy subject for further investigation. I find its implications provocative if greatly disturbing.”

On the subject-object relation of English and Spanish: “In observance of the lighting diagram, which is implicit in the grammar of the English language, the first person is the character principally illuminated. It is the first person who tells us ‘how it is’ and ‘how it must be’. In the perspective of the English grammar, the material universe exists for the single purpose of being acted upon... This idea is quite alien to speakers of Spanish for whom the world presents itself as conceptual subject, autonomously structured and spontaneously evolving... Needless to say, it is the English perspective which prevails in the world of practical affairs. It is the English perception of ‘external reality’ which provides the model for serious material and economic attainment, not the Spanish.”

On the appearance of personal pronouns in natural language: “I have tentatively assumed that ‘person’, in the period which preceded its linguistic specification...., was marked as a structural element of discourse, necessary only for emphasis or occasional disambiguation. ‘Person’ probably retained its marked status when pronouns first became available and when elaborated verb forms appeared to reinforce these distinctions. ‘Person’ remained the special case, invoked to clarify, provide emphasis, remove doubt. The unmarked time-frame was the present, as it is still today in languages and cultures world-wide, and the mode of expression was likely the collective. What ‘you’ and ‘I’ were doing and thinking, as separate individuals, was no doubt important. But it remained the special case: as marked, in the collective imagination, as the thoughts and actions of those external to the discourse of the moment.”

“Discourse pragmatics offers little in the way of explanation if, by this, we mean simply that the introduction of pronouns, and the resultant elimination of a certain redundancy in the exchange, creates greater efficiency in the organization and delivery of the message. In actual fact, the power of the pronominal system is much greater than this: pronouns supply us with a content which is entirely new to the message, a content which would appear to be highly pertinent given the paucity of contextual clues examples drawn from language typically afford. The principal function of the pronoun... is to delineate the physical relationship of the referent to the ongoing discourse. It provides a specifically linguistic representation for a kind of information which the discourse seems unable to develop easily through other means...: it tells us who is present, and who is not, in the crucial moment of the act of speech.”

On the ‘proper noun’: “By contrast, a proper noun amounts to the most conceptually isolating designation imaginable for that cluster of complex relations which form the core of the functional self, next only to one’s social security number perhaps.”

On a verse by Mexican poet Octavio Paz: “The ‘language’ of two human bodies, engaged in intimate physical interaction, dispenses with pronouns, marked tense, and the naming (and thus isolation) of ‘objects’ in a material universe. All is relation, present and proximal.”

On the subject-object relation of discourse: “The subject-object relation of the grammar is the formal residue of a primitive process by which the organism strove to initiate, and maintain, sensory contact with a universe which was sometimes familiar, sometimes alien... This ancestral experience... was inevitably and deeply ambiguous. It harbored and affirmed, simultaneously, two contradictory precepts, each originating in the ancient crucible of biological myth: the notion of the self as inclusive of the adjacent reality; but also as something separate from it. This contradiction, which the advanced organism still ‘feels’ (with higher or lower levels of intensity), follows from the fact that the subject is an experiencing as well as an acting entity, whereas the object, directly ‘acted upon’ and stimulus for the experience of the subject, enters experience only through a process of subjective assimilation. Object is somehow incomplete, dependent upon subject.”

More on the subject-object relation of the grammar: “The first element in the subject-object relation, always present in modern languages (if Greenberg’s findings may be so interpreted), is empowered with the capacity to know and to feel as well as the capacity to act; whereas the objects of the universe adjacent to this ‘knowing entity’ are permitted merely to act and to respond. The notion of a passive yet responding object, an object without the capacity to feel and express feeling, yet possessing nonetheless the capacity to function as stimulus for the feeling subject, puts biological discourse on the poorest of possible footings. Moreover, this condition is aggravated grievously by the imbalance of power, noted above, and the opportunities which come the way of the ‘knowing and feeling subject’ to assert control.”

On the linguistic system of personal reference (and the function of clothing): “The invention of the third person allowed discourse to assume, for the first time, a position outside the physical area of experience. Language had now the potential to become something separate from the discursive context in which it made its inaugural appearance. It was no longer simply an elaborated form of vocalization, no longer a mere adjunct to the complex process by which lateral transference had taken place since organisms first began to ‘feel’ their way in the world. Discourse had now the capacity to become something apart from its original being and essence, something separate from feeling itself. From a position outside the layered complexity of natural existence, discourse acquired the ability to conjure representations of experience which were objective, ‘free’ of the encumbrances and distractions of the world as internally constituted. Covering the ‘body’ was more than a symbolic act, undertaken in mythic denial of internal process. It sought to hide the very means by which feeling was transferred. It strove to subvert the capacity of the individual organism for assimilation, then (as now) the only basis for cohesion in community.”