Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  Another meaning of “Freeze you” is: “Please put some water in the ice tray and put it in the ice box so we can have some ice cubes.”

  Distinction among meanings, in actual signing, is a matter of—what shall I call it?—muscular and gestural inflection in the arms, face, and the rest of the body. And, of course, the situation.

  I remember getting the note: “Come down freeze you whiskey have want, chess.” I suspect this would be baffling without some knowledge of the sign language context, though the words “mean” pretty much the same as they do in English. One informal translation of this note into written English would be: “Come downstairs and play chess with me. You bring the ice cubes. I have some whiskey—if you want?” And an equally good translation: “Do you want to come down, bring some ice cubes, have a drink, and play chess?” And another: “Why not come on down? You make ice cubes up there; bring them. I have some whiskey. It’s all for a chess game.”

  But it would be a great mistake to try and “transform” the original into any of my English translations, either by some Chomskyan method, or by filling in suspected ellipses, understood subjects, and the like:

  “. . . have want. . .” is a single verb phrase, for example, whose translation I could spend pages on. It has at least three modulating duals (in our language context, at any rate) so that its translation tends to be some arrangement from the matrix: moving both backwards and forwards, and up or down. It is regularly interrogative. (So a written question mark, in the deaf-and-dumb language, when you use “have want” is superfluous. The phrase “have need” works by a similar matrix and is regularly imperative. The equally frequent “want need,” however, works through an entirely different matrix.) It may have several “direct objects,” each requiring a different path through the matrix to make “sense” in our language. A literal translation of Horace’s sentence, up to the comma, might read: “If you want to come down, I will have you down; if you have frozen (made) some (ice cubes), I will want some (that you have frozen); if you want whiskey, I have some whiskey . . .” And “chess” at the sentence’s end is something like a noun absolute in Latin, the topic of the whole sentence, casting back its resonances on all that has gone before.

  46. In the same language in which we still say “I see . . .,” only fifty years before Russell’s theory of “singular description,” in America one person could meaningfully refer to another as “my slave . . .“at which point the other person was constrained by the language to refer to the first as “my master . . .”—as if the bond of possession were somehow mutual and reciprocal.

  Rebellion begins when the slave realizes that in no sense whatsoever is the master “hers/his.” The slave cannot sell the master, give the master away, or keep the master should the master wish to go. This realization is the knowledge that the situation, which includes the language, exploits the slave and furthers the exploitation.

  47. Possible insight into the “Cocktail Party Effect”: Last evening, with David Warren at Professor Fodor’s lecture on the mental representation of sentences, at the London School of Economics, I had a chance to observe the Cocktail Party Effect at work. David and I were sitting on the ground floor of the Old Theatre, near the door. Outside, a mass of students was gathering, presumably for the next event in the auditorium. The general rumble of their voices finally grew loud enough to make a dozen people around us look back towards the exit with consternation.

  Professor Fodor’s delivery, while audible, was certainly not loud; and he wandered over the stage, to the blackboard, to the apron, to the podium, so that only part of the time was he near enough to the microphone for his voice to carry.

  The sound outside was definitely interfering with our hearing his lecture, and we all had to strain . . .

  The next time I was aware of the crowd noise outside, I realized that if I kept my aural concentration fixed on Fodor’s words, the crowd noise would begin to undergo a definite pulsing (I estimated the frequency to be between two pulses per second and three pulses in two seconds) while the professor’s voice stayed more or less clear through the peaks and troughs. If, however, I listened consciously to the crowd, the pulsing ceased and the Professor’s words became practically unintelligible, lost in the rush of sound.

  Is this how the “Cocktail Party Effect,” or some aspect of it, works?

  48. R. E. Geis in The Alien Critic defending himself against Joanna Russ’s and Vonda McIntyre’s accusations of sexism, cites a string of incorrect facts, half-facts, and facts implying a nonexistent context, beginning with the statement:

  I have never made a sexist editorial decision in my life.

  The form of the sentence itself implies that “making” a “sexist decision” or, for that matter, making an antisexist decision, is a case of putting energy into an otherwise neutral social contextual system.

  The social context is not neutral. It is overwhelmingly sexist.

  Studies have been done as far back as the fifties which show, in America, almost cross-culturally, male infants receive an average of slightly over 100 percent more physical contact with their parents during the first year of life than female infants! Tomes have been written on the effect of physical contact in this period on later physical strength and psychological autonomy. This alone renders the word “naturally,” in a statement like “men are naturally stronger than women,” a farce! Yet, despite how many thousands of years (probably no more than six and possibly a good deal less—another point to bear in mind) of this sort of Lamarckian pressure, when a large number of skeletons from modern cadavers, whose sexes were known and coded, were then given to various doctors, anthropologists, and archeologists to sort into male and female, the results were random! There is no way to identify the sex of a skeleton, from distinctions in size, pelvic width, shoulder width, skull size, leg length—these are all empirically nonsupported myths. Yet anthropology books are being published today with pictures captioned: “Armbone of a woman, c. eight thousand B.C.” or “Jawbone of a male, c. five thousand B.C.” Studies in the comparative heights of men and women have disclosed that, if you say you are doing a study in the comparative heights of men and women, and ask for volunteers, men average some two inches taller than women—whereas, if you say you are doing an intelligence test to compare university students with nonuniversity students, and, just incidentally, take the height of your volunteers, men average a mere three-eighths of an inch taller than women! Other, even more random samplings which have tried to obliterate all sexually associated bias, seem to indicate that the range of height of men tends to be larger—as a man, you have a greater chance of being either very tall or very short—but that the average height is the same. (Of course women are shorter than men: just stand on any street corner and look at the couples walking by. Next time you stand on any street corner, take pairs of couples and contrast the height of the woman from couple A with the man from couple B. I did this on a London street corner for two hours a few weeks back: taken as couples, it would appear that in 94 percent, men are taller than women. Taken by cross-couples, the figure goes down to 72 percent. The final twenty-two percent is more likely governed by the sad fact that, in Western society, tall women and short men often try to avoid being seen in public, especially with the opposite sex.) A male in our society receives his exaggerated social valuation with the application of the pronoun “he” before he can even smile over it. A female receives her concomitant devaluation with the pronoun “she” well before she can protest.

  Again: The system is not neutral. For every situation, verbal or nonverbal, that even approaches the sexual, the easy way to describe it, the comfortable way to respond to it, the normal way to act in it, the way that will draw the least attention to yourself—if you are male—is the sexist way. The same goes for women, with the difference that you are not quite so comfortable. Sexism is not primarily an active hostility in men towards women. It is a set of unquestioned social habits. Men become hostile when these habits are questioned
as people become hostile when anything they are comfortable doing is suddenly branded as pernicious. (“But I didn’t intend to hurt anyone; I was just doing what I always . . .”)

  A good many women have decided, finally, that the pain that accrues to them from everyone else’s acceptance of the “acceptable” way is just not worth the reward of invisibility.

  “I have never made a sexist editorial decision in my life.”

  There are no sexist decisions to be made.

  There are antisexist decisions to be made. And they require tremendous energy and self-scrutiny, as well as moral stamina in the face of the basic embarrassment campaign which is the tactic of those assured of their politically superior position. (“Don’t you think you’re being rather silly offering your pain as evidence that something I do so automatically and easily is wrong? Why, I bet it doesn’t hurt half as much as you say. Perhaps it only hurts because you’re struggling . . .?” This sort of political mystification, turning the logical arrows around inside verbal structures to render them empirically empty, and therefore useless [“It hurts because you don’t like it” rather than “You don’t like it because it hurts.”] is just another version of the “my slave/my master” game.)

  There are no sexist decisions to be made: they were all made a long time ago!

  49. The mistake we make as adolescent readers is to assume a story is exciting because of its strange happenings and exotic surfaces, when actually a story is exciting exactly to the extent that its structure is familiar. “Plot twists” and “gimmicks” aside (which, like “wisecracks,” only distract our conscious mind from the structure so that we can respond subconsciously to its familiarity with that ever sought-for “gut response”), excitement in reading invariably comes from the anticipation of (and the anticipation rewarded by) the inevitable/expected.

  This inevitability—without which there simply is no reader gut- participation—is also what holds fiction to all the political cliches of sexism, racism, and classism that mar it as an art. To write fiction without such structural inevitabilities, however (as practically every artist has discovered), is to write fiction without an audience.

  Does science fiction offer any way out of this dilemma?

  The hope that it might probably accounts for a good deal of the rapprochement between science fiction and the avant garde that occurred during the middle and late sixties.

  50. The equivocation of the genitive (children, ideas, art, and excrement) and the associative (spouses, lovers, friends, colleagues, co-patrials, and country) with the possessive (contracted objects) is the first, great, logi- cally-empty verbal structure that exists entirely for political exploitation.

  51. Meaning is a routed-wave phenomenon.

  I intend this in the sense one might intend the statement: “Painting is a colored-oil-paints spread-on-canvas phenomenon.” Just as there are many things besides oil paints on canvas that may fill, more or less well, the several uses we could reasonably ask of a painting—from tempera on masonite to colored sand spilled carefully on sun-baked ground, in one direction; or etchings, photographs, or computer reductions, in another; or patterns observed on a rock, a natural setting, or a found object, in still another—there may be other things that can fill, more or less well, the several tasks we might reasonably ask “meaning” to perform. But my statement still stands as a parametric model of what I think meaning to be. The extent to which any of my remarks contravene this model is the extent to which they should be taken as metaphoric.

  52. Language in general, poetry in particular, and mathematics, are all tools to fix meaning (in their different ways) by establishing central parameters, not circumscribing perimeters. Accuracy in all of them is achieved by cross-description, not absolute statement.

  Even 2 + 3 = 5 is better considered as a mathematical stanza than a single mathematical sentence. It models a set of several interlocked sentences; and the context interlocking them is what “contains” the meaning we might model by saying “2 + 3 = 5 is right, whereas 2 + 3 = 4 is wrong by lack of 1.”

  53. A language-function can be described as consisting of (one) a generative field (capable of generating a set of signals), (two) the signals so generated, and (three) an interpretive field (a field capable of responding to those signals) into which the signals fall.

  Examples of language-functions: mathematics, art, expressive gesture, myth.

  One of the most important language-functions is, of course, speech.

  In most multiple speaker/hearer situations, there are usually multiple language-functions occurring: A talking to B . . . B talking to A . . . C listening to what A and B say, etc. (In Art, on the other hand, there is usually one only: artist to audience. The language-function that goes from audience to artist is, of course, criticism.)

  The language itself is the way, within a single speaker/hearer, an interpretive field is connected to a generative field.

  54. The trouble with most cybernetic models of language (those models that start off with “sound waves hitting the ear”) is that they try to express language only in terms of an interpretive field. To the extent that they posit a generative field at all, they simply see it as an inverse of the interpretive field.

  In ordinary human speech, the interface of the interpretive field with the world is the ear—an incredibly sensitive microphone that, in its flexibility and versatility, still has not been matched by technology. The interface of the generative field with the world is two wet sacks of air and several guiding strips of muscle, laid out in various ways along the air track, and a variable-shaped resonance box with a variable opening: the lungs/throat/mouth complex. This complex can produce a great many sounds, and in extremely rapid succession. But it can produce nothing like the range of sounds the ear can detect.

  Language, whatever it is, in circuitry terms has to lie between these two interfaces, the ear and the mouth.

  Most cybernetic models, to the extent that they approach the problem at all, see language as a circuit to get us from a sensitive microphone to an equally sensitive loudspeaker. A sensitive loudspeaker just isn’t in the picture. And I suspect if it were, language as we know it would not exist, or at least be very different.

  Try and envision circuitry for the following language tasks:

  We have a sensitive microphone at one end of a box. At the other, we have a mechanically operable squeeze-box/vocal-chord/palate/tongue/teeth/lip arrangement. We want to fill up the box with circuitry that will accomplish the following: Among a welter of sounds—bird songs, air in leaves, footsteps, traffic noise—one is a simple, oral, human utterance. The circuitry must be able to pick out the human utterance, store it, analyze it (in terms of breath duration, breath intensity, and the various stops that have been imposed on a stream of air by vocal chords, tongue, palate, teeth, lips) and then, after a given time, reproduce this utterance through its own squeeze-box mechanism.

  This circuitry task is both much simpler and much more complicated than getting a sound out of a loudspeaker. Once we have such a circuit, however, well before we get to any “logic,” “syntax,” or “semantic” circuits, we are more than halfway to having a language circuit.

  Consider:

  We now want to modify this circuit so that it will perform the following task as well:

  Presented with a human utterance, part of which is blurred—either by other sounds or because the utterer said it unclearly—our circuit must now be able to give back the utterance correctly, using phonic overdeterminism to make the correction: Letting X stand for the blurred phoneme, if the utterance is

  The pillow lay at the foot of the Xed

  or

  She stood at the head of the Xairs

  our circuitry should be able to reproduce the most likely phoneme in place of the blur, X.

  I think most of us will agree, if we had the first circuit, getting to the second circuit would be basically a matter of adding a much greater storage capacity, connected up in a fairly simple (i.
e., regular) manner with the circuit as it already existed.

  Let us modify our circuit still more:

  We present an utterance with a blurred phoneme that can resolve in two (or more) ways:

  “Listen to the Xerds.” (Though I am not writing this out in phonetic notation, nevertheless, it is assumed that the phonic component of the written utterance is what is being dealt with.)

  Now in this situation, our very sensitive microphone is still receiving other sounds as well. The circuitry should be such that, if it is receiving, at the same time as the utterance, or has received fairly recently, some sound such as cheeping or twittering (or the sounds of pencils and rattling paper) it will resolve the blurred statement into “listen to the birds” (or, respectively, “listen to the words”)—and if the accompanying sound is a dank, gentle plashing . . . Again, this is still just a matter of more storage space to allow wider recognition/association patterns.*

  The next circuitry recomplication we want is to have our circuit such that, when presented with a human utterance, ambiguous or not, it can come back with a recognizable paraphrase. To do this, we might well have to have not only a sensitive microphone, but a sensitive camera and a sensitive micro-olfact and micro-tact as well, as well as ways of sorting, storing, and associating the material they collect. Basically, however, it is still, as far as the specific language circuitry is concerned, a matter of greater storage capacity, needed to allow greater associational range.

  I think that most people would agree, at this point, that if we had a circuit that could do all these tasks, even within a fairly limited vocabulary, though we might not have a circuit that could be said to know the language, we would certainly have one that could be said to know a lot about it.

  One reason to favor the above as a model of language is that, given the initial circuit, the more complicated versions could, conceivably, evolve by ordinary, natural-selection and mutation processes. Each new step is still basically just a matter of adding lots of very similar or identical components, connected up in very similar ways. Consider also: Complex as it is, that initial circuitry must exist, in some form or another, in every animal that recognizes and utters a mating call (or warning) to or from its own species, among the welter, confusion, and variety of wild forest sounds.