Mimesis and Critical Literacy

It's time for a bit of convergence. There are three major ares of interest I have been blogging about recently: Australian politics, critical literacy, and a couple of blogs on neuropolitics, or neurophilosophy. These are not disparate areas of interest; there are common threads that unite them, although it may not seem obvious at present. In this post, I will begin the process of weaving the second and third strands together. Previously, I have blogged about the discourse of imposition, whereby, due to our mimetic nature, we are driven to impose ourselves upon one another. As a supplementary to this blog, I more recently blogged about the misguided metaphysics that assumes that we are hyper-rational agents, quite distinct from our neurophysiology. I asserted in the latter post that such a position is just another kind of imposition in the aforementioned discourse. I have also blogged about the importance of critical literacy to democracy, and provided a demonstration of critical literacy in action. The crux of this post is to argue that, while we are governed in large part by our neurophysiology we can emancipate ourselves from the more negative implications of that fact through critical literacy.

Critical literacy, it must be remembered, helps to guard against manipulation by fallacy, particularly appeals to emotion. Our emotions are the product of neurophysiological processes that qualify our experience of the world around us. Emotions are necessary, but their necessity also makes us vulnerable. Emotional fallacies are the bread-and-butter of populist politicians, fear and envy perhaps the most commonly preyed upon. Language, as our primary tool of communication, is also the primary tool of manipulation. Language, it must also be remembered, presents only an approximation of the world around it; the world language represents is, as such, malleable. The world we live in bombards us with meaning from every angle and over a period of time that extends further than our personal memories; the legacy of ancient events from far off places still affects us, shaping our experiences from remote locations in space and time. In short, life is much more complex than can be captured in a linear language.

Language is an extension of our mimetic capacities into an abstract space. "Metaphoric space" is perhaps a better term. Recently, I have begun blogging on a fourth thread on sexual politics, where I have discussed the role of the imagination and the metaphoric processes of meaning-making that are grounded in the human body. Metaphor is an extension of our embodied experience in and understanding of the world around us, and language is grounded in metaphor; language is metaphor. Merlin Donald perhaps puts it best: "language floats on a sea of metaphor." Language is a projection of our embodied, mimetic experience into an abstract "metaphoric" space that can be translated, reproduced, and shared. Importantly, however, our experience can be shaped in that space; it is a reciprocal process of meaning-making.

Nevertheless, while language can shape our experience it is still our experience, which presupposes that which does the experiencing: the human organism. Language can be viewed as a filter through which human experience is channelled and refined. To extend the metaphor, a lot of the sediment that gets filtered out in the process, however, is still meaningful to our embodied experience. This has considerable implications for our understanding and our communication. There is an argument to be made, for instance, that the experience of women is filtered in just such a way (this was suggested to me recently in a reply to a previous blog, which I have responded to elsewhere). It is important, then, to understand the short-comings of language, as well as the processes whereby it enacts this filtration of experience. This is the role of critical literacy.

Our experience has shape prior to language, but language comes to superimpose itself on the native shapes of human experience. Importantly, language does not supplant our natural mimetic and embodied understanding of the world; we retain "body language" and other pre-linguistic modes of communication and expression, including the native intonations of voice on which, as my favourite poet Robert Frost would say, our "words are strung." There are sounds before words, and those sounds are meaningful, but that's a topic for another day. This is not some special case I'm making for human sounds; all animals have the capacity for some kind of vocal signalling, all mammals at least. Only humans have a complex conceptual language that they exalt above their other modes of communication and expression.

Language goes further than our embodied modes of communication, but is nonetheless grounded in them. Language cannot mean anything without its reference point being the body; more than they, language loses its meaningfulness when it loses it reference to the culture it sustains. A "dead language" is one that has fallen into disuse because it no longer supports the culture, or the collection of social activities, that promulgated it, and upon which it relied for its own perpetuation. We come so much to rely on the conceptual structure that language provides us that the substratum of embodied meaning is overlooked or diminished, except where it supports or augments linguistic meaning; for example, sarcasm is a prosodic augmentation that changes the meaning of the words used through inflection. The sarcastic utterance means the opposite of the conceptual meaning of the words used.

The problem, of course, is that language also empowers us to go beyond our immediate experience. We cannot do away with language; we cannot revert to "body language" and pheromones. We are our bodies, our brains, our chemistry, our instincts; but that is not all we are. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, about our experiences; we are the ideological (political and religious) debates we have about the shape of our community; we are out poetry and our songs. We shape and re-shape the perception of ourselves through our language; this can change the way we interpret our embodied experience, which in turn can change our behaviour. Even though our fundamental experiences have not changed, our understanding of them does.

By fundamental experience I mean the embodied processes, the organs of perception, the mimetic engagement, and the chemical and neurophysiological processes that underpin our experience; these processes, which we do experience, whether in the form of basic percepts, or emotional responses, do not change. Our understanding of them, as represented in art and language, do change. Love, for instance, perhaps to most common aesthetic object in human history, whatever stories, songs, poems, customs, or laws are produce with regard to it, the chemical responses remains the same. It is the language of love that changes. I mention customs and laws quite deliberately; love has been legislated, and in many ways still is. Marriage laws, divorce laws, sodomy laws, interracial marriages laws in the U.S. to name but a few. Language is used to impose control over behaviour; but language is also used to undermine such control, the "marriage equality" movement is a worthy citation here. The term "marriage equality" is an important departure from other prominent terms, such as "gay marriage" and "same-sex marriage." "Marriage equality is a much more inclusive term.

Language matters; that's why critical literacy matters. A thorough understanding of the relationship between language and our embodied mode of understand is also vitally important. We must understand where our meaning comes from, because it comes to us in a highly filtered form; if we simply accept that filtered meaning without critical analysis, or without reference to the origins of meaning-making in human understanding, then we abnegate our control and our contribution to human understanding. What's worse, we risk giving up our own bodies in the meaning-making processes; we risk letting others tell us what our body means, how it means. Language is neither perfect, nor isolated from human embodied experience; but it plays a critical role in how we perceive and represent our experience within society. As such, it is important that we maintain a critical relationship with language so that we are not manipulated by those who seek to impose their experience, their "wisdom," on us.