some (rough) ideas
i've been thinking about for a while now on the limits of universality in meaning:
talking with one of my new friends on the train ride back to
chennai, he stated quite triumphantly that body language is a universal language, citing the example of the shrug (+ flipping both hands palms up) to mean 'i don't know' in both in the west and in
india. of course that doesn't make it universal,
i'm sure there are cultures out there where a shrug means something totally different, and of course there's historical
relativisim to take into account. do we only share these similarities as a result of a history of the globalization of ideas? would two humans living in total isolation from one another both come up with a similar meaning to the shrug? probably not.
but we can go to a more fundamental level: emotions and their manifestations: smiling, laughing, crying; fear, joy, anxiety; a feeling of at-
homeness, of
ostracism, the feeling of ones-self as opposed to the outside world/the other, of nostalgia (is this universal?). these things we all share as humans and therefore serve as a common denominator for meaning. how much of the meaning in a shrug is conveyed through the physical gesture and how much is through the emotion in the facial expression associated with it (a look of bewilderment)?
furthermore, why is it that most languages (at least in my limited experience) tend to have similar words for things... like
interrogatives--who, what, where, why, when, how much? these concepts so fundamental to our human way of observing our world that most languages seem to evolve including them? (this reminds me of the anecdote
annie dillard tells about how when she was a kid she thought that foreign languages were just codes for
english (pilgrim at tinker creek)). obviously such similarities between languages don't go very deep, that's what makes poetry translation such an art. and again, historical relativism is important here... why is it that
nahuatl, basque,
turkish,
tamil, and
japanese all have similar grammatical structures (they (not exclusively) are all agglutinated... meaning that case endings are attached to the ends of words as suffixes). did they evolve these similarities coincidentally and therefore maybe there's some element of the human brain that in a particular manifestation causes this kind of thinking? (like, as all these different civilizations exhausted the space of human language development, the options were few enough to cause the development of similar structures serendipitously... not sure how one would do the calculate the statistics to get a sense of the significance of the coincidence...
hmm.) or is contact between these civilizations over the course of history responsible for the similarities (
i'm sure someone more knowledgeable than me knows this... as usual, i wish i knew more history).
humans do seem universally to be pattern-finding machines. our survival is based on our ability to recognize similarities at the right level of generalization (the ability to recognize food... be able to distinguish that this plant in front of me is indeed edible, because i ate it yesterday, to distinguish that while this piece of
broccoli is not exactly like the one i ate yesterday, it's similar enough that i can make the approximation and identify it as the same plant). we live in a world of seemingly infinite particularity (well, at the macroscopic level), and in order to survive, we must become
approximators,
generalizers in order to be pattern-seekers. (also, in order to process all the information that comes at us all the time, our brains rely on patterns that limit what we are able to notice based on what we've observed in the past...
annie dillard says children are often much better at noticing things than adults, because they haven't formed these patterns yet, objects haven't taken on meaning yet (read her accounts of people who had been blind having their sight restored as adults... producing a discrepancy between sight and meaning (pilgrim at tinker creek)).
this fundamental characteristic seems to imbue our other, higher level pursuits like the arts. we make patterns in pitches, shapes, rhythms, which form music, the arts, etc. when we listen to music or look at visual art, we naturally find causal relationships between component elements. music can be thought of as fundamentally composed of different textures, and our brains naturally try to draw comparisons between these textures (thanks to randy
coleman for getting me to read
meyer perception and cognition of complex music)
but what
i'm interested in is the place where universal meaning breaks down. in the context of body language, i can come to
india and understand a shrug, but i can't necessarily understand a head wobble without first gaining some experience with its usage (could mean yes, no, okay, maybe, depending on the context). in the context of art and music, the levels become even deeper. I went to a dance performance recently of
bharathanatyam (one of several kinds of south
indian classical dance/ballet). all the times
i've seen it the dancing has been very narrative, and especially expressive in facial expression (almost over-expressive.. expressionist even..? it's intense) and symbolic hand gestures. in the performances, the actual narration for the story lines was only
described in
tamil, so i had no idea what the stories were about. but the dancing uses a lot of expressive pantomime, and i found it interesting to see at what point i could no longer understand what was happening. the emotions all come through in gesture and facial expression (tearful sadness, serene joy, derisively haughty laughter, etc), as well as some of the basic elements of the story line. but at a certain point i just stopped understanding the overall story arcs (most of the dances seem to follow
hindu stories from sacred texts like the
ramayana or
bhagavadgita, most of which
i'm not familiar with). in addition, there are hand gestures used which just don't mean anything to me, but clearly have some prescribed meaning in the structure of the dance. it's a little bit like watching opera without reading the subtitles.. there's usually only a handful of stock narrative scenes that could be happening, but whereas with opera i know more-or-less what these options are, for
bharathanatyam, i don't really have a clue. so... there are cultural limits to the transference of meaning.
but in the arts, these limits run even deeper. sometimes i think about the sciences and the arts as existing at opposite ends of a single line, a spectrum of languages. science is a language whose fundamental axiom is that it must be universally communicable. scientists make theories to describe the world around them, but the condition is that they must communicate information 100% successfully/they must have the same fundamental meaning to everyone (interpretations can be different of course, but there's a fundamental agreement that there is one way that the world physically works, if two theories seem to describe it equally well, then there must be some way of making them equivalent). if we don't agree, then we need to run experiments to come to a consensus. disagreements must always be in a process of resolved. only the consensus is the content of science. the scientific method is the way in which science as a language creates meaning. so science is a language that must always
transmit meaning universally.
at the other end of the line is the arts. as a language, the arts seem to me to be in essence flawed, perpetually failing in the communication of meaning. we think of the arts as a form of self-expression, but the meaning that an artist puts into a piece of art is inherently incommunicable.
i'm not saying this is a problem, this failure of communication is what makes the arts incredibly beautiful. each person takes away from a piece of art their own unique meaning, formed by their personal histories and perspectives. take an apple. as a language, what science is concerned with is that we all can come to the conclusion that the apple is indeed an apple, from a certain kind of tree, with a particular genus, etc. only the things that we all agree on can be science. but from the perspective of the arts, an apple has a uniquely personal meaning for each person, and this meaning is too fine to be adequately communicated by language (just another way to communicate meaning, existing somewhere on the line in between science and the arts... it communicates meaning with an intermediate level of certainty and to a subset, not universal, group of people). this isn't to say that no meaning can be communicated by the arts, but just that the arts can't reliably communicate a particular piece of information.
anyway, sorry for the long post, not sure where all of this is going, just a lot of ideas all stuck together at this point.
