David Abram: The Alphabet, the Mind and the World

[MacCruiskeen]

A long but fascinating interview. The title at source is 'The Spell of Literacy'. The interview's very wide-ranging and almost unsummarisable, so I'll just post the link, a list of topic-headings, and (practically at random) an extract:

Reading is Like Magic
Alphabetic Civilization
How Reading Affects Us
Culture Before Writing
Writing Displaces Nature
Verbal Self-Reflexivity
Self-Talk
The Magical Spell of Writing
The Alphabet's Big Bang
Animism - Nature Speaks
Spoken Language
Sacred Breath and the 1st Alphabet
The 'Not Now' and 'Not Present'
Disinheriting the Wind
Grecian Formulas
Socrates and Plato
A Transformation in What Writing Represents
Back to Socrates & Plato
Generalizations
Reductionism
The Kabbalah
Interiority
Story and Place
The Magic of the Letters
The Child
The Oral-Local to Digital-Global Continuum

Interiority:

Dr. David Abram: So, the letters have a wonder and a power that, to me, can only be called magical. They are marvelous. And, they work marvels. They make it possible for the human organism to reflect back upon its own thoughts and to think about them more deeply and to write those new thoughts down, and reflect upon those, and so, enter into a kind of recursive dialogue with itself. They make possible a new independence of the human mind, or the human self, from the surrounding world. In a sense, there is an interiority within me that experiences an independence of everything around me, into which I can retreat to just think over a problem, or to think over something that is puzzling me, or anything I choose.

This sense of a vast interior to the human being, I think, is also an inheritance from the alphabet itself. And, that is not to say that oral indigenous peoples, without any writing system whatsoever, do not have rich, psychological lives. But, the interior with which they are most familiar is not so much a space that is inside of them, inside each individual. It is not an individual interior. It is, rather, the experience of living inside the vast, interior of the world itself, and inhabiting a common story with the other animals, and with the plants, and the winds, and the storms, and, that has its own wonder, and its own magic and a sense of living in a world that is filled with magic, and magical influences. And, one's body is in a kind of empathic relation with the other bodies that surround, whether it be the body of an aspen grove or the body of a single oak tree, or the body of a slab of granite in front of my house. I can feel. I feel differently in relation to this boulder than I do when I bring my body close to a sandstone rock. And, I can sense different qualities to the sandstone than I can sense from the granite because my body feels differently. And so, I know that there are emanations, or interactions happening between my body and the other bodies that surround me. This is the sense of being alive inside a living world, inside a common interior.

It's only when that vast, common interior is forgotten, or lost, that we, in the West, have developed this individual sense of interiority that moves and churns inside each of us, but the interior mind that is mine is very different from your interior mind, very different from anyone else's. And, it becomes very difficult, sometimes, for us to understand how we can communicate with one another, and make peace with one another, because we each have such different interiors.

In a certain sense, this is not understandable except when thinking about the common interior that was lost. Because I'm realizing that it's not just about the alphabet, what I'm saying. For instance, the loss of the Ptolemaic universe, with the Copernican revolution—that's a big transition. Our indigenous ancestors experienced life as If they were living inside a fairly intimate, closed, spherical world. And, when that was dispelled by Copernicus, suddenly, it's an infinite space and there was, “whoa!” Everybody was ungrounded and that, in a sense, is also the birth of the modern interior, because you had to find that interior. It fled inside everybody's skull. But, the alphabet is not the only player there, by any means.

David Boulton: No, no. But, it's part of the foundation of the thought process that would lead to the kind of observations and abstractions that Copernicus and Galileo and others would make that would give rise to what we're talking about.

(...)

http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/abram.htm

[slimmouse]

This sense of a vast interior to the human being, I think, is also an inheritance from the alphabet itself.

And in a simple sweeping sentence the cart is put in front of the horse (for most of humanity at least ) , and the chicken and egg problem is apparently resolved

[Wombaticus Rex]

Very interesting that Abrams has done work with the Rockefeller Foundation, especially in light of this great RI find: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32169

Relevant/Relevatory:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... metaphors/

Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn’t all that fancy. Let’s compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly. Both are made up of cells, of course, with neurons playing particularly important roles. Now one might expect that a neuron from a human will differ dramatically from one from a fly. Maybe the human’s will have especially ornate ways of communicating with other neurons, making use of unique “neurotransmitter” messengers. Maybe compared to the lowly fly neuron, human neurons are bigger, more complex, in some way can run faster and jump higher.

But no. Look at neurons from the two species under a microscope and they look the same. They have the same electrical properties, many of the same neurotransmitters, the same protein channels that allow ions to flow in and out, as well as a remarkably high number of genes in common. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.

So where’s the difference? It’s numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human’s 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.

The article then veers into primitive neuro-determinism and sociological "proof of sweeping statement by single study" horseshit, but it's at least interesting....

Another truly interesting domain in which the brain confuses the literal and metaphorical is cleanliness. In a remarkable study, Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a request for help (that the experimenters had set up) that came shortly afterward. Apparently, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate weren’t the only ones to metaphorically absolve their sins by washing their hands.

This potential to manipulate behavior by exploiting the brain’s literal-metaphorical confusions about hygiene and health is also shown in a study by Mark Landau and Daniel Sullivan of the University of Kansas and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. Subjects either did or didn’t read an article about the health risks of airborne bacteria. All then read a history article that used imagery of a nation as a living organism with statements like, “Following the Civil War, the United States underwent a growth spurt.” Those who read about scary bacteria before thinking about the U.S. as an organism were then more likely to express negative views about immigration.

[MacCruiskeen]

This sense of a vast interior to the human being, I think, is also an inheritance from the alphabet itself.

And in a simple sweeping sentence the cart is put in front of the horse (for most of humanity at least ) , and the chicken and egg problem is apparently resolved

slimmouse, did you read any of that very lengthy interview at all before pissing on it, or just the one short line I myself had bolded in the one short extract I posted here? I think we should be told. Because cherrypicking doesn't get much easier than what you just did there, in "a single sweeping sentence".

WR, I may very well be missing something (it's late here!), but I don't really see the relevance of The Metaphor Program. or of the studies you cite, to what Abram is saying here, which is about the difference between non-literate and literate consciousness. Something certainly changes radically in the way people relate to the world once they learn to read (and perhaps write), but I'm not sure metaphor has anything much to with it at all. (Pre-literate and non-literate people also use metaphors. How could they not?)

[IanEye]

i read the whole thing, but i feel like i need to read it again.

Abram makes mention of people who are blind, but he does make me wonder whether blind people "feeling" braille experience the same sensation of then "hearing" the word in their head the same as people who see the written word do.

[Wombaticus Rex]

"All words, in every language, are metaphors." -- Marshall McLuhan



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gutenberg_Galaxy

[eyeno]

Abram makes mention of people who are blind, but he does make me wonder whether blind people "feeling" braille experience the same sensation of then "hearing" the word in their head the same as people who see the written word do.

Odd timing on this article.

Three or four days ago I was wondering if people without a written and or spoken language hear the sound of their voice and words when they think or whether they simply think in silence without hearing words in their mind.

[tazmic]

"All words, in every language, are metaphors." -- Marshall McLuhan



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gutenberg_Galaxy

I think it's a bit misleading to suggest McLuhan thinks media are only sensory extensions.

"All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered."

And more appropriate to say the medium replaces it's primary sense. After all, The medium is the Massage (of the individual, not the sense).

From your link:
"McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals."

(I realize where the picture comes from, and that it is idea from where McLuhan begins)

EDIT: It's early here... And thanks Mac.

[crikkett]

Three or four days ago I was wondering if people without a written and or spoken language hear the sound of their voice and words when they think or whether they simply think in silence without hearing words in their mind.

If one does not have a written or spoken language, what words would they even have to form in their mind?

[Wombaticus Rex]

It's "a bit misleading" to quote anything the man ever said because his body of work is so massive, mutually contradictory, and complex.

As per usual, tazmic, you're responding to what you think I meant...considering we're discussing McLuhan here, that's inevitable. I actually quoted a single brief sentence and used a single picture, followed by a link. I wasn't making any assertions whatsoever, just offering a probe towards understanding why I see a connection between Abrams' work (which owes no small debt to Marshall) and DARPA "Metaphor Program."

Your interpretation of what McLuhan "meant" is just as misguided and incorrect as my own -- which I haven't shared at all here.

EDIT:And of course, Pontypool

[MacCruiskeen]

i read the whole thing, but i feel like i need to read it again.

Same here, Ian. I will have to finally read Abram's books (they've been on my list for awhile). It's sometimes frustrating the way Abram and Boulton will touch on a topic and then veer off at a tangent without covering it properly, simply because a conversation (the interplay of live, embodied voices) and a discursive text inhabit different realms and follow different 'rules'. A transcript of a conversation is bound to function very differently from something conceived as a book or article in the first place. Which neatly illustrates the very point he's making (or at least one of those points).

I'm well aware, by the way, that I'm not really presenting any kind of cogent argument here myself. I am just fascinated by various ideas opened up by David Abrams, many of which are pretty new to me, or at least presented from an angle that's new to me, and which I find illuminating.

There's lots more very interesting stuff at that site. This is from an interview with Dr. Leonard Shlain:

Alphabetic Literacy Reconfigures the Brain:

Dr. Leonard Shlain: So, the reason I consider reading and writing so very different from speaking and listening is that they reconfigure the brain. Reading and writing are very linear, sequential processes; where speaking and listening engage many more senses, and all together it's a much more holistic kind of processing. The left hemisphere processes linear and sequential information, such as language and algebra and reason and logic, and the right hemisphere processes—and again, I'm talking about right-handed people here—processes primarily holistic image gestalt information, such as recognizing images, seeing patterns, recognizing how the parts fit with the whole.

So, as a result, I concluded that learning how to read and write the alphabet changes, reconfigures – literally - the brain of anybody who learns the skill. This has been confirmed by brain scans on non-literate people compared to literate people.

My questions are: What happens to a culture when brains are reconfigured in such a way that a lot of people learn this skill? How does it cause the whole culture to change? How are the literate culture’s religions reorganized? What happens to the relationship between men and women? I concluded that these were powerful questions..

When you're listening to me right now, what's happening is that your left hemisphere is following what I'm saying in a very linear fashion. But your right hemisphere is watching me. You're checking me out. You want to see if I have dandruff on my shoulders, or alcohol on my breath, or you want to see how sincere I am. If I were drumming my fingertips on a table top, your peripheral vision would pick that up, and that would go into the mix of what's going on in this conversation.

We all tuned into the presidential debates, not because we didn't know what these guys were going to say, we wanted to see how they said it. The Chinese have a wonderful aphorism: "Let us draw closer to the fire that we might better be able to see what we are saying." How many times have you spoken to somebody, and that person’s agreeing with you, while going like this (head’s shaking left-right as if to disagree), and you know that the head movement is the more valid message? So, when you listen to somebody, there's a lot of cross-communication between your two hemispheres to ferret out the message.

Then when I speak, Broca's area area in my left hemisphere is creating these sentences that I'm speaking. But to articulate speech, I need the cooperation of both sides of my lips, tongue and vocal chords. If I've been to the dentist and have had Novocaine, I have trouble talking. So, to speak and listen there has to be enormous cooperation across this broadband of fibers called the corpus callosum that connects the right and left hemispheres.

When you write, you write with only one hand. For 5,000 years, up until the invention of the typewriter keyboard, it didn't matter whether you were a man or a woman writing, it didn't matter what language you were writing in, it didn't even matter what you were writing about. The hand that controlled the writing implement was the same hand that hurled spears, swung swords and pulled triggers. So, it became clear to me that a new form of communication, one that reinforces the left hemisphere of the brain at the expense of the right hemisphere, will cause culture to veer off in a very left hemispheric mode.

People will agree that they're a mixture of masculine and feminine traits. Men (in general) have a more masculine side than a feminine side, but men can't exist without a feminine side, just as women can't exist without a masculine side. Everyone, I believe, would agree with that concept.

I would like to give them anatomical mailing addresses. I think that the processes that are primarily used for masculine thinking—and again, both men and women have these—are located primarily in the left hemisphere of both men and women who are right-handed. It’s the converse for the feminine, in the right hemisphere.

The Alphabet versus the Goddess

Dr. Leonard Shlain: What happens, then, in a culture when the left hemisphere is given this extra power? Patriarchy and misogyny become evident in the culture, and these manifest themselves in a rather extraordinary way. Number one, image information is suppressed; it becomes an abomination. Women's rights are curtailed, and the goddess disappears.

That's the thesis of my book, The Alphabet versus the Goddess. If you look in history and see what happened, the first book that was ever written in an alphabet is the Old Testament. That's about 900 BC. In this book, the most important centerpiece is the Ten Commandments. The First Commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever transcribed. It states, "I am the Lord, thy God, there is no other." Now, the Old Testament doesn't actually state that this deity is a male. But all of the nouns and adjectives used to describe this deity, "Lord," "Ruler," "Host," "King of the Universe" - they're all masculine. So, it's safe to assume that this is a male deity. If he's the only one, then what the First Commandment states is that no woman was involved in the creation of the universe. And up until the time this Commandment was written, no people anywhere in the world ever believed that a man alone created the universe. It was usually two women together, or a woman alone, or a man and a woman together—never a man alone.

Now, if I were to place the Ten Commandments on a table and ask viewers to come up and put them in order of importance in their lives today, I have no doubt that every single person would put as number two, "Don't murder." But that's not number two, that's number six. The second most important rule [Commandment] of righteous living is, "Make no images." How strange! And for those who would argue that it's a prescription against graven images, if you read the Commandment, it says, "And thou shall create no images of anything that flies in the air, creepeth in the ground, or is under the sea" - in other words, no art.

So, the question is: Why would art be more dangerous than murder? Why was there a prescription against art that you see playing itself out every time people become alphabet literate? For example, the first act of the Orthodox Christians in 313 AD, when they became the state religion of Rome, was instructions to the minions to go into the street and destroy all of the images. Not just graven images but every Greek or Roman image they could lay their hands on. And then after this incredible destruction of images, all the goddess temples were shut down.

(...)

http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interv ... estheBrain

But of course, as McLuhan and Debord pointed out, images themselves can also constitute a kind of tyranny.

[tazmic]

As per usual, tazmic, you're responding to what you think I meant...

No, this is what you are doing, and you are wrong. I was responding to what appeared to be suggested by your brief associative post. I didn't for a moment think it had something to do with what you thought; I was thinking of what the readers might think. The 'massage', rather than your message, whatever that may have been.

Like I said, it was early. Apologies.

[Wombaticus Rex]

We just hit a whole new level of reification there, huh?



Been reading about the project behind the interview all morning now, it's fascinating stuff: nothing less than an attempt to completely re-conceptualize our language and how we learn it. I think David Boulton is doing something remarkable, even if his diagnosis of "illiteracy as our biggest problem" is curiously naive.

Considering all this material is circa 5 years ago (with bonus web 1.0 glitter .gifs) I really wonder what's become of it. It's a monumental piece of work, especially the PBS documentary which I'm going to make some time for this afternoon.

[hanshan]

...

bumping...


...

[slimmouse]

This sense of a vast interior to the human being, I think, is also an inheritance from the alphabet itself.

And in a simple sweeping sentence the cart is put in front of the horse (for most of humanity at least ) , and the chicken and egg problem is apparently resolved

slimmouse, did you read any of that very lengthy interview at all before pissing on it, or just the one short line I myself had bolded in the one short extract I posted here? I think we should be told. Because cherrypicking doesn't get much easier than what you just did there, in "a single sweeping sentence".

Firstly Mac, Let me just say that I have nothing but respect for you as a poster. I read youre offerings on this board as a matter of priority.

However, and perhaps its my age, that sentence and the like really sticks in my claw. Perhaps I misunderstood, but it strikes me as he's implying that the "vast interior of the human being" is some kind of mythical fairytale despite the tangible evidence of something intrinsically magical - such as the very product he then proceeds to wax so lyrically about.

If this is indeed his inference then perhaps the ha'penny and the cake is a metaphor well employed here.