Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Aunty Rationalism


What do we talk about when we talk
about how we talk when we
talk about talking?

Imagine: modeling [representing] a conversation,
a class discussion. Us “performing” linguistically:
talking to each other, arguing, agreeing, questioning.

Schematize: make a flow chart standing for
conversation—poster, bullet presentation,
overhead projection..

Like here’s how we rationalize the irrational,
interpret dreams, explain what happened,
demystify the mystery, stick in a thumb,
pull out a plum and say o what a
good boy am I.

Listen to the sound:--if you've got ears to hear:

“Speaking and comprehending speech can be viewed
as a speech chain, a kind of “brain-to-brain” linking…
There are mechanisms that enable us to break the
continuous stream of speech sounds into linguistic
units such as phonemes, syllables, and words in order
to comprehend and to compose sounds into words in
order to produce meaningful speech. Other mechanisms
determine how we pull words from a mental lexicon,
and still others explain how we construct a phase
structure representation of the words we retrieve.”

In order to in order to in order to: imagine a Linguist
talking like this to Helen Keller:.

Imagine a road-trip to Santa Cruz modeled & described
in terms of what goes on throughout the mechanical
system of your internal combustion SUV and
claiming that did the trick. That's what happened.

Consider the experience of a piece of coffee cake—or
better— white sugar jelly donut: its bilabial, inter-dental,
alveolar & palatal accommodation, glottal engorged
and shipped down below toward one’s intestinal,
digestive & eliminative systems etc.

Merely sampling the steps of the journey from
start to finish--beginnings, middles and endings--
with the same excruciating materialistic
description as our rational description
of the irrational mystery of
converse action..

Ways we talk about Hap..

“Brain-to-Brain linkage”

Is that what’s happening here and now?
Or are you raising the dead, kissing life into
these freeze dried samples of mind-on-a-screen
so that I’m walking around in your skull house right
now, doing my best—ecologically--to kick the dust.

A spoken utterance starts as a message in the speaker’s
brain/mind. It is put into linguistic form and interpreted
as articulation commands, emerging as an acoustic signal.
he signal is processed by the listener’s ear and sent to the
brain/mind, where it is interpreted.

You’ll notice when Linguists and associates start talking
about language and computer processing it pretty much
sounds the same as describing the lexical, phonemic,
morphophonemic, syntactical & semantic aspects and
relations in human language-ing. That’s because the computer
models the human description of process, and vice versa.



It’s a reduced mechanical, mechanistic “flatland” description
of living process—and living process is characterized by
contingency, indeterminacy, unpredictable moves.



A thorough description of automobile-ics doesn’t begin to
do justice to a road trip. A thorough description of language
doesn’t touch what’s going on in conversation: language-ing.

The devil’s in the details. Got to pay his dues. I always need
a good mechanic, but would rather drive the car.

I use/abuse my computer and than have to call on the
computer-literates, students from David Harper’s Bannerman
organization to come fix my machine. I feel stupidumb when
they sit in my chair and straighten it all out.

TechnoEnfants terrible. They know what counts & can
assess and evaluate and fix. the situation. Rationalists.
Can't live without them. Can't live with them. .

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