CeJ jannuzi at gmail.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >>CB: In other words, the fact that the signifier is _not_ the "thing" or processes that it signified is the characteristic that allows it to get across the death barrier that the body of the ancestor faces.<< So that which crosses the death barrier is not actually a thing? So what is it? ^^^^^^^ CB: Yes it is a material thing. A signifier is material. ( There is nothing but matter and it's mode of existence is motion - smile). It's words, whether spoken or material objects used as "words". The gestures you speak of correspond to brainwaves which are things. Brain waves are material things. ^^^^^^^^ Isn't there a danger here of the usual structuralist idealism? That somehow the social-symbolic defies our material world, subsisting in a 'third realm' that is crystalline and godless but still immaterial? ^^^^^ CB: I'd say Levi-Straussian structuralism is materialism. Thoughts are material. Brain physiologists recently made a break through where they could stimulate the brain electronically and reproduce some thought or other. It was the biggest advance so far in a precise location of a very specific thought. I think I posted it here. Anyway, the mind/body problem is over. Thoughts' material substratum is very precisely discovered. ^^^^^^^^ Also, I think you have to separate that (1) language life and development transcends the 'death barrier' and (2) that language, in part, and only in part, conveys the information and knowledge we use to learn and to work with others to create, produce, change our world. ^^^^^ CB; OK. Here's a reiteration of what I am saying. I didn't discover that culture and language has essentially symboling or the use of something to represent something that it is not. That is a discovery anthropology. Nor did I discover that culture and language distinguish humans from other species. That was also anthropology. Anthropology is also the source of the proposition that culture is a main form of material adaptation by the human species. Also, anthropology discovered the central place of kinship in hunting and gathering and gardening societies in "modern times", the special social studies of anthropology. Having learned all of this years ago I started wondering, "well , what is it about the symbol that would make it so in human history ?" So, central to culture and language. The current hypothesis occurred to me: It is in a material form that can survive the death of the human bodies. It occurred to me that exactly the material form of the signifiers that represent the living bodies and their movements can cross the death barrier when by definiton the signified bodies of are mortal. Can't continue to demonstrate human-bodily to be imitated directly. There's a paradox that linguistic units can convey more information than direct observation. A picture is worth a thousand words. A demonstration is worth 10,000 words. But ten thousand words can get across the death barrier and a bodily demonstraton cannot .Most of what I'm saying, my premises are anthropology a,b,c. I'm just posing a little esoteric hypothesis for some basic anthropology. Ask me another question (smile). ^^^^^^^ Still, languages change over time, given enough time, because every act of decoding and encoding in the real world of social being brings about change, such that we would have a hard time communicating in 'English' with Geoffrey Chaucer (even if he didn't speak the way he wrote). ^^^^^ CB: Sure. I'm saying the original language was largely in the form of using natural material objects as "words"; as well as your non-sonic bodily gestures, "sight" language. The first vocabularies were literally concrete. ^^^^^^ And all it takes is one failed generation of knowledge transfer and transformation and cultures can break down, fail to reproduce into future generations. ^^^^^ CB: Sure. We have lost most of Egyptian language and culture.. Most of most cultures , probably. Most of the stone age concrete lexical items were probably more perishable than stone - trees, leaves, animal bones, animal skins (clothes are big signifiers ) ,stuff I can't even creatively think of was probably used as lexical items. Think what an adaptive survival help it would to just beable to put up a sign "Lions live in this area" " lions spotted recently around here". a danger sign. The sign could be , u know, anything, as long as the humans are able to grasp the convetion involved. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
