5 On Understanding and Speaking Proficiency

On Understanding and Speaking Proficiency

Posting to Twitter, I’ve mentioned the “perverse e-communication.” I remain extremely doubtful, what exactly one should make of our new communications tools, although I resort to them with increasing frequency. As replacement for the telephone this form of contact/encounter/relationship might be sometimes good, sometimes bad.

One might have reacted just as skeptically in a previous era, when printed books first appeared and hand-illuminated codices were still the norm. All the same, book printing initiated a world-changing and worlds-destroying revolution: the Reformation and the religious wars in Europe. Similarly, new electronic tools seem to me to be amplifying the revolutions, migrations, and uprising movements of the present day. To say nothing of æsthetic performances such as flashmobs or Facebook-parties, and the nerd phenomenon.

Nevertheless there remains a feeling of doubt– not only for me, but also for many of my texting and e-mail-sending contemporaries. Rules for use of these communications channels seem to be still crystallizing; presently, it seems that capriciousness rules. A written letter usually required a reply, especially when handwritten (that is, personal). A text message, however, some answer immediately, others within a day, others not at all. These contemporaries are probably so buried by chat-message spam that their mental accounting – we need not be talking about delirium – is no longer capable of differentiating between important and unimportant messages.

Then there is the ever increasing fraction of nouveax illetrés, who shy away from using deliberately constructed language, or are no longer even capable of understanding sentences stuffed with secondary clauses, much less actually produce them. Who use creative abbreviations throughout, even when non-initiates of this new hermeticism can’t follow them. And yet this language arose out of need, not out of any overwhelming skills.

How should one speak, or rather communicate, so that one is understood? What does “understand” mean, when have I correctly understood, what does “comprehension” mean, beyond that of foreign languages? Or does every person possess a personal, highly individually colored (foreign) language? If language withers, then so will thought; people will wither (I repeat myself). Others will take over thinking, writing, (and speaking ability?), and then we’ve already arrived at a technocratic future, at external control and manipulation by machines, which rule us without our knowing, or wanting to know. Quite the contrary – we must be happy and satisfied. Anything else would be a considerable failure in the control and surveillance systems.

Yet again, how to communicate? How to speak, write, think, so that one is understood? What is understanding? To be understood? Does that even work, or do we remain forever foreigners, who – like animals – can only occupy themselves with their countrymen, their congeners: artists with artists, workers with workers, footballers, doctors, shop clerks? Which assembly-line worker understands even a single conceptual artist and his eccentric ideas? Is even interested?
Each remains in his or her own world, surrounded by foreignness and foreigners, speaks an idiosyncratic and, for others, sometimes incomprehensible language. Or is there not a universal language, which everyone understands? I believe so. But it exists beyond words. Even animals can come to agreements among themselves. Only, not elephants with snakes, nor spiders with birds, etc.. Even plants communicate with one another in a manner, as is sometimes reported. But each remains constrained within the bounds of a (foreign) language. Even things reach agreement among themselves, says Baudrillard, that they may eventually seize power over human beings. Are we not already dependent on things? How are things going with your toothpaste, pills, sugar and salt and smartphone and (sorry) your daily beer?

Some people seem unable to understand my speech, similarly my books. At some of my lectures there would be defensive reactions (primarily on the part of men), sometimes quite fierce and which, notwithstanding, I deliberately planned as provocations. Admittedly, my books are sometimes … difficult. But some of my contemporaries are also fascinated by them. It’s enough to read just a page a day, to flip through, to look something up. The following sentence: “Some pick up the pieces, if they are broken” (from my volume of collected prose poems) is at the same time easy and difficult. Easy to understand in its form (grammar), but difficult – and thus fascinating – in its sense. How can that work, that one sometimes picks something up, if one is broken? How can a person be “broken”? Or even “shattered”, like a thing,1 and then you pick up pieces of something? Pieces of what? Of oneself? Or does this transpire only in one’s memory?

Maurice Blanchot is one such master of double (or even triple) entendres. I dedicated an entire book to him: “Landscape with Martyrdom of the Holy Catherine.” A young couple meets on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Both talk about talking, and incomprehension skills. That they want to know each other more intimately, it also comes to physical encounters, and that they will nevertheless remain always inapproachably foreign. “Make it so that I can speak to you” is her quite arrogant-seeming request. Or (from my new book on “Love and Lust”): “That they need not hide themselves from one another, they opted for a new language. But they couldn’t understand one another.” – What sort of love might that possibly be‽

In all of these sentences, there is an ambiguity that opens their meaning to fantasy, knowing, helplessness, creativity. And this is the opposite of primitivism or one-dimensionality. Moreover, this sort of thinking enforces thought, and presents significant problems, at least in the interim, to machines.

Here is one last example of constructed language, from my “Æsthetics Volume 1,” once again an admittedly quite difficult work, full of hermeticism, that arose out of a particular subject-matter, namely a viewing of sculptures by Maria Grazia Sacchitelli:

“To inhabit speech and writing connotes, after my architextural ideas of language, a labyrinth. The ways in are entangled-convoluted, and you cannot escape. You wander, again and again, from detour to detour, the thread is lost; and language as an attempt at ‘spatialization’, at distribution in space, reaches its limits again and again at the guardian of the exit, the Minotaur. He does not rule, however, the realm of language, but stands – as do we(as we do?) – always only along the way to an approximation of language. For the limitlessness of thought means that it will only ever find a way to an approximation of thought, in speech or writing. My words, as well, inscribe a path in this darkness and occasional perplexity, describe this attempt at a tracing of the tracks, almost as a landscape architect. Thus we find ourselves in a traced-out labyrinth, the way out of which we perhaps do not wish to seek – the reader, the picture’s viewer, and I.” (from: Æsthetics, Volume 1 / Photo-Book, Twelve Sinai-Plates, Chap. 4, Judea).

Overcomplexity in writing and thinking, in the manner practiced by some French authors, is probably a mannerism, perhaps even an end-times phenomenon (the end of writing, of letters, of books). In any case, it is not capitulation in the face of stupidity and speechlessness in the present era, even if an “incomprehensible” hermeticism arises as a result. Or should we rather constrain ourselves to the level of short primary clauses and colorful, evocative sound-bites, to live as if in a soap-opera?

I also think that the Theory of Signs, such as from Charles Morris, can further assist us in our communications-dilemma of diminution and abbreviation of language. Let us take it as a given that we come to an understanding with one another by signs. Every sign has three dimensions: the content, the form, and the usage dimensions, or also the usage-level. Content is that which is said. Form, how it is said, and usage is the level where, and in which contexts, it is said.
In human communication, all three levels are important. In order to understand the content of a message, the pragmatic level of usage is (as I see it), however, particularly important. A sentence can be better understood when spoken. “Better” means: its truthfulness can be better grasped. “Grasped” means not only the rational, but also the sensual, the level of emotions. We expand our knowledge in conversation very powerfully through emotional reactions, gestures, etc.. That means you can understand something without it being, having been, or needing to be spoken.

All of this comes up short in electronic communications via texting or email. For communication is only natural if people exchange information as people, namely in a natural way, ideally face to face. One sees, feels, observes, and hears an encounter extraordinarily enhanced and unburdened. Communication lives beyond , furthermore very much from direct feedback. Feedback is the life-giving oxygen of every form of direct communication – spoken, gestural, emotional. Without feedback, communication dies.

Certainly there was always a discrepancy between writing (books) on the one hand and people on the other. What a huge difference it makes, to read the sentence, “I love you,” to say it, to hear it, or to feel it! Meanwhile, electronic writing has insinuated itself overpoweringly into personal conversation, in the relationships between people, indeed it seems to want to rule over all. One need only think of going out to eat, where at many a table there is an invisible secret sharer (sometimes I call it a baby), taking part in the meal, disturbing it in the process. With the result, that despite intensive chat or email contact – simulating (and attempting to suggest) community, life, and liveliness – a great uncertainty, awkwardness, and speechlessness can develop in personal encounters, without compare or companion.

Speaking, and speech ability, get lost easily; they quickly become a burden, a major incompetence, indeed incapability. The situation at the beginning of humans’ abstract thinking – say, in ancient Greece – hearing, awareness of self, and visual observation still wholly first and foremost (only a few could read, they thus needed to be able to hear precisely and concentratively), that a certain speechlessness developed, which one scarcely remembers (or wishes to). You always had your “secret sharer” (Joseph Conrad) close by.

The pop-artist Andy Warhol proclaimed in the 60s, in one of his artificial and contrived, constructed interviews: “I would like to be a machine.” And exactly these machines will soon be at hand, encountering one another through electronic gadgets, saying “I love you,” and having sex, follow orders or fashionable suggestions without a thought. These mechanical men are dead and little suited for an encounter, a relationship. To reduce oneself to a few letter-signs reduces speaking to the level of a dead machine or a living corpse. Communication with dead machines would thus be dead communication. This syllogism might well be not entirely correct in the sense of abstract logic, but you probably understand what I mean by it.

Let us thus begin singing the dirge of living corpses! What a night, what an encounter, relationship awaits us! What a beautiful new world! Machines will also soon be able to satisfy our sexual needs. Entirely unanticipated new masturbation techniques will arise! Posterity will, uh, be cloned or cultivated in special social institutions. Solipsism lives! To be alone in this world, alone and together with our mechanical friends like Siri and in a drunkenness, which lets us take our leave from you, from us, and lastly also from “I.”

We will vanish, as an objectified object in an Internet of Things™ like the stones of Carnac, of which none knows anymore whence, whither, or wherefore … (sigh). Once again I’ve plunged into lyricism, or perhaps plays on words, and in a discursive text should probably retain some measure of rationality, should I not? Yet language sometimes follows its own path with me, sets its own goals, without my being able to halt it, or set it on a path, stipulate some goal, direct it towards unambiguousness. Thus I’m already ruled by language, as if by a machine. (sigh)

1 The German words “brechen” and “zerbrechen” (meaning “break” and “shatter” respectively), are cognates that differentiate more strongly between people (as with “brechen”, where even this meaning is figurative) and things (as with “zerbrechen”, which is almost exclusively used to refer to literal breakage of inanimate objects into pieces). The word-play here thus does not easily transfer into English.