In another Honors colloquium I had to read a book entitled Revolution in Poetic Language by Julia Kristeva. Had to present on it, in fact. And while we were warned that HMV was, in common parlance, "a mindfuck," I assure you that East-Asian postmodern philosophy was even more so. I spent a quarter of an hour after one period staring at a tree, trying to understand the Jewel Net of Indra. So bear with me if what I'm about to say makes little to no sense, as much of my understanding of philosophy is, as implied above, intuitive rather than explicative.
Kristeva has this theory of the semiotic. The semiotic (distinctive from semiotics, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish) is that which we understand to be true in language, while the symbolic is how we place it into meaning, by essentially trapping it with words. Poetic language, for instance, is an attempt to use the symbolic to penetrate the semiotic, or to get at the universal understanding--kind of like Jung's collective consciousness in a way. Kristeva equates the symbolic with order, mathematics, limited understanding...and it's interesting to me that Lem seems to be equating mathematics (or at least mathematics as our narrator understands it) on the semiotic side rather than the symbolic:
“How many times in my life, after the revelation of a new discovery, having formulated it so solidly that it was quite indelible, unforgettable, was I obliged to wrestle for hours to find for it some verbal suit of clothes, because the thing had been born, in me, beyond the pale of language, natural or formal?” (20)
That "suit of clothes" is the symbolic, and I feel like that struggle, whether or not Lem was really discussing post-structuralism (which I doubt he was), is somehow inherent to this book. Human beings have a semiotic understanding--when someone says the word "tree," for instance (or arbre, or eretz, or whatever) we know what the tree is. We understand that connection because of shared experience. Establishing communication with aliens is infinitely more difficult because that shared understanding is absent. We cannot look for linguistic patterns because we don't know what those patterns are or if they will in any way be similar to ours. It's something I've never genuinely considered before and the possibility is fascinating. If we were to come into contact with alien beings, we'd have to pray that they have sufficient technology to translate us (like a TARDIS or something), because God knows we would have no idea what to do. It's like an American in a foreign country, hoping that if he speaks loudly and slowly enough everyone will understand.
I'm glad you posted on this passage, because it was one of the first in the book that struck me as really interesting, but by the time I finished reading HMV I had forgotten about it.
ReplyDeleteYour idea that Hogarth equates math with the semiotic side of this dichotomy is very interesting. It fits in well with some of his other propositions, such as the idea that science might be able to make philosophy and anthropology totally irrelevant with his study of algedonic control, or his assertion that language arises from society while mathematics is inherent in nature.
What is interesting, considering Hogarth's stance on these issues, is the fact that he utterly fails to contact the aliens. In spite of all the scientific and mathematical knowledge employed to "crack the code," no significant progress is made. Now I'm not trying to impose anything as crude as "they should have sent a poet," but HMV is among other things a critique of scientists and a satire of the contemporary scientific process. Lem may have been implying that, aside from not being advanced enough to understand the signal, humanity may not have been advanced enough to understand the right way to go about interpreting it.