MCM1201C: Imagined Networks
Blog Post #1 (blasphemously tardy)
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"Yet if the sacred silent languages were the media through which the great global communities of the past were imagined, the reality of such apparitions depended on an idea largely foreign to the contemporary Western mind: the non-arbitrariness of the sign. The ideograms of Chinese, Latin, Arabic were emanations of reality, not randomly fabrications of it" (Anderson, 14).
Each of the aforementioned languages and its correspondent religious/instructive text provided tenets for its own intimation of the word of God: tenets for the proper modes of thought as well as acceptable behaviors. More than just this, these languages portended to not only reflect reality exactly, but they purported to BE reality. Thus, the world/reality constructed about those living in the times of such languages was done so through the entirely “non-arbitrariness” of said “ideograms.” In essence, these languages (as described) seem to be constitutive of ideal, true, “right” behavior and belief, with all else existing only as derivations and deviations of such.
Such languages strike me as eerily reminiscent of the programs (written in any computer programming language – from Scheme to Java to Perl to C to C++…--) that do not produce any visible action, interface, output, image, interaction window, etc. Some programs, in contrast to games or input/output or webpages with interactive features in Javascript, work only inside the computer, telling it what types of actions to perform and the like in order to ensure that the machine functions properly.
This distinction is similar to that between ‘machine language’ (numeric codes for the operations directly executable by a computer – binary code/digits) and ‘assembly language’ (‘mnemonic codes for instructions’ which ‘allows a programmer to introduce names for blocks of memory that hold data’). The conversion from assembly language into machine language is rather simple (as would be the translation of beliefs codified by a language such as Spanish into an embodied practice/behavior). However, the reverse translation is less simple (as are the relations of truly physio/psychospiritual experiences into words or other form of expression).
The former is nearly impossible to script and understand, as it is a far cry from both ‘convention mathematical notation’ and any sociolinguistic human language.
The “sacred silent languages” strike me as being of the “as-things-ought-to-be” breed; that is, indicative of an ideal reality, with clear delineations of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as well as specifications regarding the proper method by which to interpret reality. “The contemporary Western mind” has learned that all things can be read as texts, and that all texts are subject to a diverse breadth of interpretive models. The Word of God, like the concrete ‘on-or-off’ call of binary code / machine language, is a system of one-to-ones, with no residual. The Word of God is not to be read as a text; in theory, it is impervious to any sort of translation, much less to a reliable one. Its purest form is reality itself. All answers to questions are marked by stalwart affirmatives or negatives, in the same way that machine language makes the answer to any question an ‘on,’ or an ‘off.’ In the same way that the TRUE name of God and/or the Devil cannot be pronounced (read: “Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves” by Clifford A. Pickover for an entertaining account of computers crashing after calculating the full/true name of religious iconographic figures), there is no way to pronounce the workings of code like a computer’s internal binary. While the former seems more felt and embodied than rationalized, the latter is a state of being, describable and recognizable only by its being true or false. There is the creation of an ‘ideal’ purview, a convergence of perspective, a bend toward a particular set of tasks and beliefs, the privileging of action and movement and feeling (as opposed to static images and other representational forms).
The internal programming of computers seems correlative to the internal, religious/spiritual programming of humans. They eliminate mediators (signs only, no signified) and explicitly program PROCESS and METHODOLOGY. Perhaps this is only wishful thinking. Perhaps there is no contemporary counterpart to those sacred, silent languages, which were the house of reality itself.
Yet, think of the novel, which takes the extrinsic time of the reader and links it to the intrinsic content of the novel. The sacred languages of the past took the overarching time of that which was holy and linked it to the internal, spiritual, unpronounceable experience of the human. Computer programming languages – those concerned only with the programming/functional processes of the machine (without any visible output or perceptible, representational output of the code) – take the desire to map the ‘real’ to the imaginary, indescribable depths of a machine and internalize them: they become a set of internal processes in a machine which produces a virtual reality with which we interact on the most intimate (and the most disparate) of levels.
"There is no idea here of a world so separated from language that all languages are equidistant (and thus interchangeable) signs for it. In effect, ontological reality is apprehensible only through a single, privileged system of re-presentation: the truth language of Church Latin, Qu'ranic Arabic, or Examination Chinese. And, as truth-languages, imbued with an impulse largely foreign to nationalism, the impulse towards conversion. By conversion, I mean not so much the acceptance of particular religious tenets, but alchemic absorption" (Anderson, 14-15).
The "alchemic absportion" seems reminscent of an embodied/physicalize experience, perhaps it even lies on the spectrum of 'imitating-->becoming' (in performance studies, the spectrum begins at performing "as" something -- enacting it -- and moves all the way to trance, or religious possession, in which the representation is no longer situated at a distance from the thing itself) and the 'absorption'/spiritualization of the Word of God is akin to a computer internalizing and learning to self-sustain in regard to the necessary processes to ensure its functionality.
Adonai spoke to Mosheh and said, "Take the one who cursed outside the camp and have every one who heard him press their hands onto his head; then the entire community is to execute him. And tell the Yisraelites this: Any man who curses his Elohim commits an unforgivable sin; and anyone who speaks the Four-Lettered Name must be put to death---the entire community is to execute him---the same applies to a foreigner as to a citizen---he must die for speaking the Name."
OTHER RANDOM THOUGHTS FROM THIS (THAT?) WEEK:
“Bilingualism meant access, through European language-of-state, to modern Western culture in the broadest sense, and, in particular, to the models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century" (Anderson, 116).
Bilingualism is constitutive of something resembling a simultaneous concession and move toward increasing one’s own power/access: it acknowledges the impracticality and impossibility of the superimposition of one language over all others, while also seeming an attempt at gaining access to multiple communities.
