China Miéville
2011, Del Rey
In a recent essay in Aeon, Nikhil Mahant points out (I think correctly) that most alien languages imagined in sci-fi aren’t really all that different from existing human languages. ‘As a philosopher of language, I find this unsatisfying,’ he says. ‘[I]n thinking about alien modes of communication, shouldn’t we be exploring possible languages that are very different from our own—so much so that they challenge our very conception of what a language is?’
If you share Mahant’s yearning, read Embassytown. I wish I could get every linguist to read this book; I could teach an entire class based on it. More than anything else on my syllabus, Embassytown takes us to the root of what language is and gives us the narrative space to imagine how it could be different.
It’s a tough book though. I gave up on it twice before I finally muscled through. The last few chapters make everything worth it—they’re heart-wrenching, exhilarating—and the book gets richer with every rereading (I just finished my fourth). So I’ll try to give you a sense here of how linguistically important Embassytown is and also offer some encouragement to help you make it through, hopefully without spoilers.
What it’s about. Embassytown takes place in a remote time and place, after humans have discovered how to travel across universes through an indescribable medium called Immer. Avice, the narrator and protagonist, is an interplanetary navigator (‘immerser’) who was born and raised in Embassytown, a colonial outpost on a planet called Arieka. The book is largely about what happens when Avice returns to Embassytown after a long absence, bringing her new husband, a linguist named Scile who has an obsessive interest in the language spoken by Arieka’s indigenes.
In one of the funnier scenes near the beginning, Avice meets Scile in a hotel bar and tags along with him to the conference he’s attending—CHEL, the Conference of Human Exoterre Linguists:
[There were] sessions on cross-cultural chromatophore signalling, on touch communication among the unseeing Burdhan… ‘I’m working in Homash. Do you know it?’ said one young woman to me, appropos of nothing. She was very happy when I told her no. ‘They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes in different combinations are sentences, which their interlocutors eat.’ (36)
Oh god, it’s linguists nerding out at a conference! One of the great things about Embassytown is that the setting is so remote and strange, but below the surface everything is recognizable—sometimes comically, sometimes painfully. The building blocks of the story are deeply familiar: leaving and homecoming, love and friendship, cities and politics, exploration and colonization, war and societal collapse (those chapters hit hard for me this time), and a stirring struggle for agency and independence. And the whole plot is driven by language.
Language. Even among the languages showcased at the CHEL conference, the language of the mysterious Ariekei is a standout.
The Arieki language can’t be spoken a human. Part of the problem is anatomical: the Ariekei (called ‘Hosts’ by human Embassytowners) have two speaking mouths that simultaneously articulate distinct phonemes, something the human body can’t replicate. Ordinarily in such circumstances, humans could use technology to record, resynthesize and play back polyvocal sounds as a proxy for their voices—but when they try this in Embassytown, the Hosts still don’t understand them.
The problem turns out to go much deeper: Hosts can’t even conceive of machine-generated language, because they can’t abstract the meaning of an utterance away from a living, thinking speaker. Language doesn’t mean for them the way it means for us. For them, Scile says, ‘words don’t signify: they are their referents.’ (80)
It’s a tough idea to get your head around. Here’s how Avice explains it:
Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen. (55) … It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. (83)
Stop and think about that. If you know that today is Friday, can you still make yourself believe that it’s Thursday? Can you do both of those things at the same time? I can try, but all I can do is toggle—briefly half-convince myself that today is Thursday, while half-denying my knowledge that today is Friday. I can’t hold both beliefs simultaneously.
A Host’s utterance is like one of my beliefs—tightly bound to something they understand to be true. This means it’s impossible—not just a cultural taboo, but cognitively out of reach—for a Host to say anything but (what they know to be) the literal truth. Some of them try, but they fail the same way I did in the exercise above: they toggle and waver for a second or two, then give up.
Here’s another way I understand this: If someone says to me It’s raining, I’ll probably assume that they believe it’s raining. But I don’t have to assume that. I can separate the meaning of It’s raining from the thoughts and intentions of the speaker and consider alternative interpretations: maybe the speaker is lying, joking, being ironic, telling a story, reciting a nursery rhyme, speaking metaphorically; i.e. maybe they don’t believe it’s raining at all. For Hosts, though, none of those alternatives are possible. Hosts understand every utterance to be isomorphic to a thought. An utterance for them cannot be delinked from a speaker’s belief or a speaker’s thinking body.
The Embassytowners over time develop an extreme solution to their communication problem: they breed cloned pairs of human ‘ambassadors,’ raise each pair to share all the same experiences, and teach them to speak the Arieki language simultaneously with their two separate mouths, which (sometimes) convinces the Hosts that they’re articulating the thoughts of a single mind. But even then, Scile insists, these cloned ambassadors aren’t really speaking the language, not the way the Hosts do: ‘All we can do’s teach ourselves something with the same noises, which works quite differently…Our minds aren’t like theirs.’ (56-57)
What it means. If you discover a language that seems to have all the usual formal elements (lexicon, syntax, etc.) but then learn that its speakers are engaging in a completely different kind of mental activity from ours while speaking, do you still call it language? We considered this question with ‘Funes the Memorious‘; Embassytown allows us to pursue it further, along more paths. The way meaning works in the Arieki language—which humans call simply ‘Language’—has a number of consequences, each of which might cast even more doubt on the idea that Language is language at all:
- Hosts can’t understand other languages or even conceive of them. They perceive spoken human languages as ‘meaningless barks.’
- Hosts can’t lie, but they do hold Festivals of Lies, where cloned human ambassadors are asked to say untrue things as entertainment. The Hosts ‘experience [these lies] as some giddying impossible,’ like an addictive drug. (129)
- Hosts’ utterances are precise and literal. Their Language has a future tense but they rarely use it. There are no deictic demonstratives like that. There isn’t much polysemy but there are some abstractions, like numbers.
- Hosts can’t understand writing.
- They don’t point.
- They don’t have metaphor.
- Hosts don’t have an extended language-acquisition period; they awake ‘suddenly fluent’ at a specific maturational stage. (129)
- Hosts don’t have gods. (194)
- Sometimes Hosts do want to express meanings that aren’t yet known. The only way they can do this is by staging scenes and acting them out, creating memories of real events that they can then refer back to and use in similes, e.g. ‘I am like the rock that was split apart and put back together again,’ ‘I am like the girl who ate what was given to her.’
So given all this, do we think the Hosts’ Language counts as language?
I think about Saussure‘s insistence that the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is fundamental to language, that it explains why language is organized the way it is and changes the way it does (Cours Part I ch1). Presumably the sound-meaning mapping is arbitrary in the Hosts’ Language too—but would it have these same consequences? Would we even expect the Hosts’ Language to change over generations the way human language does, given that it seems to be inborn?
I also think about performative speech acts like I quit or Class is dismissed. Could a Host use language performatively, given that e.g. I quit isn’t understood to be true until it’s uttered felicitously? (In fact, some performatives are lies at the time of the utterance, like Pam Beesly‘s declaration ‘I am the office administrator!’ when she’s still in sales.) If Hosts can’t use Language to create reality, does their Language count as language?
I also think about negation. We don’t remember the first three years of our lives, but somewhere around age 2, English-speaking toddlers learn to understand sentential negation—i.e. the word not in The ball is not in the truck; Feiman et al 2017. Imagine what that must be like, to suddenly realize that there’s a word in your lexicon that has the power to make any true sentence untrue and vice versa. (Embassytown chapter 27 makes me wonder if this might be a mind-blowing, traumatic epiphany that we just don’t remember.) How does negation work in the Hosts’ Language? Could you have something as powerful and versatile as sentential negation without also having the ability to state a falsehood? Would a language without this power count as a language?
Have I convinced you to read Embassytown yet? I hope so! But it’s a difficult book to read. Even Ursula K Le Guin said Miéville ‘sets the bar rather high.’ It’s a lot of world, as some of my fiction-writing students would say—an unfamiliar universe with different technologies, customs and vocabulary—and Miéville just throws you into it.
You constantly have to decide while reading whether you’ll stop and puzzle over words like nonex, augmens, bioware, trid, or just give up and roll with them. Some of the words get explained directly and at length, like floak and immer; some get generated in real time as part of the narrative, like fanwingless and explorocracy; some you might never figure out. (I was kind of proud of myself when I saw that Le Guin had never figured out miab and I had (it’s an acronym: message in a bottle).)
To complicate things further, Miéville likes using English words that are so obscure they might as well be coinages, like integument, chitin, nacreous, mum as a verb. (We had a delightful moment in our class discussion when a French exchange student charmingly demonstrated a moue for those who didn’t know the word.) And then Miéville will sometimes use these odd words to build very odd sentences: They stood there mooncalf and quite impossible. (48) With that spiral of assertion-abnegation came quiddities. (311) I admittedly got a little impatient with this the first time I tried to read the book.
So for my 1-credit class, we read only the first 75 pages. I hope it’s enough to get students through the most difficult part of the text and then tantalize them, so that maybe some will finish it on their own. We spend a lot of the discussion decoding. Sometimes we look at cover artwork for different editions of the book and try to figure out what’s being represented or symbolized. One semester we even started making a glossary.
But honestly, if you read this book I’d encourage you to just let the strangeness wash over you (immerse!); don’t try to understand everything. By letting yourself be lost, you’ll get a sense of what it’s like to live in Avice’s world, where different cultures and species are trying to communicate across impossible divides, everything is collapsing and getting built up again, and nobody’s sure what anything means.
The book gives us some hints that this is the right approach. We see Scile learning the vocabulary for the native animals of his new planet, and one animal turns out to be called a jackdaw—a lovely inversion because it’s brand-new word for Scile but not for us. Another gem: Avice at one point hears someone say ‘going AWOL’ and responds ‘going what?’—she has no idea what it means (and she doesn’t get an answer). But by the end of the book, she’s casually using ‘going AWOL’ herself. She rolled with it.
Similarly, that split-in-half rock shows up every now and then throughout the novel, briefly mentioned but never fully explained. It’s up to us to decide what it means, how to interpret it, just as we have to interpret other split-in-two things: the Hosts’ double mouths, the cloned ambassadors, the Immer and the everyday, the simultaneous truth of I regret and I regret nothing, the actual events and the story we tell about them.
Embassytown reminds us that when we don’t understand things, we create meaning. Could a Host do that?
What a great post. Since there are so many ideas to break down, I will respond in parts.
Part I: Mahant’s dissatisfaction with the overwhelming intra-species language research that has been done into human languages nearly mimics an analogous dissatisfaction I’ve seen from those astrophysicists who combat the constant question of the relevance of their work ‘when there are problems right down here on Earth’ (which is my paraphrasal of the common opinion). Often times over-reliant on their faith and the ways it may or may not have brought them their successes, human beings may have their gaze, attention, and concern ‘fixed’, like a structure, to the latest technology, like writing, which in our own human contribute to creation makes it the faux God our eyes are watching, while our ears, containing the labyrinth, have been forgotten by some. Between our discussions on
Derrida, a philosopher who responded to Sausurre’s structuralism, received criticism then (and now—especially from Jordan Peterson) because he argued that though we believe writing to be secondary to language—as linguistics demands, of course, in order to control the already abstract object we are studying—the features/characteristics that we believe are unique to writing and contribute to its shortcomings are actually ALSO present in speech as well, which allow us to place into doubt how much more we can trust writing to be our ‘living document’. Perhaps rather than writing being the clever way to put ourselves down onto something firm—something that will allow us to stack ourselves into civilization, the paper like Jenga, or a beanstalk/stairway to heaven/the giants/Olympus. We claim to want to stack ourselves into civilization, but why is the stack vertical? And shaped like a rocket? Or a mega-corporation’s building?
This is all further emphasized when we consider the printing press and its dissemination capacities as an megaphone.
Helpful Analogies for Communication Technologies (for myself):
language: megaphone | recorder | telephone
writing: document | book | programming and software development | LLMs and GPTs, etc.
*We have been stacking, like Jenga, on the first technology we made (language), getting more and more distant from the ground. With there being another dimension now, the distance between groups on one ‘side of the Internet’ and the other is expedited.
Just like those standing in the back of a crowd still might not hear the contents of a message delivered by megaphone (or those in the front row due to cognitive biases and other auditory perception errors), a book can sell millions of copies and not be purchased or read or acknowledged, really, by the general public. Those outside of one algorithm or for-you-page may never come across that content. Our capacity for echo chambers began with the ‘invention’ of language, which became our first opportunity to yell down a cave, for example (maybe Plato’s), and tell someone it’s safe to come out, according to ourselves. We can also hear our own voices echoed back to us when we yell down, and sometimes, I would imagine, one can’t confirm authorship or author’s intent/’meaning’, even when it is their own voice flung back to them, as echos/recursion/reproduction rot us into a distortion, as all sound does.
When I think about humans, I think of their eyes as watching “God”, which may be a person, place, destination, a pot of gold, etc.
*This is pragmatically enriched by the fun fact that Zora Neale Hurston felt most impacted by her linguist-teacher Lorenzo Dow Turner.
Anyway, in other words, the unaccounted for trace that may be language or consciousness, or a braid of the two, following the nature of DNA, can either be the sliver a human being focuses on (often a philosopher) or the sliver once ignores, opting instead to focus on the 99% while believing they are staring at God, when it is really the human’s own creation and stab at the kind of work all civilizations imagine god to do, somewhat.
To me, linguistics is a place—a nation of mind—of sorts. Just as many tend to not leave the field after taking Tamasi’s 101 course, it’s a place we go to that allows us to sneakily arrive at critical thinking by way of one of the safest remaining forms of descriptivism left–language. Other abstract objects of study like race and sex still are considered worthy of value judgements in our daily life, as is language, but many are more open to entertaining certain discussions on language, as not all of them are reactionary/inflammatory. Taboo and ‘politicized’ words come and go in human history all the time (and get recycled/upcycled). But what do we do when nearly all words are taboo to someone and radicalization happens faster and people are afraid to talk and are angry when they do? What do we do when we realize that we are dealing with our own Tower of Babel moment in 2025, as we have over-relied on language to do too much for us. This is what I imagine J. Hillis Miller to be referring to when he discusses catachresis and aporia.
But yeah, when Derrida said writing is actually primary to speech, I think he just meant that the ‘essence’ and shortcoming of speech can be found in writing and any other technology that uses language as its rudimentary code to get off the ground.
And when we were meant to deconstruct binaries, we spent perhaps too much time on race, gender, and sexuality binaries in the suburbs. And then there was a jump to presence | absence essays without a solid background in the grounds that prefaced the need for that distinction. It seems to me that we should have eventually returned to Derrida’s binary of language | writing to get ourselves out of a knot that has been coiling for quite some time now.
*This all applies to sign languages as well. No pun intended. Or tautology?)
P.S. I can’t think of Sausurre without also thinking of the word for ‘whisper’ in Spanish, susurro, and ‘so sure’. Perhaps seeing all this (if my observations are somewhat correct) is the curse of being a linguist?
The way you discuss Embassytown is how I view The Human Stain by Philip Roth. I could teach a whole class on it, cross-referenced with linguistics and literature! This book’s plot, too, is driven by language, as the inciting incident/ what I’ll call ‘the plosive point’ included catachresis as a device to demonstrate warring contexts and the lexical ambiguity that actually afflicts all words (and how in every ‘war’ or ‘binary’ or ‘duo’ or ‘partnership’, there is a secret third part) Usually what was called private information in political science as it relates to conflict and rational basis for war may actually be unraveled by either party with access to more information from the etymology line that Hiller 1992 describes.
I read it while I worked as a substitute teacher and the book is so dynamic, it changes from second-to-second. My mom and I have read it and flipped back through more times than we can count over the past 2-3 months.
It’s all about language and writing and the way it knots us up. Roth, I argue, at least, sees language as the human stain. I would go even further to suggest voice, actually. It can be the human stain or the human star–a compass of sorts, to point us back to each other since centripetal and centrifugal force will have it that way, anyway.
Something else interesting to think about is how
If an object in motion stays in motion, while an object at rest stays at rest, then when a human being stands still and the force of gravity is pushing down on them and the ground is raising them, and there is just the “Now” what does the definition of “time” become? If we replace Zeno’s Arrow with ourselves, we’ll find that time is all the extra stuff being exerted on us, and maybe language and consciousness aren’t braided together in that remaining wedge after nitrogen and oxygen and carbon and hydrogen et. al, but rather what we’ve been calling language is another condition, like gravity, that was simply the case before the arrival of man, and our bodies development through it and lack of understanding of it, has caused all this mess. When I say “all this mess”, I am referring to what political correctness has trickled down and rotted into, what dissolving binaries has trickled down and rotted into, etc.
+ I need to re-read Embassytown with my new thoughts, since I found that text incredibly challenging when I read it in your course, and I was too halted by the task of comprehension (and my views of my own competence) to be able to even tap into the author’s underlying assumptions about language that contributed to their sci-fi world.
Also, if we seem to be the primary organisms concerned with meaning and use language to get at it–though it is because of language that we cannot–there must still be answers behind human language, specifically. When animals use echolocation, it requires them to know their limits, somewhat. Do other animals have a ‘more natural’ awareness of the reduplicating bell curve that is the sound wave and the ocean waves and the mountains and language?
For example, when we call someone on the phone when they’re still close by in the room, we introduce an excess of technology unnecessarily (the person is right there) and our voices and sounds echo faster and louder. The oscillation between peak-valley-peak-valley
Perhaps what I am arguing here is that the most rudimentary units to examine here when interpreting language and literature are V and C.
vowel | consonant
resonance | constriction
velar pinch of a velar plosive on a spectrogram | potential energy–> x-plosive.
elbows
water/rivers | mountains, tectonic plates
valley| trough vs. creation/mountain/building upward
*sand dunes
*the curve of our paved roads
*door hinges
A vowel is marked by its more free-flowing stream of resonance with much less constriction than the consonant. It flows like a river, like water. Water flowing in the valley. A snake slithering on the ground.
The patterns constantly repeat themselves among elements across all regions of the world. We are so divided as a country and world even though we have the most common, most universal problem right now.
“C” may even have initially just represented creation. The iconography of the grapheme is bulbous and cloud-like, and it makes me think of cumulous clouds (which can look like multiple letter “c”s reoriented and reduplicated). Clouds look a lot like tree tops when I draw them on paper, and I would imagine a rudimentary drawing by any human across time would look this way. There is a poem called “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by John Donne, and if we substitute Zeno’s arrow with the bell as I did in my example with the human body, we’d find that the bell is not ringing for any one individual, it “tolls for no one”. It tolls for thee may mean that it tolls for You, which is everyone, since we are experiencing everything through the second-person, naturally. The second person is the creation, second only to the creator. Only “God/Voice” can say “I”, as the first person, which is why it is the first letter of the Babble. Just as all vowels begin with a glottal stop, perhaps the commonality between plosives and vowels (the overlap between V and C) allows us to arrive at a new interpretation.
A “c” is the top part of an “s”, and the flip/mirror of it is at the bottom in the denominator. If we view the “c” like a numerator and its equal and opposite is the denominator, then when we think of how matter cannot be neither created nor destroyed, and that an equal and opposite force. For every action, there is a reaction. Some societies saw this as “the cost of using magic” at some point, talking and discovering one’s desired outcome eventually was somewhat of an early speech act, spell casting. For the act of creation–bending down like the curved “c” to see ourselves in the river has become bending down to see ourselves in the black mirrors of our devices. Perhaps our first error was denying the river its significance and presence by looking down to see ourselves first in the water.
In the beginning
In thee beginning
In you beginning
In your beginning
The reader and the author never meet, just as creation and creator never meet and must instead rely on access via their only connect–that internal Voice that pushes up against some clear wall/force (The Hunger Games arena boundary) and comes out all wavy, like everything else.
Perhaps it begins with a breathe (/h/) and then a vowel (/e/ or /u/ or /a/)
glottal fricative /h/ –> [h] hello or hell or help or he (man) or helium (all important in the Bible/Babble/Babel/[babɫ], the first book.
Or maybe the first “word” was “human”, uttered at the moment of Adam’s creation, a speech act, which contains potential energy in itself.
Human
Who man
Who? Man?
Who man?
Hue man? –> becomes about race/color to describe the other, a basic form of difference/distinction
I guess no one gets saved by the bell. Not to be bleak, or anything.
If we see two “I”s or two “l”s like two sticks, just to see human written symbols as rudimentary, then a velar pinch or a carrot or a cone or an arrow are all like two sticks and the friction when we rub them.
potential and kinetic energy
The human has always wanted to be greater than the world?
“greater than” symbol () It erupts the less than sign (45 + 45 = 90). Its presence is predicated on the absence of the other. I think this is the original binary to which Derrida referred. Once we turn the symbol on ourselves to where it becomes an arrow <– it not just flies back at us, it notes us as "less-than" the world. Humans must humble themselves. Seems like the same lesson keeps being reiterated to us.
But please do let me know what you think.
Also, if we seem to be the primary organisms concerned with meaning and use language to get at it–though it is because of language that we cannot–there must still be answers behind human language, specifically. When animals use echolocation, it requires them to know their limits, somewhat. Do other animals have a ‘more natural’ awareness of the reduplicating bell curve that is the sound wave and the ocean waves and the mountains and language?
To understand this, I ask that you be open to constantly viewing the words, letters/symbols as their icon, cognates, differences from other languages,
For example, when we call someone on the phone when they’re still close by in the room, we introduce an excess of technology unnecessarily (the person is right there) and our voices and sounds echo faster and louder. The oscillation between peak-valley-peak-valley
Perhaps what I am arguing here is that the most rudimentary units to examine here when interpreting language and literature are V and C.
vowel | consonant
resonance | constriction
velar pinch of a velar plosive on a spectrogram | potential energy–> x-plosive.
elbows
water/rivers | mountains, tectonic plates
valley| trough vs. creation/mountain/building upward
*sand dunes
*the curve of our paved roads
*door hinges
A vowel is marked by its more free-flowing stream of resonance with much less constriction than the consonant. It flows like a river, like water. Water flowing in the valley. A snake slithering on the ground.
The patterns constantly repeat themselves among elements across all regions of the world. We are so divided as a country and world even though we have the most common, most universal problem right now.
“C” may even have initially just represented creation. The iconography of the grapheme is bulbous and cloud-like, and it makes me think of cumulous clouds (which can look like multiple letter “c”s reoriented and reduplicated). Clouds look a lot like tree tops when I draw them on paper, and I would imagine a rudimentary drawing by any human across time would look this way. There is a poem called “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by John Donne, and if we substitute Zeno’s arrow with the bell as I did in my example with the human body, we’d find that the bell is not ringing for any one individual, it “tolls for no one”. It tolls for thee may mean that it tolls for You, which is everyone, since we are experiencing everything through the second-person, naturally. The second person is the creation, second only to the creator. Only “God/Voice” can say “I”, as the first person, which is why it is the first letter of the Babble. Just as all vowels begin with a glottal stop, perhaps the commonality between plosives and vowels (the overlap between V and C) allows us to arrive at a new interpretation.
A “c” is the top part of an “s”, and the flip/mirror of it is at the bottom in the denominator. If we view the “c” like a numerator and its equal and opposite is the denominator, then when we think of how matter cannot be neither created nor destroyed, and that an equal and opposite force. For every action, there is a reaction. Some societies saw this as “the cost of using magic” at some point, talking and discovering one’s desired outcome eventually was somewhat of an early speech act, spell casting. For the act of creation–bending down like the curved “c” to see ourselves in the river has become bending down to see ourselves in the black mirrors of our devices. Perhaps our first error was denying the river its significance and presence by looking down to see ourselves first in the water.
In the beginning
In thee beginning
In you beginning
In your beginning
The reader and the author never meet, just as creation and creator never meet and must instead rely on access via their only connect–that internal Voice that pushes up against some clear wall/force (The Hunger Games arena boundary) and comes out all wavy, like everything else.
Perhaps it begins with a breathe (/h/) and then a vowel (/e/ or /u/ or /a/)
glottal fricative /h/ –> [h] hello or hell or help or he (man) or helium (all important in the Bible/Babble/Babel/[babɫ], the first book.
Or maybe the first “word” was “human”, uttered at the moment of Adam’s creation, a speech act, which contains potential energy in itself.
Human
Who man
Who? Man?
Who man?
Hue man? –> becomes about race/color to describe the other, a basic form of difference/distinction
I guess no one gets saved by the bell. Not to be bleak, or anything.
If we see two “I”s or two “l”s like two sticks, just to see human written symbols as rudimentary, then a velar pinch or a carrot or a cone or an arrow are all like two sticks and the friction when we rub them.
potential and kinetic energy
The human has always wanted to be greater than the world?
“greater than” symbol () It erupts the less than sign (45 + 45 = 90). Its presence is predicated on the absence of the other. I think this is the original binary to which Derrida referred. Once we turn the symbol on ourselves to where it becomes an arrow <– it not just flies back at us, it notes us as "less-than" the world. Humans must humble themselves. Seems like the same lesson keeps being reiterated to us. And like how in African American English reduplication intensifies the morpheme and in Hokkien reduplication minimizes it, I think we need to start de-plicating ourselves immediately. And forget what we thought of ourselves as a race–ax our lore, de-blow-up our heads, poke out an eye ("I"), and speak for the trees lol
to make the world into a dot
I used to not concern myself with etymology, but I’ve read so many bits and baubles and ornaments in French and German and Korean lately that all the overlaps in everything I’ve ever learned kept emerging (Kpelle, Russian, Spanish, etc.). I’ve been looking for human universals for a while through language, but haven’t we all?
Guess the solution is our human reversal? Who knew? “I” did!
Lol. Please do let me know what you think.