On the hiatus between affect/feeling/lived/psychic reality/consciousness (“events of perception”), and the means whereby it is communicated through the lexis (laws, syntax, letters, etc.) of human language.

On the hiatus between the human animal/living being, and the “one” who speaks (and self-understands, and tries to express itself, etc.) through the medium of a human language (composed of letters, syntax, etc.)– a medium that was never chosen by it and does not care if it lives or dies.

An inquiry troubled by the degree to which affect/feeling/lived experience is itself “coded” and overcoded by the way one is inserted into language, so that this “lived experience” itself makes its entry into the psyche through the categories inherited from language socialization. Troubled by the way that this “one”–as in one’s self-description, one’s self-situation–itself takes its shape through language, for example in the form of “I am this…”

Aware also of how the mere mention of a word, or the mere sight of a certain image, can send the body into cold sweats, given the circumstances. A rudimentary example of the apparently total extent to which language “triggers” us into mood, into action, into reaction, into resolutions, into perspectives, and so on.

Language in the eye of the beloved, who drives us mad.

Language in the heart excoriated by sadness and grief, seeking a sign of relief in the desert of signs, bombed out by an enculturated vision that sees nothing without its concomitant social value across the diversity of competing communicative systems– and so rarely, if it is attentive to this oppression, finds a way of speech out of the morass of littered letter-blugeonings, which stick to the psyche’s own dream like ancient grime.

We are compelled and driven and frightened and shaped by what is communicated through language. And when we want to communicate ourselves to others with any degree of sophistication (even to tell the simplest story, you think of it), we pass through this medium, and try to make an entrance into wordedness some way. Even the communication of the incommunicable must find its way through these chains.

The degree to which this coding recurs inside self-experience, one perhaps knows best when one’s thoughts are racing, when one cannot sleep for all the ‘signifiers’ in one’s head, when one is haunted by an idea or image, when one attempts to explain or defend oneself–then these bars illuminate most strongly, and the prospect of any life outside them fades into the rubble of the marks.

Which is not to say the affect/feeling/sound (of humans or animals) would lack meaning. The issue is thorny, because one is always tempted to set artificial boundaries on “language.” One tries to say that only humans have language, but then neglects the communications of other species, as well as the diversity in modes of human language itself. Or one says that animals have language and then risks losing sight of the peculiarity and consequences of human language– as there is clearly a qualitative transformation or phase shift here, which was prerequisite for society and all its subsystems (law, economy, politics, religion, romance, art, etc.).

But however it is defined, what matters is the critical stance taken toward the idea that language is merely an instrument or means–the illusion that it does not fundamentally twist what we intend to mean and can be used more or less like a tool.

When the trouble is already apparent once again: When we are so enmeshed in language, how do we articulate even to ourselves what we ‘intend to mean’ without passage through this medium? How do we make sense of our own affect when it too occurs effected, one way or another, by the language code?

Leading to the worrisome suspicion: Are we not imprisoned in these chains of words through which we speak? Are we not most enchained when we pretend that we are not in them? Isn’t our nonchalance before this fact, our denial and repression of it, the proof that the communication system has succeeded in masking its virus from our affect-perceptual-system?

This is not to say there could not be some level of “non-worded self-understanding” or communion with oneself… call it “consciousness”, if you like.

Perhaps in moments of returning to pure consciousness, when it feels as if all context is eradicated; or perhaps if one could reach the extinction of thoughts (Kaivalya) spoken about in the Yoga Sutras, then there would be a kind of restoration of the pre-linguistic state.

But the fact would remain that such a state remains ‘unobservable’ in the strict sense: it cannot be spoken about or communicated, because its referent is the undifferentiated, and there is no way to communicate without making distinctions and differentiations. That fact may remain detested by religion from the standpoint of ultimacy; but their detest relies on what is detested, namely, a communicative system.

The contingency of religion’s assertion of Unobservables, and their asserting the Unobservable’s existence as Ultimacy, is a blind-spot that no amount of meditation or prayer will resolve. The code of these verifactions will continue so long as this projection is appealing to whoever wishes to hide from the horror of language and repress its imprint rather than transform it.

Because regardless of how things may be at the pre-linguistic level of “pure consciousness,” tell me, has it eradicated your desire to speak?

Are you content with the silence of consciousness of self-death, where desire is no more, context is no more, differentiation is no more, communication is no more? It may suit the fancies of a primary narcissism; it is hardly the condition for raising a challenge to the hegemony of standardized language, which makes us vomit and kill.

Hence my interest in the failures of coupling between the psychic and communicative system. I attend to the unwanted fact that, yes, our grandest self-understandings (at least at the level of being communicable) must situate themselves on a terrain that is artificial, and which never permits anything like the recuperation of a consistency of self, such that the alienation is insurmountable–indeed, as irremediable as a death without consciousness.

Consequently I attend to the inarticulated or unarticulated that ‘attends’ any articulation whatsoever (“it is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulable” J.L.); and to how writers aware of this hiatus must twist language in order to communicate this inarticulable element (allied to affect, feeling, sound, tone, timbre, raw experience, thought, etc.) in the face of this awful hiatus that work desperately to turn into a piquant irrigation.

How is there transmittance from consciousness to communication, when “consciousness cannot communicate” and “communication cannot perceive”?

It is when the communication system is so deformed by forms invented of art, as to both tightly control possibilities while also leaving wide open a field for perceptions in the consciousness of others, which may indeed lend itself to descriptions of the incommunicable, yet only on the side of the other psyches, with whom only “contact” is possible precisely over the gap of the incommunicable.

–October 13, 2023