I feel like I’m drowning in a very deep ocean.
I tried to go out, but I was sleepy and not feeling well. There was a CD release party I wanted to go to for Mulehead, but when I drove up the parking lot at Vino’s was packed, and I would have had to walk a fucking mile to get in. Hey, they’re nice guys but . . . I just didn’t feel up to it.
So I came back to theory-land. It’s amazing how pervasive but problematic this whole linguistic enterprise is. I picked up Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and part 3 of volume one repeats much of my discourse analysis textbook. Maybe if I read the same stuff over and over again it will make more sense? I should be so lucky.
Trying to find something on a different trail, I made a mental note a while ago to find out more about a name that kept coming up as a primary text for cognitive theory, Lev Vygotsky. No relief. It’s the same stuff, really, just a different spin:
Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them.
Of course, the thrust of Vygotsky’s work was trying to discover how we make the shift into thinking in words at an early stage of childhood development rather than trying to analyze language scientifically. But it runs into the same problem: how do we accurately describe how language works? I’m amazed at how new this whole science of linguistics is, and how up in the air and in debate it is. Geez, these people writing about it admit their models are filled with problems, so how am I supposed to figure it out?
It’s really magic that we can talk at all!
