Something I'd recently posted to Facebook.
I just realized that in one interesting aspect, I think like a Pirahã. I’m thinking about their response to Daniel Everett’s attempts to teach the Christian Gospel:
Pirahã: “This Jesus fellow, did you ever meet him?”Everett: “No.”
Pirahã: “Do you know someone who did?”Everett: “Um, no.”Pirahã: “Then you don’t know that he’s real.”
As far as the Pirahã are concerned, if you haven't seen it yourself, or don't know someone who has, then it's not REAL (upper case).
This recognition of the REAL takes a somewhat different form for me, after all, I recognize the reality (lower case) of lots of things of which I have no direct experience and don't know anyone who has. Thus, to give but one example, I've not set foot on the moon and I don't know anyone who has. But I don't believe that the moon landings were faked. Yada yada.
But I’ve been thinking about the REAL for awhile. One example, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the last decade of the millennium. For someone born in 1990, say, that’s just something they read about in history books. They know it’s real, and they know it’s important. But it just doesn’t have the “bite” that it does for someone, like me, who grew up in the 1950s when the Cold War was raging. It’s not simply events that appeared in newspapers and on TV, it’s seeing Civil Defense markers on buildings designated as fall-out shelters, doing duck-and-cover drills in school, reading about home fall-out shelters in Popular Mechanics and picking a spot in the backyard where we should build one. I fully expected to live in the shadow of the Soviet Union until the day I died. Some when it finally collapsed – after considerable slacking off in the Cold War – that was a very big deal. It’s REAL for me in a way that it can’t be for someone born in 1990 or after (actually, that date’s probably a bit earlier than that).
This recognition of the REAL takes a somewhat different form for me, after all, I recognize the reality (lower case) of lots of things of which I have no direct experience and don't know anyone who has. Thus, to give but one example, I've not set foot on the moon and I don't know anyone who has. But I don't believe that the moon landings were faked. Yada yada.
But I’ve been thinking about the REAL for awhile. One example, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the last decade of the millennium. For someone born in 1990, say, that’s just something they read about in history books. They know it’s real, and they know it’s important. But it just doesn’t have the “bite” that it does for someone, like me, who grew up in the 1950s when the Cold War was raging. It’s not simply events that appeared in newspapers and on TV, it’s seeing Civil Defense markers on buildings designated as fall-out shelters, doing duck-and-cover drills in school, reading about home fall-out shelters in Popular Mechanics and picking a spot in the backyard where we should build one. I fully expected to live in the shadow of the Soviet Union until the day I died. Some when it finally collapsed – after considerable slacking off in the Cold War – that was a very big deal. It’s REAL for me in a way that it can’t be for someone born in 1990 or after (actually, that date’s probably a bit earlier than that).
[Yeah, I know, I didn't see it with my own eyes. But then is something like the Soviet Union something you can see? Sure, you can see the soil and the buildings, etc. But they're not the Soviet Union, nor are the people. The USSR is an abstract entity. And I can reasonably say that I witnessed the collapse of that abstract entity in a way that younger people have not. That makes it REAL. Or should that be REALreal? It's complicated.]
This sense of REALness is intuitive. And I’d think it is in fact quite widespread in the literate world, but mostly overwhelmed by “book learnin’”.
Another example. Just the other day I read a suite of articles in Critical Inquiry (an initial article, 5 comments in a later issue, and a reply to comments). It was about the concept of form in literary criticism, which is very important, but also very fuzzy and much contested. What struck me is that, as far as I can tell, only one of the people involved is old enough to have been thinking about literary criticism at the time when structuralism (a variety of thinkers including Lévi-Strauss and, of course, Roman Jakobson) and linguistics (Chomsky+) was something people read about and took seriously, as in: “Maybe we ought to use some of this stuff.” That phase ran from roughly the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Any scholar entering their 20s in, say, 1980 and after would think of structuralism as something in the historical past, as something the profession had considered and rejected. Over and done with.
For those thinkers structuralism and linguistics aren’t REAL in the sense I’m talking about. They know that work was done and that some of it was important; they’re educated in the history of criticism. They know that linguistics continues on, and they’ve probably heard about the recursion debates. But they’ve never even attempted to internalize any of that as a mode of thinking they could employ. It’s just not REAL to them.
Why is this important in the context of that Critical Inquiry debate? Because linguists have a very different sense of form than literary critics do. The spelling’s the same, but the idea is not. Yet literary critics are dealing with language.
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