Again: The system is not neutral. For every situation, verbal or nonverbal, that even approaches the sexual, the easy way to describe it, the comfortable way to respond to it, the normal way to act in it, the way that will draw the least attention to yourself — if you are male — is the sexist way. The same goes for women, with the difference that you are not quite so comfortable. Sexism is not primarily an active hostility in men towards women. It is a set of unquestioned social habits. Men become hostile when these habits are questioned as people become hostile when anything they are comfortable doing is suddenly branded as pernicious. (“But I didn’t intend to hurt anyone; I was just doing what I always…”)
A good many women have decided, finally, that the pain that accrues to them from everyone else’s acceptance of the “acceptable” way is just not worth the reward of invisibility.
“I have never made a sexist editorial decision in my life.”
There are no sexist decisions to be made.
There are antisexist decisions to be made. And they require tremendous energy and self-scrutiny, as well as moral stamina in the face of the basic embarrassment campaign which is the tactic of those assured of their politically superior position. (“Don’t you think you’re being rather silly offering your pain as evidence that something I do so automatically and easily is wrong? Why, I bet it doesn’t hurt half as much as you say. Perhaps it only hurts because you’re struggling…?” This sort of political mystification, turning the logical arrows around inside verbal structures to render them empirically empty, and therefore useless [“It hurts because you don’t like it” rather than “You don’t like it because it hurts.”] is just another version of the “my slave/my master” game.)
There are no sexist decisions to be made: they were all made a long time ago!
49. The mistake we make as adolescent readers is to assume a story is exciting because of its strange happenings and exotic surfaces, when actually a story is exciting exactly to the extent that its structure is familiar. “Plot twists” and “gimmicks” aside (which, like “wisecracks,” only distract our conscious mind from the structure so that we can respond subconsciously to its familiarity with that ever sought-for “gut response”), excitement in reading invariably comes from the anticipation of (and the anticipation rewarded by) the inevitable/expected.
This inevitability — without which there simply is no reader gut- participation — is also what holds fiction to all the political cliches of sexism, racism, and classism that mar it as an art. To write fiction without such structural inevitabilities, however (as practically every artist has discovered), is to write fiction without an audience.
Does science fiction offer any way out of this dilemma?
The hope that it might probably accounts for a good deal of the rapprochement between science fiction and the avant garde that occurred during the middle and late sixties.
50. The equivocation of the genitive (children, ideas, art, and excrement) and the associative (spouses, lovers, friends, colleagues, co-patrials, and country) with the possessive (contracted objects) is the first, great, logi- cally-empty verbal structure that exists entirely for political exploitation.
51. Meaning is a routed-wave phenomenon.
I intend this in the sense one might intend the statement: “Painting is a colored-oil-paints spread-on-canvas phenomenon.” Just as there are many things besides oil paints on canvas that may fill, more or less well, the several uses we could reasonably ask of a painting — from tempera on masonite to colored sand spilled carefully on sun-baked ground, in one direction; or etchings, photographs, or computer reductions, in another; or patterns observed on a rock, a natural setting, or a found object, in still another — there may be other things that can fill, more or less well, the several tasks we might reasonably ask “meaning” to perform. But my statement still stands as a parametric model of what I think meaning to be. The extent to which any of my remarks contravene this model is the extent to which they should be taken as metaphoric.
52. Language in general, poetry in particular, and mathematics, are all tools to fix meaning (in their different ways) by establishing central parameters, not circumscribing perimeters. Accuracy in all of them is achieved by cross-description, not absolute statement.
Even 2 + 3 = 5 is better considered as a mathematical stanza than a single mathematical sentence. It models a set of several interlocked sentences; and the context interlocking them is what “contains” the meaning we might model by saying “2 + 3 = 5 is right, whereas 2 + 3 = 4 is wrong by lack of 1.”
53. A language-function can be described as consisting of (one) a generative field (capable of generating a set of signals), (two) the signals so generated, and (three) an interpretive field (a field capable of responding to those signals) into which the signals fall.
Examples of language-functions: mathematics, art, expressive gesture, myth.
One of the most important language-functions is, of course, speech.
In most multiple speaker/hearer situations, there are usually multiple language-functions occurring: A talking to B… B talking to A… C listening to what A and B say, etc. (In Art, on the other hand, there is usually one only: artist to audience. The language-function that goes from audience to artist is, of course, criticism.)
The language itself is the way, within a single speaker/hearer, an interpretive field is connected to a generative field.
54. The trouble with most cybernetic models of language (those models that start off with “sound waves hitting the ear”) is that they try to express language only in terms of an interpretive field. To the extent that they posit a generative field at all, they simply see it as an inverse of the interpretive field.
In ordinary human speech, the interface of the interpretive field with the world is the ear — an incredibly sensitive microphone that, in its flexibility and versatility, still has not been matched by technology. The interface of the generative field with the world is two wet sacks of air and several guiding strips of muscle, laid out in various ways along the air track, and a variable-shaped resonance box with a variable opening: the lungs/throat/mouth complex. This complex can produce a great many sounds, and in extremely rapid succession. But it can produce nothing like the range of sounds the ear can detect.
Language, whatever it is, in circuitry terms has to lie between these two interfaces, the ear and the mouth.
Most cybernetic models, to the extent that they approach the problem at all, see language as a circuit to get us from a sensitive microphone to an equally sensitive loudspeaker. A sensitive loudspeaker just isn’t in the picture. And I suspect if it were, language as we know it would not exist, or at least be very different.
Try and envision circuitry for the following language tasks:
We have a sensitive microphone at one end of a box. At the other, we have a mechanically operable squeeze-box/vocal-chord/palate/tongue/teeth/lip arrangement. We want to fill up the box with circuitry that will accomplish the following: Among a welter of sounds — bird songs, air in leaves, footsteps, traffic noise — one is a simple, oral, human utterance. The circuitry must be able to pick out the human utterance, store it, analyze it (in terms of breath duration, breath intensity, and the various stops that have been imposed on a stream of air by vocal chords, tongue, palate, teeth, lips) and then, after a given time, reproduce this utterance through its own squeeze-box mechanism.