Theory

My reading this week has plunged me back into those icy waters of linguistic theory, first so tentatively explored in my junior year of undergraduate. I have to wonder if part of the reason this field affects me so deeply is because I seem to be made aware of it only when I am feeling completely cut off from friends and companionship; when I took my theory/criticism class in undergraduate, everyone I knew was abroad and I'd broken up with my boyfriend, and these dry discussions of the nature of the word only seemed to reinforce how alone I was. Now, I am still feeling vulnerably friendless, emotionally unstable and once again am confronted with the existential threat of Saussure. Dammit.

Still, ultimately I appreciate the almost visceral response that I tend to have to this area. I find myself terrified still by the implications of the idea that existence is predicated upon our reliance on an arbitrary system, namely, language. I can't help taking that thought to a nihilistic place where there is no meaning outside of the words, which are themselves meaningless. What I love is that I am frightened of an academic implication. It makes what I'm doing very real to me, because I can be affected by it in an emotional manner that, I think, is otherwise rare in scholarship.

The more recent upshot of returning to linguistic theory is that it has suddenly thrown the importance of the Enlightenment, which it looks like I'll be studying in detail this year, into the fore. I can imagine that the potential disconnect, the threat of the destruction of reality inherent in linguistic theory for me, is what people might have been feeling toward or in reaction to the ideas of the Enlightenment...or the Great Awakening, or the Reformation, or the American Revolution's ideals, or any new way of thinking that challenged the prevailing norm, the identity of a society.

What it makes clear is that it's real, in a sense that I think I sometimes lose when I study. It can seem so obvious, the ideas that are being grappled with in the past, that I forget they were shattering in the same sense that linguistics is to me now. Not shattering. It's like being cut loose from whatever ties you to your intellectual ground...

Imagine it. All of a sudden you are being told, urged, commanded to "know yourself," to treat yourself as a rational being capable of self-reflection and self-comprehension. But doesn't that mean you can fail to know yourself? And if there is no deity up there determining every aspect of your life for you, doesn't that mean that you can fuck up in previously literally unimaginable ways?  The stakes are much higher when all of a sudden you learn you're supposed to know what those stakes actually are.

I don't know, this post doesn't make much sense, and I'm sure it's not something that belongs in this forum. I just can't get over how disturbed I still am by the ideas of linguistic theory, and now realizing how that disturbance brings the foreign past into a place that I can understand and empathize with.

Oh, school. Heart.