Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously: Difference, Repetition, Implicit Cognition, and Gibberish
“Such a situation may be better understood if we consider that concepts with indefinite comprehension are concepts of Nature. As such, they are always in something else: they are not in Nature but in the mind which contemplates it or observes it, and represents it to itself. That is why it is said that Nature is alienated mind or alienated concept, opposed to itself. Corresponding to such concepts are those objects which themselves lack memory – that is, which neither possess nor collect in themselves their own moments. The question is asked why Nature repeats: because it is partes extra partes, mens momentanea. Novelty then passes to the mind which represents itself: because the mind has a memory or acquires habits, it is capable of forming concepts in general and of drawing something new, of subtracting something new from the repetition that it contemplates.” ~Gilles Deleuze
The above passage comes from the introduction to Gilles Delueze’s famously profound and enigmatic book, Difference and Repetition. I’m currently reading the book in my Monday evening book group where we actually take turns reading the book out loud to each other, discussing as we go. It’s been wonderful so far, although I will admit that I’m glad to have some friends in the group who are more familiar with Deleuze and can translate for me!
The above passage jumped out at me during the most recent group reading because it seemed to connect with some other ideas I’ve recently encountered; namely: Robert N. McCauley’s concept of ‘cognitive nativism,’ which I was recently exposed to through an interview he did on Homewbrewed Christianity (thanks Tripp!), and Stephen Nachmanovitch’s notion of ‘gibberish as universal language.’ I’ll try to connect these three thinkers with this post.
As far as I can tell, in the passage above Deleuze seems to be discussing a few things but perhaps one of the items he’s highlighting here is the difference between the repetitive, memory-less nature of the external world (Nature) and the capacity of the mind to remember, form concepts, and generate novelty. Delueze suggests that novelty arises from the mind’s ability to remember past experiences and draw upon them to create new concepts or interpretations, in contrast to the perpetual repetition found in Nature. I really like this and it immediately brought to mind McCauley, whose interview I had just listened to earlier in the day.
In the interview, McCauley discuses ‘implicit cognition’ or ‘cognitive nativism‘ and its role in studying religion. I believe McCauley gets into this idea in more detail in his book, Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, (which I have not read yet) but below are two transcribed quotes from the Homebrewed interview where McCauley references Noam Chomsky’s example that demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics, found in his famous book Syntatic Structures, in order to illustrate how implicit cognition works:
“But very early on, we got very, very interested in what we saw as interesting similarities between the kind of things that…Chomsky was saying about specifically native speakers’ knowledge of their language. And this kind of ended up routing us toward ritual, quite frankly, because this seemed to be the best analogy and, that is to say, something similar to what has come to be called tacit or implicit knowledge that people in religious systems have about their rituals. By calling it tacit and implicit, of course, the point is is that it’s not always and in fact typically isn’t conscious…I mean, the utterance, ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ is an utterance that any native English speaker recognizes straight away as English, but is rather peculiar and has got some problems with it. And actually, they have pretty strong intuitions about what kind of problems that utterance has in contrast to other ill-formed utterances. And it struck us that, you know, suddenly it’s when you hit these anomalies, when you hit these strange cases, when you hit on short violations of principles that inform this knowledge that you have, that you’re immediately tuned to it. You suddenly realize…”Golly, I’ve got some knowledge that I, in some regards, I guess I really didn’t realize that I had.”
[,..]
“Let me back up and say more generally the great accomplishment of the cognitive sciences has been to get us to understand that our minds are much more complex than we ever thought they were and that most important accomplishment was to in effect to lay open our implicit cognition to the kind of cognition that happens automatically, the kind of cognition that happens basically unconsciously. There are a host of things that human beings can manage that are in fact—if you begin to start thinking about them—incredibly complex and yet human beings do them without even thinking. That is to say they are what I’ve called “maturationally natural systems.” Again, the language analogy is probably the easiest and the best and the quickest sort of illustration. I mean, I’m right now producing at least roughly grammatical English sentences. I’m not thinking about them they just come out reasonably well formed reasonably well articulated and the order of words is such that it makes sense to anyone who is a native speaker of English. The verbs and the nouns, matching terms of number, and on and on and on and on. As I said, the complexity of our knowledge of language is something that only becomes clear to us when we hear a violation because we’re so incredibly sensitive to violations especially in spoken language.”
During our Deleuze reading session from which the opening quote was first encountered by me, my friend and philosopher of science, Gary Herstein, pointed out that Deleuze’s observation about how the human mind ‘subtracts something new from the repetition that it contemplates’ is correct in that this is exactly how human perception works, i.e. (to bring Nachmanovitch and his teacher Gregory Bateson into this now) we are, as humans, constantly scanning for differences! Nachmanovitch writes:
“…human retinas are hardwired to spot edges and differences. When we look around a room, our retinal ganglion cells fire more strongly when they see borders and contours than when they see the blank middle areas of uniform color. As the information gets bumped up through higher levels of brain cells, those edges yield more information — tuned by our predispositions. We are sensitive to the outlines, because that’s where the news is. A blank piece of paper may not contain much to attract us, but if we draw a single line across it, now there’s a piece of information and our eye gravitates there. The line has divided the field into two pieces. Information is measured in bits or binary digits, a single distinction. So this mark creates one bit of information — either yes or no, on or off, one or zero, this side of the line or that side. In the light of common themes from logic, philosophy, neurology, psychology, and computer design, Bateson established that the fundamental unit or atom of mind is a single difference.”
With regard to language, Nachmanovitch makes another observation in his book, The Art of Is (which, btw, just happened to be the book we read in our book group right before the Delueze book we’re currently reading), that I think ties in very nicely here with what Deleuze and McCauley are getting at. In The Art of Is Nachmanovitch proposes that gibberish, or nonsensical language, is our primordial language and can actually serve as a universal language that transcends linguistic barriers. In this sense, gibberish operates on a level beyond conventional language, allowing for direct expression of thought and emotion. Nachmanovitch writes:
“As babies we babbled fluently — a continual riot of improvising in an ever-expanding vocabulary of noise and action — playing, complaining, commenting on everything, not hesitating to laugh or cry. We erupted with a huge range of phonemes and tonemes, nearly every sound of every language on earth. Gibberish is the primordial language, which we then whittle down until it begins to match what those around us respond to. All the sounds of all the languages are liable to make an appearance: Xhosa click-talk, French nasals, southern drawl, Chinese tonal shapes. Both my sons as babies and toddlers were adept at the French rolled R at the back of their throats, extended for a long time. They cold not do this at a later age. […] You can have a more meaningful two-way conversation with a baby in gibberish, empty of ordinary signification but full of affective content, than you can in any standard language. As we communicate back and forth with preverbal babies, we learn a great deal about mindfulness and the constantly changing colors of attention. We connect in a direct modality of raw emotion, raw pleasure, raw inquisitiveness.”
I love it. To me it seems fairly clear that there are definitely some fun connections here between McCauley’s concept of cognitive nativism (or implicit cognition) and Nachmanovitch’s ‘gibberish as a universal language’ idea. Both ideas seem to tap into this innate cognitive structure that underlies human communication. While conventional languages are shaped by cultural and societal norms, gibberish operates on a more fundamental level, potentially drawing on innate cognitive processes shared across cultures. This idea seems to align well with McCauley’s proposition that certain cognitive processes are innate to humans, influencing how we perceive and interact with the world. Deleuze’s exploration of repetition and novelty in the mind also seems to connect here as does his idea of novelty arising from the mind’s ability to remember past experiences and draw upon them to create new and different concepts or interpretations, in contrast to the perpetual repetition found in Nature.
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Art by Kathleen Gallagher
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