Tongues and Simulacra.

A couple of semesters ago I did an independent study with Dr. Minton where I wrote a 30 page paper on what it means when someone gets their tongue sliced out in Renaissance drama. And I'm writing this post in utter befuddlement that I am referring back to any of this. In Carla Mazzio's Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England, one of the most informative articles on the subject, she says a few things about the tongue during this time. Because it is responsible for directly communicating the self with society, it is often an "unruly member", unstable and able to hurt and slander, among other things. But Mazzio's final point is the most interesting and revelant to this class:

"The invocation of the mobile and independent tongue (the agent of speech) in printed texts and contexts, I want to suggest, constitutes less what Walter Ong has termed "residual orality," the rhetorical traces and aftermaths of an oral culture, but an aggressive orality, an anxious response to the unsettling dispersion of languanges and identities in an increasingly textualized culture, a response to the movement of representation away from the body."

Residual orality is essentially the orality that is left in a culture that is becoming a textual culture. As a culture embraces and adopts the technology of literature and computers, the "oral residue" diminishes, but it never vanishes completely. (A literate culture does, however, produce shallow relationships between people, with text messaging, lol). Carla Mazzio believes that the tongue is excised from the body not to mark the shift from orality to literacy (as I said in a previous blog that Shakespeare certainly straddls that line), but it marks hwo nervous people in the 1600's were becoming after realizing that feelings and emotions of the individual are becoming textual in an ever textualized world. The problem with writing, Plato said, it that it does not have emotion, you cannot have a conversation with it. Certainly we've all experienced these types of anxieties. When I lol, am I laughing at you or with you? It is difficult to unterstand the intonations of a conversation, like the cooler conversation, when it is written; but when it is spoken it has the true meaning, the meaning that comes from the speaker's own conscious and is not just another far removed description in writing of a bed.

I also mentioned simulacra earlier as a post-modern coinage. Here is something I know now that I didn't know before I had read the Ad Herennium on page 6 of The Art of Memory. In describing artificial memory, the memory that is improved and not natural, "Images are forms, marks or simulacra of what we wish to remember." In the hyper-textual world in which we live we do not choose the simulacra to remember, but it comes to us, unavoidably so, principally through the images on our TV screen. I might suggest, were I to write a term paper without any further reading, that our artificial memory is becoming our natural memory. I bet we could all describe the inside of a MacDonalds and probably could have done so since we were very young because though we do not make a conscious decision to remember these places, they impose themselves on us. Our memories, our realities, our consciousness is now a result of the constant barrage of simulacra that force themselves into our memory, making it natural because it is a part of our environment which we have not chosen to memorize, but that has memorized itself.