Language and Dichotomies

In thinking about Ariel’s post, I wanted to point out the importance of language in dichotomies. Through language we are able to construct these dichotomies, to delineate between certain things that we need to separate to preserve, as Ariel puts it, our human significance. It felt like maybe Coetzee should rejoin the conversation. We talked about his distrust of rants and language and literature. Given the chosen format of Haraway’s book, at first glance I doubt Coetzee and Haraway would agree on many points. Haraway is intentionally rambling, and sometimes appears to have “lost her thread,” not unlike Elizabeth Costello.

That said, Haraway appears to also share this distrust of language, despite the massive quantities she employs to pace through her thoughts. Haraway’s “contact zone” is intrinsically a place of little language. Even the origin she traces it back to stems from a place where a sole language would not suffice. In describing her relationship to her dog, Haraway describes that they together certainly must transcend language—she still uses signifiers but those change and she changes relative to her dog’s actions. She even mentions that those who assume that their dog/partner understands their human language are generally unsuccessful.

Ariel’s example is a particularly strong place to start; the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality cannot exist without those words. If we had less signifiers for realities and more simply facing and navigating of those realities, would we create less damaging dichotomies? It seems we would, because we are not creating them in the first place. Maybe there’s a Plato’s cave-esque argument in there somewhere.

Coetzee though, with his distrust of language, creates The Live of Animals, which is a text. Could Coetzee be attempting to create a ‘contact zone’ with his text, as the only fair way to engage with the topic? It is a bit counterintuitive to do so with literature, but perhaps literature in itself is a type of ‘contact zone.’ The text becomes in relation to the reader the reader becomes in relation to the text. Could literature (rather ironically) be an attempt to create this zone using the main tool we have for consistently dividing and categorizing the world—language?  I thought that Ariel put the entire reason we draw upon dichotomies in a telling manner: “It is our way of simplifying complex entities that bleed together and intersect in surprising (and sometimes inexplicable ways).” Would the right interface between reader and text—the right contact zone—be able to convey or represent or even just be these “inexplicable ways”?