I agree with Berlin that ideology plays a large role in rhetoric; ideology is behind everything and it is a strong force in every culture. I have seen the role ideology plays in the classroom. When my students first started talking about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I first realized the role ideology plays in what we teach in composition. One of the ways my students came up with combating the AIDS epidemic is a long-debated method: needle exchanges. Needle exchanges, most common in larger cities like New York, are places where drug users can exchange dirty needles for clean ones, thus decreasing the likelihood of the transmission of HIV. This is deeply rooted in ideology and has been widely debated in American politics.

Furthermore, today in class, we talked about LGBT rights and watched several It Gets Better videos. My students responded very well to the videos and they opened up a good discussion of LGBT issues. They opened up about their experiences with bullying in middle and high school and issues adolescents face in general. All of this discussion is steeped in ideology and how Americans think. This ideology will be further translated into student writing and rhetoric.

This post will turn into a philosophical rambling because of the nature of subject matter.

It is something that terrifies me: to wake up and not know anything. To have lost my identity, my memories, my words, my thoughts. But then, having listened to Jill Taylor talk about how ‘freeing’ it was, can you really mourn the loss of something you don’t even recognize anymore? Maybe I wouldn’t panic if that happened because the ‘I’ that thinks of this scenario would not exist as it would be replaced by a blank.

“I had found a peace inside of myself that I had not known before. I had pure silence inside of my mind.  Pure silence.”

My immediate reaction to having heard this statement was thinking back to The Gita. In one of the shlokas, it talks about how one should surrender all sense of self to God and only then can one attain peace. Is language irreligious then? Is it keeping us from living in that ‘la la land’? Is it depriving us of the simple joy of experiencing a beautiful sunrise? But then, just because one has the ability to describe emotion does it mean that one is not experiencing the emotion in itself? We can describe nature but we can’t experience it? Is the descriptive thought in my head not of the experience? What is it of, if not that?

I am confused and dazed and I would really like a trip to this ‘la la land’ without having to go to the ER .

That episode was fantastic.  I just sent it to four people.  If I had the power I would weave that into the fabric of the curriculum for Lit Theory courses, because that seriously would have helped me pick up on Saussure and Derrida.

For me, the most compelling element of the “Words” episode of the Radiolab podcast is the bit involving the rats.  This seems to make the most sense in relation to the idea that language constitutes reality, which is something I’ve always struggled to understand.

The rats can see color.  For their purposes, they understand the color blue.  And they understand direction.  Left.  But they can’t seem to connect the two ideas in a way that makes sense of the world around them.  Left of blue.

“These different kinds of knowledge can’t talk to each other.”

The inference is that rats don’t have the language required for this kind of internal discussion because children behave in a similar manner until they reach an age where linguistic communication seems to allow for this very connection to take place.  Left of blue.

“And those aren’t just words that come out of the child’s mouth… inside the child’s brain, what that phrase does—is link these concepts together.”

I operate under the stance that reality is subjective.  Sure, things may exist apart from me, that is to say outside of that which I experience through sensory intake, but I can’t know that.  I know that certain things feel objective and stable, but I can’t very well exit myself to find out if those feelings are grounded in something other than a singular subjective reality.  I can, however, communicate with myself to try to reason with what it is that I am experiencing as the real—that which feels objective.  But, in keeping with the rat study, that cognitive reasoning is based on my ability to use language to make connections between ideas.  Without language there is no connection, ergo there is no reality.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience seems to complicate this—being removed from the realm of cognitive connection and relegated to immediate, present tense sensory information.  The question then becomes, in a state where language is not possible, was she experiencing reality?  Or, a bit beyond the discussion of the podcast, did she only experience those events in retrospect once she could effectively communicate her experience?

In listening to the Radiolab episode “A Word Without Words,” I was intrigued by the story of the man who lived 27 years without any concept or use of language. Once he learned to sign, he felt his world take shape. He was finally able to connect his visual and physical perceptions of reality with an inner dialogue, which gave the world significance. He began to form ideas.

The power of words in shaping perception is fascinating. It speaks to the power of stories – that an idea or a memory doesn’t exist until we can put it into a language. Margaret Atwood has a beautiful quote about this concept:

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

Radiolab’s episode, “Colors,” also speaks to words’ ability to shape perception. There’s no evidence to suggest that humans could see the color blue before 4,500 years ago. Homer uses many colors in The Odyssey, but never blue. He says the sea is “wine-dark.” When analyzing ancient Icelandic, Hindu, Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew texts, the color blue isn’t mentioned. And since the sky is one of the only natural occurrences of blue, it’s natural that no one came up with a word for it. It just wasn’t necessary. So while people could see the color, they didn’t notice it because they didn’t have the right word.

Words shape our realities on a primal level, which means learning happens through the writing process. This makes a strong case for teaching persuasive writing over informative – students discover ideas through writing, provided they’re interested in their topic.