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Voice is yet more vital than gesture. We make a series
of rapid stylistic judgments about people, most of them unreflective,
when we hear them speak. We may recognize a Brooklyn accent, a maddening
adenoidal whine, or a witless repetition of “like” after every
third word, but we always make appraising judgments about character from
voice. Likewise from costume. So Prof. Minsky, by how he talks and what
he wears, tells us something about himself. He does not appear often or
at length. He does not read the full book to us, or indeed any part of
it. He does not need to. Once we have his voice and gestural vocabulary
in mind and eye, we can supply it ourselves for the rest of the text.
If you want to spotlight how important a stylistic clue this is, imagine
how much we could learn if we had the same animated marginal presence
of Plato in one of his dialogues or Chaucer beside a famous passage in
The Canterbury Tales. Authorial voice and gesture would flow
back over the entire text like the Nile flood fertilizing Egypt. Suppose
Plato turned out to have a high-pitched funky little voice or Chaucer
talked with a deep bass-baritone?
But Plato would not have done such a thing and neither
would Chaucer. Such a “backstage” presentation was not part
of a formal written document. It seldom has been. It would have been a
relic of the oral world which writing sought to supplant. A fortiori
for books. Prof. Minsky is willing to include an out-take in which he
puzzles over whether “there are more than one kind of memory”
or “there is more than one kind of memory.” Authors of books
do not want to memorialize such temporary lapses. Printed books, certainly
scholarly books, because the text is unchangeable, almost always present
an authoritative presence. If there are any muffed lines, they are emphatically
not included as humorous out-takes. “Editing” a book means
getting rid of such embarrassing intimations of oral mortality. If you
are an author, you are, as the saying goes, a person standing up to be
shot at. You want, before you stand up, to make yourself as bulletproof
as you can.
Here, the “backstage” authorial presence contrasts with the
“frontstage” presentation of the printed book and thus gives
us two ways to read it. An august author—Prof. Minsky is one of
the founding fathers of the field of artificial intelligence—lets
us into his living room both literally and symbolically.
We see a lot of such bifocal presentations around us in
the current presentational landscape. Famous Movie is swiftly
followed by a TV special on “The Making of Famous Movie.”
The offstage life of movie stars is, for many people, more enthralling
than their camera work. And when we tune into a TV news program, we don’t
immediately see the famous duo of newscasters at their desk (the front
stage) but first dolly through the studio (the back stage) before we finally
get to the talking heads. We like this backstage/frontstage alternation,
especially in the English-speaking world, where Shakespeare created the
immortal examples of it. So here with Prof. Minsky. It is as if we were
given a binocular vision onto the text, able to see and read it with a
new depth.
We might also notice that Prof. Minsky plays a different role in the margin
and on the page. Marginal Minsky is a literary critic, commenting on his
text and paraphrasing it. Textual Minsky is a neuroscientist, telling
us how he thinks the brain works. Such a pairing resides in every authorial
self. We write something, and that uses one part of our brain and talent.
But we also revise what we write, and that editorial self reads and thinks
differently from the creative one. Any full cycle of creation comprises
an oscillation, usually repeated ones, between the two authorial postures.
Here they are put side by side in the same visual frame, both working
at the same time but in different stylistic registers.
Add all these differences up and we get a complex and detailed reenactment
of the oscillation between the flat and fixed expressive field of printed
text and the fluid animated world of 3D human behavior. This oscillation
becomes a fundamental one: the difference between an oral and a literate
culture.
The marginal Minsky impersonates an oral culture. Voice and gesture provide
a vital accompaniment to word. Both invite us to reply in kind, to start
a conversation. Oral cultures are interactive. Interactivity is what creates
them. Since in an oral culture, a culture without writing, there is no
written cultural record, when the talking stops the culture vanishes.
Oral cultures thus tend, as we see in the speeches of third world politicians,
to be long-winded. The most convincing interpretation of the Homeric poems
in our time suggests that they were the cultural repository of an oral
culture and that their stylistic habits (oral formulae like “rosy-fingered
dawn” for example) were driven by the need for memorability in an
oral culture. “Poetry,” in such a world, was not writing that
did not run to the margin but a series of techniques for making cultural
wisdom memorizable and hence memorable. In a culture where speaking is
fundamental, not writing, the self is necessarily a dramatic self, an
actor, and the conversation a drama. The expressive surface is not a “see-through”
in such a culture. It is all there is.
How different the Textual Minsky. Voiceless, gestureless, a frozen one-sided
drama. The “rhetoric” of human communication is strained out
in favor of a fixed conceptual “meaning.” The late Walter
Ong, an acute student of the orality/literacy contrast, puts this fundamental
dichotomy in a historical context.
In this economy [of print] where everything having to do with speech tends
to be in one way or another metamorphosed in terms of structure and vision,
the rhetorical approach to life—the way of Isocrates and Cicero
and Quintilian and Erasmus, and of the Old and New Testaments—is
sealed off into a cul-de-sac. The attitude toward speech has changed.
Speech is no longer a medium in which the human mind and sensibility lives.
It is resented, rather, as an accretion to thought, hereupon imagined
as ranging noiseless concepts or “ideas” in a silent field
of mental space. Here the perfect rhetoric would be to have no rhetoric
at all. Thought becomes a private, or even an antisocial enterprise.
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