Excerpts from:

Part II Chapter Six:
Language, Myth, and the Loss of the Interior Perspective
Go To Chapter Six
(Full Text) HTML

Return to Index

On markedness in language and culture: “Easily overlooked is the fact that objects, or persons, or qualities, which surface linguistically as unmarked, owe their enhanced value not to any special elaboration of intrinsic virtues but to the degradation which takes place at the marked end of the spectrum where special elaboration is required by definition. The raising of certain structures of thought to ‘high status’, in the collective imagination, proceeds in a way which is indirect, as is much else in the instrumental repertory by which the myths of our culture are propagated. So long as the marked category, represented overwhelmingly by images we draw into invidious association with nature (and the human female), is sufficiently extensive and delineated, there is no special need to extol objectivity, for example, and the other virtues of our culture. Their enhancement comes as a free gift, so to speak... We feel so ‘good’ about these virtues, they seem so ‘right’ to us. No further elaboration is necessary. (The category is ‘unmarked’.) There seems every reason to imagine we were born with them, that they reflect the ‘original hand of nature’, to use Hume’s phrase.”

On a ‘house’ with the color ‘brown’: “If I tell you about a ‘brown house’ I am not just saying that the outside provides the preferred vantage point in a culture dominated by special images of virtue. I normally expect you to understand that the color brown, assumed already to designate the exterior surface of the building question, does not designate the color of its roof, even though the roof may comprise the larger and most visible part of the surface exterior of the building. The phrase ‘brown house’ conveys the specific information that the outside walls of the building are brown, not the roof...

“As an image, the ‘roof’ of a building emerges from terrain which is radically unlike what we know and feel to be the conceptual topography of ‘walls’. In its capacity for total enclosure, a ‘roof’ is essentially integrative, assimilating, in its roughly horizontal orientation, important aspects of the natural landscape. By contrast, as the wall divides, so is it also divided. The wall structure of a building necessarily breaks down into segments which, though interconnected, are perceived as a multiplicity. We speak of necessity about the ‘walls’ of a building. Any use of the singular is marked.

“By contrast, a ‘roof’ is a structure which is somehow indivisible - a conceptual unity - no matter what its complexity or the number of facets, instances of joinder, planes, angles, etc. (The multifarious ‘House of Seven Gables’ has a single ‘roof’!) A roof integrates its various structural members and all else below and is assimilative. We bring conflicting things and ideas together metaphorically ‘under a single roof’. Moreover, the word ‘roof’ has the capability to function in linguistic stead of ‘shelter’, ‘dwelling’, etc., as in the poor have no roof(s) (meaning ‘housing’), so extensive is its imaginal reach. For a sense of the contrast: ask yourself whether it is good or bad that the city poor know no walls ..

“A ‘roof/ceiling’ has, from the interior perspective, no opposed space, no ‘other side’... We evoke thus ancient meanings when we speak of the ‘roof of the mouth’ or the ‘roof of a cave’ where no alternative place of vantage exists, where the object in question has literally no opposed space, no outside surface. The medieval believer could still locate all of existence under the ‘rof o crists heuen’. Here, too, the human imagination provided no external place of vantage. In some fundamental sense ‘roof’ meant, perhaps still means, upper limit, even ultimate closure. One can ‘go through the roof’, to be sure, but only in the hyperbolic sense of exceeding absolute limits. Having rejected the interior perspective, human action now literally know to our collective dismay no ceiling (or limit), no boundaries.”