Online Sound & Virtual Architecture [(Contribution to the geography of cultural translation)]
THESES 1.1 The unit of humanity IS the community. Anything human is communal, whether it be a village, a society or the global complex in whrch we find ourselves today. We are born not only prematurely, but incompletely. our presumably genetic dispositron to language and mentation (reason, emotron and so on) is a drsposition to commune. Steven Pinker explains that ?Rather than selectrng for a completely innate grammar, which would soon fall out of register with everyone else?s, evolution may have given children an ability to learn the vanable parts of language as a way of synchronizing their grammars with that of the community? (Pinker 1994: 243). offering as example, the babbling stage of acquiring speech, during which babres ?must be sorting sounds directly, somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes used in therr language? (Ibid: 265). The peculiar bias of cognitive psychology towards individuals - a concentration on the brain (even extended through the nervous system to the whole body) - necessarily correlates with an ideology of indrvidualrsm. But the same evidence can lead to an opposite conclusion: that the function of the language instinct IS precisely to socialize the species.