Question: Indus "symbols" or Indus "script"?

UZi.
Karachi.
2010-03-12 01:03:06

Nobody talks about philology anymore except in passing at few undergraduate classes. So kudos for this piece. Linguistics is almost cut off from the Anthropological lineage, at least in The US, while the latter is also becoming a dead discipline. The former ties itself to the objectivist threads and the murky terrain of the cognitive and the neuro science packaging itself to the market demands, which inevitably has learned to prize advertising and communication studies for the purposes of commodification and retooling market oriented messages for past few years. Academics and academia are in a really strut these days, even though theory promises ever more and fails to hold its own tenure. The problem of language discovered by Saussure and after Heidegger, exacerbated by its space and timelessness isn\'t going away any time soon. I\'m pretty ambivalent myself as to where it should go towards after all the post this and that of deconstruction, phenomenology etc etc. Another 100 years of rhetorics (?) It was timely and necessary that 20th century had to revolve around the undefined center of language, but without injunction of a dialectical intervention by way of theory to living space of language again, we might be forever slipping in that bridge while the valley gapes down at us from down below and the murmurs of the past vibrates along our steps. That last paragraph about the ramshackle crossing of the bridge is eerily reminiscent of Walter Benjamin\'s thesis on The Philosophy of History. Are we still going to be walking backwards at the assault of progress for next 70 years?

Anon
New York
2010-03-01 09:03:15

 

 

Where once stood houses by Dilip D’Souza

Ladakh after the flood.