language parallax

Last year a friend of a friend brought up the phrase “Ocular Centrism” after some semi-serious banter about the prevalence of visual metaphors in our language. Turns out I wasn’t the first person to notice this. A surfing session several months ago revealed how deeply that idea tied together a lot of my thinking. Following just the first few links brought up the names Chomsky, Foucault, Derrida, Dennett, and Descartes.

So there sits this idea in the middle of a lot of high-minded, philosophical talk. And I’m buying into it by pushing this “parallax” metaphor for issues of language. I may have to leave a full exploration of the philosophical context for after the dissertation, but it’s nice to have future projects.