Readwise.io lets you talk to your notes and itโs amazing
Iโve been using readwise.io for years to collate my Kindle highlights and send me daily e-mails with a random selection of them. My blog posts are often informed by what I encounter in these e-mails and Iโve found it a hugely creative way of engaging with what Iโve read. Theyโve now introduced an LLM into the platform, using the highlights for RAG, producing incredibly useful responses which feed directly back to particular sections of books youโve read.
Hereโs a response to the question โWhen we struggle to put something into words, what is it we are putting into words?โ:
1. The Inherited Nature and Limits of Language:
We are born into a language that is not of our own making. The words we have to express ourselves were โforged and modified by generations of speaking beings,โ and are not designed to perfectly fit what we are feeling or experiencing. We are obliged to โforce our experience into the funnel or straitjacket of the language spoken by those around us,โ but often find the words available to us โmiss the point, saying too much or too littleโโthis is referred to as our โalienation in languageโ alienation in language.
2. The Experience Beyond Words (โthe realโ): There are aspects of our experience that โbecome alienated from usโ in the very process of articulating them. We โlose those facets of our experience that we are unable to express in the words available to usโ loss and alienation in articulation. Truth, in the psychoanalytic sense, often resides in โthe experience of symbolizing what has never before been put into wordsโโwhat Lacan calls โthe realโ or โthe traumatic realโ the unspeakable and the real.
3. The Pre-Conceptual or Felt Sense:
What we are putting into words is often a โbodily felt sense of what wants to be saidโโa preconceptual, background, or tacit dimension that has not been fully articulated. The process of articulating it โgenerates new and surprising forms of insight into their intricate orderโ bodily felt sense and preconceptual insight.
4. The Discursive Gap:
There is always a gap between experience and language. People โoften live in ways they cannot put into words.โ This โtension between how we live and what our culture allows us to sayโ reveals the limits of language and the importance of striving toward a common, shared language to discuss what is otherwise inexpressible living beyond language.
5. The Self in Expression:
In struggling to put something into words, we are also forming or transforming our relationship to that experience. Putting life into storytelling or language โtransforms oneโs stanceโโwe take a distance from our immediate experience and allow it to acquire meaning, dignity, and shareability. In this, we turn private complexity into something we can communicate, to ourselves and to others language as conferral of form.
6. The Slippery Object of Desire:
Language โby its very nature has a difficult time capturing or truly depicting the objects of need and desire.โ There is always an incompatibility between the immediacy of desire and the mediation of speech slippery nature of language for desire.
7. Felt Meaning and the Search for the Right Words:
Often, what we are trying to put into words is a โfelt senseโ or an insightโeven when the first word we find seems wrong, it is attached to the feeling or meaning we are trying to reach. When we reject tentative language, sometimes we โlose track of the feelingโ we wanted to express losing track of felt meaning.
In sum:
When you struggle to put something into words, you are trying to express something that is prior to languageโa felt sense, complex experience, or perhaps even something unconscious or previously unsymbolizedโthat resists easy translation into the shared, structured system of inherited language. This struggle points to the limits and creative possibilities of communication, as well as the continual gap between lived experience and what can be said.
#discourse #EnginesOfArticulation #knowledge #knowledgeBase #learning #Reading #reflecting