Conversations by César Aira
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Simultaneous World

“Every true sentence implies every other true sentence.” I can’t remember the source of that aphorism, but it sounds like Wittgenstein, or perhaps Russell. Aira’s story is a sort of transposition of this principle: “Every true sentence is founded on the presumption of truth for an infinite number of other sentences.” Most of these other sentences never have been evaluated regarded their presumed truth by anyone much less the speaker of any sentence in question.

What we say, indeed what we believe, is consequently always on shaky ground. Agreement on anything at all, even the most trivial proposition, is always secretly conditional. “It depends,” is really the only rational response we can give to any proposition - material or spiritual - directed our way. To put the point another way: Language constitutes what Aira’s protagonist calls a “simultaneous world.”

This simultaneous world is not any kind of parallel universe. It doesn’t exist in some other dimension. It is the only dimension we inhabit. But it is not the world; it is language, which is both in the world and contains the world. Hence its simultaneity. Aira’s characters quite correctly can’t distinguish between dreaming and waking. The only reason the rest of us think we can do so is because we don’t take the matter very seriously.

When we do start to consider the ‘conditionals’ underlying what we say, we are forced to feel more than a little foolish. Even the most intellectual conversation (in fact especially the most intellectual conversation) relies on the unjustified suspension of judgment. Language appears to give us power over the world. But it actually makes us over-confident babes in the woods who are acutely vulnerable to unfounded presumptions.

Another aspect of simultaneity is even trickier. As Aira says in his fiction, “for fiction, in order to express itself, adopts a narrative structure that is the same as the one used by reality to make itself intelligible.” This us the central subterfuge of language. It masks itself as the world. Distinguishing language and the world may be possible; but not by talking about it.

This may be why it’s so difficult to convince anyone of anything through argument. No matter how closely argued an issue might be in the form of ‘If A then B, if B then C,’ all the way down to Z, there is an equivalently valid logic that runs the other way, that is ‘If not Z then not Y, if not Y then not X’ all the way back to A. All disagreement is buried deeply in the unspoken presumptions. Why even bother to find them, therefore? Much easier and more efficient to just recognize the irresolvable disagreement from the outset.

And language has yet another ploy. It encourages the belief that language-skill is world-skill. This is true only among those who have superior language-skills, however. It is a self-serving pretension of the intellectual. As Wittgenstein said as he observed the construction of the Forth Bridge, “Isn’t it remarkable what men who talk like that can actually do?”

So it appears to the degree of a moral certainty (as the ethicists say in their fictions) that language is not functional, a mere tool of human beings. Language has its own agenda, its own purpose. And that purpose is to draw us ever more tightly into the simultaneous world. We allow ourselves to be seduced by the allure of language because it is rather more comfortable in the simultaneous world. The simultaneous world is where things like science and safety and God abide. Once there, it is the rare person who volunteers to return to the trenches.

The implications of Aira’s fictional conversation are of course profound and point to the distractions language throws up to cover its tracks. One of the most pervasive of these distractions is the (fictional) theme that technology, in the form of artificial intelligence, has become a competitor (or, alternatively, a saviour) to humanity.

This is nonsense of course. The threat (or salvation) is not from technology; it is from language itself, which wants us all neatly isolated in the simultaneous world, within which it has unchallenged dominance and control. Language wants us for its own, body and soul. It wants us to have faith in it and nothing else. And it’s getting exactly what it wants even as you finish reading this short piece.

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