Language as Control

[Virgil]

I'm not sure this thread subject fits under philosophical, but here it is.

Question for Unnamable. You state:


Quote:

Ultimately, I would argue that the suppression of thought and control of language have more to do with maintaining existing power structures than any issues of morality or even propriety. This does not mean that I simply want to use ‘naughty words’ or believe that ‘anything goes’.

Can you expand on this thought? How does power surpress thought and control of language? Can you also give real life, not fictional, examples to flesh this out?

BTW, I'm not really intersted in the argument above, but in reading this over I found this an interesting thought that I would like to converse on. Be aware also that I'm inclined to disagree with it but, let us say, I'm open to persuasion.
__________________
Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood/Spirit after spirit!

[The Unnamable]

Thank you, Virgil – I’ll try but I have to wrap some presents first. I promise to get back to you, though.

[The Unnamable]

First of all, my sentence could be clearer. I didn’t mean that power suppresses thought and control of language. I meant that ‘suppression of thought’ AND ‘control of language’ are the business of power.

If you want a simple example from the real world, then think about this. During the first Gulf War, Western journalists were issued with reporting guidelines. They contained the following ‘suggestions’:

THE WEST
We have:
Reporting guidelines
Press briefings

IRAQ
They have:
Censorship
Propaganda


Our boys are….
Professional
Lion-hearts
Cautious
Confident

Theirs are….
Brainwashed
Paper tigers
Cowardly
Desperate

Our missiles cause….
Collateral damage

Their missiles cause….
Civilian casualties

We….
Precision bomb

They….
Fire wildly at anything in the skies


What, in essence, is the difference between ‘reporting guidelines’ and ‘censorship’? Why do you think the distinction so important anyway? I hope that’s enough to be getting on with.

[starrwriter]

First of all, my sentence could be clearer. I didn’t mean that power suppresses thought and control of language. I meant that ‘suppression of thought’ AND ‘control of language’ are the business of power.

Wittgenstein said language is reality.

But the idea of curse words having an evil effect is utter nonsense to me. Savages who wear loin cloths in remote jungles believe words have a magical power to corrupt people, but we were supposedly civilized long ago. Or are we still savages under our fancy clothes? I wonder sometimes, especially when I hear "educated" people complain about cursing as if it were a form of voodoo.

[The Unnamable]

Virgil,

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” –Nietzsche

There are many, many more examples of the kind of things I mention above. In the UK a number of years ago, there was significant opposition on the streets to what was then called ‘The Poll Tax’, a local tax levied at the demand of central government. After much opposition and some subsequent concessions, the tax was repackaged as ‘The Community Charge’. The word ‘Poll’ was considered too reminiscent of historical conflicts in Britain and nobody feels positively about ‘Tax’. The word ‘community’ has a much nicer set of connotations and ‘charge’ seems something much fairer – a justifiable request for payment for goods or services provided. It’s much easier to sympathise with a person refusing to pay what could be seen as an outdated tax than someone who is refusing to contribute to the community. The really interesting aspect of all this comes when you read the work of Structuralists, Post-Structuralists, Marxist, Feminist and Cultural Theorists and critics.

How is power exercised? Stalin and Hitler were able to exercise enormous power but it was obviously not because they were physically superhuman. So how is that power exercised? According to French Poststructuralist, Michel Foucault, it is through’ discourse’.

The following is cobbled together from teaching notes I have used in the past:

The father of this line of thought is the German philosopher Nietzsche, who said that people first decide what they want and then fit the facts to their aim; 'Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them/ All knowledge is an expression of the 'Will to Power'. This means that we cannot speak of any absolute truths or of objective knowledge. People recognise a particular piece of philosophy or scientific theory as 'true' only if it fits the descriptions of truth laid down by the intellectual or political authorities of the day, by the members of the ruling elite, or by the prevailing ideologues of knowledge.

The term discourse is used in a number of different ways. The usual meaning of the word when applied to discussions of narrative, describes 'how' a text is written, not the content (some critics reserve the French spelling discours for this meaning). To some extent this first usage overlaps with the second, more specific use of the term by the French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault, whose work has been very influential on post-structuralist criticism. The first thing to be said about Foucault's use of the term discourse is that it is always related to concrete examples of language being used in specific areas of knowledge. For example, Foucault argues that madness, sexuality and criminality are all discursively constructed: each of them is an example of the way in which in different historical periods human behaviour is shaped by a specific vocabulary and knowledge. But there is more to his argument than this. Foucault maintains that specific discourses such as medicine, law and psychiatry serve specific interests, and that power and control of the human subject are exercised in discourse. More particularly, discourse is a way of classifying and ordering. We can see this more clearly if we look, as Foucault does, at the history of madness and how knowledge is used as a power to control and define those who are then labelled as mad. The point here is that language operates in the interests of the institutions of society to construct people in certain ways. It is not only power, however, but also resistance to power that is embedded in each discourse. It is not possible, in other words, to have a discourse which simply maintains the status quo. The power which is inscribed in discourse is shadowed by resistance to that power which is also inscribed in the discourse.

In terms of Literature (you said, I think that you have an MA?), think for example of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Prospero has been deposed as duke and now rules an island where he has taught Caliban how to speak. But Caliban resists Prospero's white colonial rule and uses his knowledge of language to curse him. The play shows the way in which Prospero's colonial rhetoric contains the seeds of its own failure as well as its fear of that which is ‘other’. The term other is used in a number of ways in post-structuralism: here it is used to describe the way in which groups of people characterise outsiders who threaten them as 'other', in this case as non-human. Racism is a practice, for example, that operates by categorizing ethnic groups as 'other', as outsiders, as threatening, as alien. At work here is the way we use discourse to divide reality up into binary opposites - black/white, man/woman. As Foucault reminds us, however, it is discourse that masters and divides us and only seems to put us in control of the world. It is we who are the sites of discourse and constructed by it.

With reference to the use of swear words, such thinking as Foucault’s would see the promotion of one type of discourse and the marginalizing of another as simply about the exercise of power. In short, the ruling ideology does not find swearing acceptable and so, rather than simply exercising brute force to uphold their own tastes and preferences, they help (both consciously and unconsciously) disseminate the ideological standpoint that sees it as indicative of lack of education or good manners. What about working class culture, where the use of certain swear words is socially and culturally inherited? These days no one would promote the idea of suppressing a different culture but it still appears to be acceptable to denigrate a whole economic class by reinforcing the idea that their language is debased. The reasoning therefore goes that such people deserve the menial jobs and impoverished lives they lead because they have not worked hard to achieve better. They ‘fail’ not because of any inherent inequalities and contradictions in the system that condemns them but because they are themselves lacking in some way.

Obviously this is not done in a conspiratorial manner by men in black coats sitting in a darkened room somewhere. The subtlety of its workings is precisely what makes it so powerful. It enables us to capitulate while still considering ourselves to be free. The idea can be (and has been in the work of people like Roland Barthes) extended into all areas of life.

Barthes examined modern France (of the 1950s) from the standpoint of a cultural anthropologist in a little book called Mythologies which he published in France in 1957. This looked at a host of items which had never before been subjected to intellectual analysis, such as: the difference between boxing and wrestling; the significance of eating steak and chips; the styling of the Citroen car; the cinema image of Greta Garbo's face; a magazine photograph of an Algerian soldier saluting the French flag. Each of these items he placed within a wider structure of values, beliefs, and symbols as the key to understanding it. Thus, boxing is seen as a sport concerned with repression and endurance, as distinct from wrestling, where pain is flamboyantly displayed. Boxers do not cry out in pain when hit, the rules cannot be disregarded at any point during the bout, and the boxer fights as himself, not in the elaborate guise of a make-believe villain or hero. By contrast, wrestlers grunt and snarl with aggression, stage elaborate displays of agony or triumph, and fight as exaggerated, larger than life villains or super-heroes. Clearly, these two sports have quite different functions within society: boxing enacts the stoical endurance which is sometimes necessary in life, while wrestling dramatises ultimate struggles and conflicts between good and evil. Barthes's approach here, then, is that of the classic structuralist: the individual item is 'structuralised', or 'contextualised by structure', and in the process of doing this layers of sigificance are revealed.

I’m sorry if that seems like a lecture but the issue is both interesting and important enough to warrant more than a few sound bites. I’d be glad to discuss any aspects of it further.

Oh, and have a nice Christmas, by the way, if by my saying so I am not being offensive to non-Christians (of which I am one).

[Virgil]

First of all, my sentence could be clearer. I didn’t mean that power suppresses thought and control of language. I meant that ‘suppression of thought’ AND ‘control of language’ are the business of power.

Oh, I agree completely. Government uses language to their advantage as you show below.

There are many, many more examples of the kind of things I mention above. In the UK a number of years ago, there was significant opposition on the streets to what was then called ‘The Poll Tax’, a local tax levied at the demand of central government. After much opposition and some subsequent concessions, the tax was repackaged as ‘The Community Charge’. The word ‘Poll’ was considered too reminiscent of historical conflicts in Britain and nobody feels positively about ‘Tax’. The word ‘community’ has a much nicer set of connotations and ‘charge’ seems something much fairer – a justifiable request for payment for goods or services provided. It’s much easier to sympathise with a person refusing to pay what could be seen as an outdated tax than someone who is refusing to contribute to the community.

Government's play the same games here in the US too. Frankly, they ususally fail if they think their putting one over. But I guess they must try. What I thought you were getting at, you suggest a little further.

The really interesting aspect of all this comes when you read the work of Structuralists, Post-Structuralists, Marxist, Feminist and Cultural Theorists and critics.

Yes, I have an MA in lit and I've been exposed to all of the types of critical theory you mention. If I may rephrase the gist of their arguments, it might be that language and cultureal icons (for lack of a better word) are themselves constructed to impose, frame, and support the existing power structure.

I do have a problem with that. Let me just focus on language.

First we all use words to our personal advantage in every day life. It's just natural. Government is not just an abstract quality; it is compose of indivuals who are trying to negotiate, pursuade, and protect their interests. Just like anyone on a street having a conversation, on a market purchasing goods, or in a court room debating law. It's an apriori make up of the human condition, and anyone arguing against that is almost arguing against common sense.

Second, language is a "thing" that arises out of a tradition. It is the result of millions of people through hundreds of years of time. If a phrase or elocution takes root, it is implicitedly condoned and an accepted by millions of people. It is impossible for me to construe how a government could impose specific language onto people without their consent. In fact, it most likely happens the other way. Language is formed on a people level and then bubbles up to government.

What I think those movements that you point out are reacting to is the 20th Century's flux of demographic groups. At no time in history (except perhaps 1st & 2nd century Roman empire) have groups of people immigrated and come into contact with different cultures. Obviously people react posiitvely and negatively and language reflects that. There is this quality of humanity that feels compelled to characterize "the other." There is also this quality of humanity that feels compelled to characterize ourselves and within our groups, just as positively or negatively as with the other. Language is ultimately a form of signs and shorthand. What I feel is going on is that language perhaps has not caught up with the flux. Given time, I think this will work itself out. Now I'm not a advocate of political correctness, but it does serve some purpose. I don't think institutions should force people to think a certain way, but then institutions do have a right to enforce good manners and public decorum. There is a need for a balance.

Frankly except for the culturalists, I've always been skeptical of all these critical theorists. First, you mention five movements above. There are even more, such as the mythologists, psychological of which their are subdivisions of Freudian, Jungian, and whatever else. That's five to ten aesthetic theories in less than a hundred years. Well, in the couple of thousand years since Aristotle, there probably hasn't been more than five aesthetic lines of thought in all. Doesn't this suggest an incapcity to arrive at any conclusions and consensus? Second, I've always felt that these theorists (especially the Marxists and Feminists) start with an ideological point of view, and then try to force the facts to fit their theories. This is completely wrong headed. Aristotle starts from the facts and draws conclusions. I can understand a critic pointing out Marxist thought in a post Marx writer. I cannot understand a critic who tries to formulate Marxist though out of a Shakespeare play. A Marxist might argue that Marxism is the state of nature and so Shakespeare would reflect that. Well, are a huge number of people who would dispute that Marxism is a state of nature, so if a critic argues along Marxist thought in a Shakespeare play, then the bar of credibility has to be set extremely high.

Well, thank you for the Christmas wishes, and a Happy to whater holiday you maY celebrate.

[The Unnamable]

I do have a problem with that. Let me just focus on language.

First we all...common sense.

This is similar to the problem I had when I first began reading the theorists I mentioned. However, what is ‘just natural’ is itself a construct and variable according to the prevailing beliefs of the day. Look at gender. Not that long ago people would have considered it ‘natural’ for only women to bring up children. Some still do. Also, is a heart transplant ‘natural’? What about homosexuality? That seems to have done the rounds on both sides. To me, a pattern begins to emerge – we consider ‘natural’ any conditions, events, processes etc. that confirm what we want to be seen as true. All of the people you mention negotiating and persuading will use the medium of language to do so. As some feminist critics have pointed out, language itself is inherently biased towards a male view of the world. In simple terms and trying to offer real world examples, look at the following pairs of words consisting of a male and a female equivalent:

King / Queen
Dog / *****
Wizard (or Warlock) / Witch
Master / Mistress
Bull / Cow
Bachelor / Spinster

These are obviously crude examples and whether or not they are exact equivalents is debatable. Nevertheless, there is a definite hierarchy that foregrounds male experience as primary. We think of a king as mightier than a queen (even in chess); ‘dog’ does have negative connotations but not as much as ‘*****’; wizards are not perceived as being evil on the whole, while witches are. Would JK Rowling be as rich if Dumbledore had been a witch? -Probably richer, who cares? Most of the female equivalents have very negative connotations, so I have some sympathy with those critics who, albeit through far more sophisticated research and analysis, have highlighted the difficulties that women writers have in expressing their own perceptions in a language that foregrounds male experience. Part of what makes us think of things as ‘natural’ is the prevailing ideology. By this I don’t mean a set of rabble-rousing political activists, I simply mean the beliefs, concepts, ways of thinking, ideas and values that shape our thoughts and which we use to explain or understand the world. According to Marxist critics, the function of ideology is to disguise the real power relations in society. Thus ideology serves the needs of the dominant class. It does this by ensuring that subordinate classes believe they share the same interests as the ruling classes. Ideology thus seeks, invisibly, to make social conditions appear natural and, by gaining the consent of the subordinate classes, to bring about political control in the form of hegemony. So internalised are many of our assumptions that we come to think of them as ‘natural’. This is why it is so enormously powerful. As long as we are comfortable, it feels like freedom.

Second, language is a "thing"... government.

Again, I fully understand your objections but you seem to assume that we all have an equal say in how language evolves. We don’t. A number of years ago, a friend did some Christian missionary work in the Far East (think about that phrase – it’s only East if you look at a map with Europe at the centre. But it seems ‘natural’, doesn’t it? Does this mean I should now stop using the phrase? I’m sure some would say yes and tried to ban it as offensive). Anyway, she was amazed to find areas where no one had ever even heard the words ‘Jeusus Christ’ but they had heard of ‘Coca-Cola’. We simply don’t have the same power available to us to affect what new words enter the language as huge multi-national corporations. This brings me to the Media Age and the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Baudrillard is associated with ‘the loss of the real’. The idea of this is that the pervasive influence of modern media images has led to a loss of the distinction between real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth.

What I think those movements ...

Why is there a need for balance? In order that people get on better with one another? That is a good example of an ideological position that is so internalised within us all that it appears to be simple ‘common sense’. Unless you believe in a God or some other kind of objective reality, all attitudes must necessarily be subjective. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but it should make us aware that there are other ways of looking at things.

Frankly except...conclusions and consensus?

I don’t really know how to respond to this as it is quite alien to the way I approach the works of such ‘thinkers’. Your approach seems much more focused on categories that I don’t really know much about – ‘aesthetic theories’. It seems they come from within and in reaction to/against what has come before. I think one of the key differences in the last century has been an emphasis on ‘meta-narratives’ –Lyotard famously characterised postmodernism as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. I’ll try to explain this more carefully in response to your next points.

Second, I've always felt that these theorists (especially the Marxists and Feminists) start with an ideological point of view, and then try to force the facts to fit their theories. This is completely wrong headed. Aristotle starts from the facts and draws conclusions.

They do and, in the case of the Marxists, I think that is their strength. No critical approach is devoid of ideological bias. At least Marxist critics do not claim to be offering ‘the true’ view, merely their own, with its emphasis on ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. But the biggest problem here is ‘facts’. What are ‘facts’? I think Nietzsche had a point when he says “There are no facts, only interpretations.” So Aristotle starts with what he considered to be the facts at the time. To do this he also employed a linguistic system that inherently reinforced that particular world view – it must have done, without the necessary language, other ways of looking at things becomes literally unthinkable.

I can understand a critic...extremely high.

I think your disagreement here stems from the fact that Marxist critics are not interested in limiting themselves to producing particular readings of particular texts. They do this but tend rather to look at how that text was created in the first place (both literally in terms of how it physically came into existence and in terms of how and why it was generated out of the prevailing ideology of the era in which it was produced). They do not try to persuade us that Shakespeare was a Marxist thinker; they apply Marxist thought to their consideration of the way Shakespeare and his plays have been read, as well as looking for aspects of the play that also are concerned with ideology.

I have never read a Marxist critic state that Marxism is a state of nature. It seems to me that, in simplest terms, they start from Marx’s statement that “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

“Marxist literary criticism maintains that a writer's social class, and its prevailing ideology have a major bearing on what is written by a member of that class. So instead of seeing authors as primarily autonomous 'inspired' individuals whose 'genius' and creative imagination enables them to bring forth original and timeless works of art, the Marxist sees them as constantly formed by their social contexts in ways which they themselves would usually not admit. This is true not just of the content of their work but even of formal aspects of their writing which might at first seem to have no possible political overtones. For instance, the prominent British Marxist critic Terry Eagleton suggests that in language 'shared definitions and regularities of grammar both reflect and help to constitute, a well-ordered political state' (William Shakespeare, 1986, p. 1). Likewise, Catherine Belsey, another prominent British left-wing critic, argues that the form of the 'realist' novel contains implicit validation of the existing social structure, because realism, by its very nature, leaves conventional ways of seeing intact, and hence tends to discourage critical scrutiny of reality. By 'form' here is included all the conventional features of the novel - chronological time-schemes, formal beginnings and endings, in-depth psychological characterisation, intricate plotting, and fixed narratorial points of view. Similarly, the 'fragmented', 'absurdist' forms of drama and fiction used by twentieth-century writers like Beckett and Kafka are seen as a response to the contradictions and divisions inherent in late capitalist society.”

[RobinHood3000]

I think your chess analogy is a smidgen misused. The King is worth more, yes, but the Queen is vastly more powerful. Sounds like some households, doesn't it?

[starrwriter]

I think your chess analogy is a smidgen misused. The King is worth more, yes, but the Queen is vastly more powerful. Sounds like some households, doesn't it?

He does have a real girlfriend after all.

[kaka]

Originally posted by The Unnamable:

In the UK a number of years ago, there was significant opposition on the streets to what was then called ‘The Poll Tax’, a local tax levied at the demand of central government. After much opposition and some subsequent concessions, the tax was repackaged as ‘The Community Charge’. The word ‘Poll’ was considered too reminiscent of historical conflicts in Britain and nobody feels positively about ‘Tax’. The word ‘community’ has a much nicer set of connotations and ‘charge’ seems something much fairer – a justifiable request for payment for goods or services provided. It’s much easier to sympathise with a person refusing to pay what could be seen as an outdated tax than someone who is refusing to contribute to the community.

Unnamable: #1 The tax was changed from a tax per adult person (head) to a property tax! That's much more significant that anything you suggest.

#2 The expression "Poll Tax" was only a nickname. The **official** name throughout the saga was "The Community Charge". What you call the "repackaged" tax - that is, the property tax referred to in #1 - was (and still is) called "Council Tax".

Unnamable, please try to get your facts rights. Often it just takes a websearch. For further information on the tax in question, please see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax

[The Unnamable]

kaka,
Is this a serious post? If so, thank you – I’ll get the hairshirt on right away. I am really pleased that from the vast forest of words above, you chose to pick out and comment on that. It was, of course, the core of my argument and now I realise that I am simply a nincompoop. There’s me carrying out research (including web searches) on the aforementioned theories and authors, when what I should have been doing is getting my facts right on the example I used. I’m so ashamed.

[kaka]

Yes, the post is serious. That said, my apolgogies if the tone was unduly harsh. No need for any hairshirt!

I'm sure that the tax was never officially called the (or a) Poll Tax. Even Margaret Thatcher, who was particularly keen on it, didn't use that term.

If you plan to use that tax or the series of events surrounding it for future examples and/or in teaching, please check it out. (Obviously, it occurs to me that the misunderstanding may have become firmly embedded in American sociology coursebooks). For me, the absurd name "Community Charge" for a tax that was highly anti-social, suggests that sometimes people can see through propaganda.

[starrwriter]

kaka, Is this a serious post? If so, thank you – I’ll get the hairshirt on right away.

Hairshirt! Jesus, that's funny. Who would have thought you had a sense of humor, Unnamable?

As for kaka, I wonder if he realizes his screen name is baby talk for excrement.

[RAS1LOVE]

hear me now, "power" uses the rhythm of love, as we are born the body grows outta of the heart beat in the womb, the rhythm, the world is musical every aspect, and so the powerful may use their words to play to their tune, them use their created languages as in mathematics, philosophy, to support their ideology, you know originally word was the way, and word sound power will always lead the way
so hear me, them make a book, and say what we know, is only what they teach us. --RESPECT

[The Unnamable]

Hairshirt! Jesus, that's funny. Who would have thought you had a sense of humor, Unnamable?

As for kaka, I wonder if he realizes his screen name is baby talk for excrement.

star, this is the second reference you have made to human egestion in the shirt (sorry, short) time that I have been around. May we draw our own conclusions?

I don’t have a sense of humour. It was surgically (but painfully and unskilfully) removed from me in an operation called ‘accommodating other people’. It’s a bit like what happened to Randle Patrick McMurphy at the end of ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’. I wonder why he was so mean to Nurse Rached.