Language as Control

Right sticking my oar in again even though most of this is way out of my depth and Im utterly confused in points .
first off Use , understand and speak the english languge rarely go together, whoever it was who said 250 million americans speak english and all of them understand it. And another thing youll find hundreds if not thousands of those people can comprehend above the simplest english. Its a fact, that with soo many subcommunities not everyone speaks english and even then not all of them speak the same english.
Who was it who said locusts were bad? People in the arab peninsula have been eating them as a delicasy for over a thousand years. Its a preassociation, or a Western Concept that causes you to go "uggh insect gross" like me refusing to eat ox-tail I mean tails, or prehaps more validly bannans.
Now I know that the black thread you have in bananas is the Xaylam (or however you spell it) not mushed up frogs . But when I was little my cousin told me it was mushed frog, and I cann't eat them without Visualizing live frogs in a meat grinder hence I wont eat a banana from choice. But it doesnt control me it simply influences my choices.

This is all way above me. But since I look at things , try to see things thru the eyes of a Creator, Intelligent design, I cannot believe that he created us as a blank page when we are in or emerge from the womb. And if He already imprinted certain things upon our minds and hearts then that combined with our senses, whichever ones we have if not blind, deaf,etc. and our surroundings plus experiences give us our definitions of things. Or at least that which we choose to be our definitions.
For instance we all have fathers to begin with even if a test tube baby, sperm and egg but whether that parent is alive or dead, in our lives or out helps form our definition of father.
There is a scripture that says that God has put time indefinite into our hearts. eternity if you will. But what we define that is a collection of what we choose given all of the above, to believe that means. But He put it already into our hearts.
So to me the blueprints are already there in brain and heart but we build from those blueprints how we choose. Free will that He has given us.
How you gentlemen, ladies can go over and over and over this a kazillion times without running screaming down the street in frustration is beyond me.

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Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe

Anna Seis,

Who is the woman in your avatar? Hopefully I will be able to understand the answer. ;)
And if it's yourself - well hello!!!!

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Xamonas, the woman in the avatar is Greta Garbo. The picture was made for Vogue in 1928. I accept your salutation, because though I am not her, I am beautiful in a very secret secret way. :brow:

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Originally Posted by Virgil

frankly philosophy bores me....Mind you, I was not a philosophy major nor am I an expert on the topic....I don’t present myself as an expert in philosophy....I don’t even really care about it, but it must be understood.

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And yet you feel fit to deliver your own, innacuracy-ridden, 5-minute, potted philosophy lesson to the rest of us!

Frankly, I think this smacks of crass arrogance.

I think I just heard your grandmother calling. Would you be so good as to show her how to suck eggs?

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Originally Posted by Anna Seis

Xamonas, the woman in the avatar is Greta Garbo. The picture was made for Vogue in 1928. I accept your salutation, because though I am not her, I am beautiful in a very secret secret way. :brow:

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Yeah, but could Greta Garbo talk about post-modernism? I bet overall, you're much more attractive.

Any more negative comments directed at other posters gets this topic closed :)

Logos,

I apologise if any of my comments got too personal. They were intended to be aimed at the poster's words rather than person. I shall attempt to be more accurate in future. (PS. Try not to smile when you talk about closing a discussion - it's disturbing!)

Anna,

Of course it is Garbo. This was pointed out to me earlier by another poster. I should have known (Smacks self on side of head!) If she accurately represents your secret secret beauty then it must be a sight to behold for those intrepid enough to locate it. ;)

Unnamable,

I imagine that those locusts would be like eating prawns with the shells and legs still on. If you ever dare them, please let me know if I'm right.

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Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe

Logos,

I apologise if any of my comments got too personal. They were intended to be aimed at the poster's words rather than person. I shall attempt to be more accurate in future. (PS. Try not to smile when you talk about closing a discussion - it's disturbing!)

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Heh, ok. I really don't like closing topics, honest!
Thanks for the note.

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Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe

And yet you feel fit to deliver your own, innacuracy-ridden, 5-minute, potted philosophy lesson to the rest of us!

Frankly, I think this smacks of crass arrogance.

I think I just heard your grandmother calling. Would you be so good as to show her how to suck eggs?

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Xamonas
You're too young to have your blood pressure explode. And do you think ad hominem rantings perturb me in the least? :lol:
I'm an engineer. I design things. I get things built. I make things run. I don't have the patience for people in ivory towers who try to figure out how many angels can sit on the head of a pin. What you detected was part of my personality, my likes and dislikes. If that is crass arrogance, so be it.
I felt the need for the sake of those who were getting baffled by the discussion to fill them in. I wasn't even trying to make any points, just fill in background. I said I wasn't a philosophy major. This is how it was taught to me. If there are inaccuracies, please feel free to correct. Perhaps then I might be persuaded by your argument. I said how we understand the underlying philosophic principles shapes our opinion on the issue. Perhaps either your side or I don't understand it fully and discussing them may enlighten the situation. But given that you don't understand what "The sun rose today" means I wonder whether you're even capable of understanding it.
In the future please leave either of my grandmothers out of the discussion. They are both deceased.

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Originally Posted by Nightshade

Right sticking my oar in again

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Please, paddle away – at least we get movement that way, even if so many people paddling with all their might means we don’t get away and then the ship sinks. :)

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Originally Posted by Nightshade

Who was it who said locusts were bad?

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Me – although I didn’t actually say that they are bad – merely that, in linguistic terms, they have had a bad press. Yes, I know that people eat them -that’s why I posted the picture of a roadside food vendor’s wares. – I also mentioned that people here in Asia eat insects. Even that raises another interesting point. People from the north of Thailand are much more likely to eat insects than are those from the capital. Fairer-skinned, middle class Thais view eating insects with the same sort of distaste characteristic of Western people. There are many very prominently advertised products such as skin bleaching creams that are aimed at and appeal to middle class Thais. More and more their lifestyle emulates that of the western consumer. The image of the West is certainly powerful enough to overcome and suppress the culturally accepted norms of many Thais. Why would they now share an attitude that can be seen as xenophobic? Why do they want to be white? In the West everyone wants a tan.

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Originally Posted by Nightshade

But it doesnt control me it simply influences my choices.

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An interesting distinction –what choices? The ones that are available. In the case of a single phrase that I mentioned in an attempt to lighten the tone, we can’t expect much control. No, it doesn’t ‘control’ you inasmuch as it doesn’t make you jump from a tall building or dye your hair green. In the sense that your very sense of who you are is determined by the language available to express such things, it does control all of us. It controls us by enabling us to construct a fictional reality while seeing it as natural, and by hindering us greatly from imagining that things could be otherwise.

The position I am taking is one that asserts that the meaning of language is a social matter. It belongs to my society before it belongs to me. I am not going to go away and read say, Lord of the Flies using the methods suggested by Barthes, Jakobson, etc. but their work has made me far more aware of the assumptions and ideological position of my own reading methods, of the way I make sense of a text.
I think it’s vital to question how and why we have been taught what we have been taught. “I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.” (Wilson Mizner)

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Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe

One plus one is two. That's a fact. About as disinterested as you can get. But it requires an understanding of numbers, of the operation of addition, of the meaning of equality to convey it's meaning. Bertrand Russell took several chapters of his Principia Mathematica to prove this statement!

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Two sixties filmmakers have ironically addressed this paradigm of 'common sense'. In Antonioni's 'The Red Desert', a child disproves it by merging two puddles of water. Godard titled his film on the Rolling Stones 'One Pluse One' and said, by way of explanation, 'Not one plus one equals two, but just one plus one' - a statement that could easily allude to Saussurian chain of signifiers.

All this began with Virgil’s question about a statement I had made in another thread. I wrote “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.” I was commenting on the kind of censorship that justifies itself on the basis of morality or its less authoritarian cousin, polite behaviour. I hope the discussion has moved on enough for me now to say that issues of morality and propriety exist within particular ‘discursive practices’.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to discuss Michel Foucault, whose work was more instrumental than the others in establishing a link between language and control. Foucault was a poststructuralist cultural historian, who saw the modern State as maintaining its position by what he calls ‘panoptic’ (all-seeing) surveillance. This surveillance is not just a reference to the ubiquitous presence of the camera in western society but also to what he calls ‘discursive practices’. These he sees as language’s equivalent of ideological state apparatuses or hegemony. For a very clear and useful definition of what, precisely, is meant by ‘discourse’ see this link: http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics....=true&UID=1261

Discourse is not just a way of speaking or writing. It refers to language operating in a way similar to Eagleton’s description of ideology outlined in post number 48 above, “it is the very medium in which I ‘live out’ my relation to society, the realm of signs and social practices which binds me to the social structure and lends me a sense of coherent purpose and identity. Ideology in this sense may include the act of going to church, of casting a vote, of letting women pass first through doors; it may encompass not only such conscious predilections as my deep devotion to the monarchy but the way I dress and the kind of car I drive, my deeply unconscious images of others and of myself.”

Foucault points out that there isn’t just one discourse. However, he’s less interested in identifying them than he is in considering how "Knowledge" is created in our societies and with what purpose or effect.

The following is from the article mentioned above:

“In most of Foucault’s work on discourse there is a sense in which what counts as discourse is constituted out of a process of exclusion. Thus he argues that what counts as reason or rational thought is constituted by a construction of discursive frameworks of insanity or falsehood/fiction. Thus, truth and power have a strong excluding influence on what can be said or written. Foucault suggests that discourses are often constructed through a process of commentary, that is, critics comment on a text and in the process of commenting on it, constitute it as a text which can be commented upon and which is therefore important. The text will therefore be circulated within the education system or within magazines and newspapers and will be available for others to comment upon. It is this process of commentary which keeps certain ideas current and which excludes other ideas and texts. These are for Foucault the mechanisms which regulate discursive production.”


This is what I mean by control of language.

Both Literature and Literary Criticism are discourses. This means, of course, that both have to compete for space with all the other available discourses. On a very simple level, I am reminded of that very short poem ‘Days’ by Philip Larkin.


Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?


Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields

Those who come running do so armed with their own discourse, which promises to explain life.

Legal discourse is infamously impenetrable and within the reach only of those able to master it. To Foucault’s mind this very impenetrability is one effective method by which the discourse maintains its own validity. Medical discourse is similar, as is philosophical discourse, of course, and so on. Discourse is power. This is another reason that I am in no way trying to suggest any conspiracy is at work or that any explicit political motive is apparent. Our own discourse seems natural to us.

All teachers and critics of Literature are simply custodians of the discourse of literary criticism. As Eagleton says:

“Their task is to preserve this discourse, extend and elaborate it as necessary, defend it from other forms of discourse, initiate newcomers into it and determine whether or not they have successfully mastered it.”

I think this is why you, Virgil, are so fervently against these theories. They threaten to expose the relativity and ideological position of your favoured discourse. The reason why things appear 'natural' or 'common sense' is that nothing is more natural than speaking in your own language.


On this thread, time and time again we have seen people running for their discourses.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I said how we understand the underlying philosophic principles shapes our opinion on the issue.

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I would go further, have been for several posts in fact, and say that how we understand everything shapes our understanding of everything else.

I have never claimed that people don't understand the offending phrase. I have merely claimed that their understanding of it is coloured by their culture, prior knowledge, and beliefs; that everyone's understanding, while essentially the same, has a unique something of themselves in it.

As an engineer, you must be familiar with the concept of "thinking outside the box" to solve a problem. The obvious, accepted way of proceeding is not always the best (it usually is, I'll grant, it's prior effectiveness being the reason for it's general acceptance) but every now and then, somebody comes along with a brilliant new idea that turns things on their head, a paradigm shift occurs and overnight there is a new obvious and accepted method. Only by trying new things, making connections where none existed before, can this kind progress be made. The flash of inspiration which leads to new inventions, new methods, new ideas, comes about because different minds approach things from different viewpoints; make different connections; have different baggage associated with words and ideas which leads them all in subtly different directions.

I work as a computer programmer. It is a well known adage that if you give 1,000 programmers the spec for a program, you'll get 1,000 different programs back from them. All will work (hopefully), but all will work in slightly different ways. I suspect that 1,000 engineers would build 1,000 different bridges in much the same way.

And, as I have been saying for so long (seems like years), everyone has a different mental image of a sunrise and their minds will jump in different directions upon hearing that the sun has risen. This is baggage, like it or not. Call it by any other name you prefer, but it is an essential part of how our minds work - biological and psychological fact - not philosophical abstraction, post-modernist or otherwise.

I really do apologise for getting personal a few posts ago. It was not to my credit. I would have withdrawn or amended the post but felt that the damage had been done once it had been replied to. I felt frustrated because I felt that you were not really reading my posts (into which I put a lot of time and effort, in an attempt to make them as unambiguous as posible) but were pre-judging what I was trying to say in advance. Your replies appeared (and this may be an error of perception on my part - I'll admit that) to be the first things you thought of, unfiltered and unconsidered and based on those pre-judgements, rather than my actual words.

A few points about myself:

I am not a philosophy major either and I do not live in an ivory tower (I can't afford one and would hate to bring about the demise of so many elephant's) although I do love philosophy and have read many books on the subject, including the works of many of the major philosophers (but no post-modernists, any limited understanding of their concepts comes from more general texts). I also enjoy discussing philosophical issues and ideas and comparing my ideas with others. I am more than willing to agree that I am wrong, or that there is an alternative, equally valid point of view, if the argument put forward is well presented, well reasoned and sound. However, I get very annoyed at just being told I'm wrong, without full evidence of why the claimant feels that way.

I am probably much older than you think and have been on medication for high blood pressure for several years, so I really should be more careful as to how wound up I get about things or else I might just :rage:

And finally, if you've bothered to read this far, let me re-emphasise that I agree 100% with the statement which I quote at the start of this post - and with which I intend to conclude it - it is essentially, the point that I have been making for days. Please re-read my previous posts and I hope you'll see that. I have tried a variety of lines of reasoning, with different examples and styles to say exactly that.

Please everyone, was I really that opaque in my arguments?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I said how we understand the underlying philosophic principles shapes our opinion on the issue.

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

An interesting distinction –what choices? The ones that are available. In the case of a single phrase that I mentioned in an attempt to lighten the tone, we can’t expect much control. No, it doesn’t ‘control’ you inasmuch as it doesn’t make you jump from a tall building or dye your hair green. In the sense that your very sense of who you are is determined by the language available to express such things, it does control all of us. It controls us by enabling us to construct a fictional reality while seeing it as natural, and by hindering us greatly from imagining that things could be otherwise.

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Fittingly enougfh my siste is watching The Matrix in the next room. ((g)) And I have a point that pproves you right too I didnt mean chocies Im dyslexix And have troubles with languge and expressing what I mean I guesss I know alot about The confins of languge I meant desison , and there is a differance between them.

As for the East trying to be west and the west trying o get a tan I just lov e to sit back and laugh, and laugh and laugh.
:lol:

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

In the West everyone wants a tan.

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I don't. I put on sunscreen. And even those that do, how does that follow that they want to be black?

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An interesting distinction –what choices? The ones that are available. In the case of a single phrase that I mentioned in an attempt to lighten the tone, we can’t expect much control. No, it doesn’t ‘control’ you inasmuch as it doesn’t make you jump from a tall building or dye your hair green.

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This doesn't take into account the utter complexity of humanity. There are people here that dye there hair green and there are people that don't. I have a brother who is a anthropologist/philosopher; he's got a PHd. We both essentially have the same genetic make-up and grew up in the same environment. I'm an engineer. I can't stand abstract thought that has no application; he can't hammer a nail into a piece of wood. No language controled either one of us to be who we are or to see how we see the world, which is quite different.

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I am not going to go away and read say, Lord of the Flies using the methods suggested by Barthes, Jakobson, etc. but their work has made me far more aware of the assumptions and ideological position of my own reading methods, of the way I make sense of a text.

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Well, for crying out loud then we agree on all this!!!!! I don't mind the critic being sensitive to anything, but he's got to have an on-off switch that says, wait, the author isn't after this.

Xamonas - We've gotten off on the wrong foot. Let's patch up our sensitivites and agree to disagree. I'm a New Yorker. Crass arrogance is part of our nature. We grow up on it. I really, and I mean it, would feel bad if I made your blood pressure go up.

blp - The Rolling Stones do not have a song called "One Plus One." I'm a Stones buff and it didn't ring a bell. I went to Keno's Rolling Stones song list http://www.keno.org/Songlistnlyrics.htm and it wasn't listed. I would be shocked if it were so rare that Keno isn't aware of it. Your quote: 'Not one plus one equals two, but just one plus one' sounds roughly like a Who song which says: "In life one plus one don't make two; one plus one makes one." I don't know what your point was, but what The Who were trying to say is two perople each without a lover/mate are isolated individuals. It's a popular Who song, I just for the life of me can't place it.

I still haven't fleshed out why I feel post modernism is wrong in its approach to aesthetics. I'll get to that eventually.