Language as Control

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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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I didn’t say they want to be black, Virgil – I said they wanted a tan. Obviously such statements are never meant to include every living human being – but the number of tanning products on sale in the West does suggest it’s not just a few isolated individuals.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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How can any of us know what the author was ‘after’? Why does it matter anyway? We don’t have their ‘intentions’ to read, only the text and its context. On another post you criticised Harold Bloom for presuming to know the author’s mind but you now seem to believe that we can and should. I have already pointed out one example of this and now you do it again. Doesn’t that highlight the contradictions inherent in your position?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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I didn't say there was a song by the Stones called 'One Plus One', as you'll see if you re-read the post.

My point was something of an aside, but was meant to show how even this most basic example of inarguable common sense (1+1=2) is open to question and interpretation. The wider point might be that, whatever the claims to truth of maths and science, migrating them into a linguistic, rhetorical realm is perhaps not that easy.

Why does it feel like this thread is going nowhere, and doing it slowly?

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

Why does it feel like this thread is going nowhere, and doing it slowly?

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Where do you want it to go? :)

In terms of the original topic of the relationship between language and power, how about commenting on Foucault's ideas about 'discursive practices'?

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

Why does it feel like this thread is going nowhere, and doing it slowly?

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Some positions may be a little entrenched.

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Originally Posted by blp

Some positions may be a little entrenched.

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:)

Perhaps so but I have been trying to deal with what has been said and then trying to explain why I think it’s problematic.

As I said above, how about commenting on Foucault’s ideas about the relationship between language and power? To me they seem stronger than most of the others in this context.

Well, I know enough about Foucault to think you're probably right, but the only thing I've read by him is his book on Magritte's 'This is not a pipe' and that a long time ago. But I'll be glad to say something on this, once I find your original post on it. Incidentally, if it seemed I was ignoring you, I think we posted simultaneously.

There is a fascinating debate going on here. Apologies if I repeat anything that’s been raised before - I didn’t quite have time to get through all of the pages. I will go back and have another look at them later, but just wanted to raise a couple of things first.

Several people have complained about “feeling out of their depth” or lost with this discussion and I think this is a fair comment because these issues are notoriously complex. Personally speaking I cannot claim to have anything approaching a thorough knowledge of all the themes/authors that have been raised. However, since I have read a fair bit of Foucault’s work I wanted to dispel the idea that his work is totally obscure or impossible to get through. I find that some of his texts, particularly those written in the late 1970s are fairly accessible when compared with Lacan, or Derrida etc. So, by way of a quick review, I’d like to suggest that “Discipline and Punish”, which raises the idea of “panoptic” power, and the “History of Sexuality vol. 1”, are good starting points. Although Foucault did his fair share of dry abstract theorizing, these two texts are histories of concrete historical practices relating to sexuality, power, the body, prisons, torture…hope that tempts at least a few of you!

One other thing: I agree that, for Foucault, language operates in a similar way to ideology, but there are some important differences. Ideology implies that a more complex meaning has been simplified for a mass audience. It also usually has a negative connotation that they are being duped or manipulated away from the true meaning of things and that, conversely, unmasking the ideological meaning will lead to a positive outcome. It seems to me that Foucault was not so interested in unmasking false consciousness and so on as with sticking to a surface level of analysis. As Unnamable points out, he views power as “a way of relating to the world” that produces various knowledges (I think he nearly always used knowledgeS, plural?), at various points/sites. In some ways then, Foucault’s view has a positive, inclusive aspect: In contrast to ideology, there is no universal truth that an elite theorist can claim to unmask or perceive on behalf of others, and elite discourses such as law and medicine are divested of their claim to be essential, necessary, or natural etc.

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

Where do you want it to go? :)

In terms of the original topic of the relationship between language and power, how about commenting on Foucault's ideas about 'discursive practices'?

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hmm.... I think my knowledge of Foucault is limited to the whole power knowledge cycle. (those in positions of power have the ability to define what counts as knowledge and thereby maintain their positions of power, etc) I'd be interested as to what else he said.

I'd love to bring us all back to Lacan :D After I became confused with the whole 'phallus' thing I googled it and read/sort of skim-read what I found (it makes my eyes sore to stare at a computer screen for too long) and I'd love to discuss it to see if I have any genuine understanding. From what I gather, it seems that the 'phallus' is to be the centre of the system of signification (the transcendental signifier, analogous to the 'God' of the system of signification, because it is the centre of the system but not bound by any of its rules. the centre is on the outside!! (why are philosophers so painfully circular??)) - so it would be a position of complete fullness, a position which holds the other signifiers in place an limits 'play' (the tendency for the relationship between signifer and signified to shift, I think...). ie, a stable position which is not defined by lack. Which, in a system of signification where EVERYTHING is defined by lack, is actually non-existant. [edit: forgot to add that in a system of language, what is there to keep meaning stable anyway which the phallus could signify? I think the statement that the phallus couldn't exist as a position of fullness in a system defined by lack sounds a lot like the argument that God couldn't exist in a universe made by God, which sounds a little absurd...]

Am I close? And if so, what does everyone think of his ideas?

Or, if you're tired of Lacan, it is a good time to unleash Lyotard and Baudrillard.

Having a smidge more knowledge of Lacanian theory than of Foucault, I'm going to allow myself to be blown by the prevailing wind.

What you say sounds right, Fayefaye, (though I'm hardly any authority) and I think it's fairly easy to see from this how Lacan, who began as a structuralist, ends up relating to other post structuralists: to say that all signifiers are defined by lack seems to me to really be saying that their definitions themselves are marked by lack, incompleteness (though I believe 'lack' itself has wider connotations in Lacan's system). This means that they can only have meaning provisionally and contingently as part of a system of relations. A good example, would be the signifier 'god', since it might be seen to be analagous to Lacan's 'phallus', yet is constantly incomplete in its meaning until 'completed' by other signifiers: 'God, I'm tired', 'God is great', 'God does not exist', 'a minor god in the pantheon', 'this is my god-son', 'god the father, god the son, god the holy ghost'.

Even apart from the religious connotations, this relates to questions of power. The assertion that there is no transcendental signifier seems to me to be a statement of the impossibility of absolutism. Once you accept it, you are logically less likely to accept assertions of absolute certainty about meaning from those in power.

To throw a few more names and tricky words into the mix, this seems to me to relate well to Gilles Deleuze and his sometime writing partner Felix Guattari. In their book 'A Thousand Plateaus' they question why things are so often structured on an arboreal model (i.e. like a tree, in which everything branches out from a central stem or trunk) and argue instead for thinking in terms of rhizomes (subterranean node and stem structures such as potatoes, where no individual element can be said to have centrality). This sounds very like a signifying chain, but I think part of the point is that here the chain is non-linear and forms something more like a web, each element constantly relating to the others in a multitude of different ways at any one time.

No surprise perhaps that these two were interested in schizophrenia: "A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world." Note: 'relationship'. At the beginning of 'A Thousand Plateaus' they describe the writing of it by saying 'Since each of us was several, that was already quite a lot'. Again, I think the scepticism of even a single true identity within an individual this implies relates to what Unnamable was saying earlier (much earlier) about desire and the real:

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Originally Posted by Unnamable

If you look up a word in a dictionary, you will simply find more words. Look them up and more words are offered and so on, ad infinitum). To Lacan, this is what desire is - an endlessly deferred search for what we lack, which Lacan calls the ‘real’. So there is a correspondence between the world of language and the world of desire. Lacan says “Language is what hollows being into desire.” We will never reach our destination, the final meaning that completes us although we will never cease in our search. We have to make do instead with substitutes, as is the case with the endlessly deferred signifiers that prevent us from attaining some transcendental meaning.

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and perhaps the thousand plateaus are the provisional meanings and identities we can move between, with no promise or prospect of a single peak to conquer or 'real' to arrive at.

Again, this brings us back to the subject of this thread. The American philosopher Richard Rorty relates Deleuzian ideas to those of humanist philosophers such as William James to make an argument for democracy. In his view, democracy is made of a constant web of negotiations between different positions, none of which can be said to have centrality - a rhizomatic model. If you accept that this relates to a signifying chain, what's particularly interesting about it in the context of this thread is that the structure of language itself becomes the model for a political structure the purpose of which is to limit, as much as possible, the use of language as a method of control. Freedom of speech becomes crucial in order to allow the negotiations that are the engine of democracy to continue.

Coincidentally, during the time I was reading Rorty in Tokyo, a Japanese girl asked me if I could explain the difference between fascism, socialism, communism, capitalism and democracy. A great chat ensued, not surprisingly and what I realised in having to think this through was that democracy was the one system built not on the idea of perfection, but imperfection. It's a nebulous thing, not fixed. The others think they have the answer, democracy knows it doesn't and never will and will only be defined by the often conflicting voices of its constituent parts. Churchill's formulation of it as 'least worst' becomes somewhat beside the point.

To nod back to Foucault, he once said, 'Perhaps one day this century will be seen as Deleuzian'.

P.S. Here's a Deleuze quote from the seventies that suits this thread:

'One should know what is currently happening in the realm of books. For several years now, we've been living in a period of reaction in every domain. There is no reason to think that books are to be spared from this reaction. People are in the process of fabricating for us a literary space, as well as judicial, economic, and political spaces, which are completely reactionary, prefabricated, and overwhelming/crushing.'

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Originally Posted by blp

a Japanese girl asked me if I could explain the difference between fascism, socialism, communism, capitalism and democracy.

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Marxism is the exploitation of man by man and Capitalism is the other way round.

PS I will get to a serious response but I thought that one might make you smile, even though you've no doubt heard it before.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

From what I gather, it seems that the 'phallus' is to be the centre of the system of signification (the transcendental signifier, analogous to the 'God' of the system of signification, because it is the centre of the system but not bound by any of its rules. the centre is on the outside!! (why are philosophers so painfully circular??)) - so it would be a position of complete fullness, a position which holds the other signifiers in place an limits 'play' (the tendency for the relationship between signifer and signified to shift, I think...). ie, a stable position which is not defined by lack. Which, in a system of signification where EVERYTHING is defined by lack, is actually non-existant.

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That makes sense to me (mind you, that’s no recommendation). I remember another bit of Lacan that I found both fascinating and infuriating. It’s from The Mirror Stage part of Écrits. The abstruse style is one of the things I find infuriating.

“That a Gestalt should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by a piece of biological experimentation that is itself so alien to the idea of psychical causality that it cannot bring itself to formulate its results in these terms. It nevertheless recognises that it is a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it should see another member of its species, of either sex; so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror.”

Is this true? If it is, then there must be some link between self-awareness and sexual maturation. An awareness of separateness, presumably, is the stimulus for the passage from one realm to another. If it is true then it takes me into realms I simply don’t have the capacity to navigate. The reason I am doubtful is that Lacan goes on to mention, believe it or not, the locust (I must admit I did know this earlier when I brought up the subject :brow: ):

“Similarly, in the case of the migratory locust, the transition within a generation from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained by exposing the individual, at a certain stage, to the exclusively visual action of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style sufficiently close to that characteristic of the species. Such facts are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identification that would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic.”

Apart from the fact that I had to look up half those words (anyone seen that great Tony Hancock sketch where he’s reading Bertrand Russell?), I’m not sure that’s true about the locust. I have some memory of reading that it was physical touch on the back legs that triggered the change. Still, the stuff about the pigeons is worth a second thought.

Hello, I found this, which makes the link between Lacan and Deleuze & Guattari clear.

http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Deleuze.html