Language as Control

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Originally Posted by Virgil

"Reality is constructed through language" versus "reality is derived from language." There is no distinction that I can see between those phrases.

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Then why are these two sentences (they aren’t phrases) not identical? Are ‘constructed’ and ‘derived’ synonyms? It seems to me that your position is that meaning (if it would be better to call it that rather than ‘reality’) resides within a text, and is not something constructed from outside of it. Reality is not reflected by language but produced by it.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

But postmoderns believe that the test itself is unstable and in flux.

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And we all know, of course that meanings are fixed and stable. That’s why misunderstanding never occurs and also why when Gertrude said that Hamlet is ‘fat’, she meant that he was chubby.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I'm saying that to a postmodernist, it is no different whether you are talking about the sun rising or an exchange of capital. To a postmodernist, there is no distinction, it is all ideology, which I find rediculous.

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On the contrary, there are distinctions and very significant ones, but ideology permeates all language to a greater or lesser degree.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

What you are describing here is not postmodernism: logos in your interpretation quoted is not in the signifyer.

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What do you mean? Are you taking issue with my point about language or my understanding of postmodernism? I don’t care whether you call it postmodernism, theory, post-structuralism, deconstructionism or whatever (which doesn’t mean that I consider distinctions between them as non-existent). My point is that meaning is dependent upon something other than authorial intention. You still haven’t answered the question of how we know that someone is a slave if we have no word for it.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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Firstly, if Literature is so enlightening and ennobling, why has it failed so miserably in the case of humanity?


I never said it could.

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True, you didn’t. This is the Liberal Humanist position, which is as close to your own as any. Would you not agree?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I'm the one arguing that language doesn't control, remember?

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I can’t believe that we are still quibbling over the meaning of ‘control’! Look back at only my second post in this thread. I am very careful to state, “I meant that ‘suppression of thought’ AND ‘control of language’ are the business of power.” Nevertheless, I do consider that language is form of control. The way you see control (judging simply from your comment above) is as something that forces people to do or think something they don’t want to. That’s not what I mean when I say that language is a form of control. Our very sense of ourselves is only made possible by the language (verbal, visual, etc.) available to us. Given that that language pre-exists us, what sense we are able to make must necessarily be shaped by that language. In what way isn’t it a form of control? How can we express thoughts or ideas that exist outside of the realm of language? "Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"

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Originally Posted by Virgil

Paglia is the only one I know who purports this; she's a lone, anomolous voice on this; it's relatively recent and it doesn't explain the fifty years of feminist preaching.

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Very revealing choice of word, Virgil. No, Paglia isn’t a lone, anomalous voice. Women interpret pornography in different ways, as do feminists and other theorists.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

You're very flexible with your theory. When it comes to shaping women's personalities you claim all sorts of subtle connotations of language (which I've claim are trivial) has determined their being: passive, feminine, etc. Read your posts in this whole thread.

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I think you need to read them. I said absolutely nothing about women’s personalities per se. I said ‘they had been given personality characteristics’, which is not the same as what you imply above. You say that I am flexible with my theory. Perhaps it is rather that you are less than attentive in your reading of my theories?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

You, watching the show, doesn't want to make you join the mafia because you're not Italian. I've have know IA who had nothing to do with the mafia, but within the context of a particular discussion had wished that they were.
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If those systems repeatedly reinforce the idea that all IAs are gangsters, it’s hardly surprising that so many people assume that it’s true.

Well, you don't live in the United States. I believe there was a study of this. The reality turned out to be less than 1%, but the perception of the general population was in the 30ish percent range.

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I simply don’t know what your point is with most of this. I made no claims to any knowledge of IA experience and only used the information you’d given me (apart from mentioning ‘The Sopranos’. I remember that someone tried to sue (?) over the show’s negative portrayal of IAs.). I didn’t need to offer any of my own information as I thought you’d made the points very effectively. I still think so.
In the study you refer to I am here assuming that you are saying that X% of the American population believe that 30% of Italian Americans are in some way associated with the mafia. I won’t quibble over the X% except to say that I assume it is a significantly high number to warrant consideration (if only 0.005% per cent of the American public believed that 70% of IAs were involved with the mafia, it probably wouldn’t matter much). This means that, for some reason, a huge number of Americans think that nearly a third of all IAs are in some way associated with the mafia. In reality, only 1% are so how do we account for this significant difference? The theorists you decry would argue that people’s realities are constructed through the systems of meaning available. These systems are made up of signs. These are not a reflection of reality but the producers of it. Those systems are also permeated with ideological assumptions as well as competing discourses, all vying for recognition of their own position. In the case of the example you give, when those questioned were asked about an IA, they presumably had a concept of what an IA is to which they could refer to offer an answer. Now, where has that concept come from? It can’t already have existed in their heads from the moment of birth, so where’s it from and of what is it comprised? Many theorists would answer ‘from all the references to IAs to which the person has been exposed.’ What are these likely to be? I presume that personal experience might play a part in some cases but for most, it will be television, films, magazines, advertising, books, music, the whole field of signifiers which has rendered up any idea of what an AI is. So for some it might include Mario Lanza, for others Al Capone and for yet others, Robert De Niro. The last example is also interesting in that we might also ask what do people think of when they think of Robert De Niro? Obviously there will be variation but many will also think of gangsters. Our culture is so saturated with images and representations that these come to shape our sense of what is normal, everyday reality. Isn’t that what the study you mention suggests? Even though the ‘actual’ reality of the %age is just 1, the reality as it is perceived by a significant proportion of the American public is 30%. To me that is wholly consistent with just about everything the theorists have said.
I’ve no doubt, however, that you have a more correct explanation.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

*becoming increasingly cynical*

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My work is complete. :brow:

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

How can somebody say something like, 'what does it matter who is rich and who is poor?' unless they have never been poor themselves. For those who have nothing, or next to nothing, and wonder how they're going to survive, having money is pretty damn important. And those denied the status of human beings by the legal system, denied a voice and a right to vote, would probably think that having these rights is really important. Who cares if voting doesn't make a difference, the fact that they weren't allowed to do it had an impact on the way they saw themselves. Imagine being told that you weren't a person.

Commodities... food, water, basic human rights... these things are real. Maybe the argument holds for the middle/upper clases, maybe I just haven't fully understood it.

I think in some ways, some of the other things they wrote ring true. People live in a world where they think a Mercedes is success, that a big, new house, a white picket fence and a four wheel drive, a couch upholstered in Italian silk is a happy, successful life. (Throw in a marriage with kids and you 'have it all') A world where images and marketing intermingle with reality. "This isn't life. This is just STUFF! And it's become more important to you than living. Well, honey, that's just nuts." (American Beauty)

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This was my first reaction on the rich poor thing too. It sounds callous to say what does it matter. In some ways you could say, well we're caught up in a specifically linguistic binary rich/poor equating automatically the former with good and happy, the latter with bad and unhappy. In practice, I should have thought, it should be pretty obvious to most of us that this doesn't always hold true.

But the reality of poverty at its most extreme makes relativism a nonsense. What does it matter if Southern Africans are being forced at gunpoint into tiny holes in order to mine one of the key components of our computer's circuit boards? All I know is that I wouldn't want to have to do it. But what can I do about it? I don't intend to answer this because I don't think there is an answer - yet, but it's worth talking about - with specific reference to this language debate.

Guy Debord as Situationist par excellence is one of those Parisians I was talking about earlier who went through the '68 uprising and saw it fail. Already a lot of their material had gone beyond Marxism proper and into a semi-artistic realm designed to create the kinds of disturbances to consciousness that Unnamable is talking about above. 'Under the stones, the earth' they would say to remind us of the frothing, unpredictable world existing just below the surface of our ephemeral civilisation. One of their ideas, which I love, is 'the walk home' - the idea of the period of time after the event, after the spectacle, after the thing that was supposed to have centrality. After that, it's all supposed to be over, but no, you've still got to get home. They liked it because it's marginalised, something not talked about and assumed to be devoid of content and highly resistant to commodification (though I did recently see 'under the stones the beach' used, with no clearly intelligible reason, as a coca-cola ad).

This concern with a marginalised blankness in place of the spectacle runs throughout the sixties and I would say, from my own experience it does have a power to effect fairly powerful changes in consciousness. Warhol films from the period subject me to a barrage of sly detournements of traditional film language, series of events with no clear purpose, unhinged people talking nonsense, not following the script, not providing either useful information or well constructed escapist entertainment. Repeatedly watching these I've come butting up with my own conservatism, thinking, no this is stupid, there's nothing here, only to find the tension breaking as I realise I'm having a special experience, something I'm grateful for precisely because it's denied me by the dominant culture. Seeing these was one of the things that led me into having psychoanalysis - the 'talking cure'.

In a sense, my little epiphanies in cinemas have been luxuries. What of our African miners? Something tells me they're not going to be having screenings of 'Chelsea Girls' after work round the campfire, let alone much exposure to that dominant culture I'm so contemptuous of. But what's keeping them there? The situationists, particularly after '68 when they discovered to their dismay that the proletariat didn't want the revolution they were proposing, would probably say 'false consciousness' - something constructed by language. In a globalised situation, that would mean, not their own consciousness, but the consumer consciousness in the first world where the problem is always one of wanting too much and being fixated on the idea that one doesn't have enough. The Vance Packard book, 'Hidden Persuaders' that I've alluded to before is relevant. Packard describes how, using the discoveries of Freud among others about consciousness and the unconscious, advertising people in the fifties and sixties worked out how to promote this consciousness in people, falsely instilling an idea of progress so that people would feel they had to update their possessions regularly, regardless of whether the old ones were still functional. I would say that this is still happening today.

But, uh oh, we need this kind of behaviour to drive the economy don't we? Well, that's what we're told all the time and people go around saying it without always understanding it very well. I don't mean to disagree with it - I don't feel qualified to. But that means I'm also not qualified to agree with it and the same can be said about a lot of the other people blandly accepting it around me. The last thirty odd years have been dominated by rightwing economics, coming to fruition in Reaganomics and Thatcherism, but already in evidence in the policies of Jimmy Carter. In this monetarist schema, the postwar advance of the welfare state and, by extension, the idea of community (pace Thatcher 'There's no such thing as society') is seen as erroneous. 'Economic growth' is the objective and, hey, who could object? Well, according to Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman, the period between 1973 and 1993 was a period of growth, but it was also the first sustained period in American history in which the standard of living for middle income Americans fell. Economic growth simply means the average earnings of the entire populace and it could only be said to have happened during this period because the rich got exponentially richer. Everybody else simply didn't. To make matters worse, Friedman shows a pattern of history whereby, as conditions worsen, ordinary people become more reactionary and therefore more likely to elect precisely the kinds of people who institute economic measures that harm them.

No accident that one of the first things to come under threat when money is tight is education and easy to see how this perpetuates a downward spiral. This is directly about language, control of and through language. Rightwing economics are riddled with shibboleths and millennarianism, constantly underlining the message that there is no alternative (TINA, as one current philosopher usefully shortens it). This rhetoric creates a reality, the system we live under, full of people repeating its truisms. But under the stones of rightwing economic rhetoric, the infinitely more complex reality.

Uh oh, that word again: reality. This is one signifier that, as I've already pointed out, is slipping about all over the place here. Language constructs reality or obstructs reality in order to control us? Well, which is it? Is there any reality at all? Is it the same as 'the real'? Do Situationist disturbances simply construct another reality or do they create a rent in a veil of illusion to reveal reality? Perhaps it's safest to say that the word can mean different things.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

That was interesting, but I get the feeling that the person who wrote it is already pretty out of touch with reality (or at least, my understanding of it :p) How can somebody say something like, 'what does it matter who is rich and who is poor?' unless they have never been poor themselves. For those who have nothing, or next to nothing, and wonder how they're going to survive, having money is pretty damn important. And those denied the status of human beings by the legal system, denied a voice and a right to vote, would probably think that having these rights is really important. Who cares if voting doesn't make a difference, the fact that they weren't allowed to do it had an impact on the way they saw themselves. Imagine being told that you weren't a person.

Commodities... food, water, basic human rights... these things are real. Maybe the argument holds for the middle/upper clases, maybe I just haven't fully understood it.

I think in some ways, some of the other things they wrote ring true. People live in a world where they think a Mercedes is success, that a big, new house, a white picket fence and a four wheel drive, a couch upholstered in Italian silk is a happy, successful life. (Throw in a marriage with kids and you 'have it all') A world where images and marketing intermingle with reality. "This isn't life. This is just STUFF! And it's become more important to you than living. Well, honey, that's just nuts." (American Beauty)

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Although I would take issue with the writers over a number of comments, to be fair to them, I don’t think they are suggesting that the actual experiences of poverty etc. are unimportant but more that dealing with the issue of ‘poverty’ is unimportant. It is simply a ‘spectacle’ i.e. a debate that exists only for the purpose of convincing us that we are having a debate, which of course, we aren’t. All it really does is ensure the continuance of the existing power. If we believe that having a debate and trusting to the political process will solve the issue, then we probably won’t start chopping off the right heads. It also allows us to engage in our favourite activity of being comfortable (which means not thinking too much):

“But what more oft, in nations grown corrupt,
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty--
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty--”

Milton Samson Agonistes

Of course those things you mention matter to most people but the extract suggests that if we are really serious about making improvements, we must begin by realising that we need to expose the whole system for what it is. I think you realised much of this yourself when you wrote about the Homeworkers Code of Practice. You can’t put out a forest fire with a water pistol, however good it feels to know you are doing your bit. I prefer to fan the flames. ;) You appear to like Twain – here’s one that comes to mind, “There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.”

There are larger implications but I don’t know if I can articulate them without inviting a backlash of Homeric proportions, so I’ll just say:

“nothing really matters much, it’s doom alone that counts.”


“I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life...”

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

If we believe that having a debate and trusting to the political process will solve the issue, then we probably won’t start chopping off the right heads.

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The business of ethical consumer choices - though I do make them where possible - particularly backs up the current economic system: markets provide us with 'choice', they are 'rational' and self governing and self correcting. In other words, you don't need to apply international law to prevent goods being made in sweatshop conditions, the consumer market will take care of it by 'choosing' not to purchase the products. Aside from everything else, this makes it seem as if the whole thing's our fault, when actually we're largely powerless. And again, just to keep us on topic, this is done with language.

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Originally Posted by blp

Uh oh, that word again: reality. This is one signifier that, as I've already pointed out, is slipping about all over the place here. Language constructs reality or obstructs reality in order to control us? Well, which is it?
Is there any reality at all? Is it the same as 'the real'?

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Are you having a rhetorical flush or are these to be considered? It’s just that I don’t like that opposition between “constructs reality or obstructs reality in order to control”. It might make some (I’ll mention no names) think, once again, that Language is an autonomous force deciding on the world of humans. I can see what you mean – is it that the only world we know is a construct of language or is there a world beneath the surface of language, which language works to hide from us?

I wonder if the analogy of building a house might help me to explain how I see the relationship between language and power (in the context of the thread).

Imagine that someone sufficiently knowledgeable about bricklaying, carpentry, plumbing etc. is given all the materials necessary to build a house and told to make it however they like. It might appear that they were free to construct any type of house they wished. However, let’s simply assume for a moment that all the bricks made available are blue and triangular. The resulting construction will already take on certain characteristics merely by virtue of the nature of the materials. That is one way a form of control occurs. We can only operate within the constraints, even though it might not feel as if there are any.

If we expand the analogy a little, we can see how other aspects we have discussed in this thread might work. If no one manufactures any other type of bricks, or we are educated to accept that, scientifically speaking, triangular bricks are by far the best, then our choices in real terms diminish further. The D.I.Y. expert himself or herself will already have assumptions about what is and isn’t possible by virtue of having acquired his or her knowledge from the existing pool. This further influences the nature of the resulting house.

A lot of these things will be determined by dominant discourses. The capitalist discourse might offer its own explanation of why no other kinds of bricks are manufactured. The ‘actual’ reasons would probably be economic (they’re cheaper) but the ones we would hear would hide this fact. This is the Marxist view. Capitalist discourse might also call on the legitimising power of other discourses (mechanical engineering concepts might be recruited to prove that bricks have to be triangular because of the coefficient of whatever). The D.I.Y. expert’s own knowledge will have been affected by discourses. The carpentry classes he or she attended were provided by an organisation/institution that had its own ideas about what skills and knowledge constitute Carpentry.

Obviously most of these things won’t be considered by the D.I.Y. enthusiast. It will ‘feel’ as though there is a choice. There is no group of conspirators wickedly employing language to force the D.I.Y. enthusiast to build the house that suits them. He or she is, however, being controlled through language.

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Originally Posted by blp

Do Situationist disturbances simply construct another reality or do they create a rent in a veil of illusion to reveal reality?

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Both and neither. "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned."

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Originally Posted by blp

Perhaps it's safest to say that the word can mean different things.

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Or different nothings. :D

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

Then why are these two sentences (they aren’t phrases) not identical? Are ‘constructed’ and ‘derived’ synonyms? It seems to me that your position is that meaning (if it would be better to call it that rather than ‘reality’) resides within a text, and is not something constructed from outside of it. Reality is not reflected by language but produced by it.

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I still don't get it. Yes they are synonymous. The distinction between these two in this context is infintesmal.

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And we all know, of course that meanings are fixed and stable. That’s why misunderstanding never occurs and also why when Gertrude said that Hamlet is ‘fat’, she meant that he was chubby.

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What you have here, doesn't follow. Is it not possible that meanings can be fixed and misunderstandings still occur? The writer could have been imprecise; the reader could have mis read.

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On the contrary, there are distinctions and very significant ones, but ideology permeates all language to a greater or lesser degree.

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This is one of the central disagreements between us. I still haven't gotten a credible answer on The sun rose today. You all made fun of it as having a metaphor, but no one has still proven how that is ideological.

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You still haven’t answered the question of how we know that someone is a slave if we have no word for it.

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The chains around his hands; the whip marks across his back; the forced labor he performs. No word is needed.

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True, you didn’t. This is the Liberal Humanist position, which is as close to your own as any. Would you not agree?

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I don't know. I am sympathetic to Liberal humanism, and yes it is close to my position. But I'm not aware that this would be a tenet of Lib-Hum. Yes, I would agree that preaching morals is critical to society. But I would compare it to a magician doing a card trick whereby he sticks out the card he wants you to pick. Ultimately you don't have to pick it. I would not catagorize it as control through language (which suggests predeterminism) but as suggestiveness or encourgement (the right word is not coming to me here) which is laying our options from which to choose.

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On the contrary, there are distinctions and very significant ones, but ideology permeates all language to a greater or lesser degree.

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Well, then you need to clarify. To a postmodernist, as I understand it, there is no distinction, it is all ideology, which I still find rediculous. I asked where in Aristotle's Poetics is he ideological. Perhaps that's going to far across time and culture and translation of language to pick up the distinctions. Let's instead use Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Show me where he's ideological.

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I can’t believe that we are still quibbling over the meaning of ‘control’! Look back at only my second post in this thread. I am very careful to state, “I meant that ‘suppression of thought’ AND ‘control of language’ are the business of power.” Nevertheless, I do consider that language is form of control.

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What you are arguing in that thread is the act of rhetorical argumentation. Don't you have your students write essays of pursuasion? This is pursuasion, not language as control.

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Our very sense of ourselves is only made possible by the language (verbal, visual, etc.) available to us. Given that that language pre-exists us, what sense we are able to make must necessarily be shaped by that language.

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I dispute this. You have been brought up (let us assume it if you haven't) and I have been brought up with the same (albeit english english and american english) english language. How come we are so different? I said it before, how come my brother and I are so different? Where is the proof?

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I think you need to read them. I said absolutely nothing about women’s personalities per se. I said ‘they had been given personality characteristics’, which is not the same as what you imply above.

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Perhaps I'm a little thick. What is the distinction?

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Very revealing choice of word, Virgil. No, Paglia isn’t a lone, anomalous voice. Women interpret pornography in different ways, as do feminists and other theorists.

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I use the word, preaching, in a good way. I agree with the feminists here. In a paragraph above I say why preaching is important. I'm not using the word dispargingly. Paglia is the only one I've heard on this; if there are others, and I haven't heard of them, well, I'm pretty sure the average girl who goes into porn hasn't heard from them either. And so my point still stands: despite preaching from the left and the right, the porn industry has mushroomed once physical contraints were lifted.

As to the mafia issue, I agree there are many factors for becoming part of it, but you would think that with all the bombardment of cultural texts and images, that more than 1 percent of IA would join it.

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Originally Posted by blp

Language constructs reality or obstructs reality in order to control us? Well, which is it?

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Well, to throw in my two cents, I would say that language constructs reality, and because it constructs our view of reality, we could also say that it obstructs any objective reality which could be said to exist. (ie, we wouldn't have a clue what was real because we can't tell the difference between the reality and the construct) So both

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Originally Posted by blp

Is there any reality at all?

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If there was, how could I prove it to you?

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Originally Posted by blp

Is it the same as 'the real'?

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Far as I can tell, the Real is a state of fullness, where we can't differentiate between ourselves and our mothers and seem to have little idea about the world around us, and no ability to think abstractly (since we have no language). I don't consider that reality.

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Originally Posted by blp

Do Situationist disturbances simply construct another reality or do they create a rent in a veil of illusion to reveal reality?

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Knowing nothing about Situationists and being too tired/lazy to look it up, I wouldn't have a clue. I would, however, be happy to hear more about the Situationists if anyone was willing to oblige :brow:

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Originally Posted by Unnamable

I don’t think they are suggesting that the actual experiences of poverty etc. are unimportant but more that dealing with the issue of ‘poverty’ is unimportant. It is simply a ‘spectacle’ i.e. a debate that exists only for the purpose of convincing us that we are having a debate, which of course, we aren’t. All it really does is ensure the continuance of the existing power. If we believe that having a debate and trusting to the political process will solve the issue, then we probably won’t start chopping off the right heads. It also allows us to engage in our favourite activity of being comfortable (which means not thinking too much)

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I wouldn't really argue with that. I might even subscribe to it as a philosophy. But I can't help but be reminded of Sisyphus and that big, stupid rock and wonder what would happen if people really DID stop discussing/trying to deal with poverty. I'd like to think that it does make a difference, and that even if it doesn't improve things, the situation would deteriorate.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

The chains around his hands; the whip marks across his back; the forced labor he performs. No word is needed.

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But this is a concept formed by the word 'slave'. Without 'slave', it's just another person doing work.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

This is pursuasion, not language as control.

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Language constructs the way we see the world, our sense of reality, our sense of self, the very way in which we think is constructed through language. How is that not control?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I would not catagorize it as control through language (which suggests predeterminism) but as suggestiveness or encourgement (the right word is not coming to me here) which is laying our options from which to choose.

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Persuasion as to which option to choose is a means of control, isn't it? And the fact our options are constructed, isn't that also a type of control? I don't think control needs to suggest predeterminism.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

How come we are so different? I said it before, how come my brother and I are so different? Where is the proof?

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I think you're misunderstanding what we mean by language constructs identity. Read earlier posts.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I agree with the feminists here

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I'm going to split hairs and tell you there are lots of different types of feminists and you generally can't lump them all together like that.

Virgil, sorry if I've misunderstood any your post/repeated things already written, to be honest I've skipped over your recent posts (nothing personal)

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

But this is a concept formed by the word 'slave'. Without 'slave', it's just another person doing work.
What you are arguing here Faye is Platonic metaphysics: form preceeds reality. If that's the way you think it works, then fine. Postmodernism requires that meaning reside in the signifyer. The word had to precced all, even form which I don't find credible. The more you guys point things out, the more I'm beggining to believe that Postmodernism is nothing more than a variation of Plato's metaphysics.

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Language constructs the way we see the world, our sense of reality, our sense of self, the very way in which we think is constructed through language. How is that not control?

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Prove it. Even Freud had to provide/fabricate studies. This is a grand statement of human nature, one that is I would say is somewhat revolutionary. This is probably overthrowing thousands of years of western culture, or at least since the enlightenment. You and those arguing here have an obligation to prove it. Otherwise I am beggining to believe is that this is fallacy of argument by assertion. I can think a large number of examples to contradict. I gave three above. I have yet to hear of one that supports it. Someone provide me proof.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

And so my point still stands: despite preaching from the left and the right, the porn industry has mushroomed once physical contraints were lifted.

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I caved and found this on Situationism from Wikipedia:
The Spectacular society: "We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience."- Larry Law, from Images And Everyday Life, a 'Spectacular Times' pocket book.

What's interesting about this is a conversation I had with a psych major a while ago about pornography. People have done psychological studies showing that there is some sort of inverse relationship between how much porn somebody watches and how good they are in bed. (Yes, seriously) As it turns out, watching pornography offers this presentation of sex which it's often difficult for real life to stack up to in comparison. So guys become sort of... inured to it. It becomes harder and harder to turn them on; some become impotent.

What I'm suggesting, is the ever growing porn industry is because the presentation, the construction, the spectacle offers a fantasy which is almost *searching for the right words*... better than the reality. (Real sex isn't like porn, generally) Anyway, it ties in well with everything we've been talking about. Not only do people confuse the image with the real, but some actually start to prefer the image over the real. If guys get off to porn more than they actually have sex, it could be said that pornography becomes like a replacement for the reality. (It masks the absence of a reality also- they're not getting any!)

(lol, I'm just pulling ideas out of my *** here, but I really think I'm onto something!)

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Originally Posted by Virgil

The writer could have been imprecise; the reader could have mis read.

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I know which one my money is on. :D

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Originally Posted by Virgil

The chains around his hands; the whip marks across his back; the forced labor he performs. No word is needed.

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That’s interesting. It doesn’t sound like a female Roman slave. Why did you assume the kind of slave you did? The word must have different meanings for us. :) You are not thinking about this. What you see when you look might be what you describe if we look at it from the perspective of now. But what if I were a Roman senator looking at the same scene? I might not even consider the creature to be a man in the same why I am. That doesn’t mean he’s not or that he doesn’t exist until we think up a word. And what can you possibly mean by ‘no word is needed’ – as if some things are so obvious that we don’t even need a word for them. Well, name me just one thing that exists for which we don’t even need a word. ;)

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I would agree that preaching morals is critical to society.

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Whose morals, Virgil and whose society?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

But I would compare it to a magician doing a card trick whereby he sticks out the card he wants you to pick. Ultimately you don't have to pick it. I would not catagorize it as control through language (which suggests predeterminism) but as suggestiveness or encourgement (the right word is not coming to me here) which is laying our options from which to choose.

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First of all, I said nothing about predeterminism. That’s how you see it. I believe we enter a pre-existing realm that necessarily affects how we construct ourselves. That is not the same as saying that everything is already decided forever. That realm isn’t static. Competing discourses are adding to, subtracting from, re-emphasising or redefining it every day. If the ruling hegemony changes sufficiently, then the realm of language changes, as does the nature of the available roles. A simple example of this would be women employed in jobs that they would not have been employed in before.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

Show me where he's ideological.

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I love that. It’s as if the ideological can be pinned down to a particular metaphor. You might just as well hand someone a copy of King Lear and say, “Show me where he’s great.”

This is ideological:

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment. Now, if Nature be thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his Reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure.”
Wordsworth from Preface to Lyrical Ballads


I could have copied the whole of it because it is an outline of Wordsworth's own ideology with regards to Poetry and its importance. Surely even Wordsworth’s desire for change is a revolutionary ideology?

On many English Literature undergraduate courses, the significant names before the Romantics are the 18th century novelists like Richardson and Fielding and poets like Dryden and Pope. These writers would not have shared Wordsworth’s sense of the importance of ‘felt experience’ and it is out of the supposed cold rationality of that age that the Romantic Poets were born.

In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth is explicitly concerning himself with the question of what Poetry is. It’s not simply a technical mode of writing; it’s bound up with social, political and philosophical implications. Most of the Romantic Poets were political activists – easy to notice in the work of Blake and Shelley. To the Romantics, the whole realm of the ‘Imagination’ carries a political force. They hope their ideas will transform society. The emphasis is on the transformative power of the imagination, with the human subject located at the centre of this world. How can you not see that all this is an ideological position, even in your sense of the term? It’s part of the Romantic ideology. Or is Romanticism not an ideology, merely a way of categorising artists? Artists exist only in a social and historical context; they don’t float around in the ether.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

How come we are so different?

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This is relative. We are not as different as say a carrot and a monkey. (We do, though, share 35% of our genes with a daffodil.) And we are certainly more similar than either of us and a member of the Sarawak tribe. We are at least similar enough to have both arrived at and decided to post on the same website.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

As to the mafia issue, I agree there are many factors for becoming part of it, but you would think that with all the bombardment of cultural texts and images, that more than 1 percent of IA would join it.

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I’m not arguing about becoming a part of it – that is not what’s interesting about the study! I’m interested in why people’s perceptions differ. The cultural texts and images that bombard us are not recruiting for the mafia! I didn’t realise that your argument was that language can’t be controlling us otherwise more people would join the mafia and if this argument goes on much longer, I think I’ll submit an application form myself. The all-pervasive, all-encompassing texts of a modern media society are not reinforcing the idea that people should join the mafia (has it not struck you as significant that in almost 100% of mainstream films, we are finally reminded that crime doesn’t pay, that killing is wrong, or that everything will turn out well in the end?). The important point is that these images/texts etc. contain representations that end up as a part of our own sense of reality. That explains the 30% figure.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

I wouldn't really argue with that. I might even subscribe to it as a philosophy. But I can't help but be reminded of Sisyphus and that big, stupid rock and wonder what would happen if people really DID stop discussing/trying to deal with poverty.

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By dropping the issue, I don’t mean simply wash their hands and forget about it, but have done with all the present nonsense (i.e. the discursive practices with which the problem is currently addressed) and begin by seeing what the real problem is.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

I'd like to think that it does make a difference, and that even if it doesn't improve things, the situation would deteriorate.

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We would all like to think that – it stops us from just sitting down on the side of the road and simply refusing to take part any more. But our belief, despite the evidence, is vital to the continuance of the present system.

PS – Don’t forget that Camus concluded, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” :lol:

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

The Spectacular society: "We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience."- Larry Law, from Images And Everyday Life, a 'Spectacular Times' pocket book.

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The idea isn’t that dissimilar to Freud or even Lacan in its idea of substitutes. It also reminds me of Freud's idea of fetishism and the idea of commodity fetishism.
“The motive of human society is in the last an economic one.” Freud, not Marx, said that.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

how good they are in bed. (Yes, seriously)

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I think you’ve made this up to test us. How do you measure something like that? Are there judges sitting near, awarding marks for style, levels of technical difficulty, artistic interpretation? I don't know, you Aussies. :)

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

As it turns out, watching pornography offers this presentation of sex which it's often difficult for real life to stack up to in comparison. So guys become sort of... inured to it. It becomes harder and harder to turn them on; some become impotent.

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You could also say that watching action movies or soaps, or advertisements or whatever “offers presentations of XXX which it’s often difficult for life….in comparison.”

We become inured to everything: “When I hear about deprivation and injustice in the world, I get up and change the channel.” Garrison Keillor 95 Theses 95 from Lake Wobegon Days

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

If guys get off to porn more than they actually have sex, it could be said that pornography becomes like a replacement for the reality. (It masks the absence of a reality also- they're not getting any!)

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I hope this isn’t directed at me. :)

To be serious (and perhaps to highlight the extent to which thinking away from the current dominant discourses is extremely difficult, if not impossible,), look at the assumption in your own comment. You assume that actual sex is ‘reality’ and pornography is simulation. In other words, by associating pornography with those things that you angrily point out are replacing ‘real’ experience, you are assuming ‘real’ experience is superior. Will you now call on the power of biological discourse to justify your choice? :D

I agree that it is all consistent with the theories we have been discussing here. I know Virgil mentioned pornography and that is why you mentioned it, but it might be worth considering why pornography is more emotive a topic than most of the other topics we could have chosen. Why should we object more to being bombarded with pornography than to being bomborded with, say, all forms of advertising?

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

Are you having a rhetorical flush or are these to be considered?

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Gah. It ended up sounding like a rhetorical flush - a bad one - but what I was trying to say is that throughout this discussion you veer between different uses of the words 'real' and 'reality'.

Leaving aside the fact that 'the real' has a somewhat more specific connotation in Lacanian discourse, it sometimes seems that you're saying language is the reality and sometimes that there is another real reality beyond the dominant discourses' constructions of reality. I assume you'll balk at the latter and I'm sorry, there's so much to wade through that I don't think I can go back and find specific quotes, but I don't think I've imagined it. I also think it's absolutely basic to this kind of discussion that this happens. No matter how much one rationally understands the impossibility of absolutism, one keeps coming back to it unconsciously. There's also something seriously queasy about the sense that poststructuralists are saying 'language is the reality'. Everything is not true and everything is true (and, pace Hassan El Sabbad, 'Everything is permitted). Why should we address the dominant discourses at all critically if this is the case? Specifically, in doing so, aren't we saying, 'what you have constructed does not fit reality' - some 'fundamental' reality that should underpin or undermine the reality of what we build on it? To extend your house analogy, the point might be that no matter what we're allowed to build and with whatever bricks, the ground was unstable and the building's eventually going to collapse into itself and this basic, inarguable truth is denied and marginalised at every stage of the building process. But within poststructural thought, it seems that there is no possibility of such a basic truth.

If this is the case, I don't really have a big problem with it. I was mainly just trying to point out that the assumption of a fundamental reality does seem to keep coming back.