Language as Control

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

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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This is my point. Can that objective reality be said to exist at all?

Here's what I think: there's always more. Contrary to what Marx and Hegel and, later, Fukuyama have thought, there's never going to be an ultimate synthesis, which is to say, the dialectic, the debate is never going to end. It's not even as linear as the dialectical process suggests. One solution doesn't just become an opposition in another debate, it implies many many more possibilities than it is intended to. The main problem with the dominant discourses is not necessarily what they are saying in itself, it's their dominance, their assertion of centrality and the absolute absence not of an alternative (if you don't like the democrats, vote republican), but of many many alternatives.

These dominant discourses do create reality - objective reality - however ephemeral. They create facts on the ground if you like - free health care gets cut, people die. It's true, it happens, it's reality, brought about by a process of argument and assertion. But there is a reality that is denied in this, which is not so much 'If you hadn't cut free helath care, those people wouldn't have died' - a difficult case to make - as 'There are many many other ways of looking at this problem'.

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Originally Posted by blp

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'.

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One of us is / Both of us are confusing my own position with the ones I have tried to explain. I have said a few times that I don’t ultimately subscribe to these theories. Ultimately, I don’t believe that there is nothing other than text. I say ‘believe’ rather than ‘think’. It isn’t a rational position that I can defend easily but it’s largely what Literature is to me. The thing is, I don’t think it matters greatly for a lot of what we’ve been discussing. Whether or not there is anything beneath the surface will never be known until we first realise that it is just a surface.

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Originally Posted by blp

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).

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Isn’t this the conclusion Ivan Karamazov reaches? It’s interesting that I should be reminded of this. Do you know the novel? Ivan is the tormented intellectual who doubts that there is any rational or moral order in the universe. For me, the best parts of that great novel are Ivan’s discussions with Alyosha in the chapters ‘Rebellion’ and ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. If you haven’t read them, do: they really are worth it.

There is also a character called Smerdyakov, who is particularly interested in discussing philosophy with Ivan. He hears Ivan’s explanation of why ‘Everything is permitted’ and subsequently murders Fyodor Pavlovich. Ivan suffers terrible guilt over this, even though his rational mind tells him that he isn’t responsible. This is one of the reasons I prefer to read Literature in the way I do. I’ll never know what the ‘real truth’ is, so I concentrate on the way others battle with what it all means. I find Ivan fascinating.

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Originally Posted by blp

Why should we address the dominant discourses at all critically if this is the case?

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I’m not being facetious when I say, “because they are there.” We have to find something to give us the impression that we exist, eh Didi? I might never discover who I am or what the point of it all is but as much as possible I’d like the experiences I have to be only contaminated with the discourses I am prepared to defend. Most of all, I don’t want ignorance in authority to tell me what really matters, as if they know or care.

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Originally Posted by blp

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.

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Yes, I agree – which is why I said that I’d encounter a backlash if I said what I meant. In the end, none of it does matter. Horrible though it might sound, even the worst acts of atrocity are ultimately insignificant. Of course, we don’t live in the ultimate.Do you remember that George Steiner quotation I posted? It’s relevant here:

“ The notion of cosmic solitude [is] …to a great majority among us, unbearable. We crave a witness, even fiercely judgemental, to our small dirt. In sickness, in psychological or material terror, when our children lie dead before our eyes, we cry out. That such a cry resounds in nothingness, that it is a perfectly natural, even therapeutic, reflex but nothing more, is almost impossible to endure.”

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Originally Posted by blp

But within poststructural thought, it seems that there is no possibility of such a basic truth.

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Yes, I can see why you would want this and I don’t think I’d object too much if it were achieved. The important thing for me, however, is to keep questioning and challenging the assumptions that are used to control us. You want it to reveal the possibility of something better. I want it first to expose what’s wrong.

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Originally Posted by blp

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.

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http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73...tion_1933_.jpg


This Magritte painting is called ‘The Human Condition’. You’ve probably seen it many times. I can remember first seeing it when I was about 19. My reaction to it then hasn’t changed much in the subsequent years. The immediate question I asked was about the part of ‘reality’ blotted out by the canvas and easel. How do we know whether it’s the same as what is painted on the canvas within the canvas? That should alert us to the kinds of problems we’ve encountered using the term ‘reality’ here. The whole thing is a canvas, obviously. So what I called the ‘reality’ obscured by the painted canvas and easel is itself a painted representation of reality. At some point I must have realised that there is no way that we would ever be able to find out whether what’s hidden by the canvas corresponds to what appears on the canvas. Therefore, I decided, it doesn’t matter. All I have to deal with is what I perceive to be there.

I love Magritte. He always reminds me of Philip K Dick's short stories - not the best technician by a long margin - but some of the best ideas out there.

Ceci n'est pas un post!

Unnamable, just to be clear - and as may be clearer from my last post, which you may have missed - a lot of what you were responding to was not my view so much as an attempt to unpick what seemed to me to be some contradictions in what was being said throughout this thread. In the end, and here's a rhetorical flourish I'll stand by, I keep coming back to Eliot's line from Sweeney Agonistes: 'But I gotta use words when I talk to you'. And because the words keep slipping around, it can become increasingly difficult to work out whether we're agreeing. Still, I think we are on the whole, particularly on the slipperiness itself.

But here's something I'll take issue with - at least with my interpretation of it - 'none of it does matter'. It does - in the same way the individual signifiers do - not absolutely and transcendentally, but in little localised relational contexts. I credit that 'Grand Inquisitor' passage with saving what could have been years of wasted time in a friend of mine's life. I'd just read it many years ago when he told me he was thinking of joining a religious group in the north of England. I gave him my interpretation of the text and used it to explain far better than I could have myself why what he was planning made no sense. He dropped the plan and went to university. Many years later, the religious group was revealed to have been a cult. Hope this doesn't sound like bragging - it weren't me it were Dostoyevsky. Incidentally, I've been meaning to tackle the rest of the book ever since and this is a timely reminder.

'There's more to life than books you know, but not much more' - The Smiths.

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Originally Posted by blp

Unnamable, just to be clear - and as may be clearer from my last post, which you may have missed - a lot of what you were responding to was not my view so much as an attempt to unpick what seemed to me to be some contradictions in what was being said throughout this thread.

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This is how I have been taking it. I didn’t think you were looking for cracks to exploit.

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Originally Posted by blp

In the end, and here's a rhetorical flourish I'll stand by, I keep coming back to Eliot's line from Sweeney Agonistes: 'But I gotta use words when I talk to you'. And because the words keep slipping around, it can become increasingly difficult to work out whether we're agreeing. Still, I think we are on the whole, particularly on the slipperiness itself.

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I would agree with this – I think the only area that I’d disagree with you is in my sense of the hopelessness of everything. You are much more optimistic than me but that is probably to your credit rather than a reason for me to consider you ‘wrong’ in some way.

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Originally Posted by blp

But here's something I'll take issue with - at least with my interpretation of it - 'none of it does matter'. It does - in the same way the individual signifiers do - not absolutely and transcendentally, but in little localised relational contexts.

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When I said none of it maters, I did add ‘ultimately’. All I meant was something similar to Macbeth’s great speech beginning ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’. I really do believe that it’s all a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. And it certainly is full of sound and fury, mostly my own! That doesn’t mean that I am dismissing other people’s misery and suffering but simply outlining my own beliefs. ‘Nothing matters’ isn’t a comment on the Language debate specifically, more an observation from my own experiences and viewpoint. I seem to remember a powerful point you made about seeing violence as just another text. I think that point is unanswerable. Similarly, I cannot see Auschwitz as just another text. If I’m wrong, so be it. Whether or not I am right or wrong is utterly insignificant compared to most things, but especially when compared to what happened in the Death Camps.

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Originally Posted by blp

I credit that 'Grand Inquisitor' passage with saving what could have been years of wasted time in a friend of mine's life. I'd just read it many years ago when he told me he was thinking of joining a religious group in the north of England. I gave him my interpretation of the text and used it to explain far better than I could have myself why what he was planning made no sense. He dropped the plan and went to university. Many years later, the religious group was revealed to have been a cult. Hope this doesn't sound like bragging - it weren't me it were Dostoyevsky. Incidentally, I've been meaning to tackle the rest of the book ever since and this is a timely reminder.

'There's more to life than books you know, but not much more' - The Smiths.

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Those two chapters are tremendous. I’ve never reread the whole novel but I still revisit those chapters when I want some sustenance. Here’s another Morrissey comment that seems appropriate to what you’ve said about the way fiction/Literature/Art offer consolation and even some kind of guidance:

"The passing of time
And all of it’s crimes
Is making me sad again
The passing of time
And all of it’s sickening crimes
Is making me sad again
But don’t forget the songs
That made you cry
And the songs that saved your life"

Rubber Ring The Smiths

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

I would agree with this – I think the only area that I’d disagree with you is in my sense of the hopelessness of everything. You are much more optimistic than me but that is probably to your credit rather than a reason for me to consider you ‘wrong’ in some way.

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Or I'm just lucky or a better liar. I often think I might be better off if I could abandon hope. On the other hand, without being sure at all this is what's happening here, I'm reminded of the moment in 'Manhattan' when Diane Keaton's character says that the futility expressed in Ingmar Bergman is just personal neurosis justifying itself with a cloak of contemporary philosophy. It's Allen's film and he groans pointedly, but then, he's a self-confessed anhedonic (pleasure phobic) himself. I think what she says is a real trap in this kind of thought and goes to what I said before about the way absolutism can creep up in every attempt to rout it. Real hopelessness is a kind of certainty and if it's really what you end up with, I would say, get thee to a psychoanalyst forthwith, not so much as a way out of suffering as out of an ultimately subjective certainty. Wittgenstein said that the point of psychotherapy is not to make you happier but better at thinking. To be traumatised is to make bad experiences into a synechdoche for everything.

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Originally Posted by Unnamable

When I said none of it maters, I did add ‘ultimately’. All I meant was something similar to Macbeth’s great speech beginning ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’. I really do believe that it’s all a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. And it certainly is full of sound and fury, mostly my own! That doesn’t mean that I am dismissing other people’s misery and suffering but simply outlining my own beliefs. ‘Nothing matters’ isn’t a comment on the Language debate specifically, more an observation from my own experiences and viewpoint. I seem to remember a powerful point you made about seeing violence as just another text. I think that point is unanswerable. Similarly, I cannot see Auschwitz as just another text. If I’m wrong, so be it. Whether or not I am right or wrong is utterly insignificant compared to most things, but especially when compared to what happened in the Death Camps.

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Yes. And despite what I said above, there's not much I find quite so vivifying in literature as futility expressed convincingly, from the Greeks on up through Thackeray, Stendhal, to Beckett. But you say 'ultimately' - that absolutism again. And very often, the futility is shown to be a bi-product of pointless, blind, conventionalist striving. Shakespeare's the great leveller. His plays are so rich because hope there is as convincing and valid as hopelessness. Drama is a great medium for this, a cornuccopia of different voices expressing contradictory views, each dependent on a specific time and set of circumstances. Still, to end this paragraph as it begins, a short quote from Ulysses makes the point almost as well: 'Yes.'

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Originally Posted by blp

It's Allen's film and he groans pointedly, but then, he's a self-confessed anhedonic (pleasure phobic) himself.

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What are you implying, sir? :)

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Originally Posted by blp

I think what she says is a real trap in this kind of thought and goes to what I said before about the way absolutism can creep up in every attempt to rout it. Real hopelessness is a kind of certainty and if it's really what you end up with, I would say, get thee to a psychoanalyst forthwith, not so much as a way out of suffering as out of an ultimately subjective certainty.

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Hmmm, I think we are coming from different places. I’m not certain of anything other than that I exist, at least as what I experience when I think ‘I exist’. I don’t think I’m stuck in a subjective certainty by saying that, just dealing with the only evidence I have in the only way I know how. I still do battle with the everyday and think and laugh and cry and scream and eat and so on and so on. I did say, for precisely the reason you highlight, that we don’t live in the ultimate. I’m not really bothered that my existence is futile and will terminate in oblivion. So what? In fact, I find that rather funny, often hilarious. I also find it terrifying occasionally but I find it something.

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Originally Posted by blp

Wittgenstein said that the point of psychotherapy is not to make you happier but better at thinking. To be traumatised is to make bad experiences into a synechdoche for everything.

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I don’t expect to be happy or even particularly happier. Most of the time, I can be content with my lot. I keep myself amused, am touched by others, touch them and, on many occasions, “I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life...”

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Originally Posted by blp

Yes. And despite what I said above, there's not much I find quite so vivifying in literature as futility expressed convincingly, from the Greeks on up through Thackeray, Stendhal, to Beckett. But you say 'ultimately' - that absolutism again.

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Yes, I know – first see above but also, I am finite. I believe there is an absolute – that of death, the infinite jest.

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Originally Posted by blp

And very often, the futility is shown to be a bi-product of pointless, blind, conventionalist striving. Shakespeare's the great leveller. His plays are so rich because hope there is as convincing and valid as hopelessness. Drama is a great medium for this, a cornuccopia of different voices expressing contradictory views, each dependent on a specific time and set of circumstances. Still, to end this paragraph as it begins, a short quote from Ulysses makes the point almost as well: 'Yes.'

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As I said somewhere earlier, I find characters fascinating (most people I find boring :D ) and there’s a pleasure to be had in seeing how others have come to terms with what Larkin called “the million-petalled flower/Of being here.” Mind you, as much as I love many of Shakespeare's non-tragic characters, I still find Hamlet the most fascinating.

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

What are you implying, sir? :)

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You know - like Bergman. ;)

Well, I've misunderstood. But I'm in no doubt about the dying part too. in what way did you mean I was more optimistic then?

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Ultimately, nothing matters - nothing beyond the everyday: beyond getting up another morning; beyond eating another meal, drinking another cup of tea, taking another breath; beyond the fact that there's a book that's not finished yet; beyond the film that comes out next week; beyond the tickets for the football match on Saturday; beyond friends & family; beyond job, bills and debt; beyond getting and spending; beyond the everyday. All else is smoke and mirrors.

We go on because going on is all we know, all we've ever known, all we can ever know. We go on because there's no going back. We go on because the illusion of continuance, of progression, is better than the reality of futility. We go on because it is in our nature to go on. Because we're too bloody-minded to stop.

We may know that there will be an end but we don't accept it - not really - not deep down - we all harbour a hope, however miniscule, however ridiculous it seems to our intellects - that there is something beyond - something other. We all live in denial, because to face the truth is to surrender to it, to give up, and none of us want to do that, not if we want to live another day. And there's always a reason to live another day - until one day there isn't - but hopefully that day isn't this day.

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This is from an unfinished short story of mine. It's just words, not great words, just my words. It's stuff that's been said a lot of times before a lot better.

It sort of fitted with what Unnamable & blp were saying above. I'll admit that I added the word "Ultimately" to the beginning to make it fit even more. I'll add it to the original passage too, it works.

It's gloomy stuff though - so here's some light relief:

It's a post-modernity generator! Hit the refresh button for endless, convincingly meaningless essays!

Post Modernity Generator.

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Originally Posted by blp

in what way did you mean I was more optimistic then?

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Obviously I know no more of you than I have assumed from your responses here. However, it appears that you believe that even if the fight is hopeless, it’s still worth putting one’s energies into trying to find something better.

I’m more of the opinion of the main character in Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Iceman Cometh’:

“So I said to the world, God bless all here, and may the best man win and die of gluttony! And I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.”

They have the absolute freedom of the unfree. George Steiner unfashionably lamented the changes in post Berlin Wall Europe:

“In the book-stores in East Berlin or in Weimar, where they have survived at all, Jackie Collins and the video-cassette have swiftly ousted Lessing and Holderlin. Virtually overnight, freedom reclaimed its inalienable right to junk food.”


I have no religious faith whatsoever and it’s unusual for me to be quoting the Bible, but:

“Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)”

Let them.

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Originally Posted by Unnamable

I have no religious faith whatsoever and it’s unusual for me to be quoting the Bible, but:

“Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)”

Let them.

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whoa... dark.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

whoa... dark.

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Darker than this from Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?

"Now came a diversion. We heard shrieks and yells, and soon a woman came running and crying; and seeing our group, she flung herself into our midst and begged for protection. A mob of people came tearing after her, some with torches, and they said she was a witch who had caused several cows to die by a strange disease, and practiced her arts by help of a devil in the form of a black cat. This poor woman had been stoned until she hardly looked human, she was so battered and bloody. The mob wanted to burn her.

Well, now, what do you suppose our master did? When we closed around this poor creature to shelter her, he saw his chance. He said, burn her here, or they shouldn't have her at all. Imagine that! They were willing. They fastened her to a post; they brought wood and piled it about her; they applied the torch while she shrieked and pleaded and strained her two young daughters to her breast; and our brute, with a heart solely for business, lashed us into position about the stake and warmed us into life and commercial value by the same fire which took away the innocent life of that poor harmless mother. That was the sort of master we had. I took his number. That snow-storm cost him nine of his flock; and he was more brutal to us than ever, after that, for many days together, he was so enraged over his loss."

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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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You know I can't prove anything to you. All we have are theories. Psychology is a subject composed entirely of theories. What do you want me to produce for you? A set of algebraic equations for the human mind followed by the letters QED? If we're sitting around discussing what we mean when we say 'reality', and we don't know what is real and what is our perception of reality, then how can we prove things about a reality which we don't know? Alternatively, how can one prove a philosophy? To be honest, this:

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

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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was just an over-generalised, over-simplified statement which I hoped would put an end to an argument that was going back and forth over and over and over the same ground. Plus, I was tired and not in the mood for posting up something thinky. I do think that language plays a part in how we see the world (along with other things), and our sense of self, and I do think that we think through language. If you go through the thread, I think people have already written why they/we think this is so. (Still too lazy for reiteration) (sorry for the late response, I think we posted up about the same time and I didn't notice your post. When I did, I was just too lazy to respond.)

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Originally Posted by Unnamable

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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Yes, the send armies of men and women out to bars. Then, they pick out and randomly hit on strangers. Then they go back home with them and wait till they go to the bathroom, and rifle through their sock drawers, taking note of and carefully cataloguing all of their pornography. Then, they sleep with them, and rate them on a set of ten criteria, each with a scale of 1-5. These are compared to a baseline group of randomly selected people who watch no pornography, also rated and standardised. Then, a number of statistical calculations took place (t-tests and so on), and the difference was found to be significant. Something to watch out for. :p

lol, seriously though? I don't know, I think it was probably just impotence which they researched.

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Originally Posted by Unnamable

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?
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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I wasn't 'angrily' pointing out anything. It was only a matter of time before the discussion turned to sex :p. I think pornography is just more emotive because it's overtly sexual; advertising is less so. I suppose this is one of those 'discourse of sexuality' type things (Sexuality is not really to be openly talked about, yet it permeates society etc) .

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Originally Posted by Unnamable

Darker than this from Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?

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You're not really that dark. But it's always confronting to hear someone state the same sort of attitudes that we nearly all have, but don't admit to. Namely

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“So I said to the world, God bless all here, and may the best man win and die of gluttony! And I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.”

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

Something to watch out for. :p

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Is this a warning or a tip? :D
You wouldn’t happen to know where they scout for subjects, would you? No reason for asking, just curious.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

I wasn't 'angrily' pointing out anything.

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I wasn’t just referring to the pornography issue but to all the comments that suggested increasing cynicism, which finally led to your quotation from ‘American Beauty’. I wasn’t trying to insinuate that you were a ranting Sheila. Besides, I like to see a bit of angry passion. In my view, the world only really offers two ways to react - silence or rage.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

It was only a matter of time before the discussion turned to sex :p.

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That’s your doing – you’re an Aussie so it was inevitable. Since the last rugby world cup and the Ashes, you’ve nothing else to boast about being the best at. :D

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

I think pornography is just more emotive because it's overtly sexual; advertising is less so. I suppose this is one of those 'discourse of sexuality' type things (Sexuality is not really to be openly talked about, yet it permeates society etc) .

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I agree with you to some extent, except about advertising, which is saturated with sex as a commodity. I’m sure many will disagree with me but I find pornography less offensive than advertising. Advertising is much more dishonest and insidious.

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Originally Posted by fayefaye

But it's always confronting to hear someone state the same sort of attitudes that we nearly all have, but don't admit to.

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Do you mean that it's confrontational or that it’s comforting?