Humiliation of the word
Chapter 4: The Word Humiliated
(written by Jacques Ellul, 1984)
The invasion of the verbal realm by images results in role reversal and domination, leading us to another characteristic of our modern reality: the humiliation of the word.
1. Defacto Devaluation
No one consciously tried to bring it about, yet the situation of the word in our society is deplorable. For this situation the people who speak are particularly responsible — not in the moral sense of guilt, but in the sense of lack and failure. The habit of speaking without saying anything has eaten away at the word like a cancer. Such people have spoken other than in poetry, myth, and the minimum necessary for legendary history. Instead of limiting ourselves to what is useful (no more and no less) for exchanging information, news, and teaching, we keep on speaking. In addition to the ritual and mystery that codify the word we insist on speaking. These days we speak without saying anything; we just chitchat.
Scholasticism, at its very origins, was not just chatter; it became chatter. Oddly enough, this chatter invaded the scholarly world and came to provide its security. Molière and François Rabelais bear witness to this chatter, these meaningless words. Then too, there is Shakespeare: “Words, words, words.” Suddenly the tragic discovery was made that words were only words, without power to act. People became acutely aware of the uselessness of mere talk. People were not aware of this during the Middle Ages, when the word was venerated, not only in liturgy but in all its forms. After the sixteenth century, we have an avalanche of talk that is increasingly useless.
This development is easily associated with the bourgeoisie: they reduced the word to the schematic needs of business, or to conceal what people wanted to avoid saying. In this view, the word became insignificant amid the elegance of the court, through Marivaux’s subtle use of it in his plays, and because of everyday triteness that lacks any reference to real life. Mundane and intellectual chatter mixed together (as Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point shows so admirably) finally collapse into wordlessness. Eugene Ionesco’s reputation as a playwright is based on this situation.
The speaker’s error comes from the absence of something “to say,” so that he doesn’t say anything, but (as poet Jacques Prévert puts it) just goes on talking and talking and talking. We have an excess of talk devoid of meaning and veracity. We are satiated with electoral and political speeches (which we are sure say absolutely nothing), with false conversations, and with books paid by the word (some find it necessary to write, and so become writers by trade!). In spite of the lack of anything to say, the speaker continues as if he were a wordmill moved by the wind, and he becomes responsible for the fact that no one can any longer take any word seriously. No word can be taken seriously, because the rush of these words prevents us from discovering the one which, in the midst of the torrent, has meaning and deserves to be listened to.
This devaluation of words can also be the fault of intellectuals, who give us many examples of such usage these days. We will mention only the impenitent chatter of the Henry Millers and the Deleuzes and Guattaris, (To mention only the “greats”!) whose logorrhea conceals the poverty of a few simple ideas under a flood of deceptive verbiage. Their words are mere illusion, completely devaluated because they have said nothing and because of the superabundance of discourse. But this suffices for those who seize upon one glittering word and thereafter explain everything by referring solemnly to “flux” or “desire.” They do this without realizing that they only repeat medieval theories concerning the Impetus, the Impulse, etc., from which Jean Buridan’s successors were to build such beautiful effects based on vain words!
While we have a wasteland of empty verbiage, at the same time we suffer from an excess of information broadcast everywhere about everything, so that its quality is utterly destroyed. We are overwhelmed by a jumble of information: on the latest model of ballpoint pens, the pope’s election, the wedding in Monaco, the Iranian revolution, increased taxes, new possibilities for credit, the conversion of the biggest polluter to the cause of nonpollution — ten thousand words of information in an instant. We would go crazy if we really had to listen to all this seriously, so the flood of words continues, and we let it flow by. After all, whether any words are involved, the result is the same: I listen with half an ear and I catch here and there a snatch of a phrase, or a moving tone of voice, but in any case the word no longer matters to me. I have been exposed to too many words and too much information. I must defend myself against these invasions; my mind closes up spontaneously, to keep me from being torn to pieces. I am like Orpheus turned over to the media Maenads; I am blown by every wind of doctrine and words; I am lured into every trap. I have stopped listening. I refuse to hear (without even realizing it).
As noise, however, the anonymous word continues to flow. No longer is any kind of relationship established. Henceforth the word is definitively detached from the one who speaks. Nobody is behind it. When language theorists take their analysis to its logical conclusion, they declare that no person is speaking, nor is there any content to communicate. They say we must recognize that in the strict sense, it speaks, or one speaks. They are mistaken, however, when they turn this into a general rule and claim to give us either an objective analysis of language or a new psychoanalysis of the “nonsubject.” They are wrong to present this as something permanent. For our society and our epoch, for our intellectual or bourgeois groups, they are correct, but this is a sociological observation rather than something linguistic or psychoanalytic.
In our day, in this place, a sort of social discourse flows endlessly and is repeated twenty hours out of every twenty-four, expressed by individual mouths. The discourse is completely anonymous, even though it may sometimes be affirmed with force and conviction by a particular individual.(On the intellectual level, of course, l consider the books of Jacques Lacan, Foucault, Jacques Derrida, etc., utterly typical of this anonymous social discourse. These writers constitute in themselves a demonstration of what they say about all individuals who speak.) This corresponds to the speaker’s anonymity. The word has become anonymous and therefore has no importance, since its only reality involved the meaning of two living persons who needed to know and recognize each other and to exchange something. Words are just wind. They pass by and have no importance: as long as no one puts the weight of his entire life behind the word he speaks, how can we take one statement more seriously than any other?
The rupture between the speaker and his words is the decisive break. If a person is not behind his word, it is mere noise. This matter of looking for the weight of truth in philosophical or political phrases (independently of the person who said them) goes back a long way. What do I care if a person lived like a coward, a liar, or a hypocrite, since the words he left are so beautiful! This is the first great vacuum.
In the Bible the word is an integral part of the person. It is true if the person is true. Jesus’ words have no value or importance whatever if they are separated from the person of Jesus. In him there is perfect unity of life, action, word, relationship, and knowledge. The current rupture between the speaker and the word strips the word, but soon it takes on value again. But from where? Necessarily from something nonhuman, so that this value will be related to reason, science, some opinion, a social tendency, or a concept of beauty or truth. A concept rather than the beauty of an experience lived in harmony with itself, or the truth of a person’s unity. Once related only to a concept, the word is at the mercy of all sorts of winds and changes; it loses all weight and meaning. It becomes an instrument, to be manipulated. It does not commit anyone to anything.
When the word is utterly emptied of itself, it becomes mere slogan, at the service of any structure whatever.(See Olivier Reboul’s basis study, most enlightening, on modern devaluation of the word: Le Slogan (Brussels: Complexe, 1975). It becomes propaganda and serves falsehood: (I am not saying that propaganda is not based on falsehoods concerning reality; I have shown elsewhere that propaganda is efficacious only if it refers to accurate facts.) fundamental falsehood, which has to do with the unity of being and the word. The word thus becomes the servant of whatever doctrine, since any political doctrine, considered in itself, is as good as another. The word may be prostituted in any venture. The anonymous word has no name and thus is not really a word. No one has spoken it. It spreads out like liquid across a world with no reference points. All the talk about signs (signifiers and signifieds, the referent and connotations) is utterly empty talk when there is no more word. This is the fault of those who speak.
* * * * * *
The word is also devalued by the very conditions in which it is spoken in our day. The triumph of thought based on images implies a reduction of the word. We are all aware of the remarkable phenomenon that has left its mark on our era, the disintegration of language in various ways. We also see the word used in propaganda and advertising, in which a simple onomatopoeia or the elimination of a word’s meaning is sufficient, since the word is reduced to functioning as a stimulus. This is also clear and significant in contemporary poetry, in the effort to separate meaning from the word (Abraham Moles’s experiment); also in the reduction of the word to a mere conveyer of information and the tendency to analyze everything in terms of communication and information. From all this one concludes that algebra is superior to spoken language, or that images are superior to the word.
This situation is simply induced by the invasion of images. Reciprocally, based on this invasion, anything may be called language. We have the language of fashion in clothing, cinematic language, body language, etc. But it is clear that in every case a shift toward visualization and images is involved. As if without intending to, as if it were obvious, people fuse all “languages” — spoken and heard language become only a particular instance of communication. But in reality, we are dealing here with the disappearance of one sort of thinking for the sake of another.
This process confirms our tendency to live only in the present. Again, in this situation it is not by accident that we draw back and refuse to study history, and that historical continuity and significance derived from the past are rejected. This refusal obviously is not consistent with the temporal dimension of the word. On the contrary, it coincides with the fact that visual images belong to the present. An image-oriented person is a person with no past. He lives only on the basis of what images can supply. Each image contains all he needs to know; he has no need to remember or retain what he learns today. Images and the transmission of knowledge through association of images convey all one needs immediately. The uselessness of history as the study of the past coincides with this. Neither is it by accident that education loses its content. Finally, structuralism, with its crushing dominance by the synchronic element, is the method and the philosophical mode that is consistent with visual images. It is not by chance that structuralism reduces language to a relationship of structures.
The word also undergoes the repercussions of the technicalization of everything. We must become basically aware of the fact that the word is strictly contradictory to technique in every way.(I know, of course, that language is also a technique and the object of techniques. Rhetoric is a case in point. But there is no comparison between this technique, which belongs to the most traditional group, and what technique has become today.) Technique’s unconditional triumph empties the word, which becomes a wandering and dispossessed servant. The word is then further reduced within the technical framework to the level of a mere instrument. The word becomes vain because of babblers, and it becomes an instrument because of techniques. The context determines evolution in this case. The word no longer needs to bear meaning; it has been divorced from what it signifies. Once again, the scientific analysts (who refer everything to language structures, since they observe that meaning is useless) give a correct account not of what the word is, but of what it has become here and now.
The word is still used and is not yet entirely emptied, because it retains some of its former prestige. It is indispensable that we go on talking, though meaning and real value no longer exist, and even though we no longer make any reference to truth. After all, we have those ancestral memories according to which the triumphant word dictated God’s laws to the world.
Similarly, everyone holds political language in contempt. We shrug our shoulders at its promises and lyrical excesses, but it is necessary. The politician who did not give himself over to this game would have no chance of being taken seriously. This is true even though we know that this language does not commit him to anything.
Technique makes us live in a world of action, figures, demonstrations, and efficiency. But in this context there is a double effect: the emptiness of words spoken by an anonymous speaker who is not committed to his word, and the triumphant evidence for the efficacy of action — action that is now always technicalized. The word can find a modest place for itself only if it is utterly subordinated to the efficiency and the imperative of technique. The word has become image: the word made for computers, dominated by writing, inscription, and printing, and changed into a thing, into space and something visible. Now it must be seen to be believed, and we think we have finally fathomed all of language when we can apply a semiotic diagram to it.
The word deprived of meaning by the use made of it is thus transformed into something other than itself. This temptation had been great ever since writing began, since unity was the equivalent of an image. The distortion is clearly seen when within a single society one moves from a representative sign to a syllable or a letter with the same meaning. For example, a sign that represented the ocean ends up replaced by a letter or a syllable which has nothing in common with the word ocean. The same sign can thus be read twice: once in pronouncing the word ocean, and again by pronouncing the letter a.
At this point the word becomes uncertain and unstable. But obviously as yet we have no real change in that common use of the word, which remained overwhelmingly dominant. With printing this changed, because so much writing came to be distributed that reading became more important than the ability to speak. The term illiterate is the equivalent of uncivilized. Civilizations based on spoken language are usually not considered to be truly developed…
(Boer) Tom:
“…rather than the paranoid individual, who smells badly of fascism!” Enjoyed that one…
I do think that he devalues the visual and technical a bit too much, though – without access to the visual, repeated analysis becomes very confusing (how does one decide whether the towers should have toppled over, without some visual referent, e.g. center of mass of the collapsing structure, and its components of velocity?), but the danger is apparent when one assumes that something is true because of the apparent technical mastery of an image.
Other than that, he draws one back to the question of rhetoric, which was defined for us in engineering school as “communicating with an audience in order to get the audience to do what you want them to”. This sounds horribly instrumental, but need not be – engineers use lots of images in these encounters
though what exactly do we activists aim to do in talking/communicating? One doesn’t want to tell others what to do, so one makes modest suggestions. At least when you are willing to state what you want (I want you to do x, y and z, or please do x, y, and z, etc), if the person who fails to do it suffers some (preferably predicted) consequence of not doing it, you gain some credibility as a speaker/authority (in the knowledge and moral senses); in the rhetoric class, it was explained that communication relies on an interaction between the speaker and the audience, that is facilitated and modified by the message. If you want to identify probable government-based anti-truthers, look for people attacking the messenger (it works quickly) to the near exclusion of the message. (The 9/11 truther movement and the state’s response should be an object of study for activists…)
I think a big impasse in ‘leftwing’ activism is this fear of asking other people to do something (your not my boss!) – the homophobic right certainly does not have this fear – anyone want to try a handbill titled “We want you to remove your ‘Support the Troops’ stickers,” with multiple reasons listed? Another is an unwillingness to emotionally empathise with a political opponent with whom one is arguing.
14 March 2010, 9:39 pmStan:
Don’t know if you had a chance to read the preceding parts, but he doesn’t denigrate sight. He says that sight presents an as-is, a series of empirical impressions. Word, on the other hand, is part of something intersubjective, involving fuzzy boundaries, resonances, symbols that are malleable, the tension between two subjects that requires the word to leap over this existential boundary, and not least important, play.
The humiliation of the word is part of the technical propoganda apparatus… intersubjectivity is lost (you can talk back to the tv, but it doesn’t cause it to change course… I do that), and the word becomes entirely manipulative, therefore ingorable, therefore desacralized and humiliated.
I think the quote above carries an important insight for political people who decry the apparent obtuseness of most people in our culture.
Our discomfort with the disconnect between people who seem to share some capacity with us – we’ve stabbed at pattern recognition, etc, here – to think, actualy think reflectively and critically, and those who apparently cannot, has been confused with a class issue (which causes us to back off of it, lest we be accused of class bias); because access to thinking in fleshily symbolic words is restricted in “educated” society. But correlation does not equal causation.
Social control has been ceded to the advvertizers and propogandists. Not merely the love of reading, which grows out of an appreciation of the word – regconized and articulated or not – but the ability to think wordily.
Haitian peasants are not by and large readers, but they are intensely attentive to stories, to the spoken word, in ways that many of we metropolitans, disabled by years of image-heavy conditioning and snapshot instrumentality, are not. In the days before universal education, a prerequisite for the humiliation of the word, spoken language was far more often freighted with meaning, so the access to meaningful words was not consolidated in places like universities. Philosophy, etc, was; but that’s not what Ellul decries here. His thesis of the flattening out of the word is closely associated with his critique of technological civilization (he and Illich share this concern, and Illich spoke at length about it at a memorial service for Ellul).
There is likely even an organic aspect to this, which understood may relieve us of a lot of wasted energy. We know the plasticity of the brain, how habituation actually opens some kind of neural pathway (I’m watching Sherry study Spanish right now!). We may be dealing with a technically-induced, image-induced mass mental atrophy… describable in as physical terms as malaria or osteoporosis. Having said that, I’m not propounding a medical analysis, except as one situating aspect of something we are observing.
The solution may not be, looking at this from the standpoint of our persuasiveness in the public arena, changing how we present our case on this or that. People may have been reduced to the status of the proverbial hog looking at the wristwatch. It’s not getting through. There has been a phenomenological atrophy of the capacity to play in the fullness of the word.
It’s not some utilitarian flaw in our presentation. reparable if only [fill in the blank].
In a sense, we ourselves (using this ‘we’ in a very fuzzy way) have been captive to the idea of word as “communication,” constantly checking the efficacy of our “message.”
The restoration of the word, as I understand it, begins by restoring intersubjectivity… by being open to being suprised by each other, invitational. The word is a unique door for human beings to the truly important thing: reaching across the chasm. To hell with the message for a while.
Of all the stuff I wrote about the war back in my full-throttle activist days, the piece that got the best response was not analytical. It was an appeal to soldiers to “hold onto your humanity.” It was written in pain, and reaching to someone I knew somehow. The words had meaning, beyond a message.
Obviously I’ve been preoccupied lately with the relation between epistemology and phenomenology.
15 March 2010, 8:34 amm.c.:
Isn’t in Cuba, they continue the long tradition of The Reader in their cigar plants? The Readers read the newspapers, books and other valuable items of that day aloud to the cigar rollers. I’ve read they sometimes take requests from the workers, kind of like book club requests and such….
15 March 2010, 9:21 am(Boer) Tom:
I haven’t read enough of him (only this article) to get his broader perspective of vision (though he does accept it in a more technical sphere – I found some of the article confusing).
On another level, is an attempt to connect on a moral and emotional level through sincerity, and an open-ended instruction like that (hold on to your humanity) not a message? Whether written in pain, anger, disappointment (or joy, or approval), is it not perhaps a question of ceasing to hide from emotion? You wrote a piece telling certain people of consequences of certain actions, and appealing to them to avoid that class of actions. I realise that this description flattens the experience of writing it, but even the words can reduce the experience. Consider it as a class of interactions – is making a request on a moral level not a message?
I don’t mean to devalue your analysis – my problem/discomfort is with your choice of words on one level, and on another level, I don’t think the problem can usually be solved in (mass) writing. I’ll give you two examples. There is a local radical book store that I frequent, and I went there a few days ago. Some fellow from a small town about 150km south of here (100 miles? also, the town is the local centre of alternative/green technologies, composting haven etc, but still in many respects a fairly conservative small town) was trying to connect emotionally to the people working there, but he wanted to discuss whether e.g. homosexuality could be described as natural and what his ethical duties were to people of other religions etc., and was clearly very uncomfortable with homosexuality, Buddhism etc. He was making the staff very uncomfortable, and they were getting within the grey area that expands into mockery. At some point, I pulled him to the side, and continued the discussion on a more friendly manner. I gave the interpretation of religion as a lived experience, and explained the experience of chanting a mantra, taking one mantra in detail. I then explained emotion (he was extremely uncomfortable with the discussion on homosexuality, which he had initiated) as it arises from the mammalian brain, and interacts with higher brain functions to produce actions/behaviour, and is connected with the tactile sense (Shalif), and I set him on a path to explore his reaction to homosexuality, without being judgmental toward him (I did about 5% of the talking – most of the time, he was simply struggling to find words to describe and justify his confusions, discomfort etc., and I was patiently listening). At one point, some of the staff came to observe, and started to interact with him on a much more sympathetic level. Such interaction is easier when a trusted person interacts respectfully with an untrusted person.
In the rhetoric class, we were taught to empathize with the audience (I guess that when one rips off a customer, the customer should at least feel good about the whole experience
), but seriously, if one is sympathetic in a social encounter, one can exchange ideas despite profound disagreements. I do have an issue with mass communication, and if you look at e.g. alternet (2nd example), you’ll notice that people (used to) prefer the discussions (prior to their disasterous redesign) to the articles – even angry exchanges are far more human, and opportunity for far more detailed sharing of information and insight, than an article can be. Each exchange is targeted, on an emotional and intellectual level, at the person to whom one responds. In the terminology that you are using, the words are restored their meaning (with all the ambiguities that Ellul speaks of) in such interaction. Propaganda does tend to weaken it, though, and the state operatives who were attacking the truthers as untrustworthy individuals did tend to dominate discussions, and in doing so, turned people off the discussion space. I think that the propaganda states (mainly western Europe and North America) have a rather detailed understanding of this process, and practice undermining the space, and to get the participants to start undermining it as well. As such (considering that the truthers used the same techniques) it is quite plausible that state players were doing both sides.
15 March 2010, 11:25 amStan:
Letting Ellul have the floor:
15 March 2010, 3:23 pm(Boer) Tom:
What is this ‘pure’ communication, and does it lack the necessary interaction between individuals (consisting only of information)?
Also, is your purpose to study what he says in the abstract, or with some goal in mind? Playing with ambiguity is often a friendly way to get to know the person you are speaking with, thus establishing the necessary relationship for communication. If one’s purpose is to instruct in some matter, ever greater precision is used, until the desired effect is achieved, and more ambiguous language is used to achieve the desired actions once the intent is understood. If one’s purpose is to simply joke and talk with a friend, precise language is uncalled for, except where a misunderstanding occurs. As for the relationship between propositions, is the problem really language? I can use a neoclassical argument to demolish the ideological claims of neoliberalism, but when I do so, unsympathetic people become agitated and start making spurious and deranged claims. This is often not for lack of familiarity with formal logic (or the relationship between propositions) – the emotional reaction is to turn that interpretation off, as the conclusion that I represent is threatening.
Is the problem language and the use of words (as I read into Ellul), lack of technical mastery on the part of the audience, the fear of being identified as a radical or troublemaker, or some combination? (I’m back to needing more precision, at least in an example.) The engineer in his example has a material gain in the situation; we’ve just been taught to be better bullshitters, and not come across as icy anymore – we feign interest in such matters (include it in the budget, and we might even become truly interested – see e.g. Megaprojects and Risk. Without the material gain, would the engineer still be icy? With some strengthening of language as such, would he cease to be icy? Were he interested in flowery language, or alternatively, precision of meaning, would the situation change? In the latter case, with sufficient honesty, it would likely come down to, “Your quality of life may or may not be improved by the highway. That is not my concern. I have neither referents for a calculation nor resources to find such.” Would such honesty terminate the project? Possibly (with some struggle by affected groups). How about such projects in general? That engineer will get fired, and the pattern (of abuse of words, if you prefer) will continue.
Is Ellul asking for more honest language here? If language is ambiguous to start with, perhaps he is asking for honesty in the attempt to communicate. OK. How do we go about it, short of struggling for it? (We should be honest in any case.) Or is there a proposal that by changing our behaviour (as e.g. activists in respecting words? language? truth?) we can solve the problem? What would it entail? It really strikes me that the problem is one of relatively powerless people not wanting to come to conclusions that would morally require them to do something that threatens their relative security in the short run; they create justifications, and to threaten these is to raise their emotional defenses; sometimes the defenses are risen after the danger is passed (think of homophobia again) – can one short-circuit those defenses, or is there some problem with our use of language instead?
15 March 2010, 4:35 pmRobert Karaffa:
OK, pulled that cat off of my head; and the dark glasses are now resting in the leather nest of the seat next to me. The snow is gone now and we can drive fast with the usual sensations of inertia (side to side and front to back) without undue worries about sliding off the road as a consequence of just an unintentional flick of the wheel from inattention or reflexive response to the rhythm felt from whats on the radio. Language is weak. Weak. It cannot possibly express what we feel, let alone what we think in any close approximation to the power of our thoughts or feelings. But don’t think for a minute that language cannot still express surreality, because unless you are really good at hand signals (and this always works well) nothing else can do it with the same exactness unless you are incredibly good at concentrative staring. And I have to put in a plug for English as it seems to be the easiest conveyor of exact meaning (descriptively, maybe; oh forget that; just opened about 19 cans of international/cross-cultural/colonial/transnational/conquest oriented/gender derived and religiously consecrated and thermonuclear exploded cans of worms there)BUT hear this: In the USA we don’t have Culture, we have Marketing. We don’t have “news” we have positioning of hate words that elicit very well-planned responses. Maybe the word is totally humiliated; but no, none of this is over yet and we need to take heart while we can still speak from wherever we are. And ponder this: and its about cats; that poor old puss that was on my head is a neutered male cat that has a bladder problem…. the solution…my vet told me…. is to “make him a girl”….give him a female urinary channel to empty his bladder and save his life. Think about that. “HE” has to be “a girl” to save his life! HAH!
15 March 2010, 8:26 pmStan:
My reference to “message,” upon reflection, confused more than it cleared up. Perhaps I should have used the ever-popular techno-speak term “messaging.” Even still, I doubt this is the main point in Ellul, who was connecting the poverty of language in the Academy (from the same tendency that gutted feminism under the banner of post-modern orthodoxy) to the mounting superficality of culture (Robert’s point?) that employed the unanswerable image to linguistically disable whole populations. I think of consumer-culture in this regard… and the “gender-play” advanced by some academics, which gives equal weight to sex as an aspect of love and commitment and sado-masochism.
The simplest way he puts it in his essay is that the word is encroached upon in ways that superficialize or eliminate the person-to-person. No matter whether you are explaining to me how to fix a broken toilet, how class and gender intersect in workplaces, or how I feel when I risk loving you.
Technical society crowds out the intersubjective the way taylorism crowds out all meaning in the apotheosis of efficiency… part of the same process. The word is subversive of this process, because it always carries this creative potential inside the shared medium of language.
That’s why despots burned newspapers and hung public speakers. Now they crowd them out with a flood of information and images that are one-way, unanswerable.
Don’t know that Ellul has any particular plan in mind. It’s just a critique. I respect that as one who has taken a break from the windmills, and adopted the temporary standard: “Don’t just do something, sit there.”
Well… the other one is, “We must work in the garden.”
16 March 2010, 8:02 amStan:
Teaser: “But there is something even deeper: we live increasingly separated from the natural environment (we frantically try to rediscover it when we go on vacation). When we lose contact with this reality, which used to be the essential reality of our lives, we develop an extremely deep need for another reality. Modern people are the only living beings in a nonliving environment.”
Excerpt from Chapter 6:
16 March 2010, 8:30 amStan:
Another quote related to my hypothesis that we are disabled by the inundation of the unanswerable image:
Impatience and the skip-over. Once a society is entrained to this, it becomes the unwitting servant of advertizing and propaganda. This is nearly impermeable to critical persuasion, because there is already a reflex in place – Impatience and the Skip-Over – that filters out critical discourse. When I say reflex, I’m not being figurative. It is involuntary, and at some level even organic.
What teacher who is explaining a complex topic hasn’t encountered this wall in students? How much worse is it now that officialdom has embraced the dogwaggery of the standardized test?
At West Point, the harried cadets had a saying: Fuck the concept, give me the answer.
Ellul continues:
16 March 2010, 9:16 amDeAnander:
I was thinking that the Founding Fathers of contemporary USian culture are not those ponderous, aristocratic wordsmiths often cited; this culture’s architects are Bernays and Taylor.
16 March 2010, 11:22 amStan:
(-:
Then came Madison Ave with the demand-production industry.
16 March 2010, 12:30 pmStan:
Sorry, but this just popped up on our quote-list, and it somehow seemed related, since Benjamin does something called intersubjective psychoanalysis.
-Jessica Benjamin
16 March 2010, 12:36 pm(Boer) Tom:
Those students of Algeria were simply doing in a calm fashion what many do with anger – rejecting logic (relationship between propositions, again) and evidence, and going with what they are emotionally comfortable with. Perhaps on some level it is an estrangement from a living reality (how many people can comfortably sleep under the stars, with insects and small mammals crawling over them, and likewise, function as their ‘sanitized’ environment crumbles due to its own operation and external factors? They understood, and decided to go where they felt warm and fuzzy. Ironically, the few times such individuals will step out of their warm-and-fuzzy environment and deal with another person is when they seek to harm and extract wealth from another, e.g. cruel business dealings and/or rape. And again, I think it reduces to psychological, moral and intellectual development: Can a given individual operate within constraints that the individual is uncomfortable with, where the individual lacks power, etc? Does he avoid violent behaviour where the opportunity arises? Does the individual submit his (her) desires and beliefs to logic? Or does (s)he get home after work, and doze off behind the TV?
16 March 2010, 12:49 pmStan:
On the idolatry of our age:
17 March 2010, 10:33 amSkol:
I think this has important implications for our “rights” discussion. I had fallen into a sort of trap myself, by confusing what people are “messaging” when they speak of rights with what rights are supposed to mean. The word has been used in much the same way freedom and liberty has.
All of these mean something, and something profound, but I’ve grown accustomed to them meaning nothing but rhetoric used to invoke an emotional reaction that has nothing to do with the words themselves. I cringe when I hear them. I wonder if I cringe at their use or their misuse.
Maybe it’s that rights, freedom, liberty… don’t mean much to me. I have what I need. When they’re used so generally, maybe I lose part of my ability to think of what they mean for others who don’t have right of’s, freedom of’s, and liberty to’s. I wonder if they feel the same way about the words’ use/misuse. And if that’s the case, do the words actually mean anything anymore?
17 March 2010, 10:23 pmDeAnander:
Just a thought on the fly — is this humiliation of the word by the image what the traditional Muslim community tries to avoid by prohibiting the use of images in public (especially devotional) art? The traditional art of this culture-stream is calligraphic, not pictorial: the replication of beautiful words beautifully written.
OTOH we might give a thought to the idolatry of the Book… words can be reified, worshipped, claimed as turf and as idols; people will kill for them…
19 March 2010, 12:17 pmcabdriver:
I find a wonderful neutrality in text, and the ability of phonetic alphabet to arrange an extraordinary variety of words- and an infinity of connections between the words- from a small collection of abstract symbols and sounds (in English, a mere 26 alphabetic letters and 40 phonemes.)
Pictures can never supplant the ability of verbal language to convey complex information content, when it comes to the world of ideas and narrative.
I’ve only seen one film ever that was as good or better than the book it was based on- and that was due to the fact that Forrest Gump is not a very good book- it works much better as the starting premise for a screenplay.
And there’s a reason that Goebbels and Streicher placed such a heavy emphasis on visual propaganda, like films and cartoons- they intuitively grasped the mechanics of human perception, and the propensity for the human visual sense to trump rationality and reflection. Neuroscience has borne this out- evidently, something like 70-80% of the human perceptual neurosystem is devoted to the visual sense.
The above largely accounts for my low opinion of television and film- they drop pre-edited and arguably pre-digested content (largely in the form of images) into people’s brains without any possibility of their evaluative, critical, and reflective senses being engaged until after the fact (if ever). The give-and-take of reading and wrestling with words is bypassed.
Worse, the aliterate (those who can read, but won’t, who are numerous in the USA) quite often maintain the convinced impression that the information content of, say, a film documentary- or even a fictional TV show like 24- is equal to that of the unabridged nonfiction verbal narratives found in books. Such people have, for all practical purposes, been dumbed down. They’re less intelligent and less intellectually curious than they otherwise would be.
I’m not taking anything away from film as artistic accomplishment, on its own merits. Obviously, it’s able to accomplish tasks that no book can mimic. But it’s no substitute for reading.
Going out on a limb, to parse some possible insights:
We look at images. We think with words. Seeing is primarily perceptual. Thinking is primarily cognitive. We perceive experiences. Our thinking fits those perceptions into the narrative of consciousness, after the fact, cognitively. That’s why image/perceptual bombardment, a manipulative mode, is used as a technique of control and operant conditioning; while cognitive therapy to empower people (or oneself) to deal with psychological traumas concentrates on language, a self-reflective model that allows people to take control of their own stories. Outside power over the physical and material conditions of setting tends toward working to remove autonomous agency; the cognitive process of thinking- verbally- is how one defends oneself against that disempowerment. That’s how some people are able to survive stresses like solitary confinement, rape trauma, combat, natural disaster, etc. without mentally collapsing; they tell themselves stories of resistance and self-empowerment, and count every moment of survival as a victory in some sense. The outer conditions are the setting, which is perceptual; the inner conditions are the psychological set, which is cognitive, and internally generated.
20 March 2010, 1:36 pmcabdriver:
Not that words are perfect, of course- many are the cases where people tell themselves misleading stories and false narratives, in defiance of the perceptions that are blatantly in their face. Fictional cognitions/narratives that proceed in disregard and/or defiance of “facts on the ground” account for much of the folly of existence, do they not?
I’ve gotten to appreciate the insights of phenomenology, on that score. It’s imperative to keep the perceptual facility and the cognitive realm congruent, under most ordinary conditions. Those realms typically do disconnect under the most severe physical and perceptual stresses- as in the medical condition known as “shock”- and that’s a survival mechanism. But lacking that sort of dire necessity, having those realms decoupled is a bad idea.
20 March 2010, 1:48 pm(Boer) Tom:
Earlier, you stated that it the problem is not of ‘if only we did this’. I’ve had to think about it, and I’m really not sure that it is a separate concern from that of the apparent atrophy of mental capacity. The internet opens several possibilities in this regard, though again I stress that the communication is a real interaction, a two-way street – the story teller may be interrupted with difficult questions which must be answered plausibly. Is the atrophy substantial, or readily resolvable, with a suitable set of experiences? As an example, take someone who argues a point on the internet. Chances are that the individual will start with some idea gleaned from the TV. One takes a risk (of being mocked, having one’s argument torn apart by logic, etc.) by making a public argument (e.g. on the internet). After a while, one becomes accustomed to the risk of face loss, one starts to admit mistakes, read an opponent’s literature and so forth. But it is largely a path that one walks by oneself, with the occasional opponent being kind enough to provide some guidance. As an example, I was arguing with an ‘intellectual’ apologetist for the apartheid government (in a public forum) recently. She would frequently cite a multitude of books to make a given argument, but would not apply the consequences of law or limitations of logistics to evaluate the claims of crimes purportedly committed by the ANC. So I pointed some of those limitations out.
In terms of materialism vs idealism, can one not, by putting an opponent at ease, seriously considering what he is saying, etc., create a situation of partial emotional comfort that gains a material force? How does setting an example work? Think for a moment of a person as a neural network with actuators and sensors, and materialism in the philosophical sense as a social survival strategy in part, achieved through fight or flight, and in part a limitation on sensory data from which to abstract patterns. What I’m saying is ‘short-circuit’ the emotional discomfort which gives rise to the fight-or-flight response, until the new sensory data is given, and then give the person psychological breathing space or opportunity to critically consider the new data. What I said earlier about using insults (using Stockholm syndrome) is simply another way to disarm the fight-or-flight response. Another way (favourite among the confidence artists) is being extremely glib. Yet another way is repetition.
Using these, one can create openings to get the person to try an experiment under one’s guidance, which then amounts to multiple sensory and emotional data/referents, or experience (which has its/their own material force). Start someone on a short book, that is largely geared to a practical aim, and work them through some of the exercises, and their taste for reading may grow. I’m thinking in terms of recruiting to a movement…
24 March 2010, 6:21 pmStan:
We can be sure that the internet, and what it would become culturally, was not readily apparent to anyone in the mid-80s; and that would apply to Ellul as well. He had some prognostications, but the reality is always different somehow.
His attention to the word may not give us direct answers to anything, but it sure is a fertile place to start in figuring this medium out. I have very mixed feelings about this medium, and not mixed moderate feelings, but strong ones. The connection it gives me to people – like people in this venue – but to distant friends and family is invaluable, especially living as an expat. On the other hand, these things are made of things, and in ways, that give little comfort that this medium is – on balance in the larger historical perspective – more benign than malignant. In many ways, I feel very compelled to use this medium, personally, and compelled by the expectations of my loved ones that I will use ot to stay in touch with them.
I’m as convinced as Tom and many others that we still haven’t gotten our heads around this determinative “technique” as Ellul says, and that it is important that we do.
25 March 2010, 8:36 amno0:
The lack of critical literacy fed by populist appeals to common sense and the high pleasure of mass mediated reality, increasingly secured by the speed and endless spectacle of video game culture, induces a moral and political indifference that cannot even be bothered to engage intellectually on a public level at all. But more fundamentally, the appeal to common sense and plain language has become a rhetorical maneuver that masks a grab for power (especially by conservatives and corporate media) based on an illusion of legitimate authority and truth that denies the very existence of power embedded in linguistic constructs. Language in this dubious scenario is neither shaped by nor deploys power, nor is it worth struggling over.
Public discourse has taken a bad hit with the rise of the new media, with its economy of overabundance and its dizzying array of platforms. But there is more at stake here than an overabundant economy of information; there is a new kind of society of the spectacle producing a new kind of thoughtlessness.
http://www.truthout.org/on-pop-clarity-public-intellectuals-and-crisis-language57950
25 March 2010, 10:19 amHenry:
Isaiah’s Job
by Albert Jay Nock — 1936
In the year of Uzziah’s death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. “Tell them what a worthless lot they are.” He said, “Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don’t mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,” He added, “that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.”
Full article:
http://www.mrsdutoit.com/right/Isaiah.pdf
25 March 2010, 4:20 pmStan:
Here is a lengthy excerpt (by hand, scribewise) from Ivan Illich in The Rivers North of the Future. It relates to and thickens Ellul’s thesis. The book was a gift from De, thank you:
No0′s link above, btw, well worth a look.
27 March 2010, 11:45 am(Boer) Tom:
@Henry
Are you trying to address the masses, or a specific (group of) individuals? Who is the audience of your message, to whom are you explaining/demonstrating your ideas, or suggesting a path of action? The problem with the masses framework is that it is a sly way to say a ‘general audience,’ whose I existence frankly doubt. If you frankly address a hostile audience, and anger that audience by making yourself understood (assuming that you share a material interest in the matter discussed), they can come to (some of) the conclusions you present later, if you are basically respectful of their intellect. Here the written word is more effective than the spoken, as they can refer back to it, if first to attempt to prove you wrong (a healthy reflex imao)…
@Stan
27 March 2010, 4:59 pmDoes the image perhaps give rise to a sense of helplessness because it is non-interactive? In a sense, TV is an institutionalization of a Nuerenberg rally or a concert – the emotions are running too high (or too many soldiers, or people are too keenly interested in the presentation) for interaction, but now the actual interest of the participants no longer matter. (I’m not a fan of concerts generally – see Hamish Henderson‘s comments, his sexism aside…)
Stan:
I liked the Henderson link. Recommend it to others. Thanks brother.
The Gramsci material on folk singing is well worth a look.
28 March 2010, 8:31 amMichael Anderson:
I’m linking a NYT (AP) article from this A.M. about the Pope.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/world/europe/28church.html?fta=y
It highlights, in the MSM, the conflicts that have been discussed here about duality, gendered power, reason-as-separate-from-reality, and subjective/objective topics. AND humiliation of the word.
28 March 2010, 2:03 pm(Boer) Tom:
Thank you – a very kind form of address. I return it, brother. You may also enjoy his freedom come all ye, especially as sung by Luke Kelly. It is particularly relevant to us of colonial/imperial extractions, as it asks who we want to be (the Scottish were generally the imperial soldiers). With apartheid and the border war gone, we (Afrikaners) now are saddled with mercenaries, but if we can have another generation without war, we will be free of that curse as well – one of the last veteran Scottish mercenaries fought with Biafra. End your current wars, and wait another two generations, and you Americans may also be free. Good luck. I think a song has power when sung in a struggle (and when relevant to that struggle).
@no0
28 March 2010, 2:19 pmI see that thoughtlessness regularly, but it comes from people who want to emulate the academics, perhaps in the hops of being heard. The best response is to use relatively plain language to address their concerns, and use appropriate specific examples to address the concerns stated with more ‘technical’ language, while still using plain language, and not to respond with anger to the taunts of being uneducated, which arise from using the plain language.
Curt:
I now realize that maybe I should have not mentioned the fact that I recieved an Army Achievement Award some people might take that as a backhanded form of bragging.
30 March 2010, 3:42 amOk it is true to have recieved such an award was really much more than I deserved.
After all the most important thing that I did in the military was order new office furniture for the Battalion headquarters.
I have never been in the Marine Corp. but from what I have been told the Battalion Commanders do not even get a desk, even when they are in Garrison. They live by the Motto the most important work at meetings get done when everyone has to stand up.
My cousin was in the Marine Corp. He told me that once he had to go in the Battalion Commanders Office. This is how he described it. As you entered you faced a wall with the Battalion Colors at the highest level. Underneath that was a picture of President Regean. (This was when Clinton oh no maybe it was when Carter was in Office.) Underneath that was a crusifix. These items were flanked by two US Flags. One said in a plaque underneath that it was a replica of the flag that flew over Iwo Jima (or was it Hiroshima). It said that a person could verify this by counting the 48 stars on the flag.
One the wall to the right as he entered there was a collection of Swords. On the wall to the left was a antique gun collection. Hanging by thread from the triggers of the guns were pictures of his family.
It was a very functional office.
Stan:
‘I ask, “What can I do to survive in the midst of the show?” not, “How do I
improve show business?”‘
Here’s Ellul fan Illich remarking on “the image and the ethics of the gaze.” Are we ethically responsible for our gaze? One second thinking about gender, and the answer is obvious.
FULL
(thanking De again for putting me onto II)
4 April 2010, 2:01 pm