[Inspired by several recent postings: here, here and here]
Prisoners of Language
Everyone is a prisoner of language (Barthes, 1967:81) and no language can be trusted because all of them have been taken captive by publicity. Political language, a strong, heavy discourse, presents itself as knowledge but usually speaks the opposite of what it says. Wither politics, sociology, all the social sciences and their stereotyped politicized languages. In any event the language of the social today is that of fashion. Artificial languages, including the language of economics, advertising, and computers, spread like viruses. One especially sad outcome is the language of the consulting industry.
The efforts of techno-capitalism to finally rationalize language are extensive. When deployed by artificial intelligence in computerized codes language becomes as useless as the sex organs of a clone (Baudrillard, 2000:11). Language won’t be defeated when all of them are translated into 0’s and 1’s – the lonely language of computers – but we will. When one computer generated language dominates all the others we will be dead. While we wait for the arrival of our destiny new words are unwrapped and discarded over the conceptual landscape not unlike trash along our roadways. Media proliferate by filling the increasingly empty space of language (as we once knew it), with a new and seductive language of images. The cell may be more colourful and comfortable but we remain prisoners here.
When there is nothing left to say…
The global distribution of language, a process sped along by globalization and anti-globalization both, is a tragedy only from the point of view of those who wish to enforce a shared meaning. Meaning can only stand so much speed and simultaneity before it dissolves. And when, precisely, was meaning ever especially happy? Despite the translation industry all languages are singularly beautiful in that they remain foreign to one-another. There is always something malformed about language and I wonder if words do not sometimes resist meaning. Distortions echo wildly across the valleys of translation ever more bizarrely in the age of machine translation. No matter how we try to transform them into each other each language remains somewhat without equal refusing to be reduced to another. Language occupies a space between the something and the nothing (Saussure) and it alone remains immune to indifference. It precedes us and I remain uncertain as to whether it has anything at all to do with our desire for utterance. Even when we have nothing left to say language remains.
The Illusion of the World…
Language is most joyful when it creates an interruption. Language will not pass quietly into functionality and has resisted doing so since the dawn of the machine age. Language has a certain power to resist as it is “illusion in its very movement” (Baudrillard, 1996:98) just as it is merely “the involuntary accomplice of communication” (Ibid.:104). Language always says more than it means. Language thinks and it speaks us to each other. It is almost impossible to sneak up on it but sometimes we come close to its illusive presence.
In thought we meet the problematic of language and consider the possibility of poetry where language may be freed from the duty to describe. In any writing we are simulators, mere vehicles the world uses to express itself via language. We are deft dancers in this realm of discourse where a constant series of duels takes place between language and meaning. If realism had any truth to it we would recognize language to be the institutionalization of objectivity – yet we are overwhelmed by our own living discursive example of how language is the institutionalization of subjectivity. Language as such can never be an instrument and our use of language should first and foremost be concerned with language. Language has never belonged to anyone and we all do very well as survivors of the catastrophe of meaning.
Language is not a reflection of Meaning – rather it stands in the place abandoned by Meaning (Lacan; Baudrillard, 1994:92). Here the fatigued representatives of realism begin to drop out of our voyage into language – exhausted and done in by the discovery that everything is a movement – a dance of discourse. The realist believes that the world is identical with itself but it can never be so because we know the world through language. All our language ever knows is the realm of appearances behind which, as if wearing a veil, the real remains hidden. Think of the smooth, cool, flat, motionless, solid desk upon which rests your reading machine. Any physicist can share with us the beautiful theory fiction (and as it is based in language all theory is fiction), that the “real” stuff of the desk is constituted by dancing atomic fields and subfields. There is even more space between the atoms which make up your desk than is occupied by the atoms themselves. Your desk, like mine (and you and me and everything else), is more nothing than something. What we perceive as a desk are the appearances behind which the real desk remains hidden. Our relationship to our desk is but one example of the illusion of the world at work. And so language, because it belongs to the domain of illusion, allows us to play with that illusion (see also Baudrillard, 1998:44). And here in the inhabited void of language we find our relationship to it is much more poetic than material. We dance among the discourses as they constitute our world. Because of the illusion of the world and how it preserves us from the real, we can share in the dance, each in our own way.
Gerry Coulter has published in many international journals. A recent paper Baudrillard and Holderlin and the Poetic Resolution of the World” appears in the peer-review journal: Nebula, Volume 5, Number 4, December 2008:145-164. This article is also available on the internet at: www.nobleworld.biz/Coulter.pdf. His recent paper: “Launching (and Sustaining) a Scholarly Journal on the Internet: The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies appears in The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Volume 13-1 (2009): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/ text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno= 3336451.0013.104. A peer-review essay “Jean Baudrillard and Cinema: The Problems of Technology, Realism, and History” in Film Philosophy, Volume 14, Number 2 (September): pages 6-20. Available at: http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/ view /106 /287
He has also written five entries [Art; Language; Poetic Resolution; Reversibility; and Writing] for The Baudrillard Dictionary (Edited by Richard Smith), Edinburgh and Columbia University Presses, 2010. His writing on Baudrillard includes “Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive Ambivalence of Gaming” in the peer-review SAGE Journal: Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media. Volume 2, Number 4, October 2007:358-365.
Dr. Coulter’s teaching has been recognized on numerous occasions including Bishop’s University’s highest award for teaching – the William and Nancy Turner Prize. He is the founding editor of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (On the Internet): www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies
References (Dates of publication for those in English).
Roland Barthes (1967). Writing Degree Zero. Boston: Beacon Press.
Jean Baudrillard (1994). The Illusion of the End. Stanford University Press.
Jean Baudrillard (1996). The Perfect Crime. New York: Verso.
Jean Baudrillard (1998). Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit. New York: Verso.
Jean Baudrillard (2000). The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press.