When the Word Loses Its Charge
Language is created and controlled by convention, determined by poststructuralists and to have an arbitrary relationship to time and matter and manipulated by political and social forces. According to these thinkers, we are living in a mediated hallucination in which the things we see, hear or touch—even the emotions we feel—are nothing more than fantastical dreams faking cohesive narratives—shadows on the wall of a cave. Welcome to the Spectacle, of the Guy-Debord variety.
On the other hand, as thousands of gatekeepers in the process of aging out have complained through the ages, our language is deteriorating. It is increasingly full of grammatical imprecisions, clueless word choices, and apathy regarding the achievement of clarity. As a teacher of creative writing, I have tried for the thousandth time to teach students the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb, usually when explaining that you cannot “lay on a bed” in the present time; you can only “lay” something on that bed. “Lay is a transitive verb that takes a direct object,” I wearily re-explain. “You can lay a book on that bed, but you yourself must lie on it.” A jocular object lesson works no better. If I respond winkingly to a student who writes, “I am laying on the bed,” with the question, “Whom were you laying on the bed?”, I’m almost always met with perplexity. In fact, “whom” as well has become nearly extinct from the English lexicon. It is often dealt with by a blatant grammatical error (“I don’t know who I gave the book to”) or avoided altogether by turning people (“who”/”whom”) into things (“that”/”that”), and I seem to be the last one alive who minds hearing, “…the woman that I dated a year ago...”
Nevertheless, in my opinion, the worst linguistic damage has come from the recent political instinct for genderless speech, which is responsible for putting the formally plural “they” in its service, using it to indicate both its traditional plural meaning as well as the singular. Those who resort to such a solution are wont to utter, “They are going to the movies with me,” leaving it up to the listener to struggle with context in figuring out whether one or more individuals is/are being referenced. Are you going to the movies with another person or with a crowd of 3,000? Only the speaker knows for sure.
If only the grammatical nightmare unleashed by this change were all, but alas, as a teacher I have been encountering people who may be on the right side of the political spectrum but who seem to have lost the ability to decline the pronoun they, producing such concoctions as, “I went to the movies with they.”
Keeping all of this in mind, it appears that one camp of linguistic scholars must be wrong. If language is truly a system of social control, then its decay could be a type of liberation—freedom from the shackles of convention. Green anarchist and primivitist philosopher John Zerzan, whose writings may or may not have inspired the Unibomber, subscribes to such a thesis and advocates the transcendence of all symbolic thinking by returning backward to a second hunter-gatherer Eden in which there was little or no linguistic interface between our world and our senses.
Perhaps. However, it seems evident to me that the current degeneration of language we are experiencing is not moving toward any mute, ecstatic congress with nature, matter, or the immediate present, but rather, a never-before-seen, language-deprived state of “idiocracy,”* sustained by the cathectic fascination of visual signs enshrouded in the disguises of alluring capitalist promotionals.
There is an important rebuttal to my complaints, which I feel compelled to mention: as I gleaned from a course I took on the history of the English language many years ago, all linguistic development and change are accomplished by decay. One of the most familiar and tangible examples of this is the phoneme, or linguistic unit, known as a schwa, the vowel sound produced when the lips, tongue, and jaw are completely relaxed; for example, the vowel sound in “the” as well as in the article “a,” or the French word “un,” meaning one or a. Quite often in the long history of language, this noncommittal vowel has replaced more complicated inflections as words and their declinations passed into common speech and deteriorated, leading eventually to a new dialect that flowed into a new language (consider, for example, the progression of Old English to Middle English to contemporary English). From this observation, one could conclude that the distortions against which I have been railing are actually a kernel of transformation of a new English yet to come.
Nevertheless, this does not account for the observation that, with the rise of the virtual, we seem to be fleeing the Word (and the Law) of the Hebrews for the fetishistic world of the pagan Image, a place where falsification functions on a much less conscious level. When it comes to systems of social control, nothing can beat the Image, which can be as visceral to the senses as it is nebulous to the intellect. Not only are its powerful strategies often hidden behind the magnificence of its garb, but it often requires much less formal education than the Word to enjoy reacting to in a complex manner. It can be the carrier of a thousand impulsions, aggressions, libidinal storms, and unacknowledged motives that the Word would have to struggle in a long-winded, partially transparent manner to achieve.
This is not to claim that the genuine search for truth, beauty, and new ways of perceiving no longer remain the province of the serious visual artist as well as the serious writer. It is merely to maintain that the ill-intentioned use of the image for control, gain, the promotion of bias, and the hostage-taking of markets is best achieved in this domain of the visual, something that we are experiencing more and more frequently now that the image can be instantly conveyed to billions through the use of weak electric currents. Because of the increasing development of such a force, the members of our species are becoming dumb—something I intend in both senses of the word.
*Idiocracy, a 2006 American comic film directed by Mike Judge, about a future in which society has sunken into base stupidity.
**A different version of this essay appeared under another title in Art, Poetry, and the Pathos of Communication, edited by Richard Milazzo, OBSzine, No. 3 (2017).