The Problem with Words
One does not need to be an acolyte of Deconstruction to worry about the provenance of words. The problem is really that many words appear always too large (or too small) for their context. One says one thing but also at the same time, and with sliding consciousness, says another. To talk of apparently mundane things, be it the behaviour of dogs, or itches that need to be scratched is to encompass the conversation that might include many a word of practical advice or comment on politics – or at least might do (to one party or the other). Moreover it is in this doubling up of language that disciplines such as poetry, philosophy and politics slip into being; Disciplines that either ride the slippage of meaning, or remind us of it, or simply misuse it. By itself this perhaps this has little real consequence. Or rather, the consequence of quarrels and misunderstanding which has always
been the price we pay for word use, well and truly outweighed the pitfalls and problems. Perhaps however our problem with the world, is that an extra dimension clearly opens up when we can capture up so much else in the world, in the consequences of our inability to tie words to meanings. Consequences that haunt not only us (humanity), but also the wider world as well. However the ins and outs of this mislabelling is clearly itself rather complex. Words overspill meanings in a variety of different shifting ways. For example words can suffer from (amongst others) an excess of history, of understanding, of passions, and of politics. A list which is far from exhaustive, and does serve to locate the full complexity of the issues at stake here. In the rest of this Rant I will consider in a little detail each of these examples in turn.
One of the repeated themes of these Rants is that old deep problem of nations. It was Gellner who argued, very cogently that nation states were the product of a certain history, and can only be applied to all other cultures inaccurately or even murderously. That is, the nation state was by and large the product of the Atlantic sea board (with variations). It is the state of Cromwell, Louis XIV, Philip II, William of Orange, and the two archdukes of Belgium. Even in these historical examples (or perhaps one might say particularly in these historical examples), it is never simply the case that a people were calling for a nation state to express their souls with. It was rather the case that the myth of a
people, (in the case of Britain that people were either the Welsh or the Anglo-Saxons) was called upon by writers who, for their own political purposes wanted to conjure up a past, and send it off to war. Hence the great re-writers of English history are the legalists and pamphleteers of the seventeenth century who invented the idea of the Norman Yoke, and the free Anglo Saxon people. A people of the past (whose name had vanished into history), a people were thereby rendered available to be pitched into the future. The Parliamentary army was always also the Anglo-Saxon army re-fighting the battle of Hastings.
The nation was then founded on the ghost of an impossible past. A past initially conjured in the needs of the present and yet which when summoned up, becomes encased with other forces, and becomes an agent of the future. The myth of Kosovo is therefore the paradigm for the state itself. The story is of a great defeat of the Serbs by the Moslems. A defeat that then defined the Serbian people themselves, in the exile and oppression. A Legend that created a people from whom a very dark myth of nationhood could be pulled forth, given the right conjunction of circumstance and political opportunism.
The problem of course comes when this model is taken up and 'sold' across the rest of the world. The problem here is not the sheer inappropriateness of so doing (although this is a problem), so much as the opportunities for violence and war that clearly arise as the natural corollary to this process. The problem here is that for any patch of land there are likely to be a surfeit of possible peoples, of possible pasts, which might claim to own it. Political debates of today become bogged down in the past, and thereby always run the risk of becoming intractable; no matter whether that history related to the doings of yesterday, or the nineteenth century or even three thousand years ago (or so).
Moreover the ease in creating a people adds the extra dimension that if any region in any state suddenly becomes more wealthy or more poor or feels itself to be substantially different from all the rest (in any way), it is easy to find a ‘people’ of the past to substantiate this difference, and through history, convert it into the demand for nationhood. One thinks here of oil rich Biafra or Kurdistan or Scotland; Or peripheral Brittany or Cornwall.
No nation is safe in its borders, as those borders contain many other virtual peoples awaiting the right circumstance for breath. This problem is of course even further complicated by the fact that the very ability to claim to be a nation, brings with it additional advantages and perks: One earns a seat at the UN; the right to manage one’s own affairs; to have a military and a police force (and so oppress one’s people – to a degree at least); the right to manage a currency…All sorts of extra rewards then lie within nationhood’s problematic embrace. A fact which of course gives all the more reason for ‘peoples’ to emerge from the morass of folk.
The second excess of language which clearly bothers us all goes back to the issue of which labels evolve and imply being. Take as an example the word ‘environment’. In a very real sense there is no more reality to the word ‘environment’ than there is to the notion of society. I mean that both are not names for things, so much as the complex interactions between things. As such, each are possibly best known when they refer to an intricate problem which is sweeping up many aspects of the world in some problematic process. An environment starts to matter when it is seen to be brittle or on the point of collapse; or a society is perceived when it does not work, not when it does. Moreover these points of strain are of course highly subjective. On another level there really is no such thing as the environment, if by that one means a stable system. All systems are always changing at a whole variety of different levels, and in a multitude of ways. We worry when some of those ways affect us in a way that we really do not like, whether it is because they directly implicate us, or a world which we love.
It is not that such sentiments are wrong or even muddleheaded. On the contrary they are natural and in effect, inevitable. It is, moreover equally natural, that these sentiments are often strongest in those who feel themselves to be at odds with the current system. The legend of environmental collapse, serves to also register a disquiet with society as it is currently thought, and a feeling that the world really ought to be other than it is. These extra concerns naturally interbreed with the world of hard science, spawning a whole a variety of additional thoughts and feelings. Our problem is, that these extra dimensions can easily choke off serous engagement with the fact that the ice caps are melting, which buggers up at least ourselves (and is therefore a matter for the environment).
Additionally the entire issue of the environment becomes caught up with a history of its own. I mean, it is all too easy to interlink the problem with the environment back to a longing for the old ‘simpler’ ways of life. The politics of the environment slip into the politics of being a peasant (this was Heidegger’s, and the early Fascist’s move). - A slip into the past that has two additional features. On the one hand there is an articulated, and much commentated on, authoritarianism which is conjured into life by this past. A past which is the history of strong leaders doing their people good – or at least telling them just what to do! The second, far darker corollary was that this past was as often as not, a past of endemic war (and attendant disease). What kept the land pure was death and dearth, which kept population and with it pollution, down. To return to the past, might then be to return to a state of war (in some form or other). A war that would, with little doubt, save the environment (no cheap flights, rationing etc), and yet at the cost of numerous human lives…
The environment is therefore a word too big for a definition. A word that in being, defines and hooks up numerous other debates, and additional facets and elements within it; Facets that at once delight and confuse our shifting minds.
The third popular excess of language, mentioned above lies in passions. We have a strange fidelity to the passionate, - that is once it has been defined within our minds. Take for example the endless wallowing in grief over the death of Diana or the fate of Maddie McCann. In both these examples a collective passion is conjured forth, whose exact provenance is difficult to gauge (most of us did not know Diana, and to be brutal many cute children vanish). This grief then bred a loyalty all of its own – which warped reality. Endless stories still abound about the exact fate of Diana (or Maddie): New witnesses are found or old witness are encouraged to relive their memories endlessly (and almost certainly rather lucratively).
It is almost as if that, once the collective feeling or passion is created, and once it is given a proper name, and an image, then that very creation, that very act of naming is enough to demand that reality is sucked up in given testimony to these ‘other realities’. Passions become black holes of meaning, around which the sensible world of space and time endlessly circulates. Moreover each passion really operates at its centre as a black hole; In that, in a sense, at the point of Diana’s death (or Maddie’s disappearance) another reality no doubt exists. A reality that in a sense the passion itself precludes us ever finding (or even of really caring about). The story – or better the endless fantasy, becomes so much more important than any strict regard for truth. To label a passion, thence becomes to open one’s mind up to a singularity – a point where one’s world changes after the event (and in spite of what the event itself might have been). One therefore forges in one’s mind not merely an excess but also an urgency to excess, a demand for the excessive (witnessed in the endless repetition of slightly shifted facts).
The fourth excess of language, is that practiced by politicians and the media who feed off and with them. In endless very stagey debates, the meanings of words slip, as clichés spawn across and then partially create, political scandal after scandal. This lexicon for scandal invokes history and myth to support it. Therefore a certain sort of scandal is almost invariably a ‘something-gate’ – and so caught up in the great history of scandals that either did or looked like they would, topple a government. Likewise certain phrases, such as ‘Answer the Question’ are built upon that horny old myth that no politician ever answers the question (no matter whether the question itself is worth asking, or even answerable or not).
Such then is the power of this lexicon, that scandal is in itself summoned up by its use, and this is no mean problem for political life. Take as an example the recent cases of ‘corruption’ in the House of Commons. Underlying whether or not, this or that politician broke the rules (or not), or behaved unreasonably (or not), lies the deep problem that these rules themselves (which were bought in by the current government) have effectively made what passed for normality in the House of Commons illegal. This move was itself in response to the ‘sleaze-hunts‘ that bought down the last government. The problem here being that these hunts were themselves by and large founded on a fiction. It remained the fact both then and now, that the House of Commons is peculiarly uncorrupt when compared with many of its continental opposite numbers. What was made illegal was therefore in effect the very ability to be caught up in a scandal at all (irrespective of whether that scandal has grounds or not). The trouble is, of course that this move merely moved the entire rumour mill down a notch. It is now a scandal if one could be thought to be involved in a scandal, or could be suspected of being caught by one (that is, if one has not been entirely transparent). Political language becomes the language for forging new stories for free (for a full examination of this click here), where any attempt to tell fact and fiction, from the language of myths that surround them, is utterly lost. The lexicon for political life thereby undermines our very ability to govern or be governed.
As long as the world remained rather small and uncomplicated, it no doubt mattered very little that we could never say (quite) what we meant. Wars might follow on from careless (or rather over extended) language - and yet those wars remained small in scale and scope. The Problem is that as humans become more and more able to do (and miss-do), things, the consequences of our inability to say what we mean, sweeps us up in endless new complications, and complexities. Complications that we can only hope do not, eventually lead to our accidental extinction.
