Language and Power

I will try to drive this topic, but let me tell you up front, I'm a follower by nature and driving things is just not my style, but hey, I'm here to learn so take that!

This thread is for discussion of power relationships and after BushCo, more specifically how language mediates those relationships.

We are all familiar with the cant associated with our industries/jobs. Insiders and outsiders are identified by the language they use. Oligarchs recognize one another by the language they use and obfuscate their intentions through Orwellian language. Just consider "Death Panels". City folk often look down about country folk because of the language differences between them, particularly the level of diction. How do we use these in our communications strategies.

I've only read one book on this topic, Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu. I'm interested in examples of how language is used to create segregated spaces between groups of people who ostensibly speak the same language, but through word choice and accent create different impressions and as a result wield more or less power than the other. I'm also interested in the idea that reality is what we make it, a consensus of subjectivities that create a perceived reality, and how that perceived reality may vary from one consensus to another. And, if indeed there is an objective reality.

So, here we go!

I couldn't possibly touch the question of "objective reality", but this also ties into the creation of ingroup/outgroup categories and the assignment of individuals to one or the other according to their language use and ability to pick up shibboleth usages--think of sociolects like the old London Polari or French Verlan, or hip-hop slang even; think of varieties like Chicano English, which are often treated as ESL or second-language cases even when their speakers have little or no Spanish, which would seem to make them "legitimate" dialects--a Chicano speaker in LA saying "he come up to me" is going to get interpellated, stereotyped and (if it's not being too extreme) oppressed as a result of his language use, where a "Modified Northern" (as dialectologists somewhat unfortunately call it) speaker in Sheffield saying "It were amazing" is accepted as speaking a legitimate, albeit folksy, variety without strong implications for his socioeconomic class or whatever. Who owns English, and is therefore allowed to change it to suit their purposes? In what complicated ways are empowerment through language and discrimination as a result of language use connected?

Good topic.

I know I had to read something about this topic for my sociolinguistics course in college. I just can't remember what it was. There was a lot of controversy at the time (I graduated in 1990) about what linguists were calling "BVE" - Black Vernacular English in the US, and what the social implications were for black people who used it, and whether it was OK for schools to accept it as a dialect, and all these types of things. At the time I had an acquaintance who was a Masters' candidate who was interning at the Gallaudet School of the Deaf and there were similar controversies around deaf people's use of American Sign Language, which was couched as practically a human rights issue.

My SO is a social worker in a nonprofit that houses homeless seniors and he has really strong opinions about how dominant groups use language to "keep people out" or "down" and he believes that as long as you can understand someone you should not discriminate about their speech being "correct" or not. I disagree with him (I am the type of person who cringes when Bush pronounces "Nuclear" wrong) although I can see where he is coming from.

The thing about these types of topics for me is that I really can relate to every side of the controversy and I don't think there are any easy right or wrong answers for the problems created by language differences between groups.

Anna: I have to admit that I am with your SO (never seen that acronym before!) all the way, although I can see your point of view too. We all have particular usages that just kill us; for me, the trick is to concentrate on all the other reasons to dislike Bush (of which there are many!).

These days, the established term seems to be AAVE, and the dialect-status battle is fought and won in linguistic circles, I believe (I don't see that the non-dialect people have much of a leg to stand on myself), although I guess in the culture at large you still get people lampooning "ebonics" (which was a poor choice of term to hang a legitimate political programme on IMO). The ASL thing is incredibly interesting too--with cochlear implants having transformed what is possible with teaching deaf and hard-of-hearing people to speak and understand spoken language,I understand that there are a lot of older DHH people seeing a whole culture around sign language under threat of extinction--as you say, a human-rights issue.

4: Sorry to be so cutesy re "SO", but "boyfriend" sounds stupid since he's over 50.

We talk about these issues a lot. Another thing we were discussing the other day is the young female American tendency to have a raised inflection at the end of sentences, which is annoying to older people like myself. I was arguing that it makes the person sound unsure of herself because it makes her statements sound like questions. Chris (let's just start using his name) pointed out that this negative impression is true for me but that younger people would be so used to the phenomenon (which is fairly ubiquitous on the west coast) that they would not see it as a credibility issue.

On the ASL thing, I remember reading a spirited debate about whether young deaf people who were educated in a deaf environment and who are part of the ASL culture should have the choice to refuse cochlear implants (I think they were teenagers). I was really torn.

>5 anna_in_pdx: That is so closely related to my research, which is on the "creaky voice" phenomenon among young West Coast speakers. When it first appeared in the eighties, it was associated with the "Valley" accent, but it has since generalized to basically everyone who grew up in the intervening thirty years between LA and Vancouver to some degree (or such is my belief) and is spreading (from my nonsystematic observation, it seems common in young Canadian women I go to school with from Alberta and Ontario, although not from Pennsylvania and NYC. And young West Coast men definitely use creak--and uptalk, come to that. (I exhibit both strongly in my speech). There are complex rules governing the use of uptalk, but I'm not sure how conscious they are--I only know that you're definitely right, I don't think anyone hears it anymore as tentative or a credibility issue. Chris is making great observations.

I didn't realize cochlear implants were a mandatory (as opposed to routine) thing at all! That is appalling.

It was not that they were mandatory but that the parents wanted the kids to have it and the kids were old enough to have a strong opinion about it.

Kind of similar issues come up with teenagers on mental health issues. A few years ago when he was around 15, my son was prescribed anti-depressants and refused to take them because he was afraid of losing his personality or becoming somebody else.

What a thing to do to one's kids, with the cochlear implants. "Honey, we know you like the way you are, but we just hink you're broken and everything will be all right once you get these implantas put in and you can hear like the neighbours' kids."

On the other hand, I think your son was absolutely right in the case of the anti-depressants--this may be baseless prejudice, but I feel like possible deleterious side-effect would only become more possible if the subject was trepidatious about taking the drugs, and a recent tragedy in the family of a close friend has show how serious messing around with brain chemistry in any way can be. On the other other hand, anti-depressants obviously help a lot of people function too, so maybe I have no idea what I think:) I hope your son is healthy and happy and that you're having a good Christmas.

I often come to the conclusion that mosts kids are ok but that there is something very wrong with a lot of grownups.

>9 Macumbeira:

If the 80-20 rule applies, that would mean 60% of the OK children turn into very wrong grownups eventually.
So at what point would this transformation take place? Are they just adapting to the evil ways of their peers?

Good questions Pim,

I guess that in the process of growing up they are indeed accumulating " bad habits.

>5 anna_in_pdx: Anna, I agree with you about the raised intonation sounding tentative due to its similarity to a question intonation. I have often thought about this, and I'm delighted to find it so well articulated here. My students (Mandarin native speakers learning E as a second or third language) are also starting to mimic this, under the influence of movies and TV shows set in LA, I suppose. I am vigilant about correcting it.

Do you suppose it might be a manifestation of the general dumbing down of American culture? like, you know, that's what I think? but like what do I know?

Or is it an interactional device, to turn every statement into a question to encourage a response in the conversation, like a question tag?

It does make people sound excessively stupid, imv. "I went shopping? I found like this really nice like handbag? It was so like, like cheap?"

slap slap!

Blame Zappa and Moon Unit for popularizing what ye speak of as they meant to mock the inanity of it, but instead, they merely helped spread this sickening language disease across the world...

some behind the scenes on Val-Speak

Valley Girl contest, as if enunciating like this were something grand to aspire to! Dumbing down of American (sub)culture indeed.

Nooo! It's just a tone thing! I do it--I think a tonne of young people do, in the US and Canada, and here's hoping that we won't prove to be dumber than our predecessors, for everybody's sake--but, y'know, I get that it sounds obnoxious to a lot of people, but let's compare it to a grammatical tag like British "innit?" It's just another way of saying "you know what I mean? you follow?" and soliciting input without actually literally doing any of those things. I'm sure it does have a function of making things more tentative as well, but that's kind of nice too, right? Like, it makes things friendlier? Less a matter of outgrowling the other guy? Fosters dialogue? Perhaps.

(I have to admit, I'm actually kind of fond of it:)

BFA and Anna's "SO" Chris vs. Tomcat, Anna and EF on the "uptalk" thing! :) I admit that just by virtue of being on the W. Coast I say "like" and "y'know" a whole lot more than I should, but the uptalk thing just sounds too young for me to imitate.

Actually I sort of agree with BFA that it will end up just being a thing like "innit" and it's only us fogies that think it sounds like the speaker is questioning what they are saying. How old are you TCM? :)

I think the main thing that manifests "dumb" in American culture is the opposite of this - rather than sounding unsure, many Americans seem under the impression that having an opinion is a right, rather than something that should be based on actual knowledge, and I (being a judgemental jerk) really find that maddening. When you eviscerate someone's stupid, ignorant opinion with a bunch of actual facts and the person says "well, that's MY opinion! This is America!" it's such a copout. My facts can beat up your opinions!

Also, BFA, what is the difference between "creak" and "uptalk"?

Ha ha ha, I feel so weird about being "BFA" but I guess I brought it on myself. Anyway: good question! "Uptalk" is the usual linguistic term for what we've been talking about in this thread in re Valley accents--pitch raising at the end of the sentence or clause, so everything sounds like a question.

"Creak" (or creakiness, or creaky voice, or glottalization, or laryngealization, or vocal fry) is not a matter of pitch but rather of voice quality or timbre--the type of sound the voice is making. The usually identified voice qualities are modal (aka "normal"), creaky, breathy, falsetto, whistle (above falsetto; called "flageolet" by singers) and whisper, and each of them is created by a different arrangement of the vocal folds--holding them closer togetheror further apart, keeping them tenser or looser as you speak, etc. The existence of other voice qualities is sometimes argued for, such as "harsh voice" and "growl", but for various reasons these are problematic--mostly because creating them also depends on other structures outside the larynx).

The simplified version of what happens when we make speech is that our vocal folds are held together and we force them open by pushing air through them--when we put enough pressure on the folds by pushing air out with our lungs, a little bit of air is forced out and then the vocal folds slap back together, producing a pulse of sound that is then magnified by the resonant chambers in our mouth, pharynx and/or nose. Do this hundreds of times a second and you have voice. Creaky voice is what happens when you slow down the air exhalation, hold the vocal folds loosely and slackly, and each individual pulse becomes louder, "meatier" and farther apart, to the point where we can actually hear them. Here is an example (ignore the "supernote" stuff) where you can see the vocal folds (not in real time!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaW3MVPmfFs

And here is one where you can hear the creak better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P74x3D4NOuk

I always think of it as the sound bored kids make in the car on a long road trip, but perhaps a better reference point is music. Take Ani DiFranco--listen to e.g. "back door" at 0:30, but she creaks all through this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STT4tFNAmL4

Or Clarence "Frogman" Henry, starting at around 1:27. This is the kind of creaking you would never hear in speach, because it is completely consistent the whoe way through--compare Ani, who drops in and out of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9eBNRjD7bA

Here is Mr. Leonard Cohen, a good example of natural creaky voice in speech and song--you can hear it very clearly when he starts singing at 0:45, and then throughout to lesser degrees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHjnjIbwvGI

Anyway, in some languages (e.g. Khmer, Danish) creak has a phonemic function (so that "ba" and "ba" said creakily could have totally different meanings--"why" and "fish" or whatever). In English this is obviously not the case, but we use it to communicate may things in many situations--tiredness, sincerity (classic insincere sincere creaker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIP_KDQmXs), authority, masculinity, etc. But we do none of these things systematically. What is starting to emerge is that young people on the west coast are creaking like all the freaking time. It's getting more and more systematic out west and spreading east--possibly, in a perfect world, to become a universal in North American English, so our children and children's children will all be beautiful creakers.

So the short answer that goes with that long answer is that moe uptalk and more creak are both phenomena that started and are more advanced among young people out West--thus, they often go together. I leave you with this example from Seattle, exhibiting really strong creak and only a little uptalk:

http://www.acoustics.org/press/149th/ew_creaky.wav

And this example from a speaker who grew up in Canada and Wisconsin, showing both (scroll about a quarter of the way down the page--the whole entry is pretty interesting on uptalk, though:)

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=586

In the Inflectious Language thread we were discussing uses of inflection when Anna, as part of a longer post said this:

"Then there are the problematic social issues about why you would need all this extra specificity - tends to be in more gender-segregated traditional societies where there are more of these familial categories, and one could fairly ask, in a society like ours, what use would it be to differentiate between paternal and maternal aunts/uncles? And might it be argued that our lack of need to distinguish them might be a good, rather than a bad thing and a sign of progress, so to speak?

The issue was greater specificity for familial relations than we have in English. Not simply the concept of parental sibling, but on which side of the family, older, younger, and so forth, all designed to pinpoint where one is in the familial hierarchy. This led me to think of power relationships and thought maybe this thread might shed some light on language used in this way. Are there examples in the West of language used to determine social position? I'm sure there must be. Any ideas?

>17 MeditationesMartini: booksfallapart

Thanks for those sound clips. Creaking and uptalking is common here in Australia too.

>19 Thrin: Cheers:) And that's intheresting: would you say it's younger people more than older? Women more than men? Urban more than rural?

>20 MeditationesMartini: booksfallapart

It seems to be younger people here who do most of the creaking and uptalking. Teenage females more than males. Interestingly I've observed that my own younger relatives seemed to grow out of it during their university years. High School pupils seem to be the most common indulgers in these vocal traits. We're 'semi-rural' (but not far from Sydney - east-coast Australia) and the children all went to high schools in this district. I'll have to listen more carefully now. Shall report further soon.

Maybe a west-coast Australian could tell us if it's the same in Western Australia (Indian Ocean rim rather than Pacific).

Edited to add that it's possible my younger relatives haven't 'grown out of it' and that I've just got used to it. More attention needs to be paid to this on my part.

>21 Thrin: Thanks! It sounds roughly similar to what I feel like we're seeing here, but the "grown out of it" thing is another interesting wrinke. They've done some studies that show that something like 80% of Canadian children say "zee" for the last letter of the alphabet, but almost all adults say "zed"--and that this has held true over time, so there is actually no change happening (as you would usually expect if the kids were doing something different). In other words, kids abandon "zee" as they age. I wonder if something similar could be happening here--and where it comes from, and why.

>!8 Geneg, this is a fraught issue especially in business, where titles are indicative of social status and seniority: president, vice president, department head, executive assistant. Unfortunately, there is no standardisation, different companies use different nomenclature. This lack of standardisation is a nightmare for my Chinese (and I suspect Japanese) learners of English, where these kind of relationships and words to signify them are crucially important.

Another area of power and language that you mentioned are the words - and insignia- (let's do semiotics!) for military ranks in army and navy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_officer_rank_insignia

#21,22:

New Zealand and Australian uptalk has been around for at least 25 years I would guess. I still used it when I moved to the UK from New Zealand some 12 years ago.

I remember reading somewhere that it is making some inroads into the UK too, due to the influence of australian soap operas.

>24 zenomax: Cheers--there are "indigenous" British forms of uptalk as well, and I'm wondering whether (in a perfect world) North American/Antipodean (first occasion I've ever had to use that word, and I'm very pleased about it) uptalk could be traced back to a divergent stream of pitch patterning in the British Isles (like North American "r", which was dominant in Britain as well, but disappeared over the course of the 19th century--after the American Revolution and the development of a separate US standard). And then, like, maybe it only became a conscious steretype habit when it was associated with an easily stereotypable group like Valley girls? That would be amazing. That Language Log post I linked earlier says this:

"The main phonetic difference between classic North American / Antipodean uptalk and the "Urban North British" statement rises is that the latter rise at the nuclear syllable and then level out or trail off, whereas in uptalk the pitch just keeps on rising."

re: rising inflection - my totally speculative theory is that it arises from telephone culture. in a face to face conversation you have eye contact, nods, etc. to communicate "I am listening" and the speaker can watch for those and not need the constant verbal reassurances: "uh-huhs", "I follow you so far", and so on. On the telephone I as speaker cannot monitor you as listener without those verbal reassurances. The rising inflection is a non-verbal sentence, communicating the interrogative (are you with me? do you follow? do you have a reaction?) even though the verbal sentence it accompanies is not itself a question. The lack of a response to the rising inflection is then taken to be confirmation that the listener is following and does not need to intervene for clarification or comment - to use TCM's examples in 12 - clarifying responses might be "where did you go shopping? OMG! did you buy the bag we were talking about earlier? was it red?"

>26 slickdpdx: I like it! Do we have any evidence for uptalk in other languages post-telephony?

This thread is causing me acute panic and anxiety, as I think the discussion should be taking place in the 'Sounds' thread. You see, I told you I was anal about organising threads. However, I shall try to overcome my neuroses.

Creaky voice exists in Chinese, especially in the young Taiwanese. Chinese sentences generally start on a higher pitch and then descend over the sentence. This means that third tone and second tone words that are put at the end of the sentence are often pronounced with creaky voice. These tones require the voice to drop below the median intonation level of the rest of the sentence.

There is a a famous radio talk show host who uses this third tone creaky voice to great effect in her late night talk show. She is very popular with taxi drivers.

Yeah, I'll happily follow creaky voice to "Sounds" or wherever it goes:)

Andy Devine, one of the great creaking voices ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9pPFCjRPvM&feature=related

I have moved the discussion on uptalk and creaky voice to Martin's 'Sounds' thread here

http://www.librarything.com/topic/79731&newpost=1#lastmsg

so that we can get back on topic.

I know that power and language are favorite topics in Post Modern thought, does anyone have any suggestions which books might be useful for investigating this topic with an idea toward driving discussion. I was thinking given my lack of knowledge combined with interest in this area that something like a common read might get us talking in here.

My main concern with language and power is mostly rooted in the idea of framing as identified by Lakov and others. I'm very put off at the idea of framing arguments in such a way that the frame does not represent reality, thus any discussion taking place within that frame is not likely to comport to reality, either. This seems to be a favorite political tactic for putting points across in argument. When I hear people talk about "creating their own reality" it just makes me cringe. Where does this come from? What purpose does it have beyond creating false grounds from which to argue? Where did this thinking come from? Is it useful in some way and my personal distaste for lying gets in the way of my realizing this?

In what ways do we use language to enforce or create power?

Just got here, tripping over this thread that I suppose was always here. I'm with booksfallapart and anna back in messages #14 and #15. I don't see any dire devolution in the world because of the use of ''y'know" and "like," and "you know what I mean," which my wife says all the time and I've learned to nod or grunt in respond to, because that's what I think it calls for, being just, kinda (ha!), a way of reaching out for reassurance, to make a connection, to say: "Are you with me?"

Very interesting article on the use of language in the reporting of the disaster in Haiti.

http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/1514/when_the_media_is_the/

the things you read Tomcat !

>33 copyedit52: Hey, well said!

I just recommended Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" on another thread. It's on line here:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

Here's a funny example from it that I thought all of you would enjoy:

"I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. "

Ha! Anna, that is brilliant!

>34 tomcatMurr: Rebecca Solnit is such a fantastic writer. Her book Wanderlust comes with my highest rec, and while I may not agree with her on retiring the word "looting" from the English language (how else describe what American soldiers did to Iraq?), I agree with virtually everything else. The rewritten captions were especially good. And on that rewriting note,

>37 anna_in_pdx: I'd forgotten about that fantastic part of that amazing essay. The best thing that Orwell ever did for me was setting out these rules for good writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Those rules are rubbish, especially 2, 3, 4, 5. They have done more (apart from microsoft word grammar checker, probably) to create the current standards of bad writing in journalism than anything else, and have resulted in the dreadful dumbing down of public discourse.

Thanks for the Wanderlust recommendation, though. I wuold like to read more of her work.

I really think - OOH!!! OOOOOH!!! Can we start a thread on what it means to "write" well? To "communicate" well? Seriously, I'd LOVE to hear all your thoughts. Been thinking a lot about methods of communication across cultures lately!

If there's any interest - please, someone, do! I am far too shy to start one myself!

> 40 My idea ! these 6 rules are absolutely false. That's why I read Proust and not Orwell. nah !

>40 tomcatMurr:, 42 Well, rule 6 goes a long, long way, and should probably be rule 1. I just get so sick of people saying "ontology" and "hermeneutics" when they could just as easily go with "being" and "interpretation." Maybe I've just been in school too long?

But I do prefer Orwell to Proust, guilty as charged:)

Monsieur, that is blasphemy ! : )

Your wish is my command, Amaranthic:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/83044

(But Martin, 'interpretation is longer than 'hermeneutics'. I'm confused.....)

New thread new thread~!!!

Longer but less poncy!

:)

I think the essay is strong because of how it concentrates on propaganda and how it works. Less strong as a "how not to write" thing. The point of propaganda is not to communicate but to confound and confuse. If you are a propagandist you are obviously not going to write something clear and honest. Orwell did after all end his list of rules with #6 which basically says that #'s 1-5 are more or less fungible.

From Le Salon
Geneg

I am not a philosopher so when I talk about modernism/post-modernism it is not from any deep understanding of their elements and meanings. When I think of Modernism I think of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a time and ethos organized around finding Truth through investigation using objective techniques culminating in what we refer to as "the Scientific Method", if a hypothesis reliably reproduces what we observe in the real world, then I consider that one more objective Truth.

When I think of Post-Modernism, I think of a project to upset everything we think we know. It seems an effort to delve into what we think we know replacing it with things we wish were so. If there is no common ground of accepted reality, then we are left with whatever reality we can conjure out of whole cloth, whether it comports with what is or not. This is one source of extreme cognitive dissonance: what one believes can only be divorced from reality so far before one becomes confused, the struggle to maintain belief in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise leads to either acceptance of the facts or a turn to the slough of denial (I know it's the slough of despond, but despond doesn't exactly work here. I am in the slough of despond). Without a firm cultural foundation based on observable facts about the world any charlatan (think Frank Luntz, a sophist if ever there was one, see the discussion of "to incent") can convince those susceptible (mostly through ignorance either of the cynicism of those developing these groundless positions or their own general ignorance of reality, hence the concerted attack on public, fact based education in this country. If you raise a nation of clueless, uneducated people they can be more easily led) that what they so desperately wish was true, is.

I understand the attraction of playing games about the loosey-goosey nature of reality as shown by the quantum physics project, but what they miss is that as complexity increases the quanta takes on an irreversible direction and static functionality. In short it creates an objective reality. Consider the astounding amount of energy required to disintegrate the teensy hydrogen atom into it's component parts. This static functionality is not changed by wishing).

Post-Modernism comes into play politically in statements such as, "We create our own reality". Which, as it turns out, we are manifestly unable to do. We are constrained by an objective reality and can only manouever within its boundaries. The idea of ignoring reality and creating one's own through the power of imagination, while obviously possible in that we can use reality to manipulate itself, does not allow us to step outside of reality to reform it around some other operating principle. Those who wish to, wish to usurp God, and that never ends well. This was the situation under BushCo. Tax cuts would yield greater income and more jobs. The reality was the jobs created were mostly overseas and the cuts themselves threw fuel on the fire of an already overheated economy contributing to our current situation. I won't get into the craziness of "deficits don't matter" or perpetual war. I see this as all the result of post-modernism and its denial of a fundamental reality or objective reality if you wish. Unfortunately we live in a nation of people who believe clicking the heels of their red shoe together three times will send them back to Kansas. It ain't so. No matter how hard you may wish otherwise, things are what they are and successful systems are built around that fact.

Denying reality is dangerous.

So, I see this as a battle between the Modern understanding of truth as ultimately objective and the Post-Modernists who want to create an entire reality out of whole cloth. These are the people who are concerned about the subjective space between what I perceive, say, as "brown" and what you perceive as "brown". The fact that I can ask you to retrieve the "brown" pillow from a multi-colored stack of pillows, to my mind puts the lie to that thinking, but they are convinced that we recognize "brown" not through an interaction of the physical nature of color, eye, and brain, but by some learned convention, language, thus, "brown" can be whatever the consensus decides it is. How supposedly intelligent beings can think this way is beyond me, but I guess they do. To what end, though?

Now, if in some way I have mis-represented the Modernist/Post-Modernist divide, please, educate me.

One more example of what I'm referring to comes from Chaos science, at least as this layperson understands it. Dynamic systems, such as human cultures, seek the equilibrious sweet spot, anything not working in harmony to maintain the sweet-spot gets discarded, but only if the system is healthy. When dissonance becomes established in the system, like the rattle of an engine, it will eventually cause the system to reorganize around a new sweet-spot that incorporates the dissonance. But this is more in the nature of isolating the dissonance the way a tree isolates it's wounds. This fault, no matter how isolated weakens the system. Energy is expended keeping the wound isolated that could otherwise be either passed off or used for more positive ends. At some point these dissonances take over the system, increasing the energy required to maintain itself. Once the system can no longer deal with all the increased energy, it reorganizes itself, either around a new sweet-spot that normalizes the dissonances, as the independence of India in response to the colonial dissonance, or it returns to a less complex state, as happened to parts of Africa such as Rwanda, Zimbabwe and the Congo. This is the fruit of wishful thinking. While pragmatism has its own issues, it is infinitely better at dealing with problems and incorporating their solutions into the system than is idealism.

We should all have ideals to guide us, that's how we advance as a species, but that's all they can ever be, guides. When we attempt to turn the ideal entire into reality we run into all kinds of problems.

I have no beef with those who thought up this perception over reality angle, that's what thinkers do. My beef is with those who cynically use this thinking to affect top-down, imposed change to the ideal. Over the last hundred years there have been two groups that imposed such an ideal "reality": Hitler and Lenin/Stalin, although there may be some evidence that Lenin saw the error of his ways right before he died. While supposedly on opposite ends of the political scale (I take issue with this as well) they were both ideologues who destroyed their countries through strict imposition of their ideologies.

To me Post-Modernism is being treated as an ideology, rather than a philosophy. At least this one aspect of Post-Modernism, the deconstruction of fundamental knowledge, has become a dangerous ideology abroad in the world.

Mac, or anyone else, if you wish to discuss this further I will be happy to in a new thread, or we could reactivate the Salon thread for discussion of language and power, but this plainly has nothing to do with the Booker prize.

dammit.
I posted a long reply which was lost in cyberspace. I am too disheartened by this calamity to recreate it now.

F**K

I hate that when it happens. I've recently begun copying my posts before I post them, just in case...

yeah, I should have done that.

Thanks for expounding further Geneg. Your post is long and interesting.

Now, if in some way I have mis-represented the Modernist/Post-Modernist divide, please, educate me.

It seems to me, as I understand your description, that what you are describing may be better termed positivism (your modernism) and relativism (your post-modernism). Modernism and post modernism are essentially terms from lit crit, but it seems to me you are aiming for something more philosophical, and wider and deeper and broader. Also, your terms, if I may say so, suggest a chronology, whereas positivism and relativism are synchronic.

Positivism is, crudely put, the idea that truth is known, and knowable and can be positively identified. Scientific positivism is one manifestation of this - finding Truth through investigation using objective techniques, as you describe it, but it also manifests in religion, especially Roman Catholicsm and Islam and Judaism, where it is possible to assert infallible knowledge.

Relativism on the other hand is the idea that there is not such thing as truth/reality, and asserting one kind of truth/reality over any other is fraught with danger. Relativism is as old as philosophy itself. The first relativist in the West may be said to Protagoras; Socrates Kant, the phenomonologists, and Buddha may also be thought of as relativists.

Basically, the relativist position may be described like this. Sense data are received by the senses and interpreted by the brain/mind. In interpreting the data, our consciousness and the language it generates effect the way we interpret the world. We do not all see the same world –literally, we cannot occupy the same time and space as another person, there is always a slight difference in perspective or point of view. Hence everything is relative. We do in a very real sense, both scientifically, socially and entally create our own reality. My reality has large areas of overlap with yours, but it’s never static or identical.

Now when it comes to language, we can agree by convention to agree that ‘brown’ means ‘this colour’ and not ‘that colour’, but I still can never be sure that your perception of brown is exactly the same as mine. For simple things like cushions, the difference is not important, but when we talk about things like ‘virtue’ or ‘justice’ this is where relativism becomes important.

Hegel held that history can be thought of as struggle between positivism and relativism. We need relativism to drive us forward, while positivism always tries to hold us back. It was relativism that brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the scientific and industrial revolutions – democracy itself - and so on, reacting against the positivism of the Church and autocracy.

You mentioned Hitler et all. I am of the view that these kind of people are arch positivists: they think they know the truth and they impose it on others by force. This is the truth, and if you disagree, you will be shot.

I agree with you about the sorry state of the West and I deplore it as you do. But I think the reasons for it are various and different than the mere existence of relativism (your post modernism), and I do not think that positivism is the answer or solves anything.

You wrote that it is dangerous to deny reality. I honestly do not understand this at all. To me it seems more dangerous to assert a reality.

Now let’s see if I can post this successfully this time

This is a fascinating area, which I have been thinking about a great deal recently. I'd like to come back shortly with my thoughts.....

No wife. No horse. No mustache.

I've always been interested in language as a tool of power as well as communication. One of my favorite examples is the shift from Personnel Departments to Human Resources.

A person is someone who works for the company. The word Personnel connotes the set that makes up the employment roster of the company. People who do things. Human Resources, on the other hand connotes another widget, the subset of resources that are human. There is a shift in distance between the company and its personnel and the company and its human resources. Personnel have lives, families, children, interests outside of work. Resources are what the company uses to accomplish its ends. If those resources burn out, like spark plugs, they are easily replaced.

This is why when I hear a new formulation that is currently conveyed by a perfectly good, already existing word, I start looking for the hook. Fifty years ago, businesses didn't see their personnel as the enemy, employees were family (with the exception of certain industries that ran themselves as wage slave operations, like coal mining). Now, it's routine for employees to be overworked, over-stressed and booted out without even a thank you. The work place is no longer centered around what we can all accomplish together, but competitions about who gets to keep their job and who goes. Is this all a result of the shift from Personnel Departments to Human Resources? In my memory the answer is yes. Shift the ground under the meaning and over time establish a different relationship between the terms. In 1965 Personnel and Human Resources meant much closer to the same thing than they do now.

As with the "to bribe" and "to incent" discussion, "to incent" is just a way of hiding the fact that you are offering a bribe. Call it something different and after a while it won't be what we commonly understand as bribery, but as Sarah Palin well knows, no matter how much lip stick you put on that pig, it's still bribery. It's this kind of fun with words that makes us all complicit in the decline of our culture. If we don't recognize a spade for what it is, then heaven help us. This is my biggest gripe with the idea of "Politically Correct" language. It's just another way of gussyin' up that hog.

As someone said once in the heat of discussion, "Words matter!" Amen, brother. When someone creates a new word or phrase with which to replace a currently useful one I sit up and take notice. Everyone's first response should be, "Hmm, I wonder what's going on here?" Eric Blair understood this issue perfectly.

55: our computer system now calls human resources "human capital management", which to me is even farther towards depersonalizing people. Do you think that people as capital is more or less dehumanizing than people as resources?

That's just disgusting and most egregiously immoral.

Gene: Pedantic note. Wouldn't it be Biden who would know about lip stick on a pig not concealing the swine beneath?

> Thank you for the discussion of "personnel" vs. "human resources." I cringed when I first heard the term and thought it did not bode well for employees. I railed against being lumped in with raw materials and machinery. Few listened, of course.

>56 anna_in_pdx: I certainly think so. At least "resources" as such may imply, oh, the ore in the mines, or the trees in the forest. Now, we are to be equated with MONEY? Ouch.

>58 slickdpdx: Let it go! I like to think of Sarah Palin whenever I hear pigs and lipstick mentioned in the same sentence.

61: I am very disappointed to see that coming from a self-professed pedant and card-carrying member of the pedant's corner. Now if you took me to task for writing "lip_stick"...

Whether it's Sarah Palin or Joe Biden is not the point, hence the "pedantic" response. "To incent" is still a pig in a poke.

When we play loosey-goosey with meaning we play loosey-goosey with the underlying concept and when we do that we unlearn everything we ever knew about the issue, in this case about bribery. Bribery just becomes another arrow in the quiver of incentives. Corruption becomes endemic and ... Well, look around. What is the main feature of all dysfunctional governments?

People must be left alone to make their own decisions, good or bad, themselves. Rather than "incentivizing" people to take a position, the pros and cons of the position need to be laid out to them and they should make their own choices. However, this requires a certain amount of critical thinking on the part of the citizenry, one of the first skills to be abandoned in our current education climate (don't ask yourself why 2 + 2 = 4, just be content that they do, at least until someone in authority tells you otherwise). Facts are great, but if you can't arrange them into arguments, or use them analytically, what good are they? One will still need someone to tell them what the facts mean. That's where it gets dicey.

Wretched thought the usage is, "to incent" is not a pig in a poke.

Robert

>64 Mr.Durick: It is, however, a back formation from "incentive," and as such, is as clunky and ugly -- not to mention, pretty useless -- as many other back formations. To me, it draws unnecessary attention to itself, and if I were the Grammar and Usage Goddess, I'd make everyone find another (usually easy) way to say the same thing.

I meant to say "Wretched though..." and that is absolutely congruent with, albeit shorter than, what you say, msladylib.

I saw this morning in another LibraryThing thread the use of 'recommend' as a noun. Ack!

Robert

I sometimes give my posts a colloquial feel by using "recommend" instead of "recommendation". So it may have been me, but sometimes that's what the voice in my head wants me to say. Actually, I'm sometimes inclined to do the same with other noun/verb pairs, as well. It's all in what that pesky voice makes me write at the time.