Words That Mean Nothing

05-21-2017

Words That Mean Nothing

Masha Gessen, who will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center Conference on "Crises of Democracy," turns to Hannah Arendt to understand Donald Trump's assault on language and our common world.

"Trump also has a talent for using words in ways that make them mean nothing. Everyone is great and everything is tremendous. Any word can be given or taken away. NATO can be “obsolete” and then “no longer obsolete”—this challenges not only any shared understanding of the word “obsolete” but our shared experience of linear time. And then there is Trump’s ability to take words and throw them into a pile that means nothing. Here is an excerpt, chosen from many similar ones, from his interview with the AP about his first hundred days in office:

Number one, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the fifty-nine missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, “You know, this is more than just like, seventy-nine [sic] missiles. This is death that’s involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area—you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away—and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet …. every decision is much harder than you’d normally make. [unintelligible] … This is involving death and life and so many things. … So it’s far more responsibility. [unintelligible] ….The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world.

Here is a partial list of words that lose their meaning in this passage: “responsibility,” the number “fifty-nine” and the number “seventy-nine,” “death,” “people,” “risk,” “city,” “civilian,” “hamlet,” “decision,” “hard,” “normal,” “life,” the “United States.” Even the word “unintelligible,” inserted by the journalist, means nothing here, because how can something be unintelligible when uttered during a face-to-face interview? The role of the journalist is, too, rendered meaningless in the most basic way: the interviewer feels compelled to participate, interrupting this incomprehensible monologue with follow-up questions or words like “right,” but these serve to create the fiction that something is indeed “right” or could be “right” about what Trump is saying—when in fact he is saying nothing and everything at the same time, and this cannot be right. Trump’s word-piles fill public space with static. This is like having the air we breathe replaced with carbon monoxide. It is deadly. This space that he is polluting is the space of our shared reality. This is what language is for: to enable you to name “secateurs,” buy them, and use them. To make it possible for a surgeon to name “scalpel” and have it placed in her open palm. To make sure that a mother can understand the story her child tells her when she comes home from school, or a judge can evaluate a case being made. None of this is possible when words mean nothing. Now, we writers have often spent time—much of it in the late twentieth century—questioning the ability of words to reflect facts, and the existence of objective facts themselves. There are those who have, whether with glee or with shame, observed a sort of relationship between those postmodern exercises and Trump’s post-truth, post-language ways. I think this reflects a basic misunderstanding, or perhaps a willing conflation of intentions. When writers and academics question the limits of language, it is invariably an exercise that grows from a desire to bring more light into the public sphere, to arrive at a shared reality that is more nuanced than it was yesterday. To focus ever more tightly on the shape, weight, and function of any thing that can be named, or to find names for things that have not, in the past, been observed. Our ability to do this depends on a shared language. As Hannah Arendt wrote,

We know from experience that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it. If someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides."

Form more information visit: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/13/the-autocrats-language/

Illiberal and Uneducated

[caption id="attachment_18913" align="alignright" width="300"] By Gphgrd01 - The stock of CEU, CC BY-SA 3.0[/caption] It is increasingly possible, that "For the first time in Europe since World War II, a university will have been closed for political reasons." That is the increasingly likely possible for the Central European University in Budapest, which has been targeted by Hungarian President Viktor Orbán. Orbán has embraced what he calls "illiberal democracy." As Jan Werner Müeller writes, Orbán also seems set on creating an uneducated democracy.

"In recent years, Orbán has moved Hungary in a more authoritarian direction than any other European country. Since 2010, he has written a new constitution, enfeebled the judiciary, put much of the news media under the control of government-friendly oligarchs, and created a system of crony capitalism in which economic success depends increasingly on connections to his party. He has also taken an extremely hard line against refugees, building a fence with Serbia and running government-sponsored campaigns that portray all asylum seekers as “illegal immigrants” posing a threat to the nation’s Christian European identity. One would have thought that the nation’s well-being is in fact much more endangered by Orbán’s drastic reductions in education budgets at all levels; rare is a government in today’s world that seems determined to make society less smart. The number of university students has been declining dramatically since 2010; meanwhile, the age at which students can legally leave school has been lowered from eighteen to sixteen. Orbán, as part of his self-professed turn to “illiberalism,” has put forward the notion of a “work-based state.” In theory, such a state is the opposite of a polity where financial speculation generates most of the wealth. In practice, this idea has meant public works programs—especially for Roma—that critics view as highly exploitative; it has also resulted in an attempt to create a workforce primarily of manual laborers, where everyone knows their place and can at most aspire to employment by German industry (Mercedes is currently spending a billion euros on a new plant in central Hungary)."

 

Form more information visit: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/20/hungary-the-war-on-education-ceu/

Theatre Without Drama

[caption id="attachment_18914" align="alignleft" width="300"] By Gphgrd01 - The stock of CEU, CC BY-SA 3.0[/caption] Holger Syme worries that under the direction of Chris Dercon, the Volksbühne in Berlin—which just announced a new season shockingly light on dramatic theatre— is giving up on theatre as a medium to reflect upon human experience.

"From their intellectual perspective, that appears to make sense. Dercon’s director of programming, Marietta Piekenbrock, essentially announced at their press conference that theatre as we know it is moribund anyway: The stage of spoken-word theatre is indebted to a sense of the world that is centred on the human. On the stage of the 21^st century, however, we find a new distribution of power, a new dynamic of creatures, ghosts, machines, objects. The things we once invented to define identities or let them manifest themselves on stage have lost all traction. The [human] subject – is that even a topic anymore these days? From Piekenbrock’s perspective, a post-human world cannot rely on forms of representation that still focus, naively, on the human. At the same time, she also thinks that “the body – that of the refugee, the maimed, the rebel, the injured – has returned to the centre of political discourse. Across all boundaries of language its signs and messages are universally comprehensible.” So perhaps not post-human after all, just post-discursive. Bodies that stand for other bodies: old-fashioned. Bodies that speak for themselves: cutting edge. Which is presumably the reason that dance is taking centre stage in this new vision, and it obviously is the reason Susanne Kennedy comes to stand for whatever future the theatre may have: a director who hides her actors’ faces behind masks and takes their live voices away, replacing them with recordings (of their own or other voices). It seems to me that the answer to Piekenbrock’s question is an obvious and resounding “yes” – of course the subject is “still” a topic. How could it not be? If anything, the omnipresence of vulnerable and injured bodies in our newsfeeds is surely a reminder that we’re very far from being post-human. We still walk and talk amongst and with other bodies, we still interact with other beings in their embodied form, not merely through their avatars; we aren’t quite machines yet. Our lives may be more and more affected by algorithms and mediated by devices; but those lives are still the lives of bodies – bodies that speak, and feel, and sometimes think. That the relationships between bodies and feeling and words and thoughts is complicated and subject to alienation and distortion is hardly news – it is, after all, one of the main themes of the drama of the twentieth century. And certainly not just Beckett’s. But despite that complexity, and because of its awareness of it, the theatre seems to me the place where art can insist on the abiding centrality of lived human experience even and especially in a world that seems to move towards the post-human. Theatre surely is the place to highlight the inadequacy of that discourse rather than yet another art form used to echo and represent a human-made world devoid of humanity."

Form more information visit: http://www.dispositio.net/archives/2452