Sticking with our running theme of Giambattista Vico, let's delve into what insights he might offer to the use of language today. The primary insight to draw upon here is the historical dimension of language. This historical dimension does not just mark different words being used at different times, but rather the whole plane of human reference changes with the epoch.
In crude anthropological terms, language gradually transitions from a "magic" phase to a "scientific" phase, with something of a "religious" phase in between (Vico calls them the ages of Gods, Heroes, and Men, but Frazer's notation is at least commonly understood if not accepted). In the first, words exist in a powerful dynamic with the creative force of the universe. There are universal, eternal meanings that words evoke, even as they're being used in limited, ephemeral ways. Every speech act is equally a hymn of praise or a curse. This language references divinity directly, and so should be understood in the context of creation and end-times mythology.
In the second, the "religious" or Heroic phase, language still carries meaning beyond its immediate use, but this meaning is restricted to human history, mythical or otherwise. A great way to approach this is through the modern concept of ideology and our blindness to it when participant. A Jew understands his actions in how they stand up to Moses, a Christian in how they stand up to Christ, a Buddhist in how they stand up to the Buddha. "Historical" personages and their stories provide the referential context for any communication in which we engage. This is as true for political histories as it its for religious (in America see "Greatest Generation," "Founding Fathers," "Camelot," etc.).
Finally, then, the third, the "scientific" phase or the Age of Man. Language becomes increasingly vulgar and specific. Words carry their meaning only with respect to their immediate contexts and circumstances. They acquire a highly technical flavor. People worry about the clear communication of information, denotation is the stock in trade, connotative noise must be excised at all costs. Words relate to one another, but only through elaborate, structured systems of logic that are parseable by a computer.
Irony is the necessary result when this age comes into contact with the previous two. Once language is stripped down to a purely utilitarian existence, the (re-)presentation of past truths will definitively be a case of "say one thing, mean another." For the intimacy with nature and community presupposed by the ages of gods and heroes that underwrites the entire project of their language is lost. Like a frog to be dissected, the living words die in the hands of logic and linguistics. Their relations can be traced and mapped, but these maps don't furnish the reader with a new way to comprehend his own life as the myths and poems of the past might. Rather, they help the reader dissolve the myths and poems of the past, and so protect him from their lessons.
19.8.10
Hopes and Fears in the Social 2.0
Dread or fear, the thought that tomorrow might not turn out right. It's consumptive and vicious. It preys upon us and grows in strength with each bite it takes. The death wish, sure. Fear, anxiety is the experience of our own death reflected back in time.
Past ages sublimed their fears into monsters, to be defeated by the mythological forces of good. In the present we transfer it to questions of authenticity, to be mollified by wielding signs (purchased or achieved) of our authenticity, signs in need of constant subscription and renewal.
Before, our response to this fear was communal and shared. Myths gained their power through repetition, through ritual liturgies of public participation. Even the holy hermit fulfilled a social role as the community outsider, praying for those within and alleviating their fears thereby. Great things could be accomplished by a people united. Great buildings built, great wars fought. For common relief of fear, a common cause in deed.
Today, our brilliant selves have cast off religion in order to be truer to our real wants, needs, and desires. So says Freud, Maslow, et al. Authenticity, assuming some unquestioned capability for self-reflection, is achieved through an alchemical formula (unique for everyone!) of purchased objectives and socially valuable anecdotes. Now we cook, travel, and sport, all as hobbies, all as identity markers for our authentic selves. The actions aren't done for themselves but for ourselves. Fear is conquered by building a monument to focus our attentions, and thus distract them from the fate of even Ozymandias.
Futility of the project aside, we see a historical dynamic in the face of our fears from social to individual back to social. The move back to social is no longer achieved as an accumulation of individuals, but as the decomposition of individuals. This helps explain why Social 2.0 cannot be named as a communal project with substantially shared intentions, but is rather a corporate project with only formally shared intentions. We don't want the same end, we just want the same ends.
While our fears now dissolve in the solution that is passed off as culture, so too do our hopes. Each now gets smaller viewed relative to the common mass of humanity, rather than larger in its conjunction therewith. There's a chance, albeit distant, that jumbling our deconstructed selves about together might settle the mixture into some dynamic equilibrium—cohesive, structured, and sound; and there's evidence that this new way of being in the world provides a veritable primordial soup from which raw, violent creativity is raising itself in beautiful disarray.
What troubles me is the future. This whole system stands on a rather sublime technological crest. Disaster (of the kind all too often known to strike our race) looms with ever more catastrophic implications. Our small fears combine and metastasize, so that one wrong gust of the wind and all falls down, with us none the more able to cope. I fear lest reality indulges itself.
Past ages sublimed their fears into monsters, to be defeated by the mythological forces of good. In the present we transfer it to questions of authenticity, to be mollified by wielding signs (purchased or achieved) of our authenticity, signs in need of constant subscription and renewal.
Before, our response to this fear was communal and shared. Myths gained their power through repetition, through ritual liturgies of public participation. Even the holy hermit fulfilled a social role as the community outsider, praying for those within and alleviating their fears thereby. Great things could be accomplished by a people united. Great buildings built, great wars fought. For common relief of fear, a common cause in deed.
Today, our brilliant selves have cast off religion in order to be truer to our real wants, needs, and desires. So says Freud, Maslow, et al. Authenticity, assuming some unquestioned capability for self-reflection, is achieved through an alchemical formula (unique for everyone!) of purchased objectives and socially valuable anecdotes. Now we cook, travel, and sport, all as hobbies, all as identity markers for our authentic selves. The actions aren't done for themselves but for ourselves. Fear is conquered by building a monument to focus our attentions, and thus distract them from the fate of even Ozymandias.
Futility of the project aside, we see a historical dynamic in the face of our fears from social to individual back to social. The move back to social is no longer achieved as an accumulation of individuals, but as the decomposition of individuals. This helps explain why Social 2.0 cannot be named as a communal project with substantially shared intentions, but is rather a corporate project with only formally shared intentions. We don't want the same end, we just want the same ends.
While our fears now dissolve in the solution that is passed off as culture, so too do our hopes. Each now gets smaller viewed relative to the common mass of humanity, rather than larger in its conjunction therewith. There's a chance, albeit distant, that jumbling our deconstructed selves about together might settle the mixture into some dynamic equilibrium—cohesive, structured, and sound; and there's evidence that this new way of being in the world provides a veritable primordial soup from which raw, violent creativity is raising itself in beautiful disarray.
What troubles me is the future. This whole system stands on a rather sublime technological crest. Disaster (of the kind all too often known to strike our race) looms with ever more catastrophic implications. Our small fears combine and metastasize, so that one wrong gust of the wind and all falls down, with us none the more able to cope. I fear lest reality indulges itself.
17.8.10
The Apocalypse According to Vico
Imagine the apocalypse. A time when civilization has fallen, collapsed as the parlance goes. Those links that bind us to our fellow men and women lie broken, with little no hope left for repair. The city walls have been breached, the inner sanctum penetrated, and the statues of our idols smolder with the remainders of the world.
It is not a happy thought, this—our cities barren and our farms fallow, all semblance of order, moral or political, lost to unreadable histories. Who stands a chance in this? Survival now is the only imperative, for who could propose a universal maxim or salvific end in a conflagrated universe.
Vico divided human history into three stages of a repeating cycle: the ages of gods, heroes, and men. From gods to men we see a progressively more elaborate and refined system of signification, law, and culture develop. That's not to accuse him of a naive progressivism or a positive teleology of evolution. For this progress is not wholly good. Even as our language and its referents are elaborated, the original signified thing is further obscured. Religiously this point of reference is hinted at in the imago dei, the analogical moment by which the interchangeability between verum, factum, et verbum is transferred from divine to human agency. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The three ages represent the historical dynamic by which language moves from signifying universals to signifying particulars. At our earliest we name gods who are so broadly figured as power, sex, wisdom, marriage, food, wine, life, death, technology, and nature. Yet god worship eventually devolves into hero worship, and human qualities trump universals—courage, strength, wits, temperance, fortitude, honor, continence, and intelligence. Finally, language turns in on itself during the age of men. Here irony takes prominence, so that the virtues to be praised become vices to be mocked. Satire is devised to show the limits and shadows of truth, beauty, and goodness. The highest form of praise is criticism.
What interests me is the return to the beginning. What marks the transition from the age of man back to the age of the gods? What does a non-primordial barbarism look like?
In its subversions, both gross and subtle, the language of irony gradually undermines the whole project of civilization. Language loses its surety of reference, fatally impairing communication; the collapse of universals threatens the possibility of community; and the indifference to virtue disables both civility and self-transcendence. Thus, I think, begins the age of barbarism, where values are so absolutely relative to be incommunicable, and laws have designations as arbitrary as they are self-evidently violent. Is this the apocalypse we foresaw?
Or is, perhaps, the age of barbarism more subtle, less obvious in its connotations? Are we living in the age of barbarism today? That we still have some faculties of communication, that states still have borders and courts still rule on laws, suggests not, but equally, really? The contemporary American government is rather bald about the intentions of its legislation as "balancing competing interests"—that is, paying off powers that be (people included) instead of providing for a healthy civil society. (And to point this out is cynical, as, I'd say, is to say that this is just the way politics works).
And when was the last time we "bought" a politician's slogan? Modern slogans are, of course, a product of the corporate world, the face of capitalism, a capitalism so global in its ambitions to render any theories of state sovereignty as antiquated leftovers of a bygone age which persist more from habit that active necessity.
And finally, communication, a laugh. As if 140 character word bites could accurately convey the human experience. Our communication has become little more than a public tabulation of our likes and dislikes to be collected for the betterment of advertisers, or, in the best case scenario, we make posts to paint pictures of our authentic selves and fit them into ideal social communities. Both these authentic selves and their ideal social communities, even if not arbitrary and commercial, are now so disparate, abstract, and multiplied that they doubly indicate the total dissociation of society and the dissonant distension of our souls.
There are other ways of reading the tea leaves. After all, Vico's pretension of verum-factum-verbum only caught on in the late 20th century as a mockery of its former self, divorced from the imago dei that grounded its radical potentials. Rather, the dualisms of Kant and Descartes became primary, allowing us the fantasy that even as the human soul dies a withering, crippling death, material prosperity might advance to bounds beyond the human imagination. But supposing that what we do is intimately tied to who we are and the language we use to name both, then this insight into our current semiotic status is grim and disturbing. It stands to hope that the cycle will repeat and usher in a salvific age of gods, but such a hope must remain tempered by the knowledge that this course requires us to pass through the bottom of our own human depravity—a depravity that the 20th century, with its many holocausts, was not grotesque enough to represent. So, meanwhile, we must futilely tether ourselves to the present moment, proclaiming without irony, "Le Roi est Mort. Vive le Roi!"
It is not a happy thought, this—our cities barren and our farms fallow, all semblance of order, moral or political, lost to unreadable histories. Who stands a chance in this? Survival now is the only imperative, for who could propose a universal maxim or salvific end in a conflagrated universe.
Vico divided human history into three stages of a repeating cycle: the ages of gods, heroes, and men. From gods to men we see a progressively more elaborate and refined system of signification, law, and culture develop. That's not to accuse him of a naive progressivism or a positive teleology of evolution. For this progress is not wholly good. Even as our language and its referents are elaborated, the original signified thing is further obscured. Religiously this point of reference is hinted at in the imago dei, the analogical moment by which the interchangeability between verum, factum, et verbum is transferred from divine to human agency. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The three ages represent the historical dynamic by which language moves from signifying universals to signifying particulars. At our earliest we name gods who are so broadly figured as power, sex, wisdom, marriage, food, wine, life, death, technology, and nature. Yet god worship eventually devolves into hero worship, and human qualities trump universals—courage, strength, wits, temperance, fortitude, honor, continence, and intelligence. Finally, language turns in on itself during the age of men. Here irony takes prominence, so that the virtues to be praised become vices to be mocked. Satire is devised to show the limits and shadows of truth, beauty, and goodness. The highest form of praise is criticism.
What interests me is the return to the beginning. What marks the transition from the age of man back to the age of the gods? What does a non-primordial barbarism look like?
In its subversions, both gross and subtle, the language of irony gradually undermines the whole project of civilization. Language loses its surety of reference, fatally impairing communication; the collapse of universals threatens the possibility of community; and the indifference to virtue disables both civility and self-transcendence. Thus, I think, begins the age of barbarism, where values are so absolutely relative to be incommunicable, and laws have designations as arbitrary as they are self-evidently violent. Is this the apocalypse we foresaw?
Or is, perhaps, the age of barbarism more subtle, less obvious in its connotations? Are we living in the age of barbarism today? That we still have some faculties of communication, that states still have borders and courts still rule on laws, suggests not, but equally, really? The contemporary American government is rather bald about the intentions of its legislation as "balancing competing interests"—that is, paying off powers that be (people included) instead of providing for a healthy civil society. (And to point this out is cynical, as, I'd say, is to say that this is just the way politics works).
And when was the last time we "bought" a politician's slogan? Modern slogans are, of course, a product of the corporate world, the face of capitalism, a capitalism so global in its ambitions to render any theories of state sovereignty as antiquated leftovers of a bygone age which persist more from habit that active necessity.
And finally, communication, a laugh. As if 140 character word bites could accurately convey the human experience. Our communication has become little more than a public tabulation of our likes and dislikes to be collected for the betterment of advertisers, or, in the best case scenario, we make posts to paint pictures of our authentic selves and fit them into ideal social communities. Both these authentic selves and their ideal social communities, even if not arbitrary and commercial, are now so disparate, abstract, and multiplied that they doubly indicate the total dissociation of society and the dissonant distension of our souls.
There are other ways of reading the tea leaves. After all, Vico's pretension of verum-factum-verbum only caught on in the late 20th century as a mockery of its former self, divorced from the imago dei that grounded its radical potentials. Rather, the dualisms of Kant and Descartes became primary, allowing us the fantasy that even as the human soul dies a withering, crippling death, material prosperity might advance to bounds beyond the human imagination. But supposing that what we do is intimately tied to who we are and the language we use to name both, then this insight into our current semiotic status is grim and disturbing. It stands to hope that the cycle will repeat and usher in a salvific age of gods, but such a hope must remain tempered by the knowledge that this course requires us to pass through the bottom of our own human depravity—a depravity that the 20th century, with its many holocausts, was not grotesque enough to represent. So, meanwhile, we must futilely tether ourselves to the present moment, proclaiming without irony, "Le Roi est Mort. Vive le Roi!"
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