The Crisis Of Language And The Language Of Crisis

Language has become trivialized in our modern world, stripped of its depth and power. Where words were once experienced as rich, pregnant with signification, in our finessed and fragmented vocabulary all that has changed. Now a strictly logistical principle appears to hold sway, reducing the word to a mere symbol, a simple placeholder in a syllogism (as demonstrated in an earlier post), having a single, unambiguously identifiable referent, and only one. A must equal A, and it can never equal B, let alone A, B and C all together, at once. There must only be one precise meaning for each word – everything disambiguated – following both the scientific ideals and legalistic requirements of our culture.

But if you look back into the obscure and shadowy history of language, you would find a time and place before the written word, where there was only talking, with oral traditions passed down from generation to generation. Written language, emerging approximately six thousand years ago, only fully appeared coincident with the birth of cities – with civilization and history. We began to make history only when we began to write history!

This was another momentous invention of domesticated life. With the birth of cities on the heels of agriculture, it was necessary to develop stable and uniform systems of social and political control to handle the gathering together of diverse and unrelated village, clan and tribal members as urban strangers – within and well beyond the city walls. This demanded a severe change in the nature of human communication, including the removal of polysemic ambiguity in primal speech, and the articulation of a strictly univocal, written tongue. Such linguistic rationalization was only effected with the invention of the syllogism, early on perfected by the Greeks, and recast by legislators, scientists, and other specialists down through the ages. According to syllogistic reasoning, universal statements were to be related to particular circumstances within a coherent logistical structure leading to logical legal and scientific conclusions. So it all comes down to “precise words and correct syntax...that is where social laws are made and natural laws are made or discovered.”

Long before such sweeping linguistic changes took hold, our pre-historical talk and proto-historical writing were much involved in myth. Passed on from originally oral sources, myth had a textural depth and resonance that was still packed with meaning. Not only did the mythic word call up multiple referents, but also the copula between those diverse referents was extremely strong. To speak the name of something was in fact to invoke its existence, to feel its power as fully present. It was not then as it is now, where a metaphor or a simile merely suggests something else. To identify your totem for a preliterate gatherer-hunter was to be identical with it, and to feel the presence of your clan animal within you.

Even revisiting some of the earliest known written languages, for example, Old Kingdom Egyptian, you find yourself immersed within a poly-semantic world whose non-alphabetic characters bear precisely this sort of weight and significance. Hieroglyphic writing still retained almost as much multi-referential power as did the preliterate word of far-older, oral traditions. In fact, the hieroglyphs for various Egyptian divinities – Ra, Ptah, Isis, Osiris – would not only allow of multiple referents; they also embodied the power of the particular divinity symbolized on the sarcophagus or on the temple wall.

Such was the strength, the potency, of primal languages. Over millennia of civilization, these languages were forced into univocity and impotence. Stripped of their resonant depth, words became flattened-out under the requirements of an unambiguous, linear history and a scientific requirement of syllogistic communication that eventually defined the direction of modern thought and life.

By: The Critical Anarchist

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Sandy Krolick holds 3 advanced degrees; he has taught at major universities at home (UVA) and abroad and held executive posts with major American corporations, including E&Y, GE and Computer Sciences. Check out his new book www.amazon.com/Recovery-Ecstasy-Notebooks-Siberia/dp/1439227365/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235063064&sr=8-1" target="_blank">The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia