“Greece Falls Into ‘Death Spiral’: Rising
Debt, No Growth” – CNBC headline, October 4 2011
The state of our
English language as a means of individuals’ communication and liberation has
never been more complex, made so through the influence of new political,
technological, and environmental identity—as we find new ways to employ our
shared experiences to get ourselves across. Beyond Lakoff and Johnson’s full
metaphorical interpretations of our language, news headlines and the rhetoric
of the media employ figurative language and a bleak image of physical descent
to represent a country’s economic distress: we have become accustomed to these
characterizations, to description of individuals and groups, regions and
nations through their economic status, a personification of internal and
external patterns of trade, commerce, credit, and solvency. How do these
elements together form a society based on preconceived, commonly-agreed-upon,
constructions of language—one that may provide voice and promote consumption of
the humanities across a diversity of genres?
“When I f*ck up, who bails me out?” – Wall St.
Protestor, October 4 2011
Is it the
limitation of the way we may communicate with each other through language that
appears to most complicate our understanding. Chomsky, in a 1971 debate with
Foucault: “Our concept of human nature is certainly limited; it's partially
socially conditioned, constrained by our own character defects and the
limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist.” As in the
protestor’s dramatic statement above, our words—themselves representations of
thoughts and actions, however metaphorical—extend to grasp terms of social conditioning
and environmental woe, the “character defects” Chomsky and Foucault seek to
define through their discourse. We are, by Foucault’s account, not insane:
“nobody is more conservative than those people who tell you that the modern
world is afflicted by nervous anxiety or schizophrenia” (Foucault). He views
our state of being as one that borders on a distinct and “very paradoxical”
disease, one in which our definition of madness is nearly irrelevant, one
central source of malcontent at its root. Humanistic inquiry—the production of
the arts, writing, or the criticism of any creative, expressive element—is
subject to this situation of psychological paradox, according to Foucault;
according to Chomsky, the way we see ourselves and our inquiry is built in part
by the culture that surrounds us.
What kinds of violence are permitted to take
place, in the name of justice? The nightsticks and pepper spray of downtown
Manhattan, the growing protests and calls to leaderless revolution in the
Occupy movement provide a passionate response to a situation of human
limitation; reduced to Chomsky’s words, the mass arrests and persecution of
non-violent protestors may be “reduced to its essentials and forgetting
legalisms, what is happening is that the state is trying to prosecute people
for exposing its crimes”(Chomsky). The language of the protests is action
itself; the messages scrawled on cardboard, waved in the air before the monolithic
facades of our stock exchanges, represent the anxiety and nervousness Foucault
described. Police reaction to these may be characterized by Chomsky’s words
above; the result of his actions protesting the war in Vietnam. If non-violent
protest in the spirit of Ghandi and Dr. King is an act of human expression and
creativity—a high form of art—the repression of this expression may be rendered
highly unethical—especially if unwarranted physical force is applied.
Berube hints at
the nation’s schism of wealth in his essay “Idolatries of the Marketplace:
Thomas Frank, Cultural Studies, and the Voice of the People,” a review of
Frank’s work One Market under God.
Extending Frank’s dour vision, Berube’s characterizations remain too true:
“corporate America has managed to define itself precisely against what most
people think of as corporate America, and the terrain of cultural criticism has
been transformed accordingly” (p. 143). While Berube’s cultural characterizations
that follow may appear dated, his point is made immediately relevant: corporate
sponsorship of network television and media outlets have all but eliminated
messages that threaten the fiscal and oligarchical extreme that appears to have
taken control. If Chomsky’s limited and socially-conditioned “character
defects” exist, we may be beholden to them, and our corresponding deficiencies
in how we are able to communicate. Berube’s point is salient: the humanities
need to pay better attention to, and deliver better scrutiny of, how
corporations choose to characterize themselves in the public sphere.
Berube,
Michael.Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans
and the Humanities. U of North Carolina P, 2006.
Chomsky, Noam, and Michel Foucault. The
Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature. New York & London: The
New Press, 2006.
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