In Ancient Greece, the sophists were consummate exploiters of the faults, disturbances and idiosyncrasies of language, its non-sense. Installing themselves within the cracks of language, the fissures which open up where one word could mean many things, two different words could sound exactly alike, where sense and reference was confused, sophistry sometimes humourously and playfully, sometimes with apparently more sinister demagogical intent, exploited the ‘semiurgical’ quality of language and the seething cauldron of affective charge it contained to make and remake our relations to the world. For this, history shows, they were vilified, slandered and excluded from the community of normal human users of language. Philosophy and the right (thinking) use of reason was the prime agent in this historical expulsion. By the genial invention of principles such as that of non-contradiction and entities such as rhetoric to absorb the excesses of language, philosophy not only created strong normative principles for communication arguably operating on a transcendental basis (recently rehabilitated by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel), it also created a perception of language and of logic in which faults, glitches and bugs started to be seen simply as accidents, trivial anomalies easily removed by means of the better internal policing of language. Short of being a two-headed monster or a plant of some sort, you could not possibly say one thing and mean two. The norms of reason precluded this: transparency should be the elimination of agonism, not its secret accumulation. But as the sophists knew and practised, double-speak was something which politicians did all the time, more or less knowingly, more or less well. Twenty-five centuries later, with the advent of deconstruction and other approaches, we discover that in fact double-speak is the ‘repressed’, disavowed norm of reasonx.
Saturday 4 February 2012
make the accidental the essential
stratagem five: make the accidental the essential
In Ancient Greece, the sophists were consummate exploiters of the faults, disturbances and idiosyncrasies of language, its non-sense. Installing themselves within the cracks of language, the fissures which open up where one word could mean many things, two different words could sound exactly alike, where sense and reference was confused, sophistry sometimes humourously and playfully, sometimes with apparently more sinister demagogical intent, exploited the ‘semiurgical’ quality of language and the seething cauldron of affective charge it contained to make and remake our relations to the world. For this, history shows, they were vilified, slandered and excluded from the community of normal human users of language. Philosophy and the right (thinking) use of reason was the prime agent in this historical expulsion. By the genial invention of principles such as that of non-contradiction and entities such as rhetoric to absorb the excesses of language, philosophy not only created strong normative principles for communication arguably operating on a transcendental basis (recently rehabilitated by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel), it also created a perception of language and of logic in which faults, glitches and bugs started to be seen simply as accidents, trivial anomalies easily removed by means of the better internal policing of language. Short of being a two-headed monster or a plant of some sort, you could not possibly say one thing and mean two. The norms of reason precluded this: transparency should be the elimination of agonism, not its secret accumulation. But as the sophists knew and practised, double-speak was something which politicians did all the time, more or less knowingly, more or less well. Twenty-five centuries later, with the advent of deconstruction and other approaches, we discover that in fact double-speak is the ‘repressed’, disavowed norm of reasonx.
In Ancient Greece, the sophists were consummate exploiters of the faults, disturbances and idiosyncrasies of language, its non-sense. Installing themselves within the cracks of language, the fissures which open up where one word could mean many things, two different words could sound exactly alike, where sense and reference was confused, sophistry sometimes humourously and playfully, sometimes with apparently more sinister demagogical intent, exploited the ‘semiurgical’ quality of language and the seething cauldron of affective charge it contained to make and remake our relations to the world. For this, history shows, they were vilified, slandered and excluded from the community of normal human users of language. Philosophy and the right (thinking) use of reason was the prime agent in this historical expulsion. By the genial invention of principles such as that of non-contradiction and entities such as rhetoric to absorb the excesses of language, philosophy not only created strong normative principles for communication arguably operating on a transcendental basis (recently rehabilitated by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel), it also created a perception of language and of logic in which faults, glitches and bugs started to be seen simply as accidents, trivial anomalies easily removed by means of the better internal policing of language. Short of being a two-headed monster or a plant of some sort, you could not possibly say one thing and mean two. The norms of reason precluded this: transparency should be the elimination of agonism, not its secret accumulation. But as the sophists knew and practised, double-speak was something which politicians did all the time, more or less knowingly, more or less well. Twenty-five centuries later, with the advent of deconstruction and other approaches, we discover that in fact double-speak is the ‘repressed’, disavowed norm of reasonx.
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