black magick hustla
19th June 2009, 08:27
I've been skimming through my copy of "Revolution of Everyday Life" by Vaneigem. It is a book I hold very dear because it helped me cope with highschool and its statements still burn in my heart and it is this book that cemented my convictions as a communist. I do not agree with all of its statements, and rather than theory or philosophy, it is essentially a poetry book. Wittgenstein said that the only people that will understand him are those who already had similar thoughts before. Implying that some of the most "transcendental" statements of the Tractatus were pretty much nonsense. I.e. "Language is my world". Such statements are pretty much tumbling in the fence of "language" and therefore our world, so it makes no sense to someone who had not already thought a bit about that statement.
Anyway, I feel this is the nature of Vaneigem's book. I think a lot of it is nonsense and while the statements themselves can analyzed "anthropologically" and traced back to certain historical ideological movements, I think the statements in that book will only affect those of us who already thought about it.
I think he says some very interesting stuff about the nature of language and the "semiological order" which I wish to discuss:
[...].Words serve better power than they do men[..].
[...}There is a silent communication; it is well known to lovers. At this stage language seems to lose its importance as essential mediation, thought is no longer a distraction (in the sense of leading us away from ourselves), words and signs become a luxury, an exuberance. think of those bantering conversations with their baroque of cries and caresses which are so surprisingly ridiculous for those who do not share the lovers' intoxication. but it was also direct communication that Léhautier referred to when the judge asked him what anarchists he knew in Paris: :Anarchists don't need to know one another to think the same thing." In radical groups which are able to reach the highest level of theoretical and practical coherence, words will sometimes acquire this privelege of playing and making love: erotic communication.
An aside: history has often been accused of happening back-to-front; the question of language becoming superfluous and turning into language-game is another example. A baroque current runs through the history of thought, making fun of words and signs with the subversive intention of disturbing the semiological order and Order in general. But the series of attempts on the life of language by the rabble of tumbloing nonsense-rhymers whose prize fools were Lear and Carroll finds its true expression in the Dada explosion. In 1916, the desire to have it out with signs, thoughts and words corresponded for the first time to a real crisis of communication. The liquidation of language that had so often been undertaken speculatively had a chance to find its historical realisation at last.
In an epoch which still had all its transcendental faith inlanguage, and in God, the master of all transcendence, doubts about signs could only lead to terrorist activity. When the crisis of human relationships shattered the unitary web of mythical communication, the attack on language took on a revolutionary air. So much so that it is tempting to say, as Hegel might have, that the decomposition of language chose Dada as the medium through which to reveal itself to the minds of men. Under the unitary regime the same desire to play with signs had been betrayed by history and found no response. By exposing falsified communication Dada began to supersede language in the direction of poetry. Today the language of myth and the language of spectacle are giving way to the reality which underlies them: the language of deeds. This language contains in itself the critique of all modes of expression and is thus a continuous auto-critique. Poor little sub-dadaists! Because they haven't understood that Dada necessarily implies this supersession, they continue to mumble that we talk like deaf men. Which is one way to be a fat maggot in the spectacle of cultural decomposition.
*
The language of the whole man will be a whole language: perhaps the end of the old language of words. Inventing this language means reconstructing man right down to his unconscious. Totality is hacking its way through the fractured non-totality of thoughts, words and actions towards itself. We will have to speak until we can do without words.
Language is the public way of life of a community and as such it is affected by the way the mode of production is set up. In a class society, the language-games serve the social order and in themselves they contain the most powerful backbone of the social order. For example, when we think about the word "freedom" in this partticular language-game, we think about "democracy", "free market", etc. When we think about "beauty", we might think about symmetry, order, etc. When we think about "Communism", we think about boring bureacracies, war machines, etc.
The most valuable thing I extracted from Wittgenstein is its powerful way of dissolving the way the ruling class abstracts the world. How this concepts do not stand absolutely and thus they can be demolished as mere word play. I admire the Dadaists because they tried to show how some ruling class could be reduced to nonsense by boldly claiming that the dadaist "nonsense", whether their "poetry", and "art" and their "philosophy", which were absolute and self-evident nonsense were comparable with the important ideas of that time.
So my question is - is there such thing as a "semiological order" and thus how do we, as communists, turn it "upside down"? We are trapped in the same language as other people, and as such, claiming to be a communist essentially makes up fight an uphill battle against the established "meanings" of that time. Is this essentially circular?
Anyway, I feel this is the nature of Vaneigem's book. I think a lot of it is nonsense and while the statements themselves can analyzed "anthropologically" and traced back to certain historical ideological movements, I think the statements in that book will only affect those of us who already thought about it.
I think he says some very interesting stuff about the nature of language and the "semiological order" which I wish to discuss:
[...].Words serve better power than they do men[..].
[...}There is a silent communication; it is well known to lovers. At this stage language seems to lose its importance as essential mediation, thought is no longer a distraction (in the sense of leading us away from ourselves), words and signs become a luxury, an exuberance. think of those bantering conversations with their baroque of cries and caresses which are so surprisingly ridiculous for those who do not share the lovers' intoxication. but it was also direct communication that Léhautier referred to when the judge asked him what anarchists he knew in Paris: :Anarchists don't need to know one another to think the same thing." In radical groups which are able to reach the highest level of theoretical and practical coherence, words will sometimes acquire this privelege of playing and making love: erotic communication.
An aside: history has often been accused of happening back-to-front; the question of language becoming superfluous and turning into language-game is another example. A baroque current runs through the history of thought, making fun of words and signs with the subversive intention of disturbing the semiological order and Order in general. But the series of attempts on the life of language by the rabble of tumbloing nonsense-rhymers whose prize fools were Lear and Carroll finds its true expression in the Dada explosion. In 1916, the desire to have it out with signs, thoughts and words corresponded for the first time to a real crisis of communication. The liquidation of language that had so often been undertaken speculatively had a chance to find its historical realisation at last.
In an epoch which still had all its transcendental faith inlanguage, and in God, the master of all transcendence, doubts about signs could only lead to terrorist activity. When the crisis of human relationships shattered the unitary web of mythical communication, the attack on language took on a revolutionary air. So much so that it is tempting to say, as Hegel might have, that the decomposition of language chose Dada as the medium through which to reveal itself to the minds of men. Under the unitary regime the same desire to play with signs had been betrayed by history and found no response. By exposing falsified communication Dada began to supersede language in the direction of poetry. Today the language of myth and the language of spectacle are giving way to the reality which underlies them: the language of deeds. This language contains in itself the critique of all modes of expression and is thus a continuous auto-critique. Poor little sub-dadaists! Because they haven't understood that Dada necessarily implies this supersession, they continue to mumble that we talk like deaf men. Which is one way to be a fat maggot in the spectacle of cultural decomposition.
*
The language of the whole man will be a whole language: perhaps the end of the old language of words. Inventing this language means reconstructing man right down to his unconscious. Totality is hacking its way through the fractured non-totality of thoughts, words and actions towards itself. We will have to speak until we can do without words.
Language is the public way of life of a community and as such it is affected by the way the mode of production is set up. In a class society, the language-games serve the social order and in themselves they contain the most powerful backbone of the social order. For example, when we think about the word "freedom" in this partticular language-game, we think about "democracy", "free market", etc. When we think about "beauty", we might think about symmetry, order, etc. When we think about "Communism", we think about boring bureacracies, war machines, etc.
The most valuable thing I extracted from Wittgenstein is its powerful way of dissolving the way the ruling class abstracts the world. How this concepts do not stand absolutely and thus they can be demolished as mere word play. I admire the Dadaists because they tried to show how some ruling class could be reduced to nonsense by boldly claiming that the dadaist "nonsense", whether their "poetry", and "art" and their "philosophy", which were absolute and self-evident nonsense were comparable with the important ideas of that time.
So my question is - is there such thing as a "semiological order" and thus how do we, as communists, turn it "upside down"? We are trapped in the same language as other people, and as such, claiming to be a communist essentially makes up fight an uphill battle against the established "meanings" of that time. Is this essentially circular?