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Looking on the bright side
People learn quickly. As Lenin recognized: they can learn in 20 days what they forgot in 20 years. Richard Gott - GuardianThe longer I hang around on this planet, the more sense Confucian "clarification of language makes" to me.
When Confucius was asked what the first thing he would do if he were named Emperor was, he replied, "I would clarify the language".
Contemporary American English is especially treacherous in this regard. In the USA a lover may be known as a "significant other" or even as a "partner": as if all the rumpypumpy was happening in a law office or a hardware store. In this slippery dialect problems aren't called problems, they are called "issues" and child molestation is called "inappropriate behavior"... it goes on and on.
In the world of politics, the horror of plain speech, the effort to verbally cloud, obfuscate and confuse goes to truly Orwellian lengths. Thus, the world wide, historical and universal color of revolutionary socialism: red, is used in America to denominate reaction... as in "red state". So in contemporary American English a "red state" is not Cuba or Vietnam, it is Texas or Oklahoma. In Texas the song isn't "The East is Red", it's "The East is Blue".
So naturally, in the USA, this Alice-less wonderland, Marx, instead of being associated with the struggles of the working class, is much more likely to be associated with white wine and Camembert cheese: "elitism" is of course the word used to describe political agitation in favor the less fortunate. Thus certain otherwise extremely useful terms associated with Marx may sound a trifle exotic, indeed dangerous to most American ears.
Two terms that I'd like to fling carelessly around today are "use-value" and "exchange-value." Technically accurate definitions of these terms can be found here and here.
To bring home some of the intrinsic meaning contained in these concepts and to make them more "real", I would give the following example. Imagine you are a graduate engineer, who speaks four languages with an MBA from Harvard. You are a hard worker with many skills and much knowledge, all of which may be very useful to yourself or to friends and family or to anyone who asks you, solving problems and devising strategies to improve the quality of life. This might be a loose definition of your use-value, just as the walls and the roof of your house keep out the wind and the rain and give you shelter and home, which is its basic use-value.
However, until you take your skills or your house to the market and try to sell them, they have no "exchange-value". They will acquire that value and become a commodity when they are exchanged for a "universal medium of exchange" (read money). In the well oiled, smoothly functioning capitalist system that the United States embodies as no other, the conversion of "use" to "exchange" is normally so fluid, so automatic, that many may have spent their whole lives confusing the two and thinking that something that isn't a commodity, which cannot be exchanged for money, has no value, is of no use... useless.
This automatic identification of usefulness and exchange-value tends to fray in a depression. You as a graduate engineer with an MBA may find yourself out of work with few immediate prospects of finding any. You know you are still a useful person, but now you have no exchange value because the system finds you useless. The collapse of the financial system and with it much of the the power to exchange means that many people are going to find themselves in the place of our imaginary engineer or are already there. When the system of exchange breaks down the useful - people and things - become useless. Useless houses rot and so do useless people: for people this is painful. When you begin to feel useless the system is destroying you.
In 2002, when the following text by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek was written, many who stumbled upon it would have dismissed it as so much elitist mumbo jumbo. Read in the light of the present deepening crisis, its relevance jumps out at the reader. Just in case some readers find it a little heavy going, I have taken the liberty of highlighting some of Zizek's words in boldface. Adjusting for the jargon and the technocisms, try this on for size:
"Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism between use- and exchange value: in capitalism, the potentials of this opposition are fully realized, the domain of exchange value acquires autonomy, is transformed into the specter of self-propelling speculative capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its dispensable temporal embodiment. Marx derived the very notion of economic crisis from this gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money- this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely; it has to explode in ever stronger crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx, is the gap between use-value and exchange value: the logic of exchange value follows its own path, its own mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people." Salvoj Zizek - Revolution at the GatesSo that is the situation we are presently facing. People who know how to work hard and love to work hard will have no work. Powerful machines will sit idle and rust and so will powerful minds and hearts.
There is a bright side to all of this: lucidity has its price, but once acquired it is priceless. Perhaps Americans will finally learn again to call things by their real names.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/
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Anyone heard the military talk about the "enemy" lately? What do the police call people they arrest?
The answer is the same for both: "Bad Guys."
Am I the only person who has a problem with this?
February 10, 2009 9:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
CVille,
You are right on the story... you've got it cold.
February 11, 2009 1:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting points. Makes me remember the recent quote in the LAT piece about Iceland, from Haukar Mar Helgason: "...Honest resentment opens a space for the hope that one day language might regain some of its critical capacity, that it could even begin to describe social realities again." He is talking about the relief that they could openly deride unfettered capitalism because it had brought Iceland low.
And then there is Orwell on political writing.
Annoys me no end that no one is affected by actions and events anymore, rather they are impacted. Connotation inflation.
February 10, 2009 9:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have come to the tentative conclusion that if me and mine don't end up sleeping under a bridge or as wards of the county or in a mass grave with a bullet in the back of the head, I am going to enjoy this crisis.
Finally we may discover reality, talk about reality, do something about reality.
February 11, 2009 1:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
"So that is the situation we are presently facing. People who know how to work hard and love to work hard will have no work. Powerful machines will sit idle and rust and so will powerful minds and hearts."
Interesting wander from ambiguity in language into personal despair when faced with a breakdown of the illusions of usefulness. But why is re-tasking not an option? Why does unemployment insurance not require 5-20 hours per week in donation to charitable causes, esp. after the first month or two?
"There is a bright side to all of this: lucidity has its price, but once acquired it is priceless. Perhaps Americans will finally learn again to call things by their real names."
Once wisdom is acquired, it is as priceless as it is impotent.
After Zizek, I'd say that exchange-value (which seems to be market value) is the imaginary component which complements use-value. Bubbles, whether in labor, tulips, houses, or verbosity, form up as multiplications in the complex plane. Imaginary components dominate as money begins not to chase use-value, but to chase itself in the form of dreams of a greater fool to be found.
Language is a flexible net. Words have exchange-value which might not be their use-value. This is part of the ambiguity which follows from the arbitrariness of meaning which is intrinsic to and inherent in natural language.
Popper pointed out that theories cannot be verified, only falsified. No amount of evidence verifies a theory as an absolute, but one piece of contrary evidence could be enough to reject the theory. So too there is an aspect to language such that at some point, to say what we mean we must say [also] what we don't mean by what we said. This is the dialectic in dialect.
Tell me what you didn't mean.
February 10, 2009 11:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
February 11, 2009 1:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
David, either I'm getting old and soft, or you are. But this post makes sense to me. Good job. Yet again.
February 11, 2009 1:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thankee mam.
February 11, 2009 9:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Really good post David.
As it happens, I was working on a lesson/unit yesterday that looks at euphemisms within a piece of young adult literature and extends that to the world, looking at the effects of clouding language. (The book is The Giver, ps.) The people in the community there get in trouble if they don't use "precision of language," which of course is not precise at all but designed and chosen to hide meaning.
I hadn't thought of it in terms of the financial crisis and the language used to discuss it (we focused more on death) but it's a great point. Maybe my personal favorite is "economic downturn," which I still hear people using, but among others like "negative equity," "write offs" or "write downs." No wonder no one understands what's going on economically. We've designed it that way.
When I really start thinking about it, it is rather terrifying how Orwellian government and politics and business and finance has become, from "enhanced interrogation techniques" to "the surge" to "regime change" to "smart weapons" and so on and so on and so on...
February 11, 2009 7:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Somewhere between "collateral damage" and "collateralized debt obligations", we went seriously off-course.
February 11, 2009 10:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
I've been saying the same for some years now. Language is being diluted. A deliberate attempt to make communication nearly impossible.
February 11, 2009 10:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
1. For once [(!),:)], I'm in complete agreement with Thera; the bastardization of the Queen's English is a wholly regrettable affair. It's traceable, I think, to Derrida and others midcentury who noticed that by changing how people speak, you could change how they think. Hence, a perfect tool for activists in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, and for everyone who makes the attempt since.
2. I appreciate the discussion of Marx, who is thought about and written about too little these days. While my own view is that Marx's best point was a matter of political economy (the determinative force of techonology, or the "means of production"), not pure economics, the difference between use-value and exchange value is interesting.
Of course, I don't see them as opposed or conflicting, as Marx did. Exchange value is just use value "in terms of other things." Engineers don't generally need bridges built (even though that is what they can provide), they need Campbell's soup, diapers for the baby, and acetaminophen.
So they have to trade one for the other. And if no one is building bridges... they don't really have use-value either, or not as much.
February 11, 2009 11:57 AM | Reply | Permalink