brief statement. most people I know think language shapes thought. though they dont define language or using it. they also assume, then, language shapes everything and only by changing language you can change the world. they see you as a language-effect or a performance of a form of speech. in doing so they limit thought and language, and consequently speech. they write a lot about it. ironically the idea comes from Heidegger (nazi). it was taken up by Berkeley leftists and has become the epitome of what is known as pc language policing and most forms of contemporary poetics. it is also known as linguistic externalism. because it meaning is controlled by a corpus or Structure and is external Marxists have said it then is historical, is a part of the dialectic. cultural studies Marxists then said it is material culture. but none stopped to read a linguistics text (at least past Saussure who never wrote a book anyway). do you see what Im getting at? it leads to the celebration of pop cultural cliché as used in poetry of what once was called postmodernism and/or pop art. it continues through the tiresome and ad infinitum art student celebration of warhol, of the rise of comics studies, the phd thesis on steampunk. it coalesces with the academic celebration of capitalism, ironically by the cultural studies british academics who were Marxist. it denies all value and criticism, including evaluation (which is why david always tells me not to think and just like everything) it denies meaning can be determinate by an individual person, which seems like a humanism and has roots in it, but notice too it is a conservativism about proper language, whether it is the queens English (for conservatives who worried about language decay) or saying mankind (for feminists who think changing gendered language will somehow re- or un-gender the world). people put to much emphasis on words, not enough on people. it is the whole Berkeley attitude, the church of Foucault, which seeks to autocorrect what is said, and in turn imagines it will correct the sayer. this summary of twentieth century philosophical error will be deleted shortly.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 03:02:25 +0000
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