Subtitle: The Tyranny of a Modular
Language
The Pennsylvania State University Press
German original version 1988. English
translation version 1995
Preface
plastic words = connotative stereotypes
The vernacular has been colonized or
invaded by science. But science is altered in vernacular context: it becomes
contradictory, doctrinaire, and imperialistic.
Introduction
The plastic words are present everywhere:
in the speeches of politicians and on the drawing boards of city planners, at
academic conferences, and in the ever more taken-for-granted in-between world
of the media.
The nation state weeds out languages.
Universal signs – words that become common
sense.
Those words already existed two or three
hundred years ago; but they have changed their meaning.
Popular concepts from the vernacular are
transmitted into science or some other higher sphere, where they pick up the
semblance of generally applicable truths. Then they wander back, authorized and
canonized, into the vernacular, where they become dominant myths and overshadow
everyday life.
The scientific teachings of Marx and Freud
reappear in the everyday as doctrines and myths that disable the vernacular.
Amorphous plastic words are the elemental
building blocks of the industrial state.
If the one looks only at the words, they
sometimes appear to be a skeleton that displays the structure of the world more
clearly than a full ideological presentation would.
The words are modules of a new reality – a
reality that locks us in a conceptual prison.
Language crystallizes consciousness and forms an intermediate
world.
Language is an intermediate world.
Plastic words have weak contours.
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