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.
Plastic words are rarely used in a
particular, precise, appropriate manner. They are used as interchangeable
modules. Because of this, they lose any potential for precision, concreteness,
or exactitude.
1. Plastic Words on Both Sides of the Elbe
The Composite Image
Sexuality
The word has been penetrated by the science
of psychoanalysis and molded by it.
How plastic words are used bears some
resemblance to metaphor.
In Freud’s concept of “sexuality” there
was originally a visual content. He took the psyche as an apparatus inside
which measurable or at least estimatable quantities of energy circulate. The
energy can be dispersed, repressed, displaced, heightened, or lessened. The
idea of the psyche as an apparatus for energy distribution derived from
physics.
“Sexuality” is a metaphor in a double
sense, as a concept derived from science and by reason of the language of
images from physics.
“Sexuality” has become a universal
explanation.
A person in the Middle Ages had no
“sexuality”, neither the word nor the thing. This is a relatively recent
construction.
“Sexuality” has an impressive aura. It
signals science. It silences.
Development
It is an automatic attribute of all
events, emphasized for its own sake.
The word names the property of forward
movement. Everything that does not explicitly or actually correspond to it is
hopelessly backward and out of date.
PLASTIC WORDS
A.
1. The speaker lacks the power to define
the word.
2. The word is superficially related to
scientific terms. It is a stereotype.
3. It has its origin in science.
4. It is carried over from one sphere into
another, and is in that sense a metaphor.
5. It forms an unnoticed link between
science and the everyday.
B.
6. It has a very broad application.
7. It displaces synonyms.
8. It replaces the conventional, precise
word.
9. It replaces an indirect way of speaking
or a silence.
C.
10. It condenses a huge field of experience in one expression.
11. It is impoverished in content.
12. Its imagery is vapid and diffuse.
D
13. It is historically disembedded.
14. It transforms
history into a laboratory.
15. It dispenses with the question of value.
E
16. The "aura" and associations of the word dominate.
17. It names a
property and contains the appearance of an insight.
18. It has more of a function than a content.
F
19. As a scientific
"idealization" of something limitless it uncovers and awakens needs.
20. Its "naturalness" strengthens this pull.
21. The resonance of the word is imperative.
22. It has
multiple uses.
G
23. Its use increases prestige.
24. It leads to silence.
25. It anchors the
need for expert help in the vernacular and serves as a resource.
26. It forms new words and is a
flexible instrument in the hands of experts.
H
27. It makes previous words look out-of-date.
28. In this sense it is new.
29. It is an element of an international code.
I
30. It lacks an
intonation and cannot be replaced by pantomime or gesture.
Essential characteristics:
A. It originates
from science and resembles a building block. It is a
stereotype.
B. It has an
inclusive function and is a "key for everything."
C. It is a reductive concept, impoverished in content.
D. It grasps history as nature.
E. Connotation and
function predominate.
E It generates needs and uniformity.
G. It renders speech hierarchical and colonizes it, establishing
an elite of experts and serving as their "resource."
H. It belongs to a still very recent international code.
I.
It limits speech to
words, shutting out expressive gesture.
Plastic words:
- basic need
- care
- center
- communication
- consumption
- contact
- decision
- development
- education
- energy
- exchange
- factor
- function
- future
- growth
- identity
- information
- living standard
- management
- model
- modernization
- partner
- planning
- problem
- process
- production
- progress
- raw material
- relationship
- resources
- role
- service
- sexuality
- solution
- strategy
- substance
- system
- trend
- value
- welfare
- work
Our theme is the most recent phase in the
standardization of ordinary language.
Plastic words are first and foremost
concepts.
2. Are Plastic Words a New Class of Words?
Nietzsche holds a centuries-old
overextension of language responsible for the independence language has
assumed.
the fundamental alteration in the meaning
of classical topoi
Information is what one has always just
missed.
“Information” is a word derived from the
Latin. In classical Latin “informatio” means “training, instruction,
correction” or “image and imagination”. In the Latin of the Middle Ages the
word acquires the additional sense of “inquiry” and “investigation”.
Old meanings: “explanation”,
“instruction”, “report”, “evaluation”.
Since 1970s, the meaning is “news”.
In everyday life, people think less and
less in sentences and allow themselves to be led more and more by words.
“Information” becomes superior to mere
opinion, or only intuitively grounded suspicion, or even feeling. It is
fortified with data. It can be checked. As a datum, it is the essence of the
thing. It opposes everything that is not information. As soon as it is
quantified, its opposition inevitably becomes a zero.
The user of amorphous plastic words is
much more likely to be a slave to the words. He cannot check them; instead he
may have the illusion of viewing a territory in a comprehensive way.
It’s an old propaganda trick to present a
desired image of the future as a present reality, the hoped-for history of
tomorrow as the nature of today.
Catchphrases contain instructions for
action, slogans are instructions for action.
Catchphrases:
“the energy crises”
“the struggle for existence”
“a place in the sun”
“the yellow peril”
“total mobilization”
“the decline of the West”
“total war”
“zero hour”
“the iron curtain”
“currency reform”
“reconstruction”
“a planned economy versus a free market”
“the economic miracle”
“the crisis in education”
“the energy crisis”
“quality of life”
“freedom or socialism”
“the economic crisis”
“the information age”
Amorphous plastic words are not
picturesque or aggressive or target-oriented, but apparently neutral.
“So catchphrases are
interpretations of history. They are a static precis, fragments of sentences
turned into formulas. They share attributes of our plastic words, in that they
are autonomous and outside the control of the speaker. But our plastic words do
not have the defining power, the picturesqueness, or the polemical pointedness
of catchphrases. They are far less conspicuous and apparently more factual.
They also interpret, but without aggression. They are in fact completely
nonaggressive and nonpartisan. They interpret nature, not history. Expressed
more precisely, they locate history within nature, and it is just that way that
they achieve their dreadful effect.”
Plastic words are
idols.
Plastic words are
connotative stereotypes drawn from science that function as ciphers in the
vernacular.
Plastic words are
dressed up in the authority of science and its claim to a universal power of eplanation.
We are dealing with
a new type of language usage-one might call it modular-and a new word type-plastic.
The myths of Roland Barthes transform history into nature (so the plastic
words).
The news of Günther Anders make reality unreal and (so the plastic
words).
“Plastic words are
points of crystallization that order the in-between world of our everyday
language. The phantom world of the media and the things that have melted down
to signs also resemble this in-between world. They contribute to the forging of
this little set of words. But these words not only determine consciousness. As
former historical concepts, now cut loose from history, they become instruments
of manipulation and generate blueprints of a new reality. They are tools for
the laboratory of the real.”
3. Plastic Words as
Building Blocks of New Models of Reality
Language is reduced
to a series of plastic modules.
Lego words
These merry games
represent the condition of language; they point to a kind of loosening of our
language that is historically unprecedented. But at the same time they also
reflect the fact that reality itself has taken on an unparalleled flexibility.
Nor do these word games only produce empty phrases or technical jabbering. That
would be harmless. Their most effective products-and if one narrows the game to
plastic words one can recognize this-are the finished building blocks of our
world. Natura fictionem sequitur. Nature follows art, and at this moment
pretty bad art, trash. A language of interchangeable words is reflected in a
world of interchangeable trash.
4. Experts as
Functionaries Who Make Reality
Models of reality
take shape in the laboratory of plastic words.
The vernacular has
been infiltrated by a hybrid lingo made by marrying plastic words to technical
terms.
Plastic words
function as metaphors.
Transmission of
words between spheres is barely noticed anymore and, for that reason, it seems
all the more commonsense. The success of the practical colonization of our
world partly depends on a prior metaphorical colonization. A toolbox of modular
stereotypes is available and ready to use. But this transmission not only opens
up new regions, as I have said, it also disfigures and estranges them. The
metaphorical colonization means, linguistically as well as concretely, a
perversion of the social world.
There are three
colonizers: science/technology, economics and administration.
Abstract language
allows the world to be planned, levels it out evenly, and makes it available to
the drawing board. It constructs homogeneous and
easily visualized spaces. It avoids sensuousness, diversity, and
individual
variation, and focuses on what remains when one gets rid of all particular
cases. This is precisely how it opens up the world for exploitation.
At the same time
abstract language serves to cover up reality. It prevents
the imagination from reflecting on what actually happens to people. It ignores what they experience and what they feel, their life
histories. The language of the overview leads to disregard of what is most
important. The seal of science or of administration, stamped on the everyday by
the expert, hides suffering beneath an inhuman objectivity. The expert robs the
senses of their reality.
The expert is an
enemy of extremes. He identifies extreme positions as dangerous, and one of his
most common arguments is that one must maintain a middle ground between
enthusiasm for progress and fear of the future, between economics and ecology.
There is such a thing as a car fetish, he says, but there is also a danger of
turning the car into a bogeyman: one needs to find a balance between these
views. The pattern he follows is a parody of Platonic dialectic. He holds the
middle ground regardless of the question and bravely faces into the future:
"We must endure the tensions."
The language of the
experts imitates stability and secures the journey into the future.
-
the
criteria we have established for plastic words apply to the expert as
well
The expert
- silences
- and reforms the world of
everyday life through the concepts and the
-vocabulary of the scientific
world;
-he eliminates the chasm between
these spheres (1-5);
- his language has a very wide
radius of application
-and displaces locally
meaningful signs (6-9);
-his speech is poor
in content;
- his speech reduces
great diversity to a common denominator ( 10-12 );
-he disembeds
localities from history,
-transforms them
into a laboratory,
-and dispenses with
the question "good" or "bad" in favor of the question
"progressive" or "backward" ( 13-15);
- he mediates goods
and always appears on the side of Enlightenment;
-the resonance of
the name "expert" and the social function he fulfills are more
important than what he actually does ( 16-18);
- he awakens
limitless needs,
-whose
"naturalness" become an imperative through him;
-he is capable of
replicating things (otherwise he is replaced) (19-22);
-the efforts of
expert bodies raise prestige;
- he
institutionalizes himself and the need for his help through his language;
- he creates
compound words and new words which serve as flexible instruments with which to
manufacture new models of reality (23-26);
- he makes the past
look out-of-date,
-his position is
relatively new,
-he has the cachet
of the international (27-29),
-and his language lacks an individual voice (30).
5. The
Mathematization of the Vernacular
Our vernacular is
becoming increasingly mathematized.
The whole of science
is becoming mathematical.
Mingling of spheres:
the sculpting of the everyday world and its language by the natural sciences.
Abstraction,
ahistorical universality, numerical sizing, the arbitrariness principle,
reduction, combination, multiplication, model building unrestricted by any
social norm, geometrization, and enumeration-if these expressions fit, then it
is meaningful to speak of mathematization of the vernacular. Mathematics's claim
to universality has not only reached the humanities, but has also jumped over
into everyday society, where it is mirrored in its speech. But the vernacular
has not become more precise as a result: plastic words only parody mathematics,
just as they only denature the vernacular.
1. Plastic words are
characterized by a high degree of abstraction. This abstract language creates
homogeneous domains that can be scanned quickly. It directs
attention away from individual differences. "The Federal Republic is
becoming an information society." This language delivers the world into
the hands of planners, levels the terrain, and places everyone at the mercy of
the drawing board.
2. Words such as
"communication" lack a historical dimension; they are not embedded in
any particular place or society. They are shallow and they taste of nothing.
They describe nature in the terms of natural science. They banish history from
the worlds they invade and destroy the human scale.
3. Our key words are
used in the manner of boldly outlined building blocks, as though one were
dealing with numeric quantities. The aura predominates, but even in the
vernacular, many of these stereotypes suggest a quantifiable amount. Not just
"energy," "production," and "consumption," but
even "information" or "communication" increasingly appear
before us as statistics.
4. The plastic words
have a tendency to create sentences when placed in almost any order. The words
are alarmingly interchangeable, they can be equated with one another or strung
together in a chain of equations. "Communication is exchange. Exchange is
a relationship. A relationship is a process .... "
5. We are speaking
about only a small set of words, but they are the building blocks of countless
models of reality. Whether the topic is the Third World, health, agriculture,
or town planning-in the mill of the plastic words models are manufactured and
projects developed in an instant. Experts inflect each word according to the
sector to which it is assigned. Some of the words are already on the way to
becoming suffixes, to entering a grammatical category. They tend to form
series. Our world is deficient, malleable, and continually refashioned into new
structures: this is the point of this modular Lego language.
6. Mats of words
creep across the surfaces of our living spaces and grip them fast. They are
comprised of the advice of experts, catalogs of criteria, examination papers,
marks, points, tests, test results, and percentages. Enumeration and
geometrization reach into every crack.
The new concept of
language put forward by several leading twentieth-century linguists reflects
and support the mathematization and mobilization of the vernacular.
Orwell’s Newspeak –
a language without a historical dimension, an artificially created
plan-language sanctioned by state
Our theme is a different instance of mathematization: the
basic international code of modular plastic words. It is simple, has no real history,
is easy to learn and manipulate, and is limited in vocabulary and syntactic
rules: a type of Lego. It overlays and displaces the local
vernacular, replaces nuanced and nonverbal modes of expression, and over time insinuates itself everywhere. The Lego
language of the industrial state plasticizes the planet.
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