Beginning to Think About language

The title of this column began, at first, to represent the intended objectivity or at least individuality of the inquiry I have attempted to carry out. The phrase “No gods, no masters” originated in French and is thought to be coined by the socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui as the title for his journal, Ni Dieu ni Maître!, which he wrote and published from 1880 until his death the following year. Afterwards, it became an important slogan to anarchists in Spain, Portugal and France who were struggling under the oppressive reactionaries of the Catholic regimes in those countries.

However, the phrase also appears twice in a work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil where he criticizes the idea that "nature" dictates a morality of equality before the law and again later when he identifies it as both an Anarchist slogan and the motto of "herd morality," the morality of compassion for others.

I have to agree with Nietzsche in that, at least historically as we have seen, nature does not seem to dictate a morality of equality before the law. In fact, the gods and masters I have exposed so far are impartial, indifferent, impersonal, and lack any notion of social or economic equality.

These gods are threefold. One is relational in nature and has to do with a person circumstance, namely the circumstances required for their continued existence. This is the god of Necessity.

The next is fundamentally concrete and physical. Rooted in materialism is the basic desire for the means by which we might maintain our existence. This maintenance is made possible by the master called Resource. It is the physical means by which we fulfill our desires.

The last god or master of a society is possibly the most important though I’m sure there are those who might disagree with me. I claim its supremacy because without it people would never be able to carry out the things necessary to their existence. They would never be able to pass on anything and they would never be able to make innovations on the ways they do things. This is Knowledge. More specifically, it is Knowledge as we have come to experience it linguistically.

It is this I would like to focus on for a while.

In 1921, the American journalist Walter Lippmann said that a democracy requires what he called the "manufacture of consent," a phrase recently popularized by the social critic Noam Chomsky as an “Orwellian euphemism for thought control.” Lippmann had used this term to describe the fact that the United States by and large cannot exert force against its citizenry (though it has on many occasions not often or fondly remembered) and so it is more useful and advantageous for “free” countries to control what people thought.

The main and most effective way this is done is through the control of language and by that, the control of information assimilation. By institutionalizing the way we talk about things it is possible to shape the common perceptions held by people about their world and their lives. It creates a worldview and essentially creates the conditions necessary for the population to readily give their consent to the ruling class to do what they want, to what they think they want at any rate. It is a literal “manufacture of consent.”

Let’s have some elementary examples and by elementary I mean elementary school.

We were all taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America. We all also know that this is not true. Columbus landed in Hispaniola, what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which was already inhabited and enacted a successful genocide against the people living there. But this we learned too late to question what right we had here, the claim that this is “our” land, or the general perception of Columbus as a great navigator, explorer, and European hero.

Does Jesus, depicted on so many European and American churches, look like a Hebrew? No, he looks like a sandy haired Englishman in robes and sandals. Conveniently this removes Jesus from his cultural context as a Jew, a people demonized by Christianity for over a thousand years, and puts him on the side of the “righteous” white men who would spread his faith to the “inferior,” read non-white, heathens.

And let’s not forget the continual disenfranchisement of women carried out in just his way. Eve made from Adam’s rib, the weaker sex, easily tempted, easily corrupting her male counterpart. Unclean during menstruation, intellectually undeveloped, submissive, these are just a few ways women have been described as or prescribed to be throughout Western history. Serious Greek thinkers actually referred to women as “deformed men.”

You see a similar attack carried out on homosexuals today. “Gay” has become synonymous with “stupid” in contemporary slang. If some one doesn’t like something it’s, “That’s so gay.” It’s a great ego bruiser among the macho to be called a “fag” even in jest.

So it’s easy to see how language affects our thoughts; how it can betray our convictions and be used to spread though assumptions throughout a culture. It is a powerful knowledge shaping weapon both in its capacity for the truth and in its ability to manipulate those truths into the most backward lie. Next week, Language and Power, the reigns of the nation.

Power and Knowledge

It is convenient that we have first looked at a historical period so far removed from our own because with it we can more easily assume some form of neutrality. Now, as we turn to our own culture and times, the analytical knife cuts closer as it were and we become more squeamish under it.

The contrast also serves to reveal both the dynamism and universality of cultures. Things change and stay the same just as a river appears constant and yet every moment brings new waters downstream.

Last week, following the advice of Michel Foucault, I had begun to analyze power “as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain.” In a very brief sketch of the growth of American society out of colonial mercantilism it was discovered that two dominant forces did and do flow throw society to form Foucault’s requisite chain. These are resource and information.

Over two thousand years ago Plato gave us the sound insight often translated, “let us create in idea a State; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.”

People are always searching for the means by which they can take care of the necessities and thus ease the circumstances of their existence. Resources are the means that they use for these ends. This much is obvious but worth stating in that it really clarifies the fundamental nature of this inquiry.

Water, forestry products, animal products including food to raise them on, agriculture, mining, the conversion of these raw materials into commodities via industry, all these are the result of humans creating the means to satisfy their basic needs. Granted this capacity can, and has at different times throughout history, be stretched to the point of absurdity. Once the true necessities are met the tendency is to push for the maximization of comfort or luxury.

It was also Plato who said, “we must go beyond the necessities of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the art of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.” We must consider these things because they are the symptoms of our times. We live in a world in which some enjoy vast luxuries unmatched in history while others fail to meet even those basic necessities to survive.

In light of this inequality, it must be clear why resources are an adequate vehicle for power and used to control social systems under Foucault’s model of power analysis. Resources form a easily traceable chain as they travel from raw material into commodities and finally to waste and looking at the manipulation of these resources can show definite causal relations to the living circumstances of citizen living in society.

Here is where information, particularly as it is conveyed through language, becomes the key to understanding both social development and the means by which it can be controlled. In Critique of the Gotha Program Marx concludes, “The distribution of the means of consumption at any time is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves.” The conditions of production dictate the use of resource. They dictate the use of resource through the assimilation of information throughout the society.

In my previous article it was noted that information regarding the availability of resources in the New World was the most valuable thing brought back to Britain from those lands. It is because this knowledge opens up new options for the satisfying of needs. If circumstances in Europe were not adequate, perhaps this newly discovered land would prove more prosperous.

This is an easy relationship to see and once seen can be translated into the modern day without any effort. Think for a moment how the spread of information is used to widen people’s options in today’s advertising industry. At any time there are a multitude of varieties of just one kind of product and the competition between these brands is waged with multi-million dollar budgets, just to get the word out.

When an idea is related to a person, they become a vehicle for that idea and become able to act upon it. It is reasonable to stipulate that a person cannot act on an idea until they are aware of it, and so idea can be catalysts to action. Once knowledge is cemented in the consciousness a person can make any number of decisions based on that knowledge.

So it is knowledge that will ultimately restrict a person’s methods of fulfilling their needs. If the person is unaware of this particular option it is beyond their power to choose it. Language becomes the means by which a person’s actions can be controlled because it is through language, language as symbols, that information is spread from person to person.

“The individual is the effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation.” Next week we will delve into this relationship and examine the social power of language.

A New Natural History

"Every man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his own ends, and feels in his whole being that he can at any moment perform or abstain from performing this or that action, but as soon as he has performed it, that action executed at a given moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but predetermined significance," writes Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. This sentiment echoes my initial thoughts on the beginnings of U.S. history.

In my last article, a discussion had begun concerning the origins of the American social system: the events leading up to independence. Despite the intentions of the crown, regardless of the efforts of the London and Plymouth Companies, things in the colonies took their own course.

I have found myself adopting what I call a natural view of history, that is, historical events occur almost as a force of nature insofar as they are the result of a seemingly infinite array of associations between individuals and groups of individuals. For who was it that was in control of the colonial situation?

The crown? No not really. As I said in my last column the goal of the crown was to secure gold, silver, iron ore and to locate the Northwest Passage. None of these goals were achieved and necessity forced England to rely on trade, forestry and tobacco. Further, the colonists adapted means of meeting their own needs without the crown and often behind its back.

For instance, colonial products were called "enumerated products" and could legally only be shipped from colonial ports to England. The colonists effectively ignored these laws in the initial absence of customs officials, but even when those officials were instated it was excessively easy for the colonists to bribe these officials of the crown due to the extremely low living wages afforded to them by the King. John Hancock's uncle, for one, made his fortune smuggling colonial goods to the Dutch and French.

So, perhaps it was the colonists themselves and their counterparts in the London and Plymouth Companies that had real control over the formation of American society. But is this really the case? They were, largely, under the crowns control, despite their flaunting of several royal laws.

It so happened that the London Company's charter was revoked and their monopoly on tobacco reverted to the colonial landowners. Later, King George III would take measures to disenfranchise the colonial legislature, a political maneuver that would eventually lead to revolution.

A dissertation on the variables that sum up the history of our society would run on like this indefinitely. It makes it nearly impossible to deduce the exact cause of it all. Who could possibly have control over this?

That question, I believe, is an empty one because it is inherently indeterminable. The real question we should concern ourselves with and that I shall concern myself with, is how historical events in fact are controlled.

Historians, often when writing about a topic, will refer to a series of events as "inevitable." When followed closely enough, all of history would certainly seem "inevitable" due to the mere fact of its continuity. One step preceded the next, naturally. From the time John Cabot briefly surveyed the continent, to colonial revolution, to civil war and industrialization, all lead invariably to the current circumstances.

John Cabot brought back to England perhaps the most crucial ingredient to history. He returned home with the notion, the idea, that England had staked a claim in the New World. Once the King thought he had rights to resources over there, and roused the country to the idea that they had resources over there as well, a wave was set in motion that crossed the Atlantic and broke upon the Americas with a vengeance. It was information.

But not just the King assimilated information about ends in the New World, no the Puritan's did, and stockholders did and later patriots like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine and the authors of the Federalist Papers would spread all kinds of new ideas among the citizenry.

Michel Foucault writing in 1980 said, "Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain." Knowledge then becomes a primary force in history, namely, what people do with knowledge they've gained in order to satisfy their ends. The second catalyst to social impetus is resources with which the people attempt to shape the objects of their desires. Note too, that resource forms a path, a chain that can be trace traveling through various modes of society.

It is with this thought in mind that I would like to bring our inquiries into the twenty-first century and begin now to deal with issues of our own times. Keeping in mind these views on history, I would like to take a close look at how the ways the assimilation of information and the pooling of resources control our modern society. This is particularly important in the age of the internet, mass consumerism and the clash of Eastern and Western cultures, neither of which is vulnerable to the genocides that befell the Natives of the Americas.Next week I will consider the power of language in the age of mass information.

Necessity and Resource part 1

Some things to be considered in upcoming articles.

Rousseau said in On the Social Contract, “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains. This man believes he is the master of others, and still he is more of a slave than they are.” I had said that my part writing the Left Side had become like a prison. This was ironic because it’s expected that a position expressing your political views no matter how controversial (as long as they were liberal) would be very satisfying to a writer (assuming that writing gives terms like “liberal” and “conservative” a lot of weight). So there I was, Rousseau’s man, born free but in chains.

I think I can generalize my own experience because, like the prisons others find themselves in, mine was of my own design. Certain choices I had made along the way put me in those chains.

Mill wrote, “Each will receive its proper share, if each has that which more particularly concerns it.” When I arrived at the Bottom Line, they were looking for a political columnist. Leaning more to the left when placed on the political spectrum, I opted to write the Left Side as it more particularly concerned me at the time. Though things were not entirely in my control, I certainly did my part in the cooperative efforts that make the newspaper possible. This was expected of me as part of a contract I had with the Bottom Line.

This point brings us back to Rousseau, for although he believed men to be in chains he also concludes that the people are the source of the state’s authority as they exist in a reciprocal and cooperative effort combining forces as ruler and ruled. By having cooperative citizens the state derives power of authority over those consenting to its rule. Through popular agreement, convention becomes law.

Without the people, a state cannot be legitimized and when those citizens fail to recognize state sovereignty it is because they have revoked it. “The public force therefore needs an agent of its own to bind it together and set it to work under the direction of the general will, to serve as a means of communication between the State and the Sovereign, and do for the collective person more or less what the union of body and soul does for man.” This intermediary between the citizenry and the Sovereign is government.

If this is so then the prisons are devises of men’s own design. The citizenry authorizes the government to carry out the will of the sovereign so empowered by the people and legislature exists to restructure the governmental bureaucracy, the means by which the sovereign’s will is carried out.

Understand that the sovereign not an actual, physical group or person but is an abstraction Rousseau and others use to represent the collective will of the people as they have formed under the state. That will may manifest itself in the form of a king, a parliament, a president, or an assembly but whatever its shape it’s the thing people have empowered to govern them.

Similarly, Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that, “A commonwealth is said to be instituted, when a multitude of men do agree, and covenant, everyone, with everyone, that to whatsoever man, or assembly of men, shall be given by the major part, the right to present the person of them all, (that is to say be their representative;) everyone, as well he that voted for it, as he that voted against it, shall authorize all the actions and judgements, of that man, or assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protected against other men.”

This description of a state or commonwealth coming into being echoes Rousseau’s claims that the establishment of a state results in the “total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community,” thus establishing a sovereign. It is easy to see how Hobbes and others could use the concept of a Social Contract to describe the situation between a state and its citizens.

But Mill claims, “Though society is not founded on a contract, and though no good purpose is answered by inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it, every one who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest.” This is a reciprocal form of free association in which free men enter into any chains or obligations of their own volition. Such a view is complimentary of Rousseau’s belief that, “the institution of government is not a contract, but a law; that the depositories of the executive power are not the people’s master’s, but its officers…that for them there is no question of contract, but of obedience.”

So how did these things develop in our own country? How was sovereignty first established in the American colonies?

Naturally the foundation of colonies in America was a commercial endeavor for King James I of England. In 1606 two joint stock exchange companies were founded called the London Company and the Plymouth Company. Essentially the crown grant these companies charters to retrieve resources from New World territories claimed in the brief 1497 voyage of John Cabot.

The companies were commissioned to start colonies which were to strike out and secure gold, silver, and iron ore for England and to locate the fabled Northwest Passage. To work these settlements the companies brought indentured servants 95% of whom were men. The settlers would work for seven years as virtual slaves in exchange for passage to the New World and employment with the company.

Freedom was used essentially as currency by these people in extreme circumstances of need. “...the true creator [of a city] is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.” writes Plato in The Republic and later, “And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand...”

They would do it any way possible. At first, settlers owned only stock in the companies but eventually, exchanges of land called head rights were given away for shares in the produce of the land.

With no gold, silver, iron ore, or Northwest Passage agriculture, property or real estate, became the big New World business and in 1621 the London Company is given a royal monopoly on tobacco. When London Company’s charter is later revoked by the crown the largest landowner’s become powerful resources to the King and are granted the rights to form local legislative bodies. It is the proposed dissolution of these very legislative bodies that will later bring the heirs of these wealthy landowners to pledge “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to be independent of English rule.

More importantly than free of Britain, in control over their lands and the vast resources that they possessed there. Not only control over the resources but of the citizenry, many of whom were already indentured servants working under the largest landowners.

From this history of the early United States it becomes clear that although contracts are involved at times, there is no clear understanding between citizens and sovereignty in which the structure of society is agreed upon. There is no plan other than what suite the particular needs of the times.

More on this at a later time...

Intents and Purposes

The intent of any language is to convey some sense of what experience tells us the world is about. Being an experiential expression language is always directed by its source which composes the expression with certain meanings intented.

What I hope to convey through this is some sense of what I think and feel about the world I'm encountering around me and to provide a sounding board for others to share in their experiences as well. I have reached that time in my life when the questions of purpose and worth weigh very heavy on us. When we're asked to make a decision and stand resolute in what we have chosen to undertake.

I'm young and full of doubt but also full of a terrible wonder about the world that sometime paralyzes me in midstride.

Though it is not my personal story I want to tell here, I will, from time to time, supplement my thoughts with personal anecdotes and relations. This is not intended to be a journal but I believe it necessary for the sake of understanding to contextualized the source of an idea with where they're coming from.

Our unique place in history provide each of us with a vantage point never had before and never to be had again. The varience in our subjective experiences of the world make it crucial that a sincere effort is made to understand the perspective of others in order to get the widest scope possible.

Another purpose of this blog ties into the student newspaper at Frostburg State University, the Bottom Line. I had been developing a column on Politics and Society which has yielded a vast amount of information for me to sort through and consider. In addition to supplementing those articles, this blog will serve as a testing ground for new ideas and a place to further expound on themes which cannot be expanded upon in the space of a newspaper column.

I will be posting the articles here as well as providing links to the sources used in compiling historical data and literary references.

I am very excited about both of these projects and expect to see them converge in a very productive way. I look forward to reading your thoughts and criticisms.

- Donovan

Left Side, Right Side, Same Side, Wrong Side

This is the first article to be published in the Bottom Line this fall. Note I wrote the political "Left Side" column in previous semesters which should soon be archived here. - Donovan

There was a lot of discussion between myself and Jeremy, the new Editor-in-Chief of the Bottom Line, about the inevitable demise of the Left Side/Right Side columns. I know there will be some people out there who will think our decision was a bad one, made most likely so that the paper could take a more liberal stance. This is to be expected; the Bottom Line has taken lots of flak for being a “liberal” newspaper, though this critique of a college newspaper is not a surprising one. The plain truth of the matter is that the Left Side/Right Side columns were largely a result of our efforts to combat the misbegotten reputation that we are a “liberal” publication. As such, both articles, however they may have balanced things, were farces.

I am happy to set aside the Left Side. Ironically, it had become a sort of prison for me, a place in which I could not express how I felt about the critical issues we were to allegedly debate.

In the Left Side article I found myself not so much debating the issue as reading from an ideological script composed of the Republican and Democratic Party lines. This is not dialogue or even an exchange of ideas. It is a hollow political act which is perpetuated across the country as a vulgar attempt to prove there is still political diversity in American politics.

What I have found is that when we boil the issues down the Left Side and the Right Side are the Same Side.

Sure, I wanted to talk about South America and I did. But from the Democratic position on South America is to blame the Republicans for favoring big businesses in their exploitation of South American resources. Under the “Left Side” flag I could not point out that Democratic Presidents Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton have all forwarded and approved violent insurrections of South American sovereignty sometimes labeling such endeavors “peacekeeping” but more often simply “counterinsurgency.”

In short I did not feel like I was being honest and when you’re in the writer’s position, able to use words to affect a response in your readers, being dishonest with yourself is the first step toward being dishonest with your audience. So, when given my choice, I chose the more honest route. No more left side. No more sides except the side that most clearly reflects the truth.

Words have the incredible power to bring forth truth. In one sense, a word is nothing; no more than a sound. Without understanding words are just noises to be heard, some pleasant or caustic like any other sound. But humans are gifted with understanding and so words take on a whole new dimension to those who share their meanings. Words become symbolic of our experiences.

Ideological language, that particular rhetoric that is wed to one unalterable worldview, is a language that speaks not to the way things are, but to the way a group thinks things ought to be. It is a language of theory, of ideas arranged on paper so as to appear most pleasing.

It does not speak from experiences. Instead, ideologies offer a blind guess at what experience might be if only circumstances were different. The problem is that circumstances are not different; they are just what they are.

I for one am glad to be done with the political ideologies of the left side.

The question then, is what am I to do with this new found freedom? Given this space how do I fill it?

Well how do any of us fill the spaces we occupy? We start with what we know.

As an American, I know American culture. I spend everyday in American society. Television programs, books, magazines, newspapers, and Frostburg’s curriculum all supply me with an endless stream of cultural thought and popular politics. My question and my concern is where does it all come from? Who are our Gods and Masters? The search for our cultural source will be the topic of this column.

All of us are born into a situation we have no control over and grow up amid a culture already established by those long dead or dying. The nature of the individual’s place in society and how a person is to make that place their own is a concern for all of us. The answers to these questions affect our private and social lives, the environment we live in, the course our future will take, and, strangely, the past that bore us to this moment.

If possible, I will take this all in with a healthy attitude of skepticism and leave no consideration untouched. Left Side, Right Side, they’re all the Same Side and for choosing so blindly are all on the Wrong Side. Those dichotomies are arbitrary and set forth by those who wish to see their own worldview, their own ideology, become and remain the status quo. These distinctions are made by men who would be masters, by masters who would make themselves God.

I am a free man writing for a free people. For this column, there are No Gods and No Masters.