29 Aug Language Barriers

Q: What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist with the Godfather?
A: A man who makes you an offer you can’t understand.

Language is often a hindrance to communication. I’m not referring to language in the sense of somebody’s mother tongue—obviously, if I only speak English and my interlocutor only speaks Farsi, we’re going have problems getting our points across. I’m thinking of language used to erect a deliberate barrier, one in which a group of people throws up impenetrable thickets of jargon or seemingly meaningless words in order to obscure what they’re trying to say.

To see this, one need look no further than academia, where (paradoxically) I started thinking of “language” in a different way.

When I moved to France to start working on my MA, my biggest concern was the basic linguistic challenge I faced. Most courses were in French, which I hadn’t studied in any meaningful way in six years (and if I’d had any sense at all, I would have realized that this program was going to be way over my head, but that is a different story). Once in Paris, I spent my spare time studying dictionaries, making flashcards, reading and watching TV in French, anything to improve my language skills so it wouldn’t take me two hours to read a four-page article.

But even as my French improved, I still struggled mightily with some of the courses, especially one in literary theory. I’d been assigned to do a presentation on Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist. I had no idea what I was reading. Here is an example of the sort of writing I was trying to decipher (From “Interview with Julia Kristeva” in “Positions”)

At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its “living speech,” in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the “transcendental signified.”

The Derrida book that I had to speak about, Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, was in French but an English translation wouldn’t have helped- it was just too dense to wade through. After many, many read-throughs and consulting a lot of secondary sources, my classmate and I managed to give a fairly coherent presentation of the book.

Not long after I finished with Derrida, I ran across the joke above, about the Godfather and the deconstructionist. That summed up much of my experience with literary theory.

Complex ideas require complex explanations, of course.  But I objected to writers being deliberately abstruse, a characteristic that I ran across too often throughout my studies. I read books on history and literature that dealt with murder, political intrigue, the origins of power, spying, authoritarianism, the roots of fascism. They should have been fascinating reads. But they were often tedious slogs, filled with run-on sentences that ran on for paragraphs, peppered with words and phrases that were essentially meaningless. I rarely enjoyed what I was reading, possibly because “enjoyable” implies “frivolous.” A weighty and important subject can’t be too accessible, otherwise the experts lose some of their cachet.

I ran across a similar situation when I was trying to learn about the cause of the financial crisis. Fortunately, I could turn to books that were written by, if not laypeople, specialists who were accustomed to explaining to outsiders complicated-sounding principles. The principles often turned out to be far easier to understand than their names would have you believe.

Securitization? Just a bunch of assets bundled together, with different packages being sold to investors. Mortgage-backed securities were exactly what they sounded like. The very complicated-sounding collateralized debt obligations were just securities backed by loans or bonds, and the even more ominous synthetic collateralized debt obligations were just a CDO one step removed from the CDO containing the original assets. Once I translated the jargon into English, I more or less understood the origins of the crash. The ideas aren’t hard to understand, but they’re hard to boil down into sound bites. For someone who doesn’t have the time to really wade into it, the crisis will is just associated with vague words and phrases: toxic assets, bailouts, too big to fail. It makes one angry without knowing who to blame, which I suspect is often the point. If an issue can be sufficiently muddied, then no one can get punished.

This linguistic muddiness is particularly apparent in politics. It’s also the most pernicious, because on the surface, it occasionally sounds like it makes sense. This is why politicians and pundits love words like “freedom” and “liberty,” which have such vague and enormous meanings that they are meaningless without an extremely precise context. And why the same politicians and pundits shriek about scary sounding “isms.” Marxism! Fascism! Socialism! Communism! These are terms with precise definitions, which are completely taken out of context by the people who use them. It doesn’t matter. Such words whip up emotion and cloud the reality of things.

In his essay “Politics and English Language”, George Orwell wrote:

“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

This is true for so much nowadays Jargon, misleading words, meaningless phrases—all of these are smokescreens designed to obscure understanding, and they’re so omnipresent as to not even raise attention anymore. And if the distorted has become part of normal discourse, what does “normal” even mean anymore?

Emily Seftel Copyright(c) 2013 All Rights Reserved