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| The Illness of Language Jānis Taurens, Philosopher | |
| “Both forms appear as symptoms of the chronic illness of which all attitudes and standpoints merely mark the temperature curve: inauthenticity.” (Walter Benjamin. Karl Kraus) “He would not mind perhaps having a bite at the apple of sin because, apart from solecisms, he was indifferent to the idea of sin...” (Vladimir Nabokov. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight) In May, the trees suddenly sprout green leaves, then come the first unexpectedly hot days of June and then the year has ended. It ends not only because I no longer have to read lectures, but because summer is a quiet time for culture. The theatre and concert seasons are over, the last books of significance have been published, the most important exhibitions have come and gone, and the latest Biennale has opened in faraway Venice. All that’s left is a few last conversations with friends, then I pack a pile of books to take with me to the country and reread some back copies of Studija that I have been too busy to examine carefully. My attention is drawn to two interviews published in the April and June editions of Studija. They mark a triangle of relationships in which the respective points are marked with the words “artist”, “art critic” and “representative of political power.” The intolerance of artists towards art critics is nothing new and I have spoken about it many times, if not elsewhere then in my lectures, with reference to Ernesto Sabato and Sol LeWitt. But the interview reveals another form of “intolerance”, in this case a reproach about the non-existence of art criticism in Latvia shifting on to art itself. In an interview, Aiga Dzalbe says: “I think that one of the problems underlying the lack of writing is that art of the present moment doesn’t offer much to write about. If it were outstanding then... Isn’t that so?” The second relationship pairing – the artist versus power – is well-known since the connection between the avant-garde and political activism in the 20th century. In Latvia this conflict is further embittered by the inability and unwillingness (strangely enough one does not exclude the other) of the legislative and executive powers to resolve, for example, economic problems, which directly affect art, however distant the latter may seem to be from material interests. Of course, the representatives of power – in the interview this is Minister of Culture Sarmīte Ēlerte – tural life we have here. I am happy to be able to speak the Latvian language here.” (Not being a politician, I on the other hand am able to say: “Sometimes it makes me sad to be thinking mostly in Latvian; that I live, write and read lectures in Latvia.”) Sarmīte Ēlerte makes this positive assertion in opposition to an artwork by editor and artist Līga Marcinkēviča (one that I do not know of), in which she presents artists as starving martyrs: “We shouldn’t portray them all as poor and starving martyrs.” (My friend Vasīlijs Voronovs would not be able to stay silent in such a situation and would cry out, in parody: “Artists are generally emotional creatures, incapable of thinking clearly, who perceive and express everything in exaggerated imagery”. However, I am obliged to use a more reserved and unambiguous form of expression.) The next step, after the verbal battlefield has been suitably prepared, is Ēlerte’s claim that “artists are sometimes as if endowed with two natures”. The first of these is the need to be independent, to which we can only nod our approval, while the other “to be under a protective wing”: “Please understand that if an artist wants to be under a protective wing, than unfortunately he or she is prepared to give up his or her independence, and that is not in the interests of society.” (Hence…I could add). Hence art is accused of not being outstanding, and artists – that they are apparently prepared to sell out their creative freedom for material benefits. Drawing together the thoughts expressed in both interviews, it could be con¬cluded that where there is a dominant tendency “to be under a wing”, outstanding art cannot be created, and the cure for this could be an even stricter diet for artists. This conclusion, of course, is not logically sufficient; it is based on the persuasive power of language, its effect. This may explain why, when reading the interview with Ēlerte, one feels that the interviewer (the editor of the magazine) ends up taking a kind of defensive position. Phrases such as “verbal battlefield” and “defensive pos¬ition” are elements of clumsy metaphors, clumsy because here we can see the symptoms indicating the illness of language. Which language? I will try to answer that, but first of all I should explain the term “illness of language”, which has quite a complex genealogy. It is, nevertheless, import¬ant to sketch this briefly so that one can take a concrete stand with regard to the aforementioned relationship triangle. (You could also call it the triangle of art language, art criticism and the language used by politicians.) Regarding “the genealogy of morals”, once when Va¬sīlijs and I were discussing politics, the concept of the “illness of language” came up, although I no longer recall who first raised it. When later at home I reflected on this word combination, I remembered Karl Kraus and his quixotic struggle against the mixing of factual description and cre¬ative fantasy in the Viennese press of the early 20th century. The term itself – “illness” – I found in an article by Walter Benjamin about Kraus. The context of the excerpt from Benjamin’s work quoted at the top of this article was that initially Benjamin quoted Kraus’s views on Nietzsche as “…to the mixture of elements …in the decomposing Euro¬ pean style of the last half century, he added psychology, and that the new level of language he created is the level of essayism, as Heine’s was that of feuilletonism”. And identification of the illness as inauthenticity is followed by the assertion: “It is from the unmasking of the inauthentic that this battle against the press arose.” This battle against the press, conducted by Kraus from 1899 to 1936 in his anti-press publication Die Fackel, has had an influence that indicates the significance of Kraus’s views. He inspired not only Adolf Loos in his fight against ornamentation and the separation of everyday items from art (“the differentiation between a chamber pot and an urn”) and Arnold Schoenberg’s radical reform of musical language, but also Wittgenstein’s critique of language in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Returning to Kraus’s statements about Nietzsche and Heine, however, someone could interject here: “What words!” – meaning that the symptoms of the illness in Latvia are too minor to be worth considering. It really is the concrete person that is important in Kraus’s criticism, since he believes that what a person writes, even the sentence structure only, is closely related to their moral stance. In Kraus’s view, a writer who uses words for manipulation is amoral in proportion to his talent, and this polemical analysis of grammar and the use of language was also a critique of society at that time. But in reality, we too have words to compare with Nietzsche’s “essayism” or Heine’s “feuilletonism”. Here is a shining example of Latvian literary fantasy: “…because, although the banal truth is banal perhaps first of all because it is true, and sometimes a single droplet, possibly, may indeed represent an entire ocean (though the dot on the “i” is more like a dot somewhere “around the middle” of this “i”), it is doubtful whether in this attempt to get closer to Dukts we will find anything more than protozoa and plankton in the droplet offered..” The reader may have already recognised that this is the start of the first 11-page sentence in Aivars Ozoliņš’s book Dukts (1991). About 20 years ago, the newspaper Diena began publishing a commentary or “feuilleton” section on page two. The idea was to use colourful language to draw attention to current events, and at the same time – imperceptibly – to plant the correct opinion in readers’ minds, an approach which already then I found similar to the kind of thing that Kraus fought against. (But at the time I stayed silent, and up to now have only remarked on this in private conversation.) Now, in order to re-examine my impressions at that time, I recently went to the National Library reading room in Old Riga and selected some random copies of Diena from May 2001. One of the topical issues back then, it seems, was the activities of the “socialists” in the Riga City Council (who can still remember that?!). And look, here is a commentary by Aivars Ozoliņš, published on 5 May of that year: “…on the one hand, a concoction prepared by a few occupation regime collaborators holding Soviet doctoral degrees from Moscow universities and plain old KGB agents, which – hurriedly, deceitfully and under the cover of slogans popular in one part of society – is to be pushed through the referendum with a view to gaining power themselves in the next Parliamentary elections, even if it means sacrificing the principles which lie at the foundations of this state; on the other – an admirable, tragic yet shining testimony of faith and fidelity that emerged under conditions that were seemingly hopeless for Latvia’s statehood..” While the sen¬tence structure is similar to that in Dukts, the black-and-white characterisations are considerably more trivial. The form of expression is a weapon that, by changing a few words, could also be used in May 2011, because the main message is not in the facts, but rather in the emotional complexion of the text. The further we get from the original source, the more banal the forms of expression become. Here is a comment by Laima Muktupāvele in Diena on 11 June of this year, with regard to one of the referendum petition campaigns launched this spring: “If some Latvian prophet of doom, wailing about the end of the world, the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy or the butterfly effect which causes earthquakes, grumbled that Latvians were not the ones who would go..” And so on... This article does not aspire to be a sociological study on the use of language in the mass media. It is enough for me to find a paradigmatic example which has a place to exist in the logical space of the language of Latvia, i.e. one that is meaningful or in demand. But what then is the situation with our everyday language which serves as the foundation for all other uses of language, and about which the “Krausian” Wittgenstein once wrote that it is “in perfect logical order” (‘Tractatus’, 5.5563)? Later on as well, he seemingly limited the aspirations of philosophy to improve it, asserting that “philosophy must not in any way interfere with the actual use of language” (‘Philosophical Investigations’, 124. §.). And yet, this does not mean that everyday language does not contain – to use Nabokov’s term – “solecisms”. This is substantiated by two events in Wittgenstein’s life, when he reacted very harshly to linguistic imprecisions that we might consider trifling. The first was recounted in the memoirs of Norman Malcolm, and is connected with the phrase “national character” – I will not go into this here because most readers would find it commonplace (many speeches by our politicians are merely elaborations on this phrase). The second was Fanny Pascal’s lament after having her tonsils removed: “I feel like a dog that has been run over.” Wittgenstein reportedly shot back: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.” This could be taken simply as a manifestation of the Austrian thinker’s eccentricity. But in his book ‘On Bullshit’, Yale philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt analyses Pascal’s phrase as a typical case where the speaker is not interested in the truth. He writes that Wittgenstein construes Pascal as engaged in an activity (and language is, of course, also an activity) in which the distinction between what is true and what is false is crucial, and yet as someone who is completely ob¬livious to whether what she says is true or spurious. Only a fine line separates empty everyday chatter, when we are indifferent to the subject of the conversation and therefore the truth of what is being said, to speech intended to influence people – with the best of intentions, the speaker may sometimes believe. The main thing is that the rules of the language-game (these silent, non-verbalised agreements) allow this to happen, like a knight is allowed to jump over other figures in chess. In summary: it is probably possible to encounter the illness of language in any form of expression. I have indicated its possible occurrence in everyday language and the journalistic feuilleton. Something that may be a tool for literary creativity – for example Guntis Berelis describes Dukts as “a categorical rejection of the Wittgensteinian requirement that “what can be said at all must be said clearly” – becomes illness of language when we are discussing facts. This illness, possibly, may partially facilitate the uncritical attitude that people have towards the things politicians say. (We don’t like what they say, but we pay no attention to how they say it.) In politics, the struggle for power inevitably corrodes any person’s language (this is my hypothetical diagnosis based on both a priori and a posteriori considerations), and examples of this are legion. (Perhaps that’s why we should respect people who are prepared to sacrifice their language by entering politics, if they demonstrate any desire to fight (a battle doomed from the start) against the bewitchment of the language of power.) This summary has thus far not mentioned art criticism and the language of art – what shall I say in this regard? Let us return to the triangle discussed at the beginning: if it is a linguistic triangle, then what is the objective of every language? (These are meta-remarks, hence without concrete names and gradations of symptoms.) Politicians, it seems, talk about everything, including art on occasion, but the illness of language transforms what they say into an instrument for seizing power. Art criticism is about art, of course – one might say – but it must first determine the place of the specific art work in the cognitive space, which in turn stipulates one possible way of understanding this artwork. (An example of this is Berelis’ review of Dukts.) This is not one common space for all of us, because every construction is personal and every critic is responsible for it in proportion to his or her talent. Art, on the other hand... Art is in perfectly good order in that it can speak about absolutely anything, whether about national character or dogs that have been run over. However, if the language of art is to have meaning, it cannot mindlessly recycle previously used expressions (musical, visual, verbal etc.), but these are difficulties on another level, for which, as we know, Adrian Leverkühn sold his soul to the devil.1 /Translator into English: Filips Birzulis/ 1 The article may have so many references and digressions from the subject that even in the small font used for Studija footnotes it would take up over a page. Instead, I have chosen to simply list the books I took with me to the country, in the belief they would be necessary for this text. Valters Benjamins. Iluminācijas. Rīga: Latvijas Laikmetīgās mākslas centrs, 2005. (This includes the article about Karl Kraus.) Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. Touchstone, 1973. (This includes a deeper examination of Kraus’s views and influences.) Aivars Ozoliņš. Dukts. Rīga: Liesma, 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Filosofiskie pētījumi. Rīga: Minerva, 1997. (The translation of Tractatus is in my computer.) Людвиг Витгенштейн: Человек и мыслитель. Соств. В. П. Руднева. Москва: Прогресс, Культура, 1993. (Including the recollections of Norman Malcom and Fanny Pascal.) Гарри Г. Франкфурт. К вопросу о брехне. Москва: Европа, 2005. (This book also contains the original English text of On Bullshit.) Kentaurs XXI, Nr. 4, July 1993. (With Guntis Berelis’ review.) Ludwig Wittgenstein. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Ed. Cyril Barrett. Basil Blackwell, 1966. Alfred J. Ayer. Language, Truth and Logic. Penguin Books, 1990. Vladimir Nabokov. Lužina aizsardzība. Rīga: Liesma, 1989. (These last three books point to a broader version of this article composed in an imaginary world. Nabokov’s quotation from ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’ used in the text was jotted down in a notebook in Riga.) | |
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