7 October 2007

There are many brilliant academic minds who argue that language creates meaning and creates reality:

"In the social world, words make things because they make the consensus on the existence and the meaning of things, the common sense, the doxa accepted by all as self-evident."

---Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason

"...whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. [...]...men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves."

---Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Indeed, Arendt so strongly believes in the power of speech and language that she dared to give lectures on Kant's political philosophy - an endeavor quite challenging in light of the fact that Kant never wrote a political philosophy (Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy).

Furthermore, through his fascination with how a "representation of the world modified that state of the world" and with how the "quaking of stable structures through the event of speech, word, [and] symbolic irruption" occurs, Regis Debray re-formulated the exercise of mediology (Media Manifestos).

Aside from the academic, there is a very practical, albeit common sense, logic to the argument:

The reason language structures reality and our world vision is it establishes the realm and the limitations of possibility. Language mediates our recognition, acknowledgement, and our knowledge. Let me explain by way of concrete examples:

1) Athens' first philosopher, Anaxagoras (500-428 BC) wrote of minute infinite and invisible particles he called "seeds" that made up nature. He identified "nous" as the force of mind and intelligence creating man, animals, flowers, and trees. He also suggested life on other planets. Through his thoughts, he paved the way for Democritus of Abdera (c460-370 BC) to write of eternal immutable "atoms" thus enabling our languages of chemistry and particle physics to the realm of knowledge we have today and the reality we currently accept into the doxa.

2) There was a time when our language only permitted us to envision our world as flat. We needed Renee Descartes to define and to establish coordinate geometry to introduce the language of geometrical shapes namely, the sphere. In this manner, he enabled the recognitive possibility that man was living on land that is part of a spherical entity. From Ptolemy's concentric circles to Copernicus planetary bodies, we were given the possibility of acknowledging and knowing what we do today about our universe.

3) There is a language of the samurai as a social order only applicable to a country where the language of Empire also exists in relevance and in practice. There is also a language of caste systems that exists for a people with a faith in one particular religion. While samurais, empires, and caste are not relevant realities to those not structured by those language systems, they do exist nonetheless. I currently exist in a world structured by the language of democracy and freedom. Although the integrity of that language may not necessarily correspond to practice, it does exist to shape the recognitive system within which I formulate possibility according to the doxa. Whatever the case of particularity and locality, it is clear that the respective language structures formulate and establish meaning and effective reality.

And now for a bit of complexity into this mix of language and reality:

What are we to do when there is an overlap between language structures?

Currently, much of the Western world has incorporated the language of globalization, referring to it as "a shift or transformation in the scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across the world's major regions and continents" (Held and McGrew ed., The Global Transformation Reader).

At the same time, other parts of the world are experiencing the advent of modernization as a near-recent development:

"the megarhetoric of developmental modernization...in many countries is still with us. But it is often punctuated, interrogated, and domesticated by the micronarratives of film, television, music, and other expressive forms, which allow modernizatin to be rewritten more as vernacular Globalization and less as a concession to large-scale national and international policies [...] for many working people and the poor, this experiential engagement with modernity is a relatively recent fact."

---Arujn Appadurai, Modernity at Large

And still, there is an even greater effect between Religion and Globalization:

"Christianity is becoming Easternized, but Hinduism is being Westernized, like Zen. Centre and periphery have changed positions. The Globalization of beliefs has crossed the cardinal point of cultures."

---Regis Debray, God: An Itinerary

How does this all come together and why does it even matter?

Language structures reality because it establishes the realm of and limitations to possibility. A new language is needed to broaden the field, scope, and breadth of possibility today. The state of the world is in various stages of development, where the past, present, and the future co-exist in tandem parallel. The individual is in a unique position to occupy multiple spheres of virtuality within his reality.

With the recent announcement of the death of the hyphen (Charles McGrath, "Death-Knell. Or Death Knell.", The New York Times, 7 October 2007), I recommend a rebirth and replacement with the hyphen qua hyphenation as the symbol of potentiality and the remediation of Schelling's constructed line. Hyphenation is the new ontology to replace traditional (and anachronistic) dyads with nuance, and traditional limitations of human possibility with potentiality and transcendence. Hyphenation goes further to activate the dynamic sphere everyone mediates as broadcasting entities untio themselves (Howard Rheingold, The Smart Mob). More importantly, it challenges us to re-evaluate and to analyze critically the local, national, global, and universal doxa.

There is an updated 'nous' and 'noumena' that needs to be acknowledged and recognized into the realm of our current possibility. The language of our new reality structures multiple spheres of virtuality, electronically mediated potentiality and transcendence, and places into 'archive' perishing anachronistic dyads.