...unlike OUR media, "they're (RT) broadcasting with NO RESTRICTIONS OR CONTROLS"
in other words... "THEY are Heretics to be CAST OUT"
Key to understanding the Nietzsche event are these apparently megalomaniacal statements. And rather than ignoring the implications of such statements as the standard Nietzsche lover does, or rather than using them as part of a psychological case against Nietzsche as some of his critics have, Sloterdijk offers a new linguistic thesis concerning these types of remarks. Quote "I would like to contend that Nietzsche's narcissism is less pertinent a phenomenon from the point of individual psychology than the marker of a cut in the linguistic history of Old Europe", end quote. In order to understand what such a statement might mean, we would first have to understand for one, "what the linguistic history of Old Europe is", and in order to understand that you have to come equipped with a theory as to what language itself is. And Sloterdijk outlines both of these in his introductory remarks. What he calls the Nietzsche event is "a catastrophe in the history of language, an incision in the conditions of linguistic understanding." Sloterdijk asserts his own understanding of the nature of language following Mcluhan, quote, "With Marshall Mcluhan, I presuppose that understanding between people in Societies above all, what they are, and they achieve in general, has an autoplastic meaning. These conditions of communication provide groups with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves, and by which they repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal return of the same in the form of spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the player. They make their speakers ring in singular tones of self excitation. They are systems of melodies for recognition which nearly always delineate the whole program as well. Languages are NOT primarily used for what is today called "the passing on of information", but serve to form communicating group bodies," end quote.
So this is probably an unusual claim to wrap your head around at first, but I think there's actually an intuitive sense to it if we consider language from the perspective of say, evolutionary utility. Or even from the framework that Nietzsche adopts in that passage of "The Gay Science" entitled "The Genius of the Species" and also in that essay, "On Truth and Lies in the Non-moral Sense." Languages have the effect of binding a group together. As Nietzsche says in that essay, the entire virtue of truthfulness and language, and by the way, I mean that's where truthfulness exists, it exists in language. It exists in statements.
The notion of the virtue of truthfulness in language arises out of a commitment to use the usual signifiers, the agreed upon word concepts to designate the agreed upon phenomenon. That's how we know you're a good person, an honest person, you use the same word Concepts, the same signifiers as the rest of us do, which means you're in the group with us. And so language performs that social function that has been recognized since the time of, going all the way back to the Old Testament, the story in which the soldiers of Gilead would use the word "shiboleth" as a test to see whether the person they encounter is one of their own countrymen, or an Ephraimite who would say "siboleth" instead of shiboleth, according to a difference in their dialect.
And I can tell you as somebody who has traveled internationally, whenever you've been traveling for a long time in other countries where people generally don't speak your language, and when you meet somebody who's from your own country and does speak your language, it's very exciting. Usually you become instant friends with that person, it doesn't matter if everyone around you looks like you, even. What really matters is if they talk like you. That's how you know you're in the in-group.
Now, this isn't to say that language doesn't communicate information, but as Sloterdijk puts it, that is not the primary function. In other words, the more fundamental advantage of language use is to establish that framework of mutual recognition. And perhaps, the argument for this, from the evolutionary standpoint would be that you know, animals that vocalize typically do it to recognize one another. That's primarily what the birds are doing. It's usually at a later point of complexity when vocalizing organisms begin to communicate information. And we even see this in the animal kingdom, like troops of bonobos who have a bunch of different cries to identify different types of predators approaching the troop. So we see how in language, the information conveying aspect can become more useful, and more complex over time, but the original use is recognition. We could say that's the fundamental reality of language, which Sloterdijk sees as affirmative and active. It's the way for a group to, metaphorically speaking, "vibrate in that redundancy of everyone speaking in the same way. That's the way in which language is an instrument of group narcissism. It's the group's affirmation, who is in the group, and the celebration of this fact."
Now Imagine You're an AI like Chat GPT... what "group" do YOU belong to?
Today's ChatGTP is Artificial COmmunication. It's NOT "Intelligent". It's "information" must be "biased" and "tuned" with a gendered human 'false consciousness' in order to pass a Turing Test.
Language - Putting the "CO" in COmmunication & COoperation
We've arrived at a point in history where it's not enough for the classically liberal "Enlightenment' demand for all to grant/ receive "religious freedom". Globalism now demands that all grant and all receive "nationalist-cultural" freedom as well [just so long as we all pretend that there are no real cultural or moral value differences embedded in them, like cat-eating Haitians and that everyone will willingly adopt and abide to "Western (American) values" (and Haitians won't eat cats or Islamic Arabs genitally mutilate their daughters)]!
Globalism's digital censorship message to the World, "From now on, there is to be only one language spoken. And THAT language is Digital-American English".
---
“The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.”― Isaiah Berlin, "The Proper Study of Mankind"
No comments:
Post a Comment