My Nightmares

First and foremost, I think Lyotard swayed my ever-present indecision on whether or not I think I am committed enough to even think about writing a thesis.  You may now count me in on the thesis crowd.  Frankly, I don’t know if Lyotard even makes sense to me or if I just have it in my head that I have a good grip on this.  When I first started coming across his bolder statements, I thought he might be Voltairing it up.  Then I realized that someone as fixated on the function and use of language as I am would not dare to abuse it so satirically.  I realized that he was completely and terrifyingly serious, and I can’t say that I want him to be.  I will admit that I have not read the entire book yet, nor can I say that I will complete it this week amidst the million other things that I have to do—and maybe that is making excuses, but I like to be honest about what I am doing.  Since I am being frank instead of Sam, the very likelihood of me being in class is slim to none, and I hate that I will miss a discussion on language.  Now I am reading Lyotard after reading Dorothy Sayers’ “The Lost Tools of Learning” and honestly, I think they look at language very similarly.  Education, on the other hand…they are certainly polar opposite.  Sayers believes in a very medieval structure of education and the learning, and Lyotard is the furthest thing from medieval (Google trivium and quadrivium).  I don’t think he thinks that is even possible, at least not with society the way it is.  And I think it may only be a Western problem, this whole language/education issue—and as I told Schuler in my reading journal I am very willing to be wrong about that.  But I wish I knew more about Eastern thought, especially since I have every intention of living in the East one day. 

Back to the whole point, if you have heard me talk about Orwell at all then you know how much I like him.  Language has power over people, over thought, over a culture.  If someone controls the language, they control the way you articulate what you are thinking, or if you are even able to do so.  In 1984, Orwell uses the Party’s language Newspeak to address this issue of language as a social construction.  The purpose of Newspeak was to condense the English language down to the bare minimal, removing Latin roots etc. so that the people could not express emotions effectively or think for themselves.  With such a confined language, thought cannot go any further.  And Newspeak is the reason I hate abbreviating words and text speak.  I text speak frequently for the humor of it, but it is dangerous.  I want to say language is not a social construction, and I do my best to speak my mind in a way that it is not.  But I fail, and miserably so.

“Narratives, as we have seen, determine criteria of competence and/or illustrate how they are to be applied.  They thus define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do.” p.23

I could probably go on for hours about my struggles with language, and that is more than likely the reason I will more than likely study linguistics and/or anthropology in grad school.

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