Dear sir or madam will you read my hook it took two hours to write, will you take a look?
I read a fellow-’Stacker who I find really interesting. Her latest post is HERE. I started commenting and it was too long, so I thought I’d riff in my own spaces. It has to do with the writing voice and AUTHORITY, so many of you will guess where I’ll go here, but I’ll try to make it short…
As a white, privileged male let me explain Mansplaining to everyone - especially the women reading this - as it has been misunderstood and, I daresay: given a bad rap. Now, just sit down and keep quiet and let me enlighten you...
(I'm joking! I kid! “I kid because I love,” to quote the son of Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky.)
I always worry that what I mean as a bit of rhetoric - making strong statements as a sort of ludic play in writing - will be taken the wrong way. Like I'm some sort of authority. I am not. An authority. On anything. Okay, maybe no one on the planet will ever know how much I - and I say this with a great deal of authority - want a slice of chocolate cake right now. But that's quite trivial. It's almost worse than idiotic. Hold on: it seems quite idiotic to me. Anyway...
But usually I couch my statements in some sort of doubt. There's a weird yet interesting school that grew out of Korzybski: E-Prime: write in English (E) while avoiding the "is of identity." EX: "That idea is brilliant." Seasoned readers, people who've internalized rules loosely around "critical thinking" might mutter under their breath, "That idea is brilliant to you. And only nuts like you." And they should. (Mutter that.)
(Not only this volume, but at least two others on the same topic followed)
But get a load of me: when I wrote "That idea is brilliant" I actually meant it and wanted you to believe it, too. I was out on parole: the actual linguistic behavior of an individual, in contrast to the abstract linguistic system of a community. The latter, community linguistic performance, is called langue. The French intellectual system came up with these terms and rolled with ‘em. If I recall (meaning: I just checked Wikipedia), it goes back to Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss dude who was very influential. Far more influential than I suspect Saussure ever dreamed. He died in 1913. His highly influential book, A Course In General Linguistics, was published after his death, in 1916, and only because some of his students took kick-ass notes and published them as the book! (Lecturers: keep this in mind before walking up to the lectern.) I feel bad for Saussure missing out on his own book launch.
Back to E-Prime:
E-Prime exists because a student of Korzybski’s, D. David Bourland, listened very attentively to Korzybski’s lectures. The Count advised against the Aristotelian “being-ness” that was invoked, like a black magic curse, whenever we used the “is of identity”:
“The Overweening Generalist is a jackass.” See: I seem of the human form, not a donkey. Therefore, this fails. A better formulation:
“The Overweening Generalist seems like a jackass to me.” That’s so much better!
Bourland was attacked by certain General Semanticists for advocating the jettisoning of all forms of “to be.” A dizzying number of essays resulted. I do not practice E-Prime, but just going through all the arguments for or against or somewhere between, I became very sensitized to: (am, is, are, was, were, be). Bourland proposed E-Prime 15 years after Korzybski died, but he seems in the great tradition of the brilliant student who listens to the Teacher, and decides to take Teacher at his word and run with it, and my favorite example is Wilhelm Reich, who listened to Freud talk about how dangerous sexuality was to a civil society.
Reich said fuck it (literally?) and advocated free love, free sex, sexual equality, and really good orgasms for all as a way to get out from under Patriarchal Authoritarianism, which is perhaps the epicenter of the historical Nightmare. Reich also said workers should band together and make communities of meaningful work and to love knowledge: making sure the sick, elderly and children are taken care of, people have food, shelter, homes, etc. Ya know: commie stuff. If you’re a Good Murrkin you know it’s wrong wrong wrong! Why? ‘Cuz you always heard that “labor unions” evoke the word “socialism”, which actually really means “communism” which really means Stalinist Death Squads everywhere. Who told ya?: why, Authorities, that’s who.
Is this hilarious or sad?
In general, E-Prime advocates avoiding the copulae in Indo-European syntax (am, is, are, was, were, be). There exist entire books written in E-Prime. One writer I know - Robert Anton Wilson - said that E-Prime works particularly well with film and book reviews. When he was offered a book contract by one of the Big Presses in NY, on conspiracy theories, he said it was too difficult to use E-Prime when writing about conspiracy theories. I’ll let you ponder why that might “be.”
Re: E-Prime: It’s difficult (<----I just violated it there). I find it difficult. I've seen many arguments for softer versions of E-Prime, and the one that persuades me has to do with self-referential statements. “My name is Michael.” Hey, that’s what my parents called me. I don’t see why I should sound like a poorly wired robot and said “The name on my birth certificate reads as ‘Michael’.”
Also: only avoid the "is of identity." I will violate that, but only because someone else ain’t playin’ fair. One bum turn deserves another?
Robert Anton Wilson had a lot of fun with E-Prime.
EX: "Jesus Christ is the son of God." (E-Prime: "Jesus Christ seems like the son of God.")
Can you imagine a world in which it's intoned, five times a day, all over the world, "There seems no god but Allah, and Mohammed seems his messenger."? What might “be” the ramifications?
The upside of E-Prime: you cannot help but sound subjective. The downside: the world "is" run on metaphors. We think metaphorically, I believe. The very essence of a metaphor is to say, and I'll be brief here: time is money. (Not a lot of damage there. Bosses will scream it and us workers will hate them for it. It’s the same old game from here to eternity…)
But "money is speech" turns out to have - maybe? - ended the American Republic. Arguably. Metaphors can behave like the most vile, potent and very real black magickal curse. Metaphors are underrated.
That is to say, they seem underrated to me.
How much do we trust our interlocutors/readers - or potential interlocutors/readers, because we cannot account for all of the nervous systems that will encounter our writing - to apply skepticism to what we're saying?
Attention: I need to set the tone for my next bit here: I Bing’d “Stereotypical Frenchman that Americans picture in their mind” and the first image I got was this, and I’m going with it:
(We can reasonably suspect he’s on his way to un mademoiselle)
Ms. Moore objects, on very solid grounds, it seems to me, to the Roland Barthes "Death of the Author" gambit, which seems to do what so much - not “all” - of French theory seems to me to do: algebraically deal with the reciprocal as a way to create some interest. Turn things upside down, say "that's the way it must be now, after the failure of the last program everybody believed in." With structuralism, there would be hidden codes. Everywhere. And when you've found enough, the remaining hidden ones will be sussed out, suggested in some algebraic way by what you've already found. It seems deeply ludic to me. I tend to think French intellectual culture in a broader sense is not understood by a large swath of the literate American public. Not that I totally understand it. I mean, just look at the merde I’m writing about them now!
I never bought that the Author was dead, that the community writes the books, that any old Remy or Sophie can decide what the author meant, that the author is really some hapless scribe actually taking down the community wisdom. That it’s whatever you think the author meant, and ya know what? You’re right! But what about Jacques next door? Jacques, ce salaud, pensait que Lassie n'est jamais rentrée chez elle. Mais elle est clairement arrivée à la fin! Ne peut-il pas faire attention ? (I used Google Translate to get this in English: it’s something like, “Jacques, that asshole, thought Lassie never did come home. But she clearly arrived at the end! Can’t he pay attention?”)
And furthermore, I doubt Barthes believed in the mort d’Auteur, either. If he did believe it, the royalty checks he got for his books were blood money; he should have given it all away to, I dunno, Mèdecins Sans Frontiéres. Just the fact that we’re all reaching for our weapons over the Death of the Author: can’t…can’t we all, just…get along? (Talk about an author!)
Re: Structuralism: All of culture and thought could be decoded in this manner! And some of that work was fruitful and interesting, but who actually believed the world was laid out that way in the first place? Okay, Structuralism experienced diminishing returns; now let's hold the Time of Post-Structuralism. We've done away with the previous intellectual dispensation; let's see if we can make this new programme interesting. Derrida? It's 1966. Whattya got? Weren’t you working on something that had to do with Husserl?
(Barthes’s Death of the Author gave us that discours critique in 1967. What ensued was what is now remembered as “The Jacques Incident of 1967.” Bayonettes in the streets of Montmartre! In 1967! Over a Lassie book! Good thing for the defendants Devil’s Island and the Bastille were closed. The Sorbonne and École Polytechnique remain open.)
1968 in Paris seems quite another story…
I can forgive Structuralism, Deconstruction, etc, but the mass of jargon just seems like Bad Writing to me. The trick should "be" to create interesting ideas in a language not overly laden with the subdiscourse of pretextual narrativity that claims hegemonic and queer ontological performativity within a non-Foucaultean praxis.
But then again: papers must be published, academic jobs obtained, bills paid, baguettes bought, mistresses perfumed, Citroen payments made, cafes and Mass attended, accordion music listened to, the Seine gawked at. We really do “get it.”
What do we think about Games that are played in which - maybe - we don't know we're players, but others do know they're playing? Or have I changed the subject?
The first inter-post dialogue I’ve kicked off. Woohoo. Je suis arrivée !
You could argue that my post was essentially saying of Barthes: I don’t like his tone, but fancified by filtering through Donna Haraway’s theory. Before posting it and since, I’ve wondered if the point was too empty. I don’t like his tone; so what? But for most of history, someone like me would not have been able to criticism someone like him in this way. So there’s that, I guess.
I like that you referenced Barthes’s decision to make his own authorship of “Death of the Author” prominent. Rules for thee but not for me. His counter I suppose would be that he only wants to kill authors of literature or fiction. The same interpretational concerns don’t apply to his work in literary criticism, he would argue. If anything, he wants his intended interpretation to reign tyrannically — don’t misunderstand him! So I suppose he’s not being hypocritical according to his own code.
And I did wonder about the validity of applying Haraway’s theory to fiction, i.e., to the substance of Barthes’s argument not just the style, since fiction doesn’t ostensibly purport to declare facts about the world.
On the other hand, people treat it as serious Art because it establishes something deeper than facts — Truth. Hence excavating that Conrad passage. I keep thinking about Elena Ferrante in all this, and what I see as the hypocrisy in some of her related positions. I might unfold that in another post, but not sure if anyone’s interested at this point. It would’ve been a good thing to write about in 2016.
Your stroll through French literary theory reminded me of the dangers of plucking something from its original context and interpreting it in the here and now. So, maybe I’m being unfair to Barthes by judging him according to my 21st century standards. That’s partly why I’m reading the Booth book, to see how a contemporary talked about all this, and it’s making me feel I haven’t been unfair to Barthes at all. Ah, how nice it feels to be confirmed in one’s biases.
Thanks for introducing me to E-Prime. Yet another thing I’d never encountered before. Yes, taken to its extreme, it’s a bit of a bore. You can enforce against the god trick at the sentence level, which could be done in part using E-Prime. But I think a better approach is to take the tenor of the piece in its totality. We readers also shouldn’t be boors.
Terrific piece. I have lost my evangelical zeal for E-Prime, but it still shapes my world. I use it most of the time. Note: I read your wonderful essay while listening to my Yacht Rock playlist.