De Commerciele Massamedia 234

Language and the Politics of the Living Dead

Tuesday 19 January 2010

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted:doviende, Pink Sherbet Photography, zetson)

In a robust aspiring democratic society, language along with critical thought have a liberating function. At best, they work together to shatter illusions, strengthen the power of reason and critical judgment and provide the codes and framing mechanisms for human beings to exercise a degree of self-determination, while holding the throne of raw governmental, military and economic power accountable.

Language in such a society is robust, engaged, critical, dialectical, historical and creates the conditions for dialogue, thoughtfulness and informed action. Such a language refuses to be co-opted in the service of marketing goods, personalities and sleazy corporations. Needless to say, it is a language that is troubling and almost always threatening to the guardians of the status quo. As Toni Morrison said in another context, this is a language, a way of reading and writing the world, that "can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace ... [that makes visible] the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to."[1]

In authoritarian societies, language works to produce forms of historical and social amnesia, using the media, universities, and other sites of public pedagogy to cover the visual landscape with a coma-producing ignorance. This coma allows the living dead to further experiment with those political mechanisms and social filters employed to freeze meaning, limit the discourses of freedom and make certain ideas unspeakable, if not unthinkable.

Tales of repression, cruelty, human suffering and evil disappear from public memory, becoming invisible as politics works through a zombie-like language to make unjust and repressive power invisible. This type of coma-like amnesia seems to have become one of the defining features of the new American century. At the same time, this language and the ideologies and modes of governing it supports are always conditional, open to resistance and capable of being challenged by new modes of discourse, understanding and courage. One example can be seen in the ongoing resistance emerging in Iran against the use of state power to extend its ever-increasing restrictions on the new media and Internet to curb the power of the living and vital language of dissent.

Language that is coma-producing always serves the interests of the living dead, becoming zombie-like in its ability to sap meaning of any political and ethical substance. Such a language is suffocating, Orwellian in its hypocrisy and death-dealing and cruel in the relationships it often produces and legitimates.

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/language-and-politics-living-dead56192