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For the Moment

The Phantoms of the Village

"Two thumbs up to sleep, Mary. Pass the salt."

Such marauding influence is as yet undetected, but repeated exposure must surely dent the structure of the brain. To further our misery, the other flank is being assailed by the composite regurgitations of academe, and its sinful neologisms. Scientists have every right to spend all their time lolling in cafes thinking up fresh words: all those spanking new particles and objects have to be called something. But the sewage of cultural theory and philosophy is a pernicious influence, taking your average happy noun ('problem'), and disfiguring it with a meaningless suffix. Take a few more such words; apply prefixes at will; stir boldly for a decade; before long, an entire generation will have on its tongues an assortment of unaesthetic and utterly meaningless words. And there, comrades, lies the rub. Their complete uselessness means everyone will use them--simply for want of a more precise descriptive term. You'll thematize your timetable, your phone directory will be positively intertextual, and, my lord, is that a bird I see or have I got decentered subjectivity?

Doubtless such jargon has some use, if only to justify the employment of people whom previous centuries would have regarded as socially expendable. But the conjunction of cinemaspeak and jargonese can lead only to the gradual separation of the hemispheres of our brains, and an aching descent into complete madness. For they all say the same: we are what we speak; our language--its metaphors, implicit value judgments--inform our personalities. Caught between the Scylla of cliche and the Charybdis of suffix, our future personalities cannot but disintegrate into a stewing pot of confusion, from which we yearn to return to the wordlessness of the womb.

All very well for the nonchalant, but deeper ruins than folly lie ahead.

Out of this broth of verbal poverty, us poor inarticulates will have no resources to plumb the mysterious chasms of life. On one level all emotion will be encapsulated in words with the expressive power of Kevin Costner's face. On another, jargon will be so empty as to erase all valuable insights. And behind the screen of such an impotent vocabulary, behind all those psychoanalytic terms and cultural verbs, the abyss of violence, hate and hunger in the world will still stretch. To which we will only respond with a live transmission from CNN, and a denial that we can describe it with any meaning; that we can judge it morally; that we can do a thing about it.

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Say goodbye to the Romantic Genius. Whoever he or she is, the Genius has been knocked out in the bouts of contemporary language and art. Wild musings on life have been deconstructed, and ethereal visions shown up for the artificialities they must be. And we are left in the land of cultural self-abuse.

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