Click below on a category to see various posts!
Prime Tangent: An Introduction to Imajicka
Hello to All who have found themselves here!
Well, here is kinda strange, to say the least!... having completed my degree last June, I realise I must have a chronic case of Word-withdrawal! Yes, you probably noted how Word is (for my fancy) exalted, capitalised... adored as the creational Sword of the Logos, a creator of Truth and Beauty but likewise, loathed in the mouths of powerheads whose systematic ideological misuse has virtually rendered word (no capitals for their renditions!) literally obsolete! Operation Mindfuck has words emotively shaking fear into the masses with infamous expressions like that, 'axle of evil,' an expression that when you really consider it, holds no real meaning whatsoever! I had to smile (well, alright... grimmace) at American journalist Gregg Easterbrook who concluded the term must relate to, 'America's Twisted Love Affair with Sociopathic Cars.' The New World Order, run by the powerful, multi-national leaders is sickening humanity on every level, especially communicative, at an immense speed. Language and the edcational systems are by far the most dishonest and meanest weapons used against the people and against any humane justice! People who fail to question such blatant monstrocities do so because there is a loss of soul in humanity, a loss of direction, a loss of knowing that everything we learn is based in difference, a fundamental in the act of questioning, in the ability to raise doubts. I recently stumble upon an organisation called 'the English Speaking Union,' a doubtful group of multi-nationals to say the least; banks, politicians and the hierarchal tops setting out to make sure the world speaks English according to meanings they inscribe. Look them up, see for yourself. One lecture by Mr Bond (head of HSBC) is so dubious! Shakespeare's churning in his grave...
Being a lover of literature, I can vouch for the magic of word, the religous-ocity of reading, something television is destroying. I have recently thrown the TV out from my children's lives, not an easy move but one necessary to ensure their psychological growth. It is a main concern of mine; here's how I started my dissertation, which covers the main issues I think...
"The relationship between self and poetics/prose is unique and intimate, often emotive and individually meaningful. Reading offers to take us on a visual journey within spaces that are simply not accessible in the structures of our everyday life. Our imaginative self is potentially filled by a ‘still-active’ participation and connectivity, a symbiosis of self, text and author, uniting a universality of human experience. In Steven Fischer’s words, reading ‘empowers, bewitches, enriches…[can] open up our lives… and connect us with all creation.’[1] Scientifically, reading is unique in that it uses different parts of the brain than other creative activities, even writing. Reading uses the senses and invokes a distinct paradox within the multiple processes at play. That ‘sense-like magic’ of primeval cognitive scanning enables the incredible ability of humanity to assimilate the inundation of visual data from a mere glance, integrating shapes, patterns, orienteering, sequencing and tracking in a singular process.[2] Reading activates ‘proprioception response,’[3] and is, Fischer feels, ‘our true sixth sense.’[4]
Any investigation into the world history of word, language, reading and writing will ascertain language as having always been revered, believed to behold a certain magical quality, yet the evidence of its power in use is historically unsettling. From its beginnings, text has been systematically altered, defaced, removed and rewritten with surprising frequency, seized for its social power. Literacy became the status mark of the governing elite. Although language was largely motivated through religions, (‘Word’ as the divine essence of God’s truth) its power has been mostly political, nationalistic and colonial. We have only to consider the slave trade in southern America, whose plantation owners would often hang blacks caught learning to read, to realise the darker force at hand. It is no secret, nor an accident, that readers occupy the wealthiest lands; the rising numbers of the reading public in England, for example, birthed during the industrial revolution with the subsequent synergism of production, wealth and education. However, we should be cautious in believing the empowerment of language (or disempowerment, as the case may be) as a thing of the past. Language and literature remains hierarchal and elitist today and continues to define, identify, conceal and oppress. A high number in mainstream society avoid poetry fearing it incomprehensible, whilst the more political aspects of literature are compartmentalised, historicized and largely retained for ‘higher’ educational purposes. Recent reports state poetry is now under threat. The Independent wtites,
Neil Astley, editor of Bloodaxe, will use the preface of a new anthology to launch a furious attack on an ‘elitist’ group of male reviewers he dubs ‘poetry's new academic spin-doctors.’ He argues that by reserving their praise for ‘intellectual’ poets and ‘trashing’ anything they consider too populist, such critics are turning the public off poetry altogether… ‘With many poetry editors paying more heed to peer approval than reader-response, and poetry's sly spin-doctors trying to foist their academically distorted version of contemporary poetry on baffled readers, it's not surprising that bookshops see poetry as a minority interest.’[5]
‘The most recent school of logic denounces – for the impressions they bear – the words of language, holding them to be false coins better replaced by neutral counters.’[6] The idea that Western imaginative consciousness is thwarted by the powers that be is not new, yet Enlightenment ideologies of the west continue to disenchant by imposing rationalist and empiricist theories upon all ‘multiplicities of forms,’ reducing ‘the dissimilar... to abstract quantities… Modern positivism writes it off as literature.’[7] Steven Fischer fears,
Society’s present dynamic indicates the end of ethnic and linguistic diversity and the beginning of the global monoculture, not only in reading but in most facets of daily life.[8]
There is a coercive nature in literary theory/criticism that demands certain criteria are met in thinking about text. These criteria often work in antithesis to authorial intention and textual meaning. There is sad reality and a sense of loss in Harold Bloom’s introduction to Northrop Fry’s Anatomy of Criticism when he says:
Fry and his opponents have been folded together, as antique Modernists inundated by the counter-flood of feminists, queer theorists, sub-Marxists, semioticians, and the ambitious disciples of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and other Parisian prophets. Aesthetic and other cognitive values doubtless exist, but not in the universities, where the new multi-culturalists denounce the aesthetic as a colonialist and patriarchal mask. Poetry, demystified, has been levelled."[9]
[1] Fischer, Steven: p 7
[2][2] Fischer, Steven Roger A History of Reading (BCA Reaktion Books Ltd, 2005) pp 326-39 Specialists recognise five phases of information exchange: production/transmission/reception/storage and repetition.
[3] Proprioceptive=body and sense awareness. Ibid 339
[4] Ibid.
[5] Morrison, James (Arts and Media Correspondent): ‘Worse For Verse As Young Poets Get the Chop:’ The Independent (23rd August 2003) See Archive at: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/news/story.jsp%3Fstory=436614
[6] Adorno, Theodore W & Max Horkheimer: The Concept of Enlightenment’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso: 1994) p. 5
[7] Ibid. p. 7
[8] Fischer, Steven: p 309
[9] Fry, Northrop: Anatomy of Criticism vii
Recent Comments