Signifiers from the Id...

Hi, everyone; 

So sorry for the extended absence, but the last week or so has been very busy and stressful for me, with personal and family matters taking up a great deal of my time. That is why I was forced to cancel last week's presentation, and why I am now scrambling to write the programme notes for this week. (If you are reading this right now then I guess I must have finished writing it at some point. That's encouraging! I'd be curious to read it myself.)

I may not have had time to sit down to any actual writing all week, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it at every opportunity. I've been going over it in my head during every spare moment, and I know exactly what I want to say; I have a very clear sense of the ideas I want to get across. Unfortunately I still have to sit down and actually write the damn thing at some point. Thoughts inside my head are all very well, but they're no good to anyone else until I perform the overt act of converting them into language. I need to assemble the twenty-six letters of the alphabet into a structure that signifies the ideas I wish to convey, so that you, my gentle reader, may view them and (hopefully!) begin to generate complimentary ideas inside your own head.

(See what I'm doing here? What, did you think I was just randomly complaining about my rough week?)

The rest of this article; not yet assembled.

The point that I want to make here (the idea that I am currently translating into vowels and consonants) is that communicating in language requires a conscious, voluntary act. We choose the words that most effectively convey the essence of the ideas inside our head, and those words must then be articulated as marks on a page (or sounds from our vocal chords, if we are speaking aloud). This doesn't happen automatically, and it doesn't happen indiscriminately. By that I mean that the words you are currently reading on this page do not represent every last thought inside my head. Like all of us, I have any number of threads bouncing around in my brain at any given moment. Some of those threads are personal and private, some are irrelevant to anyone who isn't me, and some are just plain bonkers. A few are probably offensive. Fortunately for everyone concerned, human language does not "articulate" the entire content of the mind all at once, so we are (usually) able to share only that which we choose to share. When I select the words that I think are best suited to this particular discussion, I am making an explicit choice to leave everything else in my head (literally) unspoken.

Under normal circumstances, this curatorial element of human communication works well: we articulate those aspects of ourselves that we are happy to share, and we keep other elements to ourselves. That's ultimately a very good thing. You wouldn't want to see the entire contents of my head, and you probably don't want anyone else to see the entire contents of yours. Language is the self-portrait of our lives; it's how we choose to present to the outside world, and what goes on beneath the canvas is entirely our own business. 

That's the theory, at least.

In a 1990s episode of Star Trek (Star Trek: Voyager, if you want to pick nits) the intrepid Starfleet crew encounters an enlightened, technologically advanced and (initially, at least) welcoming race of telepaths, who have established a peaceful, liberal, thriving society in which violent thoughts have been outlawed. Just as our 21st Century human society regulates hate speech, this race of telepaths has placed restrictions on "hate thoughts" which (being telepaths) might cause harm to others who might overhear. (Inevitably, it soon becomes apparent that this seemingly open and peaceful society harbours an unsavoury black market for illicit violent imagery, courtesy of unscrupulous facilitators in back alleys. Prohibition never works - even in television Sci-Fi.)

It's easy to scoff at the idea of a government that tells you what you are allowed to think (even in a hypothetical society of telepaths) but the reality is that we regulate speech all the time, and punish people accordingly. For all the grand lip service we pay to our First Amendments and our Articles of Human Rights, "free speech" isn't nearly as fundamental as we like to pretend it is. (Try using profanity in open court and you will very quickly encounter one specific limit of "free speech": you don't get to swear at a judge without being severely punished by the State.) 

Don't be stupid; be a smarty...

If you've been following the news recently, you've probably seen the furore surrounding the American rap musician Kanye West, who had been booked to headline a major music festival in north London this Summer. Kanye West is undoubtedly a famous figure in the world of rap music, and his appearance in Finsbury Park would certainly have drawn huge crowds and plenty of money, but his music career has been, shall we say, somewhat overshadowed by his "political" views (if that's what you want to call them) including his praise for Adolf Hitler, his merchandising of Nazi iconography and his promise to go "Death-Con [sic] three on Jewish people." Last year he released an incendiary single with a title that I will not reproduce here, but which featured the refrain "Heil Hitler" combined with an emotive racial epithet that rhymes with

Following the (entirely foreseeable) backlash to his London engagement, the managing director of the music festival doubled down on the decision to book West, saying in a statement, "Forgiveness and giving people a second chance are becoming a lost virtue in this ever-increasing divisive world."

That may well be so, but Kanye West is not being judged for the inside of his head; he's being judged for the outside of his words. (There's also a big difference between showing compassion for a troubled individual and making that individual the star performer at a high profile, multi-million-pound music festival... but that's a different discussion.) 

Unlike the unfortunate lieutenant in the Star Trek episode, Kanye West has not been found guilty of harbouring an unsavoury thought in the privacy of his own head. Yes, he had very unpleasant thoughts, but then he committed the deliberate, conscious and voluntary act of expressing those thoughts in the form of words (plus music, imagery, and a mass-produced line of tee-shirts that presumably required a manufacturing and distribution chain). I don't know about you, but I have one or two thoughts of my own about all that.

For sale on Kanye West's website. I doubt if he printed and mass-produced them on his own.

By the way, I am well aware that Kanye West doesn't wish to be called "Kanye West" any more. I will be more than happy to respect his preferred nouns just as soon as he stops publicly calling for my death. That feels like a fair exchange...

Language from the Subconscious...

Let's try a little experiment for a moment.

A few paragraphs ago I declined to use a certain word that Kanye West included in the title of his recent single. I am not going to use that word at any point in these programme notes, but I'm guessing you know the word I mean. It's a word that has become so taboo that even referencing it in the context of academic discussion has been enough to end careers.

I recently encountered a modern edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet that alters Rosencrantz's line at the beginning of Act III, scene 1...

...because the original text includes an unrelated word that sounds superficially similar to the offending word we're (not) talking about.

(You can check it out here if you wish; I'll wait. It's on line 13...)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Cancelled...

Okay, so I'm not using that word, and I intend to carry on not using that word. But here's my challenge: can you not think of that word right now? It's a word that carries a great deal of baggage in modern discourse, and turns sombre literary debate into a preposterous game of charades ("One word; two syllables; begins with 'n'... rhymes with 'digger'..."). Uttering it aloud is enough to turn you into an irredeemable social pariah (unless you're Kanye West, apparently, in which case you get invited to headline a major London music festival. Although to be fair, he also championed Hitler) but what about thinking it (as I am fairly sure you are doing at this very moment)? Is it a crime to harbour a specific combination of letters in the privacy of your own head?

To answer that question, we need to look to another highly-publicised news item from a few months ago, when the film I Swear received two BAFTA awards at an explosive and spectacular ceremony in London.

The film itself dramatizes the life of a young man with Tourette's Syndrome who is subject to bouts of uncontrollable (and unintentional) profanity. That, of course, is a defining characteristic of Tourette's Syndrome, and the awards ceremony in London was attended by John Davidson, the real-life subject of the film. During the course of the evening he had a couple of involuntary outbursts in which he shouted the very word we have been dancing around all this time. Those outbursts were picked up and broadcast by the BBC microphones (and not edited out).

The response to the incident was swift, angry, and protracted. The BBC came under fire for failing to delete the word from its broadcast; the host of the evening was compelled to issue a public apology and Davidson himself published a heartfelt apology-cum-defence of his outburst (doing nothing to settle the anger and backlash, which have yet to fully subside).

But this is the point about Tourette's Syndrome: it violates the barrier between mind and language; the barrier that permits the rest of us to select which Signifiers we are going to articulate. The offending word in question is a word that most of us have in our vocabulary, but that doesn't mean we are compelled to deploy it in our conversations on a regular basis (or ever). 

When we use language, we are continually making deliberate, conscious decisions about which words to use, and which thoughts to articulate. Kanye West's outbursts of hate, bile and obscenities are not actually "outbursts" at all; they are specifically selected Signifiers, chosen because he wants the world to know what he is thinking. Hate speech is considered harmful precisely because it does not manifest involuntarily. Kanye didn't just wake up one morning to find the song "Heil Hitler" (to give its incomplete title) tangled up in his duvet, accidentally written, recorded and distributed. He elected to do all that himself. John Davidson's Tourette's incident at the BAFTA ceremony was closer to the scenario explored in the Star Trek episode: something inside his head was overheard by the entire world.

Signifiers From the Id

In 1956, MGM released the film Forbidden Planet, establishing a precedent for serious, big-budget science fiction cinema. 

The film has become such an iconic piece of cultural history that it's easy to forget just how revolutionary it was at the time. A futuristic space opera set entirely on an alien world; a special-effects heavy production filled with flying saucers and ray guns and talking robots and yet also boasting a serious, thoughtful premise (based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, no less).

At the heart of the story is the idea of (alien) technology that can manifest Reality from pure thought. One need only conceptualise a thing and it takes tangible, physical form. 

Of course we humans do that all the time... with language. We imagine a sumptuous breakfast and we can give it form in words (pancakes; crispy strips of bacon; a couple of poached eggs; a steaming cup of coffee...). We can imagine a cosy environment (curled up on a sofa, a soft blanket pulled up around us, the dog happily nestled in our lap) or we can even imagine a sentient Artificial Intelligence (a computer "consciousness" assembled out of the sum total of all words, able to converse and respond to us with a convincing simulation of self-awareness) and the words we choose (the Signifiers) give those concepts form. 

With language, we can create anything we can imagine. Just make sure you don't imagine Nazis.

Damn it; what did I just say?!

I have written elsewhere about the concept of creation through language in the Book of Genesis and the Golem legend, but of course our modern human languages do not have the power to manifest physical Reality. 

That doesn't mean that language is powerless. GINGER is a pungent spice, and a valuable seasoning in Chinese cuisine. It's also a Signifier, assembled from completely innocuous letters of the Western alphabet. But if we rearrange those identical letters into a different order, we have created something that can cause actual harm, as the BBC discovered at the BAFTA ceremony in February.

The easy and obvious solution to that is of course: don't rearrange the letters. Generating language is (normally) an act of choice, and we can choose what not to say. But as Forbidden Planet memorably demonstrates, things can be very different in our subconscious.

With language, we can give form to anything that can be visualised by the human mind. That is the superpower of our species, and it's a powerful tool under the command of our conscious brains.

Just beware of the consequences when your Id grabs the typewriter.

We will screen Forbidden Planet at 7.30 on Thursday, the 23rd of April at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.