hearing through new eyes

hearing through new eyes.

[ or ]

image as humanity’s defining language.

© jeremy rose 2006

 

Abstract

Humanity’s rise is linked to its development of language. As language acclimatizes itself to the culture of the contemporary world, language is both its scapegoat and its savior. Metamorphosed into a structural use of photography as a linguistic device, universal communication is possible and the most personal of idea language may be both translated and transliterated. Photography is the violent and active response to a passive and emotionally detached culture of negative attention spans and text messaging. The image replaces not only a thousand words, but infinite possibilities for conceptual reasoning and development of the abstract. It stands against the real in a way that language must, if it is to be integrally useful as more than communicative pragmatism. Does this spell death for written and spoken language, as it is known, or is this an evolutionary miracle?

 

Hearing through New Eyes

Contemporary society stands witness to a humanity, actively choosing to undefine itself. Centuries passed in a flurry of linguistic activity; disparate dialects and incomprehensible idiolects flourished and gave way to shared tongues and communicative logic. In contrast, a silent revolution is now taking place and its very silence is its weapon.

This shift in cultural attitude is both frightening and necessary. If language is to be replaced as the defining logic for humankind, three questions scream in the silence for answers. Is language truly dying? What will replace it as humanity’s defining achievement? And, finally, Is this replacement truly a change, at all?

A culture of timed inaction and passive entertainment has given rise to the necessary sacrifice of structural language. An era of global communications and the explosion of the Internet are fundamentally responsible for the shift of language from formal to pragmatic.

 

Language Is Dead; Long Live Language

The demise of language is both basic truth and staggering fallacy. If language is to be understood as simply the grammatical construction of sentences and their communication to a fully comprehending audience, to be digested, as has historically been the case, with a minimum of interpretation and a maximum of collective cohesion, there has clearly been a functional end, or at least a decline. If, in contrast, language is defined as that most human of concepts – a sharing of knowledge – it is well and truly alive.

These two disparate answers may be combined in an understanding of language as rebirth – renaissance.

Linguistic evolution is a process of erosion and influence. Simpler forms and less complex structures are gradually accepted as mainstream and comprehensible. Whereas this process has been an extended foray through disparate regions, leaving fragments of past assumptions in its wake and producing dialectic differences and idiolectic idiosyncrasies, globalization has reformed the process. Once a slow bulk of collective shift, minimal utterance variations are now transmitted in real-time, unhampered by distance or difficult terrain. Gradual erosion and evolution have been replaced by cultural linguistic metamorphosis.

As a quickening river smoothes imperfections in rough ground, the effect of this rapid rebirth of language has been an almost universal comprehension. The rise of English as the unofficial master of the technological domain and its anti-dialectic approach to pragmatic communication work together with an ever-increasing ability for the unknowing to functionally translate, on the fly, any commonly spoken language into their own with the mere press of a computer key. Perfection is no longer the goal; pragmatism reigns supreme in an environment of increasing speed and decreasing attention spans.

Out of this butterfly culture of linguistic metamorphosis, society seeks the replacement for a structurally solid language to call its home. Change is only visible in contrast with the fixed and static; the slow moving, therefore, must exist in this context. It is known and its name is photograph.

 

Snapshots of Worn Words

Language is the real, the actual, and the experienced. It is humanity’s outlook on its own self. And it is changing so rapidly that, without a functional interpretive model, last week’s statement may soon be incomprehensible in today’s speech. Language, therefore, is a function of culture over time; what is needed, as its structured counterpart, is a timeless method of communication.

The photograph, once thought to be a structural representation of reality, objectivity in the ultimate sense, stands directly in opposition to this concept. (Barthes; Sontag On Photography) The image exists in apposition to the real, against the real, replacing the real in the mind of the viewer. (Sontag Against Interpretation)

The question, then, is as to the nature of the photograph as a destructive entity – if it is a replacement for language or if it is intrinsically linked with the communicative properties that make the human the animal, which possesses language, over any other trait. (Sontag On Photography) In reality, its very definition implies the latter interpretation. Language for centuries has been a fixed, stable collection of concepts, through which ideas may be transmitted and received. (Lacan and Fink; Mitchell Iconology : Image, Text, Ideology) While the spoken and written words are in a state of flux, the visual world remains trapped by its physics. (Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation (the Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism); Riffaterre) Photography’s inherent natural verisimilitude exists within this framework, making it a language plug-in, rather than its conquering rival.

Humans are defined by spectrum logic, or fuzzy logic, which is impossible to recreate in a real way in either other animals or technological invention. The pragmatic impact of this anti-binary thought process is that, while animals may communicate, they may not speak new sentences. While computers may construct ideas, they are simply the result of input and a series of decision gates, each with only two pathways. Language implies a fundamentally infinite possibility for new thought; while the same sentences are constructed ad infinitum, a supply of new constructs lies in reserve inside each human. (Coquet)

The image is the key to this storage. The physically possible becomes the realistically captured, through the depression of a button and the transmission of a frame. (Sontag On Photography) The visual is a language to which all humans are native speakers, each translating to inner thought in her own way but never uncomprehending of the physical existence behind each paper structure or framework of pixels. (Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation (the Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism); Hirsch; Mitchell Picture Theory : Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation; Sontag On Photography)

As linguistic proficiency is decimated by the text message, the electronic mail, the online chat room, and the occupied parent, who neglects to read to her child, visual stimuli cannot be depleted. Today’s image is timeless, violently snatched from a fleeting existence by a visual weapon, it exists outside of time, since its reproduction in the realm of the real is no longer possible. (Baudrillard The Gulf War Did Not Take Place) Tomorrow’s child sees today’s image and a comprehension is implicit. She must hear the image in her own way, in her own tongue.

 

Speak Now; Or Forever Hold Your Pose

To imply that language is fundamentally the same is to say that the image (read, photography) is speech. As a communicative entity, the argument can be made quite easily, but as speech, a more complex framework must exist than the simple act of pressing a button to capture a fleeting moment of reality. (Sontag Against Interpretation) There is a dualism that language provides that must exist in the realm of image production before it is inducted into the linguistic cannon.

Language is pragmatic and interactively communicative. For communication of this sort to exist, there must exist a triangle of comprehension. (Lacan and Fink) This linked group may be referred to by the terms énoncé, énonciateur, and énonciataire, from a theoretical perspective. These may be replaced in English with the loose translations of message, speaker, and listener, respectively. Simply put, the message interacts with the speaker, through the process of translation. There is an active construction of thought into the realm of idea language, which is translated into a commonly understood form for transmission to an intended listener.  (This listener may be the same physical entity as the speaker, in some cases.) The transmission is not the subject of concern here and may exist in any form whereby the integral structure of the message is preserved to a fluctuating degree of accuracy. The most complex interaction occurs on the other side of the equation, between the message and the listener. A second translation must occur, in the active sense, for the message to be metamorphosed into idea language in the listener. (Barthes; Benjamin; Deleuze and Patton; Riffaterre) This does not imply active listening – but simply activity.

Photography, then, must exhibit a similar linguistic triangle to be considered language, in an unchanged form. This structural triangle may be retranslated into, again respectively, concept, artist, and audience. In this way, the concept is dually interactive with the artist and with the audience. The artist must translate, once again, her idea language into the visual form, through the medium of reality as canvas and the camera as paintbrush. (Barthes; Elkins; Sontag On Photography) Once this is accomplished, the transmission occurs to the audience and the most vital translation must occur. An active translation of the photographic concept into the inner thoughts of this audience completes the linguistic transaction. (Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation (the Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism))

This occurs without thinking upon seeing snapshots, billboards, and magazines. A more studied approach, but no more of a linguistic happening, is the procedure followed in a gallery of photographs. The dualistic translation makes the photograph equivalent to the sentence, to the paragraph, even to the book. This diminishes not in any way historical language; it simply exists in apposition thereto.

 

The Camera’s Grandchild

In truth, the photograph is only part of this story. It is the impetus, the conduit for sociolinguistic reformatting but it is not the integral change, itself. For contemporary society, it is not sufficient to say that the photograph has displaced language, as a primary method for self-definition and communication; one must speak of the image, not the negative-derived frame. A culture of snapshots is becoming, perhaps has already become, one where the image, the icon replaces that for which it stands. (Agamben; Baudrillard The Illusion of the End; Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation (the Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism))

What is curious about this occurrence is that it is both everyday and revolutionary, both calm progression from yesterday’s reality and staggering rift for a new generation of the visually fixated. What precedes this point is purely theory, primarily the theory of a dying breed of communicative practice, and its replacement with a culture of photographic hyperreality. (Baudrillard The Illusion of the End) What follows is its practice – a present-day examination of what this reorganization of society means for language culture, insofar as it is the image, the icon, the picture fragment, and not the word, which is the irreducible element of exchange. (Hirsch; Sontag On Photography)

That history has shifted, confused by its own subjectivity, is yesterday’s news. Today’s metaphysical headlines read, Language Is Dead; Long Live Language (see photo, page 2).

Truth is of questionable importance, in a society where the necessary framework for history to exist is that of an image. Put another way, it is feasible for the modern citizen to remember the past that she did not experience. While past cultures were outwardly based on oral tradition, a visual society is necessarily reliant on a collective visual memory or “post memory”. (Hirsch) A collective image consciousness must therefore exist.

It is conceptually useful to think of this collection as a vast library of photographs and, while this is definitely a contributing factor, it is not the physical gallery of images that is important in the concept; it is, instead, the images that are remembered by the living individuals. (Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation (the Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)) The images of the real mix with images of the imagined, through a medium of half conscious memory. The truth behind these interior photographs is less important than their existence. It is in this instant that a cultural shift is apparent. This is not to say that such a shift is only now occurring; it simply offers evidence of its renewed existence. The shift is that of reality, which may never have been a present-day phenomenon, to that of a hyperreality, the result of a visually motivated society. (Agamben; Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation (the Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism); Gane; Holly)

To say that reality did not exist is to presuppose a knowledge of a higher order truth that cannot be witnessed or experienced. This knowledge is not the question; moreover it is unanswerable. It cannot reasonably be said that reality has never existed; nor can the opposite be expressed with any certainty. (Agamben; Baudrillard The Illusion of the End) What can be examined, however, is the replacement of a conceptual society that relied on an original experience as the foundation for its truth, by one whose truth is built on an image, whose existence both presupposes and replaces the real. (Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation (the Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism))

 

An Icon is Worth a Thousand…?

The shift in sociointerpretive currency from the word to the picture to the icon is a fairly simple progression to follow. In the beginning was the word, whose existence cannot be questioned as the reigning communications method of choice for millennia. From the Greeks to the Elizabethans and beyond, linguistic arts were not only empty rhetoric but popular (read, basic or functional) means of existence.

It is impossible to say that the word has lost its power, its ability to communicate, its necessity both for everyday existence and theatrical pleasure. For this claim to be made, it would be a mistake of overreaching and oversimplification of a complex turn of events. It can, however, be said that spoken language has been overtaken in its headlong dash to remain the monopoly currency for communicative logic. (Mitchell Iconology : Image, Text, Ideology; Mitchell Picture Theory : Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation)

Artistic uses for language – be them poetic, theatrical, rhetorical, or musical – are perhaps stronger than ever. Literary devices abound in a world of metaphor and euphemistic pseudorealism. Spoken language has the power to speak to the masses. Yet, it does so less and less.

Intimate chats by the fire have become text messages, shared between continents. Boardroom meetings are video-derived multimedia gatherings, where the participants are secondary to slides, animations, and simplistic cartoon renderings. Perhaps most significantly, the one shift that has allowed the personal computer to make the precarious leap from its appeal to the segregated minority, the geek culture within a military and academic world, to its present place, with a computer in every home, it is the icon. (Mitchell Iconology : Image, Text, Ideology)

It is possible that ancient religions and modern electronics are the most different of concepts. They share one fundamental trait, however. Be them pagan, druidic, Christian, or Mohammedan, the vast majority of religious practices were iconic in nature. Worshipping at the feet of the Goddess’ statue or kissing the box that holds Mary Magdalene’s bones, the power of the church was in its image, its representative visual construction of a reality of the past, in a fiction of the present.

Through a history of religious imagery, culminating in a new religion, technology, this has been the basic premise for communication. The first Apple Macintosh and the early Windows environment were presented simply as easier methods to accomplish familiar tasks for a tiny audience. It would have been impossible to predict the level of influence that these crudely rendered iconic environments would have on the present.

 

Click Here to Continue

The icon is the new word, the mouse, its new pen. Fresh from photographic, realistic roots, the symbolic image takes on a structurally semiotic role that surprised even its most staunch advocates of old. In a historical system of symbolic relationships, the icon is the sign, the action that it stands for, its signified, and the user, the interpretant. What has occurred, however, is a basic shift in this logic. The image both presupposes and precedes the action that it represents. While the representative relationship still exists, the word that corresponds disappears from the equation.

The best example of this symbolic shift is the modern mobile telephone, with which almost all western citizens are intimately acquainted. The historical device, even one decade ago, was a textual nightmare of the most convoluted variety. Send, end, clear, and flash, featured prominently on a pad of ever-increasing buttons. For this device to be popularized, a simplification was imperative. Of late, words are replaced by icons, as an attempt is made to populate these once single-function devices with a litany of secondary abilities. With each new, potentially complex functionality that the handheld box of plastic and silicon may accomplish, a new environment of cartoon icons facilitates its immediate adoption by children and adults alike.

The irony of this situation is that, as telephone calls are made easier, as the devices are simplified to the point of image-only usability for the masses, the telephone call is steadily being replaced, itself, in the same manner. One century ago, the thought of instantly connecting with the voice of another, regardless of physical location, was a dream at best. In modern times, its reality is so pedestrian and assumed that it is no longer desirable, something to be shunned, avoided, or sent to voicemail.

In an attempt to streamline this communications overload, text messaging was introduced. It subsequently failed to catch on and was reworked into the current system of instant, frequently unintelligible utterances and symbols. Abbreviated and contracted words sparsely populated a stream of iconic representations and, more recently, drawings and photographs.

A colon paired with a closing parenthesis signifies happiness. That same colon with a lowercase p represents playfulness and teasing. Inverting the parenthesis converts the symbol from happiness to its opposite and the addition of an apostrophe to the result conveys tearful displeasure, even depression. This is not to say that words are dead; they are simply being replaced, outsourced into an ever-shrinking existence of common utterances and less creative uses.

 

Defeat? (read, Living to Fight Another Sentence)

Language lives, only insofar as it changes, evolves. Popularity is king in the fight for linguistic survival. What this means for an English, battered by historical slights and the abhorrence by the new generation of all things grammatically correct and rhetorical, is a complex roadmap with an unwritten destination. The best that can be accomplished is to speculate on its outcome, based on its past and its fundamental truths.

The most structurally sound path to this is a comparison between different generations’ uses for and embrace of an icon-derived linguistic future. Firstly, the history of the elderly is that of grammar, of writing, of personal communications of the most pure variety. This is not to say that, after fifty, email is an impossibility. This is a misrepresentation, at best. The elderly are a staggeringly large contingent of the technological user base. Grandparents and great-grandparents communicating with their latest family additions by email and text messaging is not an exception, it is the new rule. Pensioners speaking on mobile phones are a fixture of the modern city, as much as they can make it a reality. The elderly have not been left behind by technology.

What is the case, however, is that they, as a collective and somewhat marginalized group, have generally adapted the technology to their familiar and unchanging needs. Using a mobile as its traditional telephonic self brings families in touch, in an increasingly scattered reality, where children move farther afield of the nest, more quickly and more permanently than ever before. Email propagates the exact text of contemplated and beautifully crafted sentiments, such as a telegram or the post would have done in the past. Abbreviations and acronyms, icons and emotional representative symbols are shunned, in favor of an English of yesteryear. Simply put, technology has not changed the language of the elderly, only its method of communication.

The generation that followed, those classified commonly as Generation X, shaped modern communications. This is the generation that owns, that innovates, and that uses vast quantities more of technology than the mostly retired previous group. Meetings are still meetings, however, and the mobile is a telephone without a cord. The shift is less radical than would be expected. As communications styles shifted between generations, however, there is a striking change in email between this group and its parents.

Less attention is paid to grammar, to correctness, and to impact. Statements are no longer nestled in formality and trivial discussions of the weather. The additional speed that email and text messaging have brought to bear have affected this group’s desire to communicate quickly. The result is obvious. Short messages convey stronger sentiments in more disjunctive and less rhetorical English. Language is less flowery and more to the point.

Business communications have been shifted from a concentration on the individual relationship and its preservation, as was the case in times past, to the mass-email to the whole board, to the customers. Family communications have shifted in the same way. An email or text message to say that dinner will be late, that a meeting has been cancelled, or that a school paper is due tomorrow, flow freely, but still in perfectly legible English.

It is the recipient of these messages, the youngest living generation, whose deconstructive interpretation of the language is most striking.

Words are replaced by images – hand-drawn, copied from the Internet, or deconstructions of common Latin-script grammatical symbols, so that they resemble visual cues. Sentences are replaced by fragments and emails are shortened to the bare minimum of words and a maximum of expressive image.

Text messages follow the same pattern, as the young user attempts to have the largest quantity of information transmitted in the shortest amount of time, staying within the attention span of seconds and minutes, rather than hours or days. Online messaging software, seen as the answer to business clutter and voicemail woes, is used for single-word and, often, wordless transmissions of pictures, photographs, and symbolic distortions, which communicate the ideas that language would have done in days past – perhaps more effectively, given the complete lack of constraint.

It is here that the situation can be clearly seen. It is a freedom from language that renews it. Language metamorphoses into itself, with the addition of non-sentence, even non-word elements.

 

Conclusions

As language is the abstract construction of thoughts imposed on the reality of the moment, the photograph is the theoretical existence of ideas, imposed on the thoughts of no moment at all. There is no replacement, no change, no death in the fundamental structure of linguistic communication between humans. Language has become easier in its search for a textual replacement but it remains the same in its function.

Humans are the animals, which possess communicative reasoning. Be it quill on parchment, ink on tree, finger on keypad, or image in light, language lives on in the imagination and in the reality of humankind.

It is impossible for this communicative reality to come to an end. It is simply a shift. Both revolutionary and commonplace, both pedantic and exciting, language is reborn in modern times.

Language is dead. Long live language.

 

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