God, Gold, and Goods: Replacing God with Language
by Derick Varn

“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not political legislators, who implement change after the fact.”
----William S. Burroughs

The most interesting conversations happen over cheap coffee. At a coffee house about a quarter after midnight, a friend of mine was conversing about art and its meaning. After he threatened to beat me for my “catholic view of art,” I said that “all meaningless art is vandalism, but there is no such thing as true vandalism.” My response to him was to quote George Carlin about his hatred of soft language and euphemisms: “the quality of our thought can only be as high as the quality of our language.” Then I expanded on the quote the same way Carlin did--government and religions use language to control the actions of people. The jargon of “thou shalt”s and legal garble all involve the manipulation of language. Art is an aesthetic reaction to the unbalancing or stagnation of power–both personal and political. I concluded with “all art is propaganda in literal sense of the word.”

“Not all art is propaganda,” he responded.

“Bullshit,” I said sipping on my stale coffee, “does art have meaning?”

“Not always,” he said.

“Oh? Is art about communicating?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then it has meaning,” I continued, “and if that meaning is persuasive, then it is propaganda by definition.”

“You’re full of shit, Derick,” he took a bite of a chocolate, “are you saying that all art has to have political purpose?”

“No. I am saying all art has purpose and thus is political by its wishes to affect the way we live. It’s about power and beauty.”

“It’s about beauty.” He said as he took another sip.

“Language is about uniting people. That is about power,” I said looking at his frustrated face. “Maybe we need to redefine what we think about power.”

“Drink your coffee before I throw mine on you.” He smiled.

This conversation as well as reading Umberto Eco’s works on semiotics and Thomas Hibb’s Show about Nothing, both dealing in popular culture and its relation to linguistics, prompted this “philosophical” inquiry. Other than by brute force or threats of violence, there are two ways to redistribute the balance of power in any social system: the manipulation of wealth via business or seizure and the manipulation of communication and language through literature or polemic. For this reason, artists, especially writers and musicians, hold a special revolutionary and shamanistic place in Western society. This is a place of place and power. Historically, this power of art has been realized from the use of Latin instead of vulgar tongues by the Catholic church to limit the range of readable literature in the Middle Ages to Nixon trying to have John Lennon deported from the United States.

To understand why I categorize art, especially literary arts, with economics in my paradigm of power, simply apply economic principles to literature. Modern economics is based on the law of incentives. All things done by a human are done with marginal benefits in mind. If someone does something it is because they have an incentive for doing it, by either increasing their influence (power) or their comfort (property). Rational people respond to incentives and will respond to whatever they are convinced will bring the most, long-term happiness.

When you apply incentives to arts, you’ll see interesting developments. The incentive for writing and arts are usually catharsis, influence, or cash. Yet the incentives for partaking in high arts are often even less clear. Hyper-realism and escapism become the dominant mode of art and pseudo-art because they give the reader a quick and easy fix of something the reader thinks will benefit them. The reinforcement of what the reader always holds as “truth” or sometimes an escape from what the reader holds as “truth.” Both of these themes relate to pleasure. Although the high arts will never appeal to the common person all of the time, it will ultimately lose to commercial novels and genre fiction if it does not offer something more beneficial to the reader. Escapism is always easier than reality, but if one can help someone come to grips with something…

How do high art and its economic applications relate to power? The purpose of polemic and art is to give power to some viewpoint. Even if it is the aesthetic theme of “this is beautiful” it is still done to communicate and thus convince of someone of the view, i.e. “that is beautiful.” Thus all art is propaganda in that it aims to convince its reader of some way of viewing the world. Art is symbolically giving ideas power through well-crafted expression.

Only recently have we had such a negative connotation for the word “propaganda”. “What separates art from the escapism of popular entertainment, political rhetoric, and ethical polemic is that it is self-contained and multi-faceted,” says Foucault. He continued in The History of Sexuality: “Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere.” Power is not the same as strength, which stems from the individual. Power stems from the collective consent of some social structure–stemming from everywhere. One cannot be powerful alone.

Often rhetoric and polemic are one-sided because they embrace point/counter point duality. Literature understands that life is not that simple. Art is truly empathic because it understands the multiple and complex relationships between the subjective and objective realities around us. If there were only black and white, we would develop a spectrum of variations of gray to compensate. Both phenomenology and pragmatism apply here. All distinctions fall to the wayside when we understand that perception is the most important element in definition. The pragmatic value of the “truth” of the definition lies in the social acceptance or its meaning. This is why the polemics of politicians often seem shallow–they appeal to cultural assumptions and to social shared perceptions. If language was not the providence of power, religious leaders and politicians would not be masters at abusing it. Even the current president of the United States, George W. Bush, despite that English grammar and diction constantly wrestle him to the ground, knows how to abuse the language of euphemisms and polemic.

The reason we associate propaganda with poor literary polemic is because of the abuse of literature by all national powers in World Wars One and Two. The confusion of shallow polemic with literature was largely done by both Fascist and Communist writers. Their meaning is laced with a point. Yet we forgive this in high art: Americans do not disregard Hemingway because of his politics and pro-war stance, the British do not condemn Orwell for his leftish politics and anti-communism, and the French still believe in Camus despite his flirting with socialism and declaring that all art is moral. The works of all these writers were based on reform and redistribution of power through politics, morals, or even the lack of.

What separates art and literature from polemic? This is something that we must ask to understand why some attempts to increase the power of an idea are forgiven and others die when the political climate changes.

Literature is different because it acknowledges the complexities of perception. In an essay entitled “Language, Power, Force,” published in Travels in Hyper Reality, Umberto Eco reminds us that “[a] force is applied to another force: they form a parallelogram of forces. They do not cancel one another . . . The play amongst forces is reformist. It produces compromises.” There is no duality in this, but there is immense plurality. To think in black, white, and even grey is to ignore the manifold spectrum of color.

The plurality of literature makes it paradoxical and universal. Sometimes without the author’s consent, true literature acknowledges the values of contrary views and alternate perceptions because it respects the subjective while presenting what the author considers objective or personal elements. Even at the basic level, literature exists between the consensus of the perception of the reader and the perception of the writer. The plurality of perception in literature produces knowledge.

Knowledge is power says the old maxim. Umberto Eco expands on this in “Language, Power, Force:” “knowledge is produced the composition of force.” No one would argue with the fact that one of the major aims of literature is to produce knowledge. Knowledge is held suspect in a world that is ruled with perception, so through the force of language the artist tries to break through to the reader. Sometimes it is through beauty, sometimes it is through narrative, sometimes through psychology, but it is always trying to break through.

To truly understand the relationships between perception and power in language and art, we need to explore the politics of language in itself. Doing this we will use the theory of the “given language” as it is addressed in linguistics and semiotics. According to Eco and Foucault, the “given language” is the language of correct grammar and worn-out idioms and clichés. In this language you begin to develop the mainstream of ideology. Ideological words are often untranslatable from culture to culture and this enforces the given language. Thus the given language “legitimizes certain relationships of strength and criminalizes others.” It is the language of politically correct euphemism, that George Carlin hates, and the language of those who use far too much technical jargon in their work.

Attempts to regain cultural legitimacy are evident through the breaking of the “given language” in several periods of literature such as the Harlem Renaissance reaction against WASP America, the Irish Renaissance’s reaction to the British, and the Southern Revival’s battle against the North. In all these things, the dialect different from that of the accepted “given language” became a pivotal point in a cultural battle.

One of the things many people who abuse the “given language” do is confuse causality with symbolic relationships. Causality is unavoidable, but symbolic relations do not exist outside of perception. The most contemporary example of this is the language revision of feminism against the language of “patriarchy.” The man inseminating the woman during intercourse is a causality. The woman washing dishes for the man can be seen as a symbolic relationship of power and language. The feminists rightly realized that there was no causality in the “given language” of sexual politics so they fought to transform the language. Not just of the symbolic relationship of power involved in the washing of dishes, but also of linguistic demonstratives such as “actress” and “waitress” which imply something less than the male counterpart since the suffix “-tress” means “little.” Yet the very term “patriarchy” is a polemical abuse of the “given language” against itself. Thus replacing one stale language, with all its assumptions, with another is common amongst nonliterary language revisionists.

Semiotics theorist Roland Barthes once said, in a speech at College de France, that given language was always fascist. In response, Eco said: “You can cheat with the given language. This dishonest and liberating and healthy trick is called literature.” You destroy the static power of language. Literature and art also redistribute power by refreshing the “given language.” Literature pushes the language into new areas through new associations in theme and word play. This is another difference that separates art from polemic, it is not complacent with the limitations and clichés of the “given language.”

Roland Langacker, echoing George Carlin’s philosophical humor in a much more academic tone in his book Language and Its Structure, remarks that “[t]he overwhelming bulk of human knowledge is stored and transmitted in language. Language is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted, but without it, society as we know it would be impossible." Art is an intrinsically moral pursuit because of the power of language. When one controls the flow of ideas, one controls the imaginations and the actions of the people. “ I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar” says Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. Language and God are interchangeable in the old maxim of power: “God, Gold, and Goods.” Language can be understood then not just as words but as any symbol of communication. To quote Charles S. Pierce: “A sign is something by knowing which we know more.”

So artists are left in the proverbial coffee house arguing over the meaning of power and propaganda. Let those in the Ivory Tower of Art say that true art is subjective without political or moral motive, but we writers and artists who want to engage and reform the reader must never take such a decadent position. It is not that all artistic works have to be moral--even anti-moral or amoral works have made some assertion to the reform of social power. To quote a Rush song: “If you choose not do decide, you still have made a choice.” Art is the great balancer.

Derick Varn is a poet and longstanding contributor to Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.