LIMITS OF LANGUAGE
OCTOBER 15, 2010. On October 13, I did an hour of commentary on my radio show about THE MAGIC THEATER and the effects of language-structure on our view of reality. I recommend listening.
http://garynull.squarespace.com/the-jon-rappoport-show/
Okay. Let’s start here:
The best way to trap a person is to make him think he’s free.
Even better—far better—the person traps himself and then tells himself he’s free.
We impose the structure, the syntax, the order, the sequence, the vocabulary, and the grammar of our language on ourselves—and then we pretend this imposition in no way colors or limits our view of reality.
That’s quite a trick.
It reminds me of the trick called the Rorschach Test (RT). RT was invented by Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), a young Freudian psychoanalyst. As a boy in Switzerland, Hermann was nicknamed Klecks, which means “inkblot” in German. He used to fool around, as apparently many kids did at the time, making these blots. The activity even had a name: Klecksography.
When Hermann grew up, he thought a standardized sequence of blots might make a revealing psychological test. Therapists could infer a great deal about their patients’ neuroses.
The test is still in wide use today. The patient is shown the abstract blots and reports what he sees in them: birds, cows, planes, Mommy making bread at the oven, spiders crawling up the sides of buildings…
The Test is a kind of language. The blots are pictographs, except their meanings are left open.
Of course, in true medical fashion, it is assumed that what a person finds in the blots tells a tale about his shortcomings, problems, disorders, symptoms.
Such an assumption is no accident. Why?
Suppose we omitted those medical biases and, instead, used blots as open symbols that could be infused with unlimited meanings by those who viewed them?
We would have a different KIND of language.
One that opens doors instead of building walls.
No professional culture (e.g., psychology/psychiatry) would ever admit, in a thousand years, that such an activity was worthwhile or meaningful or possible or tolerable or positive or in the nature of a breakthrough.
If we found interesting and extended ways of working with such open symbols, our view of reality would change.
This is, in fact—though very few people would admit it or see the far-reaching potential—one of the great implications of modern art.
Let me give you a ratio. Working and communicating in some fashion with open symbols stands in relation to the Rorschach Test as freedom does to slavery.
For the human race, language has always meant system, structure, and syntax. To mention language in the same breath as open and changing and subjective infusion of meaning into symbols is considered a perfect contradiction.
But it isn’t.
There is an old actor’s exercise in which students toss gibberish at each other, back and forth, imparting to it certain attitudes and feelings. The idea is to get actors used to coloring dialogue with non-verbal meaning. When the exercise is done well, people get the point. They know what is being exchanged, even though the sounds uttered make no literal sense at all.
Of course, people who are dedicated and committed to precise clinical language would never confess to understanding gibberish. Every cell and molecule would resist admitting they really do know what is going on.
The level of reality we all accept, every day of our lives, is like a government agency. It maintains itself against all attack. It stonewalls. It refuses to answer embarrassing questions. It issues denials. It defends its own existence as absolutely necessary.
Its thick volumes of regulations are the evidence of its entangling operations.
In the same way, our language is an ultimate rationalization of the reality we defend.
If we began to engage in another species of language, our reality would reveal huge open spaces where new experience is possible.
How and why new experience would surface is answered by the simple word: imagination. Imagination, wrapped in the cocoon of the kind of language we now employ, is operating on only a fraction of its potential.
But in order to know that, one would have to explore language beyond the limits we presently put on it. Contrary to expectation, there is no sacrifice involved in launching such expeditions. Nothing central and secure is left behind. It’s not an either-or game. It’s all addition and proliferation.
This would be one of the operations of THE MAGIC THEATER.
JON RAPPOPORT