Is it necessary to know whether we are being duped by language? It is perfectly familiar: the words which stream round us, directed by the media, ruled by the demands of sales and viewing figures, are motivated not so much as by imparting information as of attracting interest. The same for our politicians, who seek to appeal to what they take to be the desires of their audience. But whose attention do they seek? The readers, viewers and listeners whose desires they claim to discover in focus groups and surveys. What they seek is to confirm a consensual reality – the circulation of words and things, values and signs according to the general equivalent of what are presumed to be the narcissistic investments of particular groups: the ‘caps and gowns,’ the ‘pools and patio’ etc. Ultimately what matters is drawing a line between our friends and families, people like us and the outsiders, prowlers and scroungers.
Are we so easily duped? We expect little else; this is the age of Sloterdijk’s cyncism: we know what we do, but we will do it anyway. Our leaders appeal to words like good and evil which echo feebly in a direction they cannot reach. Are they, these words, the sources of value of an older, more stable world? A world in which, unlike ours, meaning had not began to volatilise? But it is too late and this is why we are cynical: the great unloosening has already happened. There are no longer names and the values attached to those names, but a kind of streaming, a flow of language deterritorialised from traditional markers. Like capital in the Communist Manifesto, such language is the great liquefier of reality, stripping away every value except its own, which no longer has any intrinsic worth. What matters is surplus value, or in the realm to which the media and politicians seek success, surplus attention.
What does it matter whether we are being duped by language? Words, signs, hollow idols, believe and desire in our place. new commanders of language are like the capitalists Marx and Engels tell us are born from the streaming of capital. Are we are the workers to whom will fall the great task of remaking language and remaking the world? Workers who have yet to awaken to their revolutionary potential? But we have already awoken, and this is the tragedy: we know too much; we are no longer innocent; we know, but we carry on regardless. The great lesson of 1992 General Election in the UK: polls predicting the victory of the Labour Party were in error – why? Because no one wanted to admit they would vote Conservative.
Lars Iyer's Blog 