DOING THINGS WITH WORDS

Perhaps I should clarify the last paragraph of the previous blog Vaccines are a risky business. It should read:

 

In the meantime, let us hope there are no serious side effects to the current Trump16/20 vaccine (by that I mean the Harris-Biden vaccine). Like I said, introducing another organism into the body (politic), no matter how tested, is always a risky business; however, the COVID 19 stuff (by that I mean the current Pfizer/BioNtech and AstraZeneca vaccines) is great news (and should be taken as soon as possible)

 

Celia did suggest that I was not being very clear in the last paragraph, and that it might cause confusion. “Be more specific and you might change the title as well”.

Trying to be clever and funny is not as successful as one sometimes thinks, which is why 'stand up' is so difficult. One should not make the assumption that what one says is perfectly understandable to everyone else. What one thinks is subtle can very often be just plain dumb, in other words, as if not spoken at all. This is something I should know by now. I have been a student of Performance Writing and have a BA and MA in the subject. It takes into account semiotics and the works of J.L. Austin, Roman Jakobson, Charles Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. I should know how to do things with words, but it’s so easy to forget.

Wittgenstein’s seventh proposition in his Tractatus Logoco-Philosohicus (which should be engraved on my memory thanks to the artist Duncan MacAskill) is very much to the point:

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen."

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

In September of 2005 I was Duncan’s ‘roadie’ when he put together an exhibition in the Petrikapelle next to Brandenburg Cathedral. The Tractatus was the cornerstone of the exhibition. Here is a short piece from the event.

Some four years later Duncan and I returned to retrieve the exhibition to re-present it at Dartington College of Art.

The flowers pressed under the glass table top on the left were picked from the Grounds of the Buchenwald Concetration Camp which we visited on the way back from Brandenburg.

Sometime later I prepared a 10 minute video presentation with a view to further studies of words as sign, signifiers and identity.

 

So you might think that doing things with words is something that should flow.  To paraphrase:

“Write the words, I pray you, as I pronounced them to you, trippingly on the brain, but if you muddle them, as many writers do, I had as lief the local rag wrote my lines”

Apologies to Shakespeare. 

There is, however, something about which I can speak. One should never forget that words do things. Words are everywhere. They are displayed in all manner of ways. You will find them spoken in the air, floating on a texting mobile phone, tablet or computer screen, the smoke from skywriting planes, the pages of a book, billboards off the road and not just outside Ebbing Missouri, in cinemas and theatres, magazines and newspapers, the sides of trucks, trains and automobiles, on pavements, walls and boxes of all sorts. There is nowhere where you cannot find words. Just by being spoken, written or thought, once let loose, words perform all by themselves. Contrary to what some people would like you to think, people do understand the power of words, and because they do, words cannot be used carelessly.  In most instances, and in many particular circumstances, it is not too difficult to foresee the consequences of words, especially words which promote action. The words themselves are actions.  A minister by just saying “I pronounce you husband and wife” has performed an act of marriage. The mere words create a legal bond. By attending a wedding, even before the words are uttered, one can foresee the consequences of the event to follow.

And so, when the consequences of certain words are specifically pointed out, and when someone reacts to those consequences and proclaims to the world “This has got to stop! Someone is going to get shot!” then whoever continues to utter those words is more than fully aware of the consequences of repeating those words. There are opinions and facts, the power of words is a fact, not an opinion.

 

The comic opera playing out on the American scene has been witnessed by the whole world. We, the spectators abroad, have seen the effects of the power of words. Whatever flim flam is employed by the upper house of congress to avoid the facts and absolve the miscreant will diminish them in the eyes and minds of the entire world.

 

That’s another fact.