[Nettime-bold] <nettime> Striking at The Heart of the Grammar Police State

["Paul Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>]

....The website reminded me:
www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=10900

cd:dir>dub version>goto:
...
Well - it's been a weird day. I'm at the Russian Consulate in
Berlin near the Brandenburgh Gate where the iron curtain finally
fell, thus ushering in an era of hypercapialism and the New World
Order, and again, an e-mail about language and the construction
of reality pops up from the listserv. For me, 1989 was the year
WWII really ended, and I was a student in college listening to
stuff like KRS-1's 'Edutainment' hip-hop, and working on a paper
about total media in Wagner's Ring Cycle from the viewpoint of
Ludwig Feuerbach (the fellow who invented the term 'humanism')....
arguing with clueless professors about how the, uh, 'environment'
for philsophy and art was evolving after the end of what America
called the 'Cold War.' Funny how things change. That strange
conflict in Vietnam in the late 1960's and mid 1970's in South
Asia was called, in America, The Vietnam War. But in Vietnam,
it was called 'The American War.' They even have a museum about
it in Ho Chi Minh City, but even the name of the museum changes.
No one is really sure what to call it... like that old T-shirt,
a phrase pops up in mind: it's a post colonial thing, we wouldn't
understand..
     But anyway, a message from a critic (Mark Dery) comes across
my screen (again). It's a missive about a right wing nut named
William Safire's language columns that doesn't relate to how
he praises George W. Bush's 'subliminable' right wing agendga.
The basic premise seems to be this aforementioned critics zeal
to maintain Safire's standards for language in a world as Department
of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld describes as (you know, the fellow
who sees the world as a very 'untidy' place in need of American
policing via nuclear missles aimed everywhere to uhh.. make things
more 'tidy') being made very 'messy' by the end of the Soviet
Union. The post reminds me of someone who'd really like to be
the next Clement Greenberg or something. Yawn. 
       Anyway, back to my screen and the post that scurries across
it like a cockroach from the Paleolithic age. The post? It's
a longwinded thing filled with McAphorisms about 'transparency'
- a post that can't account for almost a hundred years of linguistic
inversions and how they've accumulated in digital media. A lazy
post, a post that doesn't really work in the real world. A message
from an ideologue of the 'Old Left.' Etc etc I look out the window
as I wait for my visa, 'cause there's a big Andy Warhol retrospective
in Moscow that I'm part of, and I think of a wide variety of
literary precedents to cite, but the specifics don't really matter.
Reality is bigger than all of us, but maybe a name or two will
suffice: From Walter Bejamin's critique of how language changed
after WWI in his classic essay 'The Story Teller' to Norman Mailer's
essay 'The White Negro' critiqued the way black language affected
American Beat Culture (funny how stuff like Emminem rules the
charts these days, eh?) to stuff like Franty Fanon's famous psychological
explorations on the impact of colonialism to D.W: Griffith's
Ku Klux Klan movie 'Birth of a Nation' to even more stuff like
Cab Calloway's jazz involutions of speech... uh... oral culture
and its migration into digital media seems to be the crux here.
The critics words remind me of something about language and control,
and I check in on a website I think reflects the critics writing
style. It's a website that gives an account of the words and
phrases owned by Mcdonalds:

www.alternet.org/story.html?storyID=10900

and how they reflect the desire of corporations to make things,
like Safire and the critic, really nice and ok.

      The article and the critic don't really seem that different
to me. Could we say McCritic equals McLanguage? While I type,
I listen again to a new KRS-1 single 'Hot' and think of the way
Black English has been a dynamic force in making American culture
evolve out of a Protestant reform into a permutation machine
that's utterly irreverent of established norms of language as
a reflection of a rapidly changing environment. In a world where
almost all aspects of digital language are rented and controlled
as they are assigned spaces on the web from places like INTERNIC,
the idea that creating new syntaxes, new modes of representing
different ways of reflecting the way we live in the age of simultaneity,
and even just having fun with language as it's lived seems to
be alot more interesting than the critics 'inner Safire'....


Scatologics of a moment lost in the real world, a flurry of correspondences,
a cross roads left open for all of the traffic flowing across
my mind. Is the critic full of sh*t? Here. Now. Then. There.
A tangled skein of time unfolding across the synchronicity of
the the 'is' that is the web. Is language a discourse network?
If so, would that make the way we use language a parallel to
the aesthetic issues on the web and in the 'info-world?' I doubt
that McCritic with his 'inner Safire' (hey! check out Safire's
editorials in last weeks NY Times singing the praises of G.W.
Bush's great language and great agenda as a president!)
would be able to comprehend this 'real world' intervention into
the world of his version of theory. Given that a language sung
in praise of Bush's agenda will pretty much leave us with no
'nature' at all anymore, what's the next step?
      Anyway, back to 'reality:' I look out my window at the
Russian Consulate while I wait for my visa. I watch the European
tribes get ready for a new soccer match. White and Blue clad
beefy fellows with blue make-up done in geometric configurations
painted on their faces march and sing beer chants as they walk
down the streets of modern Berlin.2001: Tribes and tribulation,
what's the new configuration? Who will win the soccer match?
Which crew or tribe has the best war paint? The difference between
a fool and someone who is foolish, is that the foolish can learn.
Guess which one of the two I think McCritic is?




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