Language

Wittgenstein said that “about what one cannot speak, one must remain silent.”

I can’t prove to you that I have non-linguistic thoughts (because proof is a form of essentially linguistic rigor), but I assert that I do nonetheless. When I make a snap judgment whether to speed through a yellow light or slow down abruptly, I don’t phrase it as a question before an answer arrives. Usually, my head is full of song lyrics whenever I’m driving. I suspect this kind of calculation, if it’s even profitable to think about in terms of sensoria, to be performed visually and spatially, a quick-compare against memorized impressions of speed and inertia.

Wittgenstein might argue that this doesn’t constitute a form of thought, but surely it’s an interaction between the contents of my mind. In order to know whether my van will fishtail if I slam the brakes, I have to know something about (a) how heavy objects behave when acted upon, (b) how slick the road feels, and (c) how much distance there is, deceleration-adjusted, to the stoplight. I don’t know any of these things in a form that could be easily communicated – that is, I have no precise words for the knowledge that I act upon. If asked, I am left to describe the thought, and with effort.

I’m actually a pretty bad driver. Let me refer instead to music, something I’m alright at. The usual role of bass in a rock band is counterpoint. In order to know what notes to walk, to bridge the chords in the song, I pick around intuitively until I produce sound with an emotional character that I like. I can’t tell you why I prefer certain modes, except using an invented vocabulary (e.g. “burnt,” “bluer,” “darker,” “pointier,” etc.) which is the reason most people hate musicians. To me, these characters are expressed as shapes and colors, but since I can’t share my synaesthesia directly with others, I can only hope my metaphor produces “favorable coincidence” in the mind of the person to whom I am speaking.

Now, I’m not refuting Wittgenstein here. When I say that I prefer F# because it’s orange, I’m still speaking about my private impression of F#. But I’m not communicating it, particularly. There is no language model by which I can assume that my bandmate will hear “orange” and know why I think that fits. However, neither could Wittgenstein demonstrate that I don’t think about its fitting as such, unless we’re defining thought circularly as langauge.

Almost every form of art has developed a means of using impressions to elicit responses in the recipient – particularly the manipulation of emotion. For example, one emotion I have frequently when watching motives is hate (i.e. “unfavorable coincidence”). When I was watching The Watchmen, I had no idea why certain action beats made me want to groan, until somebody told me Snyder was doing a bunch of shit to conceal wirework. Now, I know why I hated half a dozen other movies. At the time, I only knew that the response it produced in me was negative. I have forgotten what the scene even looked like. How would Wittgenstein explain the immediacy of such impressions from art? With a “hidden language” that operates beneath or outside the space of conscious speech? It’s too bad I can’t ask him; I somehow doubt this would be his reply.

If so, however, then it brings up the question I ask of linguistic determinists in general: given the hypothesis that our other forms of thought are conditioned or even constituted by language, why is everyday speech so frequently useless for explaining them?

The Ironic Kitsch

In The Simpsons, every cliché and stereotype, however noxious, gets a wink. The doctor is a cynical malpractitioner. The shopkeeper is a cynical fleecer. The clown writes bad gags and steals good ones. The bully reads Readers’ Digest. The evil mogul has a gay minion. The town’s only Scot is an angry, thrifty, uncouth janitor.

The raison d’être of the nihilistic comedy is that everything deserves to be mocked. That would be an out, if it were possible to ridicule all things simultaneously. We can, in reality, only ridicule those things for which we have notions. There is no sitcom in America about the foibles of Germans. There is no sitcom about commodities speculation. There is no sitcom about black astronauts, and if there were, the joke would be “Look, black folks in space! They’re acting just like black folks on Earth do!” Nobody would base a show on what’s funny about the life of an actual black astronaut because long before it got to production, TV execs would ask where the joke was and can the whole project.

Cynicism is purportedly more realistic than idealism. The story goes that the idealist is a wishful thinker whose veracity, however well-intentioned, is ultimately undercut by desire. The cynic says, “I don’t see the possibility of good, and that makes me a clear thinker.” But as television comedy illustrates, this begs the question. Does discounting the possibility of good excise bias? Or is it merely evidence of a different pervasive conviction?

I used the phrase “status-quo bias” before in reference to the anodyne worldview of archaic TV, but it’s equally applicable to the ironic worldview of The Simpsons. Springfield never changes. The characters have their births moved around, their backstories transplanted at a moment’s notice. Even their lineages are totally fluid. But the town itself is a rock: it will always have the same mayor, the same police chief, the same age and ethnicity demographics. It’s as though the whole show is meant to be subsumed beneath a banner: “It was ever thus!” Its characters are sacrifices before the implausibility of any change. 

Like dada and other forms of radical criticism, nihilistic comedy hinges on forswearing constructive impulses and saving all credibility for the attack (usually on family, friendship and other clichés of anodyne television). But only recently has such austerity been viable on TV, whereas this genre predates those conditions by some time, necessitating compromise with less-than-perfectly-critical mores. The Simpsons, at long last, locates good in children and family obligation. Everybody Loves Raymond finds it in familial feeling, whereas Everybody Hates Chris finds it in the mores of the urban working.

Weirdly, it’s not that compromise but another which finally transforms nihilistic irony into kitsch. Many people have hypothesized the cultural aftershocks of the Berlin Wall’s collapse; one story runs that the end of the Cold War coincided with a trend toward the denying-of-stakes generally, denying that the outcome of anything matters. The Simpsons and its ironic brethren cannot but end up there, whatever their intentions are. Television’s ironic regime says, “trust in nothing except for these: Murphy’s Law, Sturgeon’s Law, the Peter Principle, the law of averages. And trust in these absolutely.” But absolute belief makes kitsch. Here, the rock of certainty is that nothing matters, the outcome of all ideas is the same and therefore, all ideas are the same.

But that’s nonsense, and at no time is this more obvious than when looking at ideas as self-similar as those of mainstream comedy. One may be tempted to say, “if you’re so convinced that all things are toward the same outcome, then try something different” — which would be missing the point. The point is not trying, not having to think about it, because failure is a given. It’s not moral cowardice, exactly. It’s the expectation that the only alternative to anodyne totalism (i.e. judge a tree by its fruit, evil never wins, etc.) is total denial, accompanied by the fallacy that “everything” is a possible subject matter for art. And it’s less pernicious than it is boring.