KARL JASPERS FORUM

NOTE 55

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
by Adrian van der Meijden
August 2004, posted 25 September 2004

<1>
I am asking for people interested to read my paper on "politics of language".

It extends Bateson's work on the Double Bind for psychology and the prevalent attitude in psychology & sociology to tackle it as if the individual has problems, which responsibility racket is of itself a Double Bind which affects or damages both the binder and the victim; and which the paper is about. So perhaps I should re-frame it as the politics of communication. Whereas Shannon and Bell try to exclude white noise from a channel, very logical indeed, I tried to understand what all the noise is about. There cannot be anything random about it in a continuously related universe, at every level of the action. That would define chaos and the random as a case of many Laingian "knots". Paradox is also an unresolved issue as is ambiguity. Empson's is a brave attempt but does not really eplain how it works.

<2>
More in general in any ecology one can see the Double Bind in action as the relation between organisms. Fi the virus and an immune system each try to Double bind the other, and there the virus wins. So too for predators which ignore any such thing by sheer force. Think of Computer parasites and The definition of Evolution. What do we do, defend ourselves to no great or ever totally effective result. One nice contra example is Basque culture where one is, politely, asked to donate one's annual tax and that works too. This reaches beyond the standard cause and effect in linearised discourse. Here I confine myself to society and rhetoric but the mechanism of it goes much further. In a cosmological sense when the universe acts on itself that's a Double Bind. A part constrains the whole. Thus the interaction of the sea of flux and consciousness for Quantum Theory includes a Double Bind or paradoxical behaviour. At that level we're talking virtual but that makes no difference. Math itself is riddled. There are other uses for rhetoric than Aristotle's propaganda. My general finding is that we cannot:"get rid of" [THE archetypal dragon killing] DBs, but we can discover how to cope on many levels. To "get rid of" is psychologically a case of suppression of individuality vs society by re-grooving the ?client? back into the social system, which is what Ninurti II did to his people as described by Julian Jaynes bicameralisms. Ninu removed the gods and did it himself, which I surmise as a fall from grace.

<3>
DISCLAIMER: What I suggest here is that the language of politics uses Double Binds, but the DB is not confined to that, The reverse relation does not hold. Since ambiguity occurs everywere and is lexical [ie puns and jokes, thus humour as Koestler's bisociation and how Aristotle could not devise a theory of comedy], strategic, mechanically as "forces" and so on whence we also find it in poetry and surrealism which makes politics as just another use of that. It also opens up the gap between formal, logical discourse and woolly or vague language, between which the Double Bind operates by having the intent of control in the case discussed rather than communication as in poetry. Poetry uses multi-association as yoking heterogeneous ideas together by the conceit as is done by art in general.

Perforce in an essay I cannot tackle the entire range of ramifications of my idea, which portends that what binds you can also set you free. Logic, contrariwise, binds us into solipsism and isolation so how do we get free ?

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<4>
SUMMARY: This essay discusses the use of language to control and how it *organises* other people. Since a society of itself exists to bind people into a group or community it happens. The issue whether this is good or bad is a tricky one to make and the entire usage very complex to study.

I try to confine myself to the paradoxical logic of the Double bind and hope the reader can find his own instances in our society and himself. E.T. Berne admitted as much. Pavlov applied DBs on three levels. Altogether I discuss the uses of ambivalence, removed by rules of logic from formal discourse with the "well defined" word. I must also confess that I gutted many books and websites to stitch together what is put here to help articulate my experiences. So I am not very original and you may debate whether all this is merely my opinions or an agreement with many almost untold others who helped contribute to my understanding. George Orwell wrote on the politics of language but we can do much better now. The paper consists of two sections,

1: What's wrong or the case with our social system

2: How to cure the effects of the Double Bind, the wee bit at the end.

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Adrian van der Meijden

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ADDITIONAL MUSINGS

17 September 2004

Further implications of my musings are:

1: I venture to suggest we're into the paradigm peripateia.

2: God not only plays dice - the random - but he gave us the means to guess right, and, of course, also wrong. It seems an ideal way to have everything be possible. We're very good at getting it wrong more often than not, Logic guarantees it. Which leads to all those recent changes in science. That is because there are specific sub- laws we still have to understand more fully . It would seem quicker to have everybody guessing or making up possibilities that can be validated by scientific enquiry than to hotfoot them one at a time.

3: Aristotle was once more wrong about causes, they come in multiples. Given the infinite point and its variations on a theme the parameters of those variables needs must be assigned a number of causes, which may vary per event, or dimensions, as just another label

4: The latest hunt in science is for the Higg's particle, boson, field as the smallest Leggo bit with which to assemble all matter. This forces a revision of several already well known key terms in science. It's still theoretical or noumenal which needs a new accelerator in CERN, at a cost of 1.8 billion and a few more years of time.

5: The Universal, hsiao i or infinite point is also such a leggo bit. I

cannot be unentangled from the Tao, which is beyond the opposites. It has ever been the case that we get such insights made by several people at once. In effect, as i see this it makes no difference whether we tackle that cosmologically or introspectively by wholes or parts since now the field and its associated particle are "the same" being infinite or massless. Sums made of the mass of the universe come up wih zero when distributed right through evenly, although that leaves that dark matter or ernergy. The Higg's particle acquires mass from "everywhere around", which means space or continuum as, so to speak, the battery of the universe. Deus Diavolus inversus est, which Kant renamed as the immanent and transcendent. Instead of particles and waves we now are into particles and fields, since both lack size. You cannot have one without the other. We just seem to prefer it small. We still have to figure out who or what pulls the trigger. The odds favour a who. F.W. Kantor, "Information Mechanics", Wiley, 1977, quite a while ago now, deduced all particles from the whole but did not quite complete the job. The advantage of the infinite Point is that one is not dependent on science.

6: Our perspective has to shift from Location in space and time into motion and changes that force a difference between condition A, the aetheric flux or noumenal or random or WIMPwhen it is named the plasma, into condition B, the phenomenal or the so-called orderly, for which we now have a number devised by Plank, the quantum, which is noumenal. There's a wee problem with the locations of points A and B, such that we know where B pops up but it seems A is anywhere.

7: Antiquity spoke of reality and appearance and we're now in a position to peer a little deeper into how they are connected.

8: This would shift the discourse from the 4 elements into aether, plasma formation and processes making up the four into a continuing cycle.

to add a touch of humour I cannot wait for my Asimov food processor, anything goes in and what I want comes out. We still don't know where all that energy comes from. The above points are mine, well, paradiorthosed actually, which leaves just the wording.

http://www.sourial.com/ seems a good place to start to be scientific with>

He seems to like his particles solid, and do without consciousness. I don't. I don't see how one can make space consist of an aether of solid but elastic particles, and call them noumenal, but that's his perspective. For him it's still random collisions that do the trick. It fails to account for how homogeneous particles can aggregate into groups or units and besides have an essentially unknowable "matter". How can a homogenous particle do inhomogenous things ? In one sense they are all particulate and in other sense they do things to each other. He has particles as noumenal objects which is an oxymoron. All it seems to mean is that we can argue - oops reason - it out by way of particles. The Higg's particle just seems to be "there"?

Quote:

"It does not require any NEW finding in these areas of study.....The author's contribution, is a logical analysis of certain basic premises of physics, leading to a new understanding of: o Its Structure, and o Its Process.

Motion for all phenomena including:

o SPACE and TIME ,

o THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY and SYMMETRY; all of which have never been assigned a process before, as well as for:

o Every MATHEMATICAL CONCEPT, OPERATOR or COEFFICIENT,

o Every SENSORY input of knowledge , and for

o The Act of KNOWING itself .

hhmmm??? "Jordan also added "Chemistry and Geometry" to the above. Any biochemical reaction, involves the same basic principles of physics, whether we study Biochemistry as a part of Physics or not. The author believes it should include those aspects of "basic biology" at the physico chemical level that have led to the deciphering of the structure of the DNA molecules."