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quote:Originally posted by The Haus of Connection:
How are we doing?
Jerking about in the realms of Noddy Postmodernism, IMHO.
There once was a scholar called Neal,
Who said, "Although nothing is real,
When I sit on a pin,
And it punctures my skin,
I dislike what I fancy I feel."
I said this in relation to that thread Haus kicked off about the use of the word 'girl' to describe any woman under fourty. One or two folk said that they couldn't see how language was an important component of oppression, but I would argue that it absolutely is. This is evidenced by the fact that the Nazis had to use metaphors (verbal and visual) to dehumanise the minority groups they tried to erradicate. Jews, for eg, had to be likened to animals, vermin to be precise, in order to make their destruction feasible. Using "vermin", say, to describe an ethnic group is a dehumanising metaphor which can be shown to have real sociopolitical effects in the real world, like real dead queers and Jews. The metaphorical application of 'girl' to a woman is, if not dehumanising, then infantilsing, and so only a tad less dodgy. (And it's a short step from 'girl' to 'bitch', which implies canine.) I would argue that such language has real sociopolitical effects.
In conclusion: there is a material reality; metaphors twist the way we perceive it; this can lead to oppression; therefore changing language and terminology is not 'the latest example of PC gone mad'TM at all, but a way out of false consciousness.
Oh, and someone once told me that the difference between a trope and a metaphor is that a metaphor is one which we consciously know is false but a trope one whereby we don't. Eg: 'I'm all at sea' is not likely to be taken as a literal representation of one's state if one is standing on dry land when one says it. However, 'Wow, ain't that a pretty girl' is not so obviously 'false consciousness' and yet could very easily lead to a social interaction in which the 'girl', consciously or otherwise, is trapped in a subdominant role. Anyway, maybe someone better up on the lit. crit. front could tell me if this is a useful or current way of distinguishing the trope from the metaphor, and the harmless figure of speech from the harmful one. Regardless, I think my point stands. I think that contrary to Baudrillard, the Gulf War happened, and, contrary to the BNP, I think the holocaust happened too. What's more, metaphors or tropes played a significant part in these real-world events.
Seeing as Adrian Reynolds seems to have gone, to close, I'll quote him: "If it's a metaphor, then what's it a metafor?" |
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