
A theater play in the street. Budapest, 1977 | Fortepan | Public domain
We live in the era of post-truth. But if our ever-greater difficulty in accessing the “facts” has taught us anything, it is the power of words and stories to create reality. Through the ideas of different authors, Berta Gómez takes us on a journey through the material dimension of language.
A second-year journalism class at the Complutense University of Madrid. On the board, the lecturer writes “journalism vs. fake news,” and asks us what the difference is between the two. Faced with the general lethargy of the students who attend class in the afternoons, of which I am one, she answers the question herself. She explains that journalism means reporting that which corresponds to reality, while fake news, in a sort of game of opposites, is everything that does not correspond to reality. I don’t remember being particularly struck by this at the time, but I did write down the terms in capital letters in my notebook. Later, while studying for that subject, I thought a lot, or at least much more than I’m sure the lecturer intended, about the idea of “reality,” which is the first thing one needs to know in order to tackle these concepts. Because, even if we do not question our epistemological access to truth, what words or language are suitable to truthfully convey that reality to others? Does reality change if the discourse we use to refer to it changes? What about novels or works of fantasy? Can they play a role in the realm of what is real and true?
I am aware of having complicated an assertion whose purpose was, in fact, to simplify the explanation and, in a spirit of professional pragmatism, not to make us think too much. But anecdotes and memories, still hazy, can be the starting point for ruminative questions, for illuminating ideas. Salvador Oliva explains how Gabriel Ferrater, who he taught alongside at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, used to warn his students that “there is no thought without language. And anyone who disagrees can say so.” As Oliva points out, if the phrase is so forceful, so emphatic, it is because it is impossible not to agree with Ferrater.
The relationship between reality and language, explored through different intellectual and artistic disciplines, shapes us as narrative subjects (what else is the thing we call identity?) and orders what we have come to call reality: it names what we see, the relationships, sensations and feelings they trigger and, of course, it also enables us to think about the elements of our thought: concepts, categories, words.
In the history of philosophy, language and linguistic meanings have often been considered an abstract reality external to the world. We need only go back to Plato and his world of ideas – the idea of the chair, its very essence, would be beyond our universe, far removed from the real chairs that we sit on or bump into. For many years now, this understanding, in all its versions, however diffuse, has been challenged by another way of looking at language, which takes on its social dimension and, therefore, the contingent nature of meaning. In contrast to essentialism, a constructionist view emerges which sees no appreciable difference between language and action, and considers that language depends more on our way of life than on an immutable and universal essence. In other words, we now know that it is words that can make us stumble, sit down or stand up to explain what we think, what we are, and what we sense.
This is perhaps best explained by Ursula K. Le Guin, when she says that “words are events, they do things, change things.” Also, of course, through fiction, through novels. In one of her most iconic texts, as Ian Watson and Laura Huerga mention in a talk from 2019, the writer offers an ironic explanation of the fear Americans have of dragons, despite their furious moral disapproval of fantasy. A disapproval that, however, forgets that imagination and fantasy are real, even if they are not factual; thus forgetting that dragons do exist.
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In a similar vein, Andreu Jaume explains in his course on romanticism at Barcelona’s Institut d’Humanitats that the appearance of the modern novel, which can be traced back to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, democratises imagination, offering an enormous wealth of emotions with which to narrate ourselves and construct a human interiority (as real or unreal as dragons). With Don Quixote, people began to read themselves, says Jaume. In other words, they had a narrative that drew from books, whether read or listened to. That is why the novel heralded a split from myth and religion – literature ceased to serve only to recount the lives of kings, heroes or aristocrats, to focus on people and their moral problems. Or, in other words, their choices.
As Iris Murdoch writes in Salvation by Words: “We should not conceive of the world as an entity that is separate from the signs we use to name, characterise or shape it.” Language orders reality and, within this order, it also orders us. “Storytelling,” Murdoch says, “is a way of thinking, it is a fundamental mode of consciousness. We are all storytellers and we tell stories about people, and we tell these stories not only to other people but also to ourselves […] and this gives us in return a sense of our own identity.” In this sense, and returning to the initial idea, the distinction between reporting what corresponds to reality and what does not would not be a question of two opposing ideas, but of conscious choice.
For Walter Benjamin, every document of culture was a document of barbarism, but we could invert this and say that every document of barbarism is a document of culture – barbarism also has, and in many cases imminently so, a linguistic dimension. It generates imaginaries, expectations and a horizon of possibilities that enables us as agents capable of action or as impotent nihilists.
That is why, today, just as the realities we name are not the same as those that Cervantes wrote of, so too language is evolving and transforming. As Martha Palacio Avendaño says when talking about Gloria Anzaldúa, we must find words to name experiences that have not yet been heard, that have not yet been listened to, and for which, even for those who suffer them, no words yet exist. This will be one of the fundamental tasks of feminisms, from Judith Butler and her concept of performativity to Rebecca Solnit, who put a name to the everyday occurrence of mansplaining. These are linguistic phenomena that, of course, exist alongside their reactionary responses. Alice Marwick pointed out back in 2017 why the extreme right – with a discourse that blends racism, misogyny, sensationalist irony and conspiracy theories – is completely at home with new technologies, social media platforms and their algorithms: they have allowed them to grab minutes, hours, days of attention, repeating mantras, inventing a language for a new truth “against wokeness.”
A new question comes to mind that could also have been there at the beginning: who offers us this language? From whom do we learn the words? This brings me to Vanessa Springora and her well-known experience: when she was only 13 years old, Springora met the prestigious and charismatic writer Gabriel Matzneff, 36 years her senior. The ensuing relationship could be defined in many ways. For Matzneff and those in his circle, it was love, passion and devotion. In the eyes of today’s world, and of Springora herself, who described this relationship 30 years later in her book Consent, theirs was a story of perversion and abuse. An abuse that is reflected in the way he shaped her view of the world and the language she was acquiring to name herself and her feelings. He taught her all or almost all the words to define love – he showed her their form and then their meanings. Were they lies? Springora, who had to find another language for herself, thinks they were.
In short, if we pay attention to the material, transformative and eminently moral dimension of language, words can condemn us but also, as Iris Murdoch says, they can save us.
This article mentions several talks and courses from the archives of the CCCB and the Institut d’Humanitats. You can find the playlist on Spotify and Youtube.
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