What are words? Are they simply a symbolic system that represents mental, conceptual categories—completely arbitrary and with fluid boundaries? Words, and the structures that they exist in (e.g. semantic paradigms and grammatical forms) are quite interesting. One of the contentions of many spiritual gurus, such as Jiddu Krishnamurti and especially U.G. Krishanmurti, is that we are trapped in our minds, in our representations of the world through language. Memory, the replicated symbols and structures, and the very act of naming prevents us from seeing the “real,” the “true,” and thereby locking us into robotic patterns of perception and action.
“Everything you stand for, believe in, experience and aspire to is the result of thought. And thought is destructive because it is nothing more than a protective mechanism, programmed to protect its own interests at all costs.” U.G. Krishanmurti
U.G. Krishnamurti
We can find the same contention throughout popular music—especially in the psychedelic era. For example, look at the words to many of Lennon’s psychedelic anthems, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, for example:
Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she's gone
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high
Newspaper taxis appear on the shore
Waiting to take you away
Climb in the back with your head in the clouds
And you're gone
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Picture yourself on a train in a station
With plasticine porters with looking glass ties
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile
The girl with kaleidoscope eyes
Or, Strawberry Fields:
Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever
Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone
But it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me
No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
That is you can't, you know, tune in
But it's all right
That is, I think, it's not too bad
Psychedelic prose, meant to destabilize the conscious mind, and the thereby the tyranny of the system was the central conceit of William S. Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ novels, featuring pages of sometimes totally incoherent prose, and random insertions of parallel narratives. There is a very interesting element here, clearly visible in the Lennon lyrics as well—at a certain point, the text just washes over us, and we think we understand it—but do we? While many may not be aware of it, there was a quite disturbing element to the early acid tests, and even these Beatles songs, in that there are parallel messages, no clear definitions, and multiple internal contradictions; all of which serve the function of ‘freeing’ the mind by destabilizing language.
That’s all well and good, you may say. And perhaps you have spent many a tranquil afternoon, riding on several clean hits of acid, finding the magical world drifts from the commonplace, electrifying the falling snow, replacing the dreaming state with the awakened (or vise versa?). The war on language is most deeply embedded and powerfully deployed in the work of post-modernist and post-structuralist philosophers such as Giles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, and of course the King deconstruction, Jaques Derrida. There is not enough space to go into detail regarding these diverse philosopher’s connections and divergences, but the work of Derrida dominated the academy for several decades, and in fact is the primary underpinning today’s current socio-cultural-political environment.
There are two ways to look at this: (1) Derrida challenged the basis of meaning, the basis of difference and “binaries” (black/white, up/down, male/female, etc.), that make up fundamental conceptual categories. This is liberating, and reveals that everything is just a dream, just a ride, and that we make up our own realities. Words and meanings are prisons; (2) Derrida’s attack on the foundations of literature, philosophy, religion, and society itself are merely intellectual games, but have a very destructive potential, and instead of leading to freedom, are a path to bondage that precludes any exit, since you have basically burned the boat that brought you there!
In the second part of this article, I will look at the counter argument to these positions, and perhaps go into more detail as to the effects of the post-modern movement on society in general. At the heart of the deconstruction of language and all meaningful categories in the removal of the “logos,” the primary ground in an ordered universe. In simpler terms, there is no ‘truth,’ only multiple subjectivities that all experience many ‘truths.’