post #10.1: The erosion of language: conservative media and the ("a")political imagination

Writing this while very dehydrated and exhausted, on a moving train, so we'll see how this goes. (That i want to try to write regardless should say something about something, and hopefully not just about my foolhardy-ness)

     *Note at the top: I'm not linguistics person. I don't know much of the technical ways for thinking about these kinds of things. While I don't know how exceptional fnaf is for the things i want to talk about, it seems to me a very evocative site, and so I want to use it as an example. I have vague understanding of linguistics which has been produced by watching linguistics YouTube -- and more recently yt shorts -- over the last 5 or so years (tom scott. Jan misili, etymology nerd, other guy, k klein, etc...) see also indigo f and elf on shelf plural video. Anyways, here I go.

     Motivating this is also the eternal way In which I struggle to speak in ways that are understood by others -- in typing or in speaking out loud. (For various reasons, Disability or not). Because I struggle to be understood, I'm interested in sites where language is mutated, eroded, or butchered (mutilated).

[^^ sketch depicting an image of relative language (version one) ^^]

     I drafted these thoughts last night but they've been bouncing around here and there for quite a bit beforehand. Before I get into fnaf, I want to touch on another instance of destabilized meaning i came across while going through the dregs of my watch later play list this morning. When talking about language being destabilized, or new words developing, my image is usually of minoritized, marginal, or otherwise niche, disempowered cultural spaces -- black vernacular english/ebonics, various queer slang and other sorts of code switching. Considering these cases is important and the subversion these cultures act out is meaningful, but i think it's also valuable to point out instability that permeates even within spaces that counterpose this type of culture. The video from this morning was about, in different ways, so-called culture war spaces of the right (there were actually two videos, the first about the daily wire and Brett Cooper and the second about the critical drinker and what I'll call the descendents of gamer gate). The youtuber, jose, emphasized ways that the people he was talking about engaged with different levels of signification (including, for example, using dog whistles) in how they made meaning with their arguments or videos. For example, in the daily wire video, jose discussed how Brett Cooper uses a news story about fraternity members who protected a flag pole flying the US flag, thereby silencing protesters who were trying to fly a Palestinian flag. Jose talk in this case how the contested meaning of the American flag allows Brett Cooper to smuggle conservative argumentation into her rhetoric and allows the fraternity members to have at once pro-israel and both sides people within their ranks.

     The American flag, for jose, ostensibly stands for freedom and yet, and yet. And yet the fraternity members were acting to suppress another group's freedom of speech. For jose, this indicates that at some level someone doesn't understand what the signifiers are standing for, or are otherwise acting hypocritically (hose doesn't say this directly, this is what I'm dividing from what he says). In the second example I will touch upon, jose discusses how the critical drinker fails to understand what exactly he's talking about, giving first examples of how he (the critical drinker) said something was the case about the one piece live action adaptation that was not actually the case (as evidenced by jose by his supplying of additional research into the production circumstances of the show that the critical drinker had guessed at/assumed about). Later in the video, and this is the bit that is actually what I want to introduce this essay with, jose points out that in the critical drinker's video on echo (a marvel series?), the critical drinker misuses the term "girlboss" for to describe the main character and her actions. Actually, jose says, she and the show provide anti-girlboss narratives. For jose this indicates that the critical drinker doesn't understand the terminology he uses, and especially not in the ways that his opponents undetstand it (e.g., that leftists are often not actually pro-girlboss).

     Ealier in the video, jose comments on that the critical drinker uses a "triggered lib"-type image for to depict the fact that the one piece live action remake's feminist politics (the lack thereof, according to the critical drinker), would probably make feminist types angry, something he takes pleasure in. Jose suggests that the fact that the critical drinker uses a signifer (image) that points still back to 2016, that this may suggest that what the critical drinker is talking about is not necessarily real as the world exists at the point when he was making his video. I think this point is important and worth being attended to further -- indeed, it seems like there are several ways in which certain conservative groups have remained conservative in their use of images and are thus in discourse with a fictive version of the world. However, I think that something is fictive does not inherently make it meaningless. This relates to the girlboss comments since, even though the use of the term was also in a fictive / separated from reality kind of way, it still points at something. (To be clear, I'm not trying to suggest that jose is saying that folx are talking in empty signifiers).

     I want to hold on this and make sure I get it across well, as this relates inextricably to where I intend to go with my fnaf discussion. The critical drinker uses "girlboss" to derogatorily describe the fmc's actions -- esp her fighting prowess as a woman being conceived as disproportionate to the men she beats up. He's talking about something when he says this. He uses the same word that people elsewhere (in space, in time) may use to describe, for example, Elizabeth Holmes or Melinda gates, but he does not deploy it with the same meaning. The word is the same but the meaning is not. Context informs a word's meaning, yes, but this doesn't necessarily help. I would argue the fictive signification of the critical drinker's use of girlboss is important for what he's talking about. Even if he would say he's interested in realism or what not, he cannot mean this word in the literal way that i mean it. Because right wing discourses around mainstream culture are reactionary, and therefore conservative and ouroboric, words will inevitability collapse in on themselves or otherwise be turniketed from their originating contexts. Language endures a violent pummeling. Scylla and charybdis is how language always works -- Branching paths, pirouettes, etc. From an outsider like myself or jose looking in, it's easy to say that these people are using their signs improperly -- that they don't know what they are talking about, or are uninformed. Maybe that's true, but i suggest it can never be fully true.

     The critical drinker uses English words to speak, he uses his words and his mouth and his tongue. The words he uses, more often than not, he did not invent. He inherited his language. He uses the words and sounds and signs he inherited and continues to inherit try to signify,,, something. While I don't want to say that he doesn't know what he's talking about, I will intervene and say that he's speaking about a fictive imagination. In the same way that the "modern girl" never existed in Korea or Japan but in the minds of the misogynist men who invented and bemoaned about her (never = not in the ways the men speak about the figure), the critical drinker's girlboss doesn't exist in flesh. I wonder if the fact that the critical drinker is more observable engaging with planes of fiction (e.g., sci fi and fantasy pop culture audio visual media culture) affects how people understand his signs.

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this is the first part of a duo of posts discussing etymology in the wake of modern cultural movements. for part two click here