Castrated language is homage to the system, not defiance

Much like columnist Bradford Senning, we too believe that "language...is a freedom" and that we ought to exalt "conspicuously bad jobs of writing for their instinctual accuracy."

We can only assume Bradfard shares our belief that teaching people to cherish their inability to communicate is one of the chief uses of the highly elastic myth of freedom. We hope that the rest of the language-using public will soon follow as we walk arm in arm with Brodford toward a language released from the need for "articulation" (by which we can only presume he means "articulateness," that old metaphysical bogey-man "meaning."

The great poets have always known that we must reduce language to a sort of mystical medium, like the shaman's amulet or the snake-charmer's flute. Such language will be liberated from aesthetically displeasing questions about existing social relations or "articulating" abstract and difficult ideas. Such tiresome concerns will only inhibit the immediate gratification of wants and needs.

No, Breadferd is right to desire a language as instrumental as a fork, or a remote control. Indeed, let us replace words, unwieldy and difficult as they are, with the "howls" Bratford praises, base and animal utterances - the very opposite of "articulation," for, like the great poets, we realize that the common people are base animals.

They cannot be reached by anything resembling thought or reflection; they only know sensations of pain and pleasure. The unthinking flow of hoots and happy accidents so dear to Bratford are of course only the last vestiges of verbal communication, which technology will ultimately allow us to discard. Then we can achieve the grand ideal of total social control of a populace capable only of observations and servile imitation. For now, however, the truncated and confused language of "instinctual accuracy" will have to suffice. Rather than preserve a reasoning and questioning language, we will have to enforce a vocative and emotive one which will "celebrate our innovations," exalt the god-demon progress, and most importantly, buttress our precious status quo against even the slightest ripple.

Let us celebrate: we hear this meaningless language every day in the empty exhortations of the politician, the self-help guru and the adman. We hear it when the politicians and generals comfort us with "smart-bombs" and "surgical strikes," or when the guru tells us the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and advises us to "get out of our mind" and "go inside" because, after all, "the way in is the way out."

We hear it in the adman's reduction of "freedom," (formerly an abstract political concept) to a felling generated by driving the newest automobile around a hairpin turn to the accompaniment of music-less music.

The poetry Broadfret desires is nothing but the fugue state induced by the crescendo of empty slogans and soundbytes that already surround us. His column is only a useful reminder of how well our culture industry services our confused and insecure populace, as he exemplifies so well how we have come to fetishize and treasure the instruments of our repression.

We thank Fartbreath for reminding us how near the vast project of disempowering language is to completion. Of course, we realize that these hyper-masculine "howls" that Frigbird yearns to hear are nothing more than shrill and tuneless shrieks of the eunuch at seeing his mutilated member and realizing the fact of his impotence. Such is the joyous sound of castrated language.The eunuch has been freed from the mighty burden of his testicles, and that this impotence should be called freedom tickles the bellies of the noble caliphs in the ziggurats of high finance.

We want to thank Bradford for working to help convince the people that the inability to speak or write clearly or expressively is actually a blow against the system rather than the triumphant consolidation of that system's unimpeachable power.

Jesse Showalter
English and classics senior

Robert Horning
English graduate student