From Beneath A Cowled Eye

Could the leftist insistence on recreating priestly language explain some of the failure to gain the respect, or even awareness, of the American working class?

Whether its economic jargon, or the manipulation of language to generate "cross-intersectional analysis of the dialectic of social injustice," or Zizekian flights of milky self-aggrandizement - the American leftist discussion distances its adherents from those it purports to serve.

Americans are religious, but not even the American papists are publicly priestly in their choice of words. American idiom is relatively free of the technical jargon which plagues German and French, and the English mimicry of the same. This is not to suggest that it is necessarily more honest or transparent, because that is not the case. We use language emotionally, with a preponderance of mediated symbolic catch phrases employed as markers of fealty and conformity: country, faith, family, values,  family values, American way, pro-life, pro-choice, gun rights, family way, cheat, urban, douchebag, faggot, sissy, pussy, gay, girly, troops, the troops, support the troops - et cetera.

And while I'm not suggesting that leftists embrace the vulgar markers of conformity, I do wonder if this sort of misuse of language - priestly in its self-separation, in its claims to its own enlightenment - serves the interests of power more than almost any other indirect concession to its reality:

"In the creation of non-linguistic institutional facts we use meaning, the systematic powers of language, to create a set of deontic powers that go beyond the semantic powers."

"In sum, for perception and memory we represent how things really are and thus achieve mind-to-world direction of fit only in virtue of world-to-mind direction of causation. For prior intentions and intentions-in-action, we get a match between how we intend things to be and how they actually are, and thus achieve world-to-mind direction of fit, only in virtue of mind-to-world direction of causation." 

"...similar to what Searle sees to be the result of Status Function Declarations that relate networks of presupposed, mostly unconscious intentional states of various persons, also a background of abilities and capacities and dispositions, to conscious intentions, intentions-in-action, performative and declarative utterances, status functions that carry deontologies that bind persons, all in social spaces that impact non-linguistic reality.

The institutional reality is based upon Status Function Declarations, which are a certain kind of utterance (as formulated originally by J.L. Austin) whose performance has a certain form.

Basically, a person or persons counts an X as a Y in situation C. In so doing, they actually make an X into a Y in situation C by representing it as being a Y in C. The utterance is connected to prior intentions, formalized business plans, an office space, et cetera. The utterance has conditions of satisfaction, and the organization of persons through deontological Status Functions makes the institutional facts reach into and alter non-linguistic brains and spaces."

Source.

This is not language used to reach out to persons. This is language employed in a priestly manner. It isolates its speakers from their objects. It is employed to elevate its users above those they address, in their own eyes (at least as I see it). It allows its users to believe in their own special validity, a priestly possession of divine knowledge and secret keys.

Well, that's my opinion.

So does it work that way, in fact?

Does it isolate its users in pockets of self-satisfaction, while alienating those it purports to address? Does "the left" continue its abject history of comedic failure, especially in the States, because its self-appointed leadership uses priestly jargon?* Because its users sound a whole lot like the practitioners of the contractual legalese of the "bankers and lawyers and merchants of grief"?

I ask this on MLK day, in part, because the genius of the civil rights movement rests in its embrace of the vernacular, the common, even the faith terms of ordinary Americans. It offered a genuine, frightening, effective threat to power, if only for a historical moment, because it was not uttered from beneath a cowled eye. It was not communicated in the priestly language of bosses and bankers, lawyers, and capitalist academia:



And:



* - not exclusively, of course...