Information and Language and Words, Oh My!

"Language is the house of Being." - Martin Heidegger

Jun 26, 2023

OVERVIEW

Queer Theory has a language problem full stop and all inclusive because language is its enemy. The source of this enmity can be traced through many people; from the Greek Sophist Gorgias, to a certain Nazi Philosopher, and to their disciples and plagiarizers in first the French and then Anglosphere.

The following is intended to be a fast and dirty autopsy of the beast, focusing on its motivations (bad) philosophical superstructure (fatally flawed), and what it desires (to devour everything it can before it consumes itself). It does not aim to be exhaustive, but it does aim to bring to the foreground what is too often being left buried and expose it to the mettle-testing properties of the enkindling page.

“Knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering.” - Albert Einstein

Note: going forward virtually everything I write concerning words can be thought of as synonymous with human beings. I hope by the end of the piece that why that is so is clear enough.

Words = Human Beings.

That is to say, that what we say about language is what we say inevitably of ourselves, because we are made of it:

“One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.” - Francis Crick (emphasis mine).

POSTMODERNISM1 AND LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING

There are two thinkers we can use to introduce the illogic of postmodernism's (of which transgenderism is but one offshoot) maltreatment of language, and they are:

"There is nothing outside the text" - Derrida

(This would be a profoundly insightful thing to say, but Derrida does not believe that any text is meaningful in and of itself, and that is why his profound insight turns into just one more mass murder of meaning in a world long afflicted by them).

"I think that, instead of trying to find out what truth, as opposed to error, is, it might be more interesting to take up the program posed by Nietzsche: how is it that, in our societies. 'the truth' has been given this value, thus placing us absolutely under its thrall..." - Foucault

For Derrida, everything is text, and all text is without any innate meaning. His view is nihilism dressed in academic garb, and pontificating in an academic attitude to conceal itself for what it is. Nihilism can be understood in its most profound sense, to be a rejection of truth as existing at all or of being relevant to human existence.

This rejection can be seen more so in the quote by Foucault, a fellow traveler with Derrida and of the same genus who saw truth as not something real and to be sought, discovered, and cherished, but as something artificial, alien, and a product of power.

For these men and their kind, the 'logocentric' (i.e. truth-centric) focus of thinkers in civilization is a mistake.

THE SLEIGHT OF HAND

Here it is worth pausing briefly to consider how ironic this idea of theirs is, because we can and should challenge it by asking the obvious... is their opinion of truth, that it either does not exist or is unimportant, the truth? The question answers itself, and makes obvious that they are playing a disingenuous game with words. But recall words = human beings. When they have defined everything as in reality being text we must understand that they consider themselves to be... playing with human lives. And they have no shame in that.

Further allow me to juxtapose their thinking with one of history’s great minds:

“Without belief in the inner harmony of the world there could be no science.” — Albert Einstein

Einstein was absolutely right in his observation above, and he recognized that there is an inner harmony to the world. And it is this harmony that Postmodernism attacks as an enemy.

The attack will ultimately prove to be futile. They are like an airborne plane that first denies it needed a runway from which to have taken off and are now busily about decrying flight as impossible! Only falling with style will do! The passengers of any such unfortunate steersmen, are to be pitied.

They say that words don't mean anything and do not accurately reflect an external reality, but rather they manufacture reality by classifying it in an arbitrary act of will. Not even an arbitrary act of human will, just pure will. Because 'human' is just another make believe word; a fiction we tell ourselves about ourselves:

“man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.” - Foucault

QUEER THEORY (POSTMODERNISMS SPAWN)

In the exact same vein of un-think, Queer Theory considers bodies to be a meaningless text, or at the least a text without very important meaning in it. Something to be overwritten and contorted howsoever they happen to feel like doing.

From this thinking we get such gems as the following:

“A ‘universal vagina’ is an anus (through which femaleness can always be accessed)” - Andrea Long Chu, Queer Activist…..Pulitzer Prize winner 🏆🧠🎉

GODS OR MEN?

Ultimately this is due to delusions of autonomy: it is the idea of the self made man writ large and with higher stakes involved than someone’s bruised ego. But no one is self made, rather we are co-creators.

Postmodern / Queer Theories ideologues claim that language is an arbitrary invention (self made) that has no standard with which to judge it, or innate logic that supersedes all else, or point of origin beyond arbitrary will (think the Foucauldian biopower myth). But there is such a standard, and it is not an act of arbitrary invention; it is a truth that transcends all of us and brings us all together around it.

Language is not a human invention anymore than any man or woman invented their own mother. Language is embedded in the natural order of the world every bit as much as it is embedded in the human body (DNA).

THE TRICK

But here the Queer Theorist will interject and try to disingenuously use those born with sexual defects as an excuse to justify their claim that the human body is meaningless. They rinse and repeat this process where language is concerned, and in fact, in language studies is where they first learned to do this trick.

An example of what I mean in microcosmic terms, is that of a young man I spoke with - who was being inducted into the cult - whose therapist had given him a book to give his mother to read, the title was something to the effect of "there is no such thing as reality because words are fictions".

That is to say, they conceive of language and words to be two things at once: first words are prisons (Derrida himself made this comparison) made by either ignorant or bad actors that they must break free of. The second conception is more complicated, they conceive of language as not being innate in themselves or the world, and this leads down to another error, they believe the world is made up of words that have been divorced from reality because reality does not exist. Only words do. And if words are all that exist and words are something human beings invent arbitrarily without any regard for what is beyond and before them (recall the analogy of motherhood before) there is no possibility of restraint or reason left, indeed reason is the enemy! And what they do not rightly understand they cannot help but harm if not destroy.

DECONSTRUCTION, I.E. DESTRUKTION

This thinking can be encapsulated in the term deconstruction which is oh so fashionable in higher education. An unfortunate and too little known fact of the matter is that that term came from - having been washed ashore and recovered from the depths of distant but similar times - the thinking of literal Nazi's. In the German original Heidegger called it Destruktion. Which gives a more honest sense of what is meant by the English offshoot.

Derrida took it from Heidegger, the Nazi. Derrida defended another Nazi, Paul de Man. Why is everyone so eager to embrace intellectualized nazism? Not coincidentally, Marx would also intimate this thinking when he talked of the ruthless criticism of all that exist.

Comment* These metaphysical arguments have been going on for centuries, these men and movements are just more recent manifestations.

CRITICISM OR NIHILISM

Now, we can all applaud being critical to get at something beyond the criticism itself. But Destruktion (deconstruction) does not believe that criticism’s goal is to find truth; rather for them criticism is the end in and of itself. Because they believe - if not consciously then tacitly - that all of reality is a lie. They are alienated people and they teach and learn alienated doctrines from the mouths of people many of them do not understand.

DECONSTRUCTION, LYNCHPIN OF QUEER THEORY

Now what does Destruktion (deconstruction) have to do with Queer Theory and Transgenderism?

For that one need only look to see that behind the attack on all natural binaries, all natural meaning, and all so called logocentric thinking is this idea; that nothing is innately meaningful that meaningfulness is whatever one decides arbitrarily. See Judith Butler:

BUTLER

Butler used deconstruction to argue that the concept of 'gender' is a cultural construct and demonstrated how the construction of the category 'women' is both essential for and undermined by feminist politics….

Butler writes variously:

“This construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender.” - Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

“There is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural means… ‘the body’ is itself a construct.” - Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Elsewhere in the same work, she would call gender a ‘fiction’, a ‘fabrication’, and a ‘fantasy’.

These are words of alienation and total despair. They suppose that everything that is most intimate and true of themselves is merely constructed, and foisted on them without their say-so (think of the rhetoric around gender being assigned at birth). Therefore they seek to destroy it. These people have no intention of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Humpty Dumpty was rather pushed by them.

TABULA RASA?

In contrast to these Postmodernist, Noam Chomsky - a man with whom I do not necessarily agree with on much - is brilliantly correct in his assessment of language as being both universal and innate. This idea is also something the Ancient and learned Greeks new well; they talked of human beings as being the ones who speak. Language is not an invention it is a birthright, and it is a hallmark of human-ness. This is contradictory to the idea that language is merely a construct of arbitrary will as we covered above, and it is also contradictory to a notion about humanity that has been popular for a few centuries, that human beings are tabula rasa - a blank slate. I believe this is not so, for many reasons, too many to cover here in this brief write-up.

A BRIEF FORAY INTO ONTOLOGY

“Information is information; it is neither matter nor energy.” - Norbert Wiener, pioneer in cybernetics

Norbert Wiener was a recognized genius, and in the quote of his above he is claiming an ontology that unnerves the pragmatist and their fellow-traveling skeptics alike. How can something supersede the material world? The assumption of materialism has dichotomized man from reality, serving as the cave Socrates warned against. In the pragmatic moderns this translates to platitudes like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and in the skeptic moderns it displays itself in either the despairing shrug “whatever” or the violent exclamation “sez who2”

WHY IS ANY OF THIS LANGUAGE STUFF IMPORTANT?

"So what Gutenberg?" So what? So what everything! From out of a seemingly innocuous discipline like Literary Theory has come these dogma's, these lies, which affect everything; from how we treat our own bodies, to how we view the legal system and its founding words like the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution (which takes an awful lot of words to maintain these days and these lies about language are at the heart of why). In other words, it is no good to try and ignore the Liberal Arts and shield ourselves with STEM. These people, the children of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir et al. have been undermining the ground on which all of us stand together with our own bodies.

This can be demonstrated briefly by asking yourself, if we accept that,

1. everything is text…

2. that text has no definite meaning but can mean whatever we want it to…

then…

3. persons are only who we say they are..

…follows very naturally.

It is a conclusion forced from the first two premises and it is mightily evil and fabulously arrogant. It is an intellectual GOOSESTEP.

“But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

THE EXIT FROM THE CIRCLE

What if we instead recognize the truth that Einstein saw, that the universe is filled with meaning?

For that I recommend having a look at my other write up here, though I may return and add more material to this work, time permitting. But to be really pithy about it, we’d better start by asking who the hell put the meaning there? Because meaning is not something that happens by accident.

“Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.” - Francis Crick

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Chomsky Interview

Just below is an interview with Noam Chomsky who explores and defends the intellectual history of Innatism.

I do not subscribe to everything Chomsky says on this issue or others - as noted earlier - or even how he chooses to define some of his terminology. However, overall it is good to demonstrate I am not the only one saying that there is such a thing as a human being and that that necessarily comes with innate understanding to some extent. Additionally, his position in the culture war makes him an advocate able to appeal to an audience that typically wouldn’t hear it. At least that is the hope.

(See min 00:01:30 - 00:06:00 in particular)

The Meno

Link to article

Skip down the page to Part 2: Socrates demonstrates that the seemingly ignorant slave boy has mathematical knowledge.

Eleanor Gibson & The Visual Cliff

(notice the infants instinctually avoid steep vertical spaces!)

Gutenberg's Musings

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