Cinema & Liberationism: The Presence and Significance of the Ideologies of Liberationism, Anti-Speciesism, and Compassion for Nonhuman Animals in Contemporary Film Culture (PDF Presentation)
Tag Archives: linguistics
How Language Limits
Though we realize that verbal language is shaped by our need to express our thoughts, we often overlook how language in turn shapes our thoughts. Our languages guide our perceptions, of ourselves and the world around us. Language is symbolic, which is to say that the sounds “cat” and “gatto” and “katze” have nothing to do with the furry critters that fill your Facebook feed, until we consciously assign meaning to those words. We try to make sense of our environments by designating items that we deem similar enough to a symbolic category. Thus our labels are extremely significant to how we see and think. Nietzsche acknowledged that no two leaves are utterly identical, and yet in order to organize our thinking and communicate, we say “leaf” to define something by generalized similarities, disregarding the individuality of every “leaf” we have encountered (“On Truth and Lies“). In more directly relevant sociological terms, the words “black” and “white” delineate a constructed boundary line between two willfully established boxes. This boundary line between two separated “races” is entirely fabricated, as that “grey area” between albino and ebony encompasses nearly everyone, and no two people who are placed into one of the categories together have identical skin colouring. Continuing the use of these words of constructed “race” categories allows for the perpetuation of racism, a category bias. To use language to assert that difference is important to mention maintains the social significance of difference, and therefore racism and sexism and every other bigotry are permitted to persist. In the interest of developing equality it is therefore of the utmost importance that we leave behind such Othering speech, which formulates the person or people in question as “them” in an opposition to “us.” Affirmative action may be useful to kickstart equality reform, but only until sufficient momentum builds. After that, female-only colleges in a country with gender balance in education (actually, the US has more females enrolled in university (Forbes)) become sexist.
See also: TED Talk by Keith Chen on correlations between linguistic constructions of time and money-saving propensity. For further reading on symbolic means of relating to the world, look up Jaques Lacan and Judith Butler.
AGE OF EQUILIBRIUM 