Subject: (urth) Next time I'll just say "explain yourself"

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 03:36:09 +0000

Blattid wrote:

>Second, I do not mean (nor did I mean to imply) that Ascian
>Correct Thought is _exclusively_ a parable of the Maoist
>Cult of Personality.

But you =do= mean to exclude all things Orwell from the mix, right? I mean,
that is what I heard before, that is what I hear now.  That is what I
continue to find so puzzling.

>The approach to thought control taken by the Ingsoc Party
>(more specifically, one supposes, Ministrue) in NINETEEN
>EIGHTY-FOUR is fundamentally different (in my opinion) from
>that taken by the Group of Seventeen in tBotNS; the former
>seeks to redesign grammar and vocabulary so that thoughtcrime
>is literally unthinkable, but to leave enough flexibility that
>more or less anything can be thought.

Hmmm.  I don't know.

>The approach of Ascian "Correct Thought" is somewhat different.
>It does not seek to change the _form_ of the language, but to
>limit -- by what mechanism we are not told -- the actual things
>the people are allowed to say (and so, presumably, to think).
>Like Newspeak, the basic idea of imprisoning minds this way
>is (Skinnerian or Whorf-Sapirean) nonsense, and Loyal to the
>Group of Seventeen's story of the just man shows how Correct
>Thought can be manipulated to think the "incorrect" (or
>"unthinkable") -- on this much, at least, we are agreed?

Hmmm.  Well maybe.  I mean, part of the problem in this approach (comparing
Approved Texts, most of which comes from "The Just Man," with Newspeak of
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR) is that we do not have an Ascian boundary and its
penetration as we have in Oceania ("down with Big Brother!").  Winston
Smith is a rebel; Loyal to the Group of Seventeen is a prisoner of war who
does not show any clear signs of switching sides -- we take his speech to
be orthodox.  What would be the unthinkable elements in "The Just Man"?

>My point is that the Ingsoc approach is more subtle and, in a
>word, structural, allowing an essentially infinite array of
>thinkables while fencing off certain areas as unthinkable --
>a bounded infinity of utterances, if you will. The Ascian
>approach is radically different; it uses brute iterative force
>to say "Here are the thinkable thoughts; there are no others."

I'm not sure I follow.  One difference I can see, as I try to understand
what you are saying (yet this is actually not what you are saying), is a
difference of unit scale: Newspeak is built on the word level, whereas the
units of Approved Texts are . . . well, what, exactly?  Paragraphs,
sentences, and perhaps sentence fragments (like "loyal to the Group of
Seventeen"; "no one is to receive more than 100 blows").

These units are used differently, it seems.  Paragraphs would seem to have
the most rigidity to them and so presumably offer less room for nuance (as
they drag more of their original context along with them).  Sentences,
otoh, are removed from textual context and thus presumably could be used to
say the opposite of the original meaning.

Thus, if Foila isn't actually lying (i.e., giving a false interpretation of
the source text), a fellow can use Approved Texts with a cut and paste
approach and tell an original story . . . hmmm, or =is= it original?  Maybe
the entire text of "The Just Man" is unabridged, verbatim Authorized Text
-- is that what everyone assumes?  If so, that completely demolishes my
"human spirit works around the obstacle" line of reasoning . . . the tale
becomes a propaganda told by a cunning robot.

(My thinking before was something more like, oh, tell the story of "Romeo
and Juliet" using only complete sentences from "MacBeth.")

>I take this to be an extrapolation-to-the-final-stage of the
>Maoist _type_ of "political correctness."
>
>
>> OTOH, to the best of my knowledge, even at the height of the
>> personality cult the Chinese did not make a practice of
>> speaking exclusively in quotes from the little red book.
>> So the historical context of the little red book
>> does not contain the aspect of Approved Texts/Correct Thought.
>
>I cannot speak of the Chinese, except from the somewhat random
>reports I recall of people being sent to camps for "re-education
>in Chairman Mao thought" during the Cultural Revolution. (The
>thought of the Cultural Revolution inspired the Subject: line of
>this posting, of course.) I can give anecdotal evidence of folks
>I knew in Berkeley in the mid-'70s, who had a Chairman Mao quote
>for every occasion and who judged all opinions (even, it seemed
>at times, all utterances) against Chairman Mao Thought. These
>people took Mao's quotations as the set of axioms from which all
>politcally "correct thought" must flow.
>
>It seems to me to be a relatively small step, a relatively small
>_satirical_ and extrapolative step, from there to simply closing
>off the minds of the followers to all other thoughts completely.
>And so I believe that to say that "the historical context of the
>little red book does not contain the aspect of Approved Texts/
>Correct Thought" is orthogonal to the point I am making.

Then it was doubleplusgood of you to give a plusbig answer to it.

I hope the basic point of my note is undarkthink. We was gived unOrwell
statements, vaguing a position as darkthink to me (and maybe others) as the
elephant is to the three spying sightless mans: one touch the leg and say,
"Elephant is treeful"; one touch the trunk and say, "Elephant is snakeful";
man three touch the belly and say, "Elephant is houseful." When in fact
Total Elephant is untreeful, unsnakeful, and unhouseful.

For myself as unseeing man in this Elephant case, I gived the Orwell
position.  Spying into the dark, the question "Is a unsurplus of Orwell
basic the cause of this darkthink?"  No, undarkwise not: 1 = 1. Orwell
quota is established. Plusgood.

Next question, "Is littleredbookthing used in unhistoryful way?" Yes,
undarkwise: 2 = 2. Littleredbookthing position is semibuilded. Plusgood.

It was a surprise, then, that even though 1 = 1, and 2 = 2, still the
darkthink remain dark, likewise darker than anteanswer.

Undarkwise this line of inquiry is unuseful.  Down the memory hole.

=mantis=

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 16:41:53 +0000

Mantis, quoting I, wrote:

> But you =do= mean to exclude all things Orwell from the mix, 
> right? I mean, that is what I heard before, that is what I
> hear now.  That is what I continue to find so puzzling.

...perhaps. Certainly I think that any Orwellian strain is weaker 
and more distant than the Maoist. I think SF fans (myself 
included!) have a tendency to hear resonances of SF texts in 
other texts, and those not only SF texts, perhaps more strongly 
than their authors intended -- an attention-focus phenomenon that 
needs correction at times. Thus, while I don't suppose I can go so 
far as to deny that an Orwellian echo cho ho o may exist in the 
Ascian speech pattern, I think it secondary at most.

Consider: If Wolfe's model for "war" was/is his experience in the
Korean "conflict," then who were/are his model for "enemy"? The 
North Koreans, inspired/supported by -- of all entities! --  Mao's 
China. (And, to be sure, the USSR.) Asian-style Communism, as 
perceived by an American conservative (hivelike, anti-individual, 
centralized, etc.), is a clear match for Ascia.

And, perhaps most importantly, the _style_ of the Ascian sayings
greatly resembles that of Mao. Here are a few examples:

"Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? 
No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social 
practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social 
practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and 
scientific experiment."

"It [materialist dialectics] holds that external causes are the 
condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change,
and that external causes become operative through internal 
causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, 
but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because 
each has a different basis."

"Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of 
the first importance for the revolution. The basic reason why all 
previous revolutionary struggles in China achieved so little was 
their failure to unite with real friends in order to attack real 
enemies. A revolutionary party is the guide of the masses..."

"It is not enough to set tasks, we must also solve the problem 
of the methods for carrying them out. If our task is to cross a 
river, we cannot cross it without a bridge or a boat."

"On what basis should our policy rest? It should rest on our 
own strength, and that means regeneration through one's own 
efforts."

"War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid 
of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."

...well, those are only a few samples; if you want to see some
more, check out http://art-bin.com/art/omaotoc.html.

> > ... Loyal to the

> Hmmm.  Well maybe.  ... What would be the unthinkable elements
> in "The Just Man"?

Severian himself observes that it seems to criticize the 
Group of Seventeen for not dealing with the just man's 
problem promptly -- indeed, they never _do_; it's just the 
bad guys' fears that they might that provides a happy ending.

> I'm not sure I follow.  One difference I can see, as I try to 
> understand what you are saying (yet this is actually not what
> you are saying), is a difference of unit scale: Newspeak is
> built on the word level, whereas the units of Approved Texts
> are . . . well, what, exactly?  Paragraphs, sentences, and
> perhaps sentence fragments (like "loyal to the Group of

It's more than unit scale; it's a qualitative difference. 
Words give you building blocks to make thoughts out of; the 
pre-formed Approved Texts are intended to be an exhaustive 
list of the thoughts that one may think. Where a citizen of 
Oceania might in theory say "B-B doubleplusungood," an 
Ascian cannot -- again, in theory -- say "It's okay for some
people receive more than a hundred blows." Somewhere in 
there it's said that most Ascians are conditioned to the 
point where if you say anything that is not an Approved Text, 
they simply fail to understand you.

Which, once again, I think is nonsense, and totally contrary 
to the way in which humans actually acquire language ... Wolfe, 
I seem to recall, pays lip service to this by suggesting that 
non-Approved Text utterances are regarded by adult Ascians as 
"the babblings of children." But I would suggest that any 
system of mind-control that would make someone incapable of
comprehending any non-Approved utterance doesn't actually need
Approved Texts to enforce itself...

...but that, too, is orthogonal to my point; in the Lupine
universe of discourse, that's the method the Group of Seventeen
(and, ultimately, the Space/Sea Monsters) use to control the
minds of the "populace," and what we're actually arguing about 
isn't whether it would work in RL, but what its literary and 
historical antecedents and inspirations might be. 8*)

> These units are used differently, it seems.  Paragraphs would 
> seem to have the most rigidity to them and so presumably offer
> less room for nuance (as they drag more of their original 
> context along with them).  Sentences, otoh, are removed from
> textual context and thus presumably could be used to say the
> opposite of the original meaning.

Invoking a variant of Godwin's Law: When you say that, you
remind me of Douglas Hofstadter. 8*)

> (My thinking before was something more like, oh, tell the 
> story of "Romeo and Juliet" using only complete sentences
> from "MacBeth.")

H'mmm. An interesting challenge. Are name changes allowed?

> I hope the basic point of my note is undarkthink. We was 
> gived unOrwell statements, vaguing a position as darkthink
> to me (and maybe others) as the elephant is to the three
> spying sightless mans:

(Deleted your Newspeakery of the Blind Men and the Elephant.
A marvellous conceit!)

> For myself as unseeing man in this Elephant case, I gived the 
> Orwell position.  Spying into the dark, the question "Is a 
> unsurplus of Orwell basic the cause of this darkthink?"  No,
> undarkwise not: 1 = 1. Orwell quota is established. Plusgood.

And that is precisely what I am questioning: _where_ is the Orwell
quota established? The style of Correct Thought is not the style
of Newspeak; it is (as I hope my samples above have shown) very
much in the style of Chairman Mao Thought, which I hope leaves
the littleredbookthing position plusfirmlybuilded.

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From: Andy Robertson <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 18:39:16 +0000

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
> the littleredbookthing position plusfirmlybuilded.

But it is obvious.

The fact that the Ascians can speak *only* in the phrases known as Correct
Thought matches the fact that Orwell's inhabitants of Oceana will one day
speak **only** in Newspeak.

But there is no real-life correspondence to this: the Koreans may have
chanted Maoist slogans, but they were not **forbidden** to use other words
or phrases.

Only in Orwell's 1984 (and arguably in some SF books written since then)
does this concept of total linguistic replacement arise.

I agree, however, that the style of the quotes is very close to Maoism

    hartshorn

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From: Josh Geller <dclxvi at dclxvi.best.vwh.net>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 23:20:45 +0000

> does this concept of total linguistic replacement arise.

Really?

When was the last time you used the word 'nigger' in conversation?

.

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From: Andy Robertson <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 22:50:37 +0000

----- Original Message -----
From: "Josh Geller" <dclxvi at dclxvi.best.vwh.net>
> When was the last time you used the word 'nigger' in conversation?

Again, not relevant, though pithy.  Some words can be cut out, but it's not
the same thing as the massive restructuring Orwell was diagramming

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From: Josh Geller <dclxvi at dclxvi.best.vwh.net>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 23:41:54 +0000

> the same thing as the massive restructuring Orwell was diagramming

Hmm. I don't know if I agree.

But hey, go ahead and believe what you like. What do I care?

.

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From: Jason Ingram <j_ingram at mac.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 01:03:18 +0000

I don't mean to butt in, but I think a third perspective might be 
helpful . . .

The _concept_ of total linguistic replacement predates Orwell; the 
positivists were interested in replacing ambiguous terms and locutions 
with precise, scientific alternatives.  Their project had a basis in 
Jeremy Bentham's argument for the replacement of emotional, biasing 
terms with (purportedly) neutral, objective alternatives.   These 
projects were not embodied in novels--and were accordingly imagined 
differently than in Orwell--but they do seem to be "total."

At the same time, other cultures have attempted far less extreme forms 
of linguistic control; France maintains an  institution that authorizes 
new words for new inventions and generally attempts to preserve an 
'official' French.  This certainly differs in degree from Newspeak, and 
almost certainly differs in kind, but perhaps also describes a continuum.

Sepia

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 22:29:52 +0000

Andy Robertson quoting Josh Geller quoting...

> > > Only in Orwell's 1984 (and arguably in some SF books 
> > > written since then) does this concept of total
> > > linguistic replacement arise.

> Again, not relevant, though pithy.  Some words can be cut 
> out, but it's not the same thing as the massive restructuring
> Orwell was diagramming

No; but the much larger removal of _all_ such epithets 
from polite conversation comes a lot closer.

As for granting Orwell primacy in this matter, well, that's
pretty silly. There is a longish history of people claiming 
one way or another that the structure of language determines 
the structure of thought, or actively trying to restructure 
thought through some such "massive restructuring" of language; 
one well-known (at least in SF circles) example, published a 
good fifteen years before NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, is Alfred 
Korzybski's SCIENCE AND SANITY, which promises improved health 
(both phyisical and mental; indeed, it denies the distinction 
in favor of the "more general" concept of psychosomatic health) 
to persons who restructure their language (though, again 
"language" is an insufficient term) "scientifically," in lines 
with "non-Aristotelean principles and tool" such as 
"non-identfication" and "indexing." Many students of Korzybski's 
"General Semantics" speak and write (or try to) in what they 
call E', E-Prime, which is English without the verb "to be," 
which (they claim, or at least some of them do) _automatically_ 
eliminates identification ... and if that isn't restructuring
the language, I'd like to know what is!

More generally, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the basic statement
of linguistic determinism, was first announced in 1929, though
it has predecessors going back hundreds of years, of which 
perhaps the best known would be Wilhelm von Humboldt's 
_weltanschauung_ hypothesis: but I believe the roots of the idea
go back to Plato, if not further.

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From: Andy Robertson <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 22:13:58 +0000

----- Original Message -----
> pretty silly.

Oh, pish-tosh.

I'm not "granting Orwell primacy."  I'm granting SF primacy.

And you perfectly well know that this null-A Korzybski stuff is only
relevant here because of its SF content, the demented but wonderful Van Vogt
stuff.

SF rules, and defines reality, OK?

    hartshorn

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From: matthew.malthouse <matthew.malthouse at guardian.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2002 10:02:01 +0000

On 31/07/2002 23:29:52 Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

>one well-known (at least in SF circles)

Is it really significant in the context of TBotNS?

Severian is convinced from his listening to Loyal's story that the ploy
doesn't work:

Folia's explanation TCotA Ch 5

 "...words that are not approved texts are without meaning for them,  If
they admitted - even to themselves - that such talk meant something, then
it would be possible for them to hear disloyal remarks and even to make
them. That would be exptremely dangerous. As long as they only understand
and quote approved texts, no one can accuse them."

This is a protective mechansim not a succesful manuipulation on the
language/thought level.

Severian comments later, Ch 11

 "Second I learned how difficult it is to eliminate the urge for
expression.  The people of Ascia were reduced to speaking only with their
masters' voice; but they had made of it a new tounge, and I had no doubt,
after hearing the Ascian, that by it he could express whatever thought he
wished."

Matthew

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