Thought and Disruption

The Russian psychologist Lev S. Vygotski notes in his landmark study Thought and Language, that a primary word “is not a straightforward ‘symbol of concept’ but rather an image, a picture, and a mental sketch of a concept;” for instance, the Russian word for tailor, his own example, stems from an older word for a piece of cloth, while the French and German words for tailor mean ‘one who cuts’. Vygotski also notes that such a predetermined meaning of a given word unites together when a child learns such a word without knowledge of the historic meaning. The diffused complexity of the word will only gain acceptance through combining the image with a collection of other resembling and contrasting images; for example, on television, the historic feats of Sesame Street had a continual series of clips, where four images were shown in four boxes, and the narrator stated one of these images was not like the others. Three images were of police officers and the fourth was of a firefighter. The collective of images helped the child learn the difference between the word firefighter and police officer. 

Thought development is determined via language.  This means that it is possible then to change how people think. Changing language and symbolic understanding can begin to make changes in thought. Ngugi wa Thiongo believes that this is also true in Postcolonial Theory. In his Detained, the author points out that “I am only a stammerer who tries to find articulate speech in scribbled words.” As well, the Tunisian, Albert Memmi in his 1957 reflections in The Colonizer and The Colonized on the painful and constant ‘ambiguity’ that comes with broken tongues, while the “intellectual lives in cultural anguish, the illiterate person is simply walled into his language and re-chews scraps of oral culture” (Memmi).  

The imbalances of inequality from hierarchy and hegemonic control prefer to keep those who are unaware of their strengths bogged down in un-verbal ignorance. In Kenya, when Ngugi wa Thiongo wrote novels, the government was slightly worried about his pen. But when he started to produce plays, the government was threatened. The format of a dramatic performance gave the masses the words and the visual collection to activate thought. As long as the masses cannot create thought, they will not activate power. Beyond the government of Kenya, the globalized international community has to face the growing control of corporations, especially the US corporations. As long as the majority of speech is within the limits of a computer, a brand name, a cell phone, a video game, or manufactured media and political language, people can be controlled within a limited parameter. Even with the US Amendment honoring Freedom of Speech, if one does not know the words to ‘speak truth to power’ he or she cannot articulate change. Individuals can say what they want to unless it involves speaking against the chosen system of control. It is easy to confuse ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ if the words do not differentiate the two.

While Steve Biko articulated words of change to his fellow South Africans against apartheid and Assia Djebar articulated words during the French controlled Algeria, the image of privilege over others less fortunate were dictated through visual separation of white over black, French over Muslim. When the words of ‘colonialism’, ‘racism’, ‘inequality’, and ‘oppression’ create meaning because the thought comes from a language imposed through the actions, one can see how often power structures fear education.  

In 1932, the American preacher, Reinhold Niebuhr, in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society reflects on the notion of ‘ethical attitudes of a privileged class’. He brings up the clear dividing line that James Madison formatted during the early days of US independence. Declaring the ‘protection of different and unequal faculties,’ Madison made clear that inequality would perpetuate throughout US history (Niebuhr). Perhaps ‘apartheid’ South Africa has ended, and perhaps French controlled Algeria ceased for Biko and Djebar. However, the negative of oppressive acts does continue. The US military is still unjustly in Afghanistan and contracted out globally. Corporate power still finds ways to discredit critical thought.

Corporate power has a general objective and purpose. Herbert Marcuse knew this quite well. In his essay, Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society, he states that the corporate purpose is “to reconcile the individual with the mode of existence which his society imposes on him. … It is necessary to achieve a libidinal cathexis of the merchandise the individual has to buy or sell, the services he has to use to perform, the fun he has to enjoy, the status symbol he has to carry in order … to exist in the society dependant on uninterrupted production and consumption” (Marcuse). The language provided in the context of images creates a thought structure, alluding back to Vygotski, where consumption is now the only language most individuals have grown to accept.

This fantasia of thought policing can easily be overlooked because the language does not speak with clear visuals. However, continually in the past year, vivid visuals of corporate lack of accountability have made it into the online media, and at times into the mainstream media; for example, the slimy pink substance in McDonald’s hamburgers and public school meats, the dissolved image of mice that vanish from Pepsi soda, the arsenic in apple juice and chicken, the recall of Pfizer birth control pills, crushed up bugs used to make pink smoothies at Starbucks, the environmental hazards now apparent to marine life in the Gulf of Mexico due to BP’s oil spill, and the list is growing.  There is a group of elite sitting above on a privileged pedestal. The 1% seem indifferent and careless to the struggles of the growing disparity in the economy. There are large corporations who continually benefit, rarely paying taxes, who seem to raise prices yet care not about the newly homeless.

All societies of the past perpetrated and perpetuated social injustice without meeting significant resistance from those who were victimized by the social system (Niebuhr). The visual of the word ‘Occupy’ is evolving into new categories beyond Wall Street. But the new language must become more than just childish stuttering.  There are words for ‘speaking up,’ can there be a visual?