Language ought to be the joint creation of poets
and manual workers.
George Orwell
I love language. I learned to read at an early age & quickly took delight in words across a broad spectrum of sources. My parents were highly verbal people with a passion for words written & spoken. I grew up enjoying both using language myself & receiving it from others. I am, & have always been, a prodigious correspondent & a keen conversationalist.
In my work as a teacher, I will always at some appropriate point depart from the main line of the lesson to deliver the only Lesson for Life that I ever inflict upon my captive audience. With a messianic zeal undiminished by time & repetition, I urge my students to take every opportunity they can to broaden their vocabularies & to recognise in language the key to knowledge, understanding &, ultimately, independence of mind. I make reference to George Orwell’s 1984 & the mighty & potent weapon of Newspeak. I ask them to examine their own speech forms – the unquestioning reliance that some may have on deliberately vague, oblique or discursive vocabulary (“So she she’s like, ‘Whatever’…”), or on ghetto slang whose terms of reference, however linguistically rich in their own way, are meaningless within the cultural setting that these middle class students occupy.
I proselytise further about language as a universal resource whose beauty, truth & power need not be limited or constrained by social or cultural circumstances. I use as exemplars of this Gypsies with whom I have had dealings whose illiteracy, far from being an impediment to their development of facility with words, actually provoked the need for an enhanced flexibility & richness of spoken language. I beg them to see that there need be no conflict of interests between the acquisition of linguistic skills & comfortable day-to-day functioning within a resolutely anti-intellectual environment. The objective must be always to avoid being trapped within one register of language usage, unable to move with ease & grace from level to level.
Read, I tell them. Read anything & everything. Make it a habit. Regard every unfamiliar word, phrase, term, figure of speech as a challenge that must be met. Master language & you need never be manipulated, exploited, controlled, owned by anyone.
And they listen politely, only glazing over if I venture too far past the 10-minute mark. Occasionally, very occasionally, an ex-student will make reference back to the Lesson for Life & express gratitude for my having nudged them towards a greater respect for language at just the right moment. Which small triumph will always provide the impetus for the next delivery.
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For all that I can sometimes allow a well-turned sentence to teeter on a step too far only to collapse into verbosity, I loathe promiscuous language. Listening to cornered politicians turning on the tap & letting it flow unchecked has me out of my seat & shouting at the screen. Hysterical Oscar winners in verbal free fall, pretentious artists endeavouring to translate piles of house bricks into meaningful messages, pop stars who read a book once & now imagine themselves to be philosophers – all who sling words around like frisbees – have me grinding my teeth down to stumps.
But what really brings down the red mist is the use of language as a means to exclude all but the cognoscenti. When language becomes so abstruse, so convoluted, so comprehensively up its own arse, I know that I’m dealing with a man (almost invariably) who, were he not wielding a big fat pen, would be dealing with his sense of personal inadequacy by driving a very fast car very fast. These professional intellectuals – almost all of them inhabiting the worlds of recherché philosophy, arts theory or, God help us, linguistics – have no interest whatsoever either in the capacity of language to communicate complex concepts with absolute clarity or its intrinsic beauty in utterance or on the page. Standing shoulder to shoulder with IT jargoneers, estate agents (realtors) describing properties & those who compose the letters that banks send you when you’re overdrawn, they mangle & distort language into something ‘thwart & disnatured’. These are the true perpetrators of Word Crimes, not those whose command of grammar may be faulty, or those who are over-reliant on colloquialism, which categories are likely to include most of us much of the time.
There’s an organisation in the UK called the Plain English Campaign. Their principal aim is to eradicate completely the use of the elitist, special interest dialect that clogs up so much of the official documentation that we all have to deal with daily. This is their mission statement.
What is Plain English Campaign?
We are an independent organisation fighting for crystal-clear language and against jargon, gobbledygook and other confusing language. We are based in New Mills, Derbyshire in England.
What is plain English?
We define plain English as something that the intended audience can read, understand and act upon the first time they read it. Plain English takes into account design and layout as well as language.
Where should plain English be used?
Plain English is needed in all kinds of public information, such as forms, leaflets, agreements and contracts. The golden rule is that plain English should be used in any information that ordinary people rely on when they make decisions.
What's wrong with gobbledygook?
We can't put it better than a nurse who wrote to us about a baffling memo. She said that 'receiving information in this form makes us feel hoodwinked, inferior, definitely frustrated and angry, and it causes a divide between us and the writer.'
Admirable. Where do I sign..?
Now. How about this document? I stumbled across it whilst doing some Internet research & my jaw dropped. How is it possible for someone (Joseph Nechvatal, to be precise) to write so much & to say so very little? It comes from a Ph.D dissertation entitled Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances : A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms. Okay, I might be accused of emulating Hermann Goering & reaching for my revolver on the utterance of the word ‘culture’, but, please – is this utter bollocks or is it utter bollocks?
A lacunae world of incessant transmutation has emerged in art and established a seemingly unrestricted area of prodigality which I identify as viractuality. With the increased augmentation of the self via micro-electronics feasible today, the real co-exists with the virtual and the organic fuses with the computer-robotic. Consequently, I am interested in a new interlaced sense of artistic viractuality which couples the biological with the technological and the static with the malleable. As such, viractualism strives for an understanding and depiction of an anti-essentiality of the techno-body so as to allow for no privileged logos. Here images of the flesh are undone by machinic viral disturbances they cannot contain. Here thought detaches itself from the order and authority of the old signs and topples down into the realm of viractual reverie.
The concept of viractualism is concerned with the matter of visualizing aesthetic sensations linked to techno-sexual concepts. It is essentially a visual prosthetic then for both the viral machinic and the viral corporal dominion - virulent circumstances which are not historically conditioned yet.
Very essentially, the foundation of viractualism is that computer technology has become a significant means to making and understanding contemporary art. Consequently, I hope that we will investigate here art (in its many forms - including sculpture, performance, painting, video, architecture, literature, net art, and more) which addresses the merging of the computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This merging is what I call the 'viractual'. Hence the term "viractualism".
This concept of viractuality - and viractualism - emerged out of the Ph.D. research I conducted in virtual reality at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, over in the U.K. It begins with the realization that every new technology disrupts previous rhythms of consciousness. It is central to my work as an artist. In fact, for me, the viractual realm is now the authentic domain of art in light of the information age.
This space can be further inscribed as the "viractual span of liminality" - which according to the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (based on his anthropological studies of social rites of passage) is the condition of being on a threshold between spaces. I wish to suggest that the term (concept) "viractual" (and "viractuality") may be a concordant conception helpful in defining this third fused inter-spatial place of the emerging viractual arts which is forged from the meeting of the virtual and the actual.
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I wrote above about the use of language as a means deliberately to obfuscate & confuse. In 1962 the British playwright Harold Pinter made a statement about his perception of the real function of much the speech that we utter, ostensibly in the cause of communication. It’s a difficult statement that requires careful reading & subsequent reflection. But there’s a world of difference between the obscurantist game playing of the nonsense just quoted & the judicious, elegant proposition the essense of which is seen now as informing at the deepest level Pinter’s extraordinary work.
There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished, or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
11:11:30 PM 
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