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Stereotypes and human suffering

by E. Valentine Daniel, Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy, Columbia University

(Fourth Neelan Tiruchelvam memorial Lecture delivered at the SLFI, Colombo on July 29, under the auspices of the ICES, Colombo).

(Continued from yesterday)

Long suffering: The displaced

If you take a look at the introduction to Eric Partridges Dictionary of Cliches you will find the author having to resort to cliches in order to describe cliches; stereotyped, hackneyed, trite, tattered and outworn being the most common. The well-known literary critic, Christopher Hill, correctly asks; "what as a metaphor could be more hackneyed than hackneyed, outworn than outworn, tattered than tattered, trite than trite?" and, I mugth add, what could be more stereotypic than stereotypic?" then there are phrases.

You must surely agreed that the phrase seen better days has seen better days; and take it to heart is by now almost impossible to take to heart. Let us not, even for a moment, entertain the idea that cliches are weak. On the contrary, cliches are extremely powerful, almost undefeatable; like the asuras of mythology whose every drop of shed blood becomes in turn as asura. What is true of asuras is also true of cliches; every, definition of cliche entails, if not becomes, a cliche.

They are both virtually impossible to overpower; they proliferate indifferent embodiments. Cliches undermine every word or phrase they inhabit, they weaken the word within which they lie. I repeat,

"They lie," to use that most productive pun in the English language that William Shakespeare worked up to the highest pitch. I know I digress, but I can't resist that Sonnet of his that should drive home to every middle-aged first, the simple truth about the complex lie:

When my love swears that
she is made of truth,
I do believe her though
I know she lyes.
That she might thinke
me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world's
false subtilties.
This vainely thinking that
she thinkes me young,
Although she knows my
days are past the best,
Simply I credit her
false, speaking tongue,
On both sides thus is
simple truth supprest:
But wherefore sayes she
not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that
I am old?
O loves best habit is in
seeming trust,
And age in love, loves
not t'have year's told.
Therefore I lye with her,
and she with me,
And in our faults by lyes
we flattered be.

Cliches lie in the thicket of language. They lie in wait for those among us who are too lazy or too traumatized to search for the right world or wording that would express how we feel, how we are, and lead us out of the shadows into the light of day.

Cliches do not ambush us as much as offer to cheerily lead us into light. What they really do, however, is lead us into "the dreary desert sand of dead habit" where our senses will be scorched into eventual insensitivity.

How does one hold a cliche at bay or overcome it in battle? One way to do it is George's way. (Let me make it clear that the George to whom this anecdote of Marshall McLuhan is attributed is not our malapropian President, George Bush). A teacher at school asked her class to write a sentence on each of ten words. Among the ten was the word, cliche. One boy named George, read out the sentence he had written in his little blue exercise book in which he had used the word, cliche. It went like this: The boy returned home with a cliche on his face'.

When the puzzled teacher asked him to explain what he meant by cliche, he piped up and said: Why, the dictionary defines a cliche as a "worn out expression".

What George had done, either out of ingenuity or ignorance, was not to banish or belittle the cliche but co-opt it into a new game and put it in the service of a new design. This is exactly what Michel Foucault meant by genealogical analysis. Such an analysis asks us to "violently or surreptitiously appropriate (a word or phrase) in order to impose direction to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game". It entails "a reversal of forces, the usurpation of power, (and) the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who (have come to use it as cliche).

Before I leave the subject of cliche and return to "terror," and the "face," (which is after all, the title of this presentation, which I know you are waiting for me to justify) I cannot resit the temptation of introducing you to another master-saboteur of cliche, the folk singer and lyricist, Bob Dylan. This example will also be our segue back to the face. Again, I am indebted to Christopher Ricks from whom I'll quote at some length. In Bob Dylan's song, Master of War, there is the following verse:

A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

This is an anti-war song, addressed, presumably to the prevaricating American leadership of the Vietnam ara. In the first verse of the song, he had sung, "I just want you to know/I see though your masks,".

So that when we hear But I see through your eyes,' we see that it does not mean the blandly magnanimous thing ('from your point of view'), but the stubborn opposite: I see what your eyes are trying to hide. The cliche has been alerted, and we are alerted to its clicheness, seeing the words from a new perspective, a different point of view, and seeing penetratingly through them. (Ricks 1967:367).

"Terror," "terrorism" and "terrorists" have become commonplace. How do we rescue them from their state of clicheness? There is no single formula for accomplishing this. The alertness to the tendency of language to take habit and to check this by inciting its potential for re-vivification is one way to go about it. Not all of us are, however, as poetically inclined as Bob Dylan, linguistically agile as William Shakespeare, or fortuitously blest as little George. But all of us who have lived through twenty terrible years, who have seen if not heard of terrible acts of unspeakable atrocities, must not forget the details, most of all the details of face. For it is only in the details of the face that one can return to the uniqueness and aberrancy of each act of terror. Only these can put cliches and cliche-mongers-including us-on notice.

To abandon the suffering of our fellow-citizens and loved ones to cliche, and to find refuge for our own memoriam dolora in cliche, would be to abrogate our responsibility to the fallen as well as to ourselves.

A close cousin of the cliche is euphemism. It serves as what George Orwell called "doublethink". Doublethink is deliberately perverse thinking in terms that reverse or distort the truth to make it more acceptable. Orwell called such euphemistic speech, "Newspeak". One should not think that "Newspeak" is limited only to government and the news-disseminating media. It may also be encountered in differently inflected dialects among which are Sociologese, Psychologese, Legalese and even Anthropologese. I shall leave it to you to coin the appropriate names for the dialects spoken by economists and political scientists, except to note that the dialects they speak are more prestigious, than the others I have mentioned, their claims more universal and are preferred by those who speak Newspeak. Furthermore, it is no accident that English provides the friendliest climate for Newspeak to flourish. After all, it is the global language, the language of commerce and science, the language of capital, and the language that claims to be universal in more ways than one.

Father Amilraj is a Jesuit priest whom I first met twenty years ago when he assisted me in my fieldwork among Sri Lanka Tamils of Indian origin who had been repatriated to South India and had become bonded labourers there. He recently visited me in New York, after working for over twenty years in trying conditions among the poorest of the poor, teaching them how to organize themselves politically and fight their way out of bondage through non-violent methods of protest and through the courts. In our very first conversation in New York, he surprised me with the assertion that "English is the most evil of all languages". I asked him to expand on this curious assertion. He had been exposed to just a week's worth of American television, but had seen enough, it turned out, to surmise that the English language was the language in which it was easiest to be evasive and to lie. Even though his conclusion was reached by his evaluation of war-related political-speak, in which euphemisms, misrepresentations and falsehoods abound, it reveals considerable perspicuity on his part.

English, besides being the dominant and the most widely used language in the world, is also the language spoken by the most powerful men in the world. I am referring to the political leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom. Each war, since Vietnam, if not earlier, has spawned a plethora of mendacious euphemisms and dissembling words and phrases in the English language.

If power corrupts, then it only stands to reason that the powerful corrupt the language they speak. Even as the German of Goethe and Holderline was demanded and brutalized by Hitler and Goebles, the political inhumanity of the past and the present has indeed demeaned and brutalized a considerable part of the English language with its global overlordship. Unlike the poet who must speak the language with passionate asceticism, the politician uses it with pointed indulgence. And the ever-willing media, unpoetic in its own right, lends the politician's indulgence a hand. That which cannot be contained by misleading euphemisms and double-speak, is bled by over-use and cliche.

We live in a world where the knowledge of atrocity and the blitheness of song go on co-existing. Forced levity and grim desperation betray the lacerated spirit of people all over the world where civil wars have raged and ethnic hate has ravaged its people. The purpose of atrocity so vile has been to erase, wipe, and annihilate the victim so that no form of commemoration of that erasure can serve to render it less complete. To the extent that we do entertain such commemorations we do so believing that it might, at least momentarily, assuage our sense of hopelessness. Nothing more. But we the unfallen cannot escape our responsibility to those who have died, be it for cause, kind or country, in virtue or villainy, of coincidence or culpability, in innocence or iniquity. The only way in which we can be responsible for the fallen and to ourselves is by remembering them, not as numbers, nor as mere names, not even as Tamil, Sinhalese or Muslim, but as faces that we can recall and look into once more.

Which brings me back to the title of this evening's talk; Whose face is that I see? It may well strike you as queer. Given that I am a professor of anthropology, perhaps you may expect me to say something new about an old but by now defunct and discredited area of inquiry peculiar to my discipline, the shapes and sizes of the human head, of which, the most unforgettable part is, of course, the face.

Let me hasten to assure you that I do not have any intention of speaking of the face as a physical anthropologist of yore might have. Neither craniology nor phrenology interest me. But the face as a site of expression holds endless fascination for me; and it is no accident that of all expressive behaviour, facial expression has received the most attention. We humans use patterned facial movements, as do many nonhuman primates, as the main mode of displaying signals that are emotion-specific.

In South Asian dance forms, especially in kathakkali, every facial muscle is put at the service of art and expressive conventions. Scientists who have studied the facial expression of fetuses as young as eight weeks have found them to be sensitive to stimulation of their skin, especially in the area around the mouth, that very important orifice of the face that serves as the portal for the emergence of the gems and the germs of language, from expressive poems to the worn out expressions called cliche,the sentences of Abraham Lincoln and those of George Bush.

Have you ever seen a newborn infant discriminate between bitter salty, and sweet? I tried it with my sons. It was a wonderfully amusing sight to see them betray, by their facial expressions, their innate preference for sweet tastes over sour or salty ones.

Researchers tell us that the olfactory sense- itself intimately connected with our sense of taste-and the ability to expressively discriminate among odors are manifested earlier than most would imagine. Six-day-old infants can tell the smell of their own mother's breast from that of another mother.

If infants display, they also read facial expressions. As any of you who have spent any time around them knows, infants are quite partial for the sight of the human face. In the very first month after birth, they can tell one face from another by attending to the characteristics of eyes, nose and mouth. I know of a little girl who took far more kindly to her grandmother with her dentures off than with them on. Perhaps she appeared more harmless without them.

(To be continued)

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