Pixelated Semantics

When meaning has no meaning

The SMH's Opinion peices are often individualistic and desperate to make a point, but one of today's has arguably hit a new low in an already shallow, facile media-world. To wit, while discussing "slippery and faithless words", their correspondant decides that "fiction is a creative terrorist, a hostage-taker who captures the imagination in order to set it free". Mangled, meaningless, pseudo-insights that do little to add to our understanding of language or society seem to be the priority at the editorial desk. Indeed, confronted with "the duty of the writer to use logic for logic, to remember what it is necessary to remember and perhaps even to believe that democracy is possible" I find it impossible to stay with the message of this peice, (which is also an issue that has been of central concern to this writer's blog), namely the politically amoral ability to "be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies" (as frequently demonstrated by characters like Man of Steel.) The writer laudably holds that it is "far more distressing to see people used, abused, broken and crushed" than words - but is that an insight or merely a justification for the totally inappropriate and appalling use of terrorism as a metaphor for creativity? The language that "stands guard over our memories" is in the present case apparently asleep - for at least some writers recall a time when the currency of creative writing was not military but boldly humanitarian. George Orwell did not write 1984 to justify the use of language as a tool of oppression, consciously or not.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 1:37 pm ::