Magical Ceremonies of Language

Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves. Very often, they do not communicate a message. Poems are magical ceremonies of language.

Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals

We have abandoned the playfulness of language because overheated neoliberal egos accept no other object of worship than the perennially wounded, aggrieved, underfed self. If a toddler’s mother gets distracted, the child perceives this as a threat to her very survival. Only the mother’s constant, kind, loving attention makes the world less cruel and terrifying. Gradually, the child learns to do for herself, and eventually displaces her mother’s attention with her own as the main guarantee of well-being.

A neoliberal self never grows up. If it did, how could it adopt constant changeability and malleability that are the only marker of neoliberal morality? The clamoring infantile self perceives as a mortal wound any distraction of the attention of others. Such an individual has no inner core to which he could retract. He doesn’t exist if he can’t see himself, or rather, the wounds that constitute his self, in others. We’ve all seen this phenomenon in free Palestiners who appear under every social media post to berate posters for discussing something other than the Palestinian issue. [Cue Free Palestiners who will respond to this post with rants about their favorite psychic wound, remaining utterly unconscious of how they embody the exact issue I am discussing.] Or in activists who make everybody recite land acknowledgments at all sorts of unrelated events.

Playful language is as bound to wound somebody’s sensibilities in the world of overinflated egos as an umbrella is to poke a passenger in an overstuffed subway car. Speech codes that have proliferated today to the extent that would have shocked the strictest medieval Torquemada are the result of this bellowing, suppurating narcissism.