I'm researching lately for a peformance assignment in my theatre history class, and some of my findings have been seriously challenging my notions in the power of language to really power expression. Before I continue, I've got to do a small history lesson first, however.
So there was a tortured and brilliant French artist named Antonin Artaud who explored words and irrevocably shaped the face of modern theatre today. Born in 1896, he then had a deadly disease at a young age, leaving his mind weakened and prone to depression and other neurological defects. This led to a rocky youth and rebellious adolesence which forced his parents to place him in a sanitorium at the age of 19. His doctors there gave him an opiate for treatment, effectively addicting him to the drugs for the rest of his short life.
To make a long story short, Artaud, a poet, playwright, visual artist, writer, was in a constant mental anguish because of the sheer pain of mental cognizance and his innability to accurately portray his thinking in his words. He wrote volumes and volumes of electric, painful, cyclical pieces of texts describing his mental condition, his prison of a mind. Words were painful to him because they really are a poor means of communication and he couldn't accept that. Throughout his life he explored every art form and paradigm of philosophy and myth and was never satisfied; however, theatre was the form in which he found the most answers, or at the very least, a vain satisfaction. I'll not go into is contribution to theatre, although know it is huge and quite a formidable chunk of research and reading. Just remember the name, Artaud (pronounced Are-toe). And if you're an Artaud scholar reading this, just shake your head and give me a break?
So think about this, then-words really are quite poor at conveying our thoughts. Try it if you don't believe me: try and describe, for instance, a flower-easy? But wait-try and do so with words that convey the same detail and understanding that our mind percieves when we look at flower. I mean, really describe that flower: you can't, can you? Or how about describing something non-concrete: happiness, grief-or something even harder, like the concept of liberty, lunacy, or pain. How do words even begin to make sense of these things in terms explicit and understandable? This is the basis of the conundrum that drove Artaud so crazy and if you really think about this, it doesn't feel to pleasant for your own mind, either.
So there was a tortured and brilliant French artist named Antonin Artaud who explored words and irrevocably shaped the face of modern theatre today. Born in 1896, he then had a deadly disease at a young age, leaving his mind weakened and prone to depression and other neurological defects. This led to a rocky youth and rebellious adolesence which forced his parents to place him in a sanitorium at the age of 19. His doctors there gave him an opiate for treatment, effectively addicting him to the drugs for the rest of his short life.
To make a long story short, Artaud, a poet, playwright, visual artist, writer, was in a constant mental anguish because of the sheer pain of mental cognizance and his innability to accurately portray his thinking in his words. He wrote volumes and volumes of electric, painful, cyclical pieces of texts describing his mental condition, his prison of a mind. Words were painful to him because they really are a poor means of communication and he couldn't accept that. Throughout his life he explored every art form and paradigm of philosophy and myth and was never satisfied; however, theatre was the form in which he found the most answers, or at the very least, a vain satisfaction. I'll not go into is contribution to theatre, although know it is huge and quite a formidable chunk of research and reading. Just remember the name, Artaud (pronounced Are-toe). And if you're an Artaud scholar reading this, just shake your head and give me a break?
So think about this, then-words really are quite poor at conveying our thoughts. Try it if you don't believe me: try and describe, for instance, a flower-easy? But wait-try and do so with words that convey the same detail and understanding that our mind percieves when we look at flower. I mean, really describe that flower: you can't, can you? Or how about describing something non-concrete: happiness, grief-or something even harder, like the concept of liberty, lunacy, or pain. How do words even begin to make sense of these things in terms explicit and understandable? This is the basis of the conundrum that drove Artaud so crazy and if you really think about this, it doesn't feel to pleasant for your own mind, either.
And finally, I feel that this can be connected to advertising, especially to copywriting. Thinking about the power of words to convey not only what you see in your head when you think of those words but what does the mind of the millionth reader see when they read it too? What, if anything, is truly universal in the world of linguistics? Can any slogan or tagline really describe the thing discretely and powerfully? I'm not answering these questions, nor are their answers cut and dry. There's plenty of grey and smudges here associated with the power (or lack thereof) with words. Maybe I'm not so surprised we've moved to visual cues nowadays...
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