Commentary on the Uncommunicative Manifesto

(where we repeat the eloquence of the previous three pages in the crude and distasteful confusion we call language).

Five thousand years of communication have left us nowhere, mired in our inability to convey ideas, warring over trivialities, and confusing ourselves needlessly. The shining splendor of our Future will not tolerate such futile wanderings!

Abandon your words, forsake your languages, cast off the chains of communication!

That glorious path into the twenty-first century will be led by people of vision, of action, and of perception; those who cling to the failed rituals of articulation will be left behind. Would you side with the Communicationalist Distractors and their fumbling lackeys? Or would you side with the irresistable groundswell of the Future?

Abandon your words, forsake your languages, cast off the chains of communication!

We submit the record for examination, the conclusions inevitable. Language has taken us from a peaceful existence on warm veldts to the cold fluorescent rooms of the televangelists. It has ripped from us the blissful obscurity of mystery and returned nothing. Nothing, we say, and who would contradict us? The fruit of communication is confusion, the product of intercourse, inanity, and the profit of discussion, disaster! Language has become a tool for idiots, a hammer to pound the nails of stupidity. After all, what use is there for language but idle braggery, self-aggrandizing sophistry, petty argumentation, insipid observation, meaningless speculation, ludicrous hypocrisy, puerile exhibitionism, fawning sycophantry, vapid interpretation, infantile gloating, or pointless exposition?

We raise our voices in ringing condemnation of the chaos brought upon us by the babbling verbiage of the Languagists!

What has anyone ever communicated that has had meaning? What has any person, present exhorter inclusive, ever expressed but sickly requests for sympathy, pathetic beggings for approbation, twisted entreaties for respect, sorry solicitations for material wealth, or tired groveling for approval?

Is this the brilliant "communication" we've treasured lo these many aeons?

We say to you: Abandon your words, forsake your languages, cast off the chains of communication!

Language! That ancient and insidious enemy will not rest, even invading the sacred confines of our own revolutionary manifestos! Language! Enemy throughout time.

Who is behind this insidious enslavement? What twisted and repugnant elite has rendered us tongue-tied and linguistically entrapped? It is the Languagists, we tell you, the paltry perveyors of perverse phraseology! It is the Communicationalists, the stentorious sellers of sickened syntax! It is the Interchangists, we say, and other fellow-travellers, verbosely vandalizing our vaunted values via verbalization! Rise up! We must cast off the semiotic shackles of systematized statement.

We are tricked, my friends, duped into using slippery words to try to express the deeper subtlety of our thought. It would be easier to build a city from clouds than to convey our meanings with these traitorous words! And were we to achieve precision, we would necessarily relegate ourselves to the Abyss of the Terminally Verbose, a land of howling boredom where none would follow.

Yes, we've been fooled. Fifty centuries of talk and talk and talk, and here we stand, hoodwinked into thinking with language, feebly trying to declare our thoughts to one another. We speak of "communication breakdown," of "misunderstandings:" when there is nothing else -- what else could there be? Communication is itself the breakdown! Would we attempt to paint pictures with colors that look different to each person? Of course not, yet we attempt to speak with words which no two people understand alike. Would we break a painting into fragments, re-arrange them, and present them as great Art? No! Yet when labelled as "language" and "words" we do just that.

Thoughts are delicate, like ferns, yet we try to craft them with the blunt chisels of words. Feelings are as fragile as the spider's web, yet we attempt to express them with the leaden mallets of language. Better we should build skyscrapers of mercury, or sail the oceans on ships made of smoke!

Yes, we have fallen for the greatest hoax of history!

We call out: Rise up, break free from the outmoded and anachronistic bonds of language. Free yourselves from speech, from words, from the quantized scraps of thought foisted upon us by un unthinking elite!

Abandon your words, forsake your languages, cast off the chains of communication!

Contributed by Samuel Goldstein, Copyright © 1994