Beckett himself qualified the statement by appropriating Democritus’ line that ‘naught is more real than nothing’. While we might wish to take this as a paean for quietness, a sign for us to take up Samuel Beckett’s aphorism that ‘every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness’, we know this is not possible. It is both the way in which we gain access to life and that which destroys life through its very operation. Language then appears to feed vampirically off the organic entities to which it becomes attached. Inscribing these sensations and objects into the historical register of language’s conceptuality enacts a double violence: both refusing to recognise the uniqueness of the object, or feeling, and calling attention to its finitude, pointing directly towards its inevitable destruction. In the act of identifying a ‘tree’, a ‘cat’ or ‘sadness’, we destroy that object’s individuality by categorially aligning it with all the other trees, cats and moments of sadness that have been and gone or are yet to come. The implication being that, when we speak or write, the nouns we use subsume the individual under a universal. Language is always a falsehood imposed upon the reality of silence.Īt the extreme end of this, Georg Hegel wrote in the Jena Lectures (1805-6) that language murders the living things that it names.
Yet also vast because, aside from anything else, this participation is a conceptual structure formed by human beings to interpret life. As the poet Robert Duncan put it: ‘our human language is a ground in which we participate in the greater language in which the Universe itself is written’. Small because, despite the opening between the two, it is through language that human beings encounter the world. This gap is at once infinitesimally small and so vast that it might never be adequately crossed. In this way, greeting cards function as material testament to the lack of articulation at the heart of human experience, drawing attention to the gap between language and life. Whether the message is pre-printed or one we resort to writing ourselves, clichés appear where words fail.
#Utterly meaning how to
The cliché is a marker, or a stand-in, for something we aren’t sure how to express. The strange thing is that these moments of love and loss are not the place where language finds its truest expression of meaning but are in fact the place where meaning itself starts to break down, where language as a whole reveals its incapacities. Greeting cards present themselves at some of the most important, and often difficult, events of our lives: the loss of a family member or a friend, an outpouring of love and devotion, or even the simple recognition of time’s passing. It would be easy to write off these cards as empty sentences, a commercial option for the inarticulate consumer, without questioning the reason for this failure of expression. In the United States, approximately 6.5 billion greeting cards are bought each year, and the annual retail sales figures are valued at between $7-8 billion. Even within the context of the explosive proliferation of electronic communication and social media that characterise human forms of connection and conversation today, greeting cards have remained a huge industry.
The exchanging of these cliché-ridden tokens shows no sign of slowing down. Their messages are ones that have been used and discarded over and over again: Sorry for your loss. Cliché is the life-blood of greeting cards, they thrive on it. This failure is demonised as obfuscating true expression, offering little more than banal sentimentality, and to be avoided at all costs.Īs a method of communication, the giving of greeting cards stands in stark contrast to this phobic attitude to cliché, and functions in a manner that throws many of the problems of this phobia into sharp relief.
#Utterly meaning professional
Across the landscape of the written word, from Martin Amis’s declaration of The War Against Cliché (2001) to the professional products of creative writing schools, even the best of which treat language as a tool that can be manipulated to achieve maximum results, cliché is continually depicted as an abject failure of language. This statement pervades contemporary attitudes to language, both in the field of literature and in conventional human interactions.
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