How is reality
perceived or interpreted by the human beings? This question takes us back in
time when people started representing situations of daily life, the mediums of
inscriptions being rocks and walls of the cave.
And that was the origin of the visual language, where humans started
identifying the relationship with their environment, depicting their
experiences in the form of narratives.
But why was it important for the cavemen
to represent their experiences? The answer to this question is multifaceted,
but probably boils down to the innate urge of making sense of our environment
and find the underlying meaning of our existence.
As language developed
over the millennia, the written and the spoken word/image divided language in
the domains of the visual and the verbal, the seen and the said, interlinking
speech and thought. The invention of language also created conventions of
perception and cognition, which leads us to the saussurean notion of the sign
(signified/signifier). The created environment of any society is a huge
construct of signs and symbols and our behavior or action is the result of
interpreting the signs we confront in our daily lives.
The hierarchical
construction of any society rely on the profound use of language, experienced
in the continuum of space and time, creating a pattern of cognition that
informs us about our place and role in the system we inhabit.
Overtime the constructs
of the seen and said have created false realities that we end up believing in
as truth and nothing but the truth. Initially the belief in religion was the only
truth. But when reason took over with the aid of science it also gave us ideas
like eugenics, put forth by Francis Galton in the Edwardian era, where high
quality human breeding was considered as a solution to save societies from
moral decline. And this idea was then
taken up by different regimes overtime, leading to genocides, proving the
supremacy of one race over the other.
Representation of such
an idea would not have been possible without the use of words and images,
repeated over and over again to be considered as a reality. The use of language
to further such ideologies is very calculated, where basic human emotions of
fear, pain, guilt, happiness, etc are played upon, and our visceral senses help
aid the coded instinctual responses to such messages.
Over here it should be
clarified that false realities are not inherent in language, but how it is used
as a tool of rhetoric, providing information as fragmented and isolated facts.
Language also furthers the ideas of logic and rationale, where conventional
assemblage of signs as popular beliefs can be read as a pattern, but in order
to conduct such an inquiry, an individual must question the underlying or
intended meaning of any created message. What action would that message trigger
and how would it affect an individual and society as a whole?
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