[p.57]

Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosophyer of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.

The deeper we go into the written, the deeper we go into mistaking the snake for the apple – the messenger for the message. I’ve said before that one of the signs of a healthy civilization is the existence of a relatively clear language in which everyone can participate in their own way. The sign of a sick civilization in the growth of an obscure, closed language that seeks to prevent communication.

[
•blogging vs. academics & mainstream media journalism & the language of a press release;
•participatory vs. dictatorial
]

This was increasingly the case with those medieval scholars know as teh schoolmen. This is the case today with those who wield the thousands of impenetrable specialist dialects. They plead complexity, given this century’s [20th] great advances, particularly our technological breakthroughs. But the problem is not one of complexity. Not many outsiders actually want to know the nuts and bolts of building jumbo jets or writing post-modern novels. It is the intent that is in question – teh intent to use language to communicate, or alternately, through control of it, to use language as a weapon of power.

Unconsciousness – even hysterical unconsciousness – is not a surprising characteristic in a corporatist society where the language attached to power is designed to prevent communication.

“A life without this sort of examination is not worth living,” Socrates said in the most famous sentence of his trial defense. He was referring to the ongoing self-examination that public philosophy involved. And philosophy is a matter of public debate or it is nothing. Philosophy as just another specialist corporation is a flagrant return to medieval scholasticism.