Name: Confabulations
ISBN: 9780241292341

John Berger

'Language is a body, a living creature ... and this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate'. John Berger's work has revolutionized the way we understand visual language. In this new book he writes about language itself, and how it relates to thought, art, song, storytelling and political discourse today. Also containing Berger's own drawings, notes, memories and reflections on everything from Albert Camus to global capitalism, Confabulations takes us to what is 'true, essential and urgent'.

Confabulations

Marion

Likewise, today, the ever expanding human poverty and the ongoing pillaging of the planet are justified in the name of a utopia to be guaranteed by Market Forces, when they are unregulated and allowed to operate freely; a utopia in which, in Milton Friedman's words, each man can vote for the color of the tie he wants.

In any utopian vision happiness is obligatory.

This means that in reality it's unobtainable.

Within their utopian logic compassion is a weak-ness. Utopias despise the present. Utopias substitute Dogma for Hope. Dogmas are engraved; hopes flicker, by contrast, like the flame of a candle.

Nathan Johnson

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.

We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet every day total strangers, who will never say a single word to one another, can share an intimacy. 

Prose, as a form of discourse, depends upon a minimum of established continuities of mean-ing; prose is an exchange with a surrounding circle of different points of view and opinions, expressed in a shared and descriptive language.

And such a shared language exists no more in most public discourse. A temporary but historical loss.

Politicians, of both Left and Right, continue to debate, to vote, to pass resolutions, as if this were not the case. And, as a result, their discourse refers to nothing and is inconsequential.

The words and terms they repeatedly use - such as terrorism, democracy, flexibility - have been emptied of any meaning. Their publics across the world follow their speaking heads as if they were glancing at an interminable school exercise or school class for learning Rhetoric! Bullshit.

A song, as distinct from the bodies it takes over, is unfixed in time and place. A song narrates a past experience. When it is being sung it fills the present. Stories do the same. But songs have another dimension which is uniquely theirs. A song while filling the present hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere.

It leans forward, further and further. Without the persistence of this hope, songs, I believe, would not exist. Songs lean forward.

The words of songs are different from words which make prose. In prose, words are independent agents; in songs they are first and foremost the intimate sounds of their mother tongue. They signify what they signify, but at the same time they address or flow towards all the words which exist in that tongue.