Language of Ruin and Consumption: On Lamenting and Complaining

260 Pages·2020·2.671 MB·

by  Juliane Prade-Weiss

Introduction: Getting a Hearing
“… I keep no account with lamentation,
(What have I to do with lamentation?)”
WALT WHITMAN, SONG OF MYSELF 44.13–14.
Laments and complaints are pervasive among ancient texts, dominant in
political discourse, and ubiquitous in everyday speech. Still, understanding
plaintive language regularly fails because neither dirges, laments of love,
neurotic complaints nor outcries against injustice are satisfied by a discourse
on their particular claim—they all seem to want more. Plaintive cries, wailing,
and sobbing make the hermeneutic difficulty apparent that all lamenting and
complaining raise in claiming attention without presenting an object that
could be discussed. This book assumes that the diverse forms of lamenting
for, and complaining about, something all communicate a profound doubt in
the possibility of verbal exchange and communication. A fundamental doubt
in language is what makes very heterogonous utterances appear as variations
of plaintive language. What all forms of lamenting and complaining
fundamentally have in common is that they want to be heard. Getting a
hearing is, time and again, what the paradigmatic lamenter Job insists on.1
The language of lamenting and complaining foregrounds a principle of
language that is usually either taken for granted or relegated to mere rhetoric:
Speech is not only by someone and on something, but also addressed to
someone. Complaints and laments take special linguistic forms which focus on
the hearing and attention of others, and reading these forms grants insight into
how, in general, the structure of address is organized in language. Lamenting
and complaining differ from other ways of speaking insofar as they make
1Job 13:17: “Listen carefully to my words, and let my declaration be in your ears.” 19:7: “Even
when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered [heard]; I call aloud, but there is no justice.”
(NRSV, brackets AV)
2 LANGUAGE OF RUIN AND CONSUMPTION
apparent what the other modes elide, or conceal, to wit, that speaking wants
to be heard, and some very important speech situations, the most important
perhaps, show a desire to be heard when it is impossible that the speaker will
be heard: One complains when the complainer cannot resolve things herself;
one laments when this seems like the last thing on earth that can be done.
These existential situations—brought about by death, catastrophes, bad
news, neuroses, loneliness, cruelty, or something else—give rise to a mode
of speech caught in a double bind: Being heard and responded to is urgently
necessary and, at the same time, highly unlikely. Foregrounding the intention
to being heard makes plaintive language irreconcilable and violent: Laments
and complaints keep claiming attention while refusing symbolic substitution
in order to insist that they cannot be answered, satisfied, or appeased by
political, metaphysical, or therapeutic concepts. On a structural level, the
violence of plaintive language appears in the disorganization of the principle
of symbolic substitution. Lamenting and complaining communicate not by
following linguistic conventions, but by decomposing and consuming the
linguistic structures that usually enable comprehension—be it reference,
address, and authorship that are undermined in ritual and in neurotic
repetition, or be it articulation that is effaced in wailing and sobbing. Far from
dysfunctional, this ruin of conventional structures of language in lamenting
and complaining testifies to experiences of being overwhelmed which cannot
be just named and seized in statements. Laments and complaints insist that
the cause of distress is not to be re-presented by a sign, that such substitution
would counteract the sense of lamenting over someone who has passed away,
or complaining about something (like pain) that should pass. Lamenting and
complaining thus communicate by way of consuming structures of language.
This hypothesis certainly requires some explanation.
Consuming Structures of Language
Consumption is no mere metaphor for the disorganization of language
in lamenting and complaining but, rather, a theoretical vantage point for
understanding symbolization that I, turning to psychoanalytical works,
outline in Chapter 1. Freud sees a correlation between, on the one hand,
various patients’ incomprehensible laments and complaints (as he calls
them) and, on the other hand, their refusal to mourn, to accept loss. In Freud,
the disorganization of structures such as articulation and reference appears
as a metabolic process. Abraham and Torok have further expounded the
symbolic aspect of mourning as a cycle of internalization, fragmentation,
appropriation, and excretion that forms the “I” in eluding the distinction
between mental versus corporeal. In each of the following chapters, the
terminology of consumption allows this study to describe the specific
INTRODUCTION: GETTING A HEARING 3
disorganization of language as well as a particular link of the expressed
loss and pain to its psychological, social, juridical, or other negotiation.
Consuming refers to both destroying, corroding, wearing away—in the sense
that laments and complaints destroy comprehensibility—and the “the use or
exploitation of resources”2—so as to denote the processual nature of the
destruction of linguistic structures by way of repetition, slurring, and similar
techniques. Describing the disorganization of language as a consumption
of its structures alludes as much to the orality of many ritual laments
(discussed below) as to the analysis of modern consumer culture, where
consumption denotes the acquisition and usage or ingestion of goods that
follows a set of rituals and fixed practices by which consumers define and
identify themselves.3 The consumption of linguistic structures in lamenting
and complaining is a historically as well as culturally conditioned practice
that aims at forming the everyday world, too, by giving voice to experiences
(such as death or loss) and emotions (such as mourning or pain) in order
to redefine and re-identify lamenters after experiences that profoundly alter
life. These practices may be codified rites of passage or individual mourning;
Chapter 2 will elaborate on the conflict between ritual and Modernity. What
is pivotal as much to consumer culture as to the consumption of structures of
language in lamenting and complaining is the lack of distance: The practices
and rituals in question are not picked up, and later put aside, by sovereign
subjects but, rather, generate those who perform them.4
The notion that plaintive languages causes a consumption of linguistic
structures is far older than psychoanalysis and the critique of consumer
culture, and it implies no naïve phonocentrism. Ezekiel, the mute prophet,
is instructed by his god:
Ezek. 2:8 But you, mortal, hear what I say unto you; do not be rebellious
like that rebellious house; open thy mouth and eat that I give you.
9 I looked, and a hand was stretched out to me, and a written scroll
was in it.
10 And he spread it before me; it had writing on the front and on the
back, and written on it were words of lamentation and mourning and
woe.
2Oxford English Dictionary [OED] 3:801, s.v. “consume, v.1.”
3Heinz Drügh, Warenästhetik, 21; my translation.
4Ibid., 34 with reference to Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, 89: “Fools lament the decay of
criticism. For its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home
in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take
a standpoint. … Today the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the
advertisement. It abolishes the space where contemplation moved and all but hits us between the
eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions, careens at us out of a film screen.” The
vanishing of distance causes Benjamin to not only analyze but also lament the change himself.
4 LANGUAGE OF RUIN AND CONSUMPTION
3:1 He said to me, O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll,
and go, speak to the house of Israel.
2 So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. (NRSV)
This vocation carries out the otherwise implicit assumption that God puts
words into the prophet’s mouth,5 it makes Ezekiel incorporate the symbolic
order so that his words shall henceforth follow scripture by the letter. The
point of consuming the text is not that it spares from the arduous act of
reading but that it addresses the issue of getting a hearing: God appears to
Ezekiel as a speaker: “I heard a voice of someone speaking” (Ezek. 1:28,
NRSV), elects him by saying “I will speak with you” (2:1), and Ezekiel
obeys: “I heard him speaking to me” (2:2)—unlike the “rebellious house”
of Israel, about whose lacking hearing God complains (2:4, 2:7). In order to
create an efficient mouthpiece, God skips the very issue of lacking hearing
that the prospective prophet shall denounce. This produces a prophet, and
defers the crucial issue onto him. For the change of media from spoken
to written word does not provide a remedy for the original dilemma that
not even God is able to guarantee a fundamental aspect of all speech: the
hearing that receives the spoken word, the attention for the written word in
reading, and the reciprocity thus established with somebody.
Jakobson’s differentiation of “six basic functions of verbal communication”
provides one option for approaching this fundamental aspect of language:
Lamenting and complaining emphasize the “appellative” or “conative”
function of language concerned with address.6 Yet these attributes do not
clarify how the appeal, the direction at the hearing of others, forms speech—
namely, by anticipation, as Bakhtin points out:
Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound
influence of the answering word that it anticipates.
The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward
a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures
itself in the answer’s direction.
All rhetorical forms, monologic in their compositional structure, are
oriented toward the listener and his answer.7
Bakhtin’s assumption that “primacy belongs to the answer, as the activating
principle,”8 insofar as the anticipation of a reception and a response forms
utterances, permits a more accurate description of the problem presented
in the book of Ezekiel. It points out that the utterance does not have all the
5Moshe Greenberg, HThKAT: Ezek. 1–20, 84.
6Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 357–358.
7Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 280.
8Ibid., 282.
INTRODUCTION: GETTING A HEARING 5
“basic functions of verbal communication” at its disposal: In its dependence
on the hearing of others that comes to the fore in the anticipation of
possible answers (or, in plaintive language, of their lack), every form of
speech is structurally unfinished and open toward relationality. Lacan calls
the anticipation of hearing and response in speech “resonance” and, like
Bakhtin, claims, “speech always subjectively includes its own reply.” Lacan
holds that this principle forms speech and, moreover, the speaker: “What I
seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as a subject
is my question.”9 Questions, however, indicate the kind of response they are
after—much like requests, and unlike laments and complaints. Laments and
complaints voice a profound doubt that there can be anyone to pay attention
at and respond to them. Due to its lack of anticipation of a favorable answer,
plaintive language is often reproached for being point- or aimless.10 Insisting
on getting a hearing while, simultaneously, failing to indicate a possible
response, laments and complaints raise veritable affect and resentment that,
in different contexts and with varying arguments, aim at silencing them. The
rejection that laments and complaints often face is not merely a deplorable
circumstance but part of the very structure of plaintive language.
To outline these assumptions, I will first continue to expound which
insights into the structure of language and culture are gained by analyzing
laments and complaints. Second, I will explain the mode of analysis, in
particular the role of genre distinctions. Finally, a brief description will
provide an overview of the chapters and main themes of this book. In
spite of all my previous remarks, the subject still begs the question put
straightforwardly in Rilke’s tenth Duino Elegy:
Was soll’s? Sie ist eine Klage.
(What’s the point? It’s a lament.)11
Lamenting in Theory
The point of reading the language of lamenting and complaining is to
provide deeper insight into structures of language and discourse. In
theoretical approaches to language that require a stable relation between
9Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Language in Psychoanalysis,” 246–247.
10Popular culture takes on complaining find it to be dysfunctional; Cleo Wade, Heart Talk, 106:
“Complaining is something that seems to come so easy and so naturally to us, but the problem
is: complaints have no magic. They don’t make anyone’s day better, and they don’t help any
situation. Try going on a complaining cleanse.” Julian Baggini, Complaint: From Minor Moans
to Principled Protests, 19: “To complain is not only to be fully human: it is to defy the divine. …
At least, that is complaint at its best. At its worst it is a useless waste of energy, a futile cry
against the inevitable, a refusal to accept reality for what it is.”
11Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien X. Sämtliche Werke [RSW] 1, 723; my translation.
6 LANGUAGE OF RUIN AND CONSUMPTION
signifier and signified in order to form terms and concepts, lamenting and
complaining do not feature prominently but, rather, as an irritation, as
this section will outline. Massumi, in his analysis of capitalism in terms
of affect theory as “a global usurpation of belonging,” underlines twice:
“This is not merely a lament.”12 Why defend the apparently necessary
remark as “not merely” a lament? Because lamenting profoundly doubts
what Massumi seeks to discuss: relationality. Lament’s fundamental doubt
in reciprocity is the starting point for many rejections of utterances that do
not deny to be laments. Religious and personal laments as well as poetic
complaints are  often reproached for following recognizable rhetorical
patterns which are said to make the underlying individual affect of the
speaker unrecognizable.13 Such criticism projects the modern paradigm
of the inwardness of sensation and emotion14 onto texts from epochs and
contexts that function under very different paradigms. Moreover, while in
discussions of genre distinctions and rhetorical forms, following conventions
is considered to vouch for comprehensibility, this principle tends to be
neglected in readings of laments and complaints, where conventionality
is often understood as testifying against the authenticity of the utterance
and for its purely manipulative nature. Plaintive language may, of course,
be a means of manipulation, yet the generalized skepticism about what
any lament or complaint communicates testifies to a deeper, disquieting
concern caused by this kind of language. As laments and complaints are
unsure about the possibility of attaining someone’s hearing and establishing
reciprocity, it is easy to regard them as unproductive and self-absorbed.
The language of lamenting and complaining articulates what might be
called a “representational paradox”:15 On the one hand, it seeks to portray
who- or whatever is lost in such a way that the pain caused by its loss is
comprehensible without, on the other hand, accepting the portrayal as a
compensation for the loss—which is no less understandable, but undermines
the principle of symbolic substitution that the portrayal of the lost relies on.
Yet laments and complaints do not enter into discussions of justification
and coherence, because they arise precisely at those moments when it seems
impossible to establish any kind of communication and exchange. Plaintive
language highlights hearing, answer, and reciprocity because it finds them
highly unlikely, even impossible.
The manifestation of a fundamental trait of all speech in the language
of plaints, complaints, and laments tends to escape the grasp of theoretical
approaches to language. This is true for both the Aristotelian paradigm,
12Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 88. Ibid: “Neither a celebration nor a lament: a
challenge to rethink and reexperience the individual and the collective.”
13Irmgard Scheitler, “Klagerede, Klagegesang,” HWRH 4:958.
14Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber, “Rethinking Emotion: Moving Beyond Interiority,” 1–3.
15Burkhard Hasebrink, “Überlegungen zur Ästhetik der Klage,” 105; my translation.
INTRODUCTION: GETTING A HEARING 7
which regards language primarily as a means for making judgments about
the state of things, and the paradigm of performativity, which sees language
as a medium for realizing intentions. Both views presuppose that there is
someone to listen and respond, yet this is not at all a given as plaintive
language stubbornly points out. I will discuss the classic approach first. Ever
since Aristotle’s canonical description of speech, the structure of statements
has come to be, as Heidegger puts it, “a normal form of human discourse,
a form which, since the first reflections of the philosophy of antiquity,
determined not only the theory of discourse, namely, logic, but also the
study of grammar.”16 This approach to language refers back to Aristotle’s
description of speech as logos apophantikos, as “presenting speech,” that is
to say as proposition: While single words have meaning in the sense that they
refer to something by convention (sēmainein), only compositions of noun
and verb are able to present something (apophainesthai), which means, for
Aristotle: attributing or denying something to the effect that the sentence
is either true or false.17 A single word may, of course, be appropriate or
inappropriate to the thing it is supposed to name; yet articulating such a
judgment requires the compound utterance of a proposition. Aristotle does
concede in this description that there are forms of speech (logoi) which are
neither true nor false, but mentions only one example: euchē, the “prayer,
vow,” or “curse,” that is to say a “wish” for something good or bad to
happen.18 Heidegger explains the differentiation:
By propositional statement we mean only the λόγος ἀποφαντικός, discourse
that points out. Requesting, εὐχή, for example, is a non-apophantic
λόγος. If my discourse is a requesting, then it is not attempting to inform
the other person about something in the sense of increasing his or her
knowledge. Nor, however, is the request a communication of the fact that
I desire something or am filled with a desire. Nor is this discourse a mere
desiring, but rather the concrete act of “requesting of another.”19
Laments and complaints are likewise no information about what is lacking
or disturbing but, rather, a “concrete act.” Aristotle, however, relegates the
analysis of non-propositional sentences like wishes from his consideration
(theōria) into “the province of rhetoric or poetry.”20 Yet the description of
language in terms of rhetoric or poetry is governed by the propositional
structure of statements no less. Just like the discourses on grammar and
16Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics §72, 311.
17Aristotle, On Interpretation 16b.26–17a.3; affirmation and negation see 17a.8–9, 23–26.
18A Greek­English Lexicon Online [LSJ], s.v. “euchē,” http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Deu)xh%2F, accessed March 15,
2019.
19Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts §72b, 309.
20Aristotle, On Interpretation 17a.3–7.
8 LANGUAGE OF RUIN AND CONSUMPTION
logic, the examination of rhetoric and poetry forms predications in order
to articulate judgments. This means that in the gaze of theory, even non-
propositional forms of speech like wishes, laments, or complaints are
subsumed under the paradigm of the statement. And in terms of grammar,
many laments and complaints are indeed statements—for instance a stanza
from Rückert’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), partly
set to music by Mahler:
Das ist meine Klage,
Daß vor dieser Plage
Selbst verstummt die Klage.21
(This is my complaint
That such a plague
Even mutes the complaint.)
Describing this stanza as a statement is grammatically correct but misses
the pain it communicates as well as the specific form of its communication:
The verses voice the experience of being stuck, seeing no way to carry on,
and falling silent by way of an identical rhyme in which the outcry receives
no answer, just an echo. Lamenting and complaining testify to experiences
of being overwhelmed which cannot be seized in proposition as they, vice
versa, overwhelm conventional structures of language. Aristotle on the other
hand, commenting on the lament songs in tragedy, notes only what can be
seized in a proposition: “A kommos is a song of lament shared by the chorus
and the actors on the stage.”22 Significantly, considering how lament songs
constitute a central element of the tragic text and performance, Aristotle’s
approach cannot explain what is bewailed so regularly in tragedy, or why.
The assimilation of all forms of speech to the paradigm of the statement
is a fundamental difficulty in the examination of poetry as well as any
comprehensive notion of language. This difficulty marks the overall relevance
of the interest in the peculiar structure of plaintive language: Lamenting and
complaining provide an outlook onto conventional structures of language
that transcends the propositional form of statements. Many laments and
complaints do, of course, form attributions, statements, and judgments. Yet
their point is not to settle an issue, or to negotiate a truth claim, but to
stir up attention for how the presented issue affects the speaker—an issue
that, like death or loss, casts massive doubt on the possibility of finding
anyone’s hearing or response. For this reason, Old Testament jeremiads
as well as contemporary appeals to outrage like Hessel’s Indignez­vous!23
21Friedrich Rückert, Kindertodtenlieder 148.1–3, 178; my translation.
22Aristotle, Poetics 1452b.24–25.
23Stéphane Hessel, Time for Outrage: Indignez­vous!
INTRODUCTION: GETTING A HEARING 9
tend to be accused of being meaningless. The complication is that the
language of lamenting and complaining communicates “meaning” in a non-
propositional way, that is to say otherwise than in statements which are
either true or false. Rather, plaintive language communicates meaning by
disorganizing and consuming linguistic structures in order to foreground the
appeal to someone’s hearing and response.
Although Aristotle does not follow up on his hint at the form of speech
that is like a euchē (prayer, vow, curse, wish), it is instructive for reading the
language of lamenting and complaining. Plaints are an important form of
prayer, as many psalms prove,24 and the Roman nenia, besides referring to
the ritual dirge, also denotes a curse.25 Like prayers, vows, curses, and wishes,
laments and complaints, too, aim at being heard. All these forms of speech
intend, primarily, not to portray something, but to speak to others, and to
move them. A notion of language based on the paradigm of the statement is
unsuited for describing such forms of speech dominated by the intention to
be heard because a statement pays heed to a certain subject matter, silently
assuming that there is someone to hear, or read, the words. Addressing the
hearing is, however, crucial in poetry, to which Aristotle refers in passing.
Aesthetics is the consideration of a text or other work with regard to how it
appears to the senses. Poetic and literary texts transcend the propositional
structure of the statement and are heavily informed by different genres of
laments and dirges as well as by subjects like the complaint of love. This
book will, therefore, read texts from the critical and philosophical canon
next to works of literature, anthropology, and religious studies in order to
examine structures of language in those “provinces” that the Aristotelian
paradigm of language-as-proposition excludes from the field of theory.
The intention to being heard is crucial to rhetoric at which Aristotle
hints, too. What matters to rhetoric, however—especially since it had come
to focus on juridical speech after the abolishment of political deliberation
in the late Roman Empire—are accusations and judgments, both of which
correspond to the paradigm of propositional speech: They attribute or deny,
thus stating what is either right or wrong. Still, plaintive speech is anything
but foreign to juridical discourse, given that it is evoked by nothing else
than a complaint, an “outcry against or because of injury.”26 And there is no
complaint without a cause for a lament of, or a plaint for, some loss or harm;
no attempt at compensating a pain or violation by means of attribution and
judgment.
24Nancy Lee, Lyrics of Lament, 32: “The dirge and the lament prayer to the deity are the two
primary forms of lament across cultures and religions.” Otto Fuchs calls laments “a stepchild
of Christian reflection on prayer” even though roughly 40 percent of the psalms lament (Die
Klage als Gebet, 13; my translation).
25Dorota Dutsch, “Nenia: Gender, Genre, and Lament in Ancient Rome,” 258.
26OED 3:608, s.v. “complaint, n.3.”
10 LANGUAGE OF RUIN AND CONSUMPTION
Menke seeks to reconstruct the transition from an outcry of complaint to
juridical action in terms of the philosophy of law, with allusion to Nietzsche’s
Genealogy of Morals: “The right to say no, and to criticism … implies a
self-empowerment of the subject. The subject who says no is the subject
of complaint—prosecuting that things ought to change.”27 In this scenario,
the complaint is structured as a proposition: It is a negation that calls for
a remedy. Yet it is not actually the plaint that emancipates the subject, as
Menke outlines: “The slave has always suffered and complained about
it. A rebellion is the first time he asserts the right to not only express his
suffering but to judge that, because he suffers, it is wrong.”28 Complaining
appears as mere expression in this scenario; what is supposed to bring
about emancipation is the judgment about the suffering. Menke’s take on
complaining represents a notion common in philosophical approaches to
language: Who communicates his, or her, emotion is subject to suffering,
not subject of a discourse that masters objects by way of statements and
judgments. The “self-empowerment of the subject,” Menke holds, springs
from the judgment about one’s own suffering as it “asserts and, at the
same time, produces everyone’s right to consideration,” which is to say it
institutes the rule by which it judges itself. “In the very complaint,” Menke
concludes, “the subject defines its relation to the Other is such a way that
is being treated in a certain manner”—so that the subject who appears in
active control over the judgment renders itself the passive aim of an Other’s
action, or non-action.29 Yet neither a plaintive cry nor a juridical complaint
defines the relation to the Other in such a way that the form of the
successful response was predetermined. What Menke expounds as passivity
is relationality: Complaints and laments depend on being heard in order to
move others. The link between complaining about suffering and a juridical
complaint cannot be explained in terms of subject and object (or master and
slave) of propositional structures because they ignore the search for hearing
and response that is the common trait of all plaints. Filing a complaint in
order to assert the right to consideration does not define a relation between
subjects, neither does it distinguish an active subject from its suffering as a
27Christoph Menke, “Sklavenaufstand oder Warum Rechte?,” 115; my translation here and in
the following.
28Ibid., 115–116. In Nietzsche, however, the point is that the slave does not complain: “This
ancient mighty sorcerer in his struggle with displeasure, the ascetic priest—he had obviously
won, his kingdom had come: one no longer protested against pain, one thirsted for pain;
‘more pain! more pain!’ the desire of his disciples and initiates has cried for centuries” (On
the Genealogy of Morals III.20, 141). It is, according to Nietzsche, rather the Greeks who
complain—“so as to ward off the ‘bad conscience’” but make “things too easy for themselves,”
as Zeus complains in Homer: “Strange how these mortals so loudly complain of the gods!”
(ibid., II.23, 93–94; cf. Odyssey I.32).
29Menke, “Sklavenaufstand,” 116.