Perpetual Peace by Emoji
By: Andrew Macdonald Powney
Tags: Language, Humanism, Art, Content Writing, Democracy

Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground is all emoji. His Book from the Sky was all invented text. The former was contents without form, the latter form without content; in Kantian terms. Xu Bing’s terms are Buddhist, his strategy Zen: not so much to show without tell as to show without even showing. Neither the kataphatic approach from the ground, not the apophatic approach from on high, can help us; he seems to say. The fear must be that ‘universal man’ from the ground, up, must prove as objective but abstract as a foreign revelation.

Now that a book has been written in emoji, a lot of people will be — rightly — very happy.😀 People who would never and could never learn one another’s languages will all be able to read out the same emoji text, each in her own tongue. Like the initial dream of the internet, it is a great sign of hope for perpetual peace in the world through exchange.

It also means that language will not be about language. It will be about content.🤨 It is not even really exchange: it is the emoji objects themselves we have in common not the ways of reading them out. They are shared objects, but that does not make for social relations between persons.

That is a great reversal. Written language made a break from pictures five thousand years ago. Once a picture represented a thing to which we gave a sound, that picture could also represent the sound; a pictogram was a phonogram. Phonograms let us build up new pictures from combinations of sound; alphabets broke syllables down into new part-sounds to build with. Thus literature; thus the whole magic of not what you say but just how you say it, and a hundred ways to say ‘I love you’ were said with more or less wonder. It was in language, not content, that this difference resided.

Thus — you might think — the human being. The human being is not just what, arranged differently, would be a banana or a chimpanzee. It is how it can behave once the parts are arranged as ours are and amount to more than their sum — as we do. The mystery is the dignity of the human being.

Fred says Like it ❤

Dave says Like It ❤

Fred and Dave are richly different individuals

Leonardo Boff once wrote an essay suggesting that his father’s cigarette butt had been a sign of the holy for him. The essay caused some offence and ridicule, putting an extinguished cigarette on the level of the sacraments: yet every father who speaks of love says what he has to say how he says it. It is not just animal instinct on his part, that my father loves me — and we cannot live fruitfully by thinking so. It is not only the content: it is the particular story. The most ardent reductivist thinks like an idealist when it comes to his own private loves and he may even recite poetry with his whole heart.

Written language and the human being went together because both displayed agency. This is what makes both humans and their language, human. I decide how I write what I have to say even when you force me to write the content you demand. Written language was part of my free will because it preserved my grip on what I had done in the language. An author could frame a sentence in ways that made certain replies ungrammatical and the point of writing was to steer the reader to realise not only, the content of a communication, but also, the frames of reference and interpretation which could make sense of that communication.

That was possible because language was partly about the language itself. Pictures do not do this — even when they are partly about the pictures themselves. That had been said (when it came to art) to have been their great advantage — that there no right answers, and that the ‘grammar’ of pictures was really another language to learn. But until now, pictures were not words. Writing in words amounted to retaining some degree of control over one’s own observations, when irony, complexity and reserve could be required rather than hoped for.

So this great step forward to peace and understanding by emoji is also a great denudation of everything that could make public life secure and democratic. It hands over my meaning to whomever wishes to use it. It is, in short, the opposite of what it seems. It is a step towards the public space becoming, like the art gallery, a place in which people turn from each other convinced that the other viewer is an idiot but saying for social purposes that X or Y means what it does to them. It is a step not toward peace, but a step away from truth. Among the various meanings — the pictures for which we may have a use or may not — there will be no way to decide together except by force, since there will be no truth to appeal to.

You may think all this is to make too much of an emoji text, of course. Such changes do not happen in one go and even at this latest stage it is hard to see this one step as a sign of great losses. Yet the book in emoji, clever, hopeful and delightful, really is another proof that data and not persons have become the paradigm for knowledge. It shows our creeping anti-humanism. Weight, not feel; quantity, not quality; abstract and objective, not human and actual; manipulable, not changeable. Think of the people who dismiss ‘anecdotal remarks’ unless for extraneous reasons they count as ‘lived experience’. Think of those times when a ‘nuance’ is categorised either as a ‘micro-aggression’ or ‘a misunderstanding’. It is force of numbers which is coming to decide these conflicts.

Think of the vast apparatus in our schools which subverts the humanities with the kind of assessment which makes sense for elementary arithmetic (and for reports to directors of studies). In schools, 93% is used as a metaphor for ‘really good’ but teachers forget this. They develop a deluded belief in it. Then they punish each other over the gap between 90% and 93%, and make decisions that change people’s lives over this completely imaginary difference. (At least customer conversion rates are actual, trackable, sackable events!)

Private Eye used to have a joke journalist called Phil Space, but now we really do have ‘content’ rather than words. Language used to be our way to remote-control the range of ways in which what we said, could be understood, but in emoji-world, language is becoming multivalent re-purposable data, over which others will have the control.

We are often told what Orwell said: that sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. A long time ago a battle was lost in schools over how things ought to be spelled or punctuated, which was said to be dictatorial and not emancipatory. What publishing calls ‘grey publishing’, business communications, now proceed at such pace that elegance would sometimes be an unacceptable expense and solecisms are understood to be inevitable. This is not about imposing rules for how to speak, however; nor even about the rise of flaccid thinking. What an emoji book should awake us to is a future in which once we have written, our language will no longer be ours to command. It is hard to think of a surer way to reduce the human being to stuff and to shape her to ends other than her own.