Semantic Apocalypse

The day that scientific knowledge blots out human meaning -- that's the semantic apocalypse.— Robert Lamb, 2009 (paraphrasing Bakker's idea)[According to Rosenstock-Huessy] warnings came to indicate that social breakdowns and the condition or usage of language could not be separated. We have been warned by psychoanalysts, Nietzsche, and the Russian revolution in recent times that corruption of language usage and social breakdowns are concurrent. 
— Feringer, 1970In social terms, you could suggest that the Semantic Apocalypse has already happened. Consumer society is a society where liberal democratic states have retreated from the ‘meaning game,’  leaving the intractable issue to its constituents. Given the interpretative ambiguity that permeates the Question of Meaning, there is no discursive or evidential way of commanding any kind of consensus: this is why states past and present had to resort to coercion to promote meaning solidarity. Absent coercion, people pretty much climb on whatever dogmatic bandwagon that appeals to them, typically the ones that most resonate with their childhood socialization, or as we like to call it, their ‘heart.’ --- "What is the Semantic Apocalypse? by rsbakker"https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/what-is-the-semantic-apocalypse/[...] or, as Zizek would put it the death of the Big Other.--- S.C. Hickmanhttps://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2018/06/12/the-impossible-subject-semantic-apocalypse-and-the-naturalist/‘Semantic apocalypse’ apparently coined by R.S. Bakker. 
The medium of the apocalypse We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495 could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of our brains; and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet printing did all this and more. 
== Media ==
* "What is the Semantic Apocalypse? by rsbakker" 2011. 
* "Semantic Apocalypse and Life After Humanism with R. Scott Baker." Hosted by Justin Murphy, 2018.YouTube.com. "3,219 views•Streamed live on Nov 1, 2018"
* "The Impossible Subject: Semantic Apocalypse and the Naturalist", 2018.
* "The Semantic Apocalypse: Bakker's Neuropath and the Evolutionary Imagination", Mathias Clasen, 2011.
== Rhizomata ==
Semantic; Apocalypse; Meaning; Loss of meaning; Signal; Semantics; Civilizational dissolution
Culture; Nihilism; "Year Zero"; Fin de siècle; End of an era; Decline; Dissolution; Corruption 
Right speech; Right conduct 
Dissolution of meaning; Big Other; Big Brother
Dogmatic simplicity; Semantic adaptivityG. Eiríksson.; Synthetic process
Category:Science
Category:Meaning