By Steve Light.
Humans, like all other things animate and inanimate, migrate. Languages change constantly. And neither migrations nor evolutions in vocabularies and vocalizations, in idiomatic and lexical registers, can be prevented or stopped. Yet, it remains possible to say one or even two or three less than complimentary things about this or that particular linguistic evolution. Of course, in this practice one must always recognize the lessons of humanity, e.g. Quelle vérité que ces montagnes bornent, qui est mensonge qui se tient au delà? (Montaigne, Essais); Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà (Pascal, Pensees)
What is unsatisfactory for the one might not be for the other while understanding that the relative cannot in all cases constitute an absolute, or at least not absolutely. Interminable truths, interminable problems.
I noticed it all at once. Was it because with the pandemic for the first time I listened online to a podcast or two, a lecture or two, a conference or two? This utterance, “right”, as marker, emphasis, exclamation, pause, filler, rest, etc.: was this a replacement for or an addition to, e.g. “you know”, etc.? Not entirely. They co-exist, although “right” is clearly ascendent. Does it grate because I noticed it, or did I notice it because it grates? Both, which is to say, the latter! But then I’ve always thought when a figure of speech, a linguistic turn, etc. becomes noticeably omnipresent, consuming, and automatic, it is best to avoid them, e.g. “imbrication”, “parse”, “weaponize,” etc. to cite but three examples originating from relatively different milieu.
But the tale does not begin here. Sometime in the 1990s, I began to hear: “[As such and such] famously said.” “Famously said”? Where did that come from? Had I not been paying attention? I thought the standard figure in such situations was, e.g. “in the celebrated phrase of…, “…in the well-known phrase of…”, etc. At first, I heard it only here and there. But it proliferated quickly in all milieus, high, low, middle, etc. In every broadcast, on every page, there it was.
In his early years, Amiri Baraka expressed in his oft-artful manner the poetics of the newer, the “younger poets.” “How we sound!” Well, everyone sounds in one way or another, and how it sounds is dependent in part on who is listening… “and how”!
Of the inartful, those slow on the uptake, Lester Young spoke of “No Ears.” ”Famously said”? It clanged in the ears, it clattered out of tune. But it came on “…like a rose/ But everybody knows/You can look but you better not touch/ Poison ivy-e-e-e-e!” (The Coasters, 1959)
For those who used the figure everything once said and everyone who said it seemed to have been famous, which only made the proliferation all the more prolific, the “famously” being everywhere, which is to say everywhere in the said. Yet, at least 95% of the time if not more the quotation or referent that was supposedly famous was one that wasn’t famous at all, indeed, little known or unknown. Everything ever said had become famous! This would actually have been quite a marvelous thing if it meant that our species had collectively increased its erudition by great magnitudes. Actually, the erudition of our species and the General Intellect have increased, but not quite in the aforementioned way.
Moreover, the phrase quickly invaded those domains where one might have thought it would have been resisted, showing again that socio-linguistic and socio-cultural resistance can never be assumed in relation to any domain. A biographer of Guy Debord (and most recently of Isidore Isou), Andrew Hussey, exemplified the process. Hussey used “famously said” on seemingly every third page in a book ostensibly devoted to a thinker and writer, Guy Debord, who, despite abundant faults, certainly abundant personal and intersubjective faults (which Hussey failed to mention or minimized) would never have used a phrase so embedded in reigning media, socio-cultural, and socio-political spheres.
Another paradigmatic example was Robert Hullot-Kentor, a translator of Adorno and the editor of a series of Adorno translations at Stanford University Press, as well as an ardent, albeit a too-orthodox defender of Adorno. The trajectories of Adorno’s philosophical and linguistic actions would have ranged themselves at the antipode of the usage in question. And Hullot-Kentor? In his translator’s introduction to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, we find: ”…that Barnett Newman once did the world the favor of putting in a nutshell when he famously quipped….” I think Adorno would have winced at being placed in such proximity to the “famously said.”
***
Adorno’s exact contemporary, Vladimir Jankelevitch, like him both philosopher and philosopher of music, has been subjected to a similar infelicity: in her English translation of Jankelevitch’s La musique et l’ineffable (Music and the Ineffable), the Harvard musicologist, Carolyn Abbate, gave Jankelevitch to say, “famously-said.” In translating, one necessarily employs present idiomatic usage in the language into which one is translating, so it is proper for Professor Abbate to have used an idiom that is now the reigning idiom. Yet, it is crucial that one consider the linguistic manner and sensibility of the person one is translating. One must think in the terms of the being-in-English that Jankelevitch would have himself sought out. And “famously said” is an automatic and inelegant figure that he never would have adopted and internalized. Worse still, Abbate entirely misconstrued Jankelevitch’s concept of charm (le charme) and this led her to significant mistakes. But this must be an episode for another day.
As for the quotation from Barnet Newman that Hullot-Kentor utilized: it was not as famous as all that. Newman’s most well-known statement, but only in limited circles, occurred when in response to a question about the meaning of his paintings he replied that examined properly his paintings signified the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism. Indeed, such an end would be splendid. But it would have been much better if Newman had included monopoly capitalism. And that he did not can certainly lead to surmises that are not to his benefit. But then the demise of capitalists and bureaucrats (“humanity will only be happy on the day when the last capitalist…”) is not something that can be found in Newman’s vastly overrated and entirely banal paintings.
But the Newman statement to which Hullot-Kentor referred was this: “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.” This statement is known by art-world insiders. But whereas Newman’s attribution of meaning to his paintings, notwithstanding its possible connivance with and easy recuperation by U.S. Cold War itineraries, does have verve, his ornithological reference functions as one more anti-intellectual and snobbish reflex.
***
When does something become “famous”? It matters not, since it is no longer a question of facticity, but rather of a newly introduced ubiquity: I quote, therefore, what I quote must be famous. A commentator on National Public Radio, speaking of the stylistic innovation of the singers of Tuva, of their employment of a uniquely polyphonic simultaneity, attaches to these singers, singers not widely known at all, the automatic refrain, “famously….”
But the “sound” here, the clang of “famously said,” is not an immediate function of the phonemes in question. “Famously said” doesn’t sound bad strictly according to phonemic acoustics, but above all because of its socio-cultural resonances and significations. After all, I could cite an anterior historical example of that which needed nothing more than its very sound to send one scurrying for earplugs. There was this rather obscure little word, “critique,” a nice little word that spoke of a rigorous form of reason’s own self-reflection and self-constitution and which in its post-Kantian usages could take on an emphatic form of socio-historical and socio-political reflection. Of course, it was because of this latter incarnation that the intellectual and political realms in the U.S, subject to longstanding repressions and suppressions, did not abound in this figure and in this usage.
But the upsurges of the 1960s, which began to transform our intellectual, academic, and cultural worlds, liberated the word from its confinements. However, the increase in socio-political and intellectual ferment had as a rather unfortunate consequence a verbalization whereby a “new sound” emerged which only the most tin of ears could bear: “critiquing”, “critiqued.” Clang, clang, clang. And these clangs were certainly not the euphonious sounds coming from Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis: “clang, clang, clang went the trolley, ding, ding, ding went the bell” as well as in her signature “zing went the strings of my heart!”
***
“Gesture” too was also once upon a time a nice little word. And in the analyses of Benjamin and Kafka a rather fecund one at that. Then came Derrida with his precisions, virtuosities, and manifold insights but with other lesser apt things as well. And everywhere it began: thought “gestures,” indeed, everything “gestures.” “This commitment gestures, finally, toward what [Walter] Benjamin once called….” That from a page of a recent compendium of misunderstandings about Benjamin, etc.
And not just today’s functionaries, high or low, because in a non-academic vernacular there was this figure….But the ellipsis just utilized marks out an immediate necessity. Because at first, I couldn’t make out the words. “My…. ” was all I could hear. “Sir, I can’t make that out, I can’t make that out,” says the sonar man to his captain, Clark Gable, and subsequently to the first mate, Burt Lancaster, in Run Silent, Run Deep. “I can’t make that out!” Nor could I, and particularly on the basketball court. But it always seemed to occur when someone had thrown the ball out of bounds or the wrong way or otherwise messed up a play or messed up simpliciter. And then, one day, accelerating around the man guarding me and without a break in motion, straight off the dribble, sending a no-look bullet pass behind my back, I watched as the ball, passing neatly between two defenders, bunched in the key, made its way to my man open beneath the basket, watched as it bounced right off his chest. Had he been distracted or had he simply stopped to watch (and admire) the pass! Without question, I’ve made more behind-the-back passes in competition than Cousy and Maravich put together. Hence, it was one less assist for me that day. And he? “My bad,” he said. But on this day I heard it clearly!
“My bad!” There it was. And how bad it sounded. And here “bad” does not at all mean good. However, “my bad” found its attunement, its custom, and disappeared into the ordinary. I would have preferred that it disappear in a more literal and direct sense. Far better things have, like the two-handed set shot. So, there was nothing for me to say at that moment other than: “Please don’t allow another pass to bounce off your chest!” Yes, the two-hand set shot: when the ball went “swish!” it sounded no less beautiful, was no less pretty than any other swish, the one of Oscar Robertson, Roger Brown, Nate Archibald, Pete Maravich, Steph Curry, and my own.
“Famously said”, “critiquing”, “my bad”, etc. have won. But then there is this, although it has to do with a word, “luminous”, that in sound and meaning has lovely qualities. But, alas, the word has been used up, ruined completely. I don’t know when it started as the ever-and-always employed superlative of critics in each and every realm. Every praised painting, poem, novel, film, dance, installation, performance, etc. was deemed luminous. The word petrified and its choice signified the petrification of its user.
Behold: many years ago, David Pagel, an art critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a review of a retrospective of the minimalist artist, Dan Flavin, whose art (tedious and banal) consists of phosphorescent light bulbs mounted on walls. One of Pagel’s declarations—highlighted in the review as an insert–was that Flavin’s art “makes ordinary light luminous”. But Pagel could not claim originality for this declaration. Prior to Pagel, Peter Schjeldahl, in an article in The New Yorker, had already outdone one and all: “The art of Dan Flavin is luminous.” QED.
***
Is “Right” the new “Famously Said”? Both have achieved irreversible automaticity. There is no peril in their use. Nonetheless, I would counsel the choice of different dancing shoes, different dance tunes. As for “luminous”: Verbum sapienti sat est.
Enough. Let us celebrate more supple figures of speech. “Je voudrais parler la plus belle langue de mon siecle”. I don’t think Andre Breton achieved this. But it is a lovely aspiration. And for a rousing closing let us turn to John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie who exclaimed, twirling and twinkling–in a line that is not, but which ought to be much more well-known, much more celebrated—: “The next song, ‘Kush’! is dedicated to Mother Africa, and if that don’t get to you, shame on you baby!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Light, a basketball point-guard following upon Nate Archibald, Pete Maravich, and Willie Somerset—and akin as well to Steve Nash, Steph Curry, Chris Paul, and Earl Boykins—is also a philosopher and poet. His most recent books are The Emergence of Happiness (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Against Middle Passages (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). Two volumes of essays, To Give Just Weight to All Things: Essays in Politics, Race, Society, and Culture and Occasions of Happiness: Essays in Philosophy, Poetry, and Painting are in preparation. A volume of philosophical aphorisms and paragraphic essays, In All Expectation, is in progress as is his Jean Grenier: A Philosopher of Shadow and Light. He is also the translator of Jean Grenier’s Islands: Lyrical Essays (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005). His writings and translations have appeared in countries on every continent save(!) Antarctica.
