The Conversation

Again and again, "the conversation" is talked about on TV, on the radio, and in the papers. The subject matter could be anything, from ebooks to the vagaries of the weather. "When publishers and booksellers meet, the conversation is shadowed by ebooks." "Last summer, tornadoes tore through the conversation in the Midwest."

But it's uncanny how much "the conversation" has seeped into Republican Party politics.

On the eve of the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, a political blogger for the New York Times noted that Rick Santorum's endorsement by influential evangelicals "might tilt the conversation toward social issues." Two sentences later, the blogger said that "the Bain conversation" had seriously diverted attention from the Ron Paul campaign.

Last December, a Times reporter recounted how the Republican freshmen in the House of Representatives had "dominated the spending conversation" from the time they arrived.

During the grim farce that the struggle over the national debt ceiling became, John Boehner repeatedly called for an "adult conversation" about balancing the budget, stipulating that any increase in taxes would be "off the table." (Some things, evidently, can't be discussed by adults.)

What is a conversation? A somewhat informal, even genteel exchange of views?

When so many people compulsively communicate via social media, maybe brief bursts of cheery talk via Facebook and Twitter become the measure of what can be usefully said. This becomes the buzz, the conversation.

And if you want to neutralize an opposing political position, you might want to portray it as "just another point of view." Something to chat about.

A conversation, as rendered by Mary Mendell.

Stop, Hey What’s That Sound . . .

The varying reactions to the first two posts make me realize that I benefit from being prompted to reconsider my preconceptions and tics. So now perhaps I should think anew about a word that has always had a grating effect on me: feedback.

I can more or less date when I first experienced full-bore audio feedback: either in the spring of 1968 at the Fillmore East in Manhattan's East Village or in the summer of that year at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. Maybe a deliberate auditory slash by the guitarist Jeff Beck or an inadvertent ripping reverb from a member of the band Jethro Tull. A jolt, not a thrill.

The Oxford English Dictionary points to the earliest printed use of the term “feedback” in an issue of Wireless Age published in 1920: “An inductive feed-back in relation to the secondary system generates local oscillations.” Feedback as an electrical process is nothing to argue about. And the idea of biofeedback appeals to me, whether or not it really works.

What sticks in my craw, though, is a usage that the OED dates to 1971, from a publication called Frendz: “We began to get a fairly good feedback from most people who know about it and it looked as though the concerts would be good scenes.” (No indication of what the first “it” refers to.) While there’s a positive tone to “feedback” here, it makes people sound like components in psychological engineering à la B. F. Skinner. A person responds or reacts to an event, a phenomenon, a stimulus. But something mechanical becomes integrated into a feedback loop.

I may have a mistaken idea of the dehumanizing overtone of “feedback.” Even so, there is something pernicious about the way the word is deployed in management-speak. When I hear someone say that an employee or a vendor needs to be given “feedback,” I wince. The import is clear: so-and-so has to be told he’s screwed up—and had better shape up. I don’t quarrel with being candid about a failure to do something correctly. “Feedback,” however, has an impersonal, quasi-scientific ring to it that I find off-key. It’s as if the issuer of the criticism were Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey, blandly rational and incontrovertible, and the recipient the Keir Dullea character, who can have no reasoned response, at least from Hal's point of view. It may be feedback of a sort, but it’s a short-circuited loop.

The more I think about "feedback" as a human activity, the less I think of it.

When the artist Cy Twombly died this past year, the obituaries said he never much cared what people thought of his work. He did as he pleased--and parlayed that attitude into a successful career.

Ya Got an Issue?

In the fall of 2000, when I was taking a yoga class, the teacher said something that made me sit up (when I wasn’t supposed to) and had me wondering. In regard to a yoga pose that involved a severe flexing of the knee, she admitted that she had “knee issues.” To the best of my knowledge, that was the first time I heard the term “issues” used in this way.

To my ears—and so to my understanding of the term—the use of “issues” as a substitute for “problems” is very nearly preposterous. In what way is the word “problem” pejorative? Do we need an anodyne way of expressing the idea of anxiety and pain as something other than . . . anxiety and pain?

Toward the end of the entry “issue” in the Oxford English Dictionary, there is this:

Draft additions June 2003

In pl. orig. and chiefly U.S. Emotional or psychological difficulties (freq. with modifying word); points of emotional conflict.

1982    N.Y. Times 8 Dec. c10/6   The more difficult aspect can come after alcohol is removed. Then it becomes how do you deal with the emotions and intimacy issues that were largely dealt with previously through alcohol?

1991    Longevity Jan. 70/1 At the root of anniversary syndrome are unresolved issues about the loved one stemming from the past.

1998    Community Care 20 Aug. 46/5 (advt.) Educational programme and 24-hour placement support for emotionally damaged children and young people. Reparative work with attachment issues.

In the American Heritage Dictionary, there is toward the end of the entry “issue” this:

5. Informal A personal problem or emotional disorder: The teacher discussed the child's issues with his parents.

In Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, we find this at definition 6:

(2) : CONCERN, PROBLEM  *I have issues with his behavior*

Note that these are all marginal definitions in the most authoritative dictionaries we have. I would bet that most people who talk about “issues” think they are being bluntly sincere. So now just why has it become the vogue way of saying you have a problem to say you have an “issue”? I'd welcome comments. Do you have a problem with my saying that "issue" is being used as a strangely namby-pamby veil for what is really meant?

Every entry in this blog will end with an illustration, whether or not it's illustrative. Joseph Beuys didn't have problems with tossing whatever into his box of detritus (he definitely wouldn't have thought of it as an issue):

Brief Prolegomenon

Say no more.

–Monty Python (Eric Idle)

At the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein says, “What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.” (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.)

To the very small extent that I can comment on Wittgenstein’s ideas in the Tractatus, I believe his basic point is that statements about the truth of the world have to be as clear and concrete as possible. What we put in words—when we are talking in philosophical terms about the nature of reality—should be tantamount to a sharply drawn picture.

Much of what we experience inevitably eludes direct expression, which leads us to use, whether we’re conscious of it or not, figurative language and nonverbal speech (i.e., graphic art and music). As a patron of the Austrian writer Georg Trakl, Wittgenstein offered this assessment: "I do not understand [his poems]; but their tone pleases me. It is the tone of true genius." Silence takes many forms.

I’ll call a halt to deep thoughts right here.

What Can B Sd will be devoted to quirks of speech and usage that strike me as mystifying, trite, misleading, or happily apt (or maybe not so happily). Btw, the title would be What Can Be Said, except that someone else has already captured that domain name. But perhaps it was serendipitous to have to shed a few vowels . . .


By way of summing up, here is a detail from a Robert Rauschenberg painting: