დისკურსით შეცვლილი რეალობა/ The Reality Changed by Discourse

Abstract

It is well known that, in the 20th century, philosophy turned to linguistic patterns and methods. The distinction made by linguists between language and speech, the interest towards the semantic and pragmatic aspects of functioning of language and semiotic research have proved that the study of types of conjunctions in certain sentences was insufficient for the explanation of human interaction. Hence, the research developed beyond the limits of a sentence and embraced speech as a sequence of speech acts, which needs to be analyzed from diverse angles, namely, pragmatic, semantic, referential, emotive-evaluative and so on. In their turn, linguists addressed super-phrasal units, i.e. discourse, which, apart from the text, embraces non-linguistic factors like the mood of the addressor and the addressee, background knowledge, explicit aim or intention, opinions, self-esteem, evaluation of other people and so on. Despite numerous definitions of discourse and the multitude of methods of discourse analysis, there is a common conceptual basis, according to which discourse not only reflects the world, identities and social relations but also plays an active role in their formation and change. The changes are sometimes mild, sometimes positive and sometimes destructive. We witness the latter changes nowadays. The discourse of the contemporary war is entirely based on linguistic manipulations. This reminds us of our recent past, the Soviet regime, which was termed as “logocracy”. The term “Soviet language” refers not only to the discourse of the Soviet Union, but, generally, to a discourse which disguises reality by means of words and thus controls everything. This phenomenon is also related to the French expression “Langue de bois” (literally: “wooden language”), meaning a language consisting of clichés, the so-called “dead expressions”. The key mechanism of fake meanings in the ideological discourse is the substitution of denotats, hence, the term “the language of deceit”. The link between the signifier and the signified is still inexistent. Besides, the key constituents of present-day discourse (“war”, “peace”, “freedom” etc.) belong to the concepts that are distinguished by high degree of semantic diffusion. This helps the manipulator in achieving his aim. The latest examples of disguising the truth by means of words remind us of “Newspeak” – an imaginary language of the totalitarian society in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984”. However, the contemporary Russian «Новояз» (new language) is characterized by more deceit, cynicism and severity: “peaceful operation”, “special operation” / “special military operation” are used as substitutes for war, whereas the purposes of the special operations are “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine. It should be noted that such contexts do not contain expressions like brother / neighbour / co-believer Ukrainians. Instead, there are new-born complex terms “Ukronazi” / “Ukrofascists”. Therefore, the majority of Russian citizens perceives the events in the Ukraine as peaceful, noble operation and not war. The rest of the world urges Russia to stop war, but Russia continues the war and punishes its own citizens who dare pronounce the word “war”. As we have seen, dystopian discourse is still topical: “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is power”.