If Aenglish Were a Language (Part One)

How Speaks History

Not “tomorrow is another day,” but “tomorrow is another world” is what could be heard from Julien Temple’s documentary London: The Modern Babylon (2012). The archival material used in the film is seductive. Its enchantment inspires the viewer to wonder whether it owes the sense of naivety, exuding from nearly every single frame, to the imagery so unmistakenly different from that to which one is customarily exposed, or, to a sentiment entirely distinct from the modern day one.

Likewise, as it to a great extent deals with the question of diversity, especially in a multicultural society such as Britain, one wonders whether the panoramic historical overview is suggestive of Richard Rorty’s ruminations in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), where he advances the belief that different vocabularies, synchronically and diachronically alike, describe different worlds and are indicative of both the vocabularies’ and the worlds’ incommensurability. If so, it may imply not only certain incommunicability between and among the vocabularies and the worlds, but within them, as well.

By contrast, one is prone to entertain the idea Stewart Home presents in his novel Tainted Love (2005): “The Times Change and We Change Too” (217 capitalization in original), coupled with the thought from his exploration of the conversation between punk scenes and culture at large entitled Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock (1995):”We change and yet remain the same” (122).

Such dilemmas imbue the meditation with an additional layer of cultural critique, building upon what Temple suggests in the film. Clearly, it is a recklessly commoditized, worryingly violent time portrayed there. The Sex Pistols lyrics “pretty vacant” resonate with the footage of the August 2011 riots in several towns and cities in England, when the apex of the revolutionary spirit manifested itself in random looting of the nearby businesses. That may raise doubt about there being any pocket within cultural realities left readily available to be used as a source of wholesome resistance.

Dystopian as it may look, such a cultural climate may, nevertheless, provide a glimpse of the world whose languages might not be perfectly compatible, and yet, in accord with Home’s writing, in which humans can still be capable of communicating, despite an erratic nature of communicational content, hindrances in the communication channel, and / or alternating cycles of noise and silence.