Cultish by Amanda Montell

  If there’s someone that can make linguistics cool and fun, it’s Amanda Montell. I previously read her book Wordslut, which was a fun breakdown of ‘profane’ language. Cultish retains a similar accessibility and lets Montell’s lively voice shine. It is a contemporary examination of the language games cult leaders play in order to manipulate their audience.

Montell begins the reflection essentially with what we think of as “actual” cult leaders. She gives an account of Jim Jones and the Jamestown massacre, for example. She draws on personal accounts, archival recordings, and other scholarship to explain how Jones was able to maintain such control over his adherents despite the obvious lies and contradictions. Montell describes how language operates to prevent deep consideration of ideas. For Jonestown in particular, I appreciated how Montell drew on the work of Sikivu Hutchinson to explore the narrative of how Jim Jones drew on progressive ideology to manipulate people and ultimately deploy racist stereotypes to his advantage.

There are a few elements that re-emerge across different contexts. In addition to dehumanizing ‘out groups’, Montell identifies the “us vs. them” structures that give cult adherents a sense of belonging they might not otherwise be experiencing. The us/them and in/out group mentality at the core of cults serves to elevate some at the expense of others. This also leads to ‘purity tests’ that give validity to the cult followers’ experience. At the same time, cults operate on the principle that there is always another layer of purity that adherents can never achieve.

The most memorable case study for this is scientology. For instance, in scientology (and other cult-like settings), words are given new meanings that become a kind of code to those “in the know.” Again, that is able to contribute to an in-group and an out-group. We see this in all kinds of places; different communities have their own lexicon. What is different about scientology is that if a member is found to have used a word incorrectly, they are subjected to rigorous “testing” (re-programming) until they demonstrate that they now have the accepted understanding of the word. I found that section pretty compelling because it seemed the most codified and controlled use of language of the different groups in question. 

Despite other cult-like settings not being as interventionist, necessarily, in their adherents’ use of language, there are certain patterns that emerge. One chapter of the text is focused on Multi-level Marketing schemes and another focuses on fitness crazes, like spin and Bikram yoga, and Montell highlights how formulaic their messaging can be. Montell is pretty funny in creating fake outreach messages of a woman trying to recruit for her MLM. As entertaining (and informative) as it is to explain the patterns in the #girlboss dialect, Montell is also pretty sympathetic to those folks that get duped. She highlights the research that shows how cult adherents are not necessarily ignorant but that they hold a more optimistic disposition.

One of the most useful elements of Montell’s analysis of language is her commentary on “thought-terminating clichés.” Those are all those phrases that are designed to make people stop reflecting. Statements like “it is what it is” stand out as an example that encourages people to just stop thinking. Montell touches on the Trump cult briefly, but I can’t help but think of “thought-terminating clichés” like Make America Great Again as a response to any challenge to critical thinking.

Amanda Montell is a special voice in contemporary discourse. I think she’s such an accessible writer that writes in a fun and engaging voice about contemporary issues. The topics she’s addressing are deep and academic, but are delivered with such clarity that readers are made to feel welcome within the complexity of the discourse. I think I liked Wordslut a bit better, but Cultish is more broadly applicable across contexts.

Happy reading!

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

        Wordslut is such a fun book. Despite this being my first exposure to Amanda Montell, I can’t help but feel that her voice shines beautifully throughout the work. Her writing is lively, conversational, both-serious-and-not. There’s a real levity to her analysis that makes the book a truly entertaining read. It probably helps that she herself reads the audiobook and is really able to sell the tone.

At a glance, a number of the chapters come across as being silly. Consider, for example, the first chapter: “Slutty Skank Hoes and Nasty Dykes: A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults I Hate (But Also Kind of Love?)”. Another chapter is “Cyclops, Panty Puppet, Bald-Headed Bastard (And 100+ Other Things to Call Your Genitalia)” and another is called “Fuck it: An Ode to Cursing While Female”. While these chapter titles give the impression of a crass-for-fun approach, there’s something more powerful happening throughout Wordslut.

The book is a sociolinguistic exploration of sex and gender. It’s told in such an approachable, personal way that it is a beautiful entry point for people thinking about language or gender studies. It’s corrective without being accusatory. It’s informative without being pedantic. One example is when Montell breaks down the class and race-based use of “y’all” and critiques the haters of this second person plural that makes language more clear than saying “you” to multiple people or “you guys” to people that don’t all identify as boys and men.

The book touches on a number of ideas around the misogyny embedded in language. Some of the ground has been covered before (for instance, doing a statistical analysis of how many derogatory words there are for women as opposed to men), but it is always done with a fresh set of eyes and empathy for the language users most often criticized (i.e. women, people of colour, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks).

To give a few examples, Montell discusses differences in communication between socialized women and men. She discusses phenomena like hedging the conversation, affirming comments, and so on, among women. Even the phrase “like,” disproportionately (and erroneously) attributed to valley girls, serves a valuable linguistic function. Montell even goes into detail on why “the gay voice” is a phenomenon. The book is progressive and, at every turn, Montell makes a case against prescriptive linguistics and for embracing the linguistic shifts that happen naturally as the English language develops.

A number of the specifics are fascinating, but it’s a little beyond my capacity to summarize all of the specific details. All I can really do is encourage you to read the book—and better yet, listen to the audiobook so that you can hear all the fun percussive curses that come from Montell’s mouth.

Happy reading!

The Elements of Semiology by Roland Barthes

I am inching my way towards Roland Barthes completionism, and I was very kindly gifted The Elements of Semiology for Christmas. It’s a short, challenging volume about the way our linguistic frameworks operate. It is definitely one of the more opaque Barthes books I’ve read since it relies on some highly technical language and some significant background knowledge of Ferdinand de Saussure and other semiologists. There are a few key take-aways that I’ll try to keep short.

One of the things I found most helpful is Barthes regular itemization and categorization of concepts. The way I read it, Barthes offers an alternative to a sequential and linear kind of thinking that challenges the binarism at the core of Saussure. Barthes discusses the idea of “presence / absence” as a way of relating concepts, and offers the suggestion of either implying or not implying “i) the mental representation of the relata” or “an analogy between the relata”, or an immediate “link between the two relata (the stimulus and its response)” or that the relata “exactly coincide” or one overruns the other, or they imply “an existential connection with the user” (35-36). While the text could give some more concrete examples to help guide readers, it’s an interesting framework for how we classify the connections between things.

The Elements of Semiology relies on two core examples that emerge frequently: references to the Highway Code and, somewhat amusingly, the fashion industry. I say amusingly because it appears almost like a fixation and it also makes me think of the notion of the ‘seam’ that Barthes elaborates on in The Pleasure of the Text.

When discussing the semiological sign, Barthes goes beyond language. His philosophy opens up the world in that way: everything is open to interpretation. The world is composed of signs and signifiers. He gives the example of how the colour of a light tells us to drive forward or not in the Highway Code. Where linguistics and semiology differ is that semiological systems “have a substance of expression whose essence is not to signify” (41)---and yet they do. Barthes refers to “sign-functions” that come to take on meaning and, while they seem arbitrary, “as soon as there is a society, every usage is converted into a sign of itself” (41). A helpful example is the idea of how someone might wear a raincoat for the practical purpose of not getting wet in the rain, but also implies a certain relationship to the situation. 

To me, that’s what is so revolutionary about Barthes from a literary standpoint. Interpretation is not just about the words on the page, but their context as well. He also addresses the idea that interpretation is not as simple as this-stands-for-that; signs have a meaning that is separate and distinct that exist on a separate plane. Barthes says that

the signified is neither [the mental representation], nor [the real thing], but rather [the utterable]; being neither an act of consciousness, nor a real thing, it can be defined only within the signifying process, in a quasi-tautological way: it is this ‘something’ which is meant by the person who uses the sign. In this way we are back again to a purely functional definition: the signified is one of the two relata of the sign; the only difference which opposes it to the signified is that the latter is a mediator. (43)

As you can likely tell, the language is quite complex. With a focus on the utterable, Barthes says that objects, images, and gestures “refer back to something which can only be expressed through them” (43) but that the “semiological signified can be taken up by the linguistic signs” (43). Barthes talks about sweater weather in that respect: “a certain sweater means long autumn walks in the woods; in this case, the signified is mediated not only by its vestimentary signifier (the sweater), but also by a fragment of speech” (43). Again: the context in which signs appear matters.

Barthes discusses the idea several times of trying to transfer the meaning of one field into another. For instance, if you think about music, the meaning is essentially felt and then is offered verbalized signifieds (e.g. “anguished, stormy, sombre, tormented, etc.”). They are all signs for a musical signified to something that, essentially, cannot face “verbal dissection and no metaphorical small change” (45). These descriptions are referred to as metalanguages.

There is some pretty challenging discussion of how different metalanguages can interact with one another and what determines whether they are closed or open systems. There’s the notion of syntagms, which are kind of like a collection of signifiers that are associated together in the same place. Conversely, “several lexicons—and consequently several bodies of signifieds—can coexist within the same individual, determine in each one more or less ‘deep’ readings” (47). That overlap, actually, makes me think about The Pleasure of the Text being the seam where things overlap and are about to come apart. Essentially, signification “does not unite unilateral entities, it does not conjoin two terms, for the very good reason that signifier and signified are both at once term and relation” (48). Barthes says that ambiguity is exactly what forms semiological discourse, even in its clumsiness (48).

At its core, Barthes is still addressing the idea of difference. Saussure suggests that all linguistics is a relationship of differences (this-not-that). Barthes does some interesting discussion of the way that oppositions can sometimes be identical and gives some examples of words in French that sound the same despite having different meanings about number or time frame (e.g. finit/finissent, mange/mangent) (79). Semiology, in Barthes’ account, seems to suggest that we can go beyond the binaries of either/or and move towards a more both/and/neither.

(Sort of) as promised, I’m keeping this review short to try to keep my time management and priorities in check (new year, new me). I have two more Barthes texts on my shelf and I will be periodically reading him to try to enrich an understanding of the world.

        Happy reading! lowercasepoet Signing out.