ABSTRACT
In early 2000, mere thirty days after taking up office, the government of President Fernando De la Rúa (Argentina) issued a curious press release. In the release, reported in an article in the major Argentine daily newspaper La Nación on 9 January 2000, the government admits poor diffusion of messages about its activities and a need to establish “a more fluid contact with the public” (see frontispiece). Failing to live up to the pre-election promises of battling corruption and improving living standards, and faced with growing social unrest, the De la Rúa government had recourse to an ancient tool: philophronesis, a figure-mode of speech in which one mollifies the anger of a superior addressee and creates amicable rapport by using gentle words, or even a submissive apology. As it tends to happen with discourses that subsume in themselves conflicting aims and affects, and get disseminated through a multiplicity of relays, the lack of clarity is what distinguishes the government’s message, as reproduced in the article. The apparent irony that the government’s communiqué on communication is so vague was not lost on León Ferrari, one of the most prominent Latin American artists and a long-time devotee of transcription and re-transcription of ideological messages. In his Sin título (Caligrafía) (Untitled [Calligraphy]), seen on the cover of this book, Ferrari transcribes the article in barely legible script, omitting punctuation, splitting sentences into the smallest conveyors of (non-)meaning, calligraphically rearranging them so that the words and phrases wash up against each other, visually commenting on the “fluidity of contact” with the public that the government professedly sought to establish with this article.1 Belonging to the visual arts genre of deformed calligraphies that the artist perfected, Ferrari’s artwork probes the interstices between language, ideology, and their human producer and re-negotiator. It is these very orifices, and the challenges of navigating them,
that the book Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions sets out to explore.
