Telephone is a game played by youngsters in the early grades of school and at birthday parties. The object is simple: someone introduces an original phrase, like “I’m proud to be Canadian” and, through whispers and twitters into their neighbour’s ear as they sit in a circle, each participant passes on the little prize, the simple nugget of a phrase, to her neighbour. Hilarity ensues, naturally, when the verbiage becomes sufficiently garbled in barely-audible translation such that a whole other sentence and/or meaning appears – all this to ears baited and primed in pursuit of a good time.
“Ms. Martinez smells like burritos,” becomes “my teeny shells stubbed your toes,” and so on.
Not all alterations to the sentence are unintentional misappropriations on the part of participants, however. Even an earnest player might embrace the urge to freelance the auditory facts. Just as the aforementioned Ms. Martinez may, in wondrous fun-teacher fashion, have introduced the original sentence about her odour to have some fun with ethnic identity, so too might a sneaky student along the way alter the words in play. Elsewhere, a pleasant enough sentiment like “Easter eggs are my favourite holiday treat” can, with the knowing application of an excess of creative and/or poetic license, become a saying that says something else entirely: “Principle Wamsteeker peed in the hallway.” As intended, hilarity can prevail and sometimes (I can say from youthful, mirthful, experience) an escorted trip to the principle’s office can ensue! So don’t play this game in airports, folks.
As the saying goes, according to the bunny Thumper from the Disney film Bambi for those keeping score, if we don’t have anything nice and constructive to say we best be saying nothing at all.
Yet, when we do engage in saying anything at all, be it a fortune cookie sized aphorism, a wedding toast speech, or a weighty tome of a final essay project, we must know and understand not only our audience but also the material content to which we refer. Things unravel oh-so quickly, when the rules of the game are ignored. From fake news websites to deep fake images, we easily take for granted the reality of what we see and read—thereby assuming that in back of truth and lies is an ironclad reality that can, in fact, be knowable once and for all.
In 1981, Jean Baudrillard duly diagnosed the emerging nature of a computerized, if not yet digital, culture: “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.” In the manner of knowing so much that we know too much, and in the end know nothing at all, Baudrillard’s conception of a world of illusions that transcend objectivity brings, in his writing, to mind an old fable. The piece was written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares:
“Of Exactitude in Science
…In that empire, the craft of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city, and the map of the empire itself an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a map of the Empire that was of the same scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the study of cartography, succeeding generations came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome, and, not without irreverence, they abandoned it to the rigours of sun and rain. In the western deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar; in the whole nation, no other relic is left of the discipline of geography.
—From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda”.
Think here of Google earth search engines revealing historic pictures of our back yard so accurate that we can practically see into our own bathroom window. If all of life was surveilled, we’d no longer be ourselves, or feel natural anymore; like the old computer game the Sims, we’d become a simulation of our original self so perfectly mapped that we’d not know who we were. The childhood game of telephone likewise dictates a singular message to its participants, a universal road map as such, applicable regardless of the literal sentence being shared or the actual academic discipline on offer. The message is always the same and contained in the manner of its dispensation: listen and repeat what you’ve heard, and above all follow the rules.
In back of losing oneself in representation and appropriation is the generalized assumption that yes, we do have a true self and a knowable external, earthly, realm to match. The expectation is that if we dare to truly encounter truth, to go there as it were, we’d reveal and uncover many durable facts and a progressive time would be had by all. But lo, CBC radio is replete with earnest academics making this or that public policy case, based on data, and finding their life’s work falling on deaf ears! While naturally we point to ignorance or arrogance when the powers that be embrace views and acts of which we disapprove, something else may be at work – something explicable by Post Modern social theory. What if truth is far more a production, a figment of our imaginations and projections, than a bundle of realities waiting to be discovered? And why are we so sure that consequences stem from truths we see or say; correlation does not always equal causation, as many an insufferably pedant is quick to point out. And what if even the greatest of clarity, like that ringing endorsement of Ricola cough drops sounding musically across the Swiss Alps, is not enough to truly diagnose the stuffy-stuff of the universe? Anyone who’s watched a parent diagnose their child with this or that disorder, all the while categorically defining said dis-ease through liminal manifestations of their own behavior, knows that we humans do tend to create, deity-like, the world and others in our image.
In the spirit of productive criticism and self criticism, the better to critique our shortcomings, post-modernism here implies a rigorous extension of the desire for truth. A truth that, truth be told, is built right into the workings of the method by which truth is revealed, concealed, and dispensed: science that demands of adherents a certain facetious adherence to specific standards of conduct: method, in short. As a child learns, when imploring an adult for more ice cream only to be rebuffed for having already had their ice cream, the reality of what is depends largely on what counts to those holding the purse strings. On the bright side, we can mouth the words being told to us, tow the party line in the cultural game of telephone, all while our inner realms hum along like the well-oiled critical thinking machines that they are.
References
Borge, J.L & Casares, A.B. (1975). ‘Of Exactitude in Science’. Retrieved from https://sites.williams.edu/thea228/research/textual-research/borges-of-exactitude-in-science/
Ricola. (1997). ‘Commercial’. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-1ik3S6Ct4
