Shock

SHOCK. Folk-etymology operates through the discovery – or fabrication – of coincidences. It takes into account those aspects of language which a strictly linguistic perspective cannot, a ‘remainder’ which is accumulative, ‘adding’ in ways that do not necessarily ‘add up’.

Homi Bhabha – in conversation with William Kentridge – characterises Surrealist practices in this way, an ‘additionalist’ approach to symbolism, art, music and language that does not require a coherent final ‘synthesis’; where détournement (rerouting) replaces denouement (resolution). Gilles Deleuze likewise articulates his philosophy of ‘multiplicity’ through this use of the ‘and…’, rejecting the Hegelian conception of dialectical thought (and history) where thesis + antithesis = synthesis, for a ‘rhizomatic’ this + this + this… and so on. Such accumulative dynamics are often described by Deleuzians as ‘lines of flight’ – in his essay, in Dialogues with Claire Parnet, On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature – he writes:

“One only discovers worlds through a long, broken flight.”

It is for this reason that Deleuze (somewhat provocatively) considers ‘Anglo-American literature’ as superior to that of classic French authors: Melville's Moby Dick, Woolf’s Orlando, Kerouac’s On the Road, Fitzgerald’s essays, etc. In each case the characters are defined by their ‘lines’ or trajectories, their relations to the world, and not by some ineffable psychological depth or essential identity. Why might this be a uniquely ‘anglophonic’ approach? Deleuze and Parnet trace this to the empirical tradition of British philosophy, a worldview which foregrounds experience and sense-perception as the basis of the intellect. In his re-reading of empiricists such as Hume, Deleuze shows how this foregrounding of experience articulates relationality not only as a ‘mental association’ between objects in the world (and through which we can understand those objects epistemologically), but that these relations are themselves real, external (i.e. ontological) events that don't depend on the nature of what they relate. A book might be read and sold and copied and burned but its ‘essence’ does not determine which of these relations it enters into. Détourning the Kantian project of ‘transcendental idealism’, Deleuze calls this philosophy ‘transcendental empiricism’, and through it seeks to show how ideas and events are generated from encounters with the world in medias res.

In medias res is the accepted Latin phrase for the idea of starting from, or existing in, ‘the middle of things’. From within a milieu that is at once an environment, a time, a medium and its internal and external relations. In a linguistic context we might call this a ‘phonetic environment’: the manner in which a ‘phone’, any human speech sound, is impacted – and in some way consists of – the other sounds adjacent to and surrounding it. Take the ‘short A’ /æ/ in the middle of ‘mat’, the ‘LOT’ vowel /ɒ/ in the centre of a British ‘shock’ – these sounds must be approached through their relations to other sounds; from a world of sounds of which they are a part.

Etymological history – as an essentially genealogical approach to language – struggles to articulate the world in medias res. It dematerialises the object of its study and prioritises the reconstruction of more-or-less speculative ‘origins’, favouring linear narratives that may branch into new meanings, accents and dialects, but which ultimately seek a singular root or causal line. In such an account, shock is said to have entered the English language (in the mid-C16th) via the Old and Middle French choquer and chocq, quasi-military terms meaning ‘to clash in battle’ or more generally ‘jolt’ in some violent manner. Before this, choquer is thought to have derived from the Picard chuquer, the Frankish *skukkōn, and the speculatively reconstructed Proto-Germanic *skukkōną, an iteration of *skakaną, meaning to ‘swing’, ‘stir’ or ‘escape’. This hypothetical term is our ‘origin’ or ‘root’.

However, within the Middle English of the C15th, at least three similar (sounding) terms were already in use: shog, schoke and scoc (or shake). To (1) shog – still in use in Modern Scots – means to ‘shake’ or ‘rock’, derived from the Middle English ​​shoggen, an apparently onomatopoetic or alliterative translation of shokken (itself derived from Middle Low German), giving a sense of both ‘moving rapidly’ and ‘crowding together’. In this last aspect we might find some influence from a preexisting C14th English (2) schoke, (derived again from the Germanic) which defined ‘sheaves or unbound stalks of wheat’, i.e. ‘a shock of corn’ (today we might say ‘a shock of hair’), and which, by the C15th, had taken on the sense of ‘a throng’, or ‘crowd of people’. And lastly, the archaic (3) scoc – which later became ‘shake’ – understood as a poetic word for ‘journeying’, or ‘departing’... think ‘shake a leg’?

These connections are coincidences, they do not – for etymologists – surpass the causal threshold necessary to warrant inclusion into the official history of ‘shock’, as we use it today. But a coincidence is a kind of ‘relation’ that a word can retrospectively enter into, one that is external to the ‘term’ itself, one which asks us to reconsider what it is exactly that an etymology traces: a word, a sound, its meaning, its ‘semantic drift’, its ‘environment’, phonetic or otherwise?

In his theory of the remainder Jean-Jacques Lecercle argues that words accumulate ‘force’ over time. This ‘force’ is historic, pragmatic and material – but often, in some way, untraceable. One might argue that this force is the effect, or product, of coincidence. Coincidences that cannot, could not – not even with a perfect record of all utterances spoken through history – be stitched back together. That – for example – in titling his 1980 documentary series on the development of modern art, The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes drew in not only the ‘official’ history of ‘choquer’ – the ‘clash of battle’, and military conflict, the First- and Second World Wars – but, also, somehow, the ‘force’ of the shogging ‘oscillations’ of history, the archaic idea of its ‘departure’ (of scoc), and of the ‘masses’, the throng of a C14th schoke, who are its members.

From this perspective, etymology (or perhaps only its ‘folk’ counterpart) enters into the same discourse as artistic practice itself, but in some way reverses it, moving from – or between – ‘meaning’ to ‘feeling’. In closing his 8-part The Shock of the New, Hughes (who might charitably be described as a ‘lower-c’ conservative) delivered an address to his audience:

“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”

If folk-etymology were to have an aesthetic, a politics which could be embodied in some way, we might identify it as precisely the inverse of Hughes’ summary. That our ‘basic project’ would be to make the world and its history comprehensible through its destruction and multiplication, its ‘disjunctive’ and ‘conjunctive’ syntheses (as Deleuze might say), and through the generative, ‘surreal’, ‘additionalist’ production of difference. Lecercle speaks of the ‘violence’ inherent within language, its capacity to produce material effects on the subject. The ‘shock’ of language might be the event in which historical residues collide in the present, unsettling the speaker and opening the space for new relations, new senses, new worlds.

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This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout