Deranged

Lost in a Semantic Fog

Words are fun. The origins of words are especially fun to investigate. Let’s take a look at the word deranged. Its origins are older and more literal than you might think.

Deranged comes from the Old French desrangier, which breaks down into two parts: des, meaning away or apart, and rangier, meaning to set in a rank or to put in a row. The modern words range and rank share that same root.

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In the 1300s, deranged was a military term. A line of soldiers broken and scattered was deranged, literally dis-rowed, knocked out of formation. In the 1700s, the word broadened into general disarray. Machinery could be deranged. A schedule could be deranged. Anything thrown into confusion fit the definition.

As they tend to do, the meaning evolved.

In the late 18th century, the meaning of the word deranged turned inward and began to apply to the human mind. The logic was straightforward: a sane mind was an ordered mind. Someone whose thoughts refused to stay in their proper rows was deranged. Their internal furrows were misaligned.

Throughout its evolution, deranged was a precise word describing something specific. Not anger, nor passion, nor even irrationality, but the collapse of internal structure. An indication that the rows were not rowing.

Languages are living things. Their meanings and usages are something that can be studied, tracked, catalogued, and disassembled.

In the 1960s and 70s, a group of mostly French philosophers began arguing something that felt, at the time, like a purely academic exercise. Language itself, they said, was never innocent. Words did not point to stable, fixed things in the real world. Meaning was always slipping, always dependent on context, always shaped by the power structures of whoever was doing the defining.

Roland Barthes got there early. His 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” argued that the meaning of a text is not controlled by the person who wrote it. It is produced by the reader. As Barthes put it: “A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” The author’s intention is irrelevant. Once the words leave the writer, they belong to whoever receives them.

Michel Foucault took a different angle on the same problem. He was interested in how power determines what counts as knowledge, what counts as truth, and who gets to say so. In a 1976 interview titled “Truth and Power,” later collected in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, he put it plainly: “Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth — that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true.” Discourse, for Foucault, was never neutral. Every system of language reflects and reinforces the structures of power that produced it. To control the language is to control the reality.

Jacques Derrida called his contribution différance (difference/deferral), the idea that meaning is perpetually deferred, never quite arriving, never fully settled. In his 1968 essay “Différance,” originally presented to the French Philosophical Society, he wrote: “The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself… when the present cannot be presented, we signify… the sign, in this sense, is deferred presence.” Words point to other words. The thing itself is never quite there.

The word that names the disorder we are describing, deranged, is French. The philosophers who theorized the disorder are French. That is either a coincidence or language has a sense of humor. Tu m’étonnes ! (no kidding.)

Together, these three Frenchmen gave the academy a working theory of language as unstable, contested, and inseparable from power. In the seminars, this was understood as liberation. If dominant culture had always controlled the rows, then knocking them over was a radical act.

It was a philosophy built in classrooms and coffee shops, published in journals and debated on television. Still, outside the academy it remained largely theoretical, an argument about language rather than a manual for using it.

However, there were some people reading/listening and learning that words could be tools. Tools that could be weaponized. By anyone.

A former naval officer, Goldman Sachs investment banker, Hollywood producer, co-founder of Breitbart News, chief strategist in the Trump White House, and host of the influential far-right podcast War Room, Steve Bannon is one of the most consequential political architects of the modern right. Born in 1953 in Norfolk, Virginia, he came of age intellectually in the late 1960s and 70s, precisely when poststructuralism was flowering in academia and the culture wars were beginning to heat up. He was in his 20s when Derrida and Foucault were becoming unavoidable in serious intellectual circles, when the argument that meaning is made rather than found was moving from radical provocation to established theory.

Bannon was swimming in a culture that was learning to look at language the way a mechanic looks at an engine. How the words made the machine run and what could be tweaked. Meaning is not fixed. It is produced. Whoever controls the production controls the reality. Not that Bannon read Derrida, but that he operates in a world Derrida helped describe.

The ideas and tactics of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin may have helped Bannon form his strategic model. Lenin was the architect of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the man who took a fractured radical movement and seized control of the most powerful state in the world through a combination of ideological discipline, media control, and the deliberate dismantling of existing institutions. He did not win by persuasion. He won by making the existing order impossible to defend.

“I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Bannon told writer Ronald Radosh at a party at his Capitol Hill townhouse in 2013.

The original Leninist phrase referred to the essential sectors of the economy, heavy industry, banking, infrastructure, the levers that control everything else. Bannon applied it to culture. Academia. Media. Language itself. Control those, and you control what is thinkable.

His most famous tactical statement makes the method explicit. In February 2018, he told writer Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Do not argue. Do not persuade. Destabilize. If nothing means anything, your opponent cannot land a punch because there is no stable ground to punch from.

That is Derrida with a wrecking ball instead of a pen.

Bannon understood what the poststructuralists had demonstrated and what they had failed to anticipate. The technique was neutral. It did not belong to liberation. It belonged to whoever picked it up.

Now the people who took their cues from him quote Lenin in legislative chambers and call it liberty. The rows are not just knocked over. Someone is building something else in their place and calling it order.

A recent Atlantic review ( The Banality of MAGA Fiction by Jonathan Chait) of Republican operative, John Tillman’s The Political Vise captured the paradox in a single passage. Chairs noted that Tillman approvingly quotes Lenin’s call for his followers to seize the “commanding heights,” adding that the difference, according to him, is that unlike Lenin’s Communist revolution, the right-wing revolt will empower people who are good. “Those of us who love liberty,” the author writes, “can once again take control of the culture.”

The reviewer called this Orwellian irony. Any culture controlled by a political faction is, by definition, not at liberty.

That sentence should not need to be written. The contradiction is immediate and obvious, so much so that I chuckled when I read it. But sadly, the follow up sentence.does need to be written. We have arrived at a moment where the obvious requires explanation. Where a reviewer cannot trust the reader to feel the paradox land on their own and must stop to point at it.

That is what word collapse looks like in practice. It is not just that “liberty” has been emptied of meaning. It is that the emptying has gone so far that the irony of using it to describe control no longer registers without assistance. The rows are not just disordered. It is all just a messy nonsensical weed patch with woodchucks throwing dirt at each other, saying “no, you are.” What a mess our garden has become.

Then again, maybe I just have some sort of derangement syndrome.

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