The Danger of Empty Words

Current media empties words of meaning. The vacuum of meaning means that words can become shiny objects that justify terror.

January 6th riot at Capitol

In the aftermath of January 6, 2021, the group that attacked the Capitol were called, almost universally, insurrectionists. Most Americans were horrified by the desecration of the Capitol and the mob violence, especially when directed toward police. In the months and years that followed, however, the MAGA world regained control of the narrative, at least, on rightwing media like FOX News, by shifting the language. Insurrectionists became patriots or freedom fighters. The mob became peaceful protestors or tourists. Disrupting the political process became defending freedom.

Politicians have always attempted to spin facts, control the narration, and work the news cycle. But this is something else. This is a total distortion of reality.

This drift from reality could only happen, I am going to argue, when words have become empty.

In the history of media, we have reached a point where words have lost a shared meaning, a stable meaning, and sometimes all meaning. This makes it hard to engage in democratic dialogue. It also makes it hard to see what is in front of us.

The problem might even be broader than words and semantics. Empty words might only be a symptom of a larger historical shift. We may be living in a time when the world itself is becoming empty of meaning.

In the June 2025 issue of Harpers, Karl Ove Knausgaard published “The Enchanted World: On Finding Mystery in the Digital Age.” It is, not surprising, a long and winding essay. Knausgaard is best known for My Struggle—an autobiography, memoir, nonfictive novel, or all of the above—that was published in six volumes and runs about 3,600 pages in the English translation. I’ve read the entire work, and, believe it or not, Knausgaard held my interest the entire way. I finished it several years ago, and I continue to think about it.

So, I expected that Knausgaard would have some interesting things to say about living in the digital age.

In our digital age, Knausgaard writes, everything becomes image, which “empties the world.” This is how he explains it:

The feeling is one of loss of the world. As if the world were fading, as if there were less of it. This can seem paradoxical, especially considering the brutal, horrifying wars taking place right now, which, with all their death and suffering, seem like an overload of reality, but they come here as images; they are two-dimensional and manipulable, and they arrive in the midst of a flood of other images. Within me, there exists a feeling that what I see, I control, and that I in a way have an overarching perspective on it. All the images I’ve seen of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met, create a kind of pseudomemory from a pseudoworld that I don’t participate in. The images arrive already complete; there is no communication between them and myself, no reciprocal exchange.

Knausgaard is writing about how an image can be detached from the world, and, because we are increasingly living in a world of images, we too are detached. We might have a “pseudomemory” of a “pseudoworld” that is not derived from an event, something that happened in a particular time and place, once and only once, that was part of our immediate experience.

What Knausgaard describes, the way that images empty our world of meaning, is consistent with postmodern theory, especially in the area of linguistics. To discuss modern linguistics, a good place to start is Ferdinand Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics (1911) and his discussion of signs. Saussure explained that a sign has a signifier and a signified. The signifier, to use Saussure’s example, could be the word “tree.” The word “tree” has meaning because it represents a signified, which is our concept of “tree.”

Notice that this system is already a step away from the material world. I might develop my notion of what a “tree” is from seeing a lot of real world trees, but the signified is still an abstraction—not a “tree” I can see and touch—but my idea of trees in general.

As an extension of Saussure’s theory, postmodern theorists often write about the “web of signifiers.” By this, they mean that words are meaningful because they interact with other words within a text. Although the phrase predates the Internet, it helps us to understand how words and images function within a media saturated culture—the digital world. The meaning of words is reduced to images. The images of places I have never been, as Knausgaard points out, seem as real as what I see when I walk through my neighborhood, but they are not the same.

The images of social media are detached from my experience. They are placed into a “web of signifiers” within a digital world. They have immediate impact from the “now” of interacting with other images. They have less connection to my lived experience—to the material world, to history, to my personal memories.

Images, unlike my personal experience, can be cloned, placed into a new context, and reframed.

All this, I am sure, sounds abstract, so let me try to make it more concrete.

If I ask you to conjure up images associated with the word “patriot,” my guess is that you will come up with images of men in colonial era dress, not even uniforms, but civilian clothes, tattered and stained from a recent battle. You will see men holding muskets, perhaps alongside a young boy who is marking time on a snare drum. One of the patriots would hold a tattered American flag with thirteen stars. This collective image (the signifier) refers to the American Revolutionary War (the signified). Because of history lessons and political speeches, we connect the image with other signifieds—the struggle for freedom, American values, and American history.

Now, I want you to try to focus on just the images. In other words, try to empty these images of meaning.

And, at the same time, conjure up images of the January 6^th event on the steps of the Capitol, just the images, just what you saw on your television. Do you see any similarities? Your images probably include people engaged in battle and waving flags, maybe some of them emblazoned with “Don’t Tread on Me.”

At an image level, these two events are similar, at a glance, if we don’t analyze it. We see the passion, the fight, and we are moved.

The point here is that images, detached from their original context, don’t carry stable meaning. The images are flattened out and emptied. The vacuum of meaning will be filled with something—usually intense emotions, maybe emotions related to unresolved trauma. Emotions, like images, can be detached from their original context and released into a new context. The images trigger us in a primal and visceral way. They draw us into a conflict between pure good and pure evil.

If the images of January 6^th remain within media, they are easily manipulated, as we saw in the aftermath of the event. How are the images manipulated? By selection and repetition. By reframing the images with voice over narration. By supplying the actions with purely good or purely evil motives.

In Brutalism, Achille Mbembe writes: “What gives digital technologies their power is their plasticity; that is, their ability to be loosened from their original ecology and grafted onto other cultural matrixes.” To understand what Mbembe means, just think of mimes, which are so central to the digital world.

The person constructing a mime take an image and detaches it from its original context. This flattens the image. It now has no history and no meaning. They then manipulate the image and add a few words to create a message that is without context and without history, without connection to lived experience.

In The Ethics of Nonfiction, I argued that all ethics are grounded in the human body. In a world of images detached from human bodies, how can we have ethics?

In a digital world of images, it is easy to understand how “insurrectionist” can be replaced by “patriot” as if these words were synonymous. They are not synonyms. They have, however, lost their connection to the world—our connection to a specific time and place.

How can we live in a world of images?

Later in his essay, Knausgaard writes about the small garden behind his home in London. He says that, even though he often sat in the garden to write, he was not very aware of the plants and small trees in pots, so he rarely watered them. The plants and flowers eventually died.

One day, he asked his yardman to plant some new flowers and trees. His yardman said, “It will be better if you plant them yourself.” So Knausgaard became an amateur gardener. He did some planting. This made him more connected to his garden, and he began to take better care of it. Knausgaard writes:

In a few weeks the garden had gone from being nothing—“the garden,” essentially empty and interchangeable, with no meaning except as a place I happened to be in—to something I was deeply familiar with and cared about, thought about, nurtured. It had become full of meaning.

We have to consciously create connections to our time and place or we will live in a lost world of images. Our values and even the meaning of our words will be ungrounded. Here, I mean “ungrounded” both in a literal sense (as in, not connected to the earth) and a philosophical sense (as in, without the support of arguments, evidence, history, events).

Knausgaard gives new meaning to the advice at the end of Voltaire’s Candide: “Tend your own garden.”

I want to relate Knausgaard’s point to a small bit of recent history. About 80 percent of the small town of Kennett, Missouri, voted for Trump in the 2025 election. One of their concerns, not surprisingly, was immigration. They had seen images of people who did not look like them crossing our Southern border. They had seen caravans of immigrants moving toward Texas, which looked something out of a zombie movie.

The citizens of Kennett supported Trump’s policy to deport immigrants until Ice agents arrested and detained Carol, a Chinese immigrant who lived among them, someone they knew to be a good person, a good mother, a hard worker—a friend. Carol had lived among them for twenty years. But she overstayed her visa. Carol is now scheduled for deportation.

The citizens of Kennett are now outraged. They are wearing “Bring Carol Home” t-shirts. They are signing petitions. They wanted Trump to deport the scary immigrants, the violent gang members they knew as only images, as detached from their reality as zombies. They didn’t want Trump to deport a mom, a friend, a person they talk to almost every day.

Knausgaard’s point is that, if we find ways to interact with the material world, we are more aware of it. We care about our relationship to it. As we become connected to our world, we find meaning in it. This is different than interacting with images of images of images, that have lost their connection to time and place, that have no context, that have often been manipulated in order to manipulate us.

Here is another way to paraphrase Knausgaard: In a digital world of images, we need to consciously make connections to the material world, to find meaning in that world, and to connect that meaning to the words we use.

The way that we form the connections between our experience of a material world, a particular time and place, events that occurs once and only once, events that cannot be duplicated and cloned and manipulated, is by writing personal narratives.

Knausgaard doesn’t directly say this, but I think he would agree with it. So would Hannah Arendt. Writing personal narratives, even if this is only in our journals, is how we can build the democratic self.