DISCLAIMER: This
post introduces a new direction I hope to take in the future, although not with
every post I make. I focus in the
following essay on a specific work of nonfiction; although I still certainly
intend to write about SF books and cinema, I also hope to, every once in a
while, focus on a piece of theoretical or philosophical nonfiction that has
occupied my fancy. I have amended my
"Welcome" post in order to account for this shift. I do hope that any studies of nonfiction
works taken up here will contribute to my studies of SF fiction in the
future. Finally, I hope that this slight
alteration won't scare away too many readers.
Many thanks, and happy new year!
“Cosmically and
causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which
omitted to mention its occurrence might, from an impersonal point of view,
suffer only a very trivial imperfection.
In describing the world, subjectivity is a vice. Kant spoke of himself as having effected a
‘Copernican revolution’, but he would have been more accurate if he had spoken
of a ‘Ptolemaic counter-revolution’, since he put Man back at the centre [sic]
from which Copernicus had dethroned him.”
~Bertrand
Russell
I
include the word “man” in the title of this post in order to further invoke the
title of a rather famous essay, on which I will elaborate in the following
post. Of course, the word “man” should
be read synonymously as “human,” and I ask that any gendered biases be
forgiven. I like to think that if the
writer had been alive today, he would have appealed to our sensibilities and
used the word “human” instead.
This
post derives its title from two primary sources: Bertrand Russell’s quote on
knowledge (cited above), and Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic essay “On Language as
Such and on the Language of Man.” My
interest in Benjamin’s essay stems from something of a fascination with it
rather than an academic responsibility.
It is a difficult piece, and I don’t proclaim any right or ability to
faithfully and effectively explicate his argument, which incorporates an odd
blend of Saussurean linguistics, historical materialism, and more-than-slightly
mystical theology. However, I do
perceive a potent speculative capability in Benjamin’s work, which I hope to
explore in this post.
This speculative capability resides in Benjamin’s
emphasis on language’s material issuance.
Near the end of the essay, he writes:
Just as the language of poetry is
partly, if not solely, founded on the name language of man, it is very
conceivable that the language of sculpture or painting is founded on certain
kinds of thing languages, that in them we find a translation of the languages
of things into an infinitely higher language, which may still be of the same
sphere. We are concerned here with nameless, nonacoustic languages, languages
issuing from matter; here we should recall the material community of things
in their communication [emphasis added]. (Benjamin 330).
Benjamin does not
define “language as such” as strictly human; human language merely names
things, but the limits of “language as such” lie beyond naming: “It should not
be accepted that we know of no languages other than that of man, for this is
untrue. We only know of no naming language other than that of man;
to identify naming language with language as such is to rob linguistic theory
of its deepest insights. It is therefore the linguistic being of man
to name things” (317). Beyond the
narrow limits of naming, language subsists in all things and takes infinite
forms.
Benjamin delineates two important concepts that require
clarification if we are to continue exploring his essay: linguistic being and
mental being. Of these two concepts, he
writes the following: “Mental being communicates itself in, not through, a
language, which means: it is not outwardly identical with linguistic
being. Mental being is identical with
linguistic being only insofar as it is capable of communication. What is communicable in a mental entity is
its linguistic entity” (316). The
linguistic being loses something along the way; it cannot communicate the
entirety, or totality, of the mental being, but only the portion of it that is
communicable. Acknowledging the danger
of slipping into tautology, Benjamin argues: “This proposition is
untautological, for it means: that which in a mental entity is communicable is its language. On this ‘is’ (equivalent to “is immediately”)
everything depends. Not that which appears most clearly in its language is
communicable in a mental entity […] but this capacity for communication is language itself” (316). Linguistic being testifies to its own
existence in language, and this being would go unnoticed (indeed, would be
nonexistent) were it not for the expressive capacity of language. Benjamin has taken something of a brief
detour in order to drive home the point that language resides in things themselves. This is something of a shocker for those of
us traditionally educated in the Lacanian symbolic order, the boundary of
language that the subject must pass through, so to speak. In contrast (and prior) to Lacan’s notion of
the symbolic, Benjamin radically removes language as something that all things
must pass through, and reestablishes it as something that all things inherently
possess: “It is fundamental that this mental being communicates itself in language and not through language. Languages
therefore have no speaker, if this means someone communicates through these languages” (315-6).
It is worth spending just a few brief moments on this
argument since it illuminates Benjamin’s intellectual mysticism (and, as I will
argue, speculative potency). An
important point underlies his argument: all language communicates itself, thus
exposing the linguistic being of things and the mental being of humans. Language performs this binary function
simultaneously, but Benjamin distinctly separates them. The things that human beings name do not
communicate the mental being of humanity through
their names, but only their own linguistic being that corresponds to a portion
of their mental being; naming is the linguistic mode, and process, by which
human beings communicate among one another, navigating the world of things. The mental being of humanity, in contrast,
communicates itself in the general act of
naming; in a kind of emergent consequence, the entire complex system of
human language communicates humanity’s mental being. Not individual names of things, but the
complex nature of human language itself; therein resides the mental being of
humankind.
From here, Benjamin drafts a kind of hierarchy of
languages, and this leads him into regions currently dismissed as either
mystical, or hopelessly speculative.
Benjamin prompts this speculative critique by means of a question: to
whom does humanity communicate itself?
The short answer (Benjamin’s answer) is: “in naming the mental being of man communicates itself to God”
(318). I think we all saw that coming;
but the essay presents material that concerns more than just theologians. For Benjamin, human language – naming –
communicates the linguistic being of the things it names, and the mental being
of the organism (i.e. human) that uses it:
Naming is that by which nothing beyond
it is communicated, and in which
language communicates itself absolutely.
In naming the mental entity that communicates itself is language […] Name as the heritage of
human language therefore vouches for the fact that language as such is the mental being of man; and only for this
reason is the mental being of man, alone among all mental entities,
communicable without residue. On this is
founded the difference between human language and the language of things. But because the mental being of man is
language itself, he cannot communicate himself by it but only in it. (318)
Humans cannot
communicate themselves “by” language; they can name themselves, but this only
captures a portion of being, the portion that is communicable by naming. The entire mental being of man emerges only
in the presentation of language itself, of the complex human practice of
naming. Benjamin thus aligns this
presentation of language, the emergence of such a complex system, with the full
mental being of humankind.
This assertion leads Benjamin to the notion of logos, the
Fall of Man, and the problem of revelation, all devoutly theological
concepts. Revelation appears as a kind
of mediating term between “what is expressed and expressible and what is
inexpressible and unexpressed” (320).
Revelation guides Benjamin through a sometimes confusing explication of
expressibility; revelation, he contends, suggests that
the expression that is linguistically
most existent (i.e., most fixed) is linguistically the most rounded and
definitive; in a word, the most expressed is at the same time the purely mental. Exactly this […] is meant by the concept of
revelation, if it takes the inviolability of the word as the only and
sufficient condition and characteristic of the divinity of the mental being
that is expressed in it. The highest
mental region of religion is (in the concept of revelation) at the same time
the only one that does not know the inexpressible. (321)
The expressible, of
course, relies on sound; but “[t]hings are denied the pure formal principle language
– sound” (321). The languages of things,
thus, are imperfect; rather, things must “communicate to one another through a
more or less material community. This
community is immediate and infinite, like every linguistic communication; it is
magical (for there is also a magic of matter)” (321). Benjamin states that human language possesses
a feature incommensurable with other “thing-ly” languages; namely, it operates
within a network that is immaterial and (as has been shown) “purely mental,”
and its immaterial and mental power manifests in the phenomenon of sound
(321). Benjamin even finds mystical
support for this argument in the Old Testament: “The Bible expresses this
symbolic fact when it says that God breathes his breath into man: this is at once
life and mind and language” (321). With
God as Benjamin’s potential prime mover, I here want to posit a break with
Benjamin’s argument. We will continue to
cite it, occasionally, and will indeed have cause to return to it; but for the
time being, this is where we part ways.
Benjamin lays a radical framework for language not as an
apparatus in the Lacanian/poststructuralist sense, but as a form of being
inherent in things themselves. It does
not exist in its own right, as an independent form, but exists as appearance,
as presentation; it forms part of the being of things. I will always remember when, during a
conversation with him in his office at the University of Chicago, Bill Brown
described Benjamin as trying to locate a “fossil language.” At the time I was unsure what that entailed,
but I believe that it illuminates Benjamin’s speculative streak, latent though
it may be; I intend the speculative potentiality of his argument as an
alternative to the more obvious theological program apparent in the essay. The speculative question can be posed in the
following manner: what if things, rather than being possessed of a certain
divine being (i.e. a being “breathed” into them by God), instead possessed
language strictly in its material form?
This would not be a language bestowed upon things by a higher power, or
a metaphysical essence that resists representation or human access (as in
Heideggerian phenomenological thought), but a strong persistence of the
capacity for communication in inanimate things.
Even if things don’t actively “commune” with animate subjects (animals,
humans, aliens, etc.), their potential for harboring language is not precluded;
we have to imagine that language does not consist of ideas, nor does it derive
from consciousness. We have to imagine,
for a moment, that language is nothing more than matter.
Language usually ascends to the highest rung of
idealistic representation in critical circles.
Quentin Meillassoux most recently emphasizes this point in his book After Finitude: “Generally speaking,
statements are ideal insofar as they possess a signifying reality; but their
eventual referents are not necessarily ideal (the cat on the mat is real,
though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal.)” (qtd. in Brassier 86). Language appears “ideal” because its content
is referential; the subject of a sentence is merely represented by the
sentence, but actually exists elsewhere.
Language presents an “idea” of its subject. While this is true, I want to insist that
language fulfills a far more powerful task; just as the very system of language
communicates the mental being of humankind (in Benjamin’s argument), so the
system of languages in things (whatever these languages may be) also exhibit
emergent qualities. I want to distance
myself from Benjamin’s hierarchy of languages wherein human language possesses
a greater power to communicate humanity’s mental being because humanity’s mental being is
language; the languages of things, presumably, is somehow inferior, or
lacking: “the mental entity [of a thing] that communicates itself in language
is not language itself but something to be distinguished from it” (Benjamin
315). Only the mental being of humankind
is language; the mental being of
things, on the other hand, falls short. What
does the language of a thing then communicate?
Its linguistic being must correspond to a portion of its mental being;
just as human names do not express
humanity’s mental being, but only portions of the mental beings of things, the
units of thing-ly language do not express its own mental being. We encounter an obvious dilemma at this
point: if human language is made up of names, then what are thing-ly languages
made up of?
We must recall that things need not partake of naming in
order to partake of language. Language
subsists in things even if they do not practice the art of naming. But what is this language? What do the systems of thing-ly languages communicate, and to whom do they
communicate it? How can we fathom
language, in a non-naming mode, fashioned into the very matter of the world
itself? In a segment concerning
Schelling, in his recent book Less Than
Nothing, Slavoj Žižek writes:
In his most daring speculative attempt
in Weltalter, Schelling tries to
reconstruct (to ‘narrate’) in this way the very rise of logos, of articulated discourse, out of the pre-logical Ground: logos is an attempt to resolve the
debilitating deadlock of this Ground.
This is why the two true highpoints of German Idealism are the middle
Schelling and the mature Hegel: they did what no one else dared to do – they
introduced a gap into the Ground itself. (Žižek 13).
Logos
is the divine word, the “breath” of life and language bestowed upon the world
by God (and from which is derived our word “logic”); the “pre-logical Ground”
is thus the realm of dead, inanimate matter prior to this breathing. It is the actual, material world prior to the
advent of language and history, or what Meillassoux refers to as the “ancestral
realm” (Meillassoux 10). This ancestral
realm remains vastly separated from human experience, having existed prior not
only to human life, but all life
(Meillassoux situates ancestrality roughly contemporaneously with the accretion
of the earth), not to mention human language, logic, and knowledge. If we avoid the solution that God breathed
language into all things, then I want to suggest that language has subsisted in
things since the very accretion of matter
in universe. If language is
material, instead of ideal, then language might have been a consistent element
in things since their very material accumulation. Indeed, language itself is matter.
The meaning that arises between signifying statements and
human linguists is thus, once again, an emergent
phenomenon. Meaning does not inhere
in things, nor even in language itself; rather, the complexity of all systems
of language results in phenomena that cannot be accounted for when observing
singular linguistic units. Benjamin
writes that humankind “alone has a
language that is complete both in its universality and in its intensity”
(Benjamin 319). Benjamin insists here on
the fact that human language strives to name all things; but names taken at
random, in their singularity and independence, cannot reveal either their own
meaning or the mental being of humanity.
Meaning among names comes about only through their difference and
distinction from one another; meaning is differential. A word references something, or means
something, because it does not reference something else. Thus, only the entire system of language can
ground meaning among its units; furthermore, it reveals the mental being of its
practitioners. Material conditions can
explain, and account for, all such emergent phenomena. Specifically, emergence theorizes how
immensely complex patterns and systems can arise from combinations of simple
units. If viewed in the context of
emergence theory, Benjamin’s essay might in fact demonstrate how a collective
“superconsciousness” could emerge out of the system of human languages; the
complex mental being of humanity. I want
to push this idea to include not only human language, but the languages of
things as well. The relevance and
practicality of such an idea may seem elusive; but I don’t intend this post as
a means to decipher the language of things.
Rather, I want to assess the consequences of language as matter and
emergent phenomenon.
Subsisting within all matter, language would ground an
ontological division – as Žižek calls it, the “gap.” This is because language establishes that
which is communicable within matter, and that which is not; through the
implementation of its language (e.g. naming for humans), matter cannot
communicate everything about itself or the subject of its language. It can only communicate that which is capable
of being communicated. If language, in
this speculative material sense, indeed subsists within matter, then all matter
naturally contains a dehiscence within itself.
There is always-already a separation between that which can be
communicated in matter, and that which cannot.
This notion conjures the Heideggerian quality of “earth”: “We call this
ground the earth. What this word says is not to be associated
with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely
astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is
that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises as
such. In the things that arise, earth
occurs essentially as the sheltering agent” (Heidegger 168). However, we have to distinguish Benjamin’s
linguistic project from Heidegger temporal-ontological project, because
Heidegger’s “earth” relates to something of the perceptive, or sensory,
imperfections of humankind; that is, the fault lies with our own inability to
properly represent something of things to ourselves. In Benjamin’s formulation, more radically and
speculatively, this imperfection must reside already in the materiality of
things.
How did language achieve this paradoxical position in
reality? Language is, at the same time,
both a referential material and a phenomenon of matter. It refers to that which is communicable in
things, but it is also part and parcel of things. How does language, if it is a material
phenomenon, refer to itself? Benjamin
points out that “[a]ll language communicates itself,” but what is the language of language? We seem to fall, at this point, into an
infinite regress of languages and meta-languages. Benjamin, once again, offers us some
assistance:
It is whether mental being [of both
humans and things] can from the point of view of linguistic theory be described
as of linguistic nature. If mental being
is identical with linguistic being, then a thing, by virtue of its mental being,
is a medium of communication, and what is communicated in it is – in accordance
with its mediating relationship – precisely this medium (language) itself. Language is thus the mental being of things.
(Benjamin 319-20)
We arrive here at the
crux of the entire movement.
Earlier we noted that the mental being of humanity is language; here
Benjamin tells us that language is also the mental being of things. This coheres with Benjamin’s notion of
revelation and expressibility; the more firmly rooted in the mind, the more
concretely “thought,” the more coherently it can be expressed in language. Somewhere along the way, humans lost touch
with this primordial, original, divine
language of things that allowed them to “speak” the mental being of things:
The language of things can pass into the
language of knowledge and name only through translation – as many translations,
so many languages – once man has fallen from the paradisiac state that knew
only one language […] The paradisiac language of man must have been one of
perfect knowledge; whereas later all knowledge is again infinitely
differentiated in the multiplicity of language, was indeed forced to
differentiate itself on a lower level as creation in name. (326-7)
Our “postmodern”
historical position allows us to recognize that any pristine, originary
language is an ideological illusion. The
ultimate language of the creative breath provides the grounding for Benjamin’s
linguistic hierarchy; but we can transpose his framework onto a speculative
notion of thing-ly language. Benjamin argues
that what transpired in the Fall of Man was “the birth of the human word, in which name no longer
lives intact, and which has stepped out of name language, the language of
knowledge, from what we may call its own immanent magic, in order to become expressly,
as it were externally, magic” (327). All
we need to do is recognize that the “fall” never took place; language, whether
human or thing-ly, has always been the source of gaps in matter. It is always “stepped out” of itself,
subsisting as matter and yet somehow reflexively referencing the material in
which it subsists.
That which is linguistic acts as a medium; but mediums,
mediating apparatuses, are material.
Even the “ideas” we propose to think, the images conjured when someone
else speaks, are nothing more than the reactions between neurons and synapses
firing in our brains. The meaning
expressed in these “ideas” is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon
resulting from the vastness and complexity of the entirety of language itself. In order to achieve the grounding illusion of
language (the centeredness of meaning), it must appear as a closed system; but
it remains far from closed. Language is
infinite, spiraling always further and further out of control, adapting and
evolving, continuing to sever itself from itself. Benjamin suggests that, prior to the Fall,
language somehow possessed an immediate quality; only after the Fall did it
become a means of mediation. But we know
that language always mediates, can do nothing but mediate; because language
material like everything else, and as matter it effects a radical split in the
matter in which it inheres. By its very
communicable being, matter suffers an irreparable rupture.
The title of this post suggests an analogous relationship
between language and knowledge.
Knowledge could not exist without language, and knowledge itself is
susceptible to the cultural limits of language, as thinkers like Michel Foucault
have taught us. But if language subsists
in all things, then might we conclude that there is also a knowledge of things? What
does this mean? If we follow Benjamin’s
lead, then a knowledge of things is not a metaphysical essence that permeates
all things, waiting for humans to discover it; it is not a divine power, an
animistic mana that resides in the
very earth. Rather, a knowledge of
things would merely be that which can be
known about them. Just as the
linguistic being of things is that which is communicable in them, so is a
knowledge of things that which can be known about them. But does this not suggest that there is
something that cannot be known about things?
Something that eludes human perception?
Here we will avoid what Alain Badiou calls the “Great
Temptation,” a concept explained by Ray Brassier in his book Nihil Unbound (a book that performs
fantastic explications of the philosophical projects of both Meillassoux and
Badiou). Brassier writes that at the
heart of matter we encounter a split, a fissure, effected by being’s consistent
presentation of its own inconsistency (for Badiou, on whom Brassier comments,
axiomatic set theory provides the ontological basis for this argument). Essentially, this fissure always-already
subsists within matter prior to any human, or cognitive, engagement with
it. The flaw lies not in human
apperception, but in actual material noumena; an incommensurability exists
between being and its presentation: “this is not, as mystics and negative
theologians would have it, because being can only be presented as “absolutely
Other’: ineffable, un-presentable, inaccessible via the structures of rational
thought and therefore only approachable through some superior or initiatory
form of non-conceptual experience. This
is the ‘Great Temptation’” (Brassier 107). The great temptation is to insist that part of
reality – some mystical, supernatural, metaphysical essence – must remain
unknowable to us, in a Kantian sense (i.e. we can think the noumenon, but we
cannot know it). This, Brassier and Badiou insist, is
misguided; in fact, we can know the “thing itself” because this rupture, or
fissure, or lack, which we perceive as a hole in our perception, is nothing
more than an actually existing hole in the thing. The blind spot does not prohibit our
knowledge of the thing; it is a part of the thing:
Consequently, the metaontological
concept of presentation is that of anti-phenomenon; a split noumenon which
vitiates every form of intellectual intuition insofar as it embodies the unobjectifiable
dehiscence whereby, in exempting itself from the consistency which it renders
possible, structure unleashes the very inconsistency it is obliged to
foreclose. The law of presentation
conjoins the authorization of consistency and the prohibition of inconsistency
in an unpresentable caesura wherein the deployment and subtraction of structure
coincide. (107)
Benjamin’s fossil
language, like Quentin Meillassoux’s arche-fossil, exposes and occupies a space
once thought impossible for humans to detect; a space precluded by the
imperfection of human senses and perceptive faculties. This does not mean that the human organism,
with all its senses and strange consciousness, is a perfect sensory entity,
prepared for the reception of external stimuli and the perception of the
noumenon. The next piece of the puzzle
lies in recognizing this gap, this fissure in things, the rupture of matter, in our very selves. We must level the human, put it on par with
everything else of which we have been speaking: we must see the human as a thing.
The human organism, the human thing,
drenched in its thingliness and replete with all its misgivings and
shortcomings (the blind spot right in front of our face, our inability to consciously access 100% of our brains, that
same consciousness that effectively
removes us from our animalistic mode of survival-existence…) cannot entirely
conceptualize and understand itself.
Today neuroscience and philosophy of mind are plagued by questions about
consciousness: what it is, how it arose, how it is changing, etc. Rather than perceive those gaps, those
caesuras, as spaces of knowledge yet to be filled in, perhaps we should
reorient ourselves. Perhaps the fissures
we cannot seem to fill in are not fissures in our knowledge of ourselves;
perhaps they are fissures in
ourselves.
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