// In Which Language Does Not Structure Reality
(Part II)
Sitting through ironic disclaimers before trailers at the indie-film theatre, I was already trying not to forget a newly forged quip: Arrival, a film in which a cunning linguist struggles with alien mother tongue. [1]
I ended up forgetting my linguist joke because the Arrival film {spoilers!} brought a set of propositions out from under a moleskine with an aged rind around the pages. Theories, names, and concepts long ago wrestled with levitated just over the surface of my mind like so many a spacecraft in the film.
The question concerning language animated much of Arrival.
It did for me too, once.
Language Theory enjoys its place atop the plinth of contemporary discourse because philosophy in the 20th century was essentially overrun by the “linguistic turn”. Phenomenologist, Deconstructionist, Freudians, Hermeneuticians -and all their derivatives- posited human experience as necessarily structured by language.
Language-based experiential structures turned the real world into convention at worst or mis-translation at best. The tyrannic relationship between the sign-signified, symbol-symbolized, referent-referred, word-object in Philosophy caused reality to be seen as largely a “symbolic” undertaking.
Wittgenstein wrote:
The limits of our language determine the limits of our world.
Reality is mediated by the rigorous linguistic rules of the unconscious.
A Subject produced from endless deferment in chains of signifiers.
Heidegger went so far as to unequivocally claim
“language is the house of Being.” [2]
Arrival’s Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) even dreams about
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. [3]
But the problem really stems from the work of the 18th century philosopher Kant.
In Kant the experiencing subject is the seat of 2 faculties: Intuition & Understanding. With the Intuition we perceive particulars (That’s a coping saw, That’s a flush trim saw, That’s a crosscut saw). With the Understanding we classify those particulars under general categories (All those saws over there are Woodworking Tools.) [4]
What Kant generates here is the idea that experience is primarily conceptual. The preinstalled software of conceptual analysis structures the influx of stimuli. We never experience raw and unruly reality in a direct manner; we never get “Das Ding an sich”.
Instead, the experienceable is stabilized into comprehensive bites through concepts.
The list of philosophers I rattled off earlier can all be considered Neo-Kantians insofar as they merged (and furthered) Sausserian theory of language with a philosophy in which experience is structured by concepts.
With this move the Kantian Categories become Arbitrary Signifiers.
When particular experience is essentially structured by Arbitrary Signifiers then it’s language, and no longer concepts, doing the difficult task of structuring reality. That reality can potentially be different for each experiencing subject insofar as their different languages structure the field of experience in different ways.
In English I am drinking "a" Coca-Cola. In Spanish I am drinking “una" Coca-Cola.
In Spanish I could potentially be having a feminized experience with a soft drink that in English is gender neutral. It’s a different reality, you see.[5]
What we could broadly call the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis posits that large differences in language lead to large differences in experience.
In Neo-Kantian philosophies experience is primarily linguistic.
The linguistic turn would have us believe reality is stuck into simultaneous yet incompatible cultures based on differing language structures and therefore producing different symbolic organizations. This leads those subjects further and further into abstraction.
This is why in Merleau-Ponty the perception of the color red is not merely the awareness of an object’s quality but a culturally conditioned experience of a
“red [that’s] literally not the same if it appears in one constellation or in another…” [6]
That’s the story of how we got here. [7]
Philosophy in the 20th century was absolutely dominated by Neo-Kantians. All the big names from Husserl to Heidegger, from Lacan to Zizek, from Levinas to Derrida, from Barthes to Baudrillard, from Cixous to Butler, from Kuhn to Lyotard, from Blanchot to Kojève, all, invariably, posited iterations of the necessarily linguistic nature of experience.
There were a few holdouts; notable amongst which are Deleuze & Guttari. [8]
In the next post I’ll offer an alternative.
notes:
[1] The ironic disclaimers were something to the effect: “Caution: Previews may include entire film plot, tired tropes, cgi, and explosions.”
[2] Letter on Humanism, Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, London: Routledge. p. 217.
[3] I’ll specifically address the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in part 3
[4] See: Critique of Pure Reason § 79.
[5] Liz Lemon -style over-the-top eye roll
[6] The Visible and The Invisible, p. 132.
[7] I do admit this is very much a caricature insofar as I’ve exaggerated the notable features for the sake of easy recognition.
[8] This is my take on what D&G are up to in the chapter 4 “Postulates of Linguistics” of A Thousand Plateaus (w/ a serious h/t to De Landa) and why that chapter was revolutionary in all my reading of mid-to-late 20th century philosophy.
