I’ve recently concerned myself with the capacity of language to refer to the world and to articulate meanings. These two dimensions of language are called ‘reference’ and ‘sense’. The German philosopher Frege said so, not me. But all language must also have a physical embodiment – either in the flow of ink onto paper (the curls of the pen as it glides and skips) or the similarly intermittent flow of air through our mouths. We speak with our mouths, using the same intricate and sensitive muscles with which we curse and eat, drink and kiss.
For the past year and half, I was used to a daily sight as domestic as seeing my mom breastfeed my baby brother (I promise he’ll eventually stop making cameos in my publications), the outward flow of noise from a baby’s mouth alternates with the inward flow of its mother’s milk. Our first words are formed within this intimate contact, and not as abstract tokens for a distant, detached and separate reality. Meaningful words surround the child, who gradually incorporates them into the distinctive sounds of its own voice. Spoken by different people the same word sounds slightly different. Taking on the individuality of their voice it becomes “language lined with flesh” (to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes).
The baby’s babble is the beginning of language. The sounds out of which language will be formed appear first, already communicating with the encouraging gaze of the listening mother. In poetry, this babble of language (the baby’s “la, la, la…”) can be heard again, running under the race of sense in the tumpty-tum of rhythm. Poetry revives and emphasizes the rich sensuality of sounds. The best writers, of both poetry and prose, are always aware of this. So, for example, when Vladimir Nabokov introduces us to his most famous heroine, he writes:
Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Kristeva calls the two dimensions of sense and reference (taken together) “the symbolic,” and this third dimension of language (its involvement with the body of the speaker) ‘the semiotic’. It should be emphasized that this is an distinctive terminology of her own, used only by Kristeva and writers who are influenced by her. And so the word ‘semiotics’ refers to the general study of any systems of meaning.
How does babbling (the semiotic) become fused with meaning (the symbolic) to create language? Language only exists when both these aspects are combined. There can be no free-floating meaning without embodiment in something physical (whether it be the circuits of a computer, or the vibrations of our vocal chords). Human language originates in the voice, writing being a later phenomenon both historically and in the life of each child.
Plato specifically compares the original space (for which the Greek word is Chora) to a mother, and God the creator to a father. Both are necessary for the physical world to exist. All this is mythology, but Kristeva was impressed by the basic structure of Plato’s myth, the two components (ideas and Chora) which he believed were necessary for the world to exist. The creation of the world, as described by Plato, seemed to her to resemble the embodiment of intellectual ideas in the physical forms of expression provided by language. The ideas we have can only be clearly expressed, and hence communicated to others, through words. But words have their origin in our breathing body.
But then the baby grows up and starts talking about rocks and tables, then books and feelings and governments; divides the world into different kinds of things and labels. It can seem that there is a right and a wrong way to do this. There really are cows and there really are blankets, and cows really are different from blankets. I promise, there really are atoms and there really are suns and stars. We have those concepts precisely because that is how we accurately represent the way the world really is. This attitude is part of what Wittgenstein seems to be arguing against. The world does not, so to speak, naturally carve itself into objects. Grammar is arbitrary, which means that it is only limited by our needs, desires, and, in some sense, the way we perceive basic facts concerning our environment and how we are situated in it. We label the world differently if our needs were different, or if certain facts about the way we are situated in or perceive the world were susceptible to change.
But, what I just laid out leaves me in an awkward position because the same Wittgenstein wrote “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is.” It’s unclear to me to which extent you can declare that it is in fact we–and not the world–who determine what objects there are and into which labels. Is what exists (whether material like objects, or abstract, like thoughts) dependent on our language so that without language (without us) there would be no shape to the world? Grammar itself is restrained by the world; by certain basic facts of our physiology, needs, and environment. If all those things were to require our grammar to construct them, then they wouldn’t be able to restrict grammar. Does this mean, then, that there is a world independent of language, independent of us, but in some sense malleable and open to different ways of carving it up into things? I know it isn’t clear what it might mean to say that the world is ‘malleable’ in this way and probably calls something physical or metaphysical to the table, but if the world exists at all prior to our use of language, then it seems it must have some kind of independently determinate nature. What would it mean for that determinate nature to be malleable? Tongue in cheek. So confusing.
Consider the following examples: suppose you’re in class, and a classmate you have never spoken to bends to pick up a fallen pencil. He gets up and bangs his head against the desk with an audible thump. You wince, and so does everyone who watched the scene unfold, and you friend leans close to you and whispers I felt that. This is a perfectly intelligible statement and requires no paranormal explanation about feeling-at-a-distance. Right?
In a sym-pathetic experience (`feeling-with'), your intimate knowledge of another person's situation allows you to feel how you imagine you would feel if you had the other's problems or blessings. In an em-pathetic (`feeling-within') experience, your intimate knowledge of another person's feeling-reactions allows you to imagine that you are in the other person's situation, having the same problems or blessings. Of course, there are profound differences between the feeling a person whose head has been banged might have, and the remote feelings you have in witnessing this head banging; he might need a pain-killer, but you do not. The pain occurs in his head as a result of the door banging his head, whereas it is as if the pain occurred in your head as a result of seeing his head banged.
In saying "I noticed that he was out of humor,” do we have a report about his behavior or his state of mind ? Before answering, Wittgenstein shows by analogy what his answer will be; he inserts the example "The sky looks threatening" and asks if it is about the present or the future. He then answers "Both," and adds, "not side-by-side, however, but about the one via the other." He follows with a further example, in which a doctor asks "How is he feeling ?" and the answer comes from the nurse "He is groaning." It would be, well, extraordinary if the doctor were then to wax metaphysical, complaining "I asked about his inner states, not about his behavior."
A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour. You might ask, “So you are saying that the word "pain" really means crying ?' " and Wittgenstein's voice replies, most significantly for the careful articulation of this new conception : "On the contrary : the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it." Description, implying a separation between the describer and the described, would drive a wedge between pain and its expression. But, as Wittgenstein asks, "to which extent can I try to use language to get between pain and its expression?" I am aware of how pretentious this sounds but in first-person cases, emotive expressions of the self operate in the way that instinctive or natural expressive behavior functions (and I am here escaping the prejudice that all language works in the same way), and not like the descriptions we might give of any object when we examine it up close, you know?
Can it be the case that by intertwining contexts together (using different words in conjunction) the result can yield something which is better able to express the thought — perhaps more like “giving shape to thoughts”? Something more expressive? More accurately expressive? That is, considering that shape and thought are out of context in general sense, perhaps helping us to express or communicate or describe something elusive like thoughts?
That is more or less the essence of first Wittgenstein’s comment on language. He’d later on revise, since he'll understand that language is not meant to be ideal rather expressive. It’s not only a matter of context, it’s more a matter of the living creature that lives through the context. When your purpose behind using language is to go beyond this world so that you can say what’s beyond direct, universal expressions with real meaning; that is because your goal when trying to write or talk about morality and religion, for example, is to win the confrontation with the limits of the language that we have been facing in our daily interactions.
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Wittgenstein declares. What can be said through gestures and expressiveness, cannot be said without colliding with the limits through which language constrains us from what we want to say. What we say without regard to these limits, are usually nonsense, especially when we don’t rather stay silent when expressing is impossible. Wittgenstein was convinced that speech was governed by what could be clearly expressed, and that meaningless issues are only meaningless because they were uttered/written instead of just… not being expressed.
I think that our inability to express everything that is mystical within us is not due to a lack of this attitude of mysticism, that is to say that you don’t experience mysticism any less than the next person, nor to a inadequacy in the language we speak, but rather the problem is that we are not okay with the emptiness evoked in us by sticking to this position of “remaining silent” when we cannot express ourselves clearly. He says that if language has to suffice itself, we who use it must remain silent where silence is the best option, so as to stay loyal to the true philosophy open to mysticism. He saw in the mysticism he reached an important “discovery” in his philosophy, that is the conclusion that made him confident enough to be able to stop philosophizing where it is necessary and to adopt silence as a spiritual intellectual position.
All those blatant digressions taken into account, language is, despite its limitedness, what you choose (or not) to make out of it. Much more effective is how you use the language that already exists, particularly metaphor, which is a very powerful and effective tool. There's a famous example attributed to John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding". There, he tells the story of a blind man who struggled to understand the things that sighted people said about the world around them. He finally announced in triumph that he now understood what red is — the sound of trumpets. Was he wrong? I don’t think so, because who will deny him?