Comrade Oriol Arilla wrote recently in Psychology and Mind a very interesting article titled “Language as a regulator of the social.” I will take advantage of the fact that the ice has already been broken with one of the most controversial topics and that has been the subject of the most important philosophical and psychoanalytic theories of the last century to delve even deeper into the reflection.
O. Arilla’s article begins with a first and very important break with the most conventional analyzes of what language is. Namely, it is not only a means of transmitting information.
The writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin warned us almost a century ago that we could not reduce the analysis of language to the always limited bourgeois scheme s, utilitarian, of being a means to an end. In this case, a means of transmitting information from one person to another. For Benjamín, and I subscribe to his thesis, language is a pure mediality That is, it does not fall within the channels of being a means to an end but rather a means in itself and realized in itself. To defend this position, Benjamin argued that no one can refer to and think about language without resorting to language itself. If we wanted to apply a Cartesian scientific analysis to language we would have to be able to isolate it as an object, the problem is that this operation is impossible. In no way can we separate language from its own object of analysis since we must use language itself to do so.
This idea links with the quote from Nietzsche which opens, inaugurates, Oriol’s article: “There is nothing less innocent than words, the deadliest weapons that can exist.” It is not that words are only the deadliest weapon that can exist (it is not an innocent means to an end independent of them) but that they are also the first marker of power and structure. Language is the first structure that will teach us to obey.
Deleuze and Guattari they write in Thousand Plateaus: “Language is not even made to be believed in, but to be obeyed and made to be obeyed. (…) A grammar rule is a power marker before being a syntactic marker. The order is not related to previous meanings, nor to a previous organization of distinctive units” (1). Language always presupposes language and will configure, through a hard structure, a certain way of approaching the world, what is seen, what is heard. In this way, it will generate various effects of power, which include the construction of our subjectivity and our way of being in the world. Language always goes from something said to something that is said, it does not go from something seen to something that is said. Deleuze and Guattari then argue that if animals – in their example, bees – do not have language it is because what they have is the ability to communicate something seen or perceived, but they do not have the ability to transmit something unseen or unperceived to others. animals that have not seen or perceived it either.
Deleuze and Guattari state, deepening this idea: “Language is not content to go from a first to a second, from someone who has seen to someone who has not seen, but it necessarily goes from a second to a third, neither of whom has seen.” “. In that sense, language is the transmission of words that function as a slogan and not the communication of a sign as information. “Language is a map, not a carbon copy.”
The reflections of both Benjamín and Deleuze and Guattari pave the way for us to introduce two ideas that seem fundamental to me when it comes to facing our day-to-day political and psychic realities. The first idea is that of the performativity of language introduced by philosopher John Langshaw Austin and perfected by Judith Butler in the late 20th century. The second idea is that of the primacy of signifiers over meanings This second idea was widely developed by Lacan and is the epicenter of contemporary psychoanalytic theory.
Performative language and politics
Austin stated that “talking is always acting.” Language is often performative to the extent that A statement can, rather than describe a reality, accomplish the fact by the very fact of being expressed In this way, when I “swear” I am performing the act of swearing to the extent that I express the oath. Swearing or getting married – which are the two examples used by Austin – only make sense in the language itself. The statement is generating a reality, independent of any act external to it, by the simple fact of expressing itself. Through a symbolic authority such as that of a priest, the statement “I declare you husband and wife” is a statement that only enters into a relationship with himself, it is a performative act to the extent that the act, the fact , makes sense only to the extent of being within a certain community and following certain markers of language power. When the marriage has been established, the reality that existed until then changes.
Picking up this idea, Derrida will point out that the performative cannot be intentional – since Austin will argue that the first thing in language will be the will of some subject – and that it is beyond the subject. Language, by itself, will then be able to transform reality without the intentionality of humans. I will return to Derrida’s reflections for the section on psychoanalysis
Judith Butler He takes up many of the ideas presented here for his theory of gender. I will not go into his thoughts in depth in this article due to lack of space. What Butler claims is that law is performatively produced through the coercive repetitions of regulative practices. But the law is not only reduced to the legal, formal, it also extends to other social practices.
In this way and taking up an idea launched by Marx (“these believe they are subjects because he is king”) will ensure that gender is completely performative, in the sense that when we think that when we say “man” or “woman” we are describing a reality we are actually creating it In this way, our bodies cease to be bodies and become techno-living fictions which, through the repetitive coercive practices of the roles assigned to men and women, will adjust to mechanisms of power. Gender identity, being a man or a woman, does not exist autonomously from these same performative practices that adjust us to be what the social structure expects us to be. We are assigned roles –By being born with a bio-man body we will be assigned the role of masculinity – that we will have to repeat to naturalize them, to make them as if they were natural identities. This masks the social struggle that hides behind it and ignores the performative nature of being a man or a woman.
Beatriz Preciado points out a very important question to understand the magnitude of this coercive practice on bodies: at birth, the doctor never performs a chromosomal analysis but, even so, and simply through sight (observing if there is a penis or a vagina) will determine our social role (being a man or a woman). In this way, politics is made into an aesthetic. Due to our aesthetics we will be assigned a social role of masculinity or femininity. Preciado states: “Science produces performative metaphors, that is, it produces what it tries to describe through political and cultural markers prior to it.”
With everything I have explained here I simply wanted to enter into the complexity and importance of the philosophy of language as well as its impact on our daily political struggles. The deconstruction of all the concepts that are imposed on us from the moment we are born must be a constant liberating practice. And we must never forget the ultra-political dimension of language as well as performativity in the construction of our subjectivity, our resistance and power.
Language in Lacan, a few brushstrokes
In contemporary psychoanalytic theory and, particularly, in Lacan, language is a hard structure that almost entirely determines the production of our subjectivity. Lacan argues through the primacy of signifiers (S1) over signifieds (s1). To demonstrate this operation, Lacan resorts to metaphor and metonymy. Both figures are what fortify and demonstrate that the signifiers are always above the signified, since in a metaphor there is a displacement of the signifier (of the word itself) while the meaning is maintained. With different words we can convey the same meaning. Hence Lacan -and psychoanalysis- focus and pay attention to the master signifiers and the chains of signifiers, more than in the meanings. Here we could add Derrida’s reflections, in which he talks about how the same sign can have several meanings (polysemy) as a complement to Lacanian theory.
The signifiers always refer us to other signifiers, they cannot exist by themselves. Hence, classical psychoanalysis has also received many criticisms, since we do not have to look for the hidden meaning behind the words we say. For Lacan, however, the narrative arises to resolve a fundamental antagonism, in the words of Zizek, “by rearranging its parts in temporal succession.” There is a traumatic event that is constitutive of being like this, a fact, a sphere, which is the Real that can never enter the channels of the Symbolic (the Lacanian triad is The Real-the Symbolic and the Imaginary, in the center of which there is the jouissance). That which in the object is positively perceived as more than the object itself and which is the force that drives my desire would be the objet petit a, which can sometimes be confused with the real and the surplus of enjoyment. I don’t want to dwell too much on this theory in this short article. What must be retained for what concerns us is the primacy of the signifier that could be added to that of the sign and the form and that leads us somewhat to fetishism and contemporary communicative theory.
Sign, form and language in the construction of hegemonies and political frameworks
We are fascinated by the sign. The form is what determines, and not the content. And here, to conclude, I would like to try to establish a relationship with Marxist theory. Zizek quoting Marx, can help us to link and clearly capture the relationship between the fetish and the forms. Zizek writes: “classical political economy is interested only in the contents hidden behind the commodity-form and this is the reason why it cannot explain the true mystery behind the form, but rather the mystery of this form itself (…) Where does it come from? Then, the enigmatic character that distinguishes the product of labor emerges as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity.
Obviously in this same way “(2). We must avoid meanings and contents a little to focus our reflections on forms and signs. We live in a system of semi-capitalism (capitalism of signs) that generates its own oppressive frameworks and creates reality through signs and languages To combat it, we must be intelligent and create and generate our own signs as well as deconstruct our language, which is still our first marker of power and authoritarian structure.
