The experience of language is a political experience
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 16, 2024
How would it be possible to truly change the society and culture in which we live? Reforms and even revolutions, while still transforming institutions and laws, production relations and objects, do not call into question those deeper layers that shape our vision of the world and which would need to be reached for the change to be really radical. Yet we have daily experience of something that exists in a different way from all things and institutions that surround us and that conditions and determines them all: language. We are first and foremost dealing with named things, yet we continue to talk nonsense so as it comes out, without ever asking ourselves what we are doing when we speak. In this way it is just our original experience of language that remains stubbornly hidden from us and, without us realising it, it is this opaque area inside and outside us that determines our way of thinking and acting.
Western philosophy and knowledge, confronted with this problem, believed to solve it by supposing that what we do when we speak is to put a language into action, that the way in which language exists is, i.e., a grammar, a lexicon, and a set of rules for composing names and words in a discourse. It goes without saying that each one knows that, if every time we had to consciously choose words from a dictionary and just as conscientiously to put them together in a sentence, we would not be able to speak at all. Yet, in the course of a centuries-old process of elaboration and teaching, language-grammar penetrated inside us and became the powerful device through which the West imposed its knowledge and science on the whole planet. A great linguist once wrote that every century has the grammar of its philosophy: the opposite would be equally and perhaps more true, that is, that every century has the philosophy of its grammar, that the way in which we articulated our experience of language in a language and a grammar fatally deternines also the structure of our thinking. It is no coincidence that grammar is taught in primary school: the first thing a child must learn is is that what he does when he speaks has a certain structure and that his reasoning must conform to that order.
It is therefore only to the extent we succeed at questioning this fundamental assumption, that a true transformation of our culture will become possible. We must try to think again, from scratch, what we do when we speak, immerse ourselves in that opaque area and question ourselves not about grammar and lexicon, but about the use we make of our body and our voice while the words seem to come out of our lips almost by themselves. We would then see that in this experience the opening of a world and our relations with our fellow beings are at stake, and that, therefore, the experience of language is, in this sense, the most radical political experience.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 16, 2024
How would it be possible to truly change the society and culture in which we live? Reforms and even revolutions, while still transforming institutions and laws, production relations and objects, do not call into question those deeper layers that shape our vision of the world and which would need to be reached for the change to be really radical. Yet we have daily experience of something that exists in a different way from all things and institutions that surround us and that conditions and determines them all: language. We are first and foremost dealing with named things, yet we continue to talk nonsense so as it comes out, without ever asking ourselves what we are doing when we speak. In this way it is just our original experience of language that remains stubbornly hidden from us and, without us realising it, it is this opaque area inside and outside us that determines our way of thinking and acting.
Western philosophy and knowledge, confronted with this problem, believed to solve it by supposing that what we do when we speak is to put a language into action, that the way in which language exists is, i.e., a grammar, a lexicon, and a set of rules for composing names and words in a discourse. It goes without saying that each one knows that, if every time we had to consciously choose words from a dictionary and just as conscientiously to put them together in a sentence, we would not be able to speak at all. Yet, in the course of a centuries-old process of elaboration and teaching, language-grammar penetrated inside us and became the powerful device through which the West imposed its knowledge and science on the whole planet. A great linguist once wrote that every century has the grammar of its philosophy: the opposite would be equally and perhaps more true, that is, that every century has the philosophy of its grammar, that the way in which we articulated our experience of language in a language and a grammar fatally deternines also the structure of our thinking. It is no coincidence that grammar is taught in primary school: the first thing a child must learn is is that what he does when he speaks has a certain structure and that his reasoning must conform to that order.
It is therefore only to the extent we succeed at questioning this fundamental assumption, that a true transformation of our culture will become possible. We must try to think again, from scratch, what we do when we speak, immerse ourselves in that opaque area and question ourselves not about grammar and lexicon, but about the use we make of our body and our voice while the words seem to come out of our lips almost by themselves. We would then see that in this experience the opening of a world and our relations with our fellow beings are at stake, and that, therefore, the experience of language is, in this sense, the most radical political experience.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Lazar Markovich (El) Lissitzky, Cover to “For the voice” by Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, 1920. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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