[Marxism] Propositions on language

[Ed George]

PROPOSITIONS ON LANGUAGE

1.  The property that marks human beings as unique in nature is their
capacity to regulate their own relationship with the material world.
[1] Constitutive to this capacity is their capacity to *think*. The
sense-impression that is their immediate contact with the material
world is not only processed in the form of instinctual perception but
is also manipulated so as to be able to form an abstract and
theoretical representation of material reality in *thought*. [2]

2. Thought may be considered in this sense as both this *processing*
of sense-impression and *processed* sense-impression: respectively,
thought-as-process and thought-as-product.

3.  All human sense-impressions are processed. But the immediate
perception of, say, pain, of colours, of sounds, involve the
processing of external stimuli to the form of *instinctual* mental
responses: in these cases the processing itself is not carried out
with the processor being aware of its intellectual conditions and
mechanisms. If we can call the totality of processed sense-impression
*knowledge*, some knowledge is then clearly reflexive, and takes the
form of instinct (be this learned instinct or no). Thought-as-product
is thus not only merely processed sense-impression: the theoretical
nature of thought-as-product means that the sense impression which has
been processed has to have been *consciously* processed, i.e. that the
processor has to be able to be aware of the mental conditions under
which that processing occurs.

4.  We thus need to distinguish between that part of knowledge which
is merely instinctual, and that which is formed through self-conscious
processing, through thought. This conscious part of knowledge will be
here designated as *ideology*, which is, by this definition, that
theoretical (mental) reconstruction of material reality fashioned
through thought-as-process in the shape of that part of knowledge
which is thought-as-product. Ideology is, therefore, conceptualised
reality, imagined (*not* imaginary) reality, reality as theoretically
reconstructed as thought.

5.  The Kantian problematic of the inherent unknowability of the
noumenal realm is a false problematic in that it opposes the realm of
the noumenal ('things-in-themselves') to that of the phenomenal
(sense-impressions) as a formal opposition. But phenomenal knowledge
is phenomenal not because it *excludes* noumenal knowledge but in
virtue of being *how* the noumenal *is* known: 'direct' (i.e.
unmediated by the processing of sense-impression) knowledge of
things-in-themselves is indeed impossible, but it is impossible
because it conceives knowledge-in-itself as separate from the active
human subject, i.e. it is not just impossible but a contradiction in
terms. [3] The opposition between the noumenal and the phenomenal may
be real, but it is a *dialectical* opposition, the content of which is
given by human engagement with material reality, i.e. by practice.

6.  The degree of conformance between reality and its ideological
reconstruction - which may be slight or substantial - is a question
which thus cannot be resolved in thought alone. [4] Given that
ideology is a theoretical *reconstruction* of reality ideology can
neither conform 100 per cent to reality nor diverge 100 per cent from
it. The relation between ideology and reality is therefore *relative*,
and is determined by *practice*. [5] An ideological representation of
reality can be said to conform to reality, to be 'true', insofar as
human practice (including ideological practice) is informed by this
representation, and 'false' insofar as it is hindered: i.e. the
question of truth and falsehood is not an absolute one but a question
of degree of approximation. In this way the bridge between the realms
of the noumenal and the phenomenal is bridged neither by the
empiricist fallacy nor by the idealist one, but by the mediation of
practice. [6]

7.  Ideology is an act of *production*: in its formation raw material
is worked into a product through human labour.

8.  If the conscious, self-aware, processing of sensorial stimuli is
what gives us ideology, i.e. 'conscious knowledge', the intellectual
space necessary for self-awareness - where self-awareness 'resides',
intellectually speaking - is delimited by that *previously-acquired
knowledge* to which new knowledge is accreted. In other words, the
self-aware processing of sense-impression requires previously acquired
knowledge to exist: i.e. the existence of thought-as-process requires
the existence of previously carried through thought-as process. To put
this another way, while the raw material for ideology is
sense-impression - for all human contact with material reality takes
the form of sense-impression - ideology is not only not predominantly
worked up directly from immediately-acquired sense-impression but
needs, in order to come into existence, the existence of
sense-impression already worked-up in the form of *previously*
consciously processed sense impression, i.e. as *already existing*
knowledge.

9.  Knowledge therefore presupposes social dialogue, i.e. dialogue
between people who are 'socially organised'. [7]

10.  This is entirely consonant with the fact that the way that human
beings interact with and regulate their relation with the material
world is through social, not individual, practice, whether this is
perceived as such or not. [8] To put this another way, the existence
of human practice implies not only the existence of human engagement
with material reality but human engagement with the material reality
through *social practice*. [9] Human production is necessarily
*social* production, even if it is carried out by individuals.

11.  Therefore the ideological element of knowledge - the product of
thought-as-process - insofar as it is founded on the existence of
already-acquired thought-as-product is by the same token founded on
the existence of *social practice* - the interaction of people with
other people within a given social structure and in given material
conditions.

12.  Thought is an act of social production as any other act of human
production is in that it is carried out by individuals in human
engagement with material reality through social practice, [10] and in
the production of thought the relations between people - 'relations of
thought-production' - are *communicative* relations. But the
ideological representation of material reality in thought -
thought-as-product - is *constitutive* of overall human practice:
'communicative relations of production' do not form an autonomous
'level' of practice *within* human practice in general but enter
constitutively *into* human social practice. Therefore, human practice
in general is not only social practice, it must be *communicative*
social practice too.

13.  This social communicative practice is carried out through
*language*, here defined as verbal communication between people.

14.  What is communicated by language is meaning; but what is
communicated in communication - i.e. social communicative practice -
is already worked-up thought-as-product, i.e. ideological knowledge.
Therefore, meaning is thought-as-product realising itself *as*
language. [11]

15.  Not only can we say that language cannot occur without meaning,
i.e. without there being thought to be communicated, but also that
meaning itself has no existence outside of language. Language
therefore does not *convey* meaning: language *is* meaning.

16.  Language - i.e. meaning - is not given, it is made. Meaning, as
any other product of human labour, is therefore, as much with respect
to its content as to its form, not fixed, but in function of the
conditions of its production both in theory and in practice
potentially infinitely malleable

17.  Language and thought-as-product are mutually preconditional:
without thought-as-product there is no language and without language
there is no thought-as-product. This apparent paradox is resolved when
we see thought and language as *different expressions of the same
substance*. Language is
thought-as-product-in-communicative-self-realisation;
thought-as-product is accreted-communicative-social-practice: thought
and language are thus no more than two forms of existence of a single
entity - *consciousness*.

18.  Consciousness, whether in the form of thought
(language-at-social-rest) or language (thought-in-social-movement) is
the mental product of the socially active human subject, i.e. *both*
thought and language are acts of production. Consciousness thus
derives not from passive contemplation of reality but through human
engagement of that reality *through* social practice. [12]

19  Consciousness therefore presupposes its own existence. But
consciousness enters into every aspect of human behaviour:
consciousness - language and thought - is not just uniquely and
intrinsically human, it is *constitutively* human. [13] The question
of the *origins* of consciousness is therefore not a question of human
practice but rather one of human evolution.

20.  If the essential *content* of language is ideological, meaning as
thought-as-product realising itself as language, the *form* taken by
language is verbal, i.e. it is composed of those entities formed
through speech, or entities derived from speech (in which definition
'speech' refers to those acts of human vocalisation which are
intended, either potentially or actually, at communication, at the
conveyance of thought, of consciously processed sense-impression, and
'speech-derived' as referring to those acts in which speech entities
are represented in non-vocalised ways, be this graphically (e.g.
writing), physically (e.g. signing), mechanically (e.g. Morse), etc.).

21.  These verbal entities which are combined in language (which we
can, without committing ourselves to the term's conventional use,
designate as 'signs') have both a *formal* existence, and a
*referential* one. The formal manifestation of the sign is material,
physical, and consists in the particular combination of phonemes of
which it is made, whether as such or as graphically or otherwise,
directly or indirectly, represented; while its referential
manifestation consists in a *concept*, i.e. an ideological
representation of non-conceptual reality fashioned through and in
thought.

22.  This referential content of the sign is its 'meaning', and its
meaning is given by how it represents what it purports to refer to.
But meaning, insofar as it is composed of the reconstruction by and in
thought of non-verbal reality, is ideological. Thus the referential -
ideological - content of the sign and that aspect of reality it
purports to depict are *independent* entities. There is no necessary
correlation between this verbal ideology and any one or other part of
non-verbal reality other than that wrought by convention, but
convention in the realm of the human is itself not given but wrought
from and through social practice. Signs are, in this sense, outside of
practice, *undefinable* - words are, naturally, only defined by other
words, and language by just more language. Just as the truth of
thought is determined by practice-in-general, meaning is truly
manifested only in communicative practice, i.e. language-in-use. The
relation between the sign and its non-verbal referent is a social
product, mediated by practice.

23.  This means that the relation between the form of a sign and its
referential properties is arbitrary in the sense that there can be no
necessary correlation between certain material formal features and
certain referential content (which is not to say that this relation is
necessarily always the product of contingency). But it also means that
the relation between form and referentiality is *not* arbitrary in the
conventional (saussurian) sense: given that the sign is not a given
entity but the product of social human practice, in function of the
conditions of its production it is, in all its aspects, therefore both
mutable and in constant socially-determined flux.

24.  The sign, although manifestationally simultaneously both material
and ideological, i.e. social, is *essentially* social: although the
physical manifestation of the sign is a necessary part of its
existence this physical manifestation, the sign's form, is the
physical manifestation of a sign not in virtue of its materiality but
in virtue of the sign's socially-constructed ideological content
realising itself in and as language.

25.  While language-in-general is the inter-human verbal communication
of consciousness in the form of thought-as-product effected through
the deployment of signs, a single given language assumes a set of
semantic and syntactic rules whose function is to govern the way in
which signs may be deployed such that this communication may be
effected. A single, given, language, then, is that self-manifestation
of the specific and existing set of rules that govern the
configuration of a specific and existing system of signs through the
arrangement of signs at a concrete moment and place, a
self-manifestation which differentiates it both diachronically and
synchronically from other ones (including itself).

26.  A single, given language is thus none other than a local,
concrete and practical instance of language-in-general.

27  The rules that govern a language do not pre-exist verbal
communication but rather are made and remade *in* and *by* verbal
communication. Languages, as products of human labour, are not only
potentially infinitely malleable but permanently in transformation:
the whole of the set of rules that govern a language will never be
exactly the same even between individual instances of language (just
as one material object is never exactly identical with another object
or even itself). The only identity a set of language rules can have is
with itself *outside of time and use*: i.e. a language is unchanging -
fixed and given - only *outside* of communicative practice.

28.  If the property common to all given languages is that given by
being local instances of language-in-general, for any linguistics to
succeed as a linguistics it needs to be an epistemo-ontology as well.
[14] It is precisely because it failed to appreciate *this* fact that
the Chomskian project of linguistic 'deep structure' failed: i.e. the
problem is not that there is no deep structure but that such a
structure can never be a simple linguistic phenomenon *distinct from*
human thought-in-general.

29.  Language has no independent existence outside the realm of verbal
communication itself: the representation *through* language *of*
language (including the representation effected here) bears the same
relation to its object as that between ideology-in-general and
reality-in-general, and is therefore not nor ever could be
*equivalent* to language itself. A linguistics considered conceptually
divorced from socially-mediated human practice will thus remain the
chimera it always has been.



* * * * *



[1] 'Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a
process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates,
and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts
the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the
natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and
hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form
adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external
nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his
own nature. He develops the potentialities within nature, and subjects
the play of forces to his own sovereign power.' Karl Marx, Capital
vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p.283.


[2] 'A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver,
and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the
construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst
architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell
in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour
process, a result emerges which  had already been conceived by the
worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only
effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realises
his own purpose in those materials.' Capital, p. 284.


[3]  'The real is by necessity empirically imperceptible, concealing
itself in the phenomenal categories [...] it offers spontaneously for
inspection.' Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in
Marxist Literary Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1978), p. 69.


[4]  '[...] [T]he examination of knowledge can only be carried out by
an act of knowledge. [...] But to seek to know before we can know is
as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus not to venture into
the water until he had learned to swim.' G W F Hegel, 'Introduction',
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
<http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slintro.htm>
[27 June, 2007]


[5] It is here that that the Althusserian project breaks down. By
defining ideology as 'a "representation" of the imaginary relationship
of individuals to their real conditions of existence.' (Louis
Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards
an Investigation)', in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 162),
Althusser implies that ideology is *delusional*, that our ideological
conceptualisation of the real is false, and not the least problematic
aspect of such a notion of 'false consciousness' is that it implies
the possibility of a *non*-false one (demarcated off in the
Althusserian system as 'science'). Yet this opposition between false
(as opposed to true) representations of reality is mistaken, which is
why Althusser is unable to provide objective criteria for
distinguishing between the two realms. The fact is that all human
consciousness of reality is mediated by theoretical conceptualisation
(i.e. is 'ideological' in my use of the word) by definition. The irony
is that the possibility of there being some unequivocally 'correct'
way of contemplating the world is precisely the very empiricist trap
that Althusser's intervention is ostensibly aimed at discrediting.


[6] 'The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human
thinking is not a question of theory but is a *practical* question.
[...] The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is
isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.' Karl Marx,
'On Feuerbach', in Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p.
422.


[7] Valentin Voloshinov, El marxismo y la filosofía del lenguaje
(Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992), p. 35.


[8] 'Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of
connections, relations in which these individuals stand with respect
to each other.' Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 265.


[9]  'In the social production of their existence, men inevitably
enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will,
namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production.' Karl Marx,
'Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy', in
Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 425.


[10] 'The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at
first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material
intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking,
the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct
efflux of their material behaviour. [...] Men are the producers of
their conceptions, ideas, etc. - real, active men, as they are
conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and
of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms.
Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and
the existence of men is their actual life-process.' Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1970), p. 47.


[11] 'Language is as old as consciousness, language *is* practical
consciousness [...]; language, like consciousness, only arises from
the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.' The German
Ideology, p. 51.


[12] 'The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of
Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is
conceived only in the form of the *object or of contemplation*, but
not as *sensuous human activity, practice*, not subjectively. [...]
Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, but he does not conceive human
activity itself as *objective* activity. [...] Feuerbach, not
satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not
conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.' 'On
Feuerbach', pp. 421-2.


[13] Which is to say that while social being does indeed determine
social consciousness without social consciousness there can be no
social being.


[14] 'A definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a
definition of human beings in the world.' Raymond Williams, Marxism
and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 21.