Writing and the Disembodiment of Language I

116 Philosophy and Literature Tony Jackson WRITING AND THE DISEMBODIMENT OF LANGUAGE I s is well known, the study of writing in relation to speech played Aan important part in opening the door to poststructuralist theory, especially in the seminal works of Jacques Derrida.1 Taking off from his rereading of Saussurean structuralism, Derrida famously made the deconstructive case that reversed and then dissolved the ancient understanding of writing as the secondary, parasitic representation of the authentic signs of spoken language. But the question may well be asked: How will our understanding of writing and speech change if we take off from a nonrelativistic theory of representation? For it is from a thoroughly relativized theory of signs that poststructuralist theory and its derivatives all one way or the other begin. We will look at this in more detail below, but for now suffice it to say that this kind of theory always takes it that representation precedes the real in a fundamental way. No natural relationship exists between any sign and its referent. Given this fundamental disjunction as a foundation, the various theories lead to the practical work of explaining how signification does manage to occur. For example, meaning is a function of logocentrism in Derrida; desire in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory; discourse in theory after Foucault; ideology in the various new historicisms; and so on. In contrast to these understandings of representation, cognitive linguistics—I will use this broad term to include findings from the related but differentiated subfields of cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, cognitive rhetoric—claims that at least on a very fundamental level semantics always precedes any actual manifestation of language, which is to say meaning precedes representation. This is because a foundational Philosophy and Literature, © 2003, 27: 116–133 Tony Jackson 117 level of universal concepts arises from biologically determined percepts. According to this view, crucial, general kinds of meaning are a function not of discourse or power but of the evolution of the human organism in the ecosystem of the third planet from the sun.2 In order to see how the cognitive linguistic arguments run, we will take an example from George Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Lakoff brings in the work of cognitive anthropologist Eleanor Rosch in order to explain the way categorization functions in our perceptual interaction with the world. Rosch’s findings, obtained through empirical studies using standard scientific methods, strongly suggest that human experience in its most general sense is “preconceptually structured” by our innate ability to categorize according to base-level prototypes (p. 270). Humans, even children as young as two years old, have a kind of gestalt cognitive process that tends to be oriented toward certain objects and features of the world, such that these objects and features—called cognitive reference points or prototypes—are universally “known,” apart from culture and language. An example of this would be the response to primary colors as opposed to secondary colors. Rosch showed that even members of cultures lacking words for the primary colors found it easier to learn names for those colors than for secondary colors (pp. 40–41). We are, it appears, cognitively attuned to the primary colors. Further, we are cognitively constructed so as to sort colors automatically by gradations away from or closer to the primary colors. Culture will of course teach us certain beliefs about colors, but we do not “learn” to respond and operate on this basic level of perception. In the next step of the argument, we find that our “basic-level concepts correspond to [this] preconceptual structure” (p. 270). That is, in considering ourselves as linguistic creatures, we find that thinking or conceptuality also operates according to prototypes. Again, this is held to be true only of specifiable basic-level concepts. Though concepts that arise in cultural life may possibly “impose further structuring on what we experience,” nonetheless, “basic experiential structures are present regardless of any such imposition of [learned] concepts” (p. 271). Evolutionarily, language would have to emerge after these innate perceptual structures. Language as a representation would also depend heavily on prototype categorization, not because of the beliefs and values of a certain culture but because of our cognitive architecture. A major consequence of all this, then, is that when 118 Philosophy and Literature language does appear, semantics (that is, meaning) is already anchored in this bodily conceptuality. In short, there exists a universal core of signifiers that have a natural relationship to signifieds. On his own and together with Mark Johnson, Lakoff makes plain that these cognitive universals set only a foundation for the immense variety of human knowledge and belief. Nonetheless, if we accept the validity of these particular kinds of universals, then there will be large implica- tions for central claims of poststructuralist-derived theory. For instance, if language is what amounts to an instinct and if we have a base of linguistic concepts that are biologically given, then it seems difficult to sustain the poststructuralist idea that language is essentially traumatic, that language paradoxically separates human beings from the real in order to give them access to the real. This is the general understanding of the desire of language as found for instance in Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, and others. But given cognitive linguistics, coming into language in general (as opposed to any specific language) would be coming into human being in the way that, say, certain kinds of young birds come into their species’ song. Entry into language for a human, presumably, would be as natural as any other developmental stage, even though it would have its own difficulties as a development. But the same would not hold for writing. Writing, as teachers at all levels well know, must be forced upon people. Humans do not move of inner necessity into writing in the way that they move of inner necessity into speech. Writing is an artifice, a technology created by linguistic beings for specific purposes. But as with many human inventions, writing has certain unplanned effects upon those who have invented it. These effects have been studied for some time now by scholars such as Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Eric Havelock, David Olson, Jack Goody, and others. Now Derrida has considered at length writing in relation to linguistic theory, though of course he always distinguishes between his version of “writing” and the “vulgar” meaning of writing, which would be the meaning most of us take for granted. Still, he begins with a consideration of the vulgar meaning in order to go on to enlarge the concept of writing. What most distinguishes him from these other thinkers on writing and speech is that he always takes off from a radicalization of the definitions of arbitrariness and difference estab- lished in Saussure’s linguistic theory, which is, of course, the move that makes him a poststructuralist. Derrida’s critique of logocentrism de- pends on the (unacknowledged) conviction in earlier linguistic theory of an “absolute privilege to the [spoken] word” (1976, p. 31), and on Tony Jackson 119 Saussure’s conviction that the signifier could have no “‘natural attach- ment’ to the signified within reality” (1976, p. 46). All of Derrida’s major claims, all of his “non-concepts,” such as différance, the trace, the supplement, etc., depend on an initial commitment to the fact that signification is from top to bottom purely a function of systematic differences between arbitrary signifiers; by extension, the same holds true for poststructuralism and all its derivatives. Unlike Saussure, he refuses to curtail the genie of difference once it is let out of its bottle. Signification is thoroughly relativized.3 But if cognitive linguistics explains, at least, the core of language, then signification is not thoroughly and purely a function of difference. As a result, many of the general conclusions Derrida arrives at through his consideration of writing will not stand. In fact, some of his most important claims will hold only for writing as a technology, rather than for language in general, which is where his thinking always takes him. For instance, in Of Grammatology and elsewhere, Derrida discusses the anxious way that linguistic theory had always understood the relationship of speech to writing, in which writing was taken to be somehow a negative encroachment—a parasite, a threat, what have you—upon the authenticity of speech. In brief, he argues that writing has always been repressed in relation to speech, and that if we analyze this repression we will discover that speech, and language and therefore identity in general, are ungrounded, decentered, and inherently disunified as a result of the comprehensive arbitrariness of signification. Such conclusions have typically led to analyses of the various ways in which actual disunity can appear as unity, and to subsequent claims about what is at stake, about who or what is being secretly preserved by this necessary illusion. But this strong idea of arbitrariness, foundational to poststructuralism, will not really stand if the findings of cognitive linguistics are true. So the “repression” of writing in relation to speech is historical fact; but if we find cognitive linguistics convincing, then we cannot move from this fact to claims about language and identity in general. This does not, however, mean that writing has no effects upon identity at all. Writing, we have said, is a technology. But we might more rightly say that it is the technology of technologies, a “pre-emptive and imperialist activity,” as Walter Ong puts it,4 because it affects so fundamentally the way most if not all other technologies appear and evolve. Because it enables storage, preservation, and accuracy, writing promotes all man- ner of change in human life.

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