Harpham - Language Alone

First Published in 2002 by
Routledge

This edition published 2013 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 1946

Language alone : the critical fetish of modernity / Geoffrey Galt Harpham.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-94218-7 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-94219-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Language and languagesPhilosophy. I. Title.

P107.H37 2002

T his book has two purposes, one modest and service-oriented and the other critical. The first is to provide a guide to the roles played in critical thinking of the past century by the concept of language, by which I mean not languages in particular but language in general, language as such, language itself, language alone. Many of the defining intellectual debates in the past century have relied on this concept, and I try to show how, why, and to what effect.

What I will call the thought of language centers theoretical or general linguistics, with its scientific aspirations and ethos, and has informed as well the working premises of other fields, including psychoanalysis, philosophy, structural anthropology, political theory, and literary theory. Over the past century, these other discourses have sought to ground or anchor themselves in the thought of language, especially as that thought was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure. They have made theoretical progress by referring, and deferring, to language as if it were a solved problem, a stable and determined entity, even while claiming on occasion to have undermined the concept of determinate knowledge itself. Two of these theoretical discourses, concerning ethics and ideology, are treated at length here.

The second, less modest purpose of the book is to critique the thought of language by exposing the limitations of language as an object of knowledge. Nothing meaningful, I argue, can be said about language as such, both because language as such is not available for direct observation and because the features, aspects, characteristics, and qualities that can be attributed to language approach the infinite. Language is inadequate as an object of knowledge both because there is too little information available, and because there is too much. Somewhere in the vast domain of the linguistic can be found tokens of virtually anything at all, including order, arbitrariness, social cohesion, individual creativity, rationality, freedom, the unconscious, excess, nature, cultureanything. This is why all characterizations of the essence or true nature of language are tendentious, but it is also why the thought of language has been able to serve so effectively as a proxy for other thoughts, a way of addressing recurrent questions about human life that have become difficult to address directly in a posthumanistic and rationalist climate.

If the thought of language stands in for concerns that cannot, for some reason, be addressed directly, then it should, in principle, be possible to determine what those concerns are, and so usher in a new era of honesty or directness. But we should not be too quick to embrace a principle of literality that, if realized, would put an end to speculative inquiry and to the vivifying sense of progress that has long provided the best excuse for our faltering and imperfect efforts to lead the examined life. Instead, we should perhaps try to appreciate the real productivity of indirection and surrogacy, the dynamism of false consciousness; we should try, that is, to find a way to live without the direct apprehension of truth even as we seek nothing less and nothing else.