The Concept of Language We Need

Abstract

So far, I have provided only a negative account of such a concept. I have criticised a specific concept of I-language as the concept we absolutely do not need. For Chomsky’s philosophy of language has a number of advantages for us. Not only is it entirely explicit (and outdated), but it offers the converse of the concept of language we need. His theory is a photographic negative of the right concept — this should make our task easy: all we have to do is to say ‘black’ whenever he says ‘white’. This is, however, unduly optimistic: such simple conversion is not enough, as it is obviously still dependent on the concept of language that has been criticised. Hence the second negative account I have provided, when I suggested, as the inverse of mainstream philosophy of language, a series of six counter-principles, which go far beyond Chomsky’s theory of I-language, as they also involve a critique of Anglo-Saxon pragmatic linguistics and of phenomenological theories of language such as enunciation theories. The very names of those six principles (non-immanence; dysfunctionality; opacity; materiality; non-systematicity; historicity) smack of negative theology. Even the apparently positive names, ‘opacity’, ‘materiality’ and ‘historicity’ receive negative, or reactive, interpretations. Thus, ‘opacity’ is non-transparency, it is second to the transparency that is one of the tenets of mainstream philosophy of language; ‘materiality’ is abstract non-ideality, the reference to ‘matter’ and ‘materialism’ being at this stage only a philosophical gesture; ‘historicity’ in this context is mostly the antonym of ‘naturalism’, the name of the thesis that, as far as language is concerned, the very slow time of evolution is not fast enough to be relevant (this is what I have called, again and again, in deliberate exaggeration, the ‘non-time’ of evolution: Greek aion in its traditional, not its Deleuzean, sense as opposed to chronos).