Abstract
Language is infused with materiality and should therefore not be considered as an abstract system that is isolated from socio-material reality. Expressions materialise language in social practices, thus providing the necessary basis for languaging activities. For this reason, it makes sense to challenge proponents of orthodox linguistics and others who hold that language can be studied in isolation from its concrete manifestations. By exploring the relation between materiality and linguistic activity, the article extends Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory (MET) while clarifying the phenomenon of ‘linguistic denotation’. In so doing, it critiques orthodox approaches to language which trace denotation to abstract meanings and/or mental representations. The article shows how the denotative aspects of language can be cashed out in non-representational terms and, furthermore, that the interrelation of denotation and materiality is crucial to human material culture in that it allows for material engagements to transcend localised contexts. These engagements become global in Latour’s sense and, in so doing, denotation ceases to demand descriptions in terms of representations.
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Notes
On Cowley’s distributed view, language is first and foremost situationally conditioned by the embodiment of agents. This implies that “neither wordings nor verbal patterns determine” interactional outcomes since “[m]ost certainly, they cannot influence how populations act-perceive and how individuals think. Rather, they serve bonding functions, acting to ensure that lives cohere within communities” (Cowley 2015, 126). By focusing on the embodied contingencies of individuals and the flux of articulatory activities, Cowley moves away from the orthodox ‘meanings-as-semantics’-view as he addresses how language enables intelligent human activity to unfold in a cognitive ecology.
When reading a novel, for instance, we experientially depart from our immediate situatedness in the world. Poulet argues that we thus come to deliver ourselves over to “the omnipotence of fiction” by saying “farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in what is not.” This involves a “take-over” whereby language comes to surround us with “its unreality” (Poulet 1969, 55).
But language can also be non-gestural as in the case of a person who speaks to him/herself in solitude. Here, language does not entail an intersubjective dimension since no other person is present and the speaker-listener divide is absent. One can nevertheless say that even solitary speech derives from a history of gesture-based interaction since the subject must have acquired his/her linguistic skills from experiencing dialogue.
A completely different kind of embodied meaning is purely motor-sensory activity which arises as an agent enacts bodily reflexes in an automatised way. One example of this is the patient’s immediate reaction when the doctor hits the patient on the knee in order to test his/her reflexes. Being mechanic, no ‘mental’ preparation or intention by the agent is needed.
On the account presented here, expressive activities are gestural when they reify particular communicational categories such as speech, writing, waving, giving a ‘thumbs up’, nodding etcetera.
Love calls languaging a ‘cover term’ for “activities involving language: speaking, hearing (listening), writing, reading, ‘signing’ and interpreting sign language” (Love 2017, 115). Similar terms include ‘first-order language’ and ‘utterance activity’ but the appeal to the verb can be traced to Maturana (and Becker) (see Cowley 2011). For Maturana (1988) languaging has a gestural dimension in that language activity arises in an interactional domain constituted between a minimum of two subjects.
Take, for instance, Grice’s (1969) well-known example of the word *grass* that – depending on the context – can signify either lawn grass or marihuana.
For this reason, language cannot be reduced to first-order activity. Rather, as Love (2004) suggests, it also has a second-order dimension.
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Gahrn-Andersen, R. But language too is material!. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 169–183 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9540-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9540-0