Notes on Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on the Languages of Man” [“Über Sprache Überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menchen”]
[I will quote from Benjamin’s essay in italic and then try to explicate.]
Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language[…] It is possible to talk about a language of music and of sculpture, about a language of justice that has nothing directly to do with those in which German or English legal documents are couched, about a language of technology that is not the specialized language of technicians. […] There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their mental meanings [Es gibt kein Geschehen oder Ding werder in der belebten noch in der unbelebten noch Natur, das nicht in gewisser Weise an der Sprache teilhätte, denn es ist jedem wesentlich, seinem geistegen Inhalt mitzuteilen.] […]we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything.
I make two initial observations: 1) Benjamin is being Kantian. He is establishing an inescapable horizon. For Kant, time and space are transcendental; we cannot think or experience anything at all outside time and space. Benjamin is establishing language as another transcendental coordinating ground. 2) That which is communicated is geistege Inhalt :‘mental meaning’ ‘or ‘spiritual content’.
All that is asserted here is that all expression, insofar as it is a communication of mental meaning [geistege Inhalt], is to be classed as language. […]the German language, for example, is by no means the expression of everything that we could—theoretically—express through it, but is the direct expression of that which communicates itself in it. This “itself” is a mental entity
OK. We have ‘language’, ‘expression’, and ‘mental entity’. Language expresses the mental entity; the mental entity is expressed in not through language. This is important. The ‘mental entity’ is not information and not a thing. Language does not communicate the thing itself but only that which of the thing is communicable. For example, when I say ‘stinky tofu’ the stink, the odor, is not present. The word ‘stink’ does not stink. Language only communicates what is linguistic, only what is communicable. What is true of ‘stinky tofu’ is true of ‘mental entity’.
For in language the situation is this: the linguistic being of all things is their language. The understanding of linguistic theory depends on giving this proposition a clarity that annihilates even the appearance of tautology […] for it means: that which in a mental entity is communicable is its language. On this “is” (equivalent to “is immediately”) everything depends. […] Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic.
So, when language communicates the communicable (of a thing or a mental entity), it communicates linguistic being. Language is a medium and when it communicates linguistic being it communicates mediated being. The trick is: mediation is thus immediately communicated. The magic is this: the medium communicates the immediacy of mediation; or, mediation is what is immediately communicated in any communication. It simply means that media—any media—communicates itself as media prior to any other content. Or, when there is content there is always already medium. It is no different from Kant; whenever I experience something the thing is already in some space and at some time. Like magic space and time are transcendentally intuited. Space already “is” there; time already “is” there. The “is” here is not the “is” of predicative judgment but the “is” of im-mediacy. The “is” of immediacy is not falsifiable. I may say “that person is my student” and be wrong because my senses may have deceived me. She may have only looked like my student. But mediation itself cannot be mediated, cannot be put at a distance, cannot be delayed. Mediation is proximity: a transcendental horizon. It cannot be falsified.
For example, sometimes I go to the movies to see a movie everybody’s talking about, sometimes to see my favorite star, sometimes to see a good story. But sometimes I go to the movies just to see a movie—just for that specific experience. Sometimes I feel like reading a novel. What I really want is not a specific plot, characters, etc. but just—I don’t know what to call it—‘novelness’. I want to read what has never been written. It is the medium itself I want to experience. I want to read what all novels have in common; I want to see what all movies have in common. I want to experience the ‘likeness’ of each particular representation of the medium itself. In a real sense I want to experience that of which any particular novel or movie is a translation: pure novel-ness or pure cinema.
For another example, my neighbor here in Shi-zhi told me that after she had been in America for a year or so and saw on TV a story from Taiwan, she wept because she could hear Mandarin being spoken in the background. It had nothing to do with what was being said. The informational content or the particular speakers didn’t matter; what mattered to her was the medium of Mandarin itself, her native language, her home, her native being-in-Mandarin, her linguistic being.
If I’m not mistaken, in 1916 Benjamin is anticipating Marshall MacLuhan’s “the medium is the message” and all of contemporary media theory. What is expressed in language (not through it) is the communicability of the ‘mental (spiritual) entity’.
Now, putting aside local manifestations of language (the language of sculpture, music, film, etc.) is it possible to experience or to think the pure mediality of any language at all, or language as such: the linguistic being or the being-linguistic of language itself? That’s the direction Benjamin is pointing towards.
With regard to this Benjamin’s essay then moves to a way in which this is possible: Human being experiences its linguistic being in the giving of names to things. Giving names to things that are moreover already “in” language because we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything (this is the Kantian horizon I have already mentioned). Human language is made of words (unlike the language of sculpture, etc.). The mental being of man is communicated in naming things with words. The mental being of sculpture does not name things with words.
Naming, in the realm of language, has as its sole purpose and its incomparably high meaning that it is the innermost nature of language itself. Naming is that by which nothing beyond is communicated, and in which language itself communicates itself absolutely. […] Name as the heritage of human language therefore vouches for the fact that language as such is the mental being of man, alone among all mental entities, communicable without residue.
The language of things does leave a residue: the word ‘stinky’ does not stink, but the name ‘John’ leaves no residue. All of nature communicates itself. Stinky tofu stinks for man, the lamp communicates lamp-ness to man. In man (who names things) communicability—language as such—exhausts itself absolutely, applies itself absolutely, is utterly practical. “This is called ‘stinky tofu’” is an utterly practical statement. The whole mental (geistege) structure of human being is linguistic, and only when man names does the whole structure of language become absolute (i.e. without residue); hence, after Adam names things, all the meaning of language is exhausted, and there is thus no meaning of language (and no meaning of meaning). Linguistic being exhausts itself in being-called.
God gave each creature He had created a sign and then they stepped before man to be named. In naming, man conveys the image of a sign of God. In falleness, man wishes to capture for himself the creative Word and then wishes that the name convey something (--something other than itself). By doing so, the word is separated from what it names, separated from itself, and thence man is destined to live among the many languages. Language becomes a mere means to some end. A tool to mean something. The magical immediacy of mediality is shattered and the mental entity—language as such—is scattered among the languages of man.
Only in translation does man return to the paradise of naming. In translation the original naming is approached again. In translation, language becomes once again (in principle) an undivided whole. It becomes a mute sign. It is like the muteness of things and the muteness of God’s Word (God’s creation) which calls for the language of man to name things in order that their very presence may then arrive. The language of naming is the translation of mute signs into the language of man. In translation the relation between word and sign is once again original and fundamental. Thus language is both communication of the communicable and symbolic of the incommunicable (the Word of God). In Fallenness it is only in proper names (‘John’) that this survives. (Think of Marcel’s ecstasy when, in Remembrance of Things Past, he first heard Albertine “hold [his] name naked in her mouth”).
How is it that mute things (the rock, the stream, the mountain) speak to man? Easily, because man cannot imagine anything outside the transcendental horizon of language. Muteness is always already a kind of speech. Muteness is in fact already a manifestation of that always ‘other’ language that is language as such which is symbolic of, or is a sign of, God’s Word. It is magical speech. This is not so hard to understand. The name ‘John’ is untranslatable because it is a name—there is no residue outside it to translate. ‘John’ is not a concept.
How does language occur, how does it happen? It happens as translation. ‘Translation’ is the name of language.
God creates things. Man names them. In naming things, man communicates his spiritual content. His spiritual content is symbolic of God’s mute Word. Things give themselves to be understood: they mutely communicate themselves to man. Mute things were (mutely) communicated (arche-written perhaps, but I’m not sure of the connection to Derrida), and they came to be called ‘words’ (by man). This was symbolic of divinity.
(Do you remember the AIDS quilt, or the NAMES PROJECT? It was felt or hoped that by merely naming those who had died from AIDS a ‘magic’ might have occurred. But, sadly, the names were transformed into concepts, because it was a project, a means to an end (to end AIDS). The quilt of names became a concept and the project failed. But the inspiration for it was divine, magical.)
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