Language, says Sinthome, is nothing apart from ‘the ongoing operations of language in its use by speakers’. There are speakers and nothing else; just bodies between which relations of feedback allow there to emerge language itself – an ‘itself’ that is given through those particular acts that take place in concert, together: language is thus an intersubjective act, an ongoing co-constitution that is channelled in particular ways.
Language ‘itself’ – but there is no itself; only practices, channellings that feedback in various ways, changing language and, no doubt, changing the referents of language, making perceptible different features of the world, insofar as relations and interactions have a primacy over predicates, properties and substances (to paraphrase another post).
The question is not what we can know about the referent, but what they are insofar as they are brought into relation with us and are nothing outside of this relation. There is no in-itself to the world, nothing that stands apart from what is involved with them. Language does not represent the world, but co-constitutes it and between us, changing the sense of that ‘between’.
Then language is never given in itself just as the world is never itself, or in itself; it lives only as a relation, only in those relation of feedback that let it be channelled and hardened into particular idioms, particular natural languages.
And yet. Is there a way in which language might appear as it is set back from the capacity to refer, the way it calls forward a world? Is there a way of speaking, of writing, that would withdraw language into itself as claws into a cat’s paw, with no link, now, to the world outside of language?
Of course not. Language depends upon its users, and the world it allows them to co-constitute and share. And yet – what if there were a way that, while referring, even as it refers, belonging to a world or to a fragment of the world it simultaneously suspends reference, holding itself back.
This might be understood as a withdrawal into that dimension from which language might leap forward again, constituting, co-constituting the world in a new sense, naming things anew. That language has disappeared into itself to gather its powers.
But what if there were no powers, and nothing to gather. What if language were lost in itself somehow, that it dreamt, but of nothing in particular, that it moved through itself like fog in fog? Language that refers but without holding onto a world and without changing it. That refers, but hardly so, touching the world, brushing it, but too lightly? Language that has hardly anything to do with the world, loosening its powers from within?
This a dream, not an argument. Language ‘itself’, language that as it were lifts itself from the relations that give it reality. The ties of relation slackened. Telegraph wires drooping down to the earth. And then drooping so far as to be lost as in an eddy, a relation lost in itself, turning in itself. In which the most ordinary word loses itself in itself, and all of language is there, groaning, rumbling and without saying a thing.
I wonder if this is what Serres calls noise. I wonder whether language doesn’t become noise there where relation turns around itself like the tiger who ran round the tree until he became butter. And that all words between us might not turn thus, the most ordinary word becoming extraordinary, and no questions or answers making sense anymore.
Language itself, but not a substance. Language as relation, but that has withdrawn as relation, turning in itself, lost in itself, and dreaming of nothing in particular. And now imagine this wheel of fire turning through you, and that you, as speaker, as writer, are only that empty place where noise rumbles without words, but in words.
In words, with words, but apart from them. Saying nothing other than them, but hollowing out saying within saying. And saying itself, language itself, the cat’s paw without claws.
Language itself, but with no in itself. Itself as relation, and the turning of relation. The messenger who’s forgotten what is to be sent. The deserter who knows no longer what he left or what he’s looking for. The nomad without destination. An event that happens because it does, and for no reason. The without why of Silesius’s rose.
How to endure language itself? To let it pass, without getting in the way (but then it only goes deeper underground, looping there)? How to find that passage of language as smooth as a snake’s back in the sand, pure streaming? By what formulas might you wait for it? What words that it might shake apart, the whole sea of sense swelling like a tsunami?
‘I haven’t said a thing’, you will say, but your tongue is thick. Why are prophets inarticulate? Why are they said to stammer? I think prophets speak only of speech, and of the to-come of speech. Of the return of what was never there, noise at the edge of sense, language lost before reference and across it. Language that never comes in sense, never arrives, and for this reason belongs to the future.
A futural language, language itself, murmuring of itself and awaiting itself, as all of language seems to sink towards it, just as the sand must do to the ant drawn into the pit of an antlion. But a sinking that occurs between us, from one to the other. From one who addresses the Other, who becomes so (gaining a capital letter) only by drawing language itself forward, and letting it speak.
Language itself – is this what might be named by the saying, rather than the said, as it bears speech, the whole of what is said and might be said? Itself – and this as difference, as a kind of relief, the river finding the sea?
But it is not you who address the Other, but language itself. Language itself in you, as you, letting you become the anonymous current of speech, a river in which you have not stepped, and not even once. ‘I spoke’. – ‘You took up a position within speech.’ – ‘I spoke’. – ‘Language gave you a position to speak, just as it will take it away’.
But how to speak this speech? How to let it resound? But you can hear it anywhere. In gossip, for example, in rumour without substance, mere hearsay. In the whisper of pages of celebrity magazines. In the oceans of wrecked blogs, abandoned and unread. In the mausoleum of vanished languages. Or in a old page of wood s lot, from 5 years ago, half the links dead. Or in a sky crowded with dead satellites, beaming no message to anyone. In Major Tom orbiting the earth …
A neglected language. An automatic one, lapping between surrealists. Or returning on the couch of Doctor Freud. The speech of the savant or the medium, closed eyed, speaking without thought. ‘I didn’t mean what I said’. ‘I forgot every word’.
Of course, in the end, language can never be itself, that is, separated from every relation. It cannot tear itself away, or not refer. It belongs to relation and to the movement of relation. And to that movement where it seems to lose itself, to be in lieu of itself, that is, without relation.
A dream. In gossip, in chatter, language looks for itself without knowing it.
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