David Brooks - Language Creatures
We have fashioned the difference between non-human animals and ourselves as one of language, and I will accede to that. Nietzsche himself, as it happens (not that this is to be a book about Nietzsche), has a direct and concise offering on the subject:
The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae verites he has appointed to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal; he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.
— Human, All Too Human (1878) [Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, from A Nietzsche Reader, ed. Hollingdale (Penguin, 1977), 55.]
But when we speak of language in this manner we speak within severe restraints, essentially those of a power-arrangement, like those described several decades ago by Edward Said in his Orientalism (1978). One preserves one’s power (a) by not allowing those over whom one would maintain that power to have anything but the most limited and utilitarian access to one’s own language, so that one can think of them as savage, illiterate, etc., and (b) by not condescending to learn, let alone use, their language. Language and its withholding, in other words, are implements of power. We say that ‘animals’, by which we mean non-human animals – but let us name a few specifically: dogs, cats, pigs, sheep, kangaroos, rats, … the list is as long as one’s patience – do not have ‘language’, when what we mean is that they do no have our language and that we will not condescend to even identify, let alone learn, theirs.
We do not know what our relationships would be if these matters were otherwisb: if we defined language differently, say, or if we opened, as in set aside our assumptions of or demands for power.
These things are not complex, but neither are they very likely to be done. Perhaps all we can ask or hope for – and we must at least ask – is that it be acknowledged that what we have for so long held to be a truth of our relationship and the definition of our distinction, is to this extent a matter of power, and preservation of power, in effect an intellectual violence, to ourselves perhaps no less than to non-human animals. We define what ‘language’ is, we define what a ‘word’ is, we define what a ‘syntactical construction’ is, in part by refusing to consider as such languages and acts of communication that we are unwilling and unwitting witnesses to every day. What of the languages of breath, of gesture, of eyes, of smell; what of voices so high, so low, so compressed or so rapid, that we can hardly register them as voices at all?
From David Brooks, “Turin”, Brandl & Schesinger: forthcoming. You should buy this once it’s published. https://www.brandl.com.au/writers/david-brooks
