The Origin of Language Page 8
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Once we have provided a plausible understanding of the genesis of the originary sign, the rest of the development of language might be expected to belong to linguistics proper—save that we have no clear evidence of any “primitive” form of language. The apparent fact that the Pirahᾶ language lacks recursive structures, a discovery of Everett recently popularized in Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech (Little, Brown, 2016; see Chronicle 525), may be a sign that not all modern languages possess all the features of mature language, but whether or not Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device has heuristic, let alone biological validity is not something that GA need concern itself with. The important point is that it is absurd to use the complexity of mature language as the basis of a demonstration that the earliest forms of language must have been driven by a watershed advance in our cognitive ability. On the contrary, a simple increase in mimetic tension is the only contribution our increased intelligence need have made to language’s emergence.
How then might an ostensive language have evolved into mature language? Here again, it seems to me that the most fruitful avenue for speculation on this subject is not that of cognitive subtlety but of the broadening of the uses of language as a mode of communication. The peace-producing effect of language may not have left any direct evidence, but our survival (so far) as dangerously rivalrous creatures is its unmistakable testament. This implies, independently of any accompanying improvements in our cognitive abilities, what I called in TOOL a “lowering of the threshold of significance” to accommodate a broader spectrum of significant objects and differences among them: different signs for different (sacrificial) animals, for example.
Thus we must assume that although the use of signs may well long have been restricted—as much later, certain types of written language commonly were—to sacred circumstances, language eventually liberated itself from ritual, the formal becoming “secular” in contrast to the institutional reproduction/commemoration of the originary event. The originary scene would have been a locus of extreme tension, in which the emergence of the sign was a means of avoiding conflict. But once the peace-bringing effects of this scene became anticipated, the sign would spread to less formal encounters, and in particular to groups of humans that formed a part rather than the whole of the local community.
Once utterance of the sign has become an act in its own right, it is in principle detachable from the collective scene of representation and capable of recreating this scene between any two interlocutors, or in a somewhat different sense, within the individual consciousness. One’s internal scene of representation is the mental space within which we conceive the meaning of language, as when listening to another or reading a book. Such an individual space, however implemented in our nervous system, must have begun to exist in the originary event itself, or in any case in the memory of those who had participated in the event and its early repetitions.
In Chronicle 419, I developed the idea that Eve’s temptation by the snake, making woman rather than man the first sex to experience resentment, might well reflect a time when only men were permitted to use language. Clear examples of male priority in the use of sacred signs remain to this day among conservative religious groups, and that Catholics, Muslims, and traditional Orthodox Jews have only male clergy is in all probability a reflection of the priority of (more violence-prone) males over females in the origin of language. If men indeed used language before women, Eve’s taking up the snake’s suggestion to acquire forbidden knowledge when Adam had remained content to name the animals is a fascinating parable of the productivity of resentment.
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Thus we may assume that at some point there emerged an ostensive language by means of which individuals could communicate in small non-ritual groups about objects they were able to point to. As in the originary event, reality was no doubt messier than our theoretical model; it is not unlikely, for example, that the introduction of the more advanced utterance-form of the imperative might not have awaited the development of a full-fledged ostensive language. But to treat as separate stages of language developments that were necessarily chronological in the small—one cannot conceive of an imperative sign that would not have previously been intelligible as an ostensive—brings heuristic advantages with no obvious side-effects.
We use ostensives today for such things as teaching new words to children (for example, in picture books), where a pointing gesture is supplemented with a spoken word. Beyond its pedagogical function, the ostensive serves in emergencies to alert those around of a danger potentially present to all but hitherto unnoticed. The major example I gave in the original TOOL was Fire!, which is not simply an exclamation but a warning to those who have not yet detected the fire, and who would be expected to repeat the word to warn others farther off.
The secularization of language obliges us to consider the notion of felicity or appropriateness conditions. In the originary event, the sign is so to speak dictated by the presence of the central object, and this constraint remains in the reconstitution of the event in ritual. The question of felicity arises only for signs uttered outside the institutional framework of the ritual scene (we can ignore for our purposes the question of infelicitous institutional representations, such as black masses).
Once signs began to be used to convey “information,” their use would be subject to criteria concerning the validity and pertinence of this information. With regard to pertinence, the “lowering of the threshold of signification” that allows words for everyday objects to enter the language implies the use of ostensives, in circumstances less urgent than the originary mimetic crisis, to point out significant objects or phenomena in the environment, dangers as well as opportunities. Assuming the pertinence of the information conveyed by the ostensive sign, its felicity would depend on its fulfilling its implicit promise that the object referred to as present to the speaker is indeed present, and thus can normally be made to appear to his interlocutor(s).
The classic example of an infelicitous ostensive is that of the boy who cried “wolf!,” for “wolf!” is clearly an ostensive intended to signal the presence of a wolf. In the normal case, the boy would have seen or heard the wolf, no one else being close enough to do so, but his hearers would presumably be within range of the danger the wolf represents. This common vulnerability is an important detail; “Wolf!” is not the equivalent of “Help!,” which signals only a private danger. The boy presumably wants others in the community not simply to come to his rescue but to praise him for pointing out a danger to all.
This Aesopian parable of the infelicitous use of the ostensive is meant to warn us against the danger that such actions will make one an unreliable interlocutor whose future warnings risk being ignored, with potentially fatal consequences. It is of interest to us here as a demonstration that once signs exist, even signs that can presumably be easily verified, this verification, being independent of the sign itself, may fail, and the sign-user may use this fact to deliberately mislead. Higher animals are known to practice deception, but only a human being can be a liar.
Chapter 6.
Linguistics of the Ostensive
Thus far we have been concerned with the hypothetical preconditions for the existence of the ostensive utterance form. We now turn to the “linguistics” of what we can conceive of as “ostensive language.” Here we can benefit from the observation of ostensives in our own language.
In the originary event, the central referent is not detachable from the sacred scene of representation on which it appears. In the profane world, however, this scene is evoked in the communication situation, but the sacred is no longer an attribute of the referent itself. The ostensive offers a “profane” version of the scene, an intentional model of the universe limited to a single present reality, whose significance is presumed to require immediate attention. Enlarging the ostensive lexicon can increase the precision of the model, but without modifying its intentional structure, the relation of the model to our percepti
on of the world and to its potential interlocutors under the specific conditions of joint shared attention in which it is communicated.
We may assume that the ostensive would indifferently designate actions and their real or potential agents. An expression like “Fire!” would refer indifferently to a fire and to its burning. Similarly, an ostensive such as “Run!” would be understood as not distinguishing the nominal (a run or running) from the verbal ([something] runs). But although it is pointless to divide its vocabulary into nominals and verbals, epistemologically speaking, it seems reasonable to classify all ostensives functionally as nominals. For example, stampede is a verb as well as a noun, but until such time as the verbal form becomes a true predicate and takes on a tense relating linguistic time to that of the real world, Stampede! would be simply, like a fire or a wolf, a thing/event to be reacted to.
The intentional structures of elementary language, the ostensive and the imperative that emerges from it, do not possess the “third-person” stability of the declarative’s mapping of the world, but as the Wolf! example demonstrates, reflect the tension between the different standpoints of speaker and hearer. It is this tension that will lead, through the dialectic of desire and paradox, to the mature form of the declarative.
The Intentional Structure of the Ostensive
The ease with which we construct complex declarative sentences inspires in us the illusion that such sentences reveal “transparently,” as Sartre affirmed of prose in opposition to poetry, the order of things, or more precisely that of “phenomena.” In contrast, the ostensive, which asserts no propositional truth, appears to grammarians if at all as less an objective model than a “defective” expedient inspired by practical necessity.
It will take more than the “deconstruction of the discourse of Western metaphysics” to make a dent in the stubborn logocentricity of this perspective. The “truth” of the ostensive is by no means that of the declarative proposition. But to recognize the ostensive as nonetheless the simplest linguistic model of reality, subject to verification within the limits of its information-bearing power, makes us appreciate both the declarative’s superiority for conveying information and its derived, non-originary nature. In contrast, Western philosophy is founded on the metaphysical postulate that the declarative is not an evolved linguistic form but simply the natural one.
Considered from the standpoint of mature language, the ostensive utterance lacks the shifters of person and tense that explicitly relate the present of linguistic communication to the scene it evokes. The ostensive needs no tense because its referent is present to the speaker and verifiably present to the hearer. Similarly, it lacks person because the hearer/s is/are intended to stand in the same relation to the referent as the speaker. Thus after hearing an ostensive, and possibly observing its referent for himself, the hearer may repeat it for the benefit of others; the first person to cry “Fire!” has no monopoly on his utterance. Even in the case of “Ouch!” (as opposed to a true cry of pain) what is referred to is not the internal sense of pain so much as the verifiable violation of a social norm (e.g., “you stepped on my toe!” or “how stupid of me to hit my finger with the hammer!”). The ostensive presents its model and does nothing more, it being assumed that its referent is of sufficient significance for the hearer to react to it as soon as possible. The hierarchical relation between speaker and hearer on the scene of representation thus gives way to a symmetrical sharing of information, and if necessary, to cooperative action. But we should note that, unlike the imperative that derives from it, the ostensive does not explicitly refer to or demand such action. Its only reference is to the present, which it does not yet distinguish from the scenic presence of linguistic communication in general.
Within this intentional structure, the ostensive can potentially make use of a lexicon extendable in theory to the totality of perceptibles—things and actions. But although there is no a priori limit on the semantics of an ostensive language, its “signifieds” are not equivalent to those of mature language. Employed only in the presence of their referent, ostensives express an ontology of events rather than of beings. Because they define their object as significant in a given situation, and their enunciation necessarily implies the presence of this significance (danger or benefit), they are closer to exclamations than to models of conceptual thought, which signify without themselves participating in the significance of their object. The ostensive “word,” itself a complete utterance, does not possess the context-free conceptual status of our own vocabulary. The establishment of the ostensive within the profane world outside the sphere of ritual will reveal the contradictions latent in its model of reality.
Dialectic of the Ostensive
The originary sign had no place in a lexicon, not simply because it was unique, but because in its evocation of the sacred object as center of the communal scene of representation—as name-of-God—it was only in retrospect detachable from this scene. Even today, the enunciation of a divine name hints toward the ritual enactment of this scene, which in its more complete versions reproduces the originary deferral and its festive resolution. The formal or linguistic evolution of the sign must take place through the differentiation of the criteria guaranteeing its appropriateness in a given situation.
This guarantee has two aspects, of which the first is prerequisite to the second. First, the act of speech must be justified, as opposed to saying nothing at all, and second, the specific sign used must be appropriate to the situation. We may call these the criteria of significance and of signification. The intersubjective basis of the significance-criterion, which applies to ritual as well as language and other forms of representation, is the reconstitution of the public scene of representation. In contrast, the signification-criterion is roughly speaking that of truth, although only declarative sentences possess a genuine truth-value.
Although it is perfectly possible for a “true” sentence, ostensive or otherwise, to be insignificant, when there is a high threshold of significance, as we may presume existed at the earliest stages of language, the danger of falling below it makes the criterion it imposes far more critical than that of appropriate meaning. The ostensive’s emphasis on significance over signification suggests that the lexicon at this stage is likely to remain relatively undifferentiated.
In the lexicon of a language possessing declaratives, a word is not an utterance, and its meaning or signified can be considered apart from any given use of it. But in the case of the ostensive, the word can only be associated with its appropriateness condition, which is the significant presence of the object that it can be said to designate. Fire means a certain state of matter, but Fire! means the presence of a (dangerous) fire. To think “fire” is to imagine a fire, but to think “Fire!” is to imagine a situation where the cry would be appropriate, perhaps accompanied by its expected consequences: panic, flight, organization of a bucket brigade, and so on. The use of an ostensive creates an imaginary scene, and its speaker’s power to do so is an element of its “definition,” given that its appropriateness condition is the existence of a situation where the exercise of this power would be appropriate. Thus to think of an ostensive is to imagine a public scene of action. Such a thought not merely gives rise to desire, but is in itself an expression of desire, the same desire that would be felt in the presence of the scene itself.
To use a sacred name, even today, evokes a power that reconstitutes at least symbolically the communal scene. Most societies impose strict limits on such evocations (“taking God’s name in vain”). But the appropriateness of “profane” ostensives, in contrast, depends on circumstances that can only be observed a posteriori. Thus the very existence of an ostensive lexicon contains an implicit contradiction, and to think of any of its constituent elements presents the thinker with a pragmatic paradox. It is no doubt true to say that in contrast with fire, Fire! means the presence of a fire, but the word itself will provoke the same effect independently of this presence. In imagining, in the absence of this
referent, its power to compel the presence of the community, the potential speaker cannot help but realize that, given humanity’s shared scene of representation, the use of the sign alone will unleash the same power.
As we have seen in the Wolf! case, this gives rise to the possibility of lying, of deliberately provoking a wolf- or fire-reaction in the absence of its object. Considered simply as a lie, one presumes it would be sanctioned, but seen subjectively from the speaker’s point of view, this “inappropriate ostensive” opens the door to a broadening of the intentional structures of utterance forms to include the deliberate expression of desire. Because the hearer of “Fire!” is enjoined to react, the utterance itself expresses, independently of its “truth,” the desire to provoke the hearer’s anticipated reaction. The expression of desire that emerges from this new use would tend to disambiguate itself from the ostensive’s revelation of a socially significant presence. Once it becomes accepted as an utterance-form in its own right, the word would signify not the presence of its referent but the desire of the speaker for (the power conferred by) this presence. The ostensive will then have become an imperative.