LANGUAGE:

ORIGIN AND MEANING

AIRLY RECENT ANTHROPOLOGY (e.g. Sahlins, R.B. Lee) has virtually

obliterated the long-dominant conception that defined prehistoric
humanity in terms of scarcity and brutalization. As if the implications of
this are already becoming widely understood, there seems to be a growing
sense of that vast epoch as one of wholeness and grace. Our time on earth,
characterized by the very opposite of those qualities, is in the deepest need
of a reversal of the dialectic that stripped that wholeness from our life as
a species.
Being alive in nature, before our abstraction from it, must have involved
a perception and contact that we can scarcely comprehend from our levels
of anguish and alienation. The communication with all of existence must
have been an exquisite play of all the senses, reflecting the numberless,
nameless varieties of pleasure and emotion once accessible within us.
Of course we have long been instructed that this original unity was destined
to crumble, that alienation is the provmce of being human: consciousness
depends on it. In much the same sense as objectified time has been held to
be essential to consciousnessHegel called it "the necessary alienation"
so has language, and equally falsely. Language may be properly considered
the fundamental ideology, perhaps as deep a separation from the natural world
as self-iistent time. And if timelessness resolves the split between spontaneity
and consciousness, languagelessness may be equally necessary.
Language is the subject of this exploration, understood in its most virulent
sense. A fragment from Nietzsche introduces its central perspective: "words
dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon
common."
Although langu^e can still be described by scholars in such phrases as "the
most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved," this
*John Zerzan is a writer living in Eugene, Oregon.
tA digest of an anicle first appearing in the Winter 1984 issue of the quarterly The Fifth Estate
and later published in Elements of Refusal hy Left Bank Books.
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237

characterization occurs now in a context of extremity in which we are forced

to call the aggregate of the work of the "human spirit" into question. It may
sound positivist to assert that language must somehow embody all the
"ad\^nces" of society, but in civili2ation it seems that all meaning is ultimately
linguistic; the question of the meaning of language, considered in its totality, has become the unavoidable next step.
We must Consider Anew the Nature of Language
Because language is the symbolization of thought, and symbols are the basic
units of culture, speech is a cultural phenomenon fundamental to what
civilization is. And because at the level of symbols and structure there are
neither primitive nor developed languages, it may be justifiable to begin by
locating the basic qualities of language and ideology.
Ideology, alienation's armored \ray of seeing, is a domination embedded
in systematic false consciousness. It is easier still to begin to locate language
in these terms if one takes up another definition common to both ideology
and language: namely, that each is a system of distorted communication between two poles and predicated upon symbolization.
Like ideology, language creates false separations and objectifications through
its symbolizing power. The logic of ideology, from aaive to passive, from
unity to separation, is similarly reflected in the decay of the verb form in
general. In modern English, verbs account for less than 10% of words.
Considered as the paradigm of ideology, language must also be recognized as the determinant organizer of cognition. As the pioneer linguist Sapir
noted, humans are very much at the mercy of language concerning what constitutes "social reality." Another seminal anthropological linguist, Whorf,
took this further to propose that language determines one's entire -ft^y of life,
including one's thinking and all other forms of mental activity. To use
language is to limit oneself to the modes of perception already inherent in
that language. The fact that language is only form and yet molds everthing,
goes to the core of what ideology is.
The Unnatural Is Imposed
More concretely, the essence of learning a language is learning a system,
a model, that shapes and controls speaking. It is easier still to see ideology
on this level, where, due to the essential arbitrariness of the phonological,
syntactic, and semantic rules of each, every human language must be learned. The unnatural is imposed, as a necessary moment of reproducing an
unnatural world.
Even in the most primitive languages, words rarely bear a recognizable
similarity to what they denote; they are purely conventional. Of course this
is part of the tendency to see reality symbolically, which Cioran referred to
as the "sticky net" of language, an infinite regression which cuts us off

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Et cetera FALL 1989

from the world. The arbitrary, self-contained nature of language's symbolic

organization creates growing areas of false certainty where wonder, multiplicity and non-equivalence should prevail. Language effeas the original split
between wisdom and method.
Along these lines, in terms of structure, it is evident that "freedom of
speech" does not exist; grammar is the invisible "thought control" of our
mvisible prison. With language we have already accommodated ourselves to
a world of unfreedom.
Reification, the tendency to take the conceptual as the perceived and to
treat concepts as tangible, is as basic to language as it is to ideology. Language
represents the mind's reification of its experience, that is, an analysis into parts
which, as concepts, can be manipulated as if they were objects.
It has been asserted that reification is necessary to mental functioning, that
the formation of concepts which can themselves be mistaken for living properties and relationships does away with the otherwise almost intolerable
burden of relating one experience to another.
Civilization is often thought of not as a forgetting but as a remembering,
wherein language enables accumulated knowledge to be transmitted forward,
allowing us to profit from others' experience as though they were our own.
Perhaps what is foi^otten is simply that others' experiences are not our own,
that the civilizing process is thus a vicarious and inauthentic one. When
language, for good reason, is held to be virtually coterminous with life, we
are dealing with another way of saying that life has moved progressively
farther from directly lived experience.
Language, like ideology, mediates the here and now, attacking direct, spontaneous connections. A descriptive example was provided by a mother
objecting to the pressure to learn to read; "Once a child is literate, there is
no turning back. Walk through an art museum. Watch the literate adults read
the title cards before viewing the paintings to be sure that they know what
to see. Or watch them read the cards and ignore the paintings entirely . . . As
the primers point out, reading opens doors. But once those doors are open,
it is very difficult to see the world without looking through them."
Language Conceals And Justifies
The process of transforming all direct experience into the supreme symbolic expression, language, monopolizes life. Like ideology, language conceals and justifies, compelling us to suspend our doubts about its claim to
validity. It is at the root of civilization, the dynamic code of civilization's
alienated nature.
Language is an invention for the reason that cognitive processes must
precede their expression in language. To assert that humanity is only human
because of language generally neglects the corollary that being human is the
precondition of inventing language.
Contemporary linguists seem to find the problem of how words came to

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239

be accepted as signs, or how the first symbols originated "such a serious problem that one may despair of finding a way out of its difficulties." Many of
the theories that have been put forth as to the origin of language are trivial:
they explain nothing about the qualitative, intentional changes introduced
by language. Somewhat closer to the mark, I believe, is the approach of contemporary linguist E. H. Sturtevant: since all intentions and emotions are
involuntarily expressed by gesture, look or sound, voluntary communication, such as language, must have been invented for the purpose of lying or
deceiving. In a more circumspect vein, the philosopher Caws insisted that
"truth . . . is a comparative latecomer on the linguistic scene, and it is certainly a mistake to suppose that language was invented for the purpose of
telling it."
Language Arose With The Beginnings Of Technology
The proposition that language arose with the beginnings of technology
that is, m the sense of division of labor and its concomitants, such as a standardizing of things and events and the effective power of specialists over
othersis at the heart of the matter, in my view. It would seem very difficult
to disengage the division of labor"the source of civilization," in Durkheim's
phrasefrom language at any stage, perhaps least of all the beginning. Division of labor necessitates a relatively complex control of group action: in effect it demands that the whole community be ot^anized and directed. This
happens through the breakdown of functions previously performed by
everybody, into a progressively greater differentiation of tasks, and hence of
roles and distinctions.
Language Itself Is A Repression
At the close of the Paleolithic Age, as a decreased proportion of verbs in
the language reflected the decline of unique and freely chosen acts in consequence of division of labor, language still possessed no tenses. Although the
creation of a symbolic world was the condition for the existence of time, no
fixed differentiations had developed before hunter-gatherer life was displaced
by Neolithic farming. But when every verb form shows a tense, language is
"demanding lip service to time even when time is funhest from our thoughts,"
(Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object). From this point one can ask
whether time exists apart from grammar. Once the structure of speech incorporates time and is thereby animated by it at every expression, division
of labor has conclusively destroyed an earlier reality. With Derrida, one can
accurately refer to "language as the origin of history." Language itself is a
repression, and along its progress repression gathersas ideology, as workso
as to generate historical time. Without language all of history would disappear.
By about 10,000 B.C. extensive division of labor had produced the kind
of social control reflected by cities and temples. The earliest writings are

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Etcetera FALL 1989

records of taxes, laws, terms of labor and servitude. This objectified domination thus originated from the practical needs of political economy. An increased use of letters and tablets soon enabled those in chaise to reach new
heights of power and conquest, as exemplified in the new form of government commanded by Hammurabi of Babylon. As Levi-Strauss put it, writing
"seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind
. . . Writing, on this its first appearance in our midst, had allied itself with
falsehood."
The Representation Of Representation
Language at this juncture becomes the representation of representation,
in hieroglyphic and ideographic writing and then in phonetic-alphabetic
writing. The progress of symbolization, from the symbolizing of words, to
that of syllables, and finally to letters in an alphabet imposed an increasingly irresistible sense of order and control. And in the reification that writing
permits, language is no longer tied to a speaking subject or community of
discourse, but creates an autonomous field from which every subject can
be absent.
In the contemporary world, the avant-garde of art has, most noticeably,
performed at least the gestures of refusal of the prison of language. Since
Mallarme, a good deal of modernist poetry and prose has moved against the
taken-for-grantedness of normal speech. To the question "Who is speaking?"
Mallarme answered, "Language is speaking." After this reply, and especially since the explosive period around World War I when Joyce, Stein and others
attempted a new syntax as well as a new vocabulary, the restraints and distortions of language have been assaulted wholesale in literature. Russian futurists,
Dada {e.g. Hugo Ball's effort in the 1920s to create "poetry without words"),
Artaud, the Surrealists and Lettristes were among the more exotic elements
of a general resistance to language.
The Symbolist poets, and many who could be called their descendants,
held that defiance of society also includes defiance of its language. But inadequacy in the former arena precluded success in the latter, bringing one
to ask whether avant-garde strivings can be anything more than abstract,
hermetic gestures. Language, which at any given moment embodies the
ideology of a particular culture, must be ended in order to abolish both
categories of estrangement; a project of some considerable social dimensions.
That literary texts (e.g. Finnegan 's Wake., the poetry of e.e. cummings) break
the rules of language seems to have the paradoxical effect of evoking the rules
themselves. By permitting the free play of ideas about language, society treats
these ideas as mere play.
Today "incredible" and "awesome" are applied to the most commonly
trivial and boring, and it is no accident that powerful or shocking words barely
exist anymore. The deterioration of language mirrors a more general estrangement; it has become almost totally external to us. From Kafka to Pinter,

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241

silence itself is a fitting voice of our times.

I am writing (obviously) enclosed in language, aware that language reifies
the resistance to reification. As T.S. Eliot's Sweeny explains, "I've gotta use
words when I talk to you." One can imagine replacing symbolic language
with real communicationas one can imagine replacing the imprisonment
of time with a brilliant presentonly by imagining a world without division of labor, without that divorce from nature which all ideology and
authority accrue. We couldn't live in this world without language and that
is just how profoundly we must transform this world.
Words bespeak a sadness; they are used to soak up the emptiness of unbridled time. We have all had the desire to go deeper than words, the feeling
of wanting only to be done with all the talk, knowing that being allowed
to live coherently erases the need to formulate coherence.
There is a profound truth to the notion that "lovers need no words." The
point is that we must have a world of lovers, a world of the face-to-face, in
which even names can be forgotten, a world which knows that enchantment
is the opposite of ignorance. Only a politics that undoes language and time
and is thus visionary to the point of voluptuousness has any meaning.