The Language of Touch

Philosophical Examinations in Linguistics and Haptic Studies

Mirt Komel, Mirt Komel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350059283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Psycolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Offering an in-depth analysis of the relationship between touch and language through the history of philosophy, this book revitalizes the field of haptic studies, providing new insights into the philosophy of language and ontological nature of touch. The Language of Touch draws together an international team of linguists, anthropologists, and philosophers to demonstrate from a variety of disciplinary perspectives that the experience of touch is inextricable from the structure of language. Examining the intersections between phenomenology of touch and poststructural linguistics, this work draws upon figures such as Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Derrida, and Lacan to question both how language structures touch and how touch structures language.

1

The Wave of the Sign: Pyramidal Sign, Haptic Hieroglyphs, and the Touch of Language

Mirt Komel

Introduction

As I am going to discuss not only linguistic sign in connection to economic value on the one hand, and as a philosophical concept on the other—all mediated through the concept of touch as a common denominator—but also, at least at a certain point, Marx’s reference to the hieroglyphs and Hegel’s mention of the pyramids, let me start with an anecdotal remark.

The ancient Egyptian religious practices, architectural endeavors, and hieroglyphic language were, for a long period of time, considered as almost synonymous with the mysterious, the foreign, and the unknown. Contrary to the usual understanding that the Egyptians possessed a way to know things that were unknowable for an uninitiated mind, Hegel remarked somewhere that the “Egyptian mysteries were a riddle for the Egyptians themselves,” implying that the practitioners of these mysteries held no special knowledge about the religion they practiced (cf. Stewart 2017). Perhaps we could say the same about our contemporary economic practices, especially if we consider the problems related to commodity fetishism as first analyzed by Marx. And even more, we could say the same also about language, especially if we take into account Lacan’s distinctive linguistic take on psychoanalysis, as encompassed in his maxim “unconsciousness structured as a language.”

As far as the ancient Egyptian language is concerned, its decipherment has undergone a decisive breakthrough, as it is well understood due to the discovery of the so-called Rosetta Stone during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1799. This stone presents not only a hieroglyphic and demotic version of the same text, but also a Greek translation. I think touch can function as such a Rosetta Stone by helping translate certain materialistic economic mysteries into more palpable linguistic ones.

On a more conceptual note, let me lay all my cards on the table: what I want to make is a reinterpretation of the relation between the linguistic sign and economic value as defined by structural linguistics and dialectical materialism through the concept of touch, or rather and, more precisely, through the concept as touch; both were traditionally understood as separate and even opposing entities, while this contribution will provide a way of thinking of the two of them as identical.¹

The haptic cut of the sign

Now, after laying my cards on the table let me take them back and restart by playing my best card for the current game, namely, a curious biblical metaphor that Saussure used in order to illustrate the definition of sign as the relation between the signifier and the signified: “Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance” (Saussure 1966: 112). The wave of the sign is therefore produced by the encounter between air and water, between the signifier and the signified—we will return to this definition of the sign after a short detour.

The purpose of Saussure’s metaphor is to illustrate what Jean-Claude Milner, among others (cf. Benveniste 1971; Jakobson 1990; etc.), rightfully points out to be Saussure’s innovation in respect to the traditional philosophical understanding of language (Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Scholastics, Port-Royal Logic): if the sign was traditionally understood as an unilateral representation of thoughts or things (“speaking is an index of thinking”, “smoke is an index of fire”—while the contrary is not true since “thinking is not an index of speaking” and neither is “fire an index of smoke”), then Saussure redefined the sign as a mutual relation between the phonic material and the ideas of thought where one reflects the other not by representation, but rather by mutual association: the signifier is associated with the signified as much as the signified is associated with the signifier (cf. Milner 2002). Now, to reinforce this point let us return briefly to Saussure’s own wording with another comparison that precedes the metaphor of the wave: “Language could also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished only abstractedly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure phonology” (Saussure 1966: 113). The whole passage ends with the identification of linguistics as precisely the methodological scissor operating the cut through which sign is produced not as a substance, as it is often misunderstood, but rather as pure form: “Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance” (Ibid.: 113). Thus, the important thing to remember for our own endeavor is that sign is form, while the signifier and the signified are not simply substance, but two different substances—phonic and thought material—and therefore governed by a similar logic, at least looking from the standpoint of touch, that governs the well-known Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res cogitans.²

If we now return to the metaphor of the sign as the wave and put the stress on what Saussure himself determined as the “contact between air and water”: if the signifier (phonic material) is air, and if the signified (thought material) is water, then it is precisely their encounter that produces the sign in the form of wave, or vice versa, the sign as wave is the encounter of the signifier and the signified, of air and water. In this instance touch functions as the unifier of the otherwise distinct substances, since it is the contact between the two that produces the sign, that, again, itself is not a substance, but the form of this unity. However, if we consider Saussure’s other metaphor, the one with the sheet of paper, we can discern another kind of logic, more in tune with the remark that the sign is not a substance, but rather a form: if the sign is a sheet of paper with two sides, the verso side the signifier and the recto side the signified, then touch functions precisely as the cut that enables the distinction between the signifier and the signified (phonic and thought material). Touch here does not function as the unifier enabling the contact between the signifier and the signified, as was the case in the previous metaphor with the wave, but rather as the instance that cuts through the sign and produces the distinction between the signifier and the signified.

So, to conclude this first round of the game: is touch an instance that unifies the signifier and the signified in the form of the sign, or does it rather cut through the sign, thus enabling the distinction between the two? To this the most direct answer is: both; touch can be identified with the solidus in the Saussurian axiom for the sign (S/s), the solidus that not only divides the two dimensions of the signifier and the signified, but also unites them in the sign.

The (un)touchable value

Now let us see what the possible consequences are for a critique of political economy based on such a tactile redefinition of the linguistic sign, considering not only Saussure’s identification of sign with value, but, conversely, also Marx’s own identification of value with sign. As we will see in a moment, the two of them can give us two very different perspectives on a common paradox present in the sign and the value as well—besides throwing some light and some shadow on the related problems with both Saussure’s and Marx’s endeavors while constructing their respective analogies.

Saussure himself understood the sign as “value” and made the parallel between political economy and structural linguistics by stating: “both sciences are concerned with a system for equating things of different orders – labor and wages in one and a signified and signifier in the other” (Saussure 1966: 79). Embarking on his train of thought one can further differentiate between diachronic linguistics, implying a temporal continuity in the development of a language, and synchronic linguistics or linguistics stricto senso that isolates language from history by defining it as a static system of signs; conversely, one can observe economic phenomena through a synchronic view of the contemporary market economy or its diachronic historical development. If we, however, focus on the synchronic structure of language and economy only, and consider the identification of the sign with value, where value functions as the common denominator of both structural linguistics and political economy, we can see not only the parallel but also the main discrepancy between Saussure’s sign and Marx’s value.

As it is known, or at least as it should be known in this context, Marx starts his Capital by analyzing commodity as the minimal element through which he develops the logic of value, itself conceptualized through the difference between exchange and use-value. We consider that where these touch is significant: a commodity is, at the same time, a tangible thing with its intrinsically practical or at least consumable use-value, but also an intangible object of exchange with what is considered as proper value, the difference between the former and the latter being that in the first instance we look at the thing as if it has a value on its own, while in the second we necessarily relate it to other objects in order to define its exchange-value (cf. Marx 2015: 27–30).³ Similarly, Saussure states that in linguistics one must simultaneously observe the sign on its own, analyze the relation between the signifier and the signified, and consider the sign in relation to other signs by noting its peculiar character in the sense that it has sense only in relation to other signs. In short, and very broadly speaking, both sciences are “structuralistic” in their conception of sign/value since in both instances the object must be considered on its own and in relation to others at the same time—or speaking in Kantian terms: simultaneously “...