I’ll get my usual histrionics out of the way early. Embassytown is imaginative and wild and creative and I think it’s great because I’m a tremendous nerd and give me some good ole’ fashioned high sci-fi any day of the week and twice on Sundays and I’ll be happy. I love me some world-building, and even if I eventually get past the generic tropes of imagined future-slang, technobabble, and pseudo-science to the real story, I still get an Ariekei-style word-high just tying to figure it all out.
But we’re here to talk about Language. After last week, and especially coupled with the Chun article, it seemed natural to try to cram Language into a box about how language is code, and the addicted Hosts are a corrupted operating system, or something. When Avice describes a “negotiation” between the Hosts and the Ambassadors, she says, “This wasn’t an aspiration: the Hosts could only envisage that this was how it would be” (174). This seems be staging exactly what Galloway wants us to believe about code – that it is “the only language that is executable,” that it’s the only language that enacts its own truth. But this runs utterly counter to how we are to understand Language.[1] The relationship between Language and truth is no relationship at all – they are one in the same, because there is no collapsing of terms. Here, the medium is not the message; the message is the message, and that message is reality. In Language, there is no referent-reference dichotomy, at least until surh / tesh-echer figures out how to lie.[2] Language isn’t code cum language, it’s Language, and there’s no need to compile it in order for it to run.
The Hosts, then, are somehow both the perfect manifestation of code-as-language, but without the intermediate step of inventing code as somehow separate from language. This elision works to sidestep the historical development of this understanding that Chun brings us. Chun’s article does a sophisticated job of nuancing and historicizing the developing ways in which we, in the net society, have come to understand code in definitional and affective terms; how the person is erased, how the code itself becomes libidinal and Freudian. However, Embassytown avoids this higher level historical analysis (with the exception of a throwaway evolutionary-biological theory of it on 129). The novel, for all it’s high sci-fi tropes (include, in a postmodern-wink, “trope-ware,”), seems to put its essential preoccupation with the sociopolitics of interpersonal relationships into relief with Language, rather than focusing especially on it. While the Hosts are fascinating, and all the characters are fascinated with them, the narrative voice is laser-focused on Avice’s perspective. We get her memories of her relationship with Scile, the intimate moments with CalVin, her observations of the not-quite-uncanny nature of Ehrsul. Clothes and “augmentations” come up over and over. For a book about aliens that literally can only speak truth, we get a lot of unspoken truths about life on Ariekei.
Here’s my question, then. We will no doubt spend a lot of time unpacking the particulars of Language – how it supposedly works, why exactly it breaks down. We’ll obliquely cite some Hegel as Mièville does to talk about the soul of language in the era of digital information. All of this is extremely interesting and productive to talk about, especially after a few weeks of trying to dis- and re-entangle technology with lower-case language. And I hope my fellow posters this week bring us in those directions, and I look forward to it. But, that said, what position does it put us in if we use Language, and the Hosts and Ambassadors who speak it, as a mirror against which to assess the deep defamiliarization of the ways we use language – spoken and unspoken – every day right here on this side of the Immer?
[1] This whole paragraph is a mess of “Language” and “language” in series, but it’s tough to avoid, even if it frustrates clarity. Nothing else to be done, except spend a little time in class discussing the friction and frisson of the two terms.
[2] Someone better at manipulating the html protocols of WordPress than I am might be able to figure out how to “properly” represent their name here. That problem itself is another manifestation of the same interesting quirk of medium-message collapse that my failed attempts at italicization in my last post raised. No more intentional now than then, but at least we can point at it.
