As Kevin’s post astutely points out, it seems like the reading material for this week orientate us towards a discussion of Language and language. That being said, I’d like to take up Kevin’s point about the relation between Language and truth. Does an entirely different relation occur between Language and truth if we substitute an understanding of ‘Truth as an immutable and transcendental series of facts’ with ‘truth as the processes of selection and evaluation that provide the conditions for truth claims to occur in the first place’? That’s to say, what happens to the relation between Language (and language) and truth if we understand this connection in constructive terms (i.e., language plays a part in constructing truth) rather than mimetic ones (i.e., language represents an already given truth out there)?
I think that the Ariekei’s system of Language explicitly participates in such acts of construction. Take for example Avice’s explanation early in the novel of the role of Language for the Ariekei:
‘For Hosts, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams. What imaginaries any of them could conjure at all must be misty and trapped in their heads.’ (83)
This shows that, rather than there being no distinction between Language and Truth, the latter entirely depends upon the former to come into existence (or to manifest as anything other than ‘misty’ pre-thoughts). If the Ariekei are Hosts, then truth is a sort of parasite that feeds from their Language system. We might also look to the Ariekei’s construction of similes by manufacturing situations for (post?)human bodies and inanimate objects. This construction could be understood as a sort of truth-making: for something to be true, it must be said; if it cannot be said, then new forms of expression must be constructed to produce this information as truth.
This, then, begs the relationship of language to Language to code. Perhaps the mimetic understanding of the relation between language and truth (i.e., language as representing an external truth) is the same relation that Chun describes with the fetish of code: when the ‘outcome’ or ‘end’ of code obscures the coding process that enabled this object’s construction. In other words: can we draw equivalencies between, on the one hand, the situation in which representation through language masks the role of language in constructing this representation and, on the other (posthuman bionic) hand, the situation in which the outcome of code (e.g., an application or a game, etc.) distracts us from thinking about the underlying code that produced this outcome in the first place?
I think Kevin’s question about the defamiliarizing of language is a pertinent one here. And, so as to not to disappoint his expectations for theoretical conceptions of language, it might be interesting to think not about Hegel but Friedrich Kittler, and especially his idea of language as a sort of code. For Kittler, there was a time (which he calls Discourse Network 1800, which approximately correlates to the Romantic period) in which writing was a way of storing a transcendental meaning: trained to read for this meaning, audiences were able to bypass the material codes used to communicate and ‘hallucinate’ a meaning from the alphanumeric symbols arranged on a surface. With the development of new technologies, however, writing lost its monopoly as the primary material storage system. Reduced to but one mode of communication among many, the material conditions through which data was transmitted became apparent: audio playback is accompanied by the hiss of a gramophone needle; writing is exposed as a sort of code used to create a representation, rather than some sort of lossless transmission system for transcendental meaning or ‘Truth’. As Kevin noted, the lie makes truth conceivable: this is not to say truth was never there, but only that it becomes apparent through its opposite.
It’s certainly interesting to see a text like Mièville’s novel defamiliarize its own raw materials (i.e., language); I’m out of space here, but I wonder if such acts of defamiliarization could be trying to get us to think about the relationship between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, between representation and lived experience? On a different note, I think it would be helpful to scrutinize further the relationship between linguistic or natural languages and coding or ‘computer’ ‘languages’. Is it useful to associate natural and coding languages? What if we didn’t think of coding as a language at all, would that change our understanding of digital media? (By the way, these are genuine questions I don’t really have an answer to – but, especially given how most of the reading we’ve had so far has drawn a relationship between language and code in some way, I think it’s something it’d be worth thinking about!)
