Language is Not Linguistic?

Poststructuralists contend that all human experience is linguistically mediated — or, less dramatically, mediated by interpretive matrices that are structured like languages. That’s because humans think linguistically, and impose linguistic-type structures on everything. Language is such an all-pervading medium that we can have no assurance that human understanding of the world is true, that it directly corresponds to the underlying phenomena to which it refers. In linguistic terms, the linguistic signifiers don’t necessarily signify anything outside language itself — or, as Derrida puts it, there is nothing outside the text.

Humans are the only language-using animals that we know of. Other creatures interact with the world, but since they’re not language-users it seems pretty darned unlikely that they structure their experiences linguistically. For example, all creatures react instinctively to potential food sources, being drawn by sensory receptors specifically to stuff which that particular species can digest and metabolize. We can describe this instinct linguistically, but that doesn’t mean the creatures themselves operate according to our linguistic description.

We humans also react instinctively to foods. Newborns, who can’t yet structure their experiences linguistically, instinctively eat nourishing food and reject other stuff — though they do have the unsettling tendency to put weird things in their mouths. It’s possible that, once higher-level thought processes kick in, young children no longer react to food out of pure instinct, that thinking about foods linguistically becomes integral to their reactions. We can override our instincts; e.g., by not eating that second piece of cake and developing a refined palate for wines. Still, the taste buds and salivary glands continue to work automatically. I don’t know whether psychological research has been able to parse out the intricate interrelationships of instinct and cognitive-linguistic processing. I would tentatively speculate that at least some aspects of human experience operate non-linguistically, but that any human experience can be described linguistically if we think about it.

Once we’ve framed an instinctive reaction in cognitive-linguistic terms, can we ever again have the raw instinctive experience? I suspect we can. Much of what we do is automatic. We might be able to arrive at a conscious awareness of an instinctive act, an awareness that we may be able to retrieve at will, but meanwhile the instinct continues to operate automatically just as it always has. We can talk about going on a diet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t salivate at the sight or smell of a nice juicy steak.

We react instinctively, just like all other animals, bu we also perform distinctively human cultural acts without being consciously aware of them. Consider something like personal space. Americans feel comfortable speaking to one another up to a certain proximity; if someone gets too close we get nervous. Other cultures tolerate, even prefer, getting right up in each others’ faces. Though our reactions seem instinctive, clearly this is at least partly a cultural phenomenon, an element of social etiquette, like shaking right hands or hugging or kissing each other’s cheeks as a greeting. If personal space preferences were instinctive, they would be pretty much universal. Still, it’s possible to go through a lifetime without ever being aware of our cultural personal space preference. Once it enters our awareness we can describe the parameters of personal space in structural linguistic terms, but is it intrinsically structured this way? I doubt it. I think human interactions generate emergent collective structures that aren’t the result of conceptual-linguistic operations of the people involved. Consequently there’s no reason to assert that these emergent phenomena structure themselves like language.

Even language itself is mostly automatic. You can overhear people talking and, without even listening or thinking about it, you can understand what’s being said. You take this automatic language processing for granted until you go to a place where people don’t speak your language. You know they understand each other, but you cannot understand them. The language processing centers of your brain don’t even get activated. To you it’s a stream of human vocalization without linguistic meaning. You become more aware of the raw sounds (the strange r and u sounds in French), the rhythm (English accentuates syllables, French accentuates phrases) the volume (Americans generally speak more loudly than French people). Language is an emergent human artifact that is structured linguistically, and it operates linguistically in automated brain activities that don’t require conscious attention. A foreign language in which you’re not fluent doesn’t affect you the same way. You can pay conscious attention and try to understand as best you can, but once you stop paying attention the words and phrases recede back into nonlinguistic sound streams.

French schoolchildren study with intensity the structure of their own language — the grammar and verb conjugations and syntactical structures — in a way that American students never do. French people claim it’s because French is a more complicated language than English, but that seems unlikely. It’s just that they subject their language to more conscious scrutiny than we do. French people can probably tell you when they’re using the pluperfect, but just because we Americans can’t name it doesn’t mean we don’t use it — and use it correctly. In a way language is like personal space: a cultural medium that we don’t have to think about in order to participate in it. Language-using is second nature, automatic, unconscious — a lot like instinct, or like personal space. Language is a structured medium, but the cognitive structures by which we describe language aren’t necessarily intrinsic to language itself. The words we use to describe the structure of language are part of the vocabulary of that language, but it’s not clear we use grammatical rules when we happen to use a pluperfect construction in the flow of speech. In that sense you could say that language isn’t linguistic.

What are the implications for psychotherapy? We do a lot of things automatically, without consciously thinking about them. Instincts, cultural practices, even speech operate mostly at this automatic level, perhaps without our ever having paid any conscious attention to what we’re doing and saying. These activities may be well-structured to the point of rigidity, but the structures aren’t directly accessible to conscious scrutiny. Calling attention to someone’s behaviors and describing them in words is to impose an interpretive framework on these behaviors that may be completely alien to the structured matrix in which the behavior patterns take shape. Even calling attention to the words and phrases a person uses means imposing a different kind of cognitive-linguistic structure on language itself. This sort of reframing of behavior and speech can be done, and we can get skilled at it. But we should have less assurance that cognitive-linguistic reframing will readily translate into the automated “languages” that govern behavior and speech on an everyday basis. Bringing a maladaptive reaction into awareness, making sense of it, assigning words to describe it, doesn’t mean that the automated structures generating the reaction will realign themselves appropriately, spontaneously making our reactions more “sensible.” This is a sad fact of which we’re all too well aware.