In the Name of Language

In his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Walter Benjamin writes of how “we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything,” because nothing exists without its own relation to language in human mental life. For the language of music, sculpture, or justice, it is essential that we may understand language in a way other than in its direct relation to the use of language by practitioners of any medium, or in the use of language when speaking “about” a concept.[1] Mediation is specified by the particular contexts of language in use “toward the communication of the contents of the mind,” because language is “inherent” to the mental expression, “co-extensive” to the content of the mind communicating itself in words.[2] The content of the mind is not the verbal content of language, though language “means the tendency inherent in the subjects concerned,” and so this motion towards the content of the mind communicating itself in words is only “a case of human language” concerning the subject which underlies the use of language, or is “founded on” the use.[3] The use of language is in one sense the choice of words, but the choice is also a placement of words in the common experience of language, and the placement is itself a mediation between the linguistic being of things in their communication of themselves to man. The “meaning” of language is immanent in the subject’s tendency to communicate in words the content of the mind, but language also exists to the extent of “absolutely everything,” as absolutely everything exists to the extent of a relation with language to man.[4] Benjamin’s use of “language” is not metaphorical. Rather, language is the “innermost nature” of expression in everything, and thus, tends toward expression as not what communicates “through” language, but the “direct expression” communicating “itself” “in” the language.[5]

One may communicate a given subject in its specialized language, and in this sense the subject of concern underlies the language, located as the cause for language, in so far as what constitutes the subject as itself may be a priori to the use of language. The subject of concern determines how language will be used and may remain in the time of comprehension a conceptual presence underneath the language at a distance from comprehending the words and their usage, but it is also that which exists “on” the language, in the sense of being a posteriori to the experience of what is communicated through language, made legible to man by the use of words occurring prior to the subject being “found.” In that interstitial sense of legibility, language may be understood as the concept of a “cause” for discovering the subject with its tendency towards communicating the content of mental life. This “cause” is the self-evidence of the copula’s immediacy that makes this condition of language non-tautological: “the linguistic being of all things is their language.”[6] Legibility does not refer to the concept of comprehending what is “made” visible in one’s mental life, nor the use or making of language as a metaphor for the task of visibility which the communication of the mental content may demonstrate. It marks what it may describe along the gradations of consciousness, in which everything that partakes in language is communicable, not to suggest that the communicability in a “mental entity” is what “appears most clearly in its language.”[7] Thus, the “appearance” at stake in immediacy is something other than A = A. The “linguistic entity” is a direct expression of the “mental entity,” and also what is communicable in the mental entity; to understand the linguistic entity one must locate the mental entity in language, distinguished from the language itself, independent, also, of what is a priori or a posteriori to the experience of the language as an event or a thing, and what may be communicated through it; Benjamin names this mental entity in language as the expression’s direct communication of “itself.”[8] Everything in nature, whether animate or inanimate, will “partake of language,” and communicate “itself” to man. It is the nature of everything to partake in language. The corresponding mental being to language is what language communicates—that is “language communicates the linguistic being of things.”[9] If a speaker of the language were defined as one who communicates themselves through the language, then there are no true speakers of languages. The mental being of a “speaker” communicates in the language, and it is only in this sense that Benjamin says man’s language is the linguistic being of man, in so far as language communicates the linguistic being of things.[10] He writes, “For precisely because nothing is communicated through language, what is communicated in language cannot be externally limited or measured, and therefore all language contains its own incommensurable, uniquely constituted infinity.”[11] This is one reason why the human mind cannot imagine what does not partake in language. Everything able to be imagined by man possesses a “direct expression,” and this state of possession is not to be understood as being endowed with language, nor being made capable of a kind of speech.[12] Everything has the capacity to possess “expression,” distinct from having the capacity to be expressed “through” language: what is “communicable of a mental entity, in this it communicates itself.”[13] Thus, language is “this capacity for communication.”[14]

Imagination includes the strata of poetic imagination referenced by Paul de Man in his essay “Wordsworth and Hölderlin,” in which he cites from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: “[the poet] considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature.”[15] Wordsworth’s sentence precedes Benjamin’s essay on language, but one may partake in the language of his sentence through the Husserlian “reactivation of self-evidence” to practice Benjamin’s method of understanding language as more than a passive entry.[16] If language is the fullest containment of communicability, and poetic language is also to be understood as more than poiesis as a context of language in use, then we may further investigate the linguistic being of man through the two particular forms of the imagination with their own inherent tendencies of communicating in words the contents of the mind. The lower form of imagination is “fancy,” which “depends upon a relationship between mind and nature,” and the highest form of “imagination” is “defined by the power of its language precisely to remain intuitively and repetitively true to sense perception.”[17] De Man writes, “This language is empowered to produce appearances “for the gratification of the mind in contemplating the image itself.”[18] Benjamin later defines in his essay that “in an almost sublime way, the linguistic community of mute creation with God is thus conveyed in the image of the sign,” for the appearance produced by the power of language is not something other than the image, but “the image itself.”[19]

Ambiguity in “logos” exists in the assertion of a difference between the mental entity and the linguistic entity. Benjamin suggests one cannot begin by interrogating the ambiguity to further establish a communication with the “logos,” both as one who “reads” what tends toward the communication of the content of the mind, and as the expression in everything imaginable partaking of language. Yet, this sense of establishment partakes in the relation between man and nature which fancy also depends upon. The ambiguity asks of the nature in the “expression” to, as well as towards the mind—neither motion, Benjamin insists, are anthropomorphic in the partaking of language—as well as the “expression” of the mind in language, as the use of language, in language itself, and in which words “partake in language.”[20] Because mental being communicates itself in the language, rather than through the language, it is not “outwardly” identical to linguistic being, yet it is identical in its capacity for communication because what is communicable in the mental entity is the linguistic entity.[21] This “outward” difference and the power of language to produce the appearance one may contemplate as “the image itself” maintain and defer ambiguity. Thus, if language communicates the linguistic being of things, and the mental entity of a thing is what communicates “itself” in the language, then, indeed, “the linguistic being of all things is their language.”[22] Benjamin provides the example of a lamp, who’s mental being of the lamp is not the lamp itself, but the “language-lamp, the lamp in communication, the lamp in expression.”[23] Everything in partaking of language communicates itself to man, and man communicates his mental being to everything not by naming, nor through naming, but in naming things. That is, he does not use language to name things, or name things through language, but he communicates his mental being in the names he gives to things. If man did indeed communicate his mental being “by names” the passive construction would make the name, or the “words by which he denotes a thing,” the agent of communication, but words indicating things do not act on behalf of man, nor the thing communicable in mental being. Though, “through the word, man is bound to the language of things. The human word is the name of things.”[24] Name is the “innermost nature” of the medium of communication, which is language itself, just as language is the innermost nature of expression.[25] Benjamin maintains two conceptions of language. In the first, after the Fall, the word is a means of communication, and addressed to a human being, its object is factual. In the second, which was intact before the Fall, language “knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means: in the name, the mental being of man communicates itself to God.”[26] Although nothing communicates “through” language, the name, indeed, “is that through which, and in which” language communicates “itself absolutely.”[27] The name is the absolute wholeness of language as the medium wherein mental being communicates itself. Apart from other mental entities, name is the only reason the mental being of man is “communicable without residue.”[28] The difference between human language and the language of things is “founded” on name as the “heritage” of human language, which affirms “language as such” to be man’s mental being communicated by his linguistic being to name things. The act of naming is made equivalent to the condition of name “in” which a mental being of man communicates itself in language.

God’s creations are completed by man giving names to them, and this completion is also the communication toward the content of the mind. Language, however, is also capable of being “incomplete” in its capacity for communication. As there may be a mental entity communicating “itself” in language, there is also the mental entity in language which expresses “itself purely where it speaks in name,” or what Benjamin defines as “universal naming.”[29] If the mental being of a lamp is the lamp-language, the mental being of name is also the name-language. To be “without residue” may be Wordsworth’s “adaptation” of man and nature to one another reworded in Benjamin’s sentence: “All nature, in so far as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man.”[30] A time elapses within the act of mediation, a temporal progression in communication to man, from the mental entity in nature communicating “itself” in language, becoming “finally” in man. The “intensive totality of language” exists in name as the “absolutely communicable mental entity,” and the “extensive totality of language” is the entity of universal naming in its communication. Thus, the intensive totality of language is also the communicable thing of the mental being in name, or the name-language, as the extensive totality of language is the communicable thing itself. It is “by virtue of its communicating nature, its universality” that would make language “incomplete wherever the mental entity that speaks from it is not in its whole structure linguistic—that is, communicable.”[31] This final moment, in which all nature communicates itself in man, and in its adverbial function, may find its “expression” in the act of reflection, an adverbial act succeeding, also, the reflective motion it desires to modify in its relation to what is being reflected upon. Yet the relation itself, as a form of knowledge, may precede what will be modified in reflection, in what Benjamin notes as the strangeness of “speaking of a reason of state in the case of a poet,” a reason posed, also, in conditions like the “incompletion” of language.[32] His turn of thought parallels the motions of “reflection,” which De Man defines as what “must negate the act that nonetheless constitutes its origin.”[33] To speak of a reason of state is, also, to name the incompletion that a mental entity is not “in” its whole structure linguistic, in the negation of the whole from where the reasoning begins. “Finally in man” is where the contestation of the logos surfaces as ambiguity; it is the origin and end of ambiguity from where the mental entity and linguistic entity were first differentiated beyond their identical capacity for communication, and yet the “thing” which man gives a name to in communicating his mental being, is also a medium of communication itself, communicating none other than language as a result of its own mental being.[34] “Finally” is also the “great moment” constituting the whole of the lyric.[35]

Benjamin writes, “Name, however, with regard to existing language, offers only the ground in which its concrete elements are rooted. But the abstract elements of language…are rooted in the word of judgement.” [36] Name is pure language, but after the Fall, man abandoned this immediacy of name in Benjamin’s second conception of language, for the first conception in which a word is only a means, an “empty word, into the abyss of prattle” from where the ground of multiplicity begins with language made “mediate.”[37] “Signs must become confused where things are entangled,” for signs and things are on two planes of enslavement, and “turning away from things,” which is also “enslavement,” marked Babel coming into being with the future of linguistic confusion.[38] In the essentially adapted relation between man and nature is the completion of God’s creations in man having given names to them, but having given a name is only to have given a ground for the concrete element in which nature may “finally” communicate itself to man; the danger of language’s incompletion resides in the “word of judgement,” which furnishes a ground for the abstract element that remains suspended above man. If language’s “intensive totality” is in the name where the “knowledge of things” also resides, then it is in the “extensive totality” where prattle is liable to occur in the communication whose entity of universal naming retains the possibility of incompletion, in so far as the mental entity is not in its whole structure linguistic; so long as that is the case, the “outward” difference between the mental entity and the linguist entity remain, and even the “inward” identity of their same capacity for communication is at risk of illegibility. This possibility of “incompletion” is extensive; to shift the terms and thus the subject of concern from the name of language to consciousness, the possibility of incompletion is like the extensive time of impressions in which the factor of shock exists as a perpetual possibility; the consciousness has a greater extent of stimuli to “screen” itself against in the extensive time of experience (Erfahrung), that would then “remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis)”; the locality of oneself in time is also the “intensive totality” of name where man’s knowledge of things remains even after the equivalent shock from the Fall of man.[39] We may consider two parallel structures: in the first is the intensive totality that is the name, and the extensive totality in which prattle has capacity by virtue of man turning away from things; in the second is the time of impressions that “enter” experience (Erfahrung), and the “certain hour” of experience (Erlebnis) one may then assign to an incident, “a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents,” a cost of equivalence to where the mental entity is not “in its whole structure linguistic.”[40] To screen against stimuli is also to turn away from things. “Knowledge of good and evil abandons name,” for the knowledge comes from “outside,” like a stimulus the consciousness must defend itself against. Benjamin notes to achieve a defense against shock is to “turn the incident into a moment that has been lived (Erlebnis),” or, in the case of name, to perhaps return man to things, in writing, which is itself a use of language as an intervention only in relation to the time of consciousness, a use with the same effect of reflection negating its origin. If not for the “fundamental identity between the word that, after the promise of the snake, knows good and evil, and the externally communicating word,” writing would not succeed as the turning of an incident absorbed by the consciousness into a moment that is lived. This is because, after the Fall, the human word is no longer “in tact,” and thus “lives” outside of the “name-language,” or the “language of knowledge”; rather, “the word must communicate something (other than itself),” and in this condition the Adamite spirit of language decays between the mediate word’s external communication, and the expressions of nature in their essential immediacy as the creative word of God.[41] Before this decay, “the life of man in the pure spirit of language was blissful. Nature, however, is mute.”[42] We return then to the image of the sign in De Man’s commentary on Wordsworth through Benjamin’s linguistic community of mute creation with God, on the plane of fancy and on the plane of the imagination, and thus, in the relation between man and nature, and the relation between man’s communication of himself in name and the power of language communicated to him that may produce appearances to contemplate “the image itself.”[43] The production is fragile even if language is powerful due to the communicating nature of things. The poet may be afraid that “the image might escape him.”[44] Benjamin notes “language never gives mere signs”; there is no accidental relation between the word and the object, for any word as a means, and any of its objects that remain facts, because words are not “a sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by some convention.”[45] The mystical theory of language rejects the bourgeois idea of this convention, but Benjamin also rejects the idea in the mystical theory that the word is the essence of the thing.[46] Rather, “the thing in itself has no word, being created from God’s word and known in its name by a human word,” just as God did not name man, but gave man the ability to name the creations, and his own kind; to know this of things is not spontaneous and it does not come from language in the manner of an infinite creative act.[47] “Rather, the name that man gives to language depends on how language is communicated to him. In name, the word of God has not remained creative; it has become one part receptive, even if receptive to language.”[48] Here, one must return, again, to what De Man cites in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: “[the poet] considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature.” Benjamin defines translating the language of things into human language as a translation of the mute thing, which is nameless, into sound and into name. The mental being of man communicates itself to God in names given to nature corresponding to the mental entity of nature communicating “itself” in language, which name remains “receptive to,” less than creative, yet passively, in the miraculous sense, “without residue,” receiving the “residue of the creative word of God” preserved as both the name, and the word of judgement above him through the intensive and extensive totalities of naming in man’s relation to nature.[49]

Benjamin writes: “Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature (and for the sake of her redemption the life and language of man—not only, as is supposed, of the poet—are in nature).”[50] The meaning of the proposition is the conditional mood of nature in lament, which is “the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language. It contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath; and even where there is only a rustling of plants, there is always a lament.”[51] The proposition begins as such: “Because she is mute, nature mourns.” Benjamin then inverts the proposition that because of nature’s mourning, she is mute. He continues: “In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than the inability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable. To be named—even when the namer is godlike and blissful—perhaps always remains an intimate of mourning.”[52] Though the knowledge of good and evil is nameless, the inversion of Benjamin’s proposition suggests nature retains a knowing of “itself” communicated in the name-language of nature, and that this name-language, ultimately, “is,” in its immediacy, nameless, yet not spontaneous in the linguistic community of mute creation with God. De Man writes of these lines by Wordsworth:

“…Upon a Slope above the Village School,

And there, along that bank, when I have pass’ed

At evening, I believe that oftentimes

At full half-hour together I have stood

Mute—looking at the Grave in which he lies. (V. 414-22)[53]

…There is a hidden but indubitable connection between the loss of the sense of correspondence and the experience of death. The boy’s surprise at standing perplexed before the sudden silence of nature was an anticipatory announcement of his death, a movement of his consciousness passing beyond the deceptive constancy of a world of correspondences into a world in which our mind knows itself to be in an endlessly precarious state of suspension: above an earth, the stability of which it cannot participate in, and beneath a heaven that has rejected it.”[54]

The anticipatory announcement of death is also the act of translation from a sudden silence into the immediacy in the knowledge of mortality which remains an extensive experience (Erfahrung) before the “experience of death” at a certain hour of experience (Erlebnis). If the name man gives to language, in which man communicates himself to language, depends on how language is communicated to him, then the experience of death at a certain hour is also the anticipation of a name. Lyric is monologic in so far as it is a translation of the nameless into the name, the legibility of the sensuous in the nonsensuous power of language, the name of language as the name which the poet is “in,” communicating himself in language to nature, to the “creative and the finished creation” as word and name listen to the muteness of things. Fancy, which is dependent on this relation between man and nature, is also an “overnaming” that causes the melancholy of man, and this overnaming, Benjamin intimates, translates into the “overprecision” in the “tragic relationship between the languages of human speakers,” who are, to reiterate, not speaking “through” the language, but “in” the language.[55] De Man names this overprecision as “the deceptive constancy of the world of correspondences”; these correspondences are not the correspondence of linguistic entity and the mental entity in their outward difference and inward sameness, or the corresponding mental being to language that language is said to communicate in these conditions of difference. Rather, it is the correspondence of Benjamin’s first conception of language, in which words are only means and objects remain facts. It is the correspondence, also, in which the word of judgement hangs over above the speaker, thus making the speaker “above the earth”; the source of what produces this knowledge for the “endlessly precarious state of suspension” is the inexpressible state upon which only one may gaze—a gaze which turns one “Mute—looking at the Grave” such that the gaze one would share with the heaven who has rejected it, and with the muteness of nature, corresponds with all the other mental entities communicating themselves “in” language. This is what makes muteness creative, as the one who gazes becomes “Mute,” not because of a transference of moods, but in so far as the consciousness of man may truly become the mourning in nature that first created its muteness. The gaze becomes a caesura between the language of things and the language of man, as Benjamin’s inversion of his proposition may be repeated and reversed for man.

The highest poetic imagination is the deepest act of the mind: “in a word, the most expressed is at the same time the purely mental,” which Benjamin defines as the concept of revelation.[56] He writes: “notice is given that only the highest mental being, as it appears in religion, rests solely on man and on the language in him, whereas art as a whole, including poetry, rests not on the ultimate essence of the spirit of language but on the spirit of language in things, even in its consummate beauty.”[57] This appearance is like the “uncertain Heaven, receiv’d / Into the bosom of the steady Lake.”[58] That is, the words themselves translate the nameless spirit of language into the name in which our knowledge of things survives, and thus, where the spirit of language in things breathes.

Endnotes

[1] Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” Translated by Edmund Jephcott, 62.

[2] Ibid, 62.

[3] Ibid, 62.

[4] Ibid, 62.

[5] Ibid, 63.

[6] Ibid, 63.

[7] Ibid, 64.

[8] Ibid, 63.

[9] Ibid, 63.

[10] Ibid, 63.

[11] Ibid, 64.

[12] Ibid, 72.

[13] Ibid, 64.

[14] Ibid, 64.

[15] Paul de Man, “Wordsworth and Hölderlin,” 52.

[16] Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” 361.

[17] De Man, 52.

[18] Ibid, 52-53.

[19] Benjamin, 70.

[20] Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 62.

[21] Ibid, 63.

[22] Ibid, 63.

[23] Ibid, 63.

[24] Ibid, 69.

[25] Ibid, 64.

[26] Ibid, 65.

[27] Ibid, 65.

[28] Ibid, 65.

[29] Ibid, X.

[30] Ibid, 65.

[31] Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” X.

[32] Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 162.

[33] De Man, “Wordsworth and Hölderlin,” X.

[34] Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” X.

[35] Lukacs, “Theory of the Novel,” 63.

[36] Ibid, X.

[37] Ibid, X.

[38] Ibid, X.

[39] Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 162.

[40] Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” X.

[41] Ibid, X.

[42] Ibid, 72.

[43] De Man, 52.

[44] Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 163.

[45] Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” X.

[46] Ibid, 70.

[47] Ibid, 69-70.

[48] Ibid, 69.

[49] Ibid, 74.

[50] Ibid, 72.

[51] Ibid, 72.

[52] Ibid, 72.

[53] De Man, 53.

[54] Ibid, 53.

[55] Benjamin, 63.

[56] Ibid, 67.

[57] Ibid, 67.

[58] De Man, 54.