I've lost the thread of the story I was telling.
My elephant roams his dream of Hindustan again.
Narrative, poetics, destroyed, my body,
a dissolving, a return.
Rumi

The long waiting silence was utterly gone, the long tension--a kind of grave, quiet anxiety with each man very much alone--annihilated; and this was a continual enormously active present.

Patrick O'Brian

Note, in the last left-hand example, how swiftly meaning departs when words are wrongly juxtaposed.

William Strunk and E.B. White

Introduction: Putting Language in its Place

In Jorge Luis Borges' famous fable, the universe is a library. It consists of hexagonal rooms. On each wall of each room are five shelves holding thirty-five volumes each. Each volume in turn has four hundred and ten pages, each page forty lines. The library contains a single example of each possible volume-sized combination of the letters of the alphabet, the space, the comma, and the period. It appears to its inhabitants to be limitless, hexagons opening on hexagons further than one could wander in many lifetimes. And in such a lifetime one might not find a single coherent sentence, much less a great work of literature. Nevertheless, there are those who assert that every volume in the library makes sense in some language or other. This claim Borges refutes by pointing out that "four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectal or rudimentary it may be."⁽¹⁾

Even in such a place, some concessions must be made to the human organism. Each hexagon contains two small closets: "In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities" (51). When one dies, letting go once and for all of the project of making sense out of the inalterable MCV's and the rest of the gobbledygook, one is pitched over the railing to fall through the books for eternity, or thereabouts.

Ours is an era obsessed by language. Or it is better to say: ours is an academy obsessed by language. When we try to make sense or nonsense out of our world, our selves, our institutions, we seem to do it in language and by means of the trope of language. Analytic philosophy used to be concerned with the question of how words refer to the world. Under the auspices of Wittgenstein, Quine, Rorty and others this question has more or less been abandoned in favor of questions about the relations of words to one another, so that Quine says that words do not refer at all except within a whole language, Wittgenstein that talking in general about word/world relations is impossible because it constitutes a language game that purports to stand outside all language games (philosophy), Rorty that we should stop talking about the world at all and rest content with multiplying texts. The hermeneutics of Gadamer and others takes the interpretation of texts as a model for all human experience, as if we lived indeed in a library in which every volume made sense in some language or other. Deconstructionists start with the axiom that there is nothing outside the text, an axiom that would be even more compelling than it is (though not, for all that, perfectly compelling) if we lived in the Library of Babel. More widely, a lot of folks (Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum, for instance) try to make sense of human life as narrative, or by means of narrative, or in terms of "constitutive life projects." They describe moral education or ethical life as requiring narrative, or they explain our values by means of stories, and assert that those values require stories. Others, following Foucault, describe the sources of knowledge and truth as human power relations, which they in turn describe as modes of discourse. Some feminists and African-American theorists associate being oppressed with a condition in which one cannot tell or make one's own story, and describe their oppressors as engaged in the construction of meta- or master-narratives. Lyotard holds that such metanarratives are breaking down into a profusion of micronarratives. These are different approaches, but they have one commonality: there's no escape from the scribble.

There is something to be said for all these positions. The project that conceives as fundamental the question of how words refer to the world is locked in more or less completely bad ontology (an ontology that distinguishes words from "real things"). Deconstruction does interesting things to texts. Stories are central to articulating lives and values. Bodies are indeed zones of inscription, and oppression and liberation both often involve configurations of narrative. It is obvious, furthermore, that those obsessed by language are involved in various disagreements: MacIntyre wants to reconstruct a master narrative; bell hooks wants to rip master narratives apart. Quine wants to account for the language of science; Rorty wants to develop alternatives to it. Gadamer wants to understand the world as a library; Foucault wants to show us the pain that bodies endure as they are inscribed. Goodman says that worlds are made by symbol systems; Derrida displays how such worlds collapse under the weight of their own elisions.

But all these views set out from a single-minded concentration on language. Though language is used in many ways and for many purposes in contemporary academic discourse, the centrality or even ubiquity of language in human life is rarely questioned. This book is a discourse against discourse, a discourse that wants what all these thinkers omit: silence. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent; but it is, I think, also possible to pass over in silence much of which we could speak. Indeed, all of us pass over almost everything in silence; even the greatest chatterer can say only so much, thank god.

Sporadically throughout this book, I will be speculating on the reasons for the obsession with language. Cutting to the chase, I think that this obsession emerges within the era of technology, an era in which our basic relations to the world and to other human beings are conceived technologically. The form of life that regards the world and other human beings as stuff to be used, to be transformed toward ends, is a form of life that I will call, in what follows, teleological. In some sense it is founded in the foundation of the West, in Aristotle's account of human action, and of the universe as a whole, as being directed toward ends, always, everywhere. Human action would, on Aristotle's account, be impossible outside a teleological order, and the fundamental explanation of any event turns on what the telos of that event is: at what end it is aiming.

My thesis is that this thought, while foundational of the Western tradition, has intensified to the point of monomania in this century. Alongside the analytic philosophy that got itself more and more lost in the library of Babel, there developed a theory of action that was utterly teleological. Alongside the hermeneutic tradition that affirmed the absolute hegemony of language as if it were a liberation, there developed a narratology that reduced everything to stories and that made stories definable in terms of telos. And alongside all of this, there developed an unprecedented technological environment in which all the world came to be conceived as consisting of resources, as an object for use. Technology has always been dedicated to the production of artificial environments, and the philosophies that make of life a story or a drama have coincided with the production of virtual environments in which everything organic is impertinent or expunged. Stories are things we tell; words are things we wield. If the world were a story and if we were words, the world and we would belong to ourselves; we would be the narrators of our world. In my opinion, even in the technologically transformed environment in which we live, and even as we live, transformed, within that environment, the notion that the world belongs to us and is the subject of our will is a sick fantasy, a megalomaniac delusion.

There is much to be said for "social constructionism": the idea that we and our world are made by common agreement or are produced by our languages and the various disciplinary procedures they subserve. Social constructionism is a hopeful doctrine because it allows us the belief that the things that cause us pain-racism and sexism, for example-can be transformed by a transformation in our language. There is, I am saying, truth in that. But it is the limits of the social construction of reality that I am going to trace in this book; the ways in which the world exceeds our grasp and in which we exceed our own grasp. There is hope there too, because though there is much that we can change, and much that we must change, there is much that we can allow to be, and there is a joy or peace in allowing things to be. I hope that there are limits to the technological transformation of the environment and the technological transformation of ourselves, and I hope that there is the possibility of a post-technological epoch in which the basic questions are not, or not only, teleological. No doubt we have purposes. No doubt we must. But we also must let our purposes go, must find ways to make peace with our world instead of fantasizing a perfect conquest.

The discourses that grow out of the obsession with discourse occasionally bloat language into something really hideous, like a corpse that has floated two weeks in the East River. Occasionally the position is so overstated that it is (for my money) baldly ridiculous: if the assertion is that the world is a text, or people are texts, the assertion asserts what I daresay no one can actually believe. Try believing it when you stub your toe; try believing it at the moment of orgasm; try believing it while you undergo chemotherapy; try believing it in the wilderness or, for that matter, in a traffic jam. On the other hand, most of the thinkers discussed here are more thoughtful or at least less grandiose than that. But here I am more concerned with their omissions than with their commissions.

There is every reason in the world to enter into a detailed discussion of language-games, or a detailed description and critique of master narratives, or a detailed prescription for retrieving meaning out of narratively articulated traditions. But what is left out in Foucault, Nussbaum, MacIntyre, Rorty, Quine, Lyotard is the moment of silence, the moment of death, the moment of inarticulate orgasm. One way to make this point, which has been beautifully developed by Bataille, is to remind us of ecstasy: the extraordinary experience of letting-go into the divine, or into the lover, or into death: the extraordinary experience to which language seems radically insufficient. This movement is present in all great spiritual traditions (with regard to which it is often called "mysticism"), as when the Tao Te Ching says that the Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao, or when the Zen master, asked for the one word of power, replies by burping.

I will be discussing such moments. But what I actually want to emphasize is what, in our everyday experience and in our everyday world, escapes linguistic articulation: at a rough estimate, almost everything. Try providing an exhaustive description of your own visual experience at any given moment, and you will see how much of what we experience, even if it could in principle be cast into language, isn't. Perhaps what we do frame into words in some sense constitutes our awareness at any given moment, though I hope not. If that is the case, then our awareness is a tiny chattering voice in the vast noise and the vast silence. This noise and silence make language necessary and are necessary to language. And though to bring them to awareness might consist of rendering them into words (though, I think, not only of that), we cannot, fortunately, be aware of everything at once. That is, some things (most things) always stand in excess to language, and it is this excess that drives us on linguistically, that forces us into consciousness, and that makes consciousness a continual burden and unconsciousness a continual threat.

Of course, I speak these words: silence, death, noise, excess. So I am saying what I am saying cannot be said. After all I am sucking everything right here into language. Rorty says: tell me about something outside language, and I'll believe you. Of course, I might reply: tell me about everything, and I might believe you. Well, I just said it: "everything." Now "everything" is a good case for me, for it displays the total impoverishment of language in the face of the world as well as anything could. I just said everything, in the only way I know how, and what I just said amounts roughly to nothing. It is a little sound tossed up at a crushing universe, a tiny sign of the emptiness and impossible profusion out of which language emerges. Saying "everything" is saying nothing, and saying nothing can be a very good idea. For I'm not always talking. I can shut up. And if you demand that I stop talking about silence, then I will, I have: eventually I pause for breath and fall silent, as do you. This book will end; I promise.

I am tortured by language. I speak to myself constantly; the "voice in my head" seems to me most of the time to be myself; I experience myself not as a body but as a speaker, a kind of hectoring lecturer always about the insufferable business of telling "my" body what to do. That is, I have a technological or teleological relation to myself. So when someone asserts that the human subject is a linguistic construction, I know only too well what she's talking about. But I spend a lot of time experiencing my need to escape from that notion of subjectivity.

I have constructed a little narrative of my life, where I come from and where I'm going, a narrative that takes me from rebellious child to Nobel laureate. I try to hold myself to that, but of course life is providing me all the time with interruptions to my ascent of the kind I should (but rarely do) expect. I've had trouble enough just getting a Ph.D. and an academic job, not to speak of the Nobel. Failing tests, getting drunk and falling over at parties, acting like a bona fide fool; these are the petty humiliations that mess up my little story. In fact, most of what happens to me and around me is incompatible with the arc of my walnut.

But the voice goes on: now needling, now howling, giving me no surcease at all from what Barthes, with touching optimism, termed "the rustle of language." I have engaged in years of expensive therapy, spent long periods of time in meditation, sucked down innumerable pounds of marijuana, all with the goal of turning the damn thing off. And folks are always calling me whenever I find a quiet moment. And my Nobel arc requires me to read and read and read, until words are coming out my ears. Writers such as Carolyn Heilbrun and Luce Irigaray have shown me that being without a language and without a voice are dangerous and debilitating things. But having nothing but a language and a voice is also a form of suffering, though perhaps not as deep or important a form of suffering But in any event, it is as a treatment for that form of suffering that I am writing this book.

Here are some quotations that set out a view that Rorty calls "textualism": the view, roughly, that the world (at least as it enters human experience or knowledge) and the self consist of text.

Gadamer:

Language is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world.⁽²⁾

[I]n all our knowledge of ourselves and in all knowledge of the world, we are always already encompassed by the language that is our own. We grow up, and we become acquainted with men and in the last analysis with ourselves when we learn to speak. . . . What is mad about [the idea that language has an extra-linguistic origin] is that [it wants] to suspend in some artificial way our very enclosedness in the linguistic world in which we live. In truth we are always already at home in language.⁽³⁾

Language is not a delimited realm of the speakable, over against which other realms that are not speakable might stand. Rather, language is all-encompassing. There is nothing that is fundamentally excluded from being said. (p. 67)

Nelson Goodman:

If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world.⁽⁴⁾

Rorty:

To be humanoid is to have a human face, and the most important part of that face is a mouth which we can imagine uttering sentences.⁽⁵⁾

What we know about both texts and lumps [physical objects] is nothing more than the ways these are related to the other texts and lumps mentioned in or presupposed by the propositions which we use to describe them. ⁽⁶⁾

[The good guys] believe that signs have meaning in virtue of their relations to other signs. . . . They further believe that all thought is in language, so that thoughts too have meaning only by virtue of their relations to other thoughts. For antilogocentrists, therefore, truth is not a matter of transparency to, or correspondence with, reality, but rather a matter of relating thoughts or signs to one another.⁽⁷⁾

I'm not going to try to refute all these claims, or even worry about them particularly. Instead, I'm going to head out on a wandering that I hope will show something about what it's like to be trapped in language in various modalitites and how we might get out, supposing that we want to. The point is not to show that the claims made in these quotations are false. Though I think they are false, I also think that they cannot be shown to be false: every such refutation would be a linguistic item, would finally only tend to confirm what it attacked. The question here is: what do such claims show about the form of life of the people who make them, and what does the fact that I understand that way of life only too well show about the way I am living?

I'm going to explore that form of life in particular with regard to the experience it encodes or the desires it embodies with regard to time and to history. I will try to relate these claims to what, again, is a characteristically Western madness: a mania for the teleological ordering of time and of the lives that take place in time. So there is a genealogy here. But my strategy, finally, is not argumentative; it is to confront these thinkers with their own experience and to confront you with your own experience and ask over and over: do you really believe this? what would it be like to believe it? what does it mean about you that you want to believe it? what is omitted from your belief and why do you want or need to omit it? What I want you to hear above all is the howl: the visceral rejection of this form of life by someone who has experienced it too thoroughly. What I want to do is display this visceral rejection and make you feel its force. The howl itself is inarticulate: it is not a sign of anything: it is a sonic and existential event. If there could be a book that was a sheer howl I would try to write it, but instead this book I am actually going to write will itself prowl among texts; this book I am going to write is itself locked into the order of the sign and into the teleological order. This book displays my entrapment in language as clearly as anything could: in that sense it confirms what it attacks. But in that sense too the attack is redoubled or the need for the attack is made all the more obvious: this book is the disease I am trying to treat: it tries to cure itself above all. I am the person farthest away from the cure that I myself prescribe: this book is an attack on myself, on itself, a structure devoted to its own annihilation.

So I want to try to develop or discover ways out of the linguistic and narrative teleological order in which this development and discovery are all the while embedded: I want to bring you some relief, if you need or want relief, and I want to show you why I need relief and how I try to find it. This book does not speak to the condition of being deprived of language or narrative; this book does not speak for the silenced It speaks to the voice: writes at the writer: tries to cure not the oppressed but the oppressor. Whether the oppressor's oppression of himself is an artifact of his oppression of others, or whether his oppression of others is an artifact of his oppression of himself, I am addressing the oppression of the oppressor by himself: I am addressing my own self-division and self-control. And what I am aiming at by the hopeless means of further self-oppression is not just relief, but finally, release; I want to grope toward a release from regimes of signs, to release myself into a place where I can have my everyday life without remaking it into a narrative, and I want to offer strategies of release to you if you want them.

1. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel," Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 53.

2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem," Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 3.

3. Gadamer, "Man and Language," Philosophical Hermeneutics, pp. 62-63.

4. . Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), p. 3.

5.

6. . Rorty, "Texts and Lumps," Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 88.

7. . Rorty, "De Man and the American Cultural Left," Essays on Heidegger and Others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 130.