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THE DYNAMICS OF HUMANINTERACTION

LANGUAGE, POLITICS AND IDENTITY

VASSIL HRISTOV ANASTASSOV

THE DYNAMICS OF HUMANINTERACTION

LANGUAGE, POLITICS AND IDENTITY

VASSIL HRISTOV ANASTASSOV

Common Ground

First published in Champaign, Illinois in 2012by Common Ground Publishing LLCas part of The Humanities series

Copyright © Vassil Hristov Anastassov 2012

All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism orreview as permitted under the applicable copyright legislation, no part of this book may bereproduced by any process without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anastassov, Vassil Hristov.The dynamics of human interaction : language, politics and identity / Vassil HristovAnastassov.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-1-61229-063-8 (pbk : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61229-064-5 (ebook)1. Language and languages--Political aspects. 2. Intercultural communication. 3. Language andculture. 4. Anthropological linguistics. I. Title.

P119.3.A627 2012306.44--dc23

2012007497

TO ALL WHO SUPPORTED MEWITH SPIRIT, KNOWLEDGE

AND LOVE

vii

viii

Table of Contents

PrefacePreface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

AcknowledgmentsAcknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv

Chapter 1: An Introduction of the Linguistic Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 2: The Linguistic – Political Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Chapter 3: The Historical Approach I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Chapter 4: The Historical Approach II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Chapter 5: The Semiosis of Political Division of Space (I) The‘Home’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Chapter 6: The Semiosis of Political Division of Space II The ‘Walls’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Chapter 7: The Semiosis of Political Division of Space III TheNostos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Chapter 8: The Language of Political Dominance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Chapter 9: The Language of Political Persuasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Chapter 10: The Political Intertextuality in Umberto Eco’s TheTheName of the RoseName of the Rose in a Cognitive Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

ix

I landed at Prague Airport on the following day in 1990 after Vaclav Havel waselected president of (at that time) Czechoslovakia for the first time. All the postersthat the arrival hall was covered with said:

HAVEL NA HRÁD

The statement should be translated by:

(Let us vote for)HAVEL (so that he goes) TO ‘HRÁD’

(the Parliament)

Apparently, this was part of the pre-election campaign. But, as Havel was alreadyelected (as I said, it was the day after the election), enthusiastic fans had scratched onall the posters an additional ĕ after the word HRAD, so that it had changed into:

HAVEL NA HRADĕ(which means)

HAVEL IS (already) THERE!

Strictly linguistically speaking, the additional ĕ changes, according to the rules ofSlavic- Czech noun declension, the accusativeaccusative casecase ofof movementmovement in ‘Havel naHrád’ into a locative caselocative case of place locationof place location in ‘Havel na Hradĕ’

From the semiotic point of view of pragmatic/pragmatic/discoursediscourse analysisanalysis it meanssituational/ contextualsituational/ contextual background/knowledgebackground/knowledge and place deixisplace deixis.

From a simple human point of view: votersvoters werewere happyhappy therethere waswas nono Com-Com-munismmunism anymore...anymore...

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PrefacePreface

The work on this project started as the result of my desire to reveal the im-portant role of linguistics in political theory. It required an interdisciplin-ary approach: politics cannot be understood without reference to history.History itself helps the research of language comparativists. Political eventscannot be explained without the investigation of human interaction, which,by itself, is inseparable from (socio)linguistics.

The scope of analysis dramatically changed during the research process.It was initially meant to investigate the role of linguistics in the explanationof the political connotation of language, i.e., nothing much different fromwhat already has been achieved by the foregoers of the Frankfurt School.However, the deeper I went into the problems, the more I understood thatthis analysis would be incomplete without reference to language, cultur-al and political anthropology (including various issues of identity), even tolanguage philosophy and semiotics of power. That is why the focus is onthe works of Fairclough and Chilton, Foucault, Kristeva and Umberto Eco,with all the great variety of the subjects of their scientific interest.

It seemed a difficult task, taking into consideration that all these sub-jects have their own specific methods of scientific approach. But, in ourcontemporary world, with its abundant information about issues from dif-ferent perspectives, to neglect comparison is an irrelevant luxury.

Science reflects constant human attempts to know more about theworld. Various types of knowledge share much more in common than we ex-pect. ‘Not to be able to see the forest for the trees’ is typical for nineteenth-century science, in which classification and labeling plays a significant rolein scientific research:

Late-nineteenth-century philology was as uncompromisingly ‘evolutionary’ inoutlook as Darwinian biology. (Harris x)

So do logical positivism and empirics that go far beyond the discoveries ofDarwin and Mendeleyev and even affect areas of the humanitites such asphilosophy, linguistics and literary theory?

Saussure and his twentieth-century structuralist contemporaries be-lieved that

linguists were already dealing with the facts of language just as scientifically as‘the astronomer treats the stars of heaven, or the botanist the flowers of thefield’... (Ibid. xi)

Structuralism between the two world wars was extremely influenced by pos-itivism. Political science itself, according to many researchers, should bebased on a positivistic approach. It is very difficult, however (especiallywhen it comes to scientific analysis of ‘humanities’ such as linguistics andpolitical theory), to fix a strict borderline between a positivistic and a non-positivistic perspective. The former, when applied to language, doesn’t ex-plain its ‘poetic’ and ‘metalinguistic’ functions. Nor does reference to such

xi

data in the analyses of the causes of political conflicts. In this respect a par-allel between different subjects proves to be much more efficient, becauseitems of knowledge that exist in one of them can be used to fill in gaps ofmissing information in another one.

For example:The shift from synthetic to analytical structure from Old English to Middle Eng-

lish cannot be understood without reference to the Viking and the Norman Conquestand the political dominance of Norman French as the language of the governing classin England.

Nor can the present use of the Russian language as the lingua franca in the repub-lics of Central Asia be understood without knowledge of Russian tzarist and Com-munist ethnic and language policy toward its population.

Within the same context Saussure claims that[m]ajor historical events such as the Roman Conquest are of incalculable lin-guistic importance in all kinds of ways. Colonization, which is simply one formof conquest, transports a language into new environments, and this brings thechanges in the language. A great variety of examples could be cited in this con-nection. Norway, for instance, adopted Danish on becoming politically unitedto Denmark, although today Norwegians are trying to shake off this linguist-ic influence. The internal politics of a country is no less important for the lifeof a language. The governments of certain countries, such as Switzerland, al-low the coexistence of several languages. Other countries, like France, aspireto linguistic unification of several languages. (Saussure 21)

The aim of this research is to point out the link between linguistics, politicaltheory and cultural/anthropological studies of identity. It cannot be thor-oughly understood without reference to my own development as a scholar. Istarted my academic career as a linguist-comparativist. My university educa-tion in both Slavic languages and English, along with my doctorate in Indo-European/Slavic comparative-historical linguistics and my 20-year research-work experience in the domain of Indo-European/Slavic/Balkan etymology,extended my knowledge of language contacts, where an understanding ofthe history of the process of language convergence is inseparable from theanalysis of the political history of the speakers in contact themselves. Thisexperience made me realize that there are no ‘pure’ languages, because eth-nic clashes, apart from their influence on the ethnic strucure of differenthuman communities around the world, affect their languages as well.

As a relatively new ‘passion’, the idea of matching linguistics with myshort experience in political science emerged after an ‘encounter’ with theissue of language as human right, where I found my knowledge of diachroniclinguistics extremely useful.

All the turbulent changes in my personal life also contributed to my bet-ter understanding of this type of interdependence between the politicalhistory of human societies, human culture and human language. After a20-year period of working for the Linguistics Department of the BulgarianAcademy of Sciences (the Bulgarian Language Institute), I discovered thechallenge of living and working away from ‘home’. This made me realize thatsocieties and their languages constantly move and influence each other. Liv-

xii

ing abroad for so many years convinced me that in our ethnic, cultural, re-ligious and language ‘make-up’, we ‘humans’ have much more in commonthan different.

The present Dynamics of Human Interaction comes as the result of mywork on problems that I had to clarify to myself, before introducing themto the reader. Many of them were initially presented as papers in differentconferences in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, France, Italy,Estonia, Turkey, Finland, Brazil, and elsewhere.

It was a challenging endeavor for me, but so were both my professionaland personal experiences that ‘broadened up’ the horizons of my approachto science and knowledge. That is why I strongly believe that my attemptto reveal how language and identity are dependent on the political contextlanguage users live in can contribute positively to the better understandingof the activities of (post)modern Homo loquens-politicus.

Vassil Anastassov

Fatih University Istanbul

xiii

AcknowledgmentsAcknowledgments

During my first year in Istanbul, in 2001, I met Abram de Swaan fromthe University of Amsterdam, who encourarged me to start a research pro-ject with the working title, ‘The Socio-Political Dimensions of Language’.This is how the work on this project began. A turning point in my ‘politi-cized linguistic career’ was a presentation at the ISA Annual Convention inMontreal, Quebec, in 2004, where my thesis on the status of the relation-ship between ‘national’ and ‘international languages’ was strongly supportedby Zuzana Lehmannova, from the University of Economics of Prague. Sheinvited me to collaborate with her on a project entitled ‘Culture and Polit-ics in International Relations’ and encouraged me to do research on the lin-guistic part of it. To work with her and to present bits of the project at con-ferences in the Hague, the Netherlands (2004), Tartu, Estonia (2006) andTurin, Italy (2007) that were organized with our mutual efforts, was not justa mere pleasure; it developed into a strong, lifelong professional relation-ship and friendship. These presentations were the background on which Icontinued my work on the whole ‘Socio-political Dimensions of Language’,which, as I mentioned in the preface, developed into the present Dynamicsof Human Interaction.

A new stage in the development of my own attitude toward my subjectwas marked by a visit to Columbia University in New York, where my pre-vious knowledge of language and politics was extended with the help of newinformation on the philosophy of ‘the Humanities’ as a special branch ofpostmodern science. This is how I met Bill Cope from the University ofUrbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA, who played a significant role in the finalaccomplishment of my project.

Kurt Kohn from Eberhard Karls University, Tuebingen, Germany andLucie Tunkrova from Karl Palacky University, Olomouc, the Czech Repub-lic/Fatih University, Istanbul, made it possible to offer bits of this book asacademic lectures and gather some feedback before it appeared.

I owe a special ‘thank you’ to Asuncion Lopez-Varela from theUniversity of Madrid and Clyde Forsberg Jr. from Aletheia University,Taiwan, for their precious comments and remarks.

Last but not least, I must say my warmest ‘thank you’ to my family forsharing with me the most difficult stages of the development of this project.Nobody else knows more about...the ‘dynamics of human interaction’...thanthey do...!

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Chapter 1An Introduction of the Linguistic Argument

Language as ‘Time - Space’ Political Knowledge (I)

The major linguistic argument of this study is that the implicit knowledge oflanguage is inseparable from the explicit one.

By ‘implicit vs. explicit knowledge about language’ I don’t necessarily un-derstand here a Chomskyan ‘competence’ vs. ‘performance’ opposition, butrather a simpler ‘non-awareness of the rules in language use’ : ‘consciousknowledge about them’ type of correlation:

In Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain was famouslyunaware that he was speaking ‘prose’ – until it was pointed out to him. Hemay have been equally surprised to know that he was speaking ‘grammar’, forexample, or that he was pronouncing ‘phonemes’, or that he was producing‘discourse’. Most speakers of a language are similarly vague when it comes toidentifying what it is they implicitly ‘know’ about their language that enablesthem to speak it…It usually requires someone to point it out to them – tomake it explicit. This is what language awareness is: explicit knowledge aboutlanguage. (Thornburry x)

Contrariwise, my argument is based on the assumption that the poetic func-tion of language as a combination of the expressive and the metalinguisticfunctions enables Homo loquens to express emotion and to create ‘new lan-guage’, by ‘playing’ with his knowledge about it. (Anastassov)

1

The ‘poetic function of language’ means the creative use of language, notnecessarily writing poetry. The emotion/feeling that the ‘speaker’, whencombined with his knowledge of language, allows him to ‘play’ with it andhence create a ‘new’ one. I follow here the conception of Jakobson –Yaguello, (cf. below), and do not thoroughly agree with Kristeva, who sup-ports the idea that

Poetic language is distinct from language as used for ordinary communica-tion…it is almost an otherness of language. (Kristeva 5, emphasis added)

Contrariwise again, I claim that humans, as representatives of the speciesHomo loquens, share the capacity of ‘(poetic-creative) playing with language’,with the only difference that outstanding poets are more skillful in it than‘ordinary’ people.

I also argue here that in the history of human languages this ability ismarked territorially:

the land where a language is spoken

and

temporally:

the specific time when this language is spoken on the specific territory.

This is how I come to the conclusion that Homo loquens-politicus locates him-self in:

the political present (time)and

the political environment (space)by means of

language

By political present/time and political environment/space, I understand thedifferent synchronic (in the conventional Saussurean interpretation of theterm) stages of the communal life of humans as ‘political animals’ (cf. belowthe reference to Aristotle’s political-linguistic organization of communallife). The politically motivated human communal life is believed to be basedon the mutual ‘agreement’ of individuals.

This explains what ties individual ‘egos’ into a language identity, on adeictic ‘hic/nunc’ political principle (within the current pragmatic/politicalcontext), namely:

• by speaking the same language and sharing the same attitude about it, in-dividual members of the community obey a certain conventional ‘order’that attaches them to the common territory;

• language is part of the series of ‘order’ (social, political, cultural, religious,etc.) which, taken together, marks the communal identity of Homoloquens-politicus;

AN INTRODUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC ARGUMENT

2

• this ‘communal identity’, by functioning on the above-mentioned deicticprinciple, motivates not only the attachment to the commonly sharedterritory, but also explains the negative attitude toward neighboringcommunities as a potential source of threat; and

• this is what finally defines human language as

knowledge about the self-location of humans in political time andspace*

(*which is not essentially different from Aristotle’s definition of talking hu-mans as zoa politika.)

Cf. also:Public negotiations also represent communicative interactions. The study ofthese negotiations helps us to see more clearly how language functions to facil-itate interaction creatively while being bound simultaneously by cultural rulesand norms of the social system in which it takes place. (Kedar vi)

This supposes a certain role of language in the maintenance of the politicalorder of human communities.

All the above considered, languages shouldn’t be changing, because oftheir role in maintaining the coexistence/survival of the members of thesecommunities. But they do change, as a result of the change in knowledge ofthe specific political present/time and the specific political environment/space, and, in the majority of the cases, they also change as a consequence ofchanges in the political structure of the habitat, where spoken.

Linguists tend to explain this fact with an analysis of the mechanism ofthis change, i.e., the search for an answer to the question

how do languages change?

seldom with reference to the more important one:why do they change?

As Fairclough argues,But sociolinguistics is heavily influenced by ‘positivist’ conceptions of socialscience: sociolinguistic variation in a particular society tends to be seen interms of sets of facts to be observed and described using methods analogous tothose of natural science. SociolinguisticsSociolinguistics isis strongstrong onon ‘what?’‘what?’ questionsquestions (what(whatareare thethe factsfacts ofof variation?)variation?) butbut weakweak onon ‘why?’‘why?’ andand ‘how?’‘how?’ questionsquestions (why(why arearethethe factsfacts asas theythey are?;are?; howhow –– inin termsterms ofof thethe developmentdevelopment ofof socialsocial relationshipsrelationshipsof power…of power… (Fairclough 6, emphasis added)

The questions ‘why’ and ‘how’ reveal the importance of language change inthe general characteristics of language (political) use. They challenge thetrivial sine qua non conditionality of the communicative function of language,by implying that human language is something more than just a code for theinteraction of mechanical robots.

In other words, if language is not a priori referred to as nothing morethan just ‘means of social interaction’, it can be analyzed as a human desirefor ‘self-expression’. One may assume that (the poetic-creative) language

3

change emerges at the point when individual human beings cooperate witheach other, keeping the balance between the individual and the (politically)communal:

A language as a collective phenomenon, takes the form of a totality of im-prints in everyone’s brain…Thus it is something which is in each individual,but is nonetheless common to all. At the same time it is out of reach of anydeliberate interference by individuals. (Suassure 19)

Further on, Saussure elaborates more precisely on the same topic with thefollowing statement:

There is nothing collective about speech. Its manifestations are individual andephemeral. It is more than an aggregate of particular cases, which may be represen-ted by the following formula:

(1+1’+1’’+1’’’…)

(Ibid., emphasis added)

From my working perspective: the language signal, launched by the‘speaker’, would evoke a (communicative) feedback from the ‘hearer’ onlyif both of them share the same ‘emotional’ attitude toward the informative‘referent’:

The ‘SPEAKER’ → ←The ‘HEARER’(expressed emotion) (perceived emotion)

←(shared emotion) →‘REFERENT’

The conception of ‘expressing emotion’ needs clarification:It is not necessarily just a ‘mood’. It is rather the inner urge of humans

for leaving (somewhere out of their ‘own selves’) a sign of how they feel (inthe inside). It is, in its own way, a sui generis Freudian transition from the‘unconscious’ to the ‘conscious’:

In so far as the unconscious is a kind of thinking, it works with meanings; in sofar it seeks to express itself, it strives to make those meanings emerge throughthe socially dominant level of consciously controlled meaning. (Harland 131)

A parallel with visual art supports the idea of the emotional experience ofthe ‘ego’ of the ‘talking human’ who projects and shares his feelings, as a ref-erence, with yet another ‘ego’ as a part of the process of (political-commun-al) interaction.

Shared emotion with another individual would mean knowledge acquisi-tion about ‘my own self’ from a distance:

SELF (I) → SIGN LEFTSIGN LEFT

↓

expressing emotion ← sharing emotion → perceiving emotion

knowledge acquisition ← feedback ← SELF (II)


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Therefore, ‘language as knowledge’, like ‘art as knowledge’, apart fromeverything else that it is believed to be, is a human desire for self-observa-tion that politically integrates people, with a common understanding of theobject of self-observation as a referent:

language/art = knowledge↓

human desire for self-observation → object as a referent↓

common understanding → integration

In this respect, language interaction could be regarded as a complex process,combining:

• the result of the necessity of the ‘ego’ to project its feelings and emotionsanywhere out of its own self, and acquire knowledge about them from adistance;

And just after that, by cross-checking the experience with other ‘egos’:

• the establishment of the collective (‘conventional’) identity of people,sharing the same type of experience.

This is how language as a means of human interaction functions on an ‘indi-vidual’ rather than a ‘collective’ basis, which supports Saussure’s statementabout the ‘collectivity’ vs. the ‘individuality’ of human (political-communal)language.

This provokes a discussion with the (neo)Marxist views on the subject ofthe origin of language and goes too far in the direction of the recently criti-cized Wundtian understanding of the role of the individual in the creationof language and Fairclough’s criticism of the ‘exaggerated individualism’ ofAmerican pragmatics:

The main weakness of pragmatics from a critical point of view is its individu-alism: ‘action’ is thought of atomistically as emanating wholly from the indi-vidual, and is often conceptualized in terms of the ‘strategies’ adopted by theindividual speaker to achieve her ‘goals’ or ‘intentions’. This understates theextent to which people are caught up in, constrained by, and indeed derivetheir individual identities from social conventions, and gives the implausibleimpression that conventionalized ways of speaking or writing are ‘reinvented’on each occasion of the speaker generating a suitable strategy for particulargoals. (Fairclough 7-8)

Contrariwise to Fariclough’s standpoint, my interpretation of the commun-al interaction of individuals focuses on ‘individual play with language’ withinthe constraints of the communal linguistic code.

What makes me feel confident in my claim is that what is most amazingabout language is the ability to create ‘new’ forms at any systematic level;i.e., by expressing himself, the ‘SPEAKER’ plays with language, but, what iseven more, the ‘HEARER’ understands him, even if the linguistic sign, used

5

by the former, is absolutely new for him. Both of them need the commonperspective of the common political environment in order to understand eachother.

This is how language creativity poses the question of the role of the indi-vidual speaker(s) in (linguistic-political) human interaction. In the introduc-tion to Power Through Discourse, Leah Kedar refers to the same questionby ‘bridging’ (as she claims) the views of Maurice Bloch, who

focuses on the ways in which political language is shaped by the social situ-ation in which it takes place, (Kedar ibid.)

andRobert Paine’s emphasis on ‘the individual’s ability to create the “mood” of aninteraction.’ (Ibid.)

In this respect, my approach stands closer to Kedar’s position:In order to achieve a fuller understanding of the ways in which discourse bothactively facilitates communicative interaction and is bound by the circum-stances surrounding it, we look at the way in which individual discourse styleand socio-cultural constraints on discourse affect and depend upon eachother. (Ibid.)

In this respect, the questionWhat is the role/place of the individual speaker within

the overall political context of the speaking community?

can be answered in terms of his ability to use language creativity to imposepower on the rest of the linguistic community.

On the other hand, (almost) all possible forms of language change, due tolanguage creativity, have been classified throughout time as ‘language cor-ruption’ (quite often by language purists and language nationalists).

To start with Dante’s ‘De Vulgari Eloquentia’, go through Samuel John-son’s policy of condemning language innovation, and end up with the mod-ern term: ‘bastardized’ or ‘bodysnatched’ language could be, in fact, determ-ined as absolutely legitimate knowledge about it, because they all work onthe same principle of political deixis of here and now, against linguistic in-stitutionalized knowledge which is ‘based on the past’.

The concept of ‘language corruption’ is inseparable from ‘institutional-ized knowledge about language’ in the sense that it marks/evaluates ‘lan-guage change’ negatively because it aims at a certain ‘language stability’ thatlanguage change ‘corrupts’:

The great classical scholar Richard Bentley observed in 1699 that every lan-guage ‘is in perpetual motion and alteration’, but nevertheless believed that ‘itwere no difficult contrivance if the Publick had any regard to it, to make theEnglish tongue immutable. (Barber 203, emphasis in original)

In this respect, my research stands close to Saussure’s ‘priority of the syn-chronic approach’ in the sense that there is a logical connection between thedifferent paroles in the existence of a specific langue throughout time, whereany analysis of the latest ‘stage’ is done with reference to the previous one(s),so that the initially designed message reaches the next coming generation(s).


6

Hence, the separate stages (paroles) in the evolution of a language (langue) ex-ist in their own temporal dimension, as long as the shared political contextof the speakers is relatively stable, to slowly and gradually shift to anotherone with the establishment of new mechanisms of common understandingas the result of new political-spatial environment.

For example:During the time when Beowulf was written, the Anglo-Saxon/Old English lan-

guage was characterized by features that revealed a process of language convergencebetween the Romano–Celtic language substratum of the ‘local’ population and theGermanic dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. This conver-gence came as the result of politically motivated clashes in the ethnolinguistic back-ground of Britain in the period between ca. 500 AD – 1000 AD. The languageof Beowulf, as it was the Germanic - Viking invasion, and different from the oneused at the time of Chaucer, showing the traces of the Norman Conquest, and,respectively, the influence of Norman French and Anglo-Norman or, the time ofShakespeare with the inkhorn terms and secondary impact of Latin and French, asthe result of the specific political development of Elizabethan England initially writ-ten, was the language of shared ‘self-expression’, restricted to the ‘now’ limits of thespecific epoch…

This is what (in a way) supports Fairclough’s thesis (with reserve as to thequalification of language as a ‘static system’) as regards the following:

Mainstream linguistics has taken two crucial assumptions about langue fromSaussure: that the language of a particular community can for all practical pur-poses be regarded as invariant across that community, and that the study oflangue ought to be ‘synchronic’ rather than historical – it ought to be studied asa static system at a given point in time, not dynamically as it changes throughtime…(Fairclough 5-6)

The above ‘reserve’ considered: the following citation from Roy Harris’s‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics isworth discussing, to better understand the principle of ‘synchronic priority’:

The essential feature of Saussure’s linguistic sign is that being intrinsically ar-bitrary, it can be identified only by contrast with coexisting signs of the samenature, which together constitute a structured system. By taking this posi-tion, Saussure placed modern linguistics in the vanguard of twentieth-centurystructuralism. It was a position which committed Saussure to drawing a radic-al distinction between diachronic (or evolutionary) linguistics and synchronic (orstatic) linguistics, and giving priority to the latter [emphasis in original]. Forwords, sounds and constructions connected solely by processes of historical developmentover the centuries cannot possibly, according to Saussure’s analysis, enter into structuralrelations with one another, any more than Napoleon’s France and Caesar’s Rome can bestructurally under one and the same political system [emphasis added]. (Harris x)

In an environment where I can linguistically express the same type of feel-ings and emotions as You can, it is the common political background whichties Us both as the inhabitants of a certain area into a society with its ownparameters. The more We, the inhabitants, share equivalent features of thepolitical environment, the more We tend do develop a real group identity.

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On the other hand, humankind has (almost always) lived in groups, hos-tile to one another, in the division of a larger territory. In fact, the onceextremely popular understanding of language as ‘the landmark of nationalidentity’ (cf. below) is partially based on the ‘division’ principle, so typical ofthe nineteenth-century idea of ‘nation building’.

Europe is a good example of how different languages can be shared onthe same territory, in the process of space location of the ‘egos’ of itsinhabitants.

There are so many ‘exceptions to the rule’ on the Old Continent (for ex-ample, German is spoken in so many ‘nation-states’ other than Germany, orthe case of the Swiss nation, with four different languages functioning with-in the borders of the state), that it may be assumed that the ‘space locationof the ‘ego’’ of our Talking Man is, again, marked by a commonly sharedpolitical environment.

For ages, Europe has been sharing common (political) constructs, not necessarily acommon language. There are plenty of examples from literature, music, painting andarchitecture that illustrate why it is possible for German-born Haendel to be con-sidered one of the most remarkable British composers, or why Carmen became thesymbol of Spain, though created by the French (Merimé and Bizet), or how Russian-born Henri Troyat and Elsa Triolet became famous French writers...

In the ‘United Europe’ of today, where the population intensively shares a similarpolitical environment, the ‘language-identity’ criterion becomes irrelevant, simply be-cause speaking different languages on the same (relatively small) European territorymeans that the common political constructs are prior to language, when a phatic ‘mu-tual referent’ in the expression of emotions and feelings is needed.

In practice, this means that if the Dutch language and the Italian languagereflect a common European reality, no matter how structurally different they are,the Dutch and the Italian speaker experience the same type of self-expression in theprocess of space location. In this respect: the lingua franca type of languages appearon the historical stage to fulfill the necessity of political interaction around an area/territory with no common language. ‘Lingua franca’ is a term that was coined to de-note a kind of ‘interethnic’ language, motivated by the needs of cultural and trade in-teraction around the Mediterranean region. The term is often used today to denote asimilar ‘common means of language interaction’ as the result of (past) political hege-mony. But, even if there is an initial political reason for the language dominance, itloses it, and starts functioning as the symbol of the socio-cultural integrity of a certainsociety.

Throughout human history there have been lots of cases where societieswere shaped on the basis of different ethnic strata. What makes the specificsocium is not the commonly shared language, but the commonly sharedpolitical experience. In our contemporary world, where we increasinglyshare a similar political environment, language should be regarded as a sec-ondary and derivative instrument to match the needs of a society for com-mon understanding, survival or coexistence.


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By taking all this into account, this analysis shows that linguisticsprovides knowledge about the location of humans in the political contextof the space and time in which they speak. Knowledge about language alsoprovides the individual ‘ego’ with the mechanisms of expressing feelings andemotions that are relevant to the feelings and the emotions of other ‘egos’.In the same time humans need a common stimulus to urge them to expressthe same emotion. This is why it is extremely important to be aware of thecommon political background of today’s world. In this respect, knowledgeabout language, as political knowledge about what is common about humans,is extremely important in the understanding of the universality of humannature and human (political) relationships.

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Chapter 2The Linguistic – Political Approach

Language as ‘Time-Space’ Political Knowledge (II)

Political theory depends on many other sciences, basically in the sphere ofthe ‘humanities’. The political aspects of language use are the subject of the-orizing, without, though, considering lingustics as a reliable source for reli-able conclusions. The achievements of linguistics per se as the basis of polit-ical research are often neglected, on the assumption that they are too dis-tant from the general objectives of political theory.

As Fairclough claims,We live in a linguistic epoch, as major contemporary theorists such asPierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas have recognized inthe increasing importance they have given to languages in their theories. (Fair-clough 2)

The so-called linguistic turn finds a more sophisticated determination inKristeva’s claim that

Following upon the phenomenological and existentialist shock of the postwarperiod, the sixties witnessed a theoretical ebullience that could roughly besummarized as leading to the discovery of the determinative role of language inall human sciences. (Kristeva vii)

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Even more specifically:Linguists, and especially those working in sociolinguistics (which is often saidto to deal with ‘language in its social context’) have had quite to say about lan-guage and power, but they have not in my opinion done justice to the rich andcomplex interrelationships of language and power. (Fairclough 1)

Phillipson, who is one of the few ‘names’ in political science to be in favor ofmatching it with linguistics, admits that:

Although there is no doubt about the importance of language in the function-ing of such social institutions as education, the media, public administrationand civil society in general, this does not mean that language has been a majorconcern of most political scientists. (Phillipson)

As Chilton claims:At the micro level there are conflicts of interest, struggles for dominance andefforts at cooperation between individuals, between genders and between so-cial groups of various kinds’ (Chilton).

And, further:What is strikingly absent from conventional studies of politics is attention tothe fact that the micro-level behaviors mentioned above are actually kinds ofliguistic action – that is, discourse. (Ibid.)

When involved in the analysis of the political background of language, mostcontemporary linguists seem to share the views of Chilton, who argues that

In linguistics it is now widely accepted that the human capacity for speech isgenetically based, though activated in human social relations. What is contro-versial is how the genetic base itself evolved. Did it evolve as part of social in-telligence? [In this view,] the language instinct would be intrinsically bound upwith the political instinct... even if the language instinct is itself politics neut-ral...one has to assume that the cultural and culturally transmitted character-istics of human language observably serve...the needs of the political. (Chilton5)

The apparent link between humans’ ability to talk and organize their exist-ence in a polis (to use the Aristotelian term) has intrigued philosophers eversince classical times. As Chilton himself argues,

[t]he analysis of political discourse is scarcely new. The western classical tra-dition of rhetoric was in its various guises a means of codifying the way publicorators used language for persuasive and other purposes. (Chilton 2004)

And, further:Embedded in the tradition of western political thought there is in fact a viewthat language and politics are intimately linked at a fundamental level. It is notgenerally pointed out that when Aristotle gives his celebrated definition of hu-mans as creatures whose nature is to live in a polis, in almost the same breathhe speaks of the unique human capacity for speech. (Ibid.)

As the original text goes:But obviously man is a political animal [politikon zoon], in a sense in which a beeis not, or any other gregarious animal. Nature, as we say, does nothing withoutsome purpose; and she has endowed man alone among the animals with thepower of speech. (Aristotle 60)

THE LINGUISTIC – POLITICAL APPROACH

12

Aristotle’s argument makes Chilton ask himself,

But what does Aristotle mean by ‘speech’??

(Ibid. 5, emphasis added)

And he immediately finds the answer given by Aristotle himself:Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harm-ful, and so also what is just and what is unjust. For the real difference betweenman and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil,just and unjust, etc. (Ibid.)

As Chilton summarizes:Aristotle states the just and the unjust is related to what is (deemed) useful andharmful, in the common view of the group. (Chilton ibid.)

By pointing at the link between the human abilities to speak and to live in acommunity, the Titan of Classical Philosophy determined the conventionalcharacter of language as part of the communal ‘order’:

For man is the best of animals when he has reached his full development, sohe is worst of all when divorced from law and justice. Injustice armed is hard-est to deal with; and though man is born with weapons which he can use in the ser-vice of practical wisdom and virtue, it is all too easy for him to use them for themost savage, the most unrighteous, and the worst in regard to sexual licenceand gluttony. The virtue of justice is a feature of a state; for justice is the ar-rangement of the political association, and a sense of justice decides what isjust. (Aristotle 61)

This statement, which holds all the features of a Platonic understandingof the importance of justice as the major virtue of the ideal communal life(Plato’s Agathon), definitely marks language as the main element of its polit-ical order. One can assume that the concept of logos is in the basis of the ‘co-dification’ of law as the pillar of communal stability/integrity.

Plato focuses on the issue of ‘truth’ : ‘falsehood’ as the socially construc-ted ‘perceived face of reality’ which can be well supported by the followingabstract from his Sophist:

Socrates: Then because speech, we saw, is true and false, and thinking is a dia-logue of the mind with itself, and opinion is that completion of thought, andwhat we say by ‘it seems’ is a combination of perception and opinion, it mustbe that because all of these are like speech, some thinking and opinion mustalso sometimes be false. (Plato)

One can assume that language functions as a codification of the human de-sire for order in the sense of dividing the world into right and wrong or justand unjust which develops into the more general: true or false (cf. below, thereference to Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose).

As such, it fits the Medieval Christian-feudal religious-political ideologyuntil Renaissance time, when the religious affiliation moved in the directionof linking ‘national consciousness’ with ‘common national language’. Theancient territorial communal principle was thus strenghtened by an em-phasis on the specific language that marked the specific territory. Thisbrought up the issue of ‘triumph over Latin’ in most European cultures, with

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the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio and the School of Pietro Bembo inItaly, Du Bellay’s ‘Defence of the French Language’ in France and the ‘Tri-umph of English over Latin’ in England, along with the works of, to mentionjust a few, Milton, Newton and, among many others, Shakespeare.

This tendency flourished during the nineteenth century with the dis-covery of Sanskrit and the emergence and devlopment of Indo-Europeancomparative-historical linguistics. One of the basic principles of this lin-guistic subbranch, the protolanguage reconstruction, contributed effectivelynot only to the rise of language nationaism but also to political nationalism ingeneral, by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentiethcentury.

It can be inferred that politcal speculations on language, throughout his-tory, were directed toward its use ‘inside’ speaking societites to either main-tain the communal order or resist order that comes from ‘outside’...

What is missing in the existing literature of the ‘political dimensionsof language’ is reference to language as a historical continuum (in the Saus-surean sense of langue = continuum of paorles). A pragmatic/discourse ap-proach, matched with the historical one, demonstrates how the ‘ethnolin-guistic stratification of a certain community’ is temporally and territoriallymotivated within a dynamic political context.

THE LINGUISTIC – POLITICAL APPROACH

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Chapter 3The Historical Approach I

The Political Connotation of Language Change

Diachronic linguistics as the study of language change successfully accountsfor the changes in particular languages in the context of the political historyof particular speech communities. By analyzing the historical/etymologicalstructure of a given language, comparative linguistics tells a lot about theethnic stratification of a society and has an ;important role in the identific-ation of the (ethno) linguistic – political background of these communities.

A diachronic linguistic element in modern political analysis could playa significant role in the process of the establishment of political scienceas a serious domain of theoretical investigation. It can trace back the ‘pat-terns’ by means of which language and politics were interrelated throughouthistory, leading, thus, toward general conclusions about the common ruleswhich world societies have been following in their existence.

This chapter deals with the political connotation of language changewithin the context of nineteenth-century comparative-historical linguistics.It is assumed that the comparative approach to language data is relevant tothe ideology of ‘nation building’ and the ‘nation-state’. Comparativist ana-lysis of language change as the result of language convergence reveals thatin the political hegemony of one ‘nation’ over another one, language dom-inance is not necessarily the product of political or cultural superiority, but,rather, the result of the impact of a similar social, cultural and politicalenvironment.

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The Comparative-Historical Approach

As Theodora Bynon argues,Although language change has now been studied systematically for a periodof one hundred years and somewhat less systematically for a good deal longerthat that, there is still a considerable amount of disagreement about its natureand motivation. (Bynon 1977)

The main reason for this disagreement, as the same author claims, lies in theconventional view that

Historical linguistics seeks to investigate and describe the way in which lan-guages change or maintain their structure during the course of time; its do-main therefore is language in its diachronic aspect. Descriptive linguistics onthe other hand totally disregards time as a relevant factor in its investigationsand attributes to the data a uniform status of simultaneity; its concern istherefore language in its synchronic aspect. (Ibid.)

In this respect, the justification for the claim to independent status of syn-chronic description ‘derives...from the observation that the speakers forwhom a particular language serves as a means of communication are in gen-eral...unaware of its historical dimension’.

If , then, the linguist is to create a model of the code which the members of aspeech community share and though which they communicate witth one an-other, they must surely be equally independent of all historical considerations.(Ibid.)

In the analysis of models of language development Bynon admits that theneogrammarian model was the earliest, and still consitutes the essentialfoundation upon which both the structuralist (or ‘taxonomic’) and thetransformational-generative models were erected, these constituting nomore than elaborations and modifications of it. They do, however, by ad-opting different theoretical positions with regard to a number of issues,present alternative hypotheses concerning the nature of language, whichleads her to the identification of the basic issues of the neogrammarianmodel as follows:

Two main issues dominated the early course of historical linguistics, namelysynchronic irregularity within individual languages and the nature of the re-semblances existing between related languages. (Ibid.)

To develop principles of language change, according to William Labov,might seem

a quixotic undertaking...Historical linguistics is marked by the prevalence ofcontradictions and paradoxes that offer a rich array of challenges to the schol-ar who would resolve them. To how this might be done, it may be helpful toreview some of the problems of interpreting historical data, and the methodsused to deal with them. (Labov 1994; emphasis added)

In this respect, in the opinion of the same author,The most famous argument over principles is certainly the controversyover the Neogrammarian principles of sound change, which motivates muchof the research reported here... Many linguists still maintain that the Neo-grammarian formulation of the principles of sound change gives historical and

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH I

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comparative linguistics the firm foundation on which cumulative work canproceed...Yet while the practice of historical linguistics assumes the regular-ity of change, it is generally accepted that the word has its own history. (Ibıd.)

Major neogrammarian theorists, such as Hock and Joseph (1996), claim theywere strongly influenced by the work of contemporary phoneticians:

Realizing the difficulties of this approach, the neogrammarians came up witha second explanation: CHILDREN learn the basics of their first languagewithout any instruction, simply by imitating the speech of their elders. In theprocess, they may misperceive the norms of their elders and come up with dif-ferent norms of their own...Why should the deviations be cumulative in onedirection? (Ibid.)

Further in the devlopment of this thesis the above-cited authors come tothe conclusion that

The fundamental difficulty with all three of the explanations proposed by theneogrammarians is that they are based on thought experiements, not on theobservations of changes as they actually take place. The reason is that the neo-grammarians firmly believed that sound change is inobservable. (Ibid.)

That sound change, or whatever language change, is observable is the basicclaim of Labov, and Hock and Joseph try to support the idea with referenceto his famous ‘Martha’s Vineyard’ case:

Labov found that at the earliest stage, only a few words exhibited a variationbetween /a/ and a slightly more centralized variant, only in the diphtong /aw/if followed by voiceless sounds, and only in the speech of a few individuals.

Somewhere along the way, the variant with centralization was perceivedby speakers as a symbol of identity, differentiating ‘islanders’ from the ‘main-landers’...When it had come to be perceived as socially relevant, the central-ized variant began to get generalized along a number of different parameters...(Ibid.)

It can be assumed that contemprary views on ‘the neogrammarian model’of language change reveal disagreement as regards its grounds and mechan-isms. The major problems can be summarized as follows:

The conventional understanding of the Saussurean principle of the ‘pri-ority of the synchronic approach’ misleads contemporary linguistis into thedirection of negligence of the synchronic-diachronic continuity in the exist-ence of langue.

Saussure’s approach was to study the system ‘synchronically’ as it were frozenin time (like a photograph) – rather than ‘diachronically’ – in terms of its evol-ution over time (like a film). (Chandler 9)

As a result, modern linguistics tends to analyze language change as a givenfact rather than as the result of a dynamic process.

In this respect, Raymond Hickey’s understanding of the place of lan-guage change in the overall evolution of language seems relevant to my ap-proach, which supports the idea that Saussure did not deny that language isconstantly changing:

It is an obvious truism to say that, given the dynamic nature of language,change is everpresent. However, language change as a concept and as a subjectof linguistic investigation is often regarded as something separate from the

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study of language in general. Recent research into the topic, however, hasstrived to highlight the continual nature of change and to emphasise that thesynchronic and diachronic views of change can be unified, providing a pan-chronic perspective in which the relevance of small changes observed in thepresent can be shown to hold for larger-scale changes in the past. Further-more, research in the last three or four decades has been concerned with un-derstanding the precise mechanisms of change just as much as with providinglinguistically acceptable accounts of attested changes. (Hickey 2001)

Language Change, Comparative-Historical Linguistics and Politics

As has already been mentioned above, consideration of language issues fortheoretical political speculations has been, in the majority of research cases,restricted to the issue of language use as regards the ‘internal’ and ‘external’needs of speaking societies.

To paraphrase this statement according to today’s ‘socio-political lan-guage context’, the main direction in the analysis of ethnic tongues is basic-ally toward the analysis of their status

1. Inside the ‘nation-state’, which implies research on the issues of ‘lan-guage as a landmark of ethnic or national identity’, ‘ethnic vs. nationallanguages’, ‘national language vs. state language’, ‘national, state and of-ficial language’, ‘minority languages’ and, finally, ‘language nationalism’and its association with language purism and language planning as a spe-cific language policy; and

2. outside the ‘nation-state’: where the socio-political connotation of theprocess of language contact (language convergence) is often regarded asa potential threat of a certain ‘(politically) hegemonic’ language domin-ating the ‘national’ identity of specific ‘contingent’ ones and is associ-ated with ‘language imperialism’. (Anastassov 2007)

The proposed ‘inside : outside nation-state’ opposition should be under-stood as follows:

inside↓

(imagined as the ‘pure’, ‘authentic’,‘genuine’)

outside↓

(imagined as jeopardizing the ‘pure’,‘authentic’, ‘genuine’)

What is common about these two antagonistic perspectives is the beliefthat there exists in the evolution of ethniclanguages a status of absoute ‘pur-ity’. Hence the idea of language convergence as ‘jeopardizing’ this ‘status ofpurity’.

Using Schiffman’s idea of ‘language policy as a belief system’ in the con-text of the ‘nation-state’, we can easily understand the conventional idea of‘language as the landmark of national identity’ as an assumption that

there exists somewhere, perhaps in the past or in a particular textual tradition,a state of ‘purity’ that the language can aspire to return to. (Schiffman)


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The juxtaposition of ‘contingent language’ vs. ‘ (politically) hegemoniclanguage’ reflects comparative-historical views on ‘national language’ with-in the context of ‘nation building’ and ‘nation-state’ in the sense thatthe above-mentioned ‘pure ethnic languages’ belong to a certain specificterritory.

The process of language convergence reflects, in fact, a more general pro-cess of political hegemony of one ‘community’ over another that results inthe emergence of a ‘contingent community’ which speaks a new form of theevolution of its language.

Given the specific political situation of the historical period compa-rative-historical linguistics exaggerates the importance of language recon-struction in the direction ‘parent language’ – ‘daughter language’, thus un-derestimating the role of language convergence in the diachronic analysis oflanguage change.

This assumption, by itself, can easily lead to an ‘una lingua—una patria’type of language nationalism.

In fact, given the history of any existing language on earth, there is noevidence for an entirely authentic ethnic language. A possible attempt todefine ‘what makes a language really ‘unique’, from a strictly linguistic pointof view’ could be demonstrated, for example, by means of maps of iso-glosses at any systematic level of language, which would reveal that, firstly,there are no strict boundaries between languages, let alone any correspond-ence between languages and ‘nation-state’ borders. This is where the at-tempts of language purists to ‘excavate’ an ‘absolutely pure’ stage in the his-tory of any language totally fail. The ‘uniqueness’ of any language is not en-dangered—on the contrary, it could even be enriched—by the penetrationof ‘alien’ language elements, which become an inseparable part of its ownsystem. In the case of, say, bilingual socieities, the different languages which‘speech communities’ use can exist there without any damage to their spe-cific character. When languages are in contact, understanding is possiblewhen the two speech communities have too much in common in terms ofcultural interaction (traditions, lifestyle, etc.), so that for a longer periodof time they get to know each other’s ‘language building bricks’. In otherwords,

If we want to understand the role of language in people’s lives we must go bey-ond the study of their grammar and venture into the world of social action,where words are embedded in and constitutive of specific cultural activitiessuch as telling a story, asking for a favor, greeting, showing respect, praying,giving directions, reading, insulting, praising, arguing in court, making a toast,or explaining a political agenda. (Duranti 2001:1)

We may then assume, then, that in terms of language ‘specificity’ there areno ‘absolutely pure’ ethnic languages, because there are no genetically ‘abso-lutely pure’ ethnoi. Since, as we have pointed out before, ‘specific’ lanaguageshave no strict borders, it will be easy to infer that borders between separatelanguages themselves would also blur. What is more, it would be enough to

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fix these borders if they were given once forever. The big problem here isthat they constantly change along with other changes in the structure of thedifferent ethnoi.

In the history of humankind there have been lots of cases where one lan-guage becomes predominant in an area with a mixed population. A historicalapproach shows that, when there is an initial political reason for the languagedominance, it often, within time, loses it, and starts functioning as the sym-bol of the socio-cultural integrity of a ceratin society.

Language change has always been the creative element in human know-ledge about language to push it ahead. As a result, language innovation couldbe determined as the legitimate, implicit human (= non-linguistic) know-ledge about language, because it works in the political deixis of here and now.Homo loquens would locate himself then in space by means of a temporaldimension: now goes hand in hand with here whilst then is associated withthere.

It will be easy to infer that, in terms of space, ‘he’ will be located in anenvironment where ‘he’ will share the same type of cultural experience andreact to it with the same type of communicative creativity as the rest of theother representatives of the same species. The implication is that in an en-vironment where our ‘talking man’ can express the same type of feelings andemotions as the rest of the co-inhabitants, it is not the linguistic ‘authenti-city’ or ‘purity’ which makes interaction possible, but the common politicalbackground which ties the population of a certain area into a society withits own cultural parameters. So, on an interethnic scale, the more the inhab-itants share equivalent cultural values, the more they tend do develop a realgroup identity, not necessarily associated with group language.

It is important to clarify here that linguists often tend to exaggeratethe famous ‘synchronic priority’ and totally neglect what Saussure claimedabout synchronic : diachronic continuity. My understanding of the pos-tulate about synchronicity is that language (or rather speech, to use Saus-sure’s preference) functions in the actual political time and space (as arguedabove), on the synchronic hic/nunc principle. Indeed, but what linguists for-get (or ignore for the sake of comfort) is that in fact there is no such thingas ‘static-stable synchronic phase in the evolution of a language’. As hasbeen shown above, in the eighteenth century scholars were already aware ofthe illusory character of ‘language stability’. This is a statement that, again,proves that language serves the political needs of society: it functions in or-der to maintain a certain order, which is in fact ephemeral and permanentlychangeable, following the stronger inner order of the dynamics of humaninteraction...


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Chapter 4The Historical Approach II

Humans as ‘Political Animals’ and the Origin of Language

The reference to Aristotle’s Politics above points at the Greco-Roman tra-dition in the perception of humans as capable of speaking with each other andliving with each other in communities.

The term ‘political animal’ (zoon politikon), however, implies somethingmore than just ‘communal life’ that integrates the members of a certaincommunity into an entity with its own parameters. Language order as wellas social, political, cultural and belief-system order are referred to here asmatters of convention. Language functions within this communal/conven-tional system of order as the major instrument of (pragmatic) under-standing.

A language, as a collective phenomenon, takes the form of a totality of im-prints in everyone’s brain, rather like a dictionary of which each individual hasan identical copy...Thus it is something which is in each individual, but is non-etheless common to all. (Saussure 19)

In other words: human society is a group of people who live together and talkabout the way they live together by means of the language that they have agreedagreedto use together so that they can finally survive/coexist together.

A common languge connects the members of a community into an info-rmation-sharing network with formidable collective powers. (Pinker 16)

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Pinkers’s ‘information-sharing network with collective powers among mem-bers of a (speaking, human) community’ should be understood, in the con-text of the present research, in the following manner:

Community = Group of Individuals↓

whowho→ share the same territory↓

andand→agree on the rules of sharing (by means of language)↓

forfor→the sake of understanding and coexistence

In this respect, the neo-Marxist understanding of the ‘origin of language’ ispartially acceptable when it comes to the way Holborow tries to revitalizethe classical Marxist position on the social basis of language with referenceto the works of Volosinov:

The development of language and consciousness were linked because bothwere aspects of the process of modern humans coping collectively with thematerial world around them. (Holborow 17)

And, further:For Volosinov, the signing process is the means by which consciousness takesshape and is socially constructed. Signs emerge in the process of interactionbetween one individual consciousness and another; not just any two humanbeings but between two who are ‘organized socially’, and part of a socialgroup...Consciousness, then, does not arise spontaneously from nature, nor asthe external coating of some inner spirit; it materializes through signs createdby humans in the process of social intercourse. (Holborow 25)

Volosinov himself demonstrates his Marixst position by means of the fol-lowing statement, which points at the determinative/motivating role of theparticular means of communication of the specific social milieu:

The immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determ-ine – and determine from within, so to speak – the structure of an utterance.(Volosinov 132)

The above statement is based on Volosinov’s critical attitude toward Saus-sure’s definition of langue as the conceptual thinking of series of paroles :

The word is oriented toward an addressee, toward who that addressee mightbe.There can be no such thing as an abstract addressee, a man unto himself, soto speak. (Ibid. 131, emphasis added)

The ‘need for an addressee’, which Marxists determine as an inevitable/un-avoidable conditio sine qua non priority of the collective to the individual interms of ‘social experience’:

With regard to the potential addressee, a distinction can be madebetween two poles, two extremes between which an experience can be ap-prehended and ideologically structured, tending now toward the one, nowtoward the other. Let us label these two extremes the ‘I-experience’ and the‘we-experience’. (Ibid. 133)

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH II

22

Volosinov sees the juxtaposition between the ‘I-experience’ and the‘We-experience’ in the following way:

The ‘I-experience’ actually tends toward extermination: the nearer it ap-proaches the extreme limit, the more it loses its ideological structurednessand, hence, its apprehensible quality, reverting to the physiological reactionof the animal. In its course toward this extreme, the experience relinquishesall its potenatialities, all outcroppings of social orientation, and, therefore,also loses its verbal delineation. Single experiences or whole groups of exper-iences can approach this extreme, relinquishing, in doing so, their ideologic-al clarity and structuredness and testifying to the inability of the conscious-ness to strike social roots. The ‘we-experience’ is not by any means a nebulousherd experience; it is differentiated. Moreover, ideological differentiation, thegrowth of consciousness, is in direct proportion to the firmness and reliabilityof social orientation. The stronger, the more organized, the more differenti-ated the collective in which an individual orients himself, the more vivid andcomplex his inner world will be. (Ibid. 133-134)

The above citations sound quite applicable to the the main thesis of this re-search. What follows, however, sounds like an unexpected contradictio inadjecto:

A special kind of character marks the individualistic self-experience [emphasisin original]. It does not belong to the ‘I-experience’ in the strict sense of theform as defined above. The individualistic experience is fully differentiatedand structured. Individualism is a special ideological form of the ‘we-experien-ce’ of the bourgeois class. The individualistic type of experience derives froma steadfast and confident social orientation. Individualistic confidence in one-self, one’s sense of personal value, is drawn not from within, not from thedepths of one’s personality, but from the outside world. An analogous struc-ture is presented in solitary self-experience (‘the ability and strength to standalone in one’s rectitude’), a type cultivated by Romain Rolland and, to someextent, by Tolstoj. The pride involved in this solitude also depends on the ‘we’.It is a variant of the ‘we-experience’ characteristic of the modern-day Westernintelligentsia. (Ibid. 135)

Volosinov’s standpoint points out issues of fundamental importance, suchas the type of relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ within the bordersof the community. Basic talking communities are more likely to have com-prised individuals (rather than collectively functioning robots), who, for thesake of survival, were forced to stick to each other and obey certain series/types of rules/order.

In fact, Marxist philosophy, as the above references to Volosinov andHolborow reveal, emphasizes the link between language and consciousnessas the result of the social organization of the comunicators/interactors, withan emphasis on the ‘We-Experience’ ‘against’ the ‘I-Experience’.

The statement

there is no word/language without an addressee

qualifies human language as totally dependent on the ‘We-Experience’.Within this context, the theoretical foundation of my work depends on aserious reconsideration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract and hisviews on the origin of language:

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It is not hunger or thirst, but love, hate, pity, anger that draw out the firstvoices. We follow in silence the prey on which we want to feed, but to move ayoung heart, to repel an unjust aggressor, for this nature dictates the accents,the cries, the pleas. And so the most ancient words were invented and so it wasthat the first languages were musical and passionate before being simple andmethodical…(Rousseau)

Rousseau’s romantic attitude toward the origin of language aside, whatcounts in his philosophy is the idea that language can be regarded as a way ofexpressing emotion, which implies that it can be uttered without the needfor an addressee, a need that comes second in the development from singleto shared emotion.

Rousseau’s understanding of human language as ‘shared emotion’ allowsus to draw a certain parallels between art (more explicitely, music and visualart) and linguistically marked realia.

A parallel with visual art (cf. the previous chapter) in the prehistoric cavepaintings, for example, taken as initial-primitive examples of art, supportsthe idea of the emotional experience of the ‘ego’, projected on the cave walland shared, as a reference, with yet another ‘ego’ as a part of the processof interaction. Therefore, ‘language as knowledge’, like ‘art as knowledge’,apart from everything else that it is believed to be, is a human desire for self-observation that really integrates individuals, with a common understand-ing of the object of self-observation as a referent.

In the process of the exchange of emotions/feelings, individual membersof communities interact when they produce and perceive art in the follow-ing way:

PRODUCER → RECEIVER↓ ↑

expressed emotion received emotion

Without any sophisticated theory of the semiotics of art and comunication,it is apparent that the producer of art projects an ‘emotion’ outside himselfthat might, or might not, be interpreted in the way it was initially intended.


expressed emotion received emotion↓ ↓↑

intention interpretation↓

REFERENT


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or:



intention interpretation← →

REFERENT← →

The item of art functions as a referent that can be understood from the dif-ferent perspectives of the ‘producer’ and the ‘receiver’.

In his research on the language of music, Deryck Cooke argues with sometheoreticians who claim that it conveys no meaning from composer tolistener. His main concern is that music is a kind of art that is comparablewith painting, architecture and, mainly, literature. Literature, when regardedas language interaction (communication), shows, in his opinion, striking similar-ities with music, in terms of its structural elements that are creatively usedto transfer feelings and emotions from author to recipient.

In his arguments, Cooke assumes that language communication in itsorigin is based on the exchange of emotional feelings that later in the evolu-tion of human intellect developed in articulate codes. Comparison with mu-sic, as he claims, reveals that in each case there is a creative use of codes,based on sounds, which, when specifically structured, produces pieces of artthat are loaded with meaning. Deeper analysis of the shift of this ‘mean-ing’ from composer to listener makes Cooke speculate on the possibilities ofthe ‘misintepretation’ of the initial intention of the author of the musicalpiece. This part of my study contributes to the issue with reference to dis-course/pragmatic analysis of the type of relationship between intended mes-sage and intepreted message in language interaction on the one hand, and, onthe other hand, the semiotic value of literary texts as ‘open works of art’(Umberto Eco) and the syntagmatic/paradigmatic axial basis of ‘intertextual-ity’ (Kristeva).

According to Cooke, the analogy between music and language ‘can bebest understood on the primitive level’ as follows:

The most feasible theory of the origin of language is that it began as inarticu-late, purely emotional cries of pleasure and pain.

In literature, the inarticulate cries of primitive man have become elaboratedinto words, i.e., sounds which possess associations with objects, ideas and feel-ings – clear, rationally intelligible, but arbitrarty associations; whereas in mu-sic, they have become elaborated into notes, i.e., sounds which have clear, butnot rationally intelligible associations, rather inherent assocations, with thebasic emotions of mankind... (Cooke 26)

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Julia Kristeva’s definition of desire in language integrates the two perspect-ives from a postmodern point of view:

a passion for ventures with meaning and its materials (ranging from colors tosounds, beginning with phonemes, syllables, words), in order to carry a the-oretical experience to that point where apparent abstraction is revealed asthe apex of archaic, oneiric, nocturnal or corporeal concreteness, to that pointwhere meaning has not yet appeared (the child), no longer is (the insane per-son), or else functions as a restructuring (writing, art). (Kristeva x)

It can be concluded that the ‘communicability’ of language and music isbased on their capacity to make a ‘listener’ share emotion with its ‘ini-titator’:

Now when Mendelssohn comes to give examples of thoughts (Gedanken) whichmusic gives rise to, we find he is using the word in the generalized sense of‘mental activities’, and in fact means feelings...And those who have found musicexpressive of anything at all (the majority of mankind) have found it express-ive of emotions. (Cooke 12, emphasis in original)

All this still does not shed enough light on the process of transfer of ‘mean-ing’ in language and music.

Cooke agrees with Hindemith’s theoretical speculations:The truth is that as single tones they (musical sounds) are mere acoustical factswhich do not evoke any genuine musical reaction. No musical effect can beobtained unless the tension between at least two different singles tones hasbeen perceived. (Cooke 27)

And further:Of course, a piece of music cannot be made out of one note... (Ibid.)

The author identifies the main task of this part of his research as follows:The task facing us is to discover exactly how music functions as a lan-guage...Beginning with the basic material – notes of definite pitch – we mustagree with Hindemith that musical works are built out of the tensionsbetween such notes...[T]he setting up of such tensions and the colouring themby the characterizing agents of tone-colour and texture, constitute the whole ap-paratus of musical expresssion. (Ibid., emphasis in original)

A parallel with language interaction shows striking similarities:A SPEAKER shares a feeling/emotion with a HEARER while ‘project-

ing’ it/them ‘out’ of his own mind by means of linguistic signs:

SPEAKER → HEARER↓ ↑

expressed emotion received emotion


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As in art, a SPEAKER (in language interaction) constructs a message witha certain intention, which is supposed to reach the HEARER and be inter-preted by him:


expressed emotion received emotion↓↑


REFERENT

And, finally, the emotion expressed by the SPEAKER might or might notbe interpeted by the HEARER in the way it was intended:




← REFERENT →

SPEAKERS and HEARERS might/might not come to an absolutely identicalREFERENT, which may, indeed, cause misunderstanding but may creat-ively contribute to the flexibility of interaction where the area of the

optional interpretation of the reference

offers a variety of different ways of interpreting the initially intendedmessage.

This is what explains, for example, the possibility of many ways to saysomething, in terms of style and register, genre, paraphrasing and ambigu-ous figural and metaphorical meaning.

Language interaction as ‘shared emotion’ (based on its self-expressivefunction) plays an important role in the optional intepretation of the inten-ded messages in the relationship:

SPEAKER : HEARER

which, in the context of communal life, makes language creativity a sourceof possible imbalance of political power.

As agreed above,the Speaker plays with language, and, what is even more, the Hearer understands

him, even if the linguistic sign used by the former is absolutely new for him.

In order to communicate successfully, both

SPEAKER and HEARER

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need the common perspective of the common political environment in or-der to understand each other.

In modern linguistics this type of contact between the two participantsin the discourse reflects Jakobson’s understanding of language functions ascontext dependent:

REFERENTIAL/CONTEXTEMOTIVE----------PHATIC/CONTACT----------CONATIVE

METALINGUAL/CODE

(Jakobson 1958)By ‘context-dependent’ I understand here the socially-based convention-

al interaction of individuals (or the same type of pragmatic-deictic hic/nunccontext that I am using here as a term).

The ‘poetic’ function of language, then, as a combination of the express-ive/emotive and the metalingual functions is, as Yaguello claims, ‘speakeroriented’, which means that the ‘I-experience’ is given priority to the ‘we-experience’ in the sense that the emotive/expressive function of languagepredetermines the two members of a discourse as ‘shifters’, i.e., their inde-pendent attitude toward the referent because ‘speaker’ and ‘hearer’ functionindividually in the ‘conventional act of communication’.

SPEAKER-----------→REFERENT←------------HEARER

II and youyou alternate during dialogue and for this reason are called shifters.shifters.(Yaguello 8)

Further on, Yagiello extends Jakobson’s model of the poetic function of lan-guage in the sense of innovation in language (or what Volosinov called ‘thegenerative quality’) as the result of the speakers’ ability to play with it:

The word ‘play’ in English has (at least) the following meanings:

as a verb

to take part in a game;

to perform;

to engage in activity for amusement;

as a noun

rule governed activity;

a text for performance;

leeway, latitude, freedom.

(Yaguello ibid. 16-17)

This gives us, as she claims,two apparently contradictory sets of meanings. On the one hand, there is theidea of elasticity, freedom, leeway and, on the other, the idea of rules or con-straints. Indeed, it is a defining feature of play that it combines unrulinesswith rules, freedom with limits. There are constraints placed on language, yetif we could take no liberties with it, it would merely be a mechanical code.


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Only formal or artificial languages forbid play. Language has a certain play init, in the same way we might say there is play in a mechanism or a structure.And, if play is, above all, a way of distancing oneself from something, thenplaying with words is a way of distancing oneself from language and, therefore,from oneself. (Ibid.)

The above citation from Yaguello poses the question about language as‘play’:

Why is play with language possible?

As previously mentioned, humans are not mechanical robots. It is arguedhere that language order, as a convention between individuals, is markedby a certain ‘inequality’ in the process of interaction. If we agree withYaguello’s observation about ‘playing with words as a way of distancing one-self from language and, therefore, from oneself’, in his desire for ‘distan-cing from the ‘ego’ system’, Homo loquens has to ‘balance’ his capacity forplay with language with the standards of the ‘language order’ accepted byconvention. Or, in other (and simpler) words, he has to keep the balancebetween

the restriction of the rulesand

the capacity of breaking them

The latter gives him the chance to come up with his own independent inter-pretation of a received message, whereas in the case of the forwarded one,it gives the speaker the power of maneuvering and manipulation as thetwo basic elements of political persuasion.

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Chapter 5The Semiosis of Political Division of Space (I)

The ‘Home’

Language and the Territorial Basis of Identity (I)

‘Home’ as a Place That I ‘Belong To’

One of the major arguments of this research (as described before) is thathuman language is politically motivated by means of the attachment of thespeakers of a specific community to a specific territory. The (previolusly dis-cussed) hic/nunc deictic principle attaches me to my community by means of(emotional) attachment to the shared territory. This claim can be stronglysupported by a variety of different examples, often linguistically illustrated:

Slavic and Germanic tribes have always shared neighboring territories.In the Slavic language family the common root * tjut (from Indo-European* teut) developed into the following lexemes: Bulgarian čužd, Russian čužoj,Polish cudzy, all with the common meaning ‘different’, ‘foreign’, ‘alien’, even‘hostile’. At the same time, the Indo-European *teut is the basis in the form-ation of Germanic Teuton(ic) in ethnonyms such as German Deutsch, or Eng-lish Dutch. One can assume that for ancient Slavs their German neighborswere potential foes.

All the Turks who migrated to Turkey after the massive ethnic cleansingaround the Balkans in the 1980s refer to their native countries (Kosova,Macedonia, Bulgaria) as ‘the land where they were born’. That is why a Turkwho has emigrated from Bulgaria would always claim that (s)he ‘comes from

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Bulgaria’, but would never agree to be called a ‘Bulgarian Turk’. What theyinsist that they share with ‘authentic’ Bulgarians is expressed by the Turkisheski toprak, which means ‘somebody I used to share the same land/territorywith in the past’.

Throughout time, this ‘attachment to the native land’ underwent differ-ent types of modifications until it finally emerged on the stage of history asthe ‘nation-state’. The idea of the ‘nation-as-home-that-I-belong-to’ flour-ished, as is well known, during the nineteenth century, with the develop-ment of European ‘romantic nationalism’. The process of ‘nation building’upon linguistic, cultural, historical and religious unity became so intens-ive that it finally grew into fierce antagonism, which in turn prepared theground for the catastrophic events of the twentieth century.

This is what causes Ross Poole’s confusion when he exclaims:Many people have been prepared to sacrifice, not only themselves but thosedear to them, and have put the claims of the nation ahead of the demandsof religion, political commitment and morality. We need to ask: What is itabout national identity which has rendered these claims and sacrifices so ter-ribly plausible? (Poole 2003:271)

In the search for an appropriate answer to this question, Poole suggests thefollowing argument that seems to support my previous claim, namely:

Another aspect of the strength of a national identity lies in the richness of thecultural resources which are employed in forming the conception of nationalcommunity. This identity provides a land in which we are at home, a historywhich is ours, and privileged access to a vast heritage of culture and creativity.It not only provides us with the means to understand this heritage; it also as-sures us that it is ours. (Ibid. 272, emphasis added)

In the case of ‘home as locus that I belong to’ it is apparently the decitichic which motivates the emotional attachment to it, according to the abovecited statements. On the other hand, however, in the history of our world,as Poole describes it, there is no evidence for a ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ nationthat can claim a ‘land’ as the appropriate locus in the process of the buildingof a nation-state. A long quote from Daniel Defoe’s ‘The True-Born Eng-lishman’ (which I take the liberty of borrowing from Benedict Anderson)explicitly illustrates the subject:

Thus from a Mixture of all kinds began, / That Het’rogeneous Thing, AnAn English-English-manman... From whence a Mongrel half-bred Race there came, / With neither Name norNation, Speech or Fame. (quoted in Anderson 1991 xi)

All of the above points out the issue of the ethnic structure of the ‘nation-state’ and the emotional attitude toward it. The problem, as shown above,is that as there are no ethnically ‘pure’, ‘authentic’ or ‘genuine’ nations, a‘national state’ would always imply the existence of a majority vs. minor-ity(ies)within its official borders. It is important here to understand thegrounds of the emotional attitude of the minor population the motivationof which is not easy to grasp.

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE (I) THE ‘HOME’

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In one of my bus trips from Sofia to Istanbul, while waiting for the boring cus-toms procedures to finish, I started a chat with Sibel, a young lady now living inBursa. ‘Turkey is where I permanently live, yes’, she said with a sigh. ‘But, my realhome is back there’, pointing at the Bulgarian side. ‘Any time I see the Bulgarian na-tional flag I feel like crying’.

Mehmet refused to change his name in 1984, as the authorities required at thattime. In 1989 he and all his family immigrated to Turkey. When they settled in alittle town on the Marmara coast they used to go every night to the small harbor andlook at the starry sky, mesmerized by one of the stars, which, they believed, pointedat exactly the place where their native Plovdiv should be.

What is it that makes people like Sibel and Mehmet so attached to their Bulgari-an homeland?

Both average Turks and the average Bulgarians have always lived togeth-er, each side respecting the specific identity of the other. Even during theperiod of Ottoman dominance the places of mixed Bulgarian-Turkish pop-ulation were well known for peaceful coexistence.

There were, indeed, in more recent times, additional socio-politicalfactors that aimed at the integration of ethnic Turks to the bigger socialgroup of ethnic Bulgarians under the Communist regime. Immediately afterWorld War II, following the ideology of ‘proletarian internationalism’,Communist authorities tolerated the development of Turkish culture inBulgaria, stimulating Turks to open schools and theaters, publish books andnewspapers, etc. Moreover, some of them became members of the Com-munist party, which gave them the confidence that they belonged to ‘thebetter part of society’. All this collapsed when this manifestation of postwarCommunist ideology turned into nationalism in the late sixties and earlyseventies. In the mid-eighties it reached its climax with the so-called Re-birth Process, when ‘Bulgarian Turks’ were forced to change their names toBulgarian ones.

On the surface, it was an attempt to deny the existence of the Tukish population inBulgaria, based on the idea that it was a population that had lost its ‘genuine’ nation-al identity by being forcibly converted to Islam during the Ottoman conquest, and,therefore, that it should be adopted back into the big Bulgarian family by picking up‘genuine’ Bulgarian names. By forcing them to do so, Communist authorities tried topersuade them that they were ‘genetically’ part of the Bulgarian ethnos.

More deeply, the Bulgarian Communist regime at that time was in crisis andneeded a scapegoat for its failures. Depriving Turks of the right to have their nameswas planned to initiate yet another step forward: depriving them of the right toequally share with the rest of the ‘genuine’ Bulgarians the same land where they wereborn, and finally to make them ‘voluntarily’ leave the country.

Those who resisted, like Mehmet or the parents of Sibel, had to leave thecountry in 1989.

By resisting, the Turks stuck to the ‘jus soli’ rule, maintaining their rightto be equally the children of the same land where they were born. The hadagreed to be part of a society that treated them as equals, because they be-lieved in their right to be treated so. At the same time they respected their

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own ethnic identity, sharing the same social environment with the rest ofthe population of the ‘nation-state’. Once this feeling was disrespected, theyresisted, because their right to be different within the borders of their com-mon ‘habitat’ was abused, though still considering themselves part of thesame land where they were born.

The socio-cultural background that Turks from Bulgaria shared with therest of the Bulgarians played a significant role in the development of their‘territorial identity’ – their attachment to the land that they were not onlyborn in, but also shared equally with everybody else, living equally under thesame conditions.

The emotional attachment that Turks from Bulgaria feel toward Bul-garia could now be regarded from the perspective of ‘language as a landmarkof ethnic identity’: they normally refer to themselves as ‘Turks who wereborn in Bulgaria’ and not as ‘Bulgarian Turks’. Considering that, historically,the concepts of ‘ethnic identity’ and ‘language identity’ are quite often con-fused, one can easily assume that in this case, it was the Bulgarian languagethat integrated them with the rest of the inhabitants of the same land,whereas their own Turkish one kept the diversity within the integrity, bal-ancing between the different and the common. This is not an isolated case: allthroughout Europe different ethnoi speaking different languages recog-nize themselves as diverse (French, Italian, Austrian, etc.) within the common(European).

‘Home’ as a Place That ‘We All’ Belong To

The subject of this part of my analysis is the linguistic background of theconcept of ‘pan-European language’ as a possible threat to the cultural iden-tity of the different ‘nation-states’ making up the present and prospectivemembers of the EU. It investigates the interdependence between the dif-ferent languages that are spoken in Europe and European identity. Morespecifically, it deals with the fear of any specific language ‘predominating’over the rest, a fear that stimulates the emergence of extreme ideas, rangingfrom a ‘pan-European pidgin’ to the use of an ‘artificial’ (Esperanto-type)means of communication. It is assumed that the socio-cultural backgroundthat most EU members share predetermines the formation of an Europeangroup identity, where a ‘common language’, as a secondary one, would play amuch less significant role in the process.

The first step to make, in the search of an appropriate definition of‘European identity’, is to agree on:

What is Europe?

A question that Michael Wintle cautiously asks himself in his impressivespeech on the political associations throughout history of the ancient Greekmyth about the Phoenician princess Europa, abducted by Zeus in the formof a bull, and Europe the continent. By analyzing visual images, he tries tofind appropriate answers to vital questions, such as,


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What has been the interaction between visual images of Europe in a moreconventional sense, such as European culture, European civilization, orEuropean politics: in a word, European identity? (Wintle 5)

Wintle, like many others who are practically and theoretically involved inthe “building up” of the European community, are often at a crossroads asto how to define common European values in balance with European di-versity. I have deliberately chosen Wintle’s parallel between European artand European identity as a starting point for my research, because language,as a human prerequisite based on symbols, is not far away from art imagery,as part of the cultural identity of a group, or groups, that share neighboringterritories.

In this respect, Europe, inhabited by so many genetically different ethnoi(speaking different languages), is a place where, paradoxically enough, eachseparate ethnos proclaims itself European, often with disrespect for otherneighbors who share the same continental territory. This is how in, the caseof Europe, the antagonism between ‘We’ and the ‘Other’ developed intodangerous and aggressive nationalism, especially during the period betweenNapoleon and Hitler.

There can be no doubt that the awareness of many Europeans is much morenational, and increasingly regional, than European…But the predominance ofnational awareness has caused too many evils in Europe’s recent history – andgoes on causing them. In his emotional last speech to the European parlia-ment, Francois Mitterrand pronounced those words in which for Europe, heassociated nationalism with war. (Banus 158)

And, further on:The strength of this withdrawal nationalism stems from a very potent mix-ture: the atavistic fear of losing what is one’s own when it comes in contactwith what is someone else’s…Thus, the ‘establishment of group identity’ is of-ten achieved ‘by means of differentiation from other group identities…so thatoften ‘the notion of alterity becomes synonymous with that of antagonism. In-ternal cohesion, in the ideal nation-state model, required not only cultural,and if possible, linguistic unity, but also the referent ‘foreign’ as a screen toreflect that cohesion…This is how the concept of “cultural identity” becameconsecrated over a long period as a synonym of ‘national identity’…To op-pose bull-headed nationalism…European awareness should be reinforced, be-cause it means an ‘opening of horizons’. It corresponds to the reality of cul-tures, where continual interchanges have produced the phenomena of blend-ing races, changed habits and mentalities, while yet maintained identit-ies…’living together, cooperation and cultural interaction increase the possibilities andthe creativity of each people, and they do not cause changes to any culture, let alonethreaten any language, nationality or culture with extinction’… It is evident,that where there are contacts, dialogue, interchange, there can be change. But not everychange means risking the loss of identity. Because ‘identity’ is a more flexible and multi-level entity, and not a monolithic one in which different elements are unable to coexist.(Ibid., emphasis added)

Consequently,Europe especially has been living for many centuries in continual interchange,in a continuous interaction between the cultures – in assuming elements thathave become common without, thereby, losing diversity….[A]nd the presenceof characters and stories from different national sources in the cultural life of

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so many citizens has presented no problem for plurality; rather, it has beenundoubtedly ‘an enriching factor and a distinguishing mark of the people’sEurope’. (Ibid).

Common cultural heritage (commonly shared cultural constructs) shapescultural identity on its way to group identity.

How is language part of the cultural identity of a certain group, then?

The role of language in society and politics, as shown above, often holds sec-ondary position in modern political theory. In fact, language analysis cancontribute to the successful investigation of unique or specific languagesand it can, thus, support the idea that national language (with its assumedsignificance in the process of nation building) should be reconsidered in thecontext of building a united Europe. I should agree here with Harold Schiff-man, who claims that ‘purely’ linguistic and language-policy analytical aimsoften overlap in the field of semantics, where the cultural load turns lan-guage code into real language.

[I]f language policy is not deeply rooted in the linguistic culture of a languagegroup, it is not going to fit the needs of its speakers as well. Language policy istherefore not just a text, a sentence or two in the legal code, it is a belief sys-tem, a collection of ideas and decisions and attitudes about language. It is ofcourse a cultural construct, but it is either in tune with the values of the lin-guistic culture or it is in serious trouble…(Schiffman 56).

Therefore, language policy should be able to define the linguistic culture ofa language group. Using Schiffman’s idea of language policy as a belief sys-tem in the context of the nation-state, we can easily understand the conven-tional idea of language as the landmark of national identity as an assumptionthat

there exists somewhere, perhaps in the past, or in a particular textual tradi-tion, a state of ‘purity’ that the language can aspire to return to. (Ibid)

This assumption, by itself, can easily lead to an ‘una lingua – una patria’ typeof language nationalism, which does not give an appropriate answer to thequestion:

Where do multilingual societies enter this scheme?

Given the history of any existing language on earth, there is no evidencefor an entirely authentic ethnic language. A possible attempt to define whatmakes a language really ‘unique’ would reveal that there are no strict bound-aries between languages, let alone any correspondence between languagesand nation-state borders (cf. above). This is where the attempts of languagepurists to ‘excavate an absolutely pure’ stage in the history of any languagedefinitely fail. The ‘uniqueness’ of any language is not endangered—on thecontrary, it could even be enriched—by the penetration of ‘alien’ languageelements, which become an inseparable part of its own system. In the caseof, say, bilingual societies, the different languages which speech communit-ies use can exist there without any damage to their specific character. When


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languages are in contact, understanding is possible when the two speechcommunities have too much in common in terms of cultural interaction(traditions, lifestyle, etc.), so that for a longer period of time they get toknow each other’s ‘language building bricks’.

Since, as I have pointed out before, specific languages have no strict bor-ders, it will be easy to infer that borders between separate languages them-selves would also blur. Furthermore, it would be enough to fix these bordersif they were given once forever. The big problem here is that they constantlychange along with other changes in the political structure of the differentethnoi.

It will be easy to infer that in terms of space Homo loquens will be locatedin an environment where he will share the same type of cultural experiencewith the other representatives of the same species and react to it with thesame type of communicative creativity. To paraphrase what has alreadybeen stated before: the implication is that in an environment where our‘talking man’ can express the same type of feelings and emotions as the restof the co-inhabitants, it is not the linguistic ‘authenticity’ or ‘purity’ whichmakes interaction possible, but the common background that ties up pop-ulation of a certain area into a society with its own cultural parameters. So,on an interethnic scale, the more the inhabitants share equivalent culturalvalues, the more they tend to develop a real group identity, even though itmay not necessarily be associated with group language.

Europe has for a long time shared common cultural constructs with nocommon language as a must. There are plenty of examples from literature,music, painting and architecture:

Without the Italian, Petrarch, or the Frenchman, Ronsard, for example, it isimpossible to imagine Shakespeare’s sonnets; without a theological debate ofSpanish Baroque it would be impossible to imagine a European phenomen-on like Mozart’s Don Giovanni…without the Schlegel brothers in Ger-many…Spain would have never rediscovered its own Baroque drama; and along et cetera that can turn the hero of an eighth-century song into the protag-onist of one of the twentieth-century novels said to be decisive for the historyof literature (James Joyce’s Ulysses)….While, during the Baroque era, Italianarchitects not only built churches in Prague, Vienna or Madrid, they also pre-pared the scenery for plays in the Spanish Court of Aranjuez; a Greek paint-er sojourned in Italy and set himself in Spain (Domenicos Theotocopuli, bet-ter known as El Greco); Goethe’s work would be unthinkable without his tripto Italy; from his native Hamburg, Brahms moved to Vienna, where he dis-covered the Hungarian world; and the Viennese, Mahler, in the third move-ment of his first symphony, uses the theme of a French children’s song (“FrèreJacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?”). (Enrique Banús, Ibid)

As mentioned above, throughout human history there have been lots ofcases where societies were shaped on the basis of different ethnic stratawith their different linguo-cultural properties. What makes the specificsocium is not, therefore, the commonly shared language but the commonlyshared cultural experience. In a ‘United Europe’, where the population

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increasingly shares a similar cultural environment, the ‘language-identity’criterion gradually loses its relevance and gives way to any kind of linguafranca, providing understanding.

Today, most European interaction that requires a common languageis basically maintained in English (although French and German are alsowidely used). Frequently appearing opinions describe English and its grow-ing influence as the result of the political, economic and military power of(mainly) the United States. Many claim that it negatively affects the cul-tural independence of the separate national languages by penetrating ali-en elements with alien cultural connotation into their language systems. Asfor the needs of multilingual Europe, there are many who would argue thatEnglish is not the most appropriate means of ‘pan-European’ communica-tion. French show signs of nostalgic reference back to the times when it wasused much more in the world of diplomacy. The politically neutral charac-ter of Esperanto seems to be a popular option for many people. They tendto underestimate the fact it failed to become the common means of lan-guage interaction. The reason is that there are no political criteria to integ-rate ‘Esperanto native speakers’ into an Esperanto group identity because ofthe lack of the ‘territorial principle’ that was discussed above.

The use of such a common means of language interaction is often basedon political factors. But even if there is an initial political reason for the lan-guage dominance, it often loses it over time and starts functioning as thesymbol of socio-cultural integrity of a certain society:

In the thirteenth century, French was still spoken at the English court, andliterature was being written in French for the nobility of England; but it is thiscentury that sees the tipping of the balance away from French and back toEnglish. Although French was for a long time the prestige langauge in Eng-land, it was never the mother tongue of the majority of the population. (Barber141)

This part of my study deals with the position of the language of the ‘con-queror’ within the context of the everyday social communication of thedominated territory. It is assumed that a political hegemony of one ‘nation’over another is (often) followed by ‘language-culture’ dominance, whichover time develops into a specific, independent, characteristic feature of theregion. Moreover, it is also claimed that a possible ‘foreign language domin-ation’ is not always necessarily the product of political superiority.The ever-lasting strong need of global society for a common means of communic-atiıon (an ‘international language’) often goes, as shall be proved, beyond thepolitical connotaion of ‘language power’, and comes to be used to the bestadvantage of the ‘trade-culture’ integration of a certain area. This was thecase with

The Mediterranean Lingua Franca

The term ‘lingua franca’ suggests (for the non-specialist) a means of com-munication with a possible French background. In the case shown above,Norman-French, as the language of the ‘superior’ class, comes up withsocio-cultural characteristics that have existed in the English language ever


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since the eleventh century. It may, therefore, seem tempting to assume thatFrench as ‘the language of cultural dominance’ (as used in the term ‘linguafranca’) could have been evoked by a possible French political dominance.Strangely enough, the term was not coined in Britain, where we should haveexpected it, but in the Mediterranean region, as a ‘Romance Pidgin’ usedin official records on account of trade contacts. More specifically, it func-tioned as an ‘informal jargon’, being a mixture of Italian, French, Greek, Ar-abic and Spanish, to serve as medium between different nations whose lan-guages were not the same system, providing understanding.

This is how, for the needs of semilegal trade, the Mediterranean linguafranca came into being, as a means of interethnic linguistic communicationwith a strong cultural connotation. The initial ‘French connection’ in thecodification of nonima appelativa could only be traced back to Old FrenchFranc (‘free, sincere, genuine’), from the Middle Latin Franc meaning ‘a free-man’, implying that ‘only the Francs, as the conquering class, had the statusof freemen’.

Therefore, the establishment of ‘whatever language providing under-standing’ can occur in different places, away from the place where the lan-guage is ‘originally spoken’, with more socio-cultural, rather than politicalcharacter.

The Latin of the Roman Empire functioned as a common means of culturalinteraction long after the empire of Julius Caesar and Nero collapsed. OldChurch Slavonic was used as the official state language of medieval Valachia.The Spanish language of Latin America has nothing of the political connota-tion of the Spanish language of the fifteen-century Conquista. The Portugueseof Brazil is even phonetically far away from the language of imperial Portugal.Modern Greek was in its time used as a lingua franca in the regions of Istanbuland West Anatolia in Ottoman Turkey. The Russian language of the post-USSR era in the Turkic republics of Central Asia now plays the same role thatArabic used to play at the times of semi-legendary Turkestan. And, of course,the English of the British Empire and (American) English today are good ex-amples of how the language of predominant power can lose its politicalconnotation. (Barber ibid. 56)

The Linguistic Interpretation

Language per se has a potential as a source of knowledge about the socio-political relations between different cultures all around the world:

Language can serve, in all spheres of of social life, to bring people together orto divide them. (Kontra 1999)

Language can be a very important factor in group identification, group solid-arity and the signalling of difference...(Trudgill 2000)

The benefits of a possible application of linguistic anthropology to the useof international languages of the lingua franca type today (as an issue ofpolitical theory) could be based on the assumption that when languages arein contact, understanding is possible when the speech communities havemuch in common. Let me support this with a second reference to a quotethat has already beed made use of before:

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If we want to understand the role of languages in people’s lives we must gobeyond the study of their grammar and venture into the world of social action,where words are embedded in and constitutive of specific cultural activities,such as telling a story, asking for a favor, greeting, showing respect, praying,giving directions, reading, insulting, praising, arguing in court, making a toast,or explaining a political agenda. (Duranti, 2001, 1).

Taking this linguo-anthropological attitude into consideration, it will beeasy to infer (with a statement that has alreayd been referred to) that Homoloquens (the ‘talking man’) will be located in an environment where ‘he’ willshare a similar type of cultural experience and react to it with a similar typeof communicative creativity as the other representatives of the same spe-cies. The implication is that what makes interaction in a commonly sharedenvironment possible is the common background that ties the inhabitantsof a certain area into a society with its own ‘linguo-cultural’ parameters. So,on an interethnic scale, the more the inhabitants share equivalent culturalvalues, the more they tend to develop a group identity, sharing any grouplanguauge that could satisfy the demands of interaction.

For example: today, most European interaction that requires a ‘commonlanguage’ is maintained in English. Frequently appearing opinions describeEnglish and its growing influence as the result of the political, economicaland military power of (mainly) the United States. It negatively affects, asis often claimed, the ‘cultural independence’ of the separate national lan-guages by ‘injecting’ alien elements with alien cultural connotations intotheir language systems. As for the needs of multilingual Europe, there aremany who would argue that English is not the most appropriate means of‘pan-European’ communication. Many people suppor Esperanto because ofits ‘politically neutral character’, paying no attention to the reason why itfailed to become the ‘international language’ more than one hundred yearsafter it was invented: there are no socio-cultural criteria to integrate ‘Esper-anto native speakers’ into a ‘normally living’ ‘Esperanto group identity’. So,English appears to be ‘neutral’ enough for the linguistic needs of UnitedEurope.

The use of a ‘common means of communication’ is often based, it’s true,on political factors. But even if there is an initial political reason for the lan-guage dominance it often, with time, loses it, and starts functioning as thesymbol of the socio-cultural integrity of a certain society. The conclusionis that the lingua franca type of languages appear on the historical stage aposteriori possible (but not necessary) political hegemony, to fulfill the ne-cessity of cultural interaction around an area/territory with no commonlanguage.

In the case of United Europe, where all the efforts since the very begin-ning of the building process have been dedicated toward avoiding powerimbalance, the issue of a prospective hegemonic language is absolutelyirrelevant.

In our attempts to identify the cultural paradigm of United Europe,in the way Wintle analyzed it, we should always remember that it wasnot on the territory of today’s Europe where Zeus abducted the princess.


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‘European culture’, or ‘European civilization’, belongs to all of us. It is thebest possible way for the contemporary Homo loquens to accept diversitywithin our community in the globalized world.

In the case of globalization, where all the efforts since the very beginningof the ‘buiding process’ have been dedicated toward avoiding power imbal-ance, the issue of ‘hegemony’ as the source of economic/political dependen-ce loses its relevance to modify it into a modern understanding of the needof cultural cooperation. To accept this would mean to identify ourselves aspart of the invariable value of modern society. To reject it would mean toexaggerate the ‘separate’ at a very high price: the isolation from what todayit symbolizes.

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Chapter 6The Semiosis of Political Division of Space II

The ‘Walls’

Language and the Territorial Basis of Identity (II)

This chapter offers a theoretical model of ‘walls’ as signs of human deicticlocation in a political context. Reference to (political) history reveals thatthey function as basic elements of self-protection because they isolate our‘we’ from ‘the rest’ as a hostile unknown. The cognitive basis of the theoryof the embodied mind is referred to, to prove that constructing a ‘wall’between the ‘ego’ and the real surrounding political world is relevant to thecreation of myths as imaginary boundaries between humans and an ‘omni-potent and scary unknown’. One may assume that the binary oppositionbetween ‘we’ and ‘the rest’ operates as an opposition between /+known/:/-known/. The conclusion is that ‘walls’ signify human understanding of ‘lim-ited space’ as a secure political locus for the existence of the ‘ego’.

‘Walls’ as Political Metaphors

Constructing ‘walls’ for the sake of protection as a domestic political issueis not new. All around the world there are plenty of ‘city walls’ that are be-lieved to have been built to protect the citizens of a polis from a potentialthreat coming from outside.

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The political connotation of ‘walls as metapors’ is discovered when his-torical examples of the type of the Great Wall of China are taken into con-sideration. The reason for the construction of the wall of China was protec-tion from foreign forces. It is, maybe, the first historically famous exampleof a deliberate ‘literal use’ of a metaphor for protection (security).

The city wall of ancient Constantinople that was built like many othersaround the world is a political metaphor that gives explicit knowledge aboutthe history of the city itself, the Ottoman invasion of Europe and the estab-lishement of the Ottoman state. The etymology of the place name Istanbul(from Byzantine Greek: eiseis ttēnn polinpolin meaning ‘going into the direction ofthe polis (the city of Constantinople)’) implies a certain spatial dichotomy:

outside : inside

with the wall itself as a demarcation line between the two.The Israeli capture of the Old City of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War

in 1967 is an example of ‘wall destruction’ for the achievement of militarygoals and national ambtions. After a couple of days of hesitation, encour-aged by their successful resistance to the attacks of Egypt, Jordan and Syria,the Israelis captured the Old City, i.e., ‘demolished’ a political and metaphor-ical frontier between modern and ancient Israel, and finally managed to ob-tain the most significant Jewish shrine – the Wailing Wall.

From a more recent perspective the ‘Fence’ between the United Statesand Mexico, planned by the Bush administration, reveals a political modelthat aims at protection of the US from ‘imposition’ coming from outside.

‘Gated communities’ and ghettoes represent a more recent option of theeverlasting desire of humans for security (or, a feeling of security), depend-ing on who is considered to be ‘in need of protection’ and who should ‘beprotected’.

One can assume that in their political (as well as social and cultural) activ-ities humans have always been in need of ‘walls’ to seperate/protect themfrom the impact of a real or fictional superior power. Moreover, it is some-times difficult to distinguish ‘real walls’ from ‘the concept of wall as politicalmetaphors’ because of the the very essence of this ‘power’ as an expressionof human natural perception and knowledge acquistion of understandableand non-understandable reality.

Wall Metaphors and Political Life

In his research on ‘Old and New Walls in Jerusalem’, Menachem Kleinrefers to a theoretical analysis, by Lyman and Scott, in which territory isclassified by four categories: private, home, public, and platform of interac-tion. Inasmuch as this classification resembles the classical ancient conflictbewteen an oikos and a polis,what is new about it is the emphasis on the ‘plat-form of interaction’ in which

different social groups come into contact. (Klein 57)

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE II THE ‘WALLS’

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And, further:A platform of interaction is fragile because it is not homogeneous, but israther a base for interaction among the different groups that pass through.The borders of this kind of territory are porous and mutable. (Ibid.)

On the other hand, by following the models suggested by Marcuse, Ashleyand Passi, Klein comes to to the conlusion that

By excluding the ‘other’ through a border the powerful state can institution-alize identities. In other words, border construction is an expresssion of bothphysical and normative power relations. (Ibid.)

The Berlin Wall was a match between the literal and the metaphoricalmeaning of the division of two political systems. Since its conctrsuction un-til its fall it functioned as a border between the US and USSR sectors of theGerman city and symbolized Cold War antagonism.

In 1961, East German Communist authorities built the wall with theintention of stopping East Germans from fleeing the Communist regime.West Berlin was surrounded by ‘the wall’ and was an example of how the‘threatening side’ was isolated from the one in need of ‘protection’.

More specifically, by constructing ‘the wall’, the East Germans/Sovietsimposed on the whole Eastern Bloc the metaphorical burden of ‘the IronCurtian’ with a twofold intention:

to leave the East Germans with the impression that the ‘Drueben’ is ag-gressive, dangerous, threatening and, hence, they have to be protected; and

to mask the failure of Communist political economy in the eyes of theDDR/Eastern Bloc citizens.

In fact, the symbolic meaning of ‘the wall’ turned into a ‘platfrom of in-teraction’ in the metaphorical sense of Klein’s term: it intensified the ‘iden-tity narrative’ of East Germans to the extent of:

‘We, the poor and oppressed by Communism’vs.

‘They, the free and successful’

So that when ‘the wall’ finally came down they were bitterly disappointed todiscover that West Berlin and West Germany were not at all the ‘Eden’ thatthey imagined...

One can assume, therefore, that ‘to build a wall’, whether understood lit-erally or

Metaphorically, does not function just as a means of isolation. It affects the‘identity narrative’ of the separated population, based on the principle ofthe binary oppostition:

/+ known/ vs. /-known/

I claim elsewhere (Anastassov 111-120), by means of the rhetorical question

What is Behind that Wall?

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that ‘the unknown’ is not only the source of potential threat: it could alsotrigger the desire of Homo politicus for challenging that ‘threat’. This is an as-sumption that goes beyond the trivial understanding of borders as ‘means ofprotection from an imminent invasion coming from the neighborhood’ anddevelops into a ‘desire for crossing the barrier between the existence of the‘ego’ and his own body and exploring the ‘unknown’ with its mythical ma-gic’. There is no doubt about the ‘magic of the Berlin Wall’, considering thenumerous attempts to go over it, the numerous victims that turned it intoa matter of martyrdom; it is no less significant than the Wailing Wall ofJerusalem.

The ‘wall aftermath’ supports that assumption: nowadays the architec-ture of the area where it stood marks a certain urban policy that aims atforwarding a sign of the same semiotic value as the sign that appeared after‘La Bastille’ in Paris was demolished: ici on dance...The ‘Manhattan-type’ sky-scraper skyline demonstrates a certain ‘platform of interaction’ that integ-rates the two urban unities, West and East Berlin, into a symbol of a newpolitical reality.

Klein (Ibid.) refers to the following quote from Passi:Boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘others’ are critical elements in establishing ‘us’and excluding ‘others’.

Therefore he (Passi) highly evaluates a great importance of examining howboundaries become part of everyday life and an identity narrative. Secondly,he sees a link between boundaries both as symbols and as a specific form ofinstitutions and state power. By excluding the ‘other’ through a border thepowerful state can institutionalize identities. In other words, border con-struction is an expansion of both physical and normative power relations.

The ‘Cyprus wall’ symbolizes yet another element of ‘identity narrative’.The long period of Ottoman domination of the Balkans and the EasternMediterranean left as a legacy a huge population of Turkish origin strug-gling for such a narrative. The political situation on Cyprus that led to theevents in 1974 and the decision to isolate its northern part and the northernpart of Nicosia-Lefkosia threw Europe and the world into a heated debateon its legal validity. The ‘Cyprus case’, along with the political situation inthe Balkans in the 1980s, put the issue of the Balkan/Mediterranean-Turk-ish identity narrative on the agenda in the most painful way possible.

In this context I feel tempted to use a citation for the second time withthe deliberate intention of reiterating what was referred to above:

[T]he ‘establishment of group identity’ is often achieved ‘by means of differ-entiation from other group identities...so that often the notion of alterity be-comes synonymous with that of antagonism. Internal cohesion, in the idealnation-state model, required not only cultural, and if possible, linguistic unity,but also the referent ‘foreign’ as a screen to reflect that cohesion...This is howthe concept of ‘cultural identity’ became consecrated over a long period as asynonym of ‘national identity’...[L]iving together, cooperation and cultural in-teraction increase the possibilities and the creativity of each people, and theydo not cause changes to any culture, let alone threaten any language, nation-ality or culture with extinction...It is evident that where there are contacts,


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dialogue and interchange, there can be change. But not every change meansrisking the loss of identity. Because ‘identity’ is a more flexible and multilevelentity, and not a monolithic one in which different elements are unable to co-exist. (Banus 271)

All of this points out the issue of ‘territory’ as part of the way to establish an‘identity narrative’, based on the limits of ‘containers’.

Wall Metaphors and the Theory of the Embodied Mind

It has recently become quite fashionable to criticize Lakoff’s and Johnson’scognitive model of metaphors, especially after Pinker’s attack on the the-ory, without reference to the fact that the idea of the ‘human body as a bar-rier between the human mind and the outside world’ has intrigued thinkersat all times, beginning with the philosophy of Vijniana-Vada and the workof Patanjali and continuing through recent sudies on the semiotics of space.

Lakoff and Johnson claim that[j]ust as the basic experiences of human spatial orientation give rise to ori-entational metaphors, so our experiences with physical objects (especially ourown bodies) provide the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of ontologicalmetaphors, that is, ways of viewing events, activities, ideas, etc., as entities andsubstances. (Ibid., emphasis added)

This claim is not essentially different from Elliot Gaines’ argument con-cerning the froniters of space

that begin with the body of an individual subject. The physical limits of thebody and its means of conscious perception, thought, sight, sound, smell,taste, touch and the reasoning mind, all engage in identifying the meanings ofthe things in the world of experience. (Gaines)

Further reference to Lakoff and Johnson supports the idea that, with whatthey call ‘container metaphors’,

[w]e are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world bythe surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us.(Lakoff, Johnson, ibid.)

Moreover, the two American scholars argue that the human body as a ‘con-tainer’ imposes the concept of a ‘barrier’ (or ‘wall’) onto the human mind asa natural symbol of the protection of its existence:

But even where there is no natural physical boundary that can be viewed as de-fining a container, we impose boundaries – marking off territory so that it hasan inside and a bounding surface – whether a wall, a fence, or an abstract lineor plane. (Ibid.)

This research builds on the assumption that the Lakoff/Johnson theory ofthe embodied mind can be successfully applied to analysis of

The Political Connotation of ‘Walls’ as Signs,

Because they are relevant to the issues of the semiotics of space:The semiotics of space is a descriptive process enquiring into the relevant sig-nificance of the relationships between objects and their spatial contexts.(Gaines, ibid.)

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In this respect the embodied-mind theory contributes to the understandingof the wall-metaphor as a ‘demarcation line’ in the relationships betweengroups and communities (including individuals and social institutions/fam-ilies) sharing neighboring territory.

A closer investigation of this ‘territorial’ principle reveals that humansare naturally predisposed to be attached to their ‘own space’ and to perceivemembers of the ‘neighborhood’ as a source of a potential danger.

Even as far (chronologically backwards) as the ancient classical philo-sophy of Plato and Aristotle, the term oikos (home, household) is inseparablefrom polis (the state). The hic/nunc deictic principle which attaches me tomy home, attaches me to my community as well. Hence the popular metaphor‘birthplace = home’.

Another type of explanation leading toward an archetypal model is theperception of ‘my land’ as property:

If we say ‘This is my property, I shall control it’, that affirmation calls out acertain set of responses which must be the same in any community in whichproperty exists. It involves an organized attitude with reference to propertyof which is common to all the members of the community. One must have adefinite attitude of control of his own property and respect for the propertyof others. (Mead 34)

The last sentence from the quote above suggests a certain balance betweenthe notion of ‘my property’ vs. ‘your property’ which, fortunately or unfortu-nately, sounds far too idealistic and can be supported by the following state-ment made by Enrique Banus:

The strength of...nationalism stems from a very potent mixture: the atavisticfear of losing what is one’s own when it comes in contact with what is someoneelse’s...Thus, the ‘establishment of group identity’ is often achieved ‘by meansof differentiation from other group identities...so that often ‘the notion ofalterity becomes synonymous to that of antagonism. Internal cohesion, in theideal nation-state model, requires not only cultural, and if possible, linguisticunity, but also the referent ‘foreign’ as a screen to reflect that cohesion... (Banus 159,emphasis added)

It can be generalized that humankind has lived, for years, in groups, hostileto each other, in the division of a larger territory. This is how the antagon-ism between ‘we’ and the ‘other’ often develops into serious conflicts thatleads to the need for a clear ‘distinction’ between my and your property, i.e.,the ‘walls’ in question.

The Walls, the Embodied Mind and Identity Narrative

Scholars do not have basic disagreement as to the human desire for know-ledge of self by contrasting it with the rest of the ‘egos’ which our own onebelongs to.

As Herbert Mead argues:Among primitive people…the necessity of distinguishing the self and the or-ganism was recognized in what we term the ‘double’: the individual has athing-like self that is affected by the individual as it affects other people and


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which is distinguished from the immediate organism in that it can leave thebody and come back to it. This is the basis for the concept of the soul as a sep-arate entity. (Mead 34)

And further:We find in children something that answers to this double, namely the invis-ible, imaginary companions which a good many children produce in their ownexperience. They organize in this way the responses which they call out in oth-er persons and call out also in themselves. (Ibid.)

In terms of the embodied-mind theory this simply means that our bodiesfunction as a barrier between our own self and the other ‘selves’. Mead sup-ports his thesis by comparing the coexistence of different individual ‘egos’in a community with the rules of a game:

The attitudes of other players which the participant assumes organize into asort of a unit, and it is that organization which controls the response of theindividual. (Mead 36)

One can assume, in other words, that what attaches different individuals in acommunity with its own parameters is a kind of a convention à la Rousseau,where separate members of this community have to know and play ‘the rulesof the game’ in order to survive. In a community where I can discover myown self by contrasting it to the ‘selves of the rest’ it is collective cooperationfor the sake of survival that makes me stick to them against the ‘dangers ofthe unknown’. The process starts with the attempts to reconcile my ownself that is blocked into my own body with the ‘rest of the bodies in the com-munity’. It is based on the self-knowledge that I acquire by recognizing this‘rest’ as an indirect (and twisted) projection of my ‘ego’.

This assumption makes possible a certain extension of reference of themetaphor that is discussed here toward the political connotation of:

The Wall Metaphor as an Archetypal Mythological Element

As George Lakoff claims,Like metaphors, myths are necessary for making sense of what goes on aroundus. All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth anymore than they can function without metaphor. And just as we often take themetaphors of our own culture as truths, so we often take the myths of our ownculture as truths. (Lakoff 185-186)

It can be claimed that by ‘myths as truths’ we should understand a cognitivemodel of location of self in (political) space.

It is commonly accepted among scholars that the ‘walls’ or ‘barriers’ inancient myths occur as typical elements in many different belief systems andvary in the specific details, but not in the basic structure of the model. Fromthis point of view, it can be argued that a ‘wall’ or a ‘barrier’ separates hu-mans from a certain hostile unknown by marking the borders of the spacewhere they are basically located. In the ‘Odysseus type’ of myths, for ex-ample, the hero reluctantly leaves his home, afraid of the ‘journey’ that marksa clash between his ‘ego’ and the ‘hostile unknown’ out of the borders ofthe ‘home community’. The ‘Messiah-Liberator type’ (Prometheus, Jesus,

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Beowulf), on the other hand, needs to cross a certain real or fictional barrier(most often water as a symbol that separates a world of safety from a worldof unknown, scary, hostile power).

In ‘The Structural Study of Myth,’ Claude Levi-Strauss is fascinated bythe astounding similarity among so many myths from so many widely separ-ated cultures. He argues that their similarities are based on their structuralsameness sharing the following characteristics with language:

a. they are made of units that are put together according to certain rules.b. these units form relations with each other, based on binary pairs or op-

posites, which provide the basis of the structure. (Levi-Strauss, 202-212)

Hence, in the explanation of bilateral political antagonism one can arguethat there exists a certain cognitive model of conduct that combines the‘embodied mind’ theory with

The Semiotic Function of the ‘Wall-Metaphor’

All the equally structured myths in the history of human culture (Propp,Levi-Strauss), all the ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff), even the common ca-pacity of humans for syntactic structures (Chomsky), reveal a ‘universal’ wayof understanding and explaining the world.

As has already been stated, humans stick to each other on the basis ofconvention: the human body itself naturally separates individuals from indi-viduals. In order to survive, they agree on certain ‘games rules’ which theyorganize in systems of social, political, religious and language order. Theserules are applied to specific territories that are different for the differentcommunities. Hence the attachment to a ‘territory as property’, which, as aconcept, is relevant to the idea of ‘my body’/’my skin’ as the border of ‘mymind’.

One can assume then that the ‘wall/barrier’ metaphor is naturally ‘em-bodied’ in the human mind and is an inseparable part of his type of relation-ship with other individuals, who, living in a community, expand the modelonto other communities.

From a semiotic point of view the proposed model can be regarded asa binary opposition between my space and the other space,which suggests avery structuralist attitude toward human treatment of space in the sense of‘black and white’, ‘good and evil’ or ‘right and wrong’.

Politically speaking, it can be concluded that humans have always hadthe ‘embodied’ mentality of ‘own space’ defended from an antagonistic ‘oth-er’. In this respect the ‘wall’ is simply a sign of a set of typically human char-acteristic features, such as search of security and protection against fearfrom the unknown.


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Chapter 7The Semiosis of Political Division of Space III

The Nostos

Language and the Cognitive Process of Identity Search

As has already been stated, humans share the same experience with the restof the members of their actual habitat on the deictic principle of hic/nunc.This is a kind of a Saussurean synchronic principle that ties them into a com-munity with its own political parameters.

In an archetypal community where ‘to be different’ is unacceptable, notallowed, even dangerous, the desire to

break the rules(by means of playing with language)

in order to acquire knowledge about self from a distance

happens (whenever it does) to the ‘strongest individuals’ from the total ofthe community’s members.

WhoWho are they?

To give an answer to this question I refer here to the classical mythologicalelement of ‘the archetypal journey of the hero’ (in Joseph Campbell’s terms).The focus is on the concept of nostos in the logical completion of ‘the voyageof Odysseus’ as a sample narrative that illustrates that the archetype ofhuman identity-search process is based on the above mentioned self-observing-

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from-a-distance process. In respect to what has been introduced here so far as athesis, nostos is referred to as a certain human desire for freedom to ‘pull thewalls down’ balanced with a nostalgic desire to get back to the safety thatthe walls provide.

The ‘Voyage-Homecoming’ of Odysseus

The return of Odysseus forms a saga in itself, to which many additionalfolk-tale elements have been attached. Here is Aristotle’s summary of theOdyssey:

The story of the Odyssey is not long: a man is away from home for many years;Poseidon is constantly on the watch to destroy him, and he is alone; at homehis property is being wasted by suitors, and his son is the intended victim of aplot. He reaches home, tempest-tossed; he makes himself known, attacks hisenemies and destroys them, and is himself saved. This is the heart of the mat-ter, the rest is episodes. (Morford, Lenardon 354)

As the authors argue,The most interesting part of the legend, however, lies in the ‘episodes’ thatcomprise Odysseus’ adventures on his travels; they have been taken as symbol-ic (for example, Odysseus conquers death in his visit to the underworld) or asconnected with real places which had become known to the Greeks as theirtrade and colonization expanded….

Odysseus is one of the supreme heroes of Greek mythology. In the Iliad heis the wisest of the Greek leaders and a good fighter…His heroic stature be-comes fully apparent in the Odyssey, where he experiences many adventures,usually escaping from danger through his intelligence and courage…[T]hepoem continues with the arrival of Odysseus on Ithaca, his revenge on thesuitors for the hand of Penelope, and his eventual recognition by and reunionwith Penelope. (Ibid 354-355.)

Odysseus’ story by itself is a common example of the archetypal experienceof a mythological hero. As Joseph Campbell claims,

The hero…is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personaland local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms.Such a one’s visions, ideas, and inspirations come pristine from the primarysprings of human life and thought.

The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man – perfected, unspecific,universal man – he has been reborn. His second solemn task and deed there-fore…is to return to us, transfigured, and teach the lessons he has learned oflife renewed. (Campbell 19-20)

The ‘Rebirth’ phase in ‘The Voyage of the Hero’ in this context meansthat ‘the Hero’ acquires new knowledge about himself (also understandableas: new knowledge about reality/truth) that he aspires to share with therest of the community members (hence, nostos = desire). This ‘shared newknowledge’ which definitely means ‘breaking the already established/exist-ing rules (of knowledge)’ marks a new era in the life of the community to‘push it ahead’. Without it, there will be no change, no movement, no pro-gress…A reference back to ‘language as shared emotion’ would then simply

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE III THE NOSTOS

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support the statement that human interaction is based on a certain modelof the shifting of (unequal) individual power within the constraints of thecollective whole.

In the case of Odysseus, his ‘rebirth’ starts on the land of the Cyclops,where he

made Polyphemus drunk; he told him his name was Nobody, and the giant inreturn for the excellent wine promised that he would reward Nobody by eat-ing him last. He then fell asleep, and Odysseus took his revenge…[H]e (Poly-phemus) cried out in agony and the other Cyclopes came running to the cave’sentrance, only to hear the cry ‘Nobody is killing me’… (Morford, Lenardon 356,Emphasis added)

Odysseus’s stage of outis (‘nobody’) comes after a series of other stages thatinclude metis (‘cunning intelligence’) and hubris (‘arrogance’) in his final ac-complishment as a hero of the ‘modern’ type. It is his ‘cunning intelligence’that makes him the hero of the Trojan War, with the idea for the Trojanhorse. It brings the war to a successful end for the Greeks in a way that istotally different from the classical belief of a heroic battle like the one-to-one encounter between Achilles and Hector. Odysseus’s metis,which helpshim disguise his real intentions in the case of the Trojan horse, develops toanother stage when he refers to himself as ‘nobody’. Hubris in its turn makeshim think of himself as ‘the greatest possible hero’.

The comparison between the two types of encounters (Achilles/Hector :Odysseus), or the two types of ‘heroism’, helps clarify the above-mentioned‘unequal shift of power’ from yet another perspective: the Achilles/Hectorone implies ‘equality in the shifting process’, whereas the Odysseus onemeans (intellectual) superiority.

In this respect, as many scholars agree, the ‘journey’ of ‘the Hero’ sym-bolizes the everlasting desire of man for ‘knowledge about self’, based on‘distancing from self’. In the case of Odysseus, by referring to him as‘nobody’, Homer implies that his hero comes to a stage where his journey asa way of self-discovery per se turns into a total separation between his phys-ical and conceptual/intellectual ‘ego’.

From a semiotic point of view, all the above examples are metaphor-sig-nifiers with a certain symbolic value:

In semiotic terms, a metaphor involves one signified acting as a signifier re-ferring to a different signified…[W]e may also think of metaphor as symbolic.(Chandler 127, emphasis in original)

signified → Odysseus metaphor↓ signified → Distancing from Selfsignifier → Outis symbol

Cf. Chandler:The mythological or ideological order of signification can be seen as re-flecting major (culturally variable) concepts underpinning particular world-views…Myths can function to hide the ideological function of a sign. (Ibid.144-145)

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This supports the idea that Odysseus-Outis functions as as an ideological signof the power of somebody who is ‘distanced’ (= different,’nobody’) as regardsthe basic community.

The ‘Self-Discovery From a Distance’

From what has been introduced here so far one can imply that the above-mentioned desire for knowledge about self on the basis of ‘distancing’ hasfunctioned as a cognitive model for all human beings at all times. In thisrespect, the very ‘distance’ itself can be identified by contrast between the‘ego’ (or what we think about our own ‘ego’) and the group of other ‘egos’that our own belongs to.

If this really is the case, it definitely comes into conflict with the wide-spread idea of belonging to a certain social ‘place-deixis’, commonly referredto as ‘home’.

‘Homecoming’ Today: The World as Place for Everybody

The lines above imply that human identity was historically shaped, follow-ing different stages ranging from antagonism to cooperation. It is based onthe assumption that even as far back as mythological times there has alwaysbeen a desire to both belong to a community and to leave it, for the sake ofknowledge about self and power imposition.

By taking all this into account, one can assume that in the process ofsearching for self not only the Man of Today, but the Man of All Times (tostart with, the mythological Hero) has always tried to complete the journeyby ‘coming back home’ with knowledge about what makes him/her differentfrom the rest of the community and at the same time common with it. Itis claimed here that the more ‘adventurous the journey’, the more the herobelieves that he shares more universal rather than different features withthe rest of the individuals and commuities all around the world. In our post-modern age of immense migration processes and advanced technology thatmakes interaction extremely easy and totally changes the ethnic structure ofsociety, our hero has the chance to ‘be home’ anywhere on earth, a chancethat he has never had before on such a scale. Finally, one may conclude thatwhat at the beginning of this research was referred to as ‘leaving home’ is aninseparable part of ‘homecoming’ and has always existed in the human men-tality as an ‘embedded’ model of desire for self-identity.

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Chapter 8The Language of Political Dominance

Language, Power and Politics (I)

The chapter deals with the importance of language for the implementationof political goals in the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia on a diachronicbasis, starting with the relative unity (in terms of language, religion and so-cial and cultural order) of semi-legendary Turkestan, via Russian influence(both tzarist and Bolshevik-Soviet), and ending with the recent attempts ofthe so-called ‘Turkish Model’ for Turkish political and cultural influence.

It offers an analysis of the way tzarist/Communist Russian-languagepolicy affected the identity process of the Turkic population of Central Asiaafter the collapse of Soviet Communist regime.

This was inspired by Marc Dickens’ impressive work, ‘Soviet LanguagePolicy in Central Asia’, and based on the asumption that in the history ofhumankind there have been lots of cases where one language becomes pre-dominant in areas with mixed population, for the needs of ‘trade-culture’ in-teraction. It is interesting to admit that this predominance may occur as theresult of or without any political hegemony.

Even if there is an initial political reason for the language dominance itoften, with time, disappears, and language dominance starts functioning asthe symbol of the socio-cultural integrity of a certain society.

In this respect, a diachronic analysis of the situation in Central Asiashows a remarkable support for the idea, given the similarities in the needfor a ‘common language’ at all stages of evolution.

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At the time of ‘Turkestan’Because of [Central Asia’s] situation on the famous Silk Road...there has beenconsiderable mixing of ethnic groups over the centuries. As a result, in ad-dition to the major groups, one can also find Arabs, Jews, Gypsies, PersiansTatars, Koreans, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Germans, Ukrainians, Belorussiansand Russians. (Dickens)

Apparently, the need for ‘social interaction’ stimulated the need for a‘langauge’ one and, in the case of ‘Turkestan’, it was maintained by theMuslim ummah (community), by means of language (Arabic) and religion(Islam).

Arabic became the language not only of religion but also of higher learning andthe Arabic script was employed in all writing...However, most of the peoplecontinued to speak in various Turkic or Iranian dialects. (Ibid.)

It is clear that Russian policy, both tzarist and Bolshevik, toward this popu-lation managed, especially during the USSR period, to disintegrate not onlythe linguistic-religious ummah of the region, but to affect the national-cul-tural identity of the people by imposing the Russian language as a commonmeans of communication. In other words: the Central Asian area becamepart of Soviet Russia thanks to the use of language as the cultural ‘avant-garde’ component of political hegemony.

The Russian presence in the area started after Astrakhan was captured in thesixteenth century by Ivan the Terrible. From that time on, Russia was thepower to be reckoned with as she rapidly expanded her empire into Asia.(Dickens, ibid.)

As the same author points out, tzarist Russia pursued an active policy ofRussification:

However, despite [Russia’s] efforts, the native intelligentsia that emerged wasby and large extremely nationalistic. (Ibid.)

No matter how strong this ‘nationalistic’ feeling might have been, the ideaof ummah was not dead, as it re-emerged in the conception of jadid (based onthe assumption that Muslims in Russia would not be able to maintain theirethnic and religious heritage without significant reform), which includedthe promotion of a common Turkic language. Jadid could not survive thefierce resistance of Islamic conservatism and ended up a failure after SovietRussians came into power, which they established by means of the follow-ing steps:

1. Since most of the local inhabitants were illiterate, the first step tochange ‘the linguistic landscape of the area’ was to promote literacy, onthe scale of a ‘cultural revolution’, as Dickens claims. The process tookplace either in Russian or the local language, where the holders of it be-came more aware of it and developed more respect for it.

2. Since Russian Soviet (language) policy in the area, especially during Stal-in’s regime, followed the principle of ‘language as the most obvious andimportant attribute of a nation’, the language awareness mentioned

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above was successfully used to develop ‘national languages’ for the dif-ferent groups of the Turkic population, artificially focusing on the dif-ferent and ignoring the common. Hence the beginnning of a ‘nationalidentity’, based on the disintegration of the ummah. This became evenstronger with the

3. Alphabet Reform, which took place in two stages:

a. The shift from the Arabic to the Latin script, which left the olderpart of the educated Islamic priests practically helpless, and thusbroke the religious unity of the ummah.

b. The second shift, from Latin to Cyrillic, practically opened the gatesfor the status of the Russian language to change from ‘second nation-al language’ to the only possible means of comunication.

c. The linguistic journey from the Arabic to the Cyrillic script suc-ceeded in effectively separating these closely related Turkic lan-guagers from each other and from their Arabo-Persan roots, as wellas preparing the way for the introduction of Russianism... (Dickens,ibid.)

In addition to Dickens’s thesis, it should be taken into consideration that‘Russianism’ not only linguistically separated those ‘closely related Turkiclanguages’, but--what is more--it managed to manipulate the Turkic identityof the population. This is what explains the resistance to the so-called‘Turkish Model’ that revealed a certain Turkish political-economic-basedattempt to influence the democratization of Central Asia, immediatelyafter the collapse of the Soviet Union. The end of the Gorbachev era andthe collapse of Russian Soviet Communism left the Turkic republics ofCentral Asia with a strongly Russian-language-dominated ‘political-cultural’life.

The initial enthusiasm of the ‘Turkish Model’ was partly ‘cooled down’by the unstable sense of identity of the population in the Soviet aftermath.This, however, gave yet another direction to the process of the penetrationof ‘Western’ culture in the area. At the beginning of the ‘decline of theTurkish Model’ the situation looked as if the Western countries (mainly theUSA, Canada and the UK) and the republics of Central Asia had found itmutually beneficial not to interact via any intermediation. Recent research,however, shows a certain imbalance in the ‘linguistic landscape’ of the im-mediate post-Gorbachev ‘status quo’:

1. Russian, being no longer the ‘official lanuage’, started to function, andis now increasingly functioning, as the lingua franca (cf. below) in an in-creasing competition with other, local languages. The above-mentionedthesis about ‘dominant languages’ losing, with the flow of time, theirpolitical connotation, and remaining just landmarks of the cultural in-tegrity of the speakers can be supported not only by means of the ex-

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ample of the Athenian koinē, but also with many more cases, such as thecase of Spanish, spoken in almost all of Latin America, by societies thatwere different and independent from the times of Spain’s Conquista, orthe case of Portuguese in Brazil, French in Canada, or even English out-side the United Kingdom.

2. The increasingly influential role of the English language contributes tothe diversity of the picture. It is interesting to admit that, despite theefforts to deny intermediation, in fact this role of the English language,along with the prerequisites of ‘trade-culture’, penetrates into CentralAsia from different directions.

One may conclude, finally, by classifying the significant role of language inthe development of ‘national’ identity as a role capable of affecting the polit-ical status of a particular region. In the case of the republics of Central Asia,as a traditional trade route that is attractive to the neighboring powers as apotential area of influence, the importance of language as the cultural com-ponent of dominance can play a key role in handling economic factors forpolitical reasons.

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Chapter 9The Language of Political Persuasion

Language, Power and Politics (II)

The language of political persuasion (i.e., the codification of language usefor political persuasive purposes) is part of the so-called Western classical tra-dition of rhetoric. It is traditionally associated with the public speakingskills of talented orators without serious reference to the very linguisticbackground of ‘language as power’.

The linguistic ‘triangle’ below

SPEAKER (I) HEARER(You)

REFERENT

(He, She. It)

attributes a ‘stronger position’ to the SPEAKER based on the general un-derstanding of human language interaction as follows:

I(the speaker) want you (the hearer) to do/know something aboutsomebody/something (the referent)

In an ‘ordinary’ interaction the ‘shifting’ role of SPEAKER and HEARERprovides the ‘balance of power’. When it comes to political discourse,however, the previously analyzed triangle

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I (the shifting SPEAKER) ↔ (the shifting HEARER)

Want YOU

to do/know something about somebody/something

loses its ‘balance’ in the manner of Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty’s conceptionof language understanding:

‘There’s glory for you!’

‘I don’t know what you men by “glory,”‘ Alice said...

‘Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant “there is a nice knock-down argumentfor you!”‘

‘But glory doesn’t mean a “nice knock-down argument,”‘ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word...it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more norless.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice,’ whether you can make words mean so many dif-ferent things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’(Carroll 100, emphasis added)

We can finally modify the initial formula in the following way:

I want to make you do/know and believe/obeybelieve/obey something about somebody/something

which is the basis of

language manipulating/language maneuvering

Language manipulating and language maneuvering are often used in medicalor police investigation, at law court and in education, but they are basicallyrelated to the language of politics from the perspecitve of ‘political correct-ness’, which is the language of international politics and diplomacy. Thismeans, as Foucault claims, that in the case of political discourse as an ex-pression of (political-persuasive) power it is considered ‘politically correct’to use flexible language where

an intended message can be interpreted in a variety of different ways,ororwhen there can be many ways of speaking about the same subject,ororwhen there can be many ways of diplomatic reference to the same object from avariety of different perspectives...

with a final goal to impose ‘power’ from the SPEAKER onto the HEARER.

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When it comes to the analysis of political/diplomatic language, the state-ment that

there are many ways of diplomatic reference to the same object from a variety ofdifferent perspectives

logically leads to the implication that:

political correctness = speaking indirectly/metaphorically about the political truth

which, by itself, needs an explanation of its reasoning.

There are certain topics in politics, Michel Foucault claims, that everybodyis aware of, but it is considered (politically) incorrect/taboo to talk aboutthem in the simplest possible language:

What...is so perilous in the fact that people speak, and that their discourseproliferates to infinity? What is the danger in that? (Foucault 109)

And immediately there comes the answer:In a society like ours, the procedures of exclusion are well known. The most ob-vious and familiar is the prohibition. We know quite well that we do not havethe right to say everything, that we cannot speak of just anything in any cir-cumstances whatever, and that not everyone has the right to speak of anythingwhatever. (Ibid. 110, emphasis added)

In the further development of his thesis, Foucault introduces the issue ofdiscourse as desire that has to be seized as taboo at the same level as the is-sues of sexuality and politics.

These two references are expremely symptomatic: sexuality has been, forages, the object of taboo because of the fear of humans of the uncotrollablepower of sexual desire, passion and orgasm. By deliberately suppressing allthese, humans in fact deprived themselves from the right to the pleasure ofsexual intercourse. In a similar context concerning sexuality, Freud claimsin Totem et Tabou that

En polynésien, le contraire de tabou se dit noa, ce qui est ordinaire, accessibleà tout le monde. C’est ainsi qu’au tabou se rattache la notion d’une sorte deréserve, et le tabou se manifeste essentiellment par des interdictions etrestrictions. (Freud 37, emphasis in original)

In other words, Foucault’s argument about politics and sexuality as ‘taboos’finds much earlier support in Freud’s analysis of the concept of sexuality intotemic societies. The latter, in a way, sheds additional light on the historyof the human tendency to divide the world into right and wrong, for the bin-ary opposition between taboo and noa does not essentially differ from theconcepts of sin and virtue or halal and haram as regards the ‘traditional blas-phemy’ on sexuality:

Tabou est un mot polynésien, dont la traduction présente pour nous des diffi-cultés, parce que nous ne possédons plus la notion qu’il designe.Il était encorefamilier aux anciens Romains: leur sacer était identique au tabou des Polynési-ens. L’αγιος des Grecs, le kadosh des Hébreux devaient avoir le même sense que

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le tabou des Polynésiens et les désignations analogues chez beaucoup d’autrespeuples de l’Amerique, de l’Afrique (Madagascar), du Nord et du Centre del’Asie. (Ibid.)

One may assume, then, that humans are so ‘designed’ (in the sense of Levi-Strauss’s conception of the archetypal structural identity of their percep-tion of the surrounding world) as to divide this world into taboo : noa; sin :virtue; halal : haram, etc.

And here comes (again) Aristotle’s reference to the link between lan-guage and politics:

For man is the best of animals when he has reached his full development, so heis worst of all when divorced from law and justice. Injustice armed is hardestto deal with; and though man is born with weapons which he can use in the service ofpractical wisdom and virtue, it is all too easy for him to use them for most savage,the most unrighteous, and the worst in regard to sexual licence and gluttony.The virtue of justice is a feature of a state; for justice is the arrangement of thepolitical association, and a sense of justice decides what is just. (Aristotle 61)

To ‘sanction’ what is just vs. what unjust is by means of language is for Aris-totle the basis of human communal (political) life.

In this respect a reference to Julia Kristeva’s Desire in Language seemsrelevant:

Having recourse to psychoanalysis, as I attempt to do, in this work, in orderto shed light on a number of borderline practices of meaning and signification(practices of art and literature), bears, I hope, no relation to that ‘plague’ thatFreud, once more the prophet, promised America, when he brought his dis-covery of the unconscious to its shores. Grafted onto semiology, analysis hereis not restircted to themes or phantasms; rather, it scrutinizes the most subtle,the most deeply buried logic of those unities and ultimate relations that weavean identity for the subject, or sign, or sentence. (Kristeva x)

And further (cf. above):What was necessary was undoubtedly a desire for language...a passion for ven-tures with meaning and its materials...in order to carry a theoretical experien-ce to that point where apparent abstraction is revealed as the apex of archa-ic, oneiric, nocturnal, or corporeal concreteness, to that point where meaninghas not yet appeared (the child), no longer is (the insane person), or else func-tions as a restructuring (writing, art). (Ibid., emphasis in original)

A reference to Condillac – Rousseau – Godwin and the famous romanticslogan:

Man is born free, but is always in chains

marks the associative link between sex and politics as related to Foucault’s‘taboos’:

the two items are the most explicit expressions of human self-imposedrestriction on their own freedom: their (intimate) individual life and theircollective one. Sexuality unlocks human individual emotionality up to theextent of ecstasy. Anarchy (in Zeno’s sense of the term) does the same on acollective level.


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It is not by accident that Foucalt entitled his article ‘The Order of Dis-course’ (emphasis added). In human society where (as stated before) therehas always been a conventional order as regards social, political, cultural andreligious life, to be different meant to be rejected.

‘Order’ was considered necessary to avoid anarchy and to control andmanipulate. It was the fear of ‘being different’ that kept Homo loquens awayfrom ‘the truth’.

Cf. Kristeva:Saint Augustine...noted that the possibility for language to speak the truthcould not come from outside, but it governs the inner workings of the minditself). (Kristeva xi)

Within this context, ‘truth telling’ throughout history was considered polit-ically dangerous. However, in the history of human (political) discoursethere were individuals who broke the ‘rules’ and by doing so managed notonly to ‘deserve punishment’, but also to achieve the status of ‘heroes’ whosemajor contribution to the dynamics of interaction was to cause a ‘change’that, in its turn, caused movement ahead, i.e., progress. (Maybe the most ex-plicit example in this case is the myth of Prometheus.)

Within this context, Foucault reveals the role of the ‘madman’s speech’,as the speech of the only ‘hero’ who ventures to publicly ‘tell the truth’.

The idea of a madman who commits a gaffe/faux pas by admitting the‘TRUTH THE WAY IT IS’ (like the young child in Andersen’s ‘The Em-peror’s New Clothes’ who is the only one to have the courage to shout out:‘The Emperor has no clothes on!’ ) implies that in the basic triangle

SPEAKER HEARER

REFERENT

the referential point where the SPEAKER’S and the HEARER’S ‘shares’of the process of interaction are expected to meet happens to be the ideal/idealized point of ‘truth’, which, in reality, rarely or never comes true.

The following reference to J.G.A. Pocock’s article ‘Verbalizing a Politic-al Act: Toward a Politics of Speech’ sheds light on Foucault’s ‘prohibition’from the perspective of an individual self-imposed (politicaly correct) tabooon the ‘truth’:

Shakespeare’s Brutus declares--and it is significant that he does so in a soliloquy--[emphasis added]

Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasma or a hideous dream... (Julius Caesar, II, i:63-65)

Given the ambiguity of speech as both expression and communication, botha private and public act, it is appropriate to begin a study of the politics ofverbalization with a man in a moment of self-communion.

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The words quoted indicate to us what Brutus is doing. He is trying to escapefrom a hideous dream by verbalizing his action to himself, and this means twothings: verbalizing his intention to act, and verbalizing the quality of the acthe intends (which is, inter alia, to provide it with a rationale)...

Brutus does not know for sure that he is really going to kill Caesar, or thathe really intends or wants to kill him, until he hears himself say that he intendsto do so. This is why he is talking to himself; the communication is part of theperformance...

Brutus may now say ‘I intend to kill Caesar because he is a tyrant’...[W]hathe intends when he says ‘I intend’ is ‘to kill a tyrant’. The statement ‘Caesar isa tyrant’ and the implication ‘it is right to kill a tyrant’ are both present...(Pocock 1984)

Back to Foucault’s ‘madman’, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and the ‘truthabout reality’: one may asssume that Pocock comes up with a very clearreference to the Freudian-Lacanian semiotic concept of displacement in theoverall process of

avoiding/disguising the truth as political corectness

Moreover, the idea of ‘optional interpretation of the reference’ and ‘lan-guage as play’, as introduced above, provide the opportunity to analyze thelanguage of (political) persuasion as a process of deliberate displacement of‘real’ signifiers for ‘empty’ ones. The ‘new clothes’ of the emperor are an‘empty signifier’ simply because they do not exist, but it is ‘politically incor-rect’ to admit it in public. Therefore, the deliberate displacement is due toa set of different factors, with the most important ones being: the authorityof the source of displacement, and the manipulative power of the messagethat comes from this ‘authority’ and is directed to the average ‘hearer’. Backto the pattern of ‘it all depends on who is master’: the authority (speaker)forwards an expressive/emotive message that provokes a conative reactionon the side of the hearer; the intepretation is optional because the signifieris empty (has been displaced); the displacement has been deliberately organ-ized so as to cause a certain reaction; finally – the ‘real’ referent is diguisedin a way that suits the ‘speaker’, or...the master...!


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Chapter 10The Political Intertextuality in Umberto Eco’s

The Name of the RoseThe Name of the Rose in a Cognitive Context

The Language of (Political) Truth, or, the (Political)Truth about Language?

The previous chapter offered an analysis of the ‘language of political truth’with reference to ‘political correctness’, i.e., the way language is used inpolitics with the deliberate intention of avoiding direct ‘truth talk’. Thereason is twofold:

Linguistic: there is always more than one way of intepretation of an ini-tially constructed message, as well as many different linguistic ways of refer-ring to one single object;

Political: direct-language reference to political truth is commonly accep-ted as taboo...

As discussed above, the politcal taboo on ‘truth talk’ presupposes a cer-tain self-imposed restriction on human freedom. This implies a certain fearfrom its unrestircted limits, marked as ‘unknown’: collective and individualfreedom scares humans with its endless lack of vision of...limits...

The present chapter looks into the ‘opposite’ case: when there is an at-tempt to really discover the ‘language of political truth’. The way to achievethis is through a cognitive model of analysis of the (political) intertextualityin Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose based on Lakoff/Johnson’s viewson the ‘embodied mind’.

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More specifically: it is argued that in his deliberate ‘distancing’ from au-thorship, the Italian novelist and semiotician reveals his views on the thetype of relationship between

AUTHOR : READER in the non-bourgeois (neo-Marxist) consump-tion of literature (art) as ‘taboo-free’ desire for truth.

This ‘distancing’ becomes clearer from the perspective that any author’stext releases emotion that is meant to be shared with a reader, in order to beobserved from a distance, with the same final goal: to reach ‘the truth’...

To do this, Umberto Eco constructs a cognitive (and politically inter-textual) model of the human desire for orderly binary oppositions (cf. theabove-discussed self-imposed restriction on freedom). By rejecting it he ob-serves it from a distance and idenitifies himself with the ‘objecive truth’ thatis nowhere to be found...

The novel starts with a preface in which the author refers to three differ-ent dates from three different epochs of European history as an initial pointin the development of the process of writing:

ON AUGUST 16, 1968, I WAS HANDED A BOOK WRITTEN BY ACERTAIN Abbe Vallet, Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, trduit enfrancais d’apres l’edition de Dom J.Abillon (Aux Presse de l’Abbaye de laSourse, Paris, 1842). Supplemented by historical information that was actuallyquite scant, the book claimed to reproduce faithfully a fourteenth-centurymanuscript that, in its turn, had been found in the monastery of Melk by thegreat eighteenth-century man of learning, to whom we owe so much inform-ation about the history of the Benedictine order. The scholarly discovery (Imean, the third in chronological order) entertained me while I was in Prague,waiting for a dear friend. Six days later Soviet troops invaded that unhappycity. (Eco 1, emphasis added)

A lot has been speculated so far on Umberto Eco’s pretending NOT to bethe real author of The Name of the Rose. What I call here ‘distancing fromauthorship’ is in fact an old tradition that is to be found in many samples ofmedieval literature. By applying it to a work from the 1970s, the Italian nov-elist, from the very first lines of his outstanding oeuvre, ‘ushers’ the readerinto an area that belongs to more than one temporal dimension. By refer-ring to himself as the ‘third in crhonological order’ to whom the scholarlydiscovery belongs, Umberto Eco adds to the deictic ‘time distance’ a ‘persondistance’, to end up with ‘place distance’ especially when it comes to the loc-ation of ‘The Monastery’, which in fact could be anywhere around Europe.

A detailed historical description of the political-religious-ideologicalsituation in the year 1327 ends up with the introduction of Eco’s narrator,Adso of Melk, who, by himself, functions as a passive observer of the acit-ivities of yet another important ‘actor’ in ‘search of the truth’, William ofBaskerville:

I did not know what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I stilldo not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he wassolely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion – which I could see he al-ways harbored – that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any givenmoment. (Ibid. 14)

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It would be trivial to repeat here the famous reference to Sherlock Holmesand Dr. Watson that appear in Umberto Eco’s narrative as a replica of Con-an Doyle’s famous couple. So will be a statement about The Name of theRose being a gothic novel that takes the shape of a detective story.

What is more important, the reference of Adso-Watson and William-Holmes reveals Eco’s views on ‘pop-art’ as inseparable from ‘serious art’, i.e.,his (structuralist) philosophy of art, based on a dualistic (/+/ : /-/) semioticmodel of ‘the truth’, with support to be found in the following points fromthe novel’s narrative:1. Did Jesus Ever Laugh?

‘Our Lord never told comedies or fables, but only clear parables which al-legorically instruct us on how to win paradise, and so be it.’

‘I wonder’, William said, ‘why you are so opposed to the idea that Jesusmay have laughed. I believe laughter is a good medicine, like baths to treathumors and the other afflictions of the body, melancholy in particular’...

‘Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of the face, makes mansimilar to the monkey’.

‘Monkeys don’t laugh; laughter is proper to man, it is a sign of his ra-tionality’, William said. ‘Speech is also a sign of human rationality, andwith speech a man can blaspheme against God. Not everything that isproper to man is necessarily good. He who laughs does not believe inwhat he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evilmeans denying the power through which good is self-propagating...Plinythe Younger wrote, ‘Sometimes I laugh, I jest, I play, because I am a man’.

‘They were pagans,’ Jorge replied. ‘The Rule forbids with stern wordsthese trivialities’... (Eco 131, emphasis added)

2. An imagined unknown and secretly-kept second part of Aristotle’s Po-etics about comedy in the ‘labyrinth of the monastery library’:

I want to see the second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, the book every-one has believed lost or never written, and of which you hold perhaps theonly copy. (Eco 466)

By introducing blind Jorge de Burgos and his obsession with the idea of Je-sus as

The Only True Sad God

he constructs a

/+ known/ : /-known (unknown)/

and he uses a religious context as the framework of an ideology that charac-terizes deliberate totalitarian ‘hiding of the other side of truth’ for the sakeof political manipulation/maneuvering in the direction of centralized/mon-lithic power:

‘[H]ow did you guess it was the second book of Aristotle?’

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‘Your anathemas against laughter...Here Aristotle sees the tendency tolaughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value...it makesus say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it...Truth reached bydepicting men and the world as worse than they are or than we believe themto be, worse in any case than the epics, the tragedies, lives of the saints haveshown them to us...” (Eco 471-472, emphasis added)

To William’s question,

Why did you want to shield this book more than so many others?

(Ibid. 473, emphasis added)

Jorge replies:

“Becuase it was the Philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of thelearning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries...”

(Ibid., emphasis added)

The next counterargument comes logically:

“You cannot eliminate laughter by eliminating the book.”

(Ibid.)

which reinforces the previously launched idea about Eco using empty sig-nifiers to depict a ‘political language’ that is based on deliberately ignoringthe ‘opposite side’ (= Humpty Dumpty’s philosophy about ‘who is master’again from the perspective of the previously referred-to cognitive model ofthe ‘embodied mind’ by Lakoff and Johnson. Namely,

as has already been discussed, the theory looks at the human mind as‘blocked’ within the body of the individual, who uses this as a shield of pro-tection against the scary ‘unknown’ that comes from the ‘outside’. On a col-lective basis, the community of individuals sharing the same political hab-itat fears any alternative that holds ‘the negative sign’ of what it believes is‘right’ according to the ‘communal order’. When it comes to the power ofpolitical persuasion, coming from the governing ‘master’, the ‘hiding of thenegative sign’ means totalitarianism.

The climax of the debate between William of Baskerville and Jorge deBurgos reveals a certain attempt to fight the ‘fear of the unknown’, based on(Eco’s?) belief that:

The Truth is a dynamic process that incorpoates boththe ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’ sign in an integral entity.

‘[T]he Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that isnever seized by doubt...You are the Devil, and like the Devil you live in dark-ness...I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with fowl’s feath-ers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a bufoon, sothe whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer...’ (Ibid. 477)

THE POLITICAL INTERTEXTUALITY IN UMBERTO ECO’S THE NAME OF THE ROSE IN ACOGNITIVE CONTEXT

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The ‘arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seizedby doubt’, apparently refer to knowledge as the basic human virtue in con-trast with (deliberately maintained) ignorance as the source of ‘fear of theunknown’, for the sake of a (political) power exercise:

‘It was the greatest library in Christendom,’ William said. ‘Now,’ he added,‘the Antichrist is truly at hand, because no learning will hinder him anymore...’ (Ibid. 491)

‘No learning’ as the /-/ sign of the Antichrist against the /+/ sign of ‘Know-ledge’ as the symbol of God should lead toward the maintenance of a ‘powerbalance’ in the search of truth. However, Umberto Eco develops the modelfurther into the direction of a paradigmatic order of signs:

‘I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso, they are the only thing manhas to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relationamong signs...’ (Ibid. 492, emphasis added)

He finally concludes that paradigmatics and intertextuality are part of hu-man knowledge about ‘the truth about the world’ that offers no limits, and,hence, no ‘orderly’ explanation...

Where is my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance oforder, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.(Ibid. 492)

The statement

There is no order in the universe

reveals:

Eco’s attempt to go beyond the restrictions of structuralist binary opposi-tions as a human natural desire,

and also

his attempt to demonstrate natural human desire to obey the rules of theserestrictions.

Hence, the final word that the ‘word was with God, and the Word was God’:

Non in commotione, non in commotione Dominus

69

Conclusions

The present Dynamics of Human Interaction comes as the result of an ana-lysis of interrelated human activities in the field of language and politicswith reference to human identity issues. It is assumed that the Man ofToday (Homo loquens and Homo politicus) is a creative individual who,for the sake of survival and coexistence within the limits of communal life,needs ‘to be political’ and needs to keep the balance between desire for free-dom and the chains of collective responsibility.

‘Collective responsibility’ means interaction and subordination, as wellas hierarchy and discipline. It implies ‘clockwork’ organization and obedi-ence to rules.

This is what one can observe in bees and ants.However, Homo loquens-politicus is neither a bee, nor an ant...He is, when it comes to identity issues, somebody who does not actually

know who he is...In a way, throughout his whole history of existence, he has always wanted

to be...a bee or an ant...He is vulnerable, timid and scared and he needs pro-tection. Any step beyond the ‘wall-border’ signifies danger and treachery.

Nonetheless, Homo loquens-politicus has always felt tempted to go overthe ‘wall-border’...

Because, apart from being ‘vulnerable, timid and scared’ he has alwaysbeen the mythological Hero, the adventurer, the explorer, the Ikarus, thePrometheus, the Leonardo da Vinci, the Jules Verne, the Werner vonBraun, the Neil Armstrong of Manhood...

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Language comes as an inseparable part of this Manhood:Language, it is said, is a means of communication. Bees and ants also

communicate, but they don’t have the skills to produce a Homer, a Dante, aShakespeare, a Goethe...

Homer and Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe did not just communic-ate. They expressed the spark of the Renaissance/Rousseau idea of the Div-ine Spirit as a Human Spirit...

It was a beautiful Sunday fall morning in Scheveningen, the Netherlands,and I was getting ready for my flight back to Istanbul in the evening.

‘What are you doing today, before you go to the airport?’, my friendasked me. ‘Why don’t you come with me to Brussels?’

No doubt, I immediately accepted. It was my first car trip around theEU. I knew there were no borders anymore but I imagined something likean abandoned checkpoint and nobody to bother us with passport control oranything...

Nothing!

There was just a plate, saying:

Belgie!

Right in the middle of the windmills...From a linguistic point of view it meant: this is a sign that is meant to re-

mind you that you enter another region of a common territory.From a pragmatic point of view it meant: no change of place deixis.From a single human point of view it meant: freedom.

CONCLUSIONS

72

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