Distinction and Difference
Linguistics and understanding
Language is an ordered process — a machine for generating and coordinating activity. It emerges, at its most basic, from conversation: an exchange between two parties. For the sake of this exploration, I’ll assume a speaker — the one who initiates, and a listener — one stuck with the job of figuring out what is being said.
Speakers must proceed from something called intention. Intention represents the reason for initiating speech — the thing they want understood. This person annunciates an intention, represented as a set of distinctive signifiers (A or B). The listener receives those, and establishes difference, based on the requirements of their own linguistic network. That these networks are invariably different, yields the separation between the distinctiveness of the signifiers and the differences arising in interpretation.
Language’s role in the evolutionary success of our own species is made evident simply through our capacity to discuss this role at all, and while it may be that language can drive us into behaviors and habits that might prove economically and mechanically efficient, it can also sow doubt, discord, and through the machinery of signification, can be made unwind its own usefulness.
If we are to maintain any of that usefulness, the first assumption we must make is that language’s principal function is a coordinating one. It can not arise outside a population, as it is fundamentally social in nature. It functions to give rise to groups and abstract systems of identification, built principally on a shared network of sounds and gestures, interacting to create complexes of context and meaning. Language can also be thought of as topographical — both in terms of the populations among which it emerges, and in the various grammars and lexographies that these populations come to share. This topography is borne out in studies of culture and the network effects that describe its behavior.
Because language is topographical, it’s development can be explained both in time and in space — mathematically, as it were. Language follows rules similar to those revealed through other such systems — specifically that it can be considered a network, and subject to the rules of network theory, centered on speakers and shared signifiers. While this tells us nothing of poetry, it can say a thing or two about the origins of meaning. Specifically, that meaning is transmitted and mediated through a language’s history, and ones place within its wider community of interpreters.
Distinction and difference then, can be interpreted as the outcome of this other action. Language serves as a medium through which distinction and difference can take on a meaning. It is the way by which the self divests itself from experience. Language gives us the rudiments required to identify, even though it frequently does so impersonally — by subjecting us to alien signifiers and their curious interpretations.
This means that language animals, by necessity, create networks of signs that may or may not correspond to their actual intention. Religion is an example of such a network. It’s basic forms and rituals are constructed around peculiar codes and terms. The language of the Catholic Church was traditionally rendered in Latin, which still infests its hierarchy. Muslims assure us that truth faith is actually impossible without a working knowledge of Arabic. Of course, this says nothing of how the words behinds these belief systems are actually meant to be understood; there’s enough violence in the history of religion that we should probably assume a few of these differences to be irreconcilable.
And in truth, it doesn’t matter anyways. The cynical side of belief is the machinery that maintains most of America’s evangelical movement. Every corruption scandal should remind us that you don’t really need to believe to map to the texts and rituals of a church. This is the origin of both heresy and of the expression “there’s a sucker born every minute”.
