Beyond the Tyranny of Language - Part 1
Overdue thoughts on an essay by Vince Garton
About a year ago, the brilliant Vincent Garton penned an essay for Urbanomic on liberalism and the end(s) of history, called “Language Inhuman.” At the time, I started to write down some thoughts I had in reaction to his excellent piece, and the series began to develop into a series of blogposts I would publish on this Substack. But the project stalled, life got busy, I was working through some severe depression, and I didn’t complete it—so I never published it. A year later, reminded of these subjects by the recent writings of another internet friend, Ed Berger, I’ve decided to return to this series. By publishing this first part, I hope to force myself to finish writing the subsequent parts. In total, there should be three parts. So here goes.
Vincent Garton observes that the global ubiquity of liberal ideology, which prompted Francis Fukuyama to declare the end of history, has not made it any easier to define exactly what liberalism is. Throughout its long history, it has received contrary definitions by philosophers and theorists of all stripes, and still continues to receive contrary definitions by its protagonists at various points along the Right-Left spectrum. Moreover, not only is liberalism as an ideology undermined by the contradictory positions of its defenders, but it is also undermined by the practice of the regime itself whose ideology liberalism is supposed to be: as long as liberal societies have existed, they have continued to perpetuate “human rights abuses,” indefinitely prolonged wars and bloodshed, and structural social inequities that undermine the claim to a genuine end of history.
From this perspective, the problem with Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history is not that an end of history would itself be undesirable. This is a frequent reaction among some critics of liberalism, who await eagerly the time when we can start having history again. I myself used to think this way, but Garton’s reaction (and my own at this point) is somewhat different: the real problem is that history really isn’t ended enough, and we only deceive and harm ourselves by acting as if history really has ended. The ending in which we are currently living is a sort of arrested half-ending, and the great political issue of a genuine post-liberalism must therefore be that of ending history once and for all.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Vincent Garton has a unique interpretation of what exactly it would mean to definitively end history, but this requires understanding what liberalism really is at its core essence, beyond the distraction of all the various definitions that its own defenders have proposed. Vince gets right down to the business of identifying this core essence when he writes:
Tentatively, we may identify it as the supremacy of language. The property rights that liberalism promotes are the inscription of social relations in the crystal language of law. The unwillingness to undertake meaningful political action perceived by certain socialists is a consequence of the eclipse of action by language. The central point on which government must be restrained is in the freedom to express oneself—or it must be extended so as to enable the same.
Vince goes on to enumerate some of the ways in which liberalism can effectively be equated with the supremacy of language in society. Foremost among these is in law, whose conception and implementation has become almost overwhelmingly linguistic in nature. Law in this form looms over modern societies as a vast and nigh impenetrable code of arcane formulations, the interpretation of which seems to be an endless task. But it isn’t only in the realm of bureaucratic administration that law has been reduced to language. This is almost truer of the acts of legislation that occur in the major parliamentary bodies of the West, the sacred nuclei of liberal democratic regimes, where the principal act is none other than that of interminable speech, debate, and discourse. The archetypally liberal act of free speech is the central sacred ritual of parliament.
But this liberal penchant for free speech is by no means limited to the sphere of law or legal procedure. In large part, the procedures of liberal democratic institutions are themselves designed to facilitate different and often contrary versions of free expression or free speech in the cultural domain, which in turn is loudly amplified in the incessant and instantaneous stream of words, words, words, that comprises the modern news and social media. Where culture and politics intersect, political action and representation have been reduced to the act of expression or of “making a statement,” such that even activism on the streets tends to amount to little more than getting some cultural talking point across, making a “demonstration,” etc. Political action now serves the ends of speech, rather than vice versa. Language and speech are the highest form of political action, whether for those in elected offices or for the average citizen. As Vince writes, “The world is inscribed in linguistic simulation.”
How does this all relate to the end of history? Vince takes his cue from Alexandre Kojève, about whom I’ve written a good deal on this blog. (I should credit Vince himself, in several private conversations I’ve had with him, for helping me clarify my own understanding of Kojève’s work. Much of the content of Vince’s article was already revealed to me in private Twitter DMs before he published his article.) Briefly put, Kojève associated liberalism with a type of speech that seeks a simple compromise between the famous Hegelian “thesis” and “antithesis,” which he calls the “synthetic parathesis.” This is not a true synthesis, but a kind of incomplete synthesis, because it seeks to maintain the possibility of asserting multiple originally contradictory positions in a way that itself cannot be contradicted. The classic political instantiation of this synthetic parathesis is the compromise between competing private interests that is supposed to be facilitated by the institutions of parliamentary democracy. Kojève also associates this style of speech with the philosophy of Kant, for whom philosophy is identified with the very method by which contradictory positions are held simultaneously, thus rendering itself, as a whole method and a whole speech, incapable of being contradicted. In Vince Garton’s words, “It is a method without a finishing line. Hence, ‘to speak with Kant’, writes Kojève, ‘is to speak endlessly, to speak forever without ever contradicting oneself.’” Liberal speech is this Kantian speech, an endless speech that proceeds on and on, encompassing all contradictions through compromise, without ever contradicting itself, purportedly generating ever-new thoughts and discourses—what Kojève called the “parathesis.” It is a kind of mockery of the authentic synthesis in which speech is genuinely completed, because its basic desire is to be able to keep on speaking.
However else it is defined, it is this desire to produce endless speech that seems most of all essential to liberalism. Speech attains to such a degree of supremacy under liberalism that it even claims the power to alter reality itself, so much so that in effect it tends to dissolve the very reality which it signifies. Vince notes how certain “postliberal” critiques of liberalism, though logical in a way, miss the point when they accuse liberal language of arbitrarily departing from reality—as if the proper response to liberalism were some kind of “return” to reality from the realm of arbitrary language. He writes: “Liberalism is not merely a failing attempt to unravel the physics of necessity. In that role it has in fact been quite successful. It has been relentless in finding new spheres of life to remove from the dominion of necessary facts and dissolve in the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. If anything, this process tends prophetically towards the dismantling of given reality itself.” Thus, language under liberalism assumes the power to dismantle reality itself in order to uphold the arbitrariness of the speaker. To appeal to given reality over and against the arbitrariness of liberal speech is to miss the very essence of liberalism’s claim, which is that speech itself is more real than the “given reality.” The simulation now eclipses the signified reality in importance and preeminence.
Of course, as long as liberalism insists that speech must continue, the “eclipse of sign over signified” necessarily results in a condition of widespread meaninglessness. Language is produced almost automatically, endlessly, in desperate pursuit of novelty, and for its own sake. For example, the internet and social media are effectively language-producing machines, independent of whether the linguistic signs produced can be said to “accurately” signify any “given reality out there.” More and more, as Garton notes, the high temperature of reactive politics and polemics on the internet is generated merely in response to what is said on the internet or in other media environments, and less to what the saying pretends to signify “in reality.” Reality simply doesn’t matter in this environment. Speech is the only thing that matters, speech is the only thing that is real—and the speech must go on. “The simulation no longer simulates.”
The completion of this process is foreshadowed in the automated production of language by artificial intelligence, which is increasingly independent of any “given reality” for the development and fine-tuning of its own simulations. As AI continues to develop, it increasingly depends on more of its own output for the production of its simulations than it does on anything that might be labeled “given reality.” Language, endlessly produced, appears to be losing its very capacity to be meaningful.
If I understand him correctly, Garton seems to be claiming that the advent of AI puts liberalism in something of a bind. On the one hand, the automated production of language is the natural endpoint of liberalism’s own trajectory, which began with the enshrining of language as the supreme reality. On the other hand, the total automation of liberalism’s central activity—language production—would seem to spell the end of liberalism itself, since it would spell the end of the production of anything genuinely new in speech. That is, it would spell the end of language—or at any rate, the only speech it would permit would be unitotal and circular, in the way Kojève characterized the speech at the end of history. If all language could be automated, there would be nothing left to say, except what has been already said, which is indeed everything: every side of every contradiction, the totality of speech itself. And yet, while indeed everything would be said, there would be no more discourse, no more debate, no more democracy. Language would be complete; it would be self-sufficient; and as such, it would no longer be without meaning.
In fact, this seems to be Garton’s preferred method of bringing a definitive end to liberal speech—and thus an end to history itself. It is to push the autonomy of the signifier to its radical extreme, an extreme that is implied by liberalism’s own trajectory, but also feared by liberalism itself, because it spells its death. It is to make the simulation neither dependent on the signified nor simply meaningless in its faltering reference to it over time, but self-referential and self-sufficient. In Garton’s bold, rather terrifying, yet attractive formulation towards the end of his essay: “It is the decision to render the objective law itself animate—that is, to institute artificial intelligence as state-form, and thus radically to combine language with action.”
As mentioned above, I have two further sets of thoughts on this essay—one which pertains to the underlying Marxist element that is clearly and consciously at the root of Vincent’s prognosis; and another that pertains more to the theological implications of the end of free speech, and the reign of circular, self-referential, unitotal speech at the end of history. I’ll save these for the next two installments.