Language

Abstract

The “language question” has been explored for millennia, generating different conclusions and commitments about what language is and how it works. From the second half of the twentieth century through to contemporary times, the “linguistic turn” has been synonymous with the close study of culture and its operations. The focus on how systems of representation effectively “world the world,” giving it meaning, finds political structures inside the grain of language that have material or realising effect. However, the current turn toward physical material – scientific evidence, ecological data, geology, animal studies, and an array of other than human subject matter – has diminished interest in cultural or linguistic approaches, or at least assumed that they are entirely different from each other. A deconstructive approach places pressure on the usefulness, or even the accuracy, of this segregation of nature from culture and physical matter from ideation. Indeed, linguistics becomes a specific instantiation of a complexity that is generalizable. In other words, this complexity – Derrida’s “general writing” or general systematicity – enfolds the ideational through the material in a way that calls this division into question. Consequently, deconstructive and critical posthumanisms interrogate human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism, asking how their foundational logic can be justified if nature was always literate, agential, and transformative.