On Vocabulary
What begins in recognition ends in obedience.
Learning to talk
People grow up learning what to say depending on what others wants from them. In the beginning, before words, there was sensation. It was confusing for us; there was no point of reference or some stored knowledge within our own selves that we could draw on to make sense of the world around us. What is the child to do with the new myriad sensations coming into its brain? Suddenly, it feels a pang, a sensation, rather uncomfortable, emanating from somewhere in itself. Wherever — and whatever — it is, the child cries from this discomfort. The pain demands this response, which in turn produces something in the environment: an object to be consumed. Once consumed, the pangs cease to bother the child. Eventually, the child learns that the discomfort was “hunger”, it comes from the “stomach”, and “food” can end it and bring peace again. But first it had to cry so the parent could pick up on this cue and deliver the parcel of satiation to end the child’s relentless and nameless, indeed dreadful, torment. When the child gains the neurological capability to form words around the age of two, it learns, from the parent, that the utterance “I’m hungry” can trigger this pleasurable experience of eating.
It was not the child who invented this convoluted thing we call communication. It simply felt pain and needed to quell it. In other words, as Phillips tells us in his On Getting Better, “The absence of the infant’s account makes the adult’s account possible”. A thing does not exist in its proper sense until it is registered somewhere. Where does registration take place but in language? Do we not all avoid saying things out loud from time to time to avoid “making it real”? If not, why does the phrase “I love you” terrify so many insecure lovers? Or, why do some things seem so difficult to say aloud, yet it is right on the tip of our tongue?
In fact, this issue is so central to our lives that Freud’s only requirement for his patients is to say everything, without reservation or reflection, that comes to mind. This is so difficult for one basic reason: our parents, for whom we learned to speak, are set up again inside of ourselves in the form of a critical self-reflective agency — what Freud called the superego. This voice in our head is not ours, we know that. And yet it dominates what we say and think. This is not a bad thing — nor is it good. It’s simply what being an adult means in a world where we always live among others. Otherwise, how would anything get accomplished? We must’ve learned to speak from somewhere in a way that something can be communicated in a consistent manner. The highly advanced forms of linguistic communication is really just a relic of our caregivers giving our voice meaning, and registering our needs and desires. Again, Phillips, in his Unforbidden Pleasures:
The infant literally depends on the mother’s recognition of his need, and if the mother is, for her own reasons, excessively unreceptive to the nature of his need, he will have to adapt to her limits, to her capacity for recognition; to try to become what she needs him to be.
What begins in recognition ends in obedience, Phillips quotes Frank Bidart’s poem. The child is presented with options by her parent, inviting her to different ways of living, but always within the horizon of the options presented. Doll or army figurine; pink or red; orange or banana; English or French; chemist or writer. What is lost in these options? For one, alternatives are lost. Things outside of even the consciousness of the parent is lost. Thus, we can add to the quote above: the mother is also adapting to some needs that are not her own; namely, those of her own parents. There is a certain amount of acquiescence that is required for a speaking subject, a certain number of options that must be a priori lost when asking and talking and demanding and wishing. Indeed, wishing, too.
This is why it is so difficult and uncomfortable to truly free associate, as Freud would have us do. Adam Phillips seems to equate language with obedience. Can we ever, then, be free? Emancipated to truly pursue our own desire? If not, we are always living in accordance with the demand of mom and dad, older siblings, local priests, teachers, and so on.
Style and vocabulary
Nietzsche calls us to develop our own style, to strike out, live dangerously, and create ourselves in the world without reference to anything ‘greater’ than what we are, other than ourselves. But if everything we’ve ever spoken comes from elsewhere, from some other entity that is outside of our control and yet domineering in how we articulate ourselves in the world, Nietzsche’s challenge is impossible.
Of course, unless we begin with our vocabulary. What we say allows us access to options which have been presented to us as acceptable. What we’ve learned to say, our vocabulary, determines what is and isn’t appropriate to want, because we cannot want without articulating what it is we want. This is why, for Lacan, the symbolic (words, culture, and so on) emerges at the same time as the imaginary (images, relationship, feelings), not before or after. And we’ve internalized this so deeply because our life depended on us saying the right thing at the right time. So it begins privately, this new vocabulary. Without saying something to someone else, say something to yourself — for, in the end, language is always in service of another. See if it brings you pleasure, and how that pleasure sits in you. Does it quell some nameless dread or pang of lack within you? Or does it agitate that pain? Where is the dissonance?
Ever the philologist, Nietzsche tells us that, when translating from one language to another, the most important element that can never be quite translated is
[T]empo of its style, which is rooted in the character of the race — physiologically speaking, in the average tempo of its ‘metabolism’ (BGE, 28).
He tells us that, because German is ‘incapable of presto’, one is hard-pressed to find free-spirited thinking in German literature. (And of course, for Nietzsche, ‘race’ here refers to the cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic attitudes of an ethnic group.) For the opposite reasons, he thinks that only Machiavelli’s famous Prince could present such sober topics in the gaiety in which it is written. There is no inventing one’s own language, a game we typically see in children as a way to revolt against the givens of one’s speaking (and spoken) life. We can never achieve a ‘true’ representation of ourselves and our wishes in language. Indeed, whatever words we choose to populate our vocabulary with are always taken from somewhere else, some place outside of us.
But maybe Nietzsche was saying something else. Perhaps a first step to disobedience is to be un-translatable for others. There is a certain style in which we can speak that might make it difficult for others to replicate. I do not mean speaking gibberish or using impressively long words to say simple things. I mean when we choose our vocabulary, when we develop our own way of speaking, perhaps we cease to be restricted to options presented to us by the Other.
How we present ourselves in the world, we have learned, is dictated by the words we use re-present our internal states. This, however, is always done for someone else, never entirely for ourselves. Changing how we speak, then, is the first step to presenting ourselves to the world. But more than that — it is the first step to presenting ourselves to ourselves. What we say to ourselves is still operating according to the social requirements of language. Just because we are alone does not mean we freed ourselves of sociality.
Developing one’s own vocabulary is sketching out a way to speak differently about one’s internal world. Choosing words that embody complexity rather than simplicity says something about our internal state. If I were to say of a work of art, “It is beautiful”, the word is so broad and overused that it might be difficult for the listener to really pick up on the impression the art is making on us; and, again, the listener is always also ourselves among others. Saying a work of art is “beautiful” is committing ourselves to the singular option of beautiful, it’s alternative usually being “ugly”. But what if we say the painting is “elegant”, “unsettling”, or “sublime”? What other paths of thought are opened up to us, and to others? The art resonates differently in the body when we speak with a richer vocabulary. If this were not the case, poets are just confused thesauruses.
What Nietzsche is trying to say apropos translation is that each of our bodies has its own physiology, culture, and experience. It is the tempo which cannot be translated, and it is the tempo solely in which we are revealed, to ourselves and to others. It is thus the tempo and the vocabulary that establish the first step to developing one’s own style of character.
[Detours]
References
Nietzsche, F. (1886). Beyond Good and Evil.
Phillips, A. (2016). Unforbidden Pleasures.
Phillips, A. (2022). On Getting Better.
