Words impose definitions where there should be none, separating, distinguishing, discriminating. Words cover up a chaotic, fluid abyss that cannot (or rather should not) be reduced, differentiated, or delimited. By presenting an order that is invented, words give the lie to the actual dis-ordered state of the world.
As if that were not bad enough, this tyranny of words deceives in yet another fundamental way. Words, in this story, coalesce into controlling concepts, cutting up the world into arbitrary categories and quickly shutting down thought and vision. The way we think is, they warn, directed and controlled by these arbitrary signifiers- masters, which have no right to such guiding and limiting power over our thoughts and the world they pretend to describe. This arbitrariness signals a kind of treacherous deceit. In this explanation of the origin of language, words have never and never could be anything but arbitrary labels for things. It came to hold sway in the late 19 th century, along with other skepticisms, gained considerable ground at the turn of the 20 th, and is currently one of the most pervasive articles of faith of the 21 st-century social theorist and even many writers who, in holding to it, undermine a belief in their own work. It came more recently to prominence, though there were proto-believers, or shall I say skeptics-for it is a skeptical myth, though myth just the same-even in ancient times. The second myth deceptively denies any correspondence between words and world, and tends to insist that individual experience cannot be translated from one person to the next. Most compelling of all is its occasional call-as in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (1303-5)-for the modern poet to bridge the chasm between both words and the essences of ideas and things with a creative regeneration of language. Suspending for a moment belief in the myth’s more esoteric tendencies, the idea that language could be intrinsically related to reality is somewhat supported by etymological evidence tracing the roots of words in the world of matter, binding thought to history, nature, and social practices. From ancient times through the mid-18th century at least, scholars and mystics have searched for traces of a perfect language, supposedly lost after the collapse of Babel tower or after that other fall in Eden, claiming sometimes that it was a form of Hebrew and, at others, inventing new symbol systems that promised to heal the rift between word and world, human mind and cosmos. The assumption is that things mean, and that their meaning is at least partially legible-if not transparently through the dark glass of the fallen language of man, then at least through the visible language of nature, its patterns and repeating hieroglyphs. Mixing Kabbalistic creation magic with esoteric Renaissance alchemy, this myth is one source of Romantic views of the world as whole, harmonious, and inherently logical (“worded” and in accordance with Reason). The first tells the tale of a lost Ur-Sprache, wherein words were identical to the things they signified. One posits an absolute and legible world of meaning the other an utterly meaningless world. Two myths regarding the origin of language haunt our presentiments about the way we know reality and, thus, our conclusions about how and what the world means. That, however, all the patches are made of the same fabric-a fabric woven of the mind’s sympathy with the material world-we can be quite sure. But like all artists, she will deviate from the patterns, too, beginning new traditions and conventions in the place of old. There are tried and true patterns she will revert to, and for good reasons.
This strange imp will leap about in the following pages amid all manner of philosophical confusion and try to sew together again the patches of thought that have been ripped apart, but in motley fashion for she is but a poor seamstress for such complicated quilting and, besides, the seams will, in the best of circumstances, burst again and require some new arrangement. The categorical imp of the perverse is a hybrid of Kant’s categorical imperative (“Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”) and Poe’s “imp of the perverse” (a force that will suddenly act in seeming opposition to reason). Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the PerverseĪct only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. It is a radical, a primitive impulse-elementary.
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