Language and Culture

Language and Culture

“To put it simply, culture is about ‘shared meanings.’  Now, language is the privileged medium in which we ‘make sense’ of things, in which meaning is produced and exchanged.  Meanings can only be shared through our common access to language.  So, language is central to meaning and culture and has always been regarded as the key repository of cultural values and meanings.”

– Stuart Hall

The perspective of human science can help us to explore various aspects of our social and cultural legacies. One area is the relationship between language, culture, and world view. Ultimately this leads us to the need to explore how our very consciousness is shaped by the interaction of the structure, focus, and intentionality of our cultural complexity and language to comprehend what things “mean” to us. We are clearly living in a time (the early 21^st century) where the same words, icons, rites, and symbols have strikingly different meanings for diverse segments of the population. Perhaps by exploring this a little we can come to an understanding of ways to rebuild a common ground in society and return to a more civil discourse to solve the immense problems and tasks we face in order to help create a more just society and sustainable environment.

Language is the main vehicle of transpersonal or intersubjective understanding. Perhaps, but this seems to be a tautological statement which still begs the explanation it hopes to clarify.  It doesn’t really explain how meaning comes to be shared, communicated or agreed upon.  It is a given.  The point is that various cultural artifacts (words, photos, ads, paintings, and so on) demonstrate that these all are signs, communicating ideas or meanings, and that the sign has two components, the form (the signifier – the word, icon, image, photo, and so on,) and the idea or concept in your head, that is, the signified.  The sign, or symbol, extracts our agreed upon meaning from the “dictionary” in your mind when you perceive or take note of the sign.

However, it seems to me that there are more layers involved in getting to the crux of the matter of language and communication.  Critical theory views language, labor and power as intrinsically linked.  Humans exist in a natural, material environment, which they engage in for survival, acting upon it and being acted upon it in a dialectical relationship that expands both the knowing of the potential of the aspects of the environment, and reflexively, expands (realizes) the potentials of our species being.  One key development in this manipulation of the environment is the creation of tools (and then other artifacts) which have a use and a meaning for the user that was not there prior to its creation.  And tools, as a special group of cultural artifacts take on another dimension as the repository of prior labor, labor saved to be used again, which then begins the accumulation of articles which can free humans from immediate necessity.

Language arises out of a similar material manipulation of the environment, that is, speech is the manipulation of air by lungs, teeth and lips to create a symbol which represents something which may or may not be present.  And in this moment of creating this sign or representation (language), memory and consciousness are also created, as is the interaction with others expressed in language.  Language is also a tool, evolves with and from the use of tools and the need to interact with others to survive.  The “word” represents something other than itself, and makes that something present in the interaction, even though the “object” of the word is not present.

Just as human labor (acting on and reshaping the world) creates our world, speech and language allows us to “capture” that world in an abstract form and create symbolic representation of it.  So from the very first use of speech, the question of understanding meaning was a “problematic”.  Understanding or interpreting the symbolic representation of things on one level, and on another level more abstract concepts that are required for survival (danger, safety, and so on,) evolves. And like tools, language begins the accumulation of knowledge and mastery over the natural world while concurrently creating the social world through interaction and sharing through language.  And, just as with the accumulation of tools, accumulation of language creates power in relationships between the cultural participants.  Tools and language free us from immediacy and necessity and, with memory as a component of consciousness, they also create the history or lore of the group.  And underlying all of this is the creation of relationships of power through mastery of tools, language, nature and knowledge embedded in both the things and their signs.

Through this lore (memories of the past) myth and meaning are preserved, shared and evolve.  Language is both simplified and made more complex in a dialectical interaction as it evolves through agreement on meaning, expansion of vocabulary and the further “capturing” of reality in words, signs and their shared experience in human interaction and the development of more aspects of culture.  Words and their meanings are enriched, deepened and expanded.  Meaning is not simply abstracted from reality, it is actively socially “imbued” into the symbol or sign by an agreed upon understanding.  As time passes and experiences are accumulated, meanings may also change or shift, to incorporate new or discard old, cultural remnants embodied in the concept of the sign.  Signs or symbols as representation are fluid in their use and meaning. Along the way a group consensus of interpretation and meaning is arrived at or agreed upon which is implicit in the validity of the interaction through language.  The consensus in language (and other meanings of symbols) is imperative in order for society to function, and when consensus is broken it creates a social crisis of mistrust in what is meant.

As part of the “postmodern” view of language words, concepts (a collection of words to give deeper meaning), language and even culture are in constant contradiction, both historically, culturally and temporally specific, and constantly being revised through the discourse of all of the components of society and culture (morality, technology, politics, power, economic relations, institutions, and so on,) such that the meaning isn’t definable or static, but is constantly changing or being transformed.  Meaning isn’t “being”, it is constantly “becoming”.  If this is so, how is this constant transformation communicated and agreed upon? And can culture be reduced to this simple analogy or parallel?  Don’t we need to view language (and other aspects of culture) as having a multitude of durations of meaning, that is, some symbols are more fluid and changing than others?  Perhaps this is an area of exploration to see if there is a relationship between the creation of ideological symbols and the malleability of their meaning(s) such as patriotism, the flag, family, and so on.

Here we are back, it seems to me, to the classic split between understanding culture and reality either from the view of the observer (etically) or from the discriminations, contrasts, distinctions, whether real, accurate, false, appropriate or otherwise, of the actors or members of the culture themselves (emically).   Each culture, as Foucault states “has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth”.  So, the meanings may be agreed upon, acted upon and held as belief, and “truth”, and yet be based on ideological representations arrived at to “justify” certain mores and ethos which are regressive, anti-humanist and repressive.

Cultural artifacts, as elements of representational systems, may or may not be based on true social values or reality, but may be contrived to promote a certain “wish” or yearning or fantasy of cultural ideal for example, the “Frenchness” in the photos of Cartier-Bresson and so on,  Or they may be contrived to convey a “vision” of another culture, such as  exhibitions in museums or to obfuscate power relations between cultures in displays of other cultures, hiding the relationship of colonized and colonizer behind a veil of scientific objectivity.

Representation, meaning, interpretation, understanding and communication are all interlinked as facets of the same entities – language, lore, myth and other cultural artifacts (that is, the society’s body of knowledge).  In turn relationships of control and dominance (power) are in the hands of those who can impose certain definitions of meaning, value and understanding on these social realities.  Control of knowledge and the validity of meaning leads to control of the actions of others, of nature and the means by which society survives.  In a complex reflexive dialectic, control of all these aspects of culture defines meaning and therefore, what is normative, acceptable, valuable, allowed, beautiful, and so on, and who is “inside” and who is “the other.”

In the complex relationship of expanding knowing (epistemology) by refining understanding it must be remembered that understanding is not the same as knowledge.  At one level of abstraction it could be said that the “progression” is from perception to information to understanding to knowledge to wisdom, with each new level requiring a deepening of meaning and consensus.  Somewhere in here is also awareness, sense, belief and certainty, to say nothing of truth.  This opens a whole vast area of discussion for each of these levels of what are really relationships with the world. Consciousness is not individual, it is not “in here” but rather “out there” – in or with the world, not of the world.

And, so, this is where we should return to knowledge and knowing, inquiry, method, and ethical standards, as a combination which creates a discipline for knowing and changing the world. Today we speak of postmodern, postcolonial, anticolonial, etc. paradigms and deconstruction of prior (and current) views of the world.  In opposition to, and complimentary to dominant ways of knowing, characterized as encompassing a broad spectrum, i.e. White, male, bureaucratic, technological, positivist, linear, hegemonic, imperialist, colonial, militaristic, racist, misogynist, homophobic, hyper-capitalistic, neo-liberal, etc. a variety of other viewpoints have evolved.  Feminist, Chicana feminist, Black, queer, gay, lesbian, Black lesbian, indigenous, Asian, Latino(a), Indian, colonized, marginalized, etc. perceptions are evolving, combining, metamorphosing and being elaborated to give us different qualities, groundings and expressions of world views.

That being said, aren’t we still faced with the same challenge of confirming the veracity, intent, quality, and purpose of these world views, to assure they constitute knowledge?  Or are we in some completely relativistic acceptance of individual subjective, or even group dynamic, content that is given credence as knowledge because it contains ideas that can be expressed?  The task of evaluation, determining if it is up to the task of being knowledge (as opposed to delusion or opinion) has not gone away.  Acceptance of the validity of someone’s or some group’s unique perspective is one thing.  A multitude of epistemologies and ontologies exist, if we base the definitions of these terms to accept this, and I think we can.  At the same time, there are universal “truths” of humanness that unite us all as a species, and beyond that as a species-being, with a common genetic package and common potentialities.  We need, as a species, to learn that it is our unique capability to fulfill so many various destinies, each valid, truthful, and valuable, that unites us all.  The current hegemonic regime likes us at odds.  We need to end this so that we can explore all of the possible potential being human may mean.  Knowledge from all these perspectives should be put to this use, as we don’t have time for knowledge for knowledge’s sake.