Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Literary Humanism

5. Creating the World: The Performative Principle

83 While investigating Saint Augustine’s view of language in chapter two, I suggested that Judaism and early Christianity captured intriguing insights about language in the following ideas: that God created the world through speech; that the Word was with God in the beginning; that without the Word “was not anything made that was made” (John, I. 3); and that the sending of the Word into the world constituted an important message (gospel) about the coming of the kingdom of God. These ideas have been the subjects of endless theological discussion in Western civilization. What is linguistically interesting about them is their implicit understanding that there exists a reciprocity of saying and doing, of conceptualizing and enacting, and of expressing and creating reality with words. These traditions appear to understand that in our use of language we are not merely saying things but also doing and making things; and through our actions, conversely, we are also saying things to those who witness them. Saint Augustine makes a valiant attempt to understand this reciprocity in his treatise On the Trinity; however, he restricts his treatment to God’s language, the Holy Scripture, not human speech, in which Augustine has 5 Creating the World The Performative Principle In this beginning, O God, hast thou made heaven and earth, namely in thy Word, in thy Son, in thy Power, in thy Wisdom, in thy Truth; after a wonderful manner speaking, and after a wonderful manner making. —Saint Augustine, Confessions, XI, ix (Watts trans. 2:227–28) 84 creatinG tHe World very little confidence. As a consequence, the reciprocity of saying and doing is basically put forward as part of a great mystery, like the mystery of the Trinity itself. And a mystery it remained, in both theology and philosophy , in those few cases where it was acknowledged at all. The Enlightenment poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took a stab at it in his great poetic drama Faust. Here, in a famous passage Doctor Faust meditates on the meaning of that mysterious term logos, from the beginning of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word”—thus runs the text. Who helps me on? Already I’m perplexed! I cannot grant the word such sovereign merit, I must translate it in a different way If I’m indeed illuminated by the Spirit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The spirit speaks! And lo, the way is freed, I calmly write: “In the beginning was the Deed”! (Faust I, 1224–37, Arndt trans.) What makes this passage such a tour de force is that Dr. Faust ends his meditation by confidently translating “the word” as its opposite, “the deed.” The impiety—spiritual rebellion, even—of this idea lies not merely in Faust’s refusal to recognize the Son as logos but also in a broader implication : the Word is the act of creation, and not just God’s creation but the poet’s as well. (Keep in mind that Faust is the man who sold his soul to the devil, in pursuit of knowledge and power past mere human capacity .) And so in Goethe’s rendering, the reciprocity of saying and doing is now stolen from the heavens and humanized into the mystery of poetic creation. Like most modern literary humanists, I am a worshiper at the alter of poetry. However, I consider it no act of impiety to point out that the air of mystery surrounding the reciprocity of saying and doing derives, at least in part, from a defect in the tradition of Western language philosophy. Unfortunately, from ancient times into the twentieth century, the Western tradition of language philosophy has worked from within a paradigm that obscures the notion of reciprocity altogether. This is the paradigm of linguistic form as the signifier of things outside of language. Additionally, as we have already seen, most philosophical discussions within the signifier paradigm have focused on a single question: language’s adequacy to perform its role of signifying. If structures of language (the ancient ques- creatinG tHe World 85 tion goes) do not match in some way the structures of things outside of language, how can we adequately know or communicate knowledge about these things? Modern language philosophy and linguistics have found ways to break out of the signifier paradigm—chiefly through what has become known as the performative principle. the theory of Speech acts If we step back for a moment from the epistemological questions...