Lalangue, Milner argues, is not unstructured and without reason. It is structured and, according to Milner in L’amour de la langue, its structure marks the presence of a kind of “knowledge in the real.” This is what “dooms” language “to equivocity” (L’amour22). The structure or “reason” intrinsic to lalangue can even be considered extra-linguistic since it involves things like resemblances among sounds, or, in writing, the physical arrangement of letters. It is “extra-linguistic,” therefore, on the condition that language is thought of along the lines of Saussurean linguistic structure. Milner writes that “homophonies, homosemies, palindromes, anagrams, tropes, and all the imaginable figures of association” are the effects of lalangue, and are due to nothing other than the materiality or physicality of languages, and not to that in languages which is involved in the creation of meanings — such as relations and differences among signs (L’amour104). On Milner’s reading, lalangue is, therefore, also a term for what it is of language that escapes and exceeds formalization, and it therefore presents a challenge to the science of linguistics.
The way back to dialectical materialism?
Can a materialism that would not be eliminative or reductionist, but instead dialec-tical (because it posits a real transformation of being by something like thinking), and, in turn, a real influence on thought from being (if not in the domain of the hard sciences then in that of the old “human” sciences) … can such a project do anything with the idea of a “knowledge in the real,” as odd as this sounds, and as outré as such a thing would be for most types of materialism? If Hegelian idealism is to be avoided — if there is to be no super-subject who knows, no spirit or mind who is driving things—and yet thinking and being are to be aligned in a way that is more vig-orous than what occurs in the natural sciences or in mathematics itself, should this relation be put in such a way that there can be said to be a “knowledge in the real”?
The “knowledge in the real” allegedly contained in lalangue, according to Milner’s reading in L’amour de la langue, involved an ordered appearance of phonemes; an appearance that is not guided according to the dictates of sense and classical Saussurean differential relations among signs, and thus also not in accordance with a language-user’s intent, or with what a language-user wants to say. This order is guided simply by resemblances among sounds, by homophonies, or by other physical factors. Structuralist linguistics did much to teach us that a speaker says more (or less) than what she wants to say: a linguistic system generates a surplus of meaning. There is, in language use, a production of meaning that occurs in indifference to anything like the conscious intent of a speaker. This perspective affects how the relation between thinking and language should be conceived, and it helps to refute the idea that there is a clearly articulated thought that precedes its expression in language.
Rather, it is the case that being put into a form of expression gives a thought or an intention a clarity it did not previously have. This is why we continue to work with and alter the form of expression, and is why we feel that our thoughts have sometimes not been adequately expressed: not because the form of expression (language) fails to portray them accurately, but because what is expressed is itself, if not inexhaustible, then at least vague enough and indeterminate enough to allow for repeated and multiple expressions. Here, linguistic form not only forms content (meaning) but indeed makes (much of) it.
It is no wonder then that structuralist approaches to language were of interest to psychoanalysis. Lalangue shows us instead a kind of stupidity proper to language, something that concerns not the relation between thinking and language, and not the generation of unintended meanings, but rather a level of no meaning at all. A zombie-like level of language, the level of language’s materiality itself, the phoneme or grapheme; a level responsible for homophonic insistences (one sound influencing the sounds that appear elsewhere), resemblances, etc., which insist within or alongside what is meant, running parallel to what is said. As we have seen, Milner at one point wanted to call the structure that guides such articulations in lalangue a “knowledge in the real” (as opposed to the knowledge in/of the symbolic that classical linguistic structure would be). In L’Œuvre clairehe reconsiders this, because what goes on in the real no longer deserves the name of thinking. I will go over his case for this in a moment.
What Milner overlooks, however, is the fact that the dimension of lalangue can, of course, serve as a basis for the development of potential linguistic content, and for thinking. But here it is not a matter of there being, first, a relatively undetermined, vague thought that is the seed for continuing formation, precision, in words, as is the case for the relation between language and thinking.
In lalangue we see how the matter of language itself can inspire further adventures in thought. If Saussure is right about Saturnian poetry, we would have an entire genre based on this dimension. But, as I will explain in a moment, something as simple as punning shows us the same thing. And beyond punning, everyday language use contains aspects of the same thing. What I am getting at, then, is the idea that lalangue is a positive factor in, and a genuine contributor to, the creation of thought. Lalangue shows us how an adventure at the level of things can feed an adventure at the level of thought—exactly the sort of relation between thinking and being that a dialectical materialism is about.
What is going on in lalangue can be described as a zombie-like non-thinking. But punning is something else, and the punning during the silent seminars is like a folding in of lalangue into sense, an exploitation of it for sense, for thinking . . . or a forcing of sense from lalangue, such that any purity in the domain of the real is not respected at all. (And isn’t this one of the lessons of the knots anyway — the interweaving of all three orders, the abolition of the distinctness of any one of them from the others?)
We are back to what was always Lacan’s violation of Wittgenstein’s prohibition. The purity of the ineffable is rejected. Milner might take this assertion to be, in fact, a negative conclusion about theory and language — because it would seem to sanction saying whatever, presumably. Yet Milner’s interpretation of lalangue in Lacanian theory points to just what a philosophical materialism needs.
Lalangue shows us a de-individualized “knowledge in the real,” and a link between thinking and being that is more vigorous than what Quentin Meillassoux’s interesting and important project gives us.
One needs to look outside the hard sciences to find this, to what used to be called the “human sciences.” Not only linguistics, but economics and, of course, psychoanalysis need to be considered by such a project as well, as cases in which an interaction between thinking and being indeed takes place.