I. The Expressive Subversion of Rationality

To escape the rigid structure, it is necessary to somehow interrupt the process of attribution and to claim places that were seemingly not in one’s reach before. I write ‘seemingly’ because the distribution of the sensible does not necessary accord with the material conditions. The coal miners in the 19^th century did not have any right to decide if and how energy is spread through the country and into the factories. ^{Footnote 5} But because it is actually they who mine the coal with their own hands, it is also they who can cut the energy supply by striking. In this case, the expression of this material condition can be used for an interruption of social order. Thus, an expression beyond well-ordered descriptions subtly leads to social change. But how is this connected to the language animal?

Taylor discusses how two different and ambivalent aspects of language interact in the human capacity to speak: the rational and descriptive function of language on the one side, and the expressive and constitutive force simultaneously invoked by the speaking animal on the other. Taylor outlines these two strains by differentiating the approach of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Étienne Bonnet de Condillac (HLC) to language from that of Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamann and Wilhelm von Humboldt (HHH). The former group focuses on written or spoken words as a medium of reference, whereas the latter emphasizes the expressive and constitutive dimension of language, which is the very power to not only refer to predefined objects, but also to create new meanings. ^{Footnote 6}

The interaction between these two approaches indicates an important aspect of modernity. For example, several theories on modern aesthetics identify a shift from a vertical into a horizontal order around 1800, through which the expressive and material aspect of language gains its own significance in the production of literature. Art has become more and more independent and self-referring. From the late 18^th century onwards, the material and intransitive dimension of language has gained more and more appreciation. Rancière, amongst others, describes an important change in the European understanding of literature: around 1800, it transformed from being more or less representative to a kind of literature that centres on, what he calls, the silent revolution: a literature that no longer orders and represents but rather focusses the expressive dimension of language by letting its material speak for itself. ^{Footnote 7} In this way, art offers more than just a complementary and yet necessary alternative to instrumental thinking or lifestyles. Aesthetic movements themselves subtly affect the social order of modernity by changing the way we speak.

This transformation of aesthetic self-understanding can be mirrored in Taylor’s distinction between HLC and HHH. The monological structure of HLC is put into perspective by the primacy of dialogue and conversation for which HHH stands. Well-structured, timeless, and centralized orders of meaning get disrupted by momentary and interactive expressions. More than a change in art, we can support with Taylor the idea that the silent revolution which Rancière describes proves to be a broader change in social order. Through this change, people begin to value and emphasize the fact that language does not develop in an abstract and solely logical manner inside an individual’s mind but, rather, “evolves always in the interspace of joint attention, or communion.” ^{Footnote 8} Thus, the distinction between HLC and HHH connects the capacity of speech not only with a participation at the logos but simultaneously with the contingent and deliberated conditions of society. But how is the subjective and particular monologue of a speaking individual mediated into the joint attention of common interaction?

With Rancière in mind, I argue that the interaction of HLC and HHH reveals a fragile line between those who are already allowed to speak for themselves by participating at the logos and those who are forced to solely utilize the stages that are given to them by others. The HHH-language theory points to an aspect of language that allows the latter group to express themselves independently from the logos, utilizing the creative force of discourse to create meaning beyond common representations. However, the expressive momentum of language does not necessarily change social order. The expressions made through the capacities of HHH must transform into valid meanings inside HLC-theory; they must become representative. It is here where we can see the threshold of valid meanings and their opposites. But where does the point lie beyond which uttering a mere expression of lust or anger becomes intersubjectively acknowledged and regarded as a valuable claim? How can those who are used to playing on the stages of others, such as the proletarians, enact a footing where they can speak for themselves? Taylor’s concept of the force of discourse provides an important hint towards a solution.

II. From Expression to Politics

We can see already in the title Taylor has chosen a clue towards a political reading of his investigation. The collocation ‘language animal’ invokes the famous lines by which Aristotle himself defines the human being as a ‘zoon politikon.’ Other than the animal that may only use its voice to indicate pleasure or pain, human beings participate at the logos by their capacity for speech:

For Aristotle, the capacity to speak properly correlates with the ability to distinguish between good and evil. It is the foundation of any social order, the very condition that brings the family, the state, and most likely any other social communion into existence. However, from Aristotle’s point of view, it is the participation at the logos that renders the animal into a political animal. The expressive dimension of language, that is the dimensions HHH-theory emphasizes, rather seems to hinder its political emancipation. Thus, shifting the focus from rational thinking to suffering would lead away from political aspects.

From this point of view it is not the expressive aspect of language—its voicing—that enacts humans as political beings, but its rational counterpart. The ability to abstract from one’s own nature and to subject oneself to the monolithic order of a given social good. By monolithic order, I refer to an order that is strictly organized around one central point, putting every social function or place into a distinct relation to this point or value. In the Platonic republic, for example, everyone must contribute to the realization of the ideal polis and only to this. However, the distinction between voice and speech constitutes the community around the monolithical structure of the logos. It should, hence, be possible to conceptualize society all by oneself, without the need for any deliberation with others. And it could also be used as an argument to condemn seemingly superficial aspects, such as appearance or feelings, from a ‘true’ realm of political discourse. I can only touch on these questions here because they require a debate on their own.

One reason I quoted Aristotle above is that Rancière uses the quotation as a starting point for his own distinction between politics and the police. ^{Footnote 10} From the Rancièrian perspective, the police create and defend any persisting social order by regulating and structuring how the given social order is perceived. Every institution that somehow distributes social places and functions belongs to the realm of police—even those we would usually understand as political institutions, such as a parliament or the political parties themselves. They all share the common feature that they realize a distinction between what makes sense in respect to a certain order and what is just a vague expression of lust or anger from the order’s point of view.

Politics appears, then, in certain events of interruption, ^{Footnote 11} that is in events in which persons or even collectives either deny their position in a certain society or suspend the predefined manner of perception the police enforces. In doing this, they question the social order. Politics is thereby the exploitation of the fact that any distribution of places and functions fails to properly address some people—especially those who deny that they are what they ought to be or who just don’t do what people like them ought to do. A very good example of this is the proletarians who, instead of using their night time for recovery, write poetry, no matter how exhausted and hungry they are. Rancière dedicates to this phenomenon his historiographic study La Nuit des Prolétaires. ^{Footnote 12} But other examples can easily be found, especially in the context of the international labour movements. We can see this emancipation also in, for example, the rejection of academic divide in Peter Weiss’ novel Ästhetik des Widerstands, in which the protagonist defies his attribution as illiterate worker. He acquires knowledge in art and literature, not to gain access to the bourgeoisie but to reclaim a place for the proletarian itself on the stage of cultural self-understanding: his attempts to understand art from a proletarian perspective enact a completely different scene from which the socialist revolution, or at least antifascist resistance, becomes possible.

It is here that Rancière’s famous notion of the part of those who have no part ^{Footnote 13} comes into play. Those who have no part are those who are unconsidered by the proportional distribution but who also demand equal rights because they are, in fact, as equal a part of society as anybody else. Their part transcends the given social order by questioning its justice and by pointing out that they are still unconsidered despite the fact that they actually exist. We might, for example, think of Olympe de Gouge’s famous line, after which a woman’s right to speak was a consequence of the fact that she has the equal right to step onto the guillotine. ^{Footnote 14} In this case, the police structurally deny the participation of women in public affairs, although they will still be executed if they dare to participate wrongly. By demanding their share, de Gouge utilizes the equality of the death penalty against the proportional order of patriarchy. This enacts a new stage of political deliberation where women’s demands are no longer willingly misread as hysteric utterings but are seen instead as valuable and reasonable claims.

As soon as this happens, the ways women express themselves as women begin to change the descriptive conception of womanhood itself. Formerly senseless gestures widen and sometimes reverse the meaning of certain words, allowing the speakers to figuratively obtain places they are not supposed to. Thus, the expressive dimension of language helps to establish the cause of feminism as a valid political claim. The language capacities outlined by HHH-theory provide the tools for this emancipation through language. Since HHH stresses the constitutive power of expression, it also allows subliminal changes of descriptive orders of meaning. It could then be argued that the intersection of HHH and HLC resembles the confrontation of arithmetic equality and proportional order. Like the police, HLC emphasizes and realizes distinct orders of meanings, whereas HHH could be understood as a theory of language that provokes politics. However, the comparison is inadequate. There is no reason the material dimension of speech, such as gestures, stance, or body language, should not rather enrich descriptive meanings instead of subverting them. HHH does not prevent politics from disappearing in an identification of bodies and places. When the expression merges flawlessly into the description, and when people accept and acclaim their places, there is HHH without politics.

III. The Threshold of Emancipation

In Chapter Seven, Taylor analyses what he calls “The Creative Force of Discourse.” He understands discourse following Émile Benveniste’s distinction of “langue” and “discours” in a broader sense as a “focus of joint attention” that is created through communication. ^{Footnote 15} The participants of discourse constitute a certain stage on which their utterances make sense to each other. Thus, deictics like here and now receive their meaning. The actual speech event is important for full understanding. It also implies that the participant in this joint attention must be able to communicate properly and reasonably.

Taylor argues that the way we communicate practically enacts and re-enacts the terms of our relationships. Thus, speech produces what Taylor calls with Erving Goffman the “footing” on which specific interactions are based. ^{Footnote 16} The footings imply certain etiquettes. That means that they imply an attribution of who can be in which position, who can play which role and what privileges or obligations a certain role entails. Taylor then points out that these footings cannot always be derived by semantic analyses alone, because much of the enactment happens off our semantic map. ^{Footnote 17} Even if the footings are codified and thus intelligible through their names, we can challenge them by enacting them slightly differently. Thus the actual enactment of these footings can slowly reshape the terms associated with it, or change terms in such a way that the enacted relationship is no longer semantically covered: the relationship turns into something else. The question is: how can new footings emerge from the act of speaking itself? Or as Rancière would put it: what is specific to those interruptions in which the positionality of a certain footing or stage is dismissed and thereby performatively replaced?

The example of the “avuncular” relationship ^{Footnote 18} may offer some insight at this point. Taylor outlines a friendship between two people where one is regarded as older and wiser, and the other embraces this characterization in order to receive advice. Even if this relationship had no clear name, we can imagine a certain footing that regulates what each friend can expect in this relationship. If this relationship extends to the private sphere in such a way that it becomes a model for many other friendships, a society might be impelled to give it a name. It might even render the understanding of friendship such that each friendship should be regarded as an “avuncular” relationship. However, Taylors point is that the “avuncular” relationship does not exist in the beginning as a common social structure. At first it doesn’t even have a proper name because it exists solely by two people relating to each other on the basis of a spontaneous and new footing. The actual expression of their relationship, its enactment, defines its meaning and there is at first no descriptive structure to which it is oriented. The discourse of social exchange itself forges new relations and alters existing ones. Just because the meta-pragmatic communication itself introduces new terms, it enriches or even changes the existing ones. Thus, according to Taylor, discourse reveals a subtle “condition of solidarity and joint dedication which is thought to lie at the origin of our society.” ^{Footnote 19} This is what Rancière would call the “equality of intelligence” ^{Footnote 20} or the ability of each individual to reflect and evaluate a given social order. We can see clearly how the power of discourse applies a change to the valid relationships in societies through the actual enactment of different footings whereby these are not enacted by referring to another already existing description but by letting a new relationship emerge solely by acting against or beside common attributions.

But the example also shows how the creative force loses its emancipatory potential. As soon as the “avuncular” relationship is codified the creative force that created it serves now to maintain it. For us, it is not hard to imagine an uncle who gives advice to his nephew. Though it might have been a subversive act; there was a time in history when it was forbidden or at least uncommon for a nephew to listen to his uncle’s advice, but I doubt that this is the case for the Western society. But, if we consider the “avuncular” relationship as a codified relationship, we can see how the police are at work distributing the social places and functions: the “avuncular” relationship relies on a proportional distribution of the knowledge that it implies. As it serves from time to time an educational purpose, the role of the uncle involves a privileged access to the logos. We might ask at which point the nephew would reach a similar access, a similar understanding and knowledge. Given that age is the criterion of difference, this moment would either never come or it would require a repetition of the “avuncular” relationship in the next generation.

In all cases, the powers in this relationship are unbalanced. With his privileged access to the logos, the uncle would always be in the position to explain which utterances of the nephew-role count and which utterances are nothing but blabbering. Thus, the nephew’s ability to change the footing decreases significantly. No longer having free access to the logos, the nephew’s utterances would become nothing but articulations of lust or anger. All his words might require interpretation and explanation by the expertise of the uncle-role. The nephew would lack the ability to obtain strong evaluations that differ from his uncle’s values, not because he couldn’t think of other evaluations but because they wouldn’t count. In terms of Aristotle’s words quoted at the start of this paper, the nephew has a voice but he still cannot speak. We could say with Rancière that the given footage hinders the nephew’s emancipation, because it binds him to a rigid place and function distributed and organized by the wisdom of his uncle. Rancière outlines his critique of the teacher-student-hierarchy in Le Maître Ignorant (The Ignorant Schoolmaster), in which he emphasizes the importance of students being encouraged to use their own intelligence and acquire their knowledge, not through their teachers, but through their own occupation with the subject. As long as the nephew depends on the advice of his uncle, he cannot fully take responsibility for his decisions. Polemically speaking, he could like or dislike what his uncle advises, but in order to make moral decisions on his own behalf he would have to abandon his role. He must dare to be no longer just the nephew. Thus the creative force of discourse that helped to establish the new footing has either vanished or turned into its opposite.