Dynamics of Human Interaction Proof-1

This page intentionally left blank.
THE DYNAMICS OF HUMAN INTERACTION

LANGUAGE, POLITICS AND IDENTITY
VASSIL HRISTOV ANASTASSOV
THE DYNAMICS OF HUMAN INTERACTION

LANGUAGE, POLITICS AND IDENTITY
VASSIL HRISTOV ANASTASSOV
Common Ground
First published in Champaign, Illinois in 2012 by Common Ground Publishing LLC as part of The Humanities series Copyright Vassil Hristov Anastassov 2012 All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the applicable copyright legislation, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anastassov, Vassil Hristov. The dynamics of human interaction : language, politics and identity / Vassil Hristov Anastassov.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-61229-063-8 (pbk : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61229-064-5 (ebook) 1. Language and languages--Political aspects. 2. Intercultural communication. 3. Language and culture. 4. Anthropological linguistics. I. Title. P119.3.A627 2012 306.44--dc23 2012007497
TO ALL WHO SUPPORTED ME WITH SPIRIT, KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE
vii
viii
Table of Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv
Chapter 1: An Introduction of the Linguistic Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2: The Linguistic Political Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Chapter 3: The Historical Approach I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Chapter 4: The Historical Approach II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Chapter 5: The Semiosis of Political Division of Space (I) The Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Chapter 6: The Semiosis of Political Division of Space II The Walls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Chapter 7: The Semiosis of Political Division of Space III The Nostos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Chapter 8: The Language of Political Dominance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Chapter 9: The Language of Political Persuasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Chapter 10: The Political Intertextuality in Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose in a Cognitive Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
ix
I landed at Prague Airport on the following day in 1990 after Vaclav Havel was elected president of (at that time) Czechoslovakia for the first time. All the posters that the arrival hall was covered with said:
HAVEL NA HRD
The statement should be translated by: (Let us vote for) HAVEL (so that he goes) TO HRD (the Parliament)
Apparently, this was part of the pre-election campaign. But, as Havel was already elected (as I said, it was the day after the election), enthusiastic fans had scratched on all the posters an additional after the word HRAD, so that it had changed into: HAVEL NA HRAD (which means) HAVEL IS (already) THERE!
Strictly linguistically speaking, the additional changes, according to the rules of Slavic- Czech noun declension, the accusative case of movement in Havel na Hrd into a locative case of place location in Havel na Hrad From the semiotic point of view of pragmatic/discourse analysis it means pragmatic/discourse situational/ contextual background/knowledge and place deixis. From a simple human point of view: voters were happy there was no Communism anymore...
Preface
The work on this project started as the result of my desire to reveal the important role of linguistics in political theory. It required an interdisciplinary approach: politics cannot be understood without reference to history. History itself helps the research of language comparativists. Political events cannot be explained without the investigation of human interaction, which, by itself, is inseparable from (socio)linguistics. The scope of analysis dramatically changed during the research process. It was initially meant to investigate the role of linguistics in the explanation of the political connotation of language, i.e., nothing much different from what already has been achieved by the foregoers of the Frankfurt School. However, the deeper I went into the problems, the more I understood that this analysis would be incomplete without reference to language, cultural and political anthropology (including various issues of identity), even to language philosophy and semiotics of power. That is why the focus is on the works of Fairclough and Chilton, Foucault, Kristeva and Umberto Eco, with all the great variety of the subjects of their scientific interest. It seemed a difficult task, taking into consideration that all these subjects have their own specific methods of scientific approach. But, in our contemporary world, with its abundant information about issues from different perspectives, to neglect comparison is an irrelevant luxury. Science reflects constant human attempts to know more about the world. Various types of knowledge share much more in common than we expect. Not to be able to see the forest for the trees is typical for nineteenthcentury science, in which classification and labeling plays a significant role in scientific research:
Late-nineteenth-century philology was as uncompromisingly evolutionary in outlook as Darwinian biology. (Harris x)
So do logical positivism and empirics that go far beyond the discoveries of Darwin and Mendeleyev and even affect areas of the humanitites such as philosophy, linguistics and literary theory? Saussure and his twentieth-century structuralist contemporaries believed that
linguists were already dealing with the facts of language just as scientifically as the astronomer treats the stars of heaven, or the botanist the flowers of the field... (Ibid. xi)
Structuralism between the two world wars was extremely influenced by positivism. Political science itself, according to many researchers, should be based on a positivistic approach. It is very difficult, however (especially when it comes to scientific analysis of humanities such as linguistics and political theory), to fix a strict borderline between a positivistic and a nonpositivistic perspective. The former, when applied to language, doesnt explain its poetic and metalinguistic functions. Nor does reference to such
xi
data in the analyses of the causes of political conflicts. In this respect a parallel between different subjects proves to be much more efficient, because items of knowledge that exist in one of them can be used to fill in gaps of missing information in another one. For example: The shift from synthetic to analytical structure from Old English to Middle English cannot be understood without reference to the Viking and the Norman Conquest and the political dominance of Norman French as the language of the governing class in England. Nor can the present use of the Russian language as the lingua franca in the republics of Central Asia be understood without knowledge of Russian tzarist and Communist ethnic and language policy toward its population. Within the same context Saussure claims that
[m]ajor historical events such as the Roman Conquest are of incalculable linguistic importance in all kinds of ways. Colonization, which is simply one form of conquest, transports a language into new environments, and this brings the changes in the language. A great variety of examples could be cited in this connection. Norway, for instance, adopted Danish on becoming politically united to Denmark, although today Norwegians are trying to shake off this linguistic influence. The internal politics of a country is no less important for the life of a language. The governments of certain countries, such as Switzerland, allow the coexistence of several languages. Other countries, like France, aspire to linguistic unification of several languages. (Saussure 21)
The aim of this research is to point out the link between linguistics, political theory and cultural/anthropological studies of identity. It cannot be thoroughly understood without reference to my own development as a scholar. I started my academic career as a linguist-comparativist. My university education in both Slavic languages and English, along with my doctorate in IndoEuropean/Slavic comparative-historical linguistics and my 20-year researchwork experience in the domain of Indo-European/Slavic/Balkan etymology, extended my knowledge of language contacts, where an understanding of the history of the process of language convergence is inseparable from the analysis of the political history of the speakers in contact themselves. This experience made me realize that there are no pure languages, because ethnic clashes, apart from their influence on the ethnic strucure of different human communities around the world, affect their languages as well. As a relatively new passion, the idea of matching linguistics with my short experience in political science emerged after an encounter with the issue of language as human right, where I found my knowledge of diachronic linguistics extremely useful. All the turbulent changes in my personal life also contributed to my better understanding of this type of interdependence between the political history of human societies, human culture and human language. After a 20-year period of working for the Linguistics Department of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (the Bulgarian Language Institute), I discovered the challenge of living and working away from home. This made me realize that societies and their languages constantly move and influence each other. Liv-
xii
ing abroad for so many years convinced me that in our ethnic, cultural, religious and language make-up, we humans have much more in common than different. The present Dynamics of Human Interaction comes as the result of my work on problems that I had to clarify to myself, before introducing them to the reader. Many of them were initially presented as papers in different conferences in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Estonia, Turkey, Finland, Brazil, and elsewhere. It was a challenging endeavor for me, but so were both my professional and personal experiences that broadened up the horizons of my approach to science and knowledge. That is why I strongly believe that my attempt to reveal how language and identity are dependent on the political context language users live in can contribute positively to the better understanding of the activities of (post)modern Homo loquens-politicus. Vassil Anastassov Fatih University Istanbul
xiii
Acknowledgments
During my first year in Istanbul, in 2001, I met Abram de Swaan from the University of Amsterdam, who encourarged me to start a research project with the working title, The Socio-Political Dimensions of Language. This is how the work on this project began. A turning point in my politicized linguistic career was a presentation at the ISA Annual Convention in Montreal, Quebec, in 2004, where my thesis on the status of the relationship between national and international languages was strongly supported by Zuzana Lehmannova, from the University of Economics of Prague. She invited me to collaborate with her on a project entitled Culture and Politics in International Relations and encouraged me to do research on the linguistic part of it. To work with her and to present bits of the project at conferences in the Hague, the Netherlands (2004), Tartu, Estonia (2006) and Turin, Italy (2007) that were organized with our mutual efforts, was not just a mere pleasure; it developed into a strong, lifelong professional relationship and friendship. These presentations were the background on which I continued my work on the whole Socio-political Dimensions of Language, which, as I mentioned in the preface, developed into the present Dynamics of Human Interaction. A new stage in the development of my own attitude toward my subject was marked by a visit to Columbia University in New York, where my previous knowledge of language and politics was extended with the help of new information on the philosophy of the Humanities as a special branch of postmodern science. This is how I met Bill Cope from the University of Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA, who played a significant role in the final accomplishment of my project. Kurt Kohn from Eberhard Karls University, Tuebingen, Germany and Lucie Tunkrova from Karl Palacky University, Olomouc, the Czech Republic/Fatih University, Istanbul, made it possible to offer bits of this book as academic lectures and gather some feedback before it appeared. I owe a special thank you to Asuncion Lopez-Varela from the University of Madrid and Clyde Forsberg Jr. from Aletheia University, Taiwan, for their precious comments and remarks. Last but not least, I must say my warmest thank you to my family for sharing with me the most difficult stages of the development of this project. Nobody else knows more about...the dynamics of human interaction...than they do...!
xiv
Chapter 1
An Introduction of the Linguistic Argument
Language as Time - Space Political Knowledge (I)
The major linguistic argument of this study is that the implicit knowledge of language is inseparable from the explicit one. By implicit vs. explicit knowledge about language I dont necessarily understand here a Chomskyan competence vs. performance opposition, but rather a simpler non-awareness of the rules in language use : conscious knowledge about them type of correlation:
In Molires play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain was famously unaware that he was speaking prose until it was pointed out to him. He may have been equally surprised to know that he was speaking grammar, for example, or that he was pronouncing phonemes, or that he was producing discourse. Most speakers of a language are similarly vague when it comes to identifying what it is they implicitly know about their language that enables them to speak itIt usually requires someone to point it out to them to make it explicit. This is what language awareness is: explicit knowledge about language. (Thornburry x)
Contrariwise, my argument is based on the assumption that the poetic function of language as a combination of the expressive and the metalinguistic functions enables Homo loquens to express emotion and to create new language, by playing with his knowledge about it. (Anastassov)
AN INTRODUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC ARGUMENT
The poetic function of language means the creative use of language, not necessarily writing poetry. The emotion/feeling that the speaker, when combined with his knowledge of language, allows him to play with it and hence create a new one. I follow here the conception of Jakobson Yaguello, (cf. below), and do not thoroughly agree with Kristeva, who supports the idea that
Poetic language is distinct from language as used for ordinary communicationit is almost an otherness of language. (Kristeva 5, emphasis added)
Contrariwise again, I claim that humans, as representatives of the species Homo loquens, share the capacity of (poetic-creative) playing with language, with the only difference that outstanding poets are more skillful in it than ordinary people. I also argue here that in the history of human languages this ability is marked territorially:
the land where a language is spoken
and temporally:
the specific time when this language is spoken on the specific territory.
This is how I come to the conclusion that Homo loquens-politicus locates himself in: the political present (time) and by means of
the political environment (space) language
By political present/time and political environment/space, I understand the different synchronic (in the conventional Saussurean interpretation of the term) stages of the communal life of humans as political animals (cf. below the reference to Aristotles political-linguistic organization of communal life). The politically motivated human communal life is believed to be based on the mutual agreement of individuals. This explains what ties individual egos into a language identity, on a deictic hic/nunc political principle (within the current pragmatic/political context), namely: by speaking the same language and sharing the same attitude about it, individual members of the community obey a certain conventional order that attaches them to the common territory; language is part of the series of order (social, political, cultural, religious, etc.) which, taken together, marks the communal identity of Homo loquens-politicus;
this communal identity, by functioning on the above-mentioned deictic principle, motivates not only the attachment to the commonly shared territory, but also explains the negative attitude toward neighboring communities as a potential source of threat; and this is what finally defines human language as
knowledge about the self-location of humans in political time and space*
(*which is not essentially different from Aristotles definition of talking humans as zoa politika.) Cf. also:
Public negotiations also represent communicative interactions. The study of these negotiations helps us to see more clearly how language functions to facilitate interaction creatively while being bound simultaneously by cultural rules and norms of the social system in which it takes place. (Kedar vi)
This supposes a certain role of language in the maintenance of the political order of human communities. All the above considered, languages shouldnt be changing, because of their role in maintaining the coexistence/survival of the members of these communities. But they do change, as a result of the change in knowledge of the specific political present/time and the specific political environment/ space, and, in the majority of the cases, they also change as a consequence of changes in the political structure of the habitat, where spoken. Linguists tend to explain this fact with an analysis of the mechanism of this change, i.e., the search for an answer to the question
how do languages change?
seldom with reference to the more important one:

why do they change?
As Fairclough argues,
But sociolinguistics is heavily influenced by positivist conceptions of social science: sociolinguistic variation in a particular society tends to be seen in terms of sets of facts to be observed and described using methods analogous to those of natural science. Sociolinguistics is strong on what? questions (what are the facts of variation?) but weak on why? and how? questions (why are the facts as they are?; how in terms of the development of social relationships of power (Fairclough 6, emphasis added)
The questions why and how reveal the importance of language change in the general characteristics of language (political) use. They challenge the trivial sine qua non conditionality of the communicative function of language, by implying that human language is something more than just a code for the interaction of mechanical robots. In other words, if language is not a priori referred to as nothing more than just means of social interaction, it can be analyzed as a human desire for self-expression. One may assume that (the poetic-creative) language 3
change emerges at the point when individual human beings cooperate with each other, keeping the balance between the individual and the (politically) communal:
A language as a collective phenomenon, takes the form of a totality of imprints in everyones brainThus it is something which is in each individual, but is nonetheless common to all. At the same time it is out of reach of any deliberate interference by individuals. (Suassure 19)
Further on, Saussure elaborates more precisely on the same topic with the following statement:
There is nothing collective about speech. Its manifestations are individual and ephemeral. It is more than an aggregate of particular cases, which may be represented by the following formula: (1+1+1+1) (Ibid., emphasis added)
From my working perspective: the language signal, launched by the speaker, would evoke a (communicative) feedback from the hearer only if both of them share the same emotional attitude toward the informative referent: The SPEAKER The HEARER (expressed emotion) (perceived emotion) (shared emotion) REFERENT The conception of expressing emotion needs clarification: It is not necessarily just a mood. It is rather the inner urge of humans for leaving (somewhere out of their own selves) a sign of how they feel (in the inside). It is, in its own way, a sui generis Freudian transition from the unconscious to the conscious:
In so far as the unconscious is a kind of thinking, it works with meanings; in so far it seeks to express itself, it strives to make those meanings emerge through the socially dominant level of consciously controlled meaning. (Harland 131)
A parallel with visual art supports the idea of the emotional experience of the ego of the talking human who projects and shares his feelings, as a reference, with yet another ego as a part of the process of (political-communal) interaction. Shared emotion with another individual would mean knowledge acquisition about my own self from a distance:
SELF (I)
SIGN LEFT
perceiving emotion SELF (II)
expressing emotion knowledge acquisition
sharing emotion feedback
Therefore, language as knowledge, like art as knowledge, apart from everything else that it is believed to be, is a human desire for self-observation that politically integrates people, with a common understanding of the object of self-observation as a referent: language/art = knowledge human desire for self-observation object as a referent common understanding integration In this respect, language interaction could be regarded as a complex process, combining: the result of the necessity of the ego to project its feelings and emotions anywhere out of its own self, and acquire knowledge about them from a distance; And just after that, by cross-checking the experience with other egos: the establishment of the collective (conventional) identity of people, sharing the same type of experience. This is how language as a means of human interaction functions on an individual rather than a collective basis, which supports Saussures statement about the collectivity vs. the individuality of human (political-communal) language. This provokes a discussion with the (neo)Marxist views on the subject of the origin of language and goes too far in the direction of the recently criticized Wundtian understanding of the role of the individual in the creation of language and Faircloughs criticism of the exaggerated individualism of American pragmatics:
The main weakness of pragmatics from a critical point of view is its individualism: action is thought of atomistically as emanating wholly from the individual, and is often conceptualized in terms of the strategies adopted by the individual speaker to achieve her goals or intentions. This understates the extent to which people are caught up in, constrained by, and indeed derive their individual identities from social conventions, and gives the implausible impression that conventionalized ways of speaking or writing are reinvented on each occasion of the speaker generating a suitable strategy for particular goals. (Fairclough 7-8)
Contrariwise to Faricloughs standpoint, my interpretation of the communal interaction of individuals focuses on individual play with language within the constraints of the communal linguistic code. What makes me feel confident in my claim is that what is most amazing about language is the ability to create new forms at any systematic level; i.e., by expressing himself, the SPEAKER plays with language, but, what is even more, the HEARER understands him, even if the linguistic sign, used
by the former, is absolutely new for him. Both of them need the common perspective of the common political environment in order to understand each other. This is how language creativity poses the question of the role of the individual speaker(s) in (linguistic-political) human interaction. In the introduction to Power Through Discourse, Leah Kedar refers to the same question by bridging (as she claims) the views of Maurice Bloch, who
focuses on the ways in which political language is shaped by the social situation in which it takes place, (Kedar ibid.)
and
Robert Paines emphasis on the individuals ability to create the mood of an interaction. (Ibid.)
In this respect, my approach stands closer to Kedars position:

In order to achieve a fuller understanding of the ways in which discourse both actively facilitates communicative interaction and is bound by the circumstances surrounding it, we look at the way in which individual discourse style and socio-cultural constraints on discourse affect and depend upon each other. (Ibid.)
In this respect, the question

What is the role/place of the individual speaker within the overall political context of the speaking community?
can be answered in terms of his ability to use language creativity to impose power on the rest of the linguistic community. On the other hand, (almost) all possible forms of language change, due to language creativity, have been classified throughout time as language corruption (quite often by language purists and language nationalists). To start with Dantes De Vulgari Eloquentia, go through Samuel Johnsons policy of condemning language innovation, and end up with the modern term: bastardized or bodysnatched language could be, in fact, determined as absolutely legitimate knowledge about it, because they all work on the same principle of political deixis of here and now, against linguistic institutionalized knowledge which is based on the past. The concept of language corruption is inseparable from institutionalized knowledge about language in the sense that it marks/evaluates language change negatively because it aims at a certain language stability that language change corrupts:
The great classical scholar Richard Bentley observed in 1699 that every language is in perpetual motion and alteration, but nevertheless believed that it were no difficult contrivance if the Publick had any regard to it, to make the English tongue immutable. (Barber 203, emphasis in original)
In this respect, my research stands close to Saussures priority of the synchronic approach in the sense that there is a logical connection between the different paroles in the existence of a specific langue throughout time, where any analysis of the latest stage is done with reference to the previous one(s), so that the initially designed message reaches the next coming generation(s). 6
Hence, the separate stages (paroles) in the evolution of a language (langue) exist in their own temporal dimension, as long as the shared political context of the speakers is relatively stable, to slowly and gradually shift to another one with the establishment of new mechanisms of common understanding as the result of new political-spatial environment. For example: During the time when Beowulf was written, the Anglo-Saxon/Old English language was characterized by features that revealed a process of language convergence between the RomanoCeltic language substratum of the local population and the Germanic dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. This convergence came as the result of politically motivated clashes in the ethnolinguistic background of Britain in the period between ca. 500 AD 1000 AD. The language of Beowulf, as it was the Germanic - Viking invasion, and different from the one used at the time of Chaucer, showing the traces of the Norman Conquest, and, respectively, the influence of Norman French and Anglo-Norman or, the time of Shakespeare with the inkhorn terms and secondary impact of Latin and French, as the result of the specific political development of Elizabethan England initially written, was the language of shared self-expression, restricted to the now limits of the specific epoch This is what (in a way) supports Faircloughs thesis (with reserve as to the qualification of language as a static system) as regards the following:
Mainstream linguistics has taken two crucial assumptions about langue from Saussure: that the language of a particular community can for all practical purposes be regarded as invariant across that community, and that the study of langue ought to be synchronic rather than historical it ought to be studied as a static system at a given point in time, not dynamically as it changes through time(Fairclough 5-6)
The above reserve considered: the following citation from Roy Harriss Translators Introduction to Saussures Course in General Linguistics is worth discussing, to better understand the principle of synchronic priority:
The essential feature of Saussures linguistic sign is that being intrinsically arbitrary, it can be identified only by contrast with coexisting signs of the same nature, which together constitute a structured system. By taking this position, Saussure placed modern linguistics in the vanguard of twentieth-century structuralism. It was a position which committed Saussure to drawing a radical distinction between diachronic (or evolutionary) linguistics and synchronic (or static) linguistics, and giving priority to the latter [emphasis in original]. For words, sounds and constructions connected solely by processes of historical development over the centuries cannot possibly, according to Saussures analysis, enter into structural relations with one another, any more than Napoleons France and Caesars Rome can be structurally under one and the same political system [emphasis added]. (Harris x)
In an environment where I can linguistically express the same type of feelings and emotions as You can, it is the common political background which ties Us both as the inhabitants of a certain area into a society with its own parameters. The more We, the inhabitants, share equivalent features of the political environment, the more We tend do develop a real group identity.
On the other hand, humankind has (almost always) lived in groups, hostile to one another, in the division of a larger territory. In fact, the once extremely popular understanding of language as the landmark of national identity (cf. below) is partially based on the division principle, so typical of the nineteenth-century idea of nation building. Europe is a good example of how different languages can be shared on the same territory, in the process of space location of the egos of its inhabitants. There are so many exceptions to the rule on the Old Continent (for example, German is spoken in so many nation-states other than Germany, or the case of the Swiss nation, with four different languages functioning within the borders of the state), that it may be assumed that the space location of the ego of our Talking Man is, again, marked by a commonly shared political environment. For ages, Europe has been sharing common (political) constructs, not necessarily a common language. There are plenty of examples from literature, music, painting and architecture that illustrate why it is possible for German-born Haendel to be considered one of the most remarkable British composers, or why Carmen became the symbol of Spain, though created by the French (Merim and Bizet), or how Russianborn Henri Troyat and Elsa Triolet became famous French writers... In the United Europe of today, where the population intensively shares a similar political environment, the language-identity criterion becomes irrelevant, simply because speaking different languages on the same (relatively small) European territory means that the common political constructs are prior to language, when a phatic mutual referent in the expression of emotions and feelings is needed. In practice, this means that if the Dutch language and the Italian language reflect a common European reality, no matter how structurally different they are, the Dutch and the Italian speaker experience the same type of self-expression in the process of space location. In this respect: the lingua franca type of languages appear on the historical stage to fulfill the necessity of political interaction around an area/ territory with no common language. Lingua franca is a term that was coined to denote a kind of interethnic language, motivated by the needs of cultural and trade interaction around the Mediterranean region. The term is often used today to denote a similar common means of language interaction as the result of (past) political hegemony. But, even if there is an initial political reason for the language dominance, it loses it, and starts functioning as the symbol of the socio-cultural integrity of a certain society. Throughout human history there have been lots of cases where societies were shaped on the basis of different ethnic strata. What makes the specific socium is not the commonly shared language, but the commonly shared political experience. In our contemporary world, where we increasingly share a similar political environment, language should be regarded as a secondary and derivative instrument to match the needs of a society for common understanding, survival or coexistence.
By taking all this into account, this analysis shows that linguistics provides knowledge about the location of humans in the political context of the space and time in which they speak. Knowledge about language also provides the individual ego with the mechanisms of expressing feelings and emotions that are relevant to the feelings and the emotions of other egos. In the same time humans need a common stimulus to urge them to express the same emotion. This is why it is extremely important to be aware of the common political background of todays world. In this respect, knowledge about language, as political knowledge about what is common about humans, is extremely important in the understanding of the universality of human nature and human (political) relationships.
Chapter 2
The Linguistic Political Approach
Language as Time-Space Political Knowledge (II)
Political theory depends on many other sciences, basically in the sphere of the humanities. The political aspects of language use are the subject of theorizing, without, though, considering lingustics as a reliable source for reliable conclusions. The achievements of linguistics per se as the basis of political research are often neglected, on the assumption that they are too distant from the general objectives of political theory. As Fairclough claims,
We live in a linguistic epoch, as major contemporary theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Jrgen Habermas have recognized in the increasing importance they have given to languages in their theories. (Fairclough 2)
The so-called linguistic turn finds a more sophisticated determination in Kristevas claim that
Following upon the phenomenological and existentialist shock of the postwar period, the sixties witnessed a theoretical ebullience that could roughly be summarized as leading to the discovery of the determinative role of language in all human sciences. (Kristeva vii)
11
THE LINGUISTIC POLITICAL APPROACH
Even more specifically:

Linguists, and especially those working in sociolinguistics (which is often said to to deal with language in its social context) have had quite to say about language and power, but they have not in my opinion done justice to the rich and complex interrelationships of language and power. (Fairclough 1)
Phillipson, who is one of the few names in political science to be in favor of matching it with linguistics, admits that:
Although there is no doubt about the importance of language in the functioning of such social institutions as education, the media, public administration and civil society in general, this does not mean that language has been a major concern of most political scientists. (Phillipson)
As Chilton claims:
At the micro level there are conflicts of interest, struggles for dominance and efforts at cooperation between individuals, between genders and between social groups of various kinds (Chilton).
And, further:
What is strikingly absent from conventional studies of politics is attention to the fact that the micro-level behaviors mentioned above are actually kinds of liguistic action that is, discourse. (Ibid.)
When involved in the analysis of the political background of language, most contemporary linguists seem to share the views of Chilton, who argues that
In linguistics it is now widely accepted that the human capacity for speech is genetically based, though activated in human social relations. What is controversial is how the genetic base itself evolved. Did it evolve as part of social intelligence? [In this view,] the language instinct would be intrinsically bound up with the political instinct... even if the language instinct is itself politics neutral...one has to assume that the cultural and culturally transmitted characteristics of human language observably serve...the needs of the political. (Chilton 5)
The apparent link between humans ability to talk and organize their existence in a polis (to use the Aristotelian term) has intrigued philosophers ever since classical times. As Chilton himself argues,
[t]he analysis of political discourse is scarcely new. The western classical tradition of rhetoric was in its various guises a means of codifying the way public orators used language for persuasive and other purposes. (Chilton 2004)
And, further:
Embedded in the tradition of western political thought there is in fact a view that language and politics are intimately linked at a fundamental level. It is not generally pointed out that when Aristotle gives his celebrated definition of humans as creatures whose nature is to live in a polis, in almost the same breath he speaks of the unique human capacity for speech. (Ibid.)
As the original text goes:

But obviously man is a political animal [politikon zoon], in a sense in which a bee is not, or any other gregarious animal. Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and she has endowed man alone among the animals with the power of speech. (Aristotle 60)
12
Aristotles argument makes Chilton ask himself,

But what does Aristotle mean by speech?
(Ibid. 5, emphasis added) And he immediately finds the answer given by Aristotle himself:
Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust. For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust, etc. (Ibid.)
As Chilton summarizes:
Aristotle states the just and the unjust is related to what is (deemed) useful and harmful, in the common view of the group. (Chilton ibid.)
By pointing at the link between the human abilities to speak and to live in a community, the Titan of Classical Philosophy determined the conventional character of language as part of the communal order:
For man is the best of animals when he has reached his full development, so he is worst of all when divorced from law and justice. Injustice armed is hardest to deal with; and though man is born with weapons which he can use in the service of practical wisdom and virtue, it is all too easy for him to use them for the most savage, the most unrighteous, and the worst in regard to sexual licence and gluttony. The virtue of justice is a feature of a state; for justice is the arrangement of the political association, and a sense of justice decides what is just. (Aristotle 61)
This statement, which holds all the features of a Platonic understanding of the importance of justice as the major virtue of the ideal communal life (Platos Agathon), definitely marks language as the main element of its political order. One can assume that the concept of logos is in the basis of the codification of law as the pillar of communal stability/integrity. Plato focuses on the issue of truth : falsehood as the socially constructed perceived face of reality which can be well supported by the following abstract from his Sophist:
Socrates: Then because speech, we saw, is true and false, and thinking is a dialogue of the mind with itself, and opinion is that completion of thought, and what we say by it seems is a combination of perception and opinion, it must be that because all of these are like speech, some thinking and opinion must also sometimes be false. (Plato)
One can assume that language functions as a codification of the human desire for order in the sense of dividing the world into right and wrong or just and unjust which develops into the more general: true or false (cf. below, the reference to Umberto Ecos The Name of The Rose). As such, it fits the Medieval Christian-feudal religious-political ideology until Renaissance time, when the religious affiliation moved in the direction of linking national consciousness with common national language. The ancient territorial communal principle was thus strenghtened by an emphasis on the specific language that marked the specific territory. This brought up the issue of triumph over Latin in most European cultures, with 13
THE LINGUISTIC POLITICAL APPROACH
the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio and the School of Pietro Bembo in Italy, Du Bellays Defence of the French Language in France and the Triumph of English over Latin in England, along with the works of, to mention just a few, Milton, Newton and, among many others, Shakespeare. This tendency flourished during the nineteenth century with the discovery of Sanskrit and the emergence and devlopment of Indo-European comparative-historical linguistics. One of the basic principles of this linguistic subbranch, the protolanguage reconstruction, contributed effectively not only to the rise of language nationaism but also to political nationalism in general, by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It can be inferred that politcal speculations on language, throughout history, were directed toward its use inside speaking societites to either maintain the communal order or resist order that comes from outside... What is missing in the existing literature of the political dimensions of language is reference to language as a historical continuum (in the Saussurean sense of langue = continuum of paorles). A pragmatic/discourse approach, matched with the historical one, demonstrates how the ethnolinguistic stratification of a certain community is temporally and territorially motivated within a dynamic political context.
14
Chapter 3
The Historical Approach I
The Political Connotation of Language Change
Diachronic linguistics as the study of language change successfully accounts for the changes in particular languages in the context of the political history of particular speech communities. By analyzing the historical/etymological structure of a given language, comparative linguistics tells a lot about the ethnic stratification of a society and has an ;important role in the identification of the (ethno) linguistic political background of these communities. A diachronic linguistic element in modern political analysis could play a significant role in the process of the establishment of political science as a serious domain of theoretical investigation. It can trace back the patterns by means of which language and politics were interrelated throughout history, leading, thus, toward general conclusions about the common rules which world societies have been following in their existence. This chapter deals with the political connotation of language change within the context of nineteenth-century comparative-historical linguistics. It is assumed that the comparative approach to language data is relevant to the ideology of nation building and the nation-state. Comparativist analysis of language change as the result of language convergence reveals that in the political hegemony of one nation over another one, language dominance is not necessarily the product of political or cultural superiority, but, rather, the result of the impact of a similar social, cultural and political environment. 15
THE HISTORICAL APPROACH I
The Comparative-Historical Approach As Theodora Bynon argues,

Although language change has now been studied systematically for a period of one hundred years and somewhat less systematically for a good deal longer that that, there is still a considerable amount of disagreement about its nature and motivation. (Bynon 1977)
The main reason for this disagreement, as the same author claims, lies in the conventional view that
Historical linguistics seeks to investigate and describe the way in which languages change or maintain their structure during the course of time; its domain therefore is language in its diachronic aspect. Descriptive linguistics on the other hand totally disregards time as a relevant factor in its investigations and attributes to the data a uniform status of simultaneity; its concern is therefore language in its synchronic aspect. (Ibid.)
In this respect, the justification for the claim to independent status of synchronic description derives...from the observation that the speakers for whom a particular language serves as a means of communication are in general...unaware of its historical dimension.
If , then, the linguist is to create a model of the code which the members of a speech community share and though which they communicate witth one another, they must surely be equally independent of all historical considerations. (Ibid.)
In the analysis of models of language development Bynon admits that the neogrammarian model was the earliest, and still consitutes the essential foundation upon which both the structuralist (or taxonomic) and the transformational-generative models were erected, these constituting no more than elaborations and modifications of it. They do, however, by adopting different theoretical positions with regard to a number of issues, present alternative hypotheses concerning the nature of language, which leads her to the identification of the basic issues of the neogrammarian model as follows:
Two main issues dominated the early course of historical linguistics, namely synchronic irregularity within individual languages and the nature of the resemblances existing between related languages. (Ibid.)
To develop principles of language change, according to William Labov, might seem

a quixotic undertaking...Historical linguistics is marked by the prevalence of contradictions and paradoxes that offer a rich array of challenges to the scholar who would resolve them. To how this might be done, it may be helpful to review some of the problems of interpreting historical data, and the methods used to deal with them. (Labov 1994; emphasis added)
In this respect, in the opinion of the same author,

The most famous argument over principles is certainly the controversy over the Neogrammarian principles of sound change, which motivates much of the research reported here... Many linguists still maintain that the Neogrammarian formulation of the principles of sound change gives historical and
16
comparative linguistics the firm foundation on which cumulative work can proceed...Yet while the practice of historical linguistics assumes the regularity of change, it is generally accepted that the word has its own history. (Ibd.)
Major neogrammarian theorists, such as Hock and Joseph (1996), claim they were strongly influenced by the work of contemporary phoneticians:
Realizing the difficulties of this approach, the neogrammarians came up with a second explanation: CHILDREN learn the basics of their first language without any instruction, simply by imitating the speech of their elders. In the process, they may misperceive the norms of their elders and come up with different norms of their own...Why should the deviations be cumulative in one direction? (Ibid.)
Further in the devlopment of this thesis the above-cited authors come to the conclusion that
The fundamental difficulty with all three of the explanations proposed by the neogrammarians is that they are based on thought experiements, not on the observations of changes as they actually take place. The reason is that the neogrammarians firmly believed that sound change is inobservable. (Ibid.)
That sound change, or whatever language change, is observable is the basic claim of Labov, and Hock and Joseph try to support the idea with reference to his famous Marthas Vineyard case:
Labov found that at the earliest stage, only a few words exhibited a variation between /a/ and a slightly more centralized variant, only in the diphtong /aw/ if followed by voiceless sounds, and only in the speech of a few individuals. Somewhere along the way, the variant with centralization was perceived by speakers as a symbol of identity, differentiating islanders from the mainlanders...When it had come to be perceived as socially relevant, the centralized variant began to get generalized along a number of different parameters... (Ibid.)
It can be assumed that contemprary views on the neogrammarian model of language change reveal disagreement as regards its grounds and mechanisms. The major problems can be summarized as follows: The conventional understanding of the Saussurean principle of the priority of the synchronic approach misleads contemporary linguistis into the direction of negligence of the synchronic-diachronic continuity in the existence of langue.
Saussures approach was to study the system synchronically as it were frozen in time (like a photograph) rather than diachronically in terms of its evolution over time (like a film). (Chandler 9)
As a result, modern linguistics tends to analyze language change as a given fact rather than as the result of a dynamic process. In this respect, Raymond Hickeys understanding of the place of language change in the overall evolution of language seems relevant to my approach, which supports the idea that Saussure did not deny that language is constantly changing:
It is an obvious truism to say that, given the dynamic nature of language, change is everpresent. However, language change as a concept and as a subject of linguistic investigation is often regarded as something separate from the
17
study of language in general. Recent research into the topic, however, has strived to highlight the continual nature of change and to emphasise that the synchronic and diachronic views of change can be unified, providing a panchronic perspective in which the relevance of small changes observed in the present can be shown to hold for larger-scale changes in the past. Furthermore, research in the last three or four decades has been concerned with understanding the precise mechanisms of change just as much as with providing linguistically acceptable accounts of attested changes. (Hickey 2001)
Language Change, Comparative-Historical Linguistics and Politics As has already been mentioned above, consideration of language issues for theoretical political speculations has been, in the majority of research cases, restricted to the issue of language use as regards the internal and external needs of speaking societies. To paraphrase this statement according to todays socio-political language context, the main direction in the analysis of ethnic tongues is basically toward the analysis of their status 1. Inside the nation-state, which implies research on the issues of language as a landmark of ethnic or national identity, ethnic vs. national languages, national language vs. state language, national, state and official language, minority languages and, finally, language nationalism and its association with language purism and language planning as a specific language policy; and 2. outside the nation-state: where the socio-political connotation of the process of language contact (language convergence) is often regarded as a potential threat of a certain (politically) hegemonic language dominating the national identity of specific contingent ones and is associated with language imperialism. (Anastassov 2007) The proposed inside : outside nation-state opposition should be understood as follows:
inside (imagined as the pure, authentic, genuine) outside (imagined as jeopardizing the pure, authentic, genuine)
What is common about these two antagonistic perspectives is the belief that there exists in the evolution of ethniclanguages a status of absoute purity. Hence the idea of language convergence as jeopardizing this status of purity. Using Schiffmans idea of language policy as a belief system in the context of the nation-state, we can easily understand the conventional idea of language as the landmark of national identity as an assumption that
there exists somewhere, perhaps in the past or in a particular textual tradition, a state of purity that the language can aspire to return to. (Schiffman)
18
The juxtaposition of contingent language vs. (politically) hegemonic language reflects comparative-historical views on national language within the context of nation building and nation-state in the sense that the above-mentioned pure ethnic languages belong to a certain specific territory. The process of language convergence reflects, in fact, a more general process of political hegemony of one community over another that results in the emergence of a contingent community which speaks a new form of the evolution of its language. Given the specific political situation of the historical period comparative-historical linguistics exaggerates the importance of language reconstruction in the direction parent language daughter language, thus underestimating the role of language convergence in the diachronic analysis of language change. This assumption, by itself, can easily lead to an una linguauna patria type of language nationalism. In fact, given the history of any existing language on earth, there is no evidence for an entirely authentic ethnic language. A possible attempt to define what makes a language really unique, from a strictly linguistic point of view could be demonstrated, for example, by means of maps of isoglosses at any systematic level of language, which would reveal that, firstly, there are no strict boundaries between languages, let alone any correspondence between languages and nation-state borders. This is where the attempts of language purists to excavate an absolutely pure stage in the history of any language totally fail. The uniqueness of any language is not endangeredon the contrary, it could even be enrichedby the penetration of alien language elements, which become an inseparable part of its own system. In the case of, say, bilingual socieities, the different languages which speech communities use can exist there without any damage to their specific character. When languages are in contact, understanding is possible when the two speech communities have too much in common in terms of cultural interaction (traditions, lifestyle, etc.), so that for a longer period of time they get to know each others language building bricks. In other words,
If we want to understand the role of language in peoples lives we must go beyond the study of their grammar and venture into the world of social action, where words are embedded in and constitutive of specific cultural activities such as telling a story, asking for a favor, greeting, showing respect, praying, giving directions, reading, insulting, praising, arguing in court, making a toast, or explaining a political agenda. (Duranti 2001:1)
We may then assume, then, that in terms of language specificity there are no absolutely pure ethnic languages, because there are no genetically absolutely pure ethnoi. Since, as we have pointed out before, specific lanaguages have no strict borders, it will be easy to infer that borders between separate languages themselves would also blur. What is more, it would be enough to
19
fix these borders if they were given once forever. The big problem here is that they constantly change along with other changes in the structure of the different ethnoi. In the history of humankind there have been lots of cases where one language becomes predominant in an area with a mixed population. A historical approach shows that, when there is an initial political reason for the language dominance, it often, within time, loses it, and starts functioning as the symbol of the socio-cultural integrity of a ceratin society. Language change has always been the creative element in human knowledge about language to push it ahead. As a result, language innovation could be determined as the legitimate, implicit human (= non-linguistic) knowledge about language, because it works in the political deixis of here and now. Homo loquens would locate himself then in space by means of a temporal dimension: now goes hand in hand with here whilst then is associated with there. It will be easy to infer that, in terms of space, he will be located in an environment where he will share the same type of cultural experience and react to it with the same type of communicative creativity as the rest of the other representatives of the same species. The implication is that in an environment where our talking man can express the same type of feelings and emotions as the rest of the co-inhabitants, it is not the linguistic authenticity or purity which makes interaction possible, but the common political background which ties the population of a certain area into a society with its own cultural parameters. So, on an interethnic scale, the more the inhabitants share equivalent cultural values, the more they tend do develop a real group identity, not necessarily associated with group language. It is important to clarify here that linguists often tend to exaggerate the famous synchronic priority and totally neglect what Saussure claimed about synchronic : diachronic continuity. My understanding of the postulate about synchronicity is that language (or rather speech, to use Saussures preference) functions in the actual political time and space (as argued above), on the synchronic hic/nunc principle. Indeed, but what linguists forget (or ignore for the sake of comfort) is that in fact there is no such thing as static-stable synchronic phase in the evolution of a language. As has been shown above, in the eighteenth century scholars were already aware of the illusory character of language stability. This is a statement that, again, proves that language serves the political needs of society: it functions in order to maintain a certain order, which is in fact ephemeral and permanently changeable, following the stronger inner order of the dynamics of human interaction...
20
Chapter 4
The Historical Approach II
Humans as Political Animals and the Origin of Language
The reference to Aristotles Politics above points at the Greco-Roman tradition in the perception of humans as capable of speaking with each other and living with each other in communities. The term political animal (zoon politikon), however, implies something more than just communal life that integrates the members of a certain community into an entity with its own parameters. Language order as well as social, political, cultural and belief-system order are referred to here as matters of convention. Language functions within this communal/conventional system of order as the major instrument of (pragmatic) understanding.
A language, as a collective phenomenon, takes the form of a totality of imprints in everyones brain, rather like a dictionary of which each individual has an identical copy...Thus it is something which is in each individual, but is nonetheless common to all. (Saussure 19)
In other words: human society is a group of people who live together and talk about the way they live together by means of the language that they have agreed to use together so that they can finally survive/coexist together.
A common languge connects the members of a community into an information-sharing network with formidable collective powers. (Pinker 16)
21
THE HISTORICAL APPROACH II
Pinkerss information-sharing network with collective powers among members of a (speaking, human) community should be understood, in the context of the present research, in the following manner:
Community = Group of Individuals who share the same territory and agree on the rules of sharing (by means of language) for the sake of understanding and coexistence
In this respect, the neo-Marxist understanding of the origin of language is partially acceptable when it comes to the way Holborow tries to revitalize the classical Marxist position on the social basis of language with reference to the works of Volosinov:
The development of language and consciousness were linked because both were aspects of the process of modern humans coping collectively with the material world around them. (Holborow 17)
And, further:
For Volosinov, the signing process is the means by which consciousness takes shape and is socially constructed. Signs emerge in the process of interaction between one individual consciousness and another; not just any two human beings but between two who are organized socially, and part of a social group...Consciousness, then, does not arise spontaneously from nature, nor as the external coating of some inner spirit; it materializes through signs created by humans in the process of social intercourse. (Holborow 25)
Volosinov himself demonstrates his Marixst position by means of the following statement, which points at the determinative/motivating role of the particular means of communication of the specific social milieu:
The immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine and determine from within, so to speak the structure of an utterance. (Volosinov 132)
The above statement is based on Volosinovs critical attitude toward Saussures definition of langue as the conceptual thinking of series of paroles :
The word is oriented toward an addressee, toward who that addressee might be.There can be no such thing as an abstract addressee, a man unto himself, so to speak. (Ibid. 131, emphasis added)
The need for an addressee, which Marxists determine as an inevitable/unavoidable conditio sine qua non priority of the collective to the individual in terms of social experience: With regard to the potential addressee, a distinction can be made between two poles, two extremes between which an experience can be apprehended and ideologically structured, tending now toward the one, now toward the other. Let us label these two extremes the I-experience and the we-experience. (Ibid. 133)
22
Volosinov sees the juxtaposition between the I-experience and the We-experience in the following way:
The I-experience actually tends toward extermination: the nearer it approaches the extreme limit, the more it loses its ideological structuredness and, hence, its apprehensible quality, reverting to the physiological reaction of the animal. In its course toward this extreme, the experience relinquishes all its potenatialities, all outcroppings of social orientation, and, therefore, also loses its verbal delineation. Single experiences or whole groups of experiences can approach this extreme, relinquishing, in doing so, their ideological clarity and structuredness and testifying to the inability of the consciousness to strike social roots. The we-experience is not by any means a nebulous herd experience; it is differentiated. Moreover, ideological differentiation, the growth of consciousness, is in direct proportion to the firmness and reliability of social orientation. The stronger, the more organized, the more differentiated the collective in which an individual orients himself, the more vivid and complex his inner world will be. (Ibid. 133-134)
The above citations sound quite applicable to the the main thesis of this research. What follows, however, sounds like an unexpected contradictio in adjecto:
A special kind of character marks the individualistic self-experience [emphasis in original]. It does not belong to the I-experience in the strict sense of the form as defined above. The individualistic experience is fully differentiated and structured. Individualism is a special ideological form of the we-experience of the bourgeois class. The individualistic type of experience derives from a steadfast and confident social orientation. Individualistic confidence in oneself, ones sense of personal value, is drawn not from within, not from the depths of ones personality, but from the outside world. An analogous structure is presented in solitary self-experience (the ability and strength to stand alone in ones rectitude), a type cultivated by Romain Rolland and, to some extent, by Tolstoj. The pride involved in this solitude also depends on the we. It is a variant of the we-experience characteristic of the modern-day Western intelligentsia. (Ibid. 135)
Volosinovs standpoint points out issues of fundamental importance, such as the type of relationship between the I and the We within the borders of the community. Basic talking communities are more likely to have comprised individuals (rather than collectively functioning robots), who, for the sake of survival, were forced to stick to each other and obey certain series/ types of rules/order. In fact, Marxist philosophy, as the above references to Volosinov and Holborow reveal, emphasizes the link between language and consciousness as the result of the social organization of the comunicators/interactors, with an emphasis on the We-Experience against the I-Experience. The statement
there is no word/language without an addressee
qualifies human language as totally dependent on the We-Experience. Within this context, the theoretical foundation of my work depends on a serious reconsideration of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Social Contract and his views on the origin of language: 23
It is not hunger or thirst, but love, hate, pity, anger that draw out the first voices. We follow in silence the prey on which we want to feed, but to move a young heart, to repel an unjust aggressor, for this nature dictates the accents, the cries, the pleas. And so the most ancient words were invented and so it was that the first languages were musical and passionate before being simple and methodical(Rousseau)
Rousseaus romantic attitude toward the origin of language aside, what counts in his philosophy is the idea that language can be regarded as a way of expressing emotion, which implies that it can be uttered without the need for an addressee, a need that comes second in the development from single to shared emotion. Rousseaus understanding of human language as shared emotion allows us to draw a certain parallels between art (more explicitely, music and visual art) and linguistically marked realia. A parallel with visual art (cf. the previous chapter) in the prehistoric cave paintings, for example, taken as initial-primitive examples of art, supports the idea of the emotional experience of the ego, projected on the cave wall and shared, as a reference, with yet another ego as a part of the process of interaction. Therefore, language as knowledge, like art as knowledge, apart from everything else that it is believed to be, is a human desire for selfobservation that really integrates individuals, with a common understanding of the object of self-observation as a referent. In the process of the exchange of emotions/feelings, individual members of communities interact when they produce and perceive art in the following way:
PRODUCER expressed emotion RECEIVER received emotion
Without any sophisticated theory of the semiotics of art and comunication, it is apparent that the producer of art projects an emotion outside himself that might, or might not, be interpreted in the way it was initially intended.
PRODUCER expressed emotion intention REFERENT interpretation RECEIVER received emotion
24
or:
PRODUCER expressed emotion intention REFERENT interpretation RECEIVER received emotion
The item of art functions as a referent that can be understood from the different perspectives of the producer and the receiver. In his research on the language of music, Deryck Cooke argues with some theoreticians who claim that it conveys no meaning from composer to listener. His main concern is that music is a kind of art that is comparable with painting, architecture and, mainly, literature. Literature, when regarded as language interaction (communication), shows, in his opinion, striking similarities with music, in terms of its structural elements that are creatively used to transfer feelings and emotions from author to recipient. In his arguments, Cooke assumes that language communication in its origin is based on the exchange of emotional feelings that later in the evolution of human intellect developed in articulate codes. Comparison with music, as he claims, reveals that in each case there is a creative use of codes, based on sounds, which, when specifically structured, produces pieces of art that are loaded with meaning. Deeper analysis of the shift of this meaning from composer to listener makes Cooke speculate on the possibilities of the misintepretation of the initial intention of the author of the musical piece. This part of my study contributes to the issue with reference to discourse/pragmatic analysis of the type of relationship between intended message and intepreted message in language interaction on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the semiotic value of literary texts as open works of art (Umberto Eco) and the syntagmatic/paradigmatic axial basis of intertextuality (Kristeva). According to Cooke, the analogy between music and language can be best understood on the primitive level as follows:
The most feasible theory of the origin of language is that it began as inarticulate, purely emotional cries of pleasure and pain. In literature, the inarticulate cries of primitive man have become elaborated into words, i.e., sounds which possess associations with objects, ideas and feelings clear, rationally intelligible, but arbitrarty associations; whereas in music, they have become elaborated into notes, i.e., sounds which have clear, but not rationally intelligible associations, rather inherent assocations, with the basic emotions of mankind... (Cooke 26)
25
Julia Kristevas definition of desire in language integrates the two perspectives from a postmodern point of view:
a passion for ventures with meaning and its materials (ranging from colors to sounds, beginning with phonemes, syllables, words), in order to carry a theoretical experience to that point where apparent abstraction is revealed as the apex of archaic, oneiric, nocturnal or corporeal concreteness, to that point where meaning has not yet appeared (the child), no longer is (the insane person), or else functions as a restructuring (writing, art). (Kristeva x)
It can be concluded that the communicability of language and music is based on their capacity to make a listener share emotion with its inititator:
Now when Mendelssohn comes to give examples of thoughts (Gedanken) which music gives rise to, we find he is using the word in the generalized sense of mental activities, and in fact means feelings...And those who have found music expressive of anything at all (the majority of mankind) have found it expressive of emotions. (Cooke 12, emphasis in original)
All this still does not shed enough light on the process of transfer of meaning in language and music. Cooke agrees with Hindemiths theoretical speculations:
The truth is that as single tones they (musical sounds) are mere acoustical facts which do not evoke any genuine musical reaction. No musical effect can be obtained unless the tension between at least two different singles tones has been perceived. (Cooke 27)
And further:
Of course, a piece of music cannot be made out of one note... (Ibid.)
The author identifies the main task of this part of his research as follows:
The task facing us is to discover exactly how music functions as a language...Beginning with the basic material notes of definite pitch we must agree with Hindemith that musical works are built out of the tensions between such notes...[T]he setting up of such tensions and the colouring them by the characterizing agents of tone-colour and texture, constitute the whole apparatus of musical expresssion. (Ibid., emphasis in original)
A parallel with language interaction shows striking similarities: A SPEAKER shares a feeling/emotion with a HEARER while projecting it/them out of his own mind by means of linguistic signs:
SPEAKER expressed emotion HEARER received emotion
26
As in art, a SPEAKER (in language interaction) constructs a message with a certain intention, which is supposed to reach the HEARER and be interpreted by him:
SPEAKER expressed emotion intention interpretation REFERENT HEARER received emotion
And, finally, the emotion expressed by the SPEAKER might or might not be interpeted by the HEARER in the way it was intended:
SPEAKER expressed emotion intention REFERENT HEARER received emotion interpretation
SPEAKERS and HEARERS might/might not come to an absolutely identical REFERENT, which may, indeed, cause misunderstanding but may creatively contribute to the flexibility of interaction where the area of the
optional interpretation of the reference
offers a variety of different ways of interpreting the initially intended message. This is what explains, for example, the possibility of many ways to say something, in terms of style and register, genre, paraphrasing and ambiguous figural and metaphorical meaning. Language interaction as shared emotion (based on its self-expressive function) plays an important role in the optional intepretation of the intended messages in the relationship:
SPEAKER : HEARER
which, in the context of communal life, makes language creativity a source of possible imbalance of political power. As agreed above, the Speaker plays with language, and, what is even more, the Hearer understands him, even if the linguistic sign used by the former is absolutely new for him. In order to communicate successfully, both
SPEAKER and HEARER
27
need the common perspective of the common political environment in order to understand each other. In modern linguistics this type of contact between the two participants in the discourse reflects Jakobsons understanding of language functions as context dependent:
REFERENTIAL/CONTEXT EMOTIVE----------PHATIC/CONTACT----------CONATIVE METALINGUAL/CODE
(Jakobson 1958) By context-dependent I understand here the socially-based conventional interaction of individuals (or the same type of pragmatic-deictic hic/nunc context that I am using here as a term). The poetic function of language, then, as a combination of the expressive/emotive and the metalingual functions is, as Yaguello claims, speaker oriented, which means that the I-experience is given priority to the weexperience in the sense that the emotive/expressive function of language predetermines the two members of a discourse as shifters, i.e., their independent attitude toward the referent because speaker and hearer function individually in the conventional act of communication.
SPEAKER-----------REFERENT------------HEARER
I and you alternate during dialogue and for this reason are called shifters.
(Yaguello 8) Further on, Yagiello extends Jakobsons model of the poetic function of language in the sense of innovation in language (or what Volosinov called the generative quality) as the result of the speakers ability to play with it:
The word play in English has (at least) the following meanings: as a verb to take part in a game; to perform; to engage in activity for amusement; as a noun rule governed activity; a text for performance; leeway, latitude, freedom. (Yaguello ibid. 16-17)
This gives us, as she claims,

two apparently contradictory sets of meanings. On the one hand, there is the idea of elasticity, freedom, leeway and, on the other, the idea of rules or constraints. Indeed, it is a defining feature of play that it combines unruliness with rules, freedom with limits. There are constraints placed on language, yet if we could take no liberties with it, it would merely be a mechanical code.
28
Only formal or artificial languages forbid play. Language has a certain play in it, in the same way we might say there is play in a mechanism or a structure. And, if play is, above all, a way of distancing oneself from something, then playing with words is a way of distancing oneself from language and, therefore, from oneself. (Ibid.)
The above citation from Yaguello poses the question about language as play:
Why is play with language possible?
As previously mentioned, humans are not mechanical robots. It is argued here that language order, as a convention between individuals, is marked by a certain inequality in the process of interaction. If we agree with Yaguellos observation about playing with words as a way of distancing oneself from language and, therefore, from oneself, in his desire for distancing from the ego system, Homo loquens has to balance his capacity for play with language with the standards of the language order accepted by convention. Or, in other (and simpler) words, he has to keep the balance between
the restriction of the rules and the capacity of breaking them
The latter gives him the chance to come up with his own independent interpretation of a received message, whereas in the case of the forwarded one, it gives the speaker the power of maneuvering and manipulation as the two basic elements of political persuasion.
29
Chapter 5
The Semiosis of Political Division of Space (I) The Home
Language and the Territorial Basis of Identity (I)
Home as a Place That I Belong To One of the major arguments of this research (as described before) is that human language is politically motivated by means of the attachment of the speakers of a specific community to a specific territory. The (previolusly discussed) hic/nunc deictic principle attaches me to my community by means of (emotional) attachment to the shared territory. This claim can be strongly supported by a variety of different examples, often linguistically illustrated: Slavic and Germanic tribes have always shared neighboring territories. In the Slavic language family the common root * tjut (from Indo-European * teut) developed into the following lexemes: Bulgarian ud, Russian uoj, Polish cudzy, all with the common meaning different, foreign, alien, even hostile. At the same time, the Indo-European *teut is the basis in the formation of Germanic Teuton(ic) in ethnonyms such as German Deutsch, or English Dutch. One can assume that for ancient Slavs their German neighbors were potential foes. All the Turks who migrated to Turkey after the massive ethnic cleansing around the Balkans in the 1980s refer to their native countries (Kosova, Macedonia, Bulgaria) as the land where they were born. That is why a Turk who has emigrated from Bulgaria would always claim that (s)he comes from 31
THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE (I) THE HOME
Bulgaria, but would never agree to be called a Bulgarian Turk. What they insist that they share with authentic Bulgarians is expressed by the Turkish eski toprak, which means somebody I used to share the same land/territory with in the past. Throughout time, this attachment to the native land underwent different types of modifications until it finally emerged on the stage of history as the nation-state. The idea of the nation-as-home-that-I-belong-to flourished, as is well known, during the nineteenth century, with the development of European romantic nationalism. The process of nation building upon linguistic, cultural, historical and religious unity became so intensive that it finally grew into fierce antagonism, which in turn prepared the ground for the catastrophic events of the twentieth century. This is what causes Ross Pooles confusion when he exclaims:
Many people have been prepared to sacrifice, not only themselves but those dear to them, and have put the claims of the nation ahead of the demands of religion, political commitment and morality. We need to ask: What is it about national identity which has rendered these claims and sacrifices so terribly plausible? (Poole 2003:271)
In the search for an appropriate answer to this question, Poole suggests the following argument that seems to support my previous claim, namely:
Another aspect of the strength of a national identity lies in the richness of the cultural resources which are employed in forming the conception of national community. This identity provides a land in which we are at home, a history which is ours, and privileged access to a vast heritage of culture and creativity. It not only provides us with the means to understand this heritage; it also assures us that it is ours. (Ibid. 272, emphasis added)
In the case of home as locus that I belong to it is apparently the decitic hic which motivates the emotional attachment to it, according to the above cited statements. On the other hand, however, in the history of our world, as Poole describes it, there is no evidence for a pure or authentic nation that can claim a land as the appropriate locus in the process of the building of a nation-state. A long quote from Daniel Defoes The True-Born Englishman (which I take the liberty of borrowing from Benedict Anderson) explicitly illustrates the subject:
Thus from a Mixture of all kinds began, / That Hetrogeneous Thing, An Englishman... From whence a Mongrel half-bred Race there came, / With neither Name nor Nation, Speech or Fame. (quoted in Anderson 1991 xi)
All of the above points out the issue of the ethnic structure of the nationstate and the emotional attitude toward it. The problem, as shown above, is that as there are no ethnically pure, authentic or genuine nations, a national state would always imply the existence of a majority vs. minority(ies)within its official borders. It is important here to understand the grounds of the emotional attitude of the minor population the motivation of which is not easy to grasp.
32
In one of my bus trips from Sofia to Istanbul, while waiting for the boring customs procedures to finish, I started a chat with Sibel, a young lady now living in Bursa. Turkey is where I permanently live, yes, she said with a sigh. But, my real home is back there, pointing at the Bulgarian side. Any time I see the Bulgarian national flag I feel like crying. Mehmet refused to change his name in 1984, as the authorities required at that time. In 1989 he and all his family immigrated to Turkey. When they settled in a little town on the Marmara coast they used to go every night to the small harbor and look at the starry sky, mesmerized by one of the stars, which, they believed, pointed at exactly the place where their native Plovdiv should be. What is it that makes people like Sibel and Mehmet so attached to their Bulgarian homeland? Both average Turks and the average Bulgarians have always lived together, each side respecting the specific identity of the other. Even during the period of Ottoman dominance the places of mixed Bulgarian-Turkish population were well known for peaceful coexistence. There were, indeed, in more recent times, additional socio-political factors that aimed at the integration of ethnic Turks to the bigger social group of ethnic Bulgarians under the Communist regime. Immediately after World War II, following the ideology of proletarian internationalism, Communist authorities tolerated the development of Turkish culture in Bulgaria, stimulating Turks to open schools and theaters, publish books and newspapers, etc. Moreover, some of them became members of the Communist party, which gave them the confidence that they belonged to the better part of society. All this collapsed when this manifestation of postwar Communist ideology turned into nationalism in the late sixties and early seventies. In the mid-eighties it reached its climax with the so-called Rebirth Process, when Bulgarian Turks were forced to change their names to Bulgarian ones. On the surface, it was an attempt to deny the existence of the Tukish population in Bulgaria, based on the idea that it was a population that had lost its genuine national identity by being forcibly converted to Islam during the Ottoman conquest, and, therefore, that it should be adopted back into the big Bulgarian family by picking up genuine Bulgarian names. By forcing them to do so, Communist authorities tried to persuade them that they were genetically part of the Bulgarian ethnos. More deeply, the Bulgarian Communist regime at that time was in crisis and needed a scapegoat for its failures. Depriving Turks of the right to have their names was planned to initiate yet another step forward: depriving them of the right to equally share with the rest of the genuine Bulgarians the same land where they were born, and finally to make them voluntarily leave the country. Those who resisted, like Mehmet or the parents of Sibel, had to leave the country in 1989. By resisting, the Turks stuck to the jus soli rule, maintaining their right to be equally the children of the same land where they were born. The had agreed to be part of a society that treated them as equals, because they believed in their right to be treated so. At the same time they respected their 33
own ethnic identity, sharing the same social environment with the rest of the population of the nation-state. Once this feeling was disrespected, they resisted, because their right to be different within the borders of their common habitat was abused, though still considering themselves part of the same land where they were born. The socio-cultural background that Turks from Bulgaria shared with the rest of the Bulgarians played a significant role in the development of their territorial identity their attachment to the land that they were not only born in, but also shared equally with everybody else, living equally under the same conditions. The emotional attachment that Turks from Bulgaria feel toward Bulgaria could now be regarded from the perspective of language as a landmark of ethnic identity: they normally refer to themselves as Turks who were born in Bulgaria and not as Bulgarian Turks. Considering that, historically, the concepts of ethnic identity and language identity are quite often confused, one can easily assume that in this case, it was the Bulgarian language that integrated them with the rest of the inhabitants of the same land, whereas their own Turkish one kept the diversity within the integrity, balancing between the different and the common. This is not an isolated case: all throughout Europe different ethnoi speaking different languages recognize themselves as diverse (French, Italian, Austrian, etc.) within the common (European). Home as a Place That We All Belong To The subject of this part of my analysis is the linguistic background of the concept of pan-European language as a possible threat to the cultural identity of the different nation-states making up the present and prospective members of the EU. It investigates the interdependence between the different languages that are spoken in Europe and European identity. More specifically, it deals with the fear of any specific language predominating over the rest, a fear that stimulates the emergence of extreme ideas, ranging from a pan-European pidgin to the use of an artificial (Esperanto-type) means of communication. It is assumed that the socio-cultural background that most EU members share predetermines the formation of an European group identity, where a common language, as a secondary one, would play a much less significant role in the process. The first step to make, in the search of an appropriate definition of European identity, is to agree on:
What is Europe?
A question that Michael Wintle cautiously asks himself in his impressive speech on the political associations throughout history of the ancient Greek myth about the Phoenician princess Europa, abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull, and Europe the continent. By analyzing visual images, he tries to find appropriate answers to vital questions, such as,
34
What has been the interaction between visual images of Europe in a more conventional sense, such as European culture, European civilization, or European politics: in a word, European identity? (Wintle 5)
Wintle, like many others who are practically and theoretically involved in the building up of the European community, are often at a crossroads as to how to define common European values in balance with European diversity. I have deliberately chosen Wintles parallel between European art and European identity as a starting point for my research, because language, as a human prerequisite based on symbols, is not far away from art imagery, as part of the cultural identity of a group, or groups, that share neighboring territories. In this respect, Europe, inhabited by so many genetically different ethnoi (speaking different languages), is a place where, paradoxically enough, each separate ethnos proclaims itself European, often with disrespect for other neighbors who share the same continental territory. This is how in, the case of Europe, the antagonism between We and the Other developed into dangerous and aggressive nationalism, especially during the period between Napoleon and Hitler.
There can be no doubt that the awareness of many Europeans is much more national, and increasingly regional, than EuropeanBut the predominance of national awareness has caused too many evils in Europes recent history and goes on causing them. In his emotional last speech to the European parliament, Francois Mitterrand pronounced those words in which for Europe, he associated nationalism with war. (Banus 158)
And, further on:

The strength of this withdrawal nationalism stems from a very potent mixture: the atavistic fear of losing what is ones own when it comes in contact with what is someone elsesThus, the establishment of group identity is often achieved by means of differentiation from other group identitiesso that often the notion of alterity becomes synonymous with that of antagonism. Internal cohesion, in the ideal nation-state model, required not only cultural, and if possible, linguistic unity, but also the referent foreign as a screen to reflect that cohesionThis is how the concept of cultural identity became consecrated over a long period as a synonym of national identityTo oppose bull-headed nationalismEuropean awareness should be reinforced, because it means an opening of horizons. It corresponds to the reality of cultures, where continual interchanges have produced the phenomena of blending races, changed habits and mentalities, while yet maintained identitiesliving together, cooperation and cultural interaction increase the possibilities and the creativity of each people, and they do not cause changes to any culture, let alone threaten any language, nationality or culture with extinction It is evident, that where there are contacts, dialogue, interchange, there can be change. But not every change means risking the loss of identity. Because identity is a more flexible and multilevel entity, and not a monolithic one in which different elements are unable to coexist. (Ibid., emphasis added)
Consequently,
Europe especially has been living for many centuries in continual interchange, in a continuous interaction between the cultures in assuming elements that have become common without, thereby, losing diversity.[A]nd the presence of characters and stories from different national sources in the cultural life of
35
so many citizens has presented no problem for plurality; rather, it has been undoubtedly an enriching factor and a distinguishing mark of the peoples Europe. (Ibid).
Common cultural heritage (commonly shared cultural constructs) shapes cultural identity on its way to group identity.
How is language part of the cultural identity of a certain group, then?
The role of language in society and politics, as shown above, often holds secondary position in modern political theory. In fact, language analysis can contribute to the successful investigation of unique or specific languages and it can, thus, support the idea that national language (with its assumed significance in the process of nation building) should be reconsidered in the context of building a united Europe. I should agree here with Harold Schiffman, who claims that purely linguistic and language-policy analytical aims often overlap in the field of semantics, where the cultural load turns language code into real language.
[I]f language policy is not deeply rooted in the linguistic culture of a language group, it is not going to fit the needs of its speakers as well. Language policy is therefore not just a text, a sentence or two in the legal code, it is a belief system, a collection of ideas and decisions and attitudes about language. It is of course a cultural construct, but it is either in tune with the values of the linguistic culture or it is in serious trouble(Schiffman 56).
Therefore, language policy should be able to define the linguistic culture of a language group. Using Schiffmans idea of language policy as a belief system in the context of the nation-state, we can easily understand the conventional idea of language as the landmark of national identity as an assumption that
there exists somewhere, perhaps in the past, or in a particular textual tradition, a state of purity that the language can aspire to return to. (Ibid)
This assumption, by itself, can easily lead to an una lingua una patria type of language nationalism, which does not give an appropriate answer to the question:
Where do multilingual societies enter this scheme?
Given the history of any existing language on earth, there is no evidence for an entirely authentic ethnic language. A possible attempt to define what makes a language really unique would reveal that there are no strict boundaries between languages, let alone any correspondence between languages and nation-state borders (cf. above). This is where the attempts of language purists to excavate an absolutely pure stage in the history of any language definitely fail. The uniqueness of any language is not endangeredon the contrary, it could even be enrichedby the penetration of alien language elements, which become an inseparable part of its own system. In the case of, say, bilingual societies, the different languages which speech communities use can exist there without any damage to their specific character. When 36
languages are in contact, understanding is possible when the two speech communities have too much in common in terms of cultural interaction (traditions, lifestyle, etc.), so that for a longer period of time they get to know each others language building bricks. Since, as I have pointed out before, specific languages have no strict borders, it will be easy to infer that borders between separate languages themselves would also blur. Furthermore, it would be enough to fix these borders if they were given once forever. The big problem here is that they constantly change along with other changes in the political structure of the different ethnoi. It will be easy to infer that in terms of space Homo loquens will be located in an environment where he will share the same type of cultural experience with the other representatives of the same species and react to it with the same type of communicative creativity. To paraphrase what has already been stated before: the implication is that in an environment where our talking man can express the same type of feelings and emotions as the rest of the co-inhabitants, it is not the linguistic authenticity or purity which makes interaction possible, but the common background that ties up population of a certain area into a society with its own cultural parameters. So, on an interethnic scale, the more the inhabitants share equivalent cultural values, the more they tend to develop a real group identity, even though it may not necessarily be associated with group language. Europe has for a long time shared common cultural constructs with no common language as a must. There are plenty of examples from literature, music, painting and architecture:
Without the Italian, Petrarch, or the Frenchman, Ronsard, for example, it is impossible to imagine Shakespeares sonnets; without a theological debate of Spanish Baroque it would be impossible to imagine a European phenomenon like Mozarts Don Giovanniwithout the Schlegel brothers in GermanySpain would have never rediscovered its own Baroque drama; and a long et cetera that can turn the hero of an eighth-century song into the protagonist of one of the twentieth-century novels said to be decisive for the history of literature (James Joyces Ulysses).While, during the Baroque era, Italian architects not only built churches in Prague, Vienna or Madrid, they also prepared the scenery for plays in the Spanish Court of Aranjuez; a Greek painter sojourned in Italy and set himself in Spain (Domenicos Theotocopuli, better known as El Greco); Goethes work would be unthinkable without his trip to Italy; from his native Hamburg, Brahms moved to Vienna, where he discovered the Hungarian world; and the Viennese, Mahler, in the third movement of his first symphony, uses the theme of a French childrens song (Frre Jacques, Frre Jacques, dormez-vous?). (Enrique Bans, Ibid)
As mentioned above, throughout human history there have been lots of cases where societies were shaped on the basis of different ethnic strata with their different linguo-cultural properties. What makes the specific socium is not, therefore, the commonly shared language but the commonly shared cultural experience. In a United Europe, where the population
37
increasingly shares a similar cultural environment, the language-identity criterion gradually loses its relevance and gives way to any kind of lingua franca, providing understanding. Today, most European interaction that requires a common language is basically maintained in English (although French and German are also widely used). Frequently appearing opinions describe English and its growing influence as the result of the political, economic and military power of (mainly) the United States. Many claim that it negatively affects the cultural independence of the separate national languages by penetrating alien elements with alien cultural connotation into their language systems. As for the needs of multilingual Europe, there are many who would argue that English is not the most appropriate means of pan-European communication. French show signs of nostalgic reference back to the times when it was used much more in the world of diplomacy. The politically neutral character of Esperanto seems to be a popular option for many people. They tend to underestimate the fact it failed to become the common means of language interaction. The reason is that there are no political criteria to integrate Esperanto native speakers into an Esperanto group identity because of the lack of the territorial principle that was discussed above. The use of such a common means of language interaction is often based on political factors. But even if there is an initial political reason for the language dominance, it often loses it over time and starts functioning as the symbol of socio-cultural integrity of a certain society:
In the thirteenth century, French was still spoken at the English court, and literature was being written in French for the nobility of England; but it is this century that sees the tipping of the balance away from French and back to English. Although French was for a long time the prestige langauge in England, it was never the mother tongue of the majority of the population. (Barber 141)
This part of my study deals with the position of the language of the conqueror within the context of the everyday social communication of the dominated territory. It is assumed that a political hegemony of one nation over another is (often) followed by language-culture dominance, which over time develops into a specific, independent, characteristic feature of the region. Moreover, it is also claimed that a possible foreign language domination is not always necessarily the product of political superiority.The everlasting strong need of global society for a common means of communication (an international language) often goes, as shall be proved, beyond the political connotaion of language power, and comes to be used to the best advantage of the trade-culture integration of a certain area. This was the case with The Mediterranean Lingua Franca The term lingua franca suggests (for the non-specialist) a means of communication with a possible French background. In the case shown above, Norman-French, as the language of the superior class, comes up with socio-cultural characteristics that have existed in the English language ever 38
since the eleventh century. It may, therefore, seem tempting to assume that French as the language of cultural dominance (as used in the term lingua franca) could have been evoked by a possible French political dominance. Strangely enough, the term was not coined in Britain, where we should have expected it, but in the Mediterranean region, as a Romance Pidgin used in official records on account of trade contacts. More specifically, it functioned as an informal jargon, being a mixture of Italian, French, Greek, Arabic and Spanish, to serve as medium between different nations whose languages were not the same system, providing understanding. This is how, for the needs of semilegal trade, the Mediterranean lingua franca came into being, as a means of interethnic linguistic communication with a strong cultural connotation. The initial French connection in the codification of nonima appelativa could only be traced back to Old French Franc (free, sincere, genuine), from the Middle Latin Franc meaning a freeman, implying that only the Francs, as the conquering class, had the status of freemen. Therefore, the establishment of whatever language providing understanding can occur in different places, away from the place where the language is originally spoken, with more socio-cultural, rather than political character.
The Latin of the Roman Empire functioned as a common means of cultural interaction long after the empire of Julius Caesar and Nero collapsed. Old Church Slavonic was used as the official state language of medieval Valachia. The Spanish language of Latin America has nothing of the political connotation of the Spanish language of the fifteen-century Conquista. The Portuguese of Brazil is even phonetically far away from the language of imperial Portugal. Modern Greek was in its time used as a lingua franca in the regions of Istanbul and West Anatolia in Ottoman Turkey. The Russian language of the postUSSR era in the Turkic republics of Central Asia now plays the same role that Arabic used to play at the times of semi-legendary Turkestan. And, of course, the English of the British Empire and (American) English today are good examples of how the language of predominant power can lose its political connotation. (Barber ibid. 56)
The Linguistic Interpretation Language per se has a potential as a source of knowledge about the sociopolitical relations between different cultures all around the world:
Language can serve, in all spheres of of social life, to bring people together or to divide them. (Kontra 1999) Language can be a very important factor in group identification, group solidarity and the signalling of difference...(Trudgill 2000)
The benefits of a possible application of linguistic anthropology to the use of international languages of the lingua franca type today (as an issue of political theory) could be based on the assumption that when languages are in contact, understanding is possible when the speech communities have much in common. Let me support this with a second reference to a quote that has already beed made use of before:
39
If we want to understand the role of languages in peoples lives we must go beyond the study of their grammar and venture into the world of social action, where words are embedded in and constitutive of specific cultural activities, such as telling a story, asking for a favor, greeting, showing respect, praying, giving directions, reading, insulting, praising, arguing in court, making a toast, or explaining a political agenda. (Duranti, 2001, 1).
Taking this linguo-anthropological attitude into consideration, it will be easy to infer (with a statement that has alreayd been referred to) that Homo loquens (the talking man) will be located in an environment where he will share a similar type of cultural experience and react to it with a similar type of communicative creativity as the other representatives of the same species. The implication is that what makes interaction in a commonly shared environment possible is the common background that ties the inhabitants of a certain area into a society with its own linguo-cultural parameters. So, on an interethnic scale, the more the inhabitants share equivalent cultural values, the more they tend to develop a group identity, sharing any group languauge that could satisfy the demands of interaction. For example: today, most European interaction that requires a common language is maintained in English. Frequently appearing opinions describe English and its growing influence as the result of the political, economical and military power of (mainly) the United States. It negatively affects, as is often claimed, the cultural independence of the separate national languages by injecting alien elements with alien cultural connotations into their language systems. As for the needs of multilingual Europe, there are many who would argue that English is not the most appropriate means of pan-European communication. Many people suppor Esperanto because of its politically neutral character, paying no attention to the reason why it failed to become the international language more than one hundred years after it was invented: there are no socio-cultural criteria to integrate Esperanto native speakers into a normally living Esperanto group identity. So, English appears to be neutral enough for the linguistic needs of United Europe. The use of a common means of communication is often based, its true, on political factors. But even if there is an initial political reason for the language dominance it often, with time, loses it, and starts functioning as the symbol of the socio-cultural integrity of a certain society. The conclusion is that the lingua franca type of languages appear on the historical stage a posteriori possible (but not necessary) political hegemony, to fulfill the necessity of cultural interaction around an area/territory with no common language. In the case of United Europe, where all the efforts since the very beginning of the building process have been dedicated toward avoiding power imbalance, the issue of a prospective hegemonic language is absolutely irrelevant. In our attempts to identify the cultural paradigm of United Europe, in the way Wintle analyzed it, we should always remember that it was not on the territory of todays Europe where Zeus abducted the princess. 40
European culture, or European civilization, belongs to all of us. It is the best possible way for the contemporary Homo loquens to accept diversity within our community in the globalized world. In the case of globalization, where all the efforts since the very beginning of the buiding process have been dedicated toward avoiding power imbalance, the issue of hegemony as the source of economic/political dependence loses its relevance to modify it into a modern understanding of the need of cultural cooperation. To accept this would mean to identify ourselves as part of the invariable value of modern society. To reject it would mean to exaggerate the separate at a very high price: the isolation from what today it symbolizes.
41
Chapter 6
The Semiosis of Political Division of Space II The Walls
Language and the Territorial Basis of Identity (II)
This chapter offers a theoretical model of walls as signs of human deictic location in a political context. Reference to (political) history reveals that they function as basic elements of self-protection because they isolate our we from the rest as a hostile unknown. The cognitive basis of the theory of the embodied mind is referred to, to prove that constructing a wall between the ego and the real surrounding political world is relevant to the creation of myths as imaginary boundaries between humans and an omnipotent and scary unknown. One may assume that the binary opposition between we and the rest operates as an opposition between /+known/:/known/. The conclusion is that walls signify human understanding of limited space as a secure political locus for the existence of the ego. Walls as Political Metaphors Constructing walls for the sake of protection as a domestic political issue is not new. All around the world there are plenty of city walls that are believed to have been built to protect the citizens of a polis from a potential threat coming from outside.
43
THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE II THE WALLS
The political connotation of walls as metapors is discovered when historical examples of the type of the Great Wall of China are taken into consideration. The reason for the construction of the wall of China was protection from foreign forces. It is, maybe, the first historically famous example of a deliberate literal use of a metaphor for protection (security). The city wall of ancient Constantinople that was built like many others around the world is a political metaphor that gives explicit knowledge about the history of the city itself, the Ottoman invasion of Europe and the establishement of the Ottoman state. The etymology of the place name Istanbul (from Byzantine Greek: eis tn polin meaning going into the direction of the polis (the city of Constantinople)) implies a certain spatial dichotomy:
outside : inside
with the wall itself as a demarcation line between the two. The Israeli capture of the Old City of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967 is an example of wall destruction for the achievement of military goals and national ambtions. After a couple of days of hesitation, encouraged by their successful resistance to the attacks of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the Israelis captured the Old City, i.e., demolished a political and metaphorical frontier between modern and ancient Israel, and finally managed to obtain the most significant Jewish shrine the Wailing Wall. From a more recent perspective the Fence between the United States and Mexico, planned by the Bush administration, reveals a political model that aims at protection of the US from imposition coming from outside. Gated communities and ghettoes represent a more recent option of the everlasting desire of humans for security (or, a feeling of security), depending on who is considered to be in need of protection and who should be protected. One can assume that in their political (as well as social and cultural) activities humans have always been in need of walls to seperate/protect them from the impact of a real or fictional superior power. Moreover, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish real walls from the concept of wall as political metaphors because of the the very essence of this power as an expression of human natural perception and knowledge acquistion of understandable and non-understandable reality. Wall Metaphors and Political Life In his research on Old and New Walls in Jerusalem, Menachem Klein refers to a theoretical analysis, by Lyman and Scott, in which territory is classified by four categories: private, home, public, and platform of interaction. Inasmuch as this classification resembles the classical ancient conflict bewteen an oikos and a polis,what is new about it is the emphasis on the platform of interaction in which
different social groups come into contact. (Klein 57)
44
And, further:
A platform of interaction is fragile because it is not homogeneous, but is rather a base for interaction among the different groups that pass through. The borders of this kind of territory are porous and mutable. (Ibid.)
On the other hand, by following the models suggested by Marcuse, Ashley and Passi, Klein comes to to the conlusion that
By excluding the other through a border the powerful state can institutionalize identities. In other words, border construction is an expresssion of both physical and normative power relations. (Ibid.)
The Berlin Wall was a match between the literal and the metaphorical meaning of the division of two political systems. Since its conctrsuction until its fall it functioned as a border between the US and USSR sectors of the German city and symbolized Cold War antagonism. In 1961, East German Communist authorities built the wall with the intention of stopping East Germans from fleeing the Communist regime. West Berlin was surrounded by the wall and was an example of how the threatening side was isolated from the one in need of protection. More specifically, by constructing the wall, the East Germans/Soviets imposed on the whole Eastern Bloc the metaphorical burden of the Iron Curtian with a twofold intention: to leave the East Germans with the impression that the Drueben is aggressive, dangerous, threatening and, hence, they have to be protected; and to mask the failure of Communist political economy in the eyes of the DDR/Eastern Bloc citizens. In fact, the symbolic meaning of the wall turned into a platfrom of interaction in the metaphorical sense of Kleins term: it intensified the identity narrative of East Germans to the extent of:
We, the poor and oppressed by Communism vs. They, the free and successful
So that when the wall finally came down they were bitterly disappointed to discover that West Berlin and West Germany were not at all the Eden that they imagined... One can assume, therefore, that to build a wall, whether understood literally or Metaphorically, does not function just as a means of isolation. It affects the identity narrative of the separated population, based on the principle of the binary oppostition:
/+ known/ vs. /-known/
I claim elsewhere (Anastassov 111-120), by means of the rhetorical question

What is Behind that Wall?
45
that the unknown is not only the source of potential threat: it could also trigger the desire of Homo politicus for challenging that threat. This is an assumption that goes beyond the trivial understanding of borders as means of protection from an imminent invasion coming from the neighborhood and develops into a desire for crossing the barrier between the existence of the ego and his own body and exploring the unknown with its mythical magic. There is no doubt about the magic of the Berlin Wall, considering the numerous attempts to go over it, the numerous victims that turned it into a matter of martyrdom; it is no less significant than the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem. The wall aftermath supports that assumption: nowadays the architecture of the area where it stood marks a certain urban policy that aims at forwarding a sign of the same semiotic value as the sign that appeared after La Bastille in Paris was demolished: ici on dance...The Manhattan-type skyscraper skyline demonstrates a certain platform of interaction that integrates the two urban unities, West and East Berlin, into a symbol of a new political reality. Klein (Ibid.) refers to the following quote from Passi:
Boundaries between us and others are critical elements in establishing us and excluding others.
Therefore he (Passi) highly evaluates a great importance of examining how boundaries become part of everyday life and an identity narrative. Secondly, he sees a link between boundaries both as symbols and as a specific form of institutions and state power. By excluding the other through a border the powerful state can institutionalize identities. In other words, border construction is an expansion of both physical and normative power relations. The Cyprus wall symbolizes yet another element of identity narrative. The long period of Ottoman domination of the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean left as a legacy a huge population of Turkish origin struggling for such a narrative. The political situation on Cyprus that led to the events in 1974 and the decision to isolate its northern part and the northern part of Nicosia-Lefkosia threw Europe and the world into a heated debate on its legal validity. The Cyprus case, along with the political situation in the Balkans in the 1980s, put the issue of the Balkan/Mediterranean-Turkish identity narrative on the agenda in the most painful way possible. In this context I feel tempted to use a citation for the second time with the deliberate intention of reiterating what was referred to above:
[T]he establishment of group identity is often achieved by means of differentiation from other group identities...so that often the notion of alterity becomes synonymous with that of antagonism. Internal cohesion, in the ideal nation-state model, required not only cultural, and if possible, linguistic unity, but also the referent foreign as a screen to reflect that cohesion...This is how the concept of cultural identity became consecrated over a long period as a synonym of national identity...[L]iving together, cooperation and cultural interaction increase the possibilities and the creativity of each people, and they do not cause changes to any culture, let alone threaten any language, nationality or culture with extinction...It is evident that where there are contacts,
46
dialogue and interchange, there can be change. But not every change means risking the loss of identity. Because identity is a more flexible and multilevel entity, and not a monolithic one in which different elements are unable to coexist. (Banus 271)
All of this points out the issue of territory as part of the way to establish an identity narrative, based on the limits of containers. Wall Metaphors and the Theory of the Embodied Mind It has recently become quite fashionable to criticize Lakoffs and Johnsons cognitive model of metaphors, especially after Pinkers attack on the theory, without reference to the fact that the idea of the human body as a barrier between the human mind and the outside world has intrigued thinkers at all times, beginning with the philosophy of Vijniana-Vada and the work of Patanjali and continuing through recent sudies on the semiotics of space. Lakoff and Johnson claim that
[j]ust as the basic experiences of human spatial orientation give rise to orientational metaphors, so our experiences with physical objects (especially our own bodies) provide the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is, ways of viewing events, activities, ideas, etc., as entities and substances. (Ibid., emphasis added)
This claim is not essentially different from Elliot Gaines argument concerning the froniters of space
that begin with the body of an individual subject. The physical limits of the body and its means of conscious perception, thought, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and the reasoning mind, all engage in identifying the meanings of the things in the world of experience. (Gaines)
Further reference to Lakoff and Johnson supports the idea that, with what they call container metaphors,
[w]e are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us. (Lakoff, Johnson, ibid.)
Moreover, the two American scholars argue that the human body as a container imposes the concept of a barrier (or wall) onto the human mind as a natural symbol of the protection of its existence:
But even where there is no natural physical boundary that can be viewed as defining a container, we impose boundaries marking off territory so that it has an inside and a bounding surface whether a wall, a fence, or an abstract line or plane. (Ibid.)
This research builds on the assumption that the Lakoff/Johnson theory of the embodied mind can be successfully applied to analysis of The Political Connotation of Walls as Signs, Because they are relevant to the issues of the semiotics of space:
The semiotics of space is a descriptive process enquiring into the relevant significance of the relationships between objects and their spatial contexts. (Gaines, ibid.)
47
In this respect the embodied-mind theory contributes to the understanding of the wall-metaphor as a demarcation line in the relationships between groups and communities (including individuals and social institutions/families) sharing neighboring territory. A closer investigation of this territorial principle reveals that humans are naturally predisposed to be attached to their own space and to perceive members of the neighborhood as a source of a potential danger. Even as far (chronologically backwards) as the ancient classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the term oikos (home, household) is inseparable from polis (the state). The hic/nunc deictic principle which attaches me to my home, attaches me to my community as well. Hence the popular metaphor birthplace = home. Another type of explanation leading toward an archetypal model is the perception of my land as property:
If we say This is my property, I shall control it, that affirmation calls out a certain set of responses which must be the same in any community in which property exists. It involves an organized attitude with reference to property of which is common to all the members of the community. One must have a definite attitude of control of his own property and respect for the property of others. (Mead 34)
The last sentence from the quote above suggests a certain balance between the notion of my property vs. your property which, fortunately or unfortunately, sounds far too idealistic and can be supported by the following statement made by Enrique Banus:
The strength of...nationalism stems from a very potent mixture: the atavistic fear of losing what is ones own when it comes in contact with what is someone elses...Thus, the establishment of group identity is often achieved by means of differentiation from other group identities...so that often the notion of alterity becomes synonymous to that of antagonism. Internal cohesion, in the ideal nation-state model, requires not only cultural, and if possible, linguistic unity, but also the referent foreign as a screen to reflect that cohesion... (Banus 159, emphasis added)
It can be generalized that humankind has lived, for years, in groups, hostile to each other, in the division of a larger territory. This is how the antagonism between we and the other often develops into serious conflicts that leads to the need for a clear distinction between my and your property, i.e., the walls in question. The Walls, the Embodied Mind and Identity Narrative Scholars do not have basic disagreement as to the human desire for knowledge of self by contrasting it with the rest of the egos which our own one belongs to. As Herbert Mead argues:
Among primitive peoplethe necessity of distinguishing the self and the organism was recognized in what we term the double: the individual has a thing-like self that is affected by the individual as it affects other people and
48
which is distinguished from the immediate organism in that it can leave the body and come back to it. This is the basis for the concept of the soul as a separate entity. (Mead 34)
And further:
We find in children something that answers to this double, namely the invisible, imaginary companions which a good many children produce in their own experience. They organize in this way the responses which they call out in other persons and call out also in themselves. (Ibid.)
In terms of the embodied-mind theory this simply means that our bodies function as a barrier between our own self and the other selves. Mead supports his thesis by comparing the coexistence of different individual egos in a community with the rules of a game:
The attitudes of other players which the participant assumes organize into a sort of a unit, and it is that organization which controls the response of the individual. (Mead 36)
One can assume, in other words, that what attaches different individuals in a community with its own parameters is a kind of a convention la Rousseau, where separate members of this community have to know and play the rules of the game in order to survive. In a community where I can discover my own self by contrasting it to the selves of the rest it is collective cooperation for the sake of survival that makes me stick to them against the dangers of the unknown. The process starts with the attempts to reconcile my own self that is blocked into my own body with the rest of the bodies in the community. It is based on the self-knowledge that I acquire by recognizing this rest as an indirect (and twisted) projection of my ego. This assumption makes possible a certain extension of reference of the metaphor that is discussed here toward the political connotation of: The Wall Metaphor as an Archetypal Mythological Element As George Lakoff claims,
Like metaphors, myths are necessary for making sense of what goes on around us. All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth any more than they can function without metaphor. And just as we often take the metaphors of our own culture as truths, so we often take the myths of our own culture as truths. (Lakoff 185-186)
It can be claimed that by myths as truths we should understand a cognitive model of location of self in (political) space. It is commonly accepted among scholars that the walls or barriers in ancient myths occur as typical elements in many different belief systems and vary in the specific details, but not in the basic structure of the model. From this point of view, it can be argued that a wall or a barrier separates humans from a certain hostile unknown by marking the borders of the space where they are basically located. In the Odysseus type of myths, for example, the hero reluctantly leaves his home, afraid of the journey that marks a clash between his ego and the hostile unknown out of the borders of the home community. The Messiah-Liberator type (Prometheus, Jesus, 49
Beowulf), on the other hand, needs to cross a certain real or fictional barrier (most often water as a symbol that separates a world of safety from a world of unknown, scary, hostile power). In The Structural Study of Myth, Claude Levi-Strauss is fascinated by the astounding similarity among so many myths from so many widely separated cultures. He argues that their similarities are based on their structural sameness sharing the following characteristics with language: a. they are made of units that are put together according to certain rules. b. these units form relations with each other, based on binary pairs or opposites, which provide the basis of the structure. (Levi-Strauss, 202-212) Hence, in the explanation of bilateral political antagonism one can argue that there exists a certain cognitive model of conduct that combines the embodied mind theory with The Semiotic Function of the Wall-Metaphor All the equally structured myths in the history of human culture (Propp, Levi-Strauss), all the metaphors we live by (Lakoff), even the common capacity of humans for syntactic structures (Chomsky), reveal a universal way of understanding and explaining the world. As has already been stated, humans stick to each other on the basis of convention: the human body itself naturally separates individuals from individuals. In order to survive, they agree on certain games rules which they organize in systems of social, political, religious and language order. These rules are applied to specific territories that are different for the different communities. Hence the attachment to a territory as property, which, as a concept, is relevant to the idea of my body/my skin as the border of my mind. One can assume then that the wall/barrier metaphor is naturally embodied in the human mind and is an inseparable part of his type of relationship with other individuals, who, living in a community, expand the model onto other communities. From a semiotic point of view the proposed model can be regarded as a binary opposition between my space and the other space,which suggests a very structuralist attitude toward human treatment of space in the sense of black and white, good and evil or right and wrong. Politically speaking, it can be concluded that humans have always had the embodied mentality of own space defended from an antagonistic other. In this respect the wall is simply a sign of a set of typically human characteristic features, such as search of security and protection against fear from the unknown.
50
Chapter 7
The Semiosis of Political Division of Space III The Nostos
Language and the Cognitive Process of Identity Search
As has already been stated, humans share the same experience with the rest of the members of their actual habitat on the deictic principle of hic/nunc. This is a kind of a Saussurean synchronic principle that ties them into a community with its own political parameters. In an archetypal community where to be different is unacceptable, not allowed, even dangerous, the desire to
break the rules (by means of playing with language) in order to acquire knowledge about self from a distance
happens (whenever it does) to the strongest individuals from the total of the communitys members.
Who are they?
To give an answer to this question I refer here to the classical mythological element of the archetypal journey of the hero (in Joseph Campbells terms). The focus is on the concept of nostos in the logical completion of the voyage of Odysseus as a sample narrative that illustrates that the archetype of human identity-search process is based on the above mentioned self-observing51
THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE III THE NOSTOS
from-a-distance process. In respect to what has been introduced here so far as a thesis, nostos is referred to as a certain human desire for freedom to pull the walls down balanced with a nostalgic desire to get back to the safety that the walls provide. The Voyage-Homecoming of Odysseus The return of Odysseus forms a saga in itself, to which many additional folk-tale elements have been attached. Here is Aristotles summary of the Odyssey:
The story of the Odyssey is not long: a man is away from home for many years; Poseidon is constantly on the watch to destroy him, and he is alone; at home his property is being wasted by suitors, and his son is the intended victim of a plot. He reaches home, tempest-tossed; he makes himself known, attacks his enemies and destroys them, and is himself saved. This is the heart of the matter, the rest is episodes. (Morford, Lenardon 354)
As the authors argue,

The most interesting part of the legend, however, lies in the episodes that comprise Odysseus adventures on his travels; they have been taken as symbolic (for example, Odysseus conquers death in his visit to the underworld) or as connected with real places which had become known to the Greeks as their trade and colonization expanded. Odysseus is one of the supreme heroes of Greek mythology. In the Iliad he is the wisest of the Greek leaders and a good fighterHis heroic stature becomes fully apparent in the Odyssey, where he experiences many adventures, usually escaping from danger through his intelligence and courage[T]he poem continues with the arrival of Odysseus on Ithaca, his revenge on the suitors for the hand of Penelope, and his eventual recognition by and reunion with Penelope. (Ibid 354-355.)
Odysseus story by itself is a common example of the archetypal experience of a mythological hero. As Joseph Campbell claims,
The herois the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms. Such a ones visions, ideas, and inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought. The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man perfected, unspecific, universal man he has been reborn. His second solemn task and deed thereforeis to return to us, transfigured, and teach the lessons he has learned of life renewed. (Campbell 19-20)
The Rebirth phase in The Voyage of the Hero in this context means that the Hero acquires new knowledge about himself (also understandable as: new knowledge about reality/truth) that he aspires to share with the rest of the community members (hence, nostos = desire). This shared new knowledge which definitely means breaking the already established/existing rules (of knowledge) marks a new era in the life of the community to push it ahead. Without it, there will be no change, no movement, no progressA reference back to language as shared emotion would then simply
52
support the statement that human interaction is based on a certain model of the shifting of (unequal) individual power within the constraints of the collective whole. In the case of Odysseus, his rebirth starts on the land of the Cyclops, where he
made Polyphemus drunk; he told him his name was Nobody, and the giant in return for the excellent wine promised that he would reward Nobody by eating him last. He then fell asleep, and Odysseus took his revenge[H]e (Polyphemus) cried out in agony and the other Cyclopes came running to the caves entrance, only to hear the cry Nobody is killing me (Morford, Lenardon 356, Emphasis added)
Odysseuss stage of outis (nobody) comes after a series of other stages that include metis (cunning intelligence) and hubris (arrogance) in his final accomplishment as a hero of the modern type. It is his cunning intelligence that makes him the hero of the Trojan War, with the idea for the Trojan horse. It brings the war to a successful end for the Greeks in a way that is totally different from the classical belief of a heroic battle like the one-toone encounter between Achilles and Hector. Odysseuss metis,which helps him disguise his real intentions in the case of the Trojan horse, develops to another stage when he refers to himself as nobody. Hubris in its turn makes him think of himself as the greatest possible hero. The comparison between the two types of encounters (Achilles/Hector : Odysseus), or the two types of heroism, helps clarify the above-mentioned unequal shift of power from yet another perspective: the Achilles/Hector one implies equality in the shifting process, whereas the Odysseus one means (intellectual) superiority. In this respect, as many scholars agree, the journey of the Hero symbolizes the everlasting desire of man for knowledge about self, based on distancing from self. In the case of Odysseus, by referring to him as nobody, Homer implies that his hero comes to a stage where his journey as a way of self-discovery per se turns into a total separation between his physical and conceptual/intellectual ego. From a semiotic point of view, all the above examples are metaphor-signifiers with a certain symbolic value:
In semiotic terms, a metaphor involves one signified acting as a signifier referring to a different signified[W]e may also think of metaphor as symbolic. (Chandler 127, emphasis in original)
signified Odysseus metaphor signified Distancing from Self symbol
signifier Outis
Cf. Chandler:
The mythological or ideological order of signification can be seen as reflecting major (culturally variable) concepts underpinning particular worldviewsMyths can function to hide the ideological function of a sign. (Ibid. 144-145)
53
THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE III THE NOSTOS
This supports the idea that Odysseus-Outis functions as as an ideological sign of the power of somebody who is distanced (= different,nobody) as regards the basic community. The Self-Discovery From a Distance From what has been introduced here so far one can imply that the abovementioned desire for knowledge about self on the basis of distancing has functioned as a cognitive model for all human beings at all times. In this respect, the very distance itself can be identified by contrast between the ego (or what we think about our own ego) and the group of other egos that our own belongs to. If this really is the case, it definitely comes into conflict with the widespread idea of belonging to a certain social place-deixis, commonly referred to as home. Homecoming Today: The World as Place for Everybody The lines above imply that human identity was historically shaped, following different stages ranging from antagonism to cooperation. It is based on the assumption that even as far back as mythological times there has always been a desire to both belong to a community and to leave it, for the sake of knowledge about self and power imposition. By taking all this into account, one can assume that in the process of searching for self not only the Man of Today, but the Man of All Times (to start with, the mythological Hero) has always tried to complete the journey by coming back home with knowledge about what makes him/her different from the rest of the community and at the same time common with it. It is claimed here that the more adventurous the journey, the more the hero believes that he shares more universal rather than different features with the rest of the individuals and commuities all around the world. In our postmodern age of immense migration processes and advanced technology that makes interaction extremely easy and totally changes the ethnic structure of society, our hero has the chance to be home anywhere on earth, a chance that he has never had before on such a scale. Finally, one may conclude that what at the beginning of this research was referred to as leaving home is an inseparable part of homecoming and has always existed in the human mentality as an embedded model of desire for self-identity.
54
Chapter 8
The Language of Political Dominance
Language, Power and Politics (I)
The chapter deals with the importance of language for the implementation of political goals in the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia on a diachronic basis, starting with the relative unity (in terms of language, religion and social and cultural order) of semi-legendary Turkestan, via Russian influence (both tzarist and Bolshevik-Soviet), and ending with the recent attempts of the so-called Turkish Model for Turkish political and cultural influence. It offers an analysis of the way tzarist/Communist Russian-language policy affected the identity process of the Turkic population of Central Asia after the collapse of Soviet Communist regime. This was inspired by Marc Dickens impressive work, Soviet Language Policy in Central Asia, and based on the asumption that in the history of humankind there have been lots of cases where one language becomes predominant in areas with mixed population, for the needs of trade-culture interaction. It is interesting to admit that this predominance may occur as the result of or without any political hegemony. Even if there is an initial political reason for the language dominance it often, with time, disappears, and language dominance starts functioning as the symbol of the socio-cultural integrity of a certain society. In this respect, a diachronic analysis of the situation in Central Asia shows a remarkable support for the idea, given the similarities in the need for a common language at all stages of evolution. 55
THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL DOMINANCE
At the time of Turkestan

Because of [Central Asias] situation on the famous Silk Road...there has been considerable mixing of ethnic groups over the centuries. As a result, in addition to the major groups, one can also find Arabs, Jews, Gypsies, Persians Tatars, Koreans, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Germans, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Russians. (Dickens)
Apparently, the need for social interaction stimulated the need for a langauge one and, in the case of Turkestan, it was maintained by the Muslim ummah (community), by means of language (Arabic) and religion (Islam).
Arabic became the language not only of religion but also of higher learning and the Arabic script was employed in all writing...However, most of the people continued to speak in various Turkic or Iranian dialects. (Ibid.)
It is clear that Russian policy, both tzarist and Bolshevik, toward this population managed, especially during the USSR period, to disintegrate not only the linguistic-religious ummah of the region, but to affect the national-cultural identity of the people by imposing the Russian language as a common means of communication. In other words: the Central Asian area became part of Soviet Russia thanks to the use of language as the cultural avantgarde component of political hegemony.
The Russian presence in the area started after Astrakhan was captured in the sixteenth century by Ivan the Terrible. From that time on, Russia was the power to be reckoned with as she rapidly expanded her empire into Asia. (Dickens, ibid.)
As the same author points out, tzarist Russia pursued an active policy of Russification:
However, despite [Russias] efforts, the native intelligentsia that emerged was by and large extremely nationalistic. (Ibid.)
No matter how strong this nationalistic feeling might have been, the idea of ummah was not dead, as it re-emerged in the conception of jadid (based on the assumption that Muslims in Russia would not be able to maintain their ethnic and religious heritage without significant reform), which included the promotion of a common Turkic language. Jadid could not survive the fierce resistance of Islamic conservatism and ended up a failure after Soviet Russians came into power, which they established by means of the following steps: 1. Since most of the local inhabitants were illiterate, the first step to change the linguistic landscape of the area was to promote literacy, on the scale of a cultural revolution, as Dickens claims. The process took place either in Russian or the local language, where the holders of it became more aware of it and developed more respect for it. 2. Since Russian Soviet (language) policy in the area, especially during Stalins regime, followed the principle of language as the most obvious and important attribute of a nation, the language awareness mentioned
56
above was successfully used to develop national languages for the different groups of the Turkic population, artificially focusing on the different and ignoring the common. Hence the beginnning of a national identity, based on the disintegration of the ummah. This became even stronger with the 3. Alphabet Reform, which took place in two stages: a. The shift from the Arabic to the Latin script, which left the older part of the educated Islamic priests practically helpless, and thus broke the religious unity of the ummah. b. The second shift, from Latin to Cyrillic, practically opened the gates for the status of the Russian language to change from second national language to the only possible means of comunication. c. The linguistic journey from the Arabic to the Cyrillic script succeeded in effectively separating these closely related Turkic languagers from each other and from their Arabo-Persan roots, as well as preparing the way for the introduction of Russianism... (Dickens, ibid.) In addition to Dickenss thesis, it should be taken into consideration that Russianism not only linguistically separated those closely related Turkic languages, but--what is more--it managed to manipulate the Turkic identity of the population. This is what explains the resistance to the so-called Turkish Model that revealed a certain Turkish political-economic-based attempt to influence the democratization of Central Asia, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The end of the Gorbachev era and the collapse of Russian Soviet Communism left the Turkic republics of Central Asia with a strongly Russian-language-dominated political-cultural life. The initial enthusiasm of the Turkish Model was partly cooled down by the unstable sense of identity of the population in the Soviet aftermath. This, however, gave yet another direction to the process of the penetration of Western culture in the area. At the beginning of the decline of the Turkish Model the situation looked as if the Western countries (mainly the USA, Canada and the UK) and the republics of Central Asia had found it mutually beneficial not to interact via any intermediation. Recent research, however, shows a certain imbalance in the linguistic landscape of the immediate post-Gorbachev status quo: 1. Russian, being no longer the official lanuage, started to function, and is now increasingly functioning, as the lingua franca (cf. below) in an increasing competition with other, local languages. The above-mentioned thesis about dominant languages losing, with the flow of time, their political connotation, and remaining just landmarks of the cultural integrity of the speakers can be supported not only by means of the ex-
57
THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL DOMINANCE
ample of the Athenian koin, but also with many more cases, such as the case of Spanish, spoken in almost all of Latin America, by societies that were different and independent from the times of Spains Conquista, or the case of Portuguese in Brazil, French in Canada, or even English outside the United Kingdom. 2. The increasingly influential role of the English language contributes to the diversity of the picture. It is interesting to admit that, despite the efforts to deny intermediation, in fact this role of the English language, along with the prerequisites of trade-culture, penetrates into Central Asia from different directions. One may conclude, finally, by classifying the significant role of language in the development of national identity as a role capable of affecting the political status of a particular region. In the case of the republics of Central Asia, as a traditional trade route that is attractive to the neighboring powers as a potential area of influence, the importance of language as the cultural component of dominance can play a key role in handling economic factors for political reasons.
58
Chapter 9
The Language of Political Persuasion
Language, Power and Politics (II)
The language of political persuasion (i.e., the codification of language use for political persuasive purposes) is part of the so-called Western classical tradition of rhetoric. It is traditionally associated with the public speaking skills of talented orators without serious reference to the very linguistic background of language as power. The linguistic triangle below
SPEAKER (I) HEARER(You)
REFERENT (He, She. It)
attributes a stronger position to the SPEAKER based on the general understanding of human language interaction as follows:
I(the speaker) want you (the hearer) to do/know something about somebody/something (the referent)
In an ordinary interaction the shifting role of SPEAKER and HEARER provides the balance of power. When it comes to political discourse, however, the previously analyzed triangle 59
THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL PERSUASION
I (the shifting SPEAKER)
Want YOU
(the shifting HEARER)
to do/know something about somebody/something
loses its balance in the manner of Carrolls Humpty Dumptys conception of language understanding:
Theres glory for you! I dont know what you men by glory, Alice said... Of course you dont till I tell you. I meant there is a nice knock-down argument for you! But glory doesnt mean a nice knock-down argument, Alice objected. When I use a word...it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master thats all. (Carroll 100, emphasis added)
We can finally modify the initial formula in the following way:

I want to make you do/know and believe/obey something about somebody/something
which is the basis of

language manipulating/language maneuvering
Language manipulating and language maneuvering are often used in medical or police investigation, at law court and in education, but they are basically related to the language of politics from the perspecitve of political correctness, which is the language of international politics and diplomacy. This means, as Foucault claims, that in the case of political discourse as an expression of (political-persuasive) power it is considered politically correct to use flexible language where
an intended message can be interpreted in a variety of different ways, or when there can be many ways of speaking about the same subject, or when there can be many ways of diplomatic reference to the same object from a variety of different perspectives...
with a final goal to impose power from the SPEAKER onto the HEARER.
60
When it comes to the analysis of political/diplomatic language, the statement that

there are many ways of diplomatic reference to the same object from a variety of different perspectives
logically leads to the implication that:

political correctness = speaking indirectly/metaphorically about the political truth
which, by itself, needs an explanation of its reasoning. There are certain topics in politics, Michel Foucault claims, that everybody is aware of, but it is considered (politically) incorrect/taboo to talk about them in the simplest possible language:
What...is so perilous in the fact that people speak, and that their discourse proliferates to infinity? What is the danger in that? (Foucault 109)
And immediately there comes the answer:

In a society like ours, the procedures of exclusion are well known. The most obvious and familiar is the prohibition. We know quite well that we do not have the right to say everything, that we cannot speak of just anything in any circumstances whatever, and that not everyone has the right to speak of anything whatever. (Ibid. 110, emphasis added)
In the further development of his thesis, Foucault introduces the issue of discourse as desire that has to be seized as taboo at the same level as the issues of sexuality and politics. These two references are expremely symptomatic: sexuality has been, for ages, the object of taboo because of the fear of humans of the uncotrollable power of sexual desire, passion and orgasm. By deliberately suppressing all these, humans in fact deprived themselves from the right to the pleasure of sexual intercourse. In a similar context concerning sexuality, Freud claims in Totem et Tabou that
En polynsien, le contraire de tabou se dit noa, ce qui est ordinaire, accessible tout le monde. Cest ainsi quau tabou se rattache la notion dune sorte de rserve, et le tabou se manifeste essentiellment par des interdictions et restrictions. (Freud 37, emphasis in original)
In other words, Foucaults argument about politics and sexuality as taboos finds much earlier support in Freuds analysis of the concept of sexuality in totemic societies. The latter, in a way, sheds additional light on the history of the human tendency to divide the world into right and wrong, for the binary opposition between taboo and noa does not essentially differ from the concepts of sin and virtue or halal and haram as regards the traditional blasphemy on sexuality:
Tabou est un mot polynsien, dont la traduction prsente pour nous des difficults, parce que nous ne possdons plus la notion quil designe.Il tait encore familier aux anciens Romains: leur sacer tait identique au tabou des Polynsiens. L des Grecs, le kadosh des Hbreux devaient avoir le mme sense que
61
le tabou des Polynsiens et les dsignations analogues chez beaucoup dautres peuples de lAmerique, de lAfrique (Madagascar), du Nord et du Centre de lAsie. (Ibid.)
One may assume, then, that humans are so designed (in the sense of LeviStrausss conception of the archetypal structural identity of their perception of the surrounding world) as to divide this world into taboo : noa; sin : virtue; halal : haram, etc. And here comes (again) Aristotles reference to the link between language and politics:
For man is the best of animals when he has reached his full development, so he is worst of all when divorced from law and justice. Injustice armed is hardest to deal with; and though man is born with weapons which he can use in the service of practical wisdom and virtue, it is all too easy for him to use them for most savage, the most unrighteous, and the worst in regard to sexual licence and gluttony. The virtue of justice is a feature of a state; for justice is the arrangement of the political association, and a sense of justice decides what is just. (Aristotle 61)
To sanction what is just vs. what unjust is by means of language is for Aristotle the basis of human communal (political) life. In this respect a reference to Julia Kristevas Desire in Language seems relevant:
Having recourse to psychoanalysis, as I attempt to do, in this work, in order to shed light on a number of borderline practices of meaning and signification (practices of art and literature), bears, I hope, no relation to that plague that Freud, once more the prophet, promised America, when he brought his discovery of the unconscious to its shores. Grafted onto semiology, analysis here is not restircted to themes or phantasms; rather, it scrutinizes the most subtle, the most deeply buried logic of those unities and ultimate relations that weave an identity for the subject, or sign, or sentence. (Kristeva x)
And further (cf. above):

What was necessary was undoubtedly a desire for language...a passion for ventures with meaning and its materials...in order to carry a theoretical experience to that point where apparent abstraction is revealed as the apex of archaic, oneiric, nocturnal, or corporeal concreteness, to that point where meaning has not yet appeared (the child), no longer is (the insane person), or else functions as a restructuring (writing, art). (Ibid., emphasis in original)
A reference to Condillac Rousseau Godwin and the famous romantic slogan:

Man is born free, but is always in chains
marks the associative link between sex and politics as related to Foucaults taboos: the two items are the most explicit expressions of human self-imposed restriction on their own freedom: their (intimate) individual life and their collective one. Sexuality unlocks human individual emotionality up to the extent of ecstasy. Anarchy (in Zenos sense of the term) does the same on a collective level. 62
It is not by accident that Foucalt entitled his article The Order of Discourse (emphasis added). In human society where (as stated before) there has always been a conventional order as regards social, political, cultural and religious life, to be different meant to be rejected. Order was considered necessary to avoid anarchy and to control and manipulate. It was the fear of being different that kept Homo loquens away from the truth. Cf. Kristeva:
Saint Augustine...noted that the possibility for language to speak the truth could not come from outside, but it governs the inner workings of the mind itself). (Kristeva xi)
Within this context, truth telling throughout history was considered politically dangerous. However, in the history of human (political) discourse there were individuals who broke the rules and by doing so managed not only to deserve punishment, but also to achieve the status of heroes whose major contribution to the dynamics of interaction was to cause a change that, in its turn, caused movement ahead, i.e., progress. (Maybe the most explicit example in this case is the myth of Prometheus.) Within this context, Foucault reveals the role of the madmans speech, as the speech of the only hero who ventures to publicly tell the truth. The idea of a madman who commits a gaffe/faux pas by admitting the TRUTH THE WAY IT IS (like the young child in Andersens The Emperors New Clothes who is the only one to have the courage to shout out: The Emperor has no clothes on! ) implies that in the basic triangle
SPEAKER HEARER
REFERENT
the referential point where the SPEAKERS and the HEARERS shares of the process of interaction are expected to meet happens to be the ideal/ idealized point of truth, which, in reality, rarely or never comes true. The following reference to J.G.A. Pococks article Verbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech sheds light on Foucaults prohibition from the perspective of an individual self-imposed (politicaly correct) taboo on the truth:
Shakespeares Brutus declares--and it is significant that he does so in a soliloquy-[emphasis added] Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream... (Julius Caesar, II, i:63-65)
Given the ambiguity of speech as both expression and communication, both a private and public act, it is appropriate to begin a study of the politics of verbalization with a man in a moment of self-communion. 63
The words quoted indicate to us what Brutus is doing. He is trying to escape from a hideous dream by verbalizing his action to himself, and this means two things: verbalizing his intention to act, and verbalizing the quality of the act he intends (which is, inter alia, to provide it with a rationale)... Brutus does not know for sure that he is really going to kill Caesar, or that he really intends or wants to kill him, until he hears himself say that he intends to do so. This is why he is talking to himself; the communication is part of the performance... Brutus may now say I intend to kill Caesar because he is a tyrant...[W]hat he intends when he says I intend is to kill a tyrant. The statement Caesar is a tyrant and the implication it is right to kill a tyrant are both present... (Pocock 1984)
Back to Foucaults madman, The Emperors New Clothes and the truth about reality: one may asssume that Pocock comes up with a very clear reference to the Freudian-Lacanian semiotic concept of displacement in the overall process of
avoiding/disguising the truth as political corectness
Moreover, the idea of optional interpretation of the reference and language as play, as introduced above, provide the opportunity to analyze the language of (political) persuasion as a process of deliberate displacement of real signifiers for empty ones. The new clothes of the emperor are an empty signifier simply because they do not exist, but it is politically incorrect to admit it in public. Therefore, the deliberate displacement is due to a set of different factors, with the most important ones being: the authority of the source of displacement, and the manipulative power of the message that comes from this authority and is directed to the average hearer. Back to the pattern of it all depends on who is master: the authority (speaker) forwards an expressive/emotive message that provokes a conative reaction on the side of the hearer; the intepretation is optional because the signifier is empty (has been displaced); the displacement has been deliberately organized so as to cause a certain reaction; finally the real referent is diguised in a way that suits the speaker, or...the master...!
64
Chapter 10
The Political Intertextuality in Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose in a Cognitive Context
The Language of (Political) Truth, or, the (Political) Truth about Language?
The previous chapter offered an analysis of the language of political truth with reference to political correctness, i.e., the way language is used in politics with the deliberate intention of avoiding direct truth talk. The reason is twofold: Linguistic: there is always more than one way of intepretation of an initially constructed message, as well as many different linguistic ways of referring to one single object; Political: direct-language reference to political truth is commonly accepted as taboo... As discussed above, the politcal taboo on truth talk presupposes a certain self-imposed restriction on human freedom. This implies a certain fear from its unrestircted limits, marked as unknown: collective and individual freedom scares humans with its endless lack of vision of...limits... The present chapter looks into the opposite case: when there is an attempt to really discover the language of political truth. The way to achieve this is through a cognitive model of analysis of the (political) intertextuality in Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose based on Lakoff/Johnsons views on the embodied mind. 65
THE POLITICAL INTERTEXTUALITY IN UMBERTO ECOS THE NAME OF THE ROSE IN A COGNITIVE CONTEXT
More specifically: it is argued that in his deliberate distancing from authorship, the Italian novelist and semiotician reveals his views on the the type of relationship between AUTHOR : READER in the non-bourgeois (neo-Marxist) consumption of literature (art) as taboo-free desire for truth. This distancing becomes clearer from the perspective that any authors text releases emotion that is meant to be shared with a reader, in order to be observed from a distance, with the same final goal: to reach the truth... To do this, Umberto Eco constructs a cognitive (and politically intertextual) model of the human desire for orderly binary oppositions (cf. the above-discussed self-imposed restriction on freedom). By rejecting it he observes it from a distance and idenitifies himself with the objecive truth that is nowhere to be found... The novel starts with a preface in which the author refers to three different dates from three different epochs of European history as an initial point in the development of the process of writing:
ON AUGUST 16, 1968, I WAS HANDED A BOOK WRITTEN BY A CERTAIN Abbe Vallet, Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, trduit en francais dapres ledition de Dom J.Abillon (Aux Presse de lAbbaye de la Sourse, Paris, 1842). Supplemented by historical information that was actually quite scant, the book claimed to reproduce faithfully a fourteenth-century manuscript that, in its turn, had been found in the monastery of Melk by the great eighteenth-century man of learning, to whom we owe so much information about the history of the Benedictine order. The scholarly discovery (I mean, the third in chronological order) entertained me while I was in Prague, waiting for a dear friend. Six days later Soviet troops invaded that unhappy city. (Eco 1, emphasis added)
A lot has been speculated so far on Umberto Ecos pretending NOT to be the real author of The Name of the Rose. What I call here distancing from authorship is in fact an old tradition that is to be found in many samples of medieval literature. By applying it to a work from the 1970s, the Italian novelist, from the very first lines of his outstanding oeuvre, ushers the reader into an area that belongs to more than one temporal dimension. By referring to himself as the third in crhonological order to whom the scholarly discovery belongs, Umberto Eco adds to the deictic time distance a person distance, to end up with place distance especially when it comes to the location of The Monastery, which in fact could be anywhere around Europe. A detailed historical description of the political-religious-ideological situation in the year 1327 ends up with the introduction of Ecos narrator, Adso of Melk, who, by himself, functions as a passive observer of the acitivities of yet another important actor in search of the truth, William of Baskerville:
I did not know what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion which I could see he always harbored that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment. (Ibid. 14)
66
It would be trivial to repeat here the famous reference to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson that appear in Umberto Ecos narrative as a replica of Conan Doyles famous couple. So will be a statement about The Name of the Rose being a gothic novel that takes the shape of a detective story. What is more important, the reference of Adso-Watson and WilliamHolmes reveals Ecos views on pop-art as inseparable from serious art, i.e., his (structuralist) philosophy of art, based on a dualistic (/+/ : /-/) semiotic model of the truth, with support to be found in the following points from the novels narrative: 1. Did Jesus Ever Laugh?
Our Lord never told comedies or fables, but only clear parables which allegorically instruct us on how to win paradise, and so be it. I wonder, William said, why you are so opposed to the idea that Jesus may have laughed. I believe laughter is a good medicine, like baths to treat humors and the other afflictions of the body, melancholy in particular... Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of the face, makes man similar to the monkey. Monkeys dont laugh; laughter is proper to man, it is a sign of his rationality, William said. Speech is also a sign of human rationality, and with speech a man can blaspheme against God. Not everything that is proper to man is necessarily good. He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means denying the power through which good is self-propagating...Pliny the Younger wrote, Sometimes I laugh, I jest, I play, because I am a man. They were pagans, Jorge replied. The Rule forbids with stern words these trivialities... (Eco 131, emphasis added)
2. An imagined unknown and secretly-kept second part of Aristotles Poetics about comedy in the labyrinth of the monastery library:
I want to see the second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, the book everyone has believed lost or never written, and of which you hold perhaps the only copy. (Eco 466)
By introducing blind Jorge de Burgos and his obsession with the idea of Jesus as
The Only True Sad God
he constructs a
/+ known/ : /-known (unknown)/
and he uses a religious context as the framework of an ideology that characterizes deliberate totalitarian hiding of the other side of truth for the sake of political manipulation/maneuvering in the direction of centralized/monlithic power:
[H]ow did you guess it was the second book of Aristotle?
67
THE POLITICAL INTERTEXTUALITY IN UMBERTO ECOS THE NAME OF THE ROSE IN A COGNITIVE CONTEXT
Your anathemas against laughter...Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value...it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didnt know it...Truth reached by depicting men and the world as worse than they are or than we believe them to be, worse in any case than the epics, the tragedies, lives of the saints have shown them to us... (Eco 471-472, emphasis added)
To Williams question,
Why did you want to shield this book more than so many others?
(Ibid. 473, emphasis added) Jorge replies:

Becuase it was the Philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries...
(Ibid., emphasis added) The next counterargument comes logically:

You cannot eliminate laughter by eliminating the book.
(Ibid.) which reinforces the previously launched idea about Eco using empty signifiers to depict a political language that is based on deliberately ignoring the opposite side (= Humpty Dumptys philosophy about who is master again from the perspective of the previously referred-to cognitive model of the embodied mind by Lakoff and Johnson. Namely, as has already been discussed, the theory looks at the human mind as blocked within the body of the individual, who uses this as a shield of protection against the scary unknown that comes from the outside. On a collective basis, the community of individuals sharing the same political habitat fears any alternative that holds the negative sign of what it believes is right according to the communal order. When it comes to the power of political persuasion, coming from the governing master, the hiding of the negative sign means totalitarianism. The climax of the debate between William of Baskerville and Jorge de Burgos reveals a certain attempt to fight the fear of the unknown, based on (Ecos?) belief that:
The Truth is a dynamic process that incorpoates both the positive and the negative sign in an integral entity.
[T]he Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt...You are the Devil, and like the Devil you live in darkness...I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with fowls feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a bufoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer... (Ibid. 477)
68
The arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt, apparently refer to knowledge as the basic human virtue in contrast with (deliberately maintained) ignorance as the source of fear of the unknown, for the sake of a (political) power exercise:
It was the greatest library in Christendom, William said. Now, he added, the Antichrist is truly at hand, because no learning will hinder him any more... (Ibid. 491)
No learning as the /-/ sign of the Antichrist against the /+/ sign of Knowledge as the symbol of God should lead toward the maintenance of a power balance in the search of truth. However, Umberto Eco develops the model further into the direction of a paradigmatic order of signs:
I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso, they are the only thing man has to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs... (Ibid. 492, emphasis added)
He finally concludes that paradigmatics and intertextuality are part of human knowledge about the truth about the world that offers no limits, and, hence, no orderly explanation...
Where is my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe. (Ibid. 492)
The statement
There is no order in the universe
reveals: Ecos attempt to go beyond the restrictions of structuralist binary oppositions as a human natural desire, and also his attempt to demonstrate natural human desire to obey the rules of these restrictions. Hence, the final word that the word was with God, and the Word was God:
Non in commotione, non in commotione Dominus
69
Conclusions
The present Dynamics of Human Interaction comes as the result of an analysis of interrelated human activities in the field of language and politics with reference to human identity issues. It is assumed that the Man of Today (Homo loquens and Homo politicus) is a creative individual who, for the sake of survival and coexistence within the limits of communal life, needs to be political and needs to keep the balance between desire for freedom and the chains of collective responsibility. Collective responsibility means interaction and subordination, as well as hierarchy and discipline. It implies clockwork organization and obedience to rules. This is what one can observe in bees and ants. However, Homo loquens-politicus is neither a bee, nor an ant... He is, when it comes to identity issues, somebody who does not actually know who he is... In a way, throughout his whole history of existence, he has always wanted to be...a bee or an ant...He is vulnerable, timid and scared and he needs protection. Any step beyond the wall-border signifies danger and treachery. Nonetheless, Homo loquens-politicus has always felt tempted to go over the wall-border... Because, apart from being vulnerable, timid and scared he has always been the mythological Hero, the adventurer, the explorer, the Ikarus, the Prometheus, the Leonardo da Vinci, the Jules Verne, the Werner von Braun, the Neil Armstrong of Manhood...
71
CONCLUSIONS
Language comes as an inseparable part of this Manhood: Language, it is said, is a means of communication. Bees and ants also communicate, but they dont have the skills to produce a Homer, a Dante, a Shakespeare, a Goethe... Homer and Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe did not just communicate. They expressed the spark of the Renaissance/Rousseau idea of the Divine Spirit as a Human Spirit... It was a beautiful Sunday fall morning in Scheveningen, the Netherlands, and I was getting ready for my flight back to Istanbul in the evening. What are you doing today, before you go to the airport?, my friend asked me. Why dont you come with me to Brussels? No doubt, I immediately accepted. It was my first car trip around the EU. I knew there were no borders anymore but I imagined something like an abandoned checkpoint and nobody to bother us with passport control or anything... Nothing! There was just a plate, saying:
Belgie!
Right in the middle of the windmills... From a linguistic point of view it meant: this is a sign that is meant to remind you that you enter another region of a common territory. From a pragmatic point of view it meant: no change of place deixis. From a single human point of view it meant: freedom.
72
References
Anastassov, Vassil. The Lingua Franca of the Past and Today: Political Dominance or Cultural Need? Culture in International Relations (2006) 259-264. Anastassov Vassil Poetic Function of Language in Political Time and Space: Language, Linguistics and Political Studies. The International Journal of the Humanities 6.5 (2008). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 1991. Aristotle. The Politics. Trans. T.A.Sinclair. Penguin Books, 1992. Banus, Enrique. Cultural Policy in the EU and the European Identity. European Identity in the 21 Century. Eds. Mary Farell, Stefano Fella and Michael Newman. London: Sage, 2002. Barber, Charles. The English Languge: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bynon, Theodora. Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato: New World Library, 2008. Carrol, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass. Penguin Classics, 1994. Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. New York: Routledge, 2002. Chilton, Paul. Analyzing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. Palgrave, 2004. Cooke, Deryck. The Language of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. 73
REFERENCES
Dickens, Mark. Soviet Language Policy in Central Asia. 1988. www.ox-uscom/lang-policy.htm. Duranti, Alessandro. Linguistic Anthropology: History, Ideas and Issues. Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader. Ed. Alessandro Duranti. Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001. Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage, 2004. Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Discourse. Power Through Discourse. Ed. Leah Kedar. Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1987. Freud, Sigmund. Totem et Tabou. Trans. Serge Jankelevitch. Editions Payot, 1965. Gaines, Elliot. Communication and the Semiotics of Space. Journal of Creative Communications. (2006): 1-2. Harland, Richard. Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes. London-New York: Palgrave Macmilan, 1999. Harris, Roy. Translators Introduction. Course in General Linguistics. By Ferdinand de Saussure. Paris: Editions Payot, 1983. Hickey, Raymond. Language Change. Handbook of Pragmatics. Eds. JanOla stman, Jan Blommaert and John Benjamins. Amsterdam, 2001. Hock, Hans H. and Brian D. Joseph. Language History, Language Change and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996. Holborow, Marnie. The Politics of English: A Marxist View on Language. London: Sage, 1999. Jakobson, Roman. Linguistics and Poetics. Sebeok, 1960. Kedar, Leah. Power Through Discourse. Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1987. Klein, Menahem. Old and New Walls in Jerusalem. Political Geography 24 (2005). Kontra, Miklos. Concpetualizing and Implementing Linguistic Human Rights. Language: A Right and a Resource. Ed. Miklos Kontra. Budapest: CEEUPRESS, 1999. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Labov, William. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Blackwell Publishers, 1994. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jakobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Doubleday Anchor Press, 1963.
74
Mead, Herbert. The Self. Identities. Eds. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta. Malden: Blackwell, 2003. Morford, Mark P.O. and Robert Lenardon. Classical Mythology. London: Longman, 1985. Phillipson, Robert. Political Science. Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity. Ed. Josuha A. Fishman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pinker, Stephen. The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. Penguin Books, 1994. Plato. The Weaving Together of Forms. Philosophy of Language: The Big Questions. Ed. Andrea Nye. Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998. Pocock, J.G.A. Verbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech. Power Through Language. Ed. Leah Kedar. Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1987. Poole, Ross. National Identity and Citizenship. Identities. Eds Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta. Malden: Blackwell, 2003. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Of Words. Philosophy of Language.The Big Quesions. Ed. Andrea Nye. Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1986. Schiffman, Harold. Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. London: Routledge, 1998. Thornburry, Scott. About Language: Tasks for Teachers of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. London: Penguin, 2000. Volosinov, V.N. Verbal Interaction. Philosophy of Language: The Big Quesions. Ed. Andrea Nye. Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998. Wintle, Michael. Europa and the Bull, Europe and European Studies: Visual Images as Historical Source Material. Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA, 2004. Yaguello, Marina. Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics. Trans. Trevor Harris with the author. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
75

Dynamics of Human Interaction Proof-1

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Dynamics of Human Interaction Proof-1

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This page intentionally left blank.

THE DYNAMICS OF HUMAN INTERACTION

VASSIL HRISTOV ANASTASSOV

THE DYNAMICS OF HUMAN INTERACTION

VASSIL HRISTOV ANASTASSOV

TO ALL WHO SUPPORTED ME WITH SPIRIT, KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE

AN INTRODUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC ARGUMENT

the political environment (space) language

seldom with reference to the more important one:

AN INTRODUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC ARGUMENT

expressing emotion knowledge acquisition

sharing emotion feedback

AN INTRODUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC ARGUMENT

In this respect, my approach stands closer to Kedars position:

In this respect, the question

AN INTRODUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC ARGUMENT

THE LINGUISTIC POLITICAL APPROACH

Even more specifically:

As the original text goes:

Aristotles argument makes Chilton ask himself,

THE LINGUISTIC POLITICAL APPROACH

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH I

The Comparative-Historical Approach As Theodora Bynon argues,

To develop principles of language change, according to William Labov, might seem

In this respect, in the opinion of the same author,

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH I

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH I

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH II

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH II

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH II

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH II

This gives us, as she claims,

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE (I) THE HOME

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE (I) THE HOME

And, further on:

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE (I) THE HOME

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE (I) THE HOME

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE (I) THE HOME

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE II THE WALLS

I claim elsewhere (Anastassov 111-120), by means of the rhetorical question

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE II THE WALLS

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE II THE WALLS

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE II THE WALLS

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE III THE NOSTOS

As the authors argue,

THE SEMIOSIS OF POLITICAL DIVISION OF SPACE III THE NOSTOS

THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL DOMINANCE

At the time of Turkestan

THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL DOMINANCE

REFERENT (He, She. It)

THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL PERSUASION

I (the shifting SPEAKER)

(the shifting HEARER)

to do/know something about somebody/something

We can finally modify the initial formula in the following way:

which is the basis of

When it comes to the analysis of political/diplomatic language, the statement that

logically leads to the implication that:

And immediately there comes the answer:

THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL PERSUASION

And further (cf. above):

A reference to Condillac Rousseau Godwin and the famous romantic slogan:

THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL PERSUASION