“Alienation” is a word that hasn’t really gone out of style. It seems to apply just as well to today’s labor conditions, people’s relations to unresponsive, even hostile governments, the desiccation and depravation of culture, deteriorating relations between the sexes, as it ever did. But if we’re alienated, what are we alienated from? Critiques of alienation, whether coming from Marxism, existentialism or new schools of psychology presupposed some natural or ideal condition from which one was alienated—some intuitive sense of wholeness, from which the splitting of the subject against itself was a deviation to be remedied. So far, I can say that we are alienated from our proper relation to the center. Our secular condition, and its entire vocabulary, which can only define the world itself against a demythified center, perpetually refilled with disposable scaepgoats, can only define all the agents in this world in opposition to each other— even the individual or subject can only be defined in opposition to itself. Everyone’s externality to each other is a useful way to think about alienation. All anyone can do is invoke some super- sovereignty that the state “should” be “accountable” to and deploy it against their opponents. More precise than (and complementary to) “alienation” might be another term that has been straddling the boundary separating pop from disciplinary culture for decades: “meaninglessness.” “Meaninglessness” can be treated quite literally: a lack of access to the center takes the form of words not having any determinate meaning. We can work with the cliché of, say watching TV as a meaningless activity, and this can lead us to delve earnestly into the empty soul of the TV watcher; or, we can ask what the word “watch” means, and whether this meaning can be redeemed when applied to viewing TV—if no, then the real problem is in our language, not our souls (and it’s easier to think of tending to our language). Anthropomorphic inquiry as establishing the meaning of words retrieves something fundamental to the reification of declarative culture in literacy, which first of all made it possible to speak of “meaning,” a central concern in the earliest philosophical texts. Words as the sites of thought experiments distinguishing the boundaries distinguishing them from other words; words as originating in ostensive-imperative-declarative articulations; words as subjected to the disciplines; words as mistakenly fit into new uses: inquiries along all these lines are part of the anthropomorphic project of restoring meaning. What we want above all is to mean what we say. If there are subversions in the background of our discourse that empty our words of meaning, we would like
to remedy that. David Olson shows that literacy introduces the distinction between “speaker’s meaning” and “sentence meaning,” and once we have such a distinction the latter can get away from the former, which means one’s words are at the mercy of all the ways in which they can be repeated in different contexts. Clearly, the solution here is not to install a kind of homuncular simulation of the author in texts to ensure they don’t stray from the speaker’s meaning; rather, we keep returning to our words as they are returned to us, supplying them with more explicit ostensive-imperative articulations that were only tacit the first time around. Others can continue this project after us, as they come to inhabit our words and take on the same stake in ensuring their meaning. As Michael Polanyi has contended, we know more than we can say; for this very reason, when what we say is handed over to other forms of knowledge, we have to make what we have said sites of shared knowing we contribute to along with others.
According to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolution, pursuing the questions generated by normal scientific activity leads to the discovery of more and more facts that cannot be reconciled with the regnant theory that determines the relationship between observed facts. These anomalous facts are, through increasingly complicated means, made consistent with the theory, until we get to the point where accounting for those anomalies requires the proposal of new theories, one of which will eventually institute a scientific “revolution” and thereby initiate a new period of normal science. However that may be for the physical sciences, in the human sciences we need a different model of disciplinary transformation. In the human sciences, it’s the meaning of “key words” within the disciplines that become anomalous, and eventually take on new meanings. Anna Wierzbicka’s work is rich in examples of such transformations (her study of the change in the meaning of the Anglo legal term “reasonable doubt” in _Experience, Evidence and Sense_ is exemplary) and Google’s ngram viewer provides us with the somewhat different but closely related phenomenon of new and transformed words created new regions of reference in real time. If we abjure the use of some metalanguage that might put all this linguistic movement in order, the only way of working to make knowledge out of linguistic evolutions is by entering different linguistic domains and signifying from within them. At first glance, of course, the teeming new vocabulary of, say, transgenderism, can be seen as a transparently partisan attempt to hijack the language in the ongoing wars of the cultural left against normal sexuality, the nuclear family, gender difference as experienced by the vast majority of the population, and so on. This perspective is accurate enough as far as it goes, and there may be times when some new linguistic field can be “waited out” or successfully resisted in the name of some existing and still powerful vocabulary. In general, though, it will always be possible, and it is more generally the more powerful strategy, to enter such linguistic fields and supply meaning to its terms where they are lacking. Whenever possible, new linguistic fields, whatever their origins, should be redeemed —not in the interest of compromise or dialogue, but of knowledge, which can only be generated by enriching rather than restricting linguistic potential. There are many ways of making anomalous linguistic fields consistent with existing ones: any decentering can be treated as a search for the center. Key terms of contemporary liberalism, like “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “Islamophobia,” and so on, will best be reworked from within, rather than resisted from without, or simply turned against the original users (such as accusing the anti-racists as being the “real racists”). Yes, “racist,” in its most common uses, including
those uses the newly accused are nostalgic for, is just liberalism’s equivalent of “counter- revolutionary”; but lingering over the term, and making explicit the full range of by no means internally consistent phenomena it brings into view is what will eventually both de-toxify the term and use it to notice new things about what we notice in our attempts to figure out what the center wants from us. We may almost be at the point where accusations of racism have so proliferated that it will be incumbent even upon “anti-racists” to ask what, exactly, makes a particular statement or gesture “racist”—the results should be interesting. Working on saying what we mean can involve clarifying and simplifying what we say, and bringing our practices into accord with common, or more consistently excavated usage; but it can also mean finding ways to mean a lot more things.