Chapter 10 of "TOOL"
If the speaker can have meta-awareness of himself, he could also have meta-meta-awareness and meta-meta-meta-awareness, and so on. He could never get to the intention of actually putting forth a linguistic model.
I think Gans is indeed saying that our utterances can only be explicated after the fact and never fully account for themselves but that this doesn't mean that our intuition of the intelligibility of any utterance is a "fraud" to be nihilistically denounced--we can continually, if never completely, clarify it.
Declaratives, i would say, conceal from themselves their own grounding in desire because their "essence" is to demystify some other desire. This concealment can be maintained if the proposition is treated alone, as a "reflection" of reality in itself. Once propositions are understood recursively, as explicating previous declaratives and being explicated in turn, the desire informing them is "unconcealed."
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Any utterance is grounded in desire. Even if you're presenting a "model of reality" you want that model to prevail over some other possible one. In uttering a declarative, you're modeling, along with "reality," a way of appropriating reality.
The declarative emerges as the contrast between reality with the desire expressed in an imperative. The declarative's essence is to demonstrate the impossibility of fulfillment of some imperative.
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Yes, ultimately language is a kind of substitute for (or deferral of) appropriation. But this gets much more complex than in the examples we have to use in hypothesizing the emergence of basic speech forms. If you refer to a mountain, you're probably not just pointing to it--you're talking about it in a conversation that might involve planning a trip, studying geology, looking at a painting, etc. The appropriation that is being deferred in these cases must be understood in broader social terms--hiking trips, discussions of art and scientific inquiry aIll serve deferral purposes. That is, they all, like the declarative, create a "reality," a part of the world we treat linguistically rather than fight over. Institutions established authoritatively serve the purpose of deferral. The most basic model for all this is ritual, which provides the terms of coherence for a community by repeating the act of communal origin. More developed institutions do this in more indirect ways. Language first developed to give added meaning to ritual, so that ritual could provide means for modeling more practices. Language still does the same thing--it produces narrative of institutions that keep accounting for new desires and resentments generated those institutions."Appropriation" comes to mean things like acquiring wealth, power and status, and doing these things in socially destructive ways must be deferred--that's what we use language for. Establishing spaces (like art and science) where constrained intellectual practices are privileged provide language for deferring socially destructive "appropriations."
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Sickness is a good example. In a sacrificial culture, where everything that happens to one is a result of the doings of the gods, to be sick (or injured, or malformed...) is to be "marked" in some way. The gods hate you, so you deserve it. Referring to the sick is a kind of scapegoating, in that case--referring to him maliciously defers resentment among others in the community.
Now, referring to sickness as something towards which we should show compassion and which we should try to alleviate, is a way of deferring such scapegoating. We are still tempted to "blame the victim," but we have created institutions of deferral that enable us to treat the victim differently.
So, in talking about sickness, we are talking about how to address victimization. Under some conditions, "piling on" the afflicted is the way one "appropriates" status and power; under other conditions, deferring that impulse is the way we confer honor (and a certain social status or authority is "appropriated:).