conjunction junction: language as posthuman object

In this week's reading from LeFevre, we are introduced to some Kantian philosophy as related to language. Unfortunately for you, Kant and Latour have some interesting intersections that I cannot resist exploring here. But first, let's revisit LeFevre's buildup. She asks us to consider the eternal question: what is language? A reflection, distortion, metaphor, medium, obstruction, tool, or reality itself? A pretty ambitious question, one that thinkers have been trying to answer for some time. And perhaps there is no answer that satisfactorily answers that question.

Yet Kant, and later Latour, come as close to answering that question as possible, in my estimation. As LeFevre notes, Kant makes some valuable observations regarding the relationships between humans and objects, notably that it is the relationship between the two that is important, not the anthropocentric point of view that even considers whether or not the fabled tree falling in the woods makes sound. Kant argued that it would be "an absurdity if we conceded no things in themselves or set up our experience as the only possible mode of knowing things" (107). In other words, the tree does make a sound. Of course it does, because the world is not centered around and dependent upon a human's presence.

Yet meaning--and indeed language--is still made by humans, but it is made via a series of a priori categories that comprise our epistemologies and ontologies, and lead us to evaluate the world in a system of shared symbolic meaning. Ideas, then, become objects in themselves, and, as Bronowski notes, "the world is not a fixed, solid array of objects...it shifts under our gaze, it interacts with us..." (109-110). So we are interacting with the world and making our own meaning, yet that meaning is dynamic and dependent on the networks of objects/actors in which we find ourselves entangled.

So what is language? At least according to Kant and Latour, we might frame language as objects. In an elementary way, this makes sense. We teach language as a series of building blocks (words) that do different things when used in different ways, right?

So can we talk about language as a Latourian actor? This is complex, of course, because I would have to prove that language can be separated from the user. But language has been disembodied since Gutenberg, and it is increasingly disembodied as our words and language systems are uploaded, downloaded, remixed, and hacked in digital spaces.

Q: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Q: What is language's relationship to reality? With whom do you most closely align yourself?

Q: If we consider (even for just a moment) that language is an actant on the same ontological footing as its users, how can we reframe the idea of authorship?