Man's faculty of thought has appeared to be so distinct from nature that some have attributed it to a gift from God, leading to a Cartesian-type dualism – against which Spinoza would have reacted – while other philosophers, from Fichte to Léon Brunschvicg, have subordinated perceptible reality to it, passing from spiritualism to absolute idealism. Since the last World War – and the intensification of the tragic dimension of history – whether or not one is speaking of a materialism refined by the progress of science in all its diversity, the cards have been modified by the importance now attributed to language. Language has provided the necessary means of resisting the antinomy between a dogmatic metaphysics – that sets thinking or the mind apart from the world – and a neurological determinism which anticipates everything will be accounted for through research on the brain. Before the perceptible world, an irreducible symbolic and semiotic dimension began to be put in place, arising out of the numerous analyses of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1904) and passing on to the revolutions of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1923).
In reality one should go back further, to the later research of Wilhelm von Humboldt (d. 1835), to mark the beginning of a second wave of modernity in contrast to Cartesianism and its technicist promises. In the period between Humboldt and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), on the fringe of manifold advances in psychoanalysis, the rehabilitation by Nietzsche of the body would have very fruitfully stirred up the preconceived ideas about the nature of the thinking being. The commonplace that ‘language is the unique characteristic of man’, which was minutely analysed in many articles by Émile Benveniste (1902–1975) and collected together in the two volumes of his Problèmes de linguistique générale published in 1966 and 1974, could then come under examination from an anthropological perspective (transcending the swings between psychology and sociology), and to which the contribution of the linguistic theory of Gustave Guillaume was by no means the slightest. The occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death on 3 February 1960 serves as a call to try to clarify and make better known what was fundamentally at issue in his penetrating hypotheses. To keep to the essentials of that astonishing project, we will, within the limits of our modest discussion, try to bring out successively:
I. The kinetic implications of any quest for meaning by a thinking process that is striving to express itself: being the dependence not only of ‘to think’ on linguistic systems, but also of these latter on a signifying mechanics;
II. The operative and temporal character of these kinetic processes that are constitutive of language: an operative time that is not measurable but ordinal, corresponding itself to an Instant which paradoxically is constant.
Whence the capacity of language, which does not lodge anywhere else – whatever its association with cerebral activity might be – to enter upon discourse at any instant and in an instant; and its homology with the Cogito, coextensive in a thinking-speaking Subject, the core of the human condition.
From systems to a ‘mechanics’
If, in order to speak, it is not essential to be aware of the history (diachrony) of one's language – as Guillaume delighted in emphasising – on the other hand it is important that its synchrony (an ‘at the same time’ by which it is systematised), along with completing a language act as given recognition by Saussure, is not limited to describing a state of language (a linguistics that is primarily structural, because static) but encompasses what Saussure very correctly calls the ‘mechanism of the language’. Alone among the latter's successors, Guillaume sought to pin his theoretical research to a ‘psycho-mechanics of language’, radicalising on a kinetic basis what he had previously called a ‘psycho-systematics of language’. From the very fact that language appeared to him as being an ‘(integrative) system of systems’ – nominal or verbal – (La langue est-elle ou n’est-elle pas un système? 1952), the shifts implied by the construction of these systems – operations, assumed by the language users, justified the use of the term ‘mechanics’: the effective condition for ‘illumination’ (language as ‘lucidity’, rising above ‘animal turbulence’) and in no way blind, as often thought. On the other hand, in the term ‘psycho-mechanics’, the radical ‘psycho-’, which is ambiguous, particularly in French (as in English), would be better replaced by ‘signifying’ (thus: signifying mechanics), since mentalism is no way involved.
The two major language registers which may illustrate the hypothesis, subsequently developed into a theory, concern on the one hand the systems involving the French definite and indefinite article, elaborated in 1919 though not altogether thoroughly, despite the stages previously traversed by Louis Havet, and on the other the Indo-European verbo-temporal systems, were elucidated in Temps et Verbe [Tense and Verb] in 1929. In the case of the former, the shifts from broad to narrow focus and vice versa, from which one cannot effectively stand aside if one is to understand and be seized of the real, as demanded by language activity, call for the recognition in the French indefinite article ‘un’ (Eng. ‘a’) of a shift from the Universal (swiftly registered by the mind in ‘un homme est mortel’ – ‘a man is mortal’) to the singular, approached in ‘un homme entra’ – ‘a man went in’, before this movement reaches its inversion threshold. At that point of rebound there emerges the definite article ‘le’ (Eng. ‘the’) – with its origin in the Latin pronoun ille – as in ‘l’homme entra’ – ‘the man went in’ – preceding the generality of ‘l’homme est mortel’ – ‘the human being is mortal’. This interpretation is kinetic in nature, going beyond the standard designations of the articles as indefinite and definite where the articles register an unequal relevance at their moment of perception. Verbal systems, on the other hand, are governed by a process of ‘chronogenesis’, where the (tri-phase) construction of a time-image, which is characteristic of the indicative (in esse time) follows upon modes of subjunctive type (in fieri time) and quasi-nominal type – infinitives and participles (in posse time). Within the set of conjugations may be noted the plurality of ‘sense effects’ of the French imperfect tense – where the expression ‘un moment après, le train déraillait’ (‘a moment later, the train derailed/was derailing’) reveals the fine balance with which language subtends our thought.Footnote 1
If meaning derives out of direction and movement, with linguistic operations supposing a process of reconstruction (an instantaneous and unconscious reiteration of the constitutive kinetic processes of the language), such a constructivist explanation no doubt goes beyond the habitual explanatory approaches to language structures and systems.
Given this conclusion that, functioning at a more micro level than psychology, the science of behaviour, linguistics as kinetically based presents as a mechanics of meaning, Guillaume, by melding the linguistic genetics of Wilhelm von Humboldt with the (differential) diacritics of Saussure, could well appear as the ‘Newton of the moral world’, a status David Hume aspired to shortly after the death of the great theoretician of celestial mechanics. This all the more since linguistics, which, like psychology, had no distinct existence at that period, cannot be ignored by today's psychologists when they address the domain of cognitive activity. It is there that operativity provokes a revolutionary instantaneity in man – one much prior to those deplored by Paul Virilio in the technological domain – in favour of kinetic processes of which we are unconscious but which very propitiously underpin our thinking capabilities.
From the Cogito to the Instant of the Loquor
The priority of the kinetic over the static, in occasioning a process of instantialisation weighty in its consequences, aligns quite closely with the intuitive character of thinking to assist in showing up a removal from time or a dependence on an eternity: there where there is engenderment and condensation, that is, in the domain of operativity. Such an instant is both separative of a past and a future, and actualisation of a language in utterances. An instant of initiation which ‘downstream’ provokes renewal but which ‘upstream’ paradoxically affirms constancy: these to the extent where it is the same linguistic virtualities which authorise, at any instant and in an instant, spoken – or written – concatenations of greater or lesser length. The setting-off of in-common thought against the fleeting instant calls for the latter to be attributed a capitalisation (something neglected by theoreticians): as is done with the speaking Subject, both depository of the language and composer of its expression. Thus denoted, the generativity of utterance is distinguished from the subordination of the speaking subjects to forms of domination within their particular socio-political domain. The instance, at the centre of a tension between the conservation of the system and the innovation of its utterances stands in sharp distinction to the non-linguistic institutions.
Thus, not only can human temporality not be separated in any way from this organisation – whence the reference in George Steiner's After Babel (1998: 139) and in Paul Ricœur's Temps et récit (III, 1982: 10) to our Temps et langage, essai sur les structures du sujet parlant (1967) which was inspired by the teaching of Guillaume – but the constancy of this brings to mind the Cartesian Cogito, coextensive with our lives. With this reservation, that the Cogito has been genetically transformed by its incarnation in particular expression, as was decisively set in train by Wilhelm von Humboldt's project of a Comparative Anthropology of Human Languages. That is why, if the issue of thinkability – of means of thinking – is of capital importance in the destiny of the speaking Subject, the I of the Cogito lodges there, to the benefit of a Loquor (Temps et langage: 284) whose deponence suitably limits the element of the acquired or the transmitted, while discursive activity arises out of it.
Hence, alongside Benveniste's ‘instances of discourse’, this linguistic Instant infers that language is not an institution like others, whatever might be the influence of the social milieu in its regard – something often underlined by Pierre Bourdieu. For it occurs ‘distributively’ in each of us, at a distance from the exteriority of the State, the Church, the factory or the hospital. It allows utterances to be exteriorised, in widely different contexts. It introduces an instantial dimension that is original to humans, a condition of existentiality and temporalisation, in the face of spaces that are becoming more and more urbanised and where the density of voices and noises never ceases to grow. Whatever the impact of languages on the human condition, their synchronic operativity, anteceding all consciousness, subtends the apparent miracle of thinking, by substituting for any dogmatic or loose affirmation the rigour of an organisation that systematically and kinetically conditions its sense.
Conclusions
The importance given to Guillaume's work by a whole school of linguists, whose members, working on the majority of languages on the five continents, have increased tenfold since the master's passing, has not failed to strike many philosophers, through the issue that we have tried to bring out. In their turn, Father Gaston Fessard, Paul Ricœur, Gilles-Gaston Granger, Henri Maldiney, Jean-Marc Ferry or Giorgio Agamben concluded that they were discovering a genius whose work they needed to turn to profit in order to throw new light on the origins of thought and time, key elements of the human condition. Should not the idea of a mechanics of signification, sufficiently innovative to underpin the operative Instant of thinking-speaking Subjects whom their language renders available for initiating utterances (whatever their degree of culture), call for some particular attention?
By bringing back language (the Idea-Universe) into a ‘great face-off’ with the universe itself (the representative vertical dimension of the relation Man-Universe), Guillaume brought forward determinations that are no doubt irreplaceable for realising what Humboldt, Hegel or Cassirer were striving to achieve. Reflexivity and analysis of the perceptible world assist in transcending, genetically and structurally, a substantialism that is constantly reasserting itself. The anthropological specificity of the transcendental, which had roused Michel Foucault's interest from the time of his translation of Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in 1961, arises all the more out of the power of language in that it corresponds to an unexpected and pluralised opposition to the mechanics of rationality, which governs empirical reality. Less than ever could it be that there are two worlds, each of different nature, but rather that there exist complex and varied processes which enable the universe – within its ultimate but lowly inhabitants that we are – to be cultivated (to become the culture of nature) through self-reflection.
The Subject, co-extensive with the Instant (in-stans), results out of a ‘Subject-becoming’ of the individual, that is, of a body which, standing erect (stans) in space, does not depart from a quasi-animal present. By structuring himself through language in order to voice his experience – to other Subjects – he unites the singularity of his expressivity to the latent universality of his communication. Language is truly a dense and radiant core for the human condition: melding together the tension of virtualities in each of us with extension to groups of more or less vast dimensions. Its operativity assigns to its sense-intentions – and a thought-actualisation specified linguistically – a temporal constructivity able to dissipate the metaphysical illusions of the intemporal. From universal gravitation to the singular generative capacity of each speaker, movement could not fail to unfold, however contrastively, from the sensible to the sense.
Translated from the French by Colin Anderson
