Or, Almost as Many Commas as Derrida
Humanity wasn’t born into language. That is, language is a tool learned — it’s nothing innate. Kenneth Burke, and Derrida, for that matter, would argue language establishes hierarchy — humanity operating under the umbrella of a lingualism not owned, nor created, by any one user, but one cultivated to serve the interests of a powerful minority. Further, no human is raised to be truly multilingual, forever operating in a “mother tongue” (though, even mother tongues are vapor, an illusion of social interaction). These conclusions represent an oversimplified, reduced core of Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, an obscure take on human languaging and our inability to grasp the true nature, or rather, daunting meaninglessness of spoken word and languaged thought.
Derrida exerts we dwell within our own monolingualism, drawing from it self, identity, culture, and powerful metaphors and idioms, with which we structure our understanding of reality. (But, in genuine, contradictory Derrida fashion, we also do none of the above.) In many ways, language is a trap. For, as Derrida explains, we cannot accurately speak of language but in that language itself, rendering cross-cultural communication and translation ineffectual at their core. Also trapping us inside our own minds, language is no less created by the individual than reality. The language by which we define ourselves is simply, from the beginning, a language of the other — created through history, by millions, owned by none.
Of course, Derrida has more to say (and much more to self-contradict), but this core idea of the trappings of language can be wonderfully extrapolated through Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind. Colonized Africa has been systematically forced into the language of Western Imperialism, striped of a mother tongue (a first-level language of the other), crammed into the language of another, drawing Derrida’s theory into a second-level perspective.
Derrida states a foreign language, while possible to translate, is never inhabitable in the way a mother tongue is. In Africa, this resulted, as Ngugi explains, in the complete loss of power, and culture, of native Africans, as well as the creation of a corrupt, second-tier power in post-colonial African politics. Ngugi’s accounts support Derrida’s idea of power-creation by naming. Ngugi ancestors and contemporaries were forced to discard their native language, and as a result, discard their identities, in exchange for the language of the power holders. This rendered the liberal arts and creative class, the religious and the petty bourgeois even weaker due to the fact African culture was completely lost in translation or discarded for the cause of Western power.
Ngugi, working with concrete examples, is slightly more cheery than Derrida, speaking of a harmony of the mother tongue. And even though Derrida would argue Nguigi’s mother tongue also deceives him, Ngugi’s experience puts Derrida’s theory in perspective, allowing a sense of the real to rise out. For all who control language, control power — a lesson easily learned, but hardly applied.
Calling back to my reaction to escaping Adorno’s Culture Industry, it appears the solution lies in the individual. As Derrida puts it, and clearly Ngugi agrees, invention is the holy answer — individual invention of language, invention of form, invention of medium (as in Ngugi’s case of the African novel). Using this path, one can make some wonderful leaps, advancing the argument supporting art as a medium for social reform: from individuals (such as Ngugi), to collectives, to movements, to true progress.
But to return to the point, a more grounded argument could be made (and is by Derrida) for the importance of language in the creation of identity, and thus a stressed importance of the individual in the creation and cultivation of language. As Ngugi found, through creating a medium, by inventing, and owning, a new language of the other, one for the descendants of the mother tongue, he was rewarded with considerable power in the development of the resulting cultural movement. Knowing creation is power, then, is the first step toward securing freedom, the all-important universal ideal.