Let a man get up and say, 'Behold, this is the truth,' and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say. Virginia Woolf
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1985) have recently made a spirited effort to reassert the rights of that oldest of concepts 'the mother tongue.' It was certainly high time. The Lacanian equation of the child's entry into the symbolic order (the order of language) with the imposition of the Law of the Father has been too easily accepted by many women. The resultant readiness to see our everyday tongue as 'male' and attempts to find a new female 'language,' a form of writing free of patriarchal constraints, have led straight back into that old trap, the dichotomizing of mind and body, of culture and nature, and the traditional labelling of the one as masculine and the other as feminine.
Gubar and Gilbert suggest that the very concept of language itself as patriarchal is an assertion of territory which results from deep-seated male fears, an attempt to impose a primacy over language which in fact belongs to the mother, the medium through whom the child's second birth, that into language, is affected. Observations of children's language acquisition suggest that it is the child's realization of the mother's autonomy, and the need for language to overcome the resultant helplessness, which precipitates the 'symbolic contract.'
Indeed, it may be important to see that, since the symbolic contract is 'signed' before the social contract which in patriarchal culture constructs gender difference, these two contracts are notably different treaties with the world (1985:537-8).
The question which then arises is how language, the universal
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mother tongue, is converted into a tool for the implementing of the social contract. What forms of language become 'master tongues?'
The most convincing study of the setting up of a master tongue is that by Walter Ong in Fighting for Life (1981). If the first tongue is the mother tongue, and indeed 'there are no father tongues' (36), then how is a language of control, a legalistic or priestly speech, a patrius sermo as opposed to the materna lingua, to be set up? In fact, precisely because women did control the vernacular, another discourse of masculine dominance was needed. At first, in largely oral societies, the mere control of a written script and its particular formulations was enough to distinguish the priestly or bureaucratic class, to reserve for them the master tongue. Through writing there develops the grapholect (Ong, 1982:106-8) which eventually enables both the richness of elaborated codes and the social control permitted by a national language.
However, the spread of writing to 'lower' spheres, such as the domestic and the commercial, encouraged the preservation of a special privileged discourse, a priestly tongue. This special discourse resulted in Europe from the teaching of rhetoric in Latin.
Because of its base in academia, which was totally male — with exceptions so utterly rare as to be quite negligible — Learned Latin had another feature in common with rhetoric besides its classical provenance. For well over a thousand years, it was sex-linked, a language written and spoken only by males ... Devoid of baby-talk, insulated from the earliest life of childhood where language has its deepest psychic roots, a first language to none of its users ... Learned Latin ... establish[ed] knowledge in a medium isolated from the emotion-charged depths of one's mother tongue, thus reducing interference from the human life-world and making possible the exquisitely abstract world of medieval scholasticism and of the new mathematical modern science which followed on the scholastic experience (1982:113-4).
Similar positions of power, of social and intellectual control, were occupied by such sex-linked patriarchal languages as Rabbinic Hebrew, Sanskrit and Classical Chinese. All were learned originally by writing and were spoken only by those privileged to write them. All conferred the unique power of the mastery of abstraction. Ong sees this 'closed-shop' effect, combined with the agonistic and contestatory nature of rhetorical training, as producing a male bonding pattern. Then he rather naively adds:
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Far from considering the learning of such languages attractive, women commonly shunned it as disabling. The exquisite Japanese writer Lady Murasaki Shikibu (b.967?) reports in her diary that she learned Classical Chinese by sitting in on her brother's lessons in the language but hid her knowledge of it because she knew it would make her disliked, as, she notes, knowing it made even boys unpopular (1981:133-4).
According to Ong, the twentieth century has seen an enormous change in the orientation of education, coinciding with the entry of females into secondary and especially tertiary education. The priestly tongues, Latin and Greek, have been replaced by the general use of the vernacular, the contestatory patterns of learning and the communication of knowledge have given way to a more interiorized approach, as witness the abandonment of the agonistic mode of teaching history. Here I would beg to differ from him; a legacy of two thousand years in which the word for school (ludus) also meant training for war (1981:132) is not so soon dispensed with.
In modern academia, and indeed in many walks of life, the priestly or the master tongue has merely found new forms, of which the most notable is the ever-growing use and development of metalanguages. Metalanguages are languages which comment on language, second-order systems which take over a first language and use it to examine itself. The first language thus becomes the system under scrutiny. Language is here understood in its wider sense as any signifying system, whether of symbols, of visual signs, or of oral signs.
The notion of metalanguage must not be confined to scientific languages; when ordinary language, in its denoted state, takes over a system of signifying objects, it becomes an 'operation,' that is, a metalanguage (Barthes, 1968:92).
The characteristics of metalanguage are well displayed in this partial definition, which is also paradigmatic of certain uses of syntax and vocabulary. There is the appeal to a closed group of initiated, of cognoscenti, by the use of specialized terms. There is the characteristic use of the hortatory speech act: 'The notion ... must not be confined.' Last but not least one sees the traces of the agonistic rhetorical vocabulary which is part of the academic tradition: 'language ... takes over a system.' I am placing the emphasis on the metaphoricity of war, of acquisition, of proprietorship.
I should stress that the present study is not an attack on metalanguage. Like the priestly tongues which preceded it, it has incalculable
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advantages. Just as Latin enabled clear precise communication of ideas throughout a whole continent of disparate and warring nations, and permitted the essential development of abstract thought, so metalanguage permits us accurate communication and the development of clearly defined concepts in everything from cybernetics to literary theory. However, this should not obscure the history of these discourses, largely devised and used by men, still fulfilling the function of the bonding of a peer group, all restricted codes within the elaborated codes of education language. They are the discourses of control, of regulation and of power: the very terms used to elaborate scientific language have their roots in masculine activity, they are terms of war, of possession, of penetration, of division, of territory. An early example, obvious, but not atypical, is:
The verb is a word whose principal use is to express affirmation, that is to say, to denote that a discourse wherein the verb is employed is the discourse of a man who not only conceives things (that is, representations, ideas) but who judges and affirms them (Logique de Port Royal, cit. Marin, 1980:302).
However, the big advantage of metalanguage is that it gives us the tools to criticize itself (see, for example, Wilden, 1972:ch.l4). Speech act theory, for instance, has sharpened our appreciation of the pragmatics of discourse. We appreciate the hidden commands behind such statements as 'It will be observed that,' 'It is agreed that' and — 'We appreciate.' In the same way deconstruction allows us to read male discourse in the light of the female discourse it occludes or subverts. We read with a different attention such phrases as 'the man who conceives things,' and assert the primacy of the oppressed term (Culler, 1982:169-70), the deeper signification hidden behind the accepted metaphor.
So what is the advantage of reading, and writing, metalanguage as a woman? Mostly, an increased awareness of the non-neutrality of 'scientific' language, of the fact that:
It is an illusion to imagine ... that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection ... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community pre-dispose certain choices of interpretation (Sapir: 'The Status of Linguistics as a Science.' cit. Hawkes, 1972:80).
If the formulations of men are no more wrong than the formulations of women, nor are they privileged in any way. Male academics, however, have tended to assume that the language of their findings is ob-
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jective, neutral and universal, as proper a vehicle for their female colleagues as for themselves. The users of metalanguages claim exactness, based on the methods of the exact sciences, yet those very sciences now admit, since Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle, that any observation must take the observer into account. Women are also witness to the curious masculine double standard which demonstrates the gender-based nature of metalanguage. Any female employing such discourse successfully has had the dubious privilege of being congratulated by her male colleagues on her 'masculine powers of expression and reasoning.'
So women's advantage in using metalanguage is not to transcend but to exploit the gender difference. Because it is not their language, because it functions in and from a masculine power base, they are more aware of the extent to which the gender of the observer shapes and frames the observation. In the exercise of metalanguage women are speaking in a 'double voice,' to adapt a formulation of Mikhail Bakhtin. He points out that when we speak the language of another, as for example when a minority adopts the language of a majority or one class that of another, the words become bivocal:
Another person's words, when introduced into our speech, inevitably take on a new aspect — our understanding and our valuation; i.e. the other person's words become double-voiced. But the interrelationship between the two voices can vary ... Our practical everyday speech is full of the words of other people; we merge our voice completely with some of them, forgetting whose they are; others we take as authoritative, using them to support our own words; still others we people with aspirations of our own which are foreign or hostile to them (1973:161-2).
As far as I know, Bakhtin never applied this idea to gender, and yet it seems clear that one of the main forms of bivocalism occurs between genders. In the exercise of poetics and interpretation, for instance, women are speaking as non-natives. They are quoting metalinguistic male discourse. This may confer the immense privilege which Gilles Deleuze qualifies as:
Being a foreigner, but in one's own tongue, and not simply as someone speaks another tongue than their own. Being bilingual, multilingual, but in the same single tongue, without even dialect or regional speech (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980:124, my translation).
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In terms of discourse, speaking with a double voice confers, at the very least, something of the same advantage as that of the left-handed tennis-player who must be aware of his or her own game and also of that of right-handers and learn to combine the two bodily languages in one. Of course the left-hander may never learn to use this advantage fully, just as a woman academic may go on trying to play the male game on male terms. Speaking in another's voice can even have positive disadvantages. Think of some English-speaking semioticians, permanently doomed to express themselves like a bad translation from the French, because this is the form in which the metalanguage has reached them, and they are unable to divide the content from the expression.
All of us, say Deleuze and Guattari, are in fact speaking at all times in the tongue of others. Our language is a mosaic of quotations from our history, our ideology, our gender, our race: a sort of free indirect speech, where expression is the site of an interaction between speaking us and being spoken by us (1980:134). As we have seen, metalanguage likewise speaks its users, in as far as it emerges from the whole history of academic discourse, of sex-divided language groups, of the rhetoric of power. There is however a difference between being spoken by one's discourse, unconsciously, and speaking that discourse as a conscious art.
When we are spoken by our discourse, as even scientists and public servants are by their seemingly objective language, we are territorialized, we become the possession of, are included in the standard workings of, language and thought. If however we use our discourse as a foreigner, or as the member of a minority uses the speech of the majority, we can deterritorialize ourselves and our language, change the stakes, and shake the proprietorial bonds.
Thus the very concept of langue, of natural language, is a metalanguage which involves an effort to possess, to master the ungraspable potentialities of the mother-tongue, a territorialization. We can take this very language a step further, however, and use it to deterritorialize linguistics, to understand that any chain of meaning comprises:
very diverse acts, linguistic acts but also acts of perception, of mimicry, of gesture, of cogitation: there is no langue as such, nor any universality of language, but a competition of dialects, local speech, slang, special languages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980:14, my translation).
The danger, however, is that the traditional structures of lan-
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guage and thought constantly threaten to reassert their control, to reterritorialize our language and our thinking.
Take for example a very positive approach to deconstructing the all pervasive male/female opposition that penetrates all our metaphoric and analogic thought, an approach offered by the new research being done on the brain. If within each of us, as now seems established, there exists a dialectic, an interpenetration, of the functions performed by the right hemisphere of the brain, the analogic, and those performed by the left, the digital (Wilden, 1972:155-195), then we have a universal human model which accounts for many of the phenomena which have been attributed to sexual difference or, more subtly, by Freud for example, to the internalization of maleness and femaleness in every person as a product of their socialization. And yet, as Anthony Wilden remarks (1972:295), it is fatally easy to plot these new discoveries onto the old binary schema. Then the reterritorialization by the forces within metalanguage itself takes place. Even such an innovative thinker as Walter Ong (1981:133) succumbs:
Differences here between intellectualizing agonistic play and artistically creative play perhaps correspond in some way to the bicameral organization of knowledge and behaviour in the two hemispheres of the brain, although the truth about bicame-rality is still exceedingly ill defined. The agonistic would belong with the analytic, left, field-breaking side (masculine). The less agonistic or nonagonistic would of course be more holistic (feminine).
A similar reterritorialization by the forces inherent in the metalanguage itself constantly threatens the work of Julia Kristeva, in spite of the fact that she has done so much to draw awareness to the potentialities of the 'feminine.' The terminology of psychoanalysis still forces her into reasserting the binary opposition of the feminine and the masculine and the definition of the feminine in terms of lack, of being the non-masculine, characteristic of that discourse (see Gross, 1985).
Psychoanalytic language constantly pre-empts questions of symbolic priorities, and this preemption is then reinscribed in the discourse of literary criticism when it quotes psychoanalysis. To take one example: a common feature of many male writers' discussion of their work is the use of the terminology of child-bearing (Maclean, 1982). Works are conceived, carried to term, brought into the world with pain and travail and, of course, frequently aborted or still-born. Here we have a very revealing discourse which is not phallocentric but hysterocentric, and yet this same discourse is invariably converted
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by the metalanguage of literary criticism into expressions of potency as opposed to castration and impotence (cf. Gunew, 1983). One function of women's reading of such texts and use of such metalanguage should be to deterritorialize the discourse itself, to use the double vision and the double voice conferred by the consciousness of gender to undermine the false presumption of scientific objectivity, and to make literary critics, male and female, aware that the tools of their trade are gender-biased. Such new awareness, however, must avoid the danger of merely reversing the terms. In discussing the above case, the mere substitution of womb-envy for penis-envy would be only 'building up another set of oppositions, still coded around the ideological opposition of the sexes' (Wilden, 1972:295).
What are some of the possible outcomes of women's use of metalanguage? Regretfully one must admit that in most cases the probable result will be that they become controlled by the very language they have learned to master (and I use the term advisedly). They will manipulate and be manipulated by the ancient agonistic paraphernalia of logic and rhetoric. However this form of unconscious quotation, of indirect speech in another's tongue, can be superseded by a conscious use of the discourse. We can become aware of the gender-based, historically and ideologically influenced metaphorical and metonymic foundations of the new 'priestly' tongues.
Parody and irony will help to raise awareness of the extent of the problem. But more is needed. We must learn to use metalinguistic resources to decentre metalanguage itself. Bakhtin made a distinction between the imitation of the discourse of others, which is a nonproductive form of double voice, and the more productive relativiza-tion of that discourse, which involves exploiting it for one's own ends. The double voice of gender is but one of the many forms of 'indirect speech,' like those of class or of cultural and ideological background, which contribute to the relativization of discourse, making us 'multilingual' or producing what Bakhtin called polyphony. An awareness of the possibilities of that relativization should come naturally to female scholars, trained to speak the priestly tongues from the position of the outsider admitted to the temple. Women should be less in danger of being reterritorialized by gender-based methods of argument and semantic structures than are their male colleagues, but it is important not to underestimate either the power of the discourse itself or that of the academic rituals within which it functions. Toril Moi (1985:1-18) has recently demonstrated how some feminist criticism has been unable to break through the traditional structures and approaches of the academic establishment.
Only an awareness of the dangers of such reterritorialization will
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enable women to promote a new flexibility, a new exploitation of multiple levels of meaning and suggestion. They can also, as Jonathan Culler suggests in On Deconstruction (1982), promote a new masculine awareness of the gender-based vocabulary and strategies of much metalanguage. Women semioticians, women critics, women interpreters have the immense advantage of 'being a foreigner, but in one's own tongue.' In practising poetics, the only way we can work on creation by words is through words, words which in their turn work on us. Woman can benefit from the very distance which separates her from languages which were created for, and constantly recreate, that stranger, her other.
Marie Maclean teaches at Monash University Notes
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1973) Dostoevsky's Poetics trans. Rotsel, New York: Ardis.
Barthes, Roland (1968) Elements of Semiology trans. Lavers, A. and Smith, C., New York: Hill and Wang.
Culler, Jonathan (1982) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1980) 'Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality' New Literary History XVI, 3, 514-543. Contains extensive bibliography.
Gross, Elizabeth (1985) 'French Letters: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Pleasure 'forthcoming.
Gunew, Sneja (1983) 'Feminist Criticism: Positions and Questions' Southern Review 16, 151-161.
Hawkes, Terence (1972) Metaphor, London: Methuen.
Maclean, Marie (1982) 'Baudelaire and the Paradox of Procreation' Studi Francesi 76, 87-98.
Marin, Louis (1980) 'Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherd' in Suleiman, S. and Crosman, J. eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Moi, Toril (1985) Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London and New York: Methuen.
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Ong, Walter (1981) Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
........ (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word,
London and New York: Methuen.
Wilden, Anthony (1972) System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, London: Tavistock.
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