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The second objection to Kohn’s incomplete ‘provinzialization of language’ and his maintenance of linguistic hierarchies pertains to the relationships between iconicity and indexicality on the one had, and symbolicity on the other hand, and the sorts of relationships that persist between them despite the distinction that Kohn sets up. Whereas my first objection to Kohn’s distinction has been largely in the mode of critique, this second objection will look in the direction of a more positive ‘entanglement’ of those elements he believes to be separate.

For Kohn, the imprisonment of language at the level of indexicality or iconicity (in the case of animals or plants) is registered as a poverty or paucity of complexity. But maybe we should think this the other way around. Perhaps we should envisage the iconic or the indexical word, to the extent that they advertise their relatedness to things in the world, as the true nature of language, part of things and part of their constant transformation, as the norm—not because they represent better, but because they are closer to things. By extension, it would then become possible to conceptualize the symbolic function as a generativity that doesn’t loose itself from those things, thereby erasing the difference by which humanity seeks to define its specificity and singularity.

It is instructive to return to Peirce at this point to listen to his definition of semiotic generativity, which he calls ‘transuasion’, effectively a sort of semiotic translation. In order to describe semiotic generativity, Peirce (1931-58, I/II: 51) invents another semiotic triangle, not that of icon-index-symbol, but rather, a larger, all encompassing triad of sign-object-interpretant:

Genuine mediation is the character of a sign. A Sign is anything which is related to a second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality, in such a way as to bring a third thing, its Interpretant, into relation to the same Object, and that in such a way as to bring a fourth into relation to that object in the same form, ad infinitum. If the series is broken off, the sign, in so far, falls short of the perfect significant character.

What Peirce calls ‘[t]ransuasion in its obsistent aspect, or Mediation’ (ibid: 51) is the difference within the sign, a sort of resistance or obstinate difficulty which, far from blocking productivity, spurs it on to creative transformations. Resistance guarantees the productivity of textual semiosis and generates the infinite series of interpretations constituting signification (ibid: 50). What is striking about this definition is that it describes the ongoing creative encounters that are characteristic of creativity throughout the material world:

What we need, if we want to do science, is a theory that tells us how the variables change with respect to one another. That is to say, how one changes when others change. The fundamental theory of the world must be constructed in this way; it does not need a time variable: it needs to tell us only how the things we see in the world vary with respect to each other. That is to say, what the relations may be between these variables. (Rovelli 2018: 103)

Peirce’s definition of semiosis is thus, by default, an inclusive one that can, in accordance with his exhaustive semiotic theory, encompass far more than merely language. Correspondingly, the ‘Sign is anything which is related to a second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality’ (ibid: 51), thereby encompassing icon, index and symbol, all of which are equally susceptible of participating in ‘mediation’ or semiotic generativity. There is no hint of any hierarchy of distances-cum-emanicipation from the world of things here. Nor is there any sense that some modes of semiotic activity may be bogged down in the world of things. Quite to the contrary, for Peirce it is the material ‘resistance’ (or ‘obsistence’) of signification that generates complexity and creativity, not the emancipation from such resistance. The resistant materiality at the heart of generative signification is an example of the ‘enabling constraint’ (Massumi 2015: 72-3) to which I will refer in part 2 of this book (especially chapter 11) as a crucial element in the translation process.

In order to offer alternatives to Kohn’s hierarchical demarcations and fallacious emancipations of one aspect of language from others, it is helpful to mention, by way of an example, Kristeva’s (1974) notion of the Semiotic, largely neglected since her particular redefinition of the term in the 1970s. Kristeva’s Semiotic refers to a pre-linguistic continuum of sounds, colours, motions registered by the foetus in the womb. Sometimes dismissed alongside ‘écriture féminine’ (Cixous 1976) as one of the experimental conceptual productions of an essentializing 1970s French Feminism (e.g. Oliver, ed. 2000), such notions are regaining traction in recent research the child’s learning of intonation in the period before birth (Mampe et al. 2009; Wermke et al. 2016), and to its early ability to articulate the full range of human sounds before it is locked into the limited palette of vocalic patterns imposed by its native language(s). For Kristeva, the Semiotic is a fluid and unordered medium of raw signifying material which must be repressed within the order of the Symbolic, i.e. human language, which depends for its meaning-making upon a high degree of selection and reduction of signifying possibilities. (Remaining in the unstructured free play of the Semiotic, Kristeva suggests, is tantamount to psychosis). However, the Semiotic may resurge, partly structured but nonetheless given more space than in the language of everyday communication, in art—most obviously in the play of colour and form unleashed in abstract and Modernist painting or in stream-of-consciousness or other avant-garde literary techniques (see also Kristeva 1986). Kristeva’s Semiotic is tangential to Lacan’s (1982) triadic categorization of psychoanalytical language functions into Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, just as it defies easy alignment with the Peircean triad of iconic, indexical and symbolic dimensions of signification. It may, however, be cognate with Peirce’s other semiotic triangle, that which places ‘transuasion’ or ‘mediation’, the creative work of translative ‘interpretation’ at the forefront of semiotic generativity shared by many sorts of semiotic operators. Kristeva’s Semiotic offers the prospect of a creative drive underpinning and informing patently Symbolic structures that never loses contact with other material aspects of the cosmos, and eschews any definitive insertion within a hierarchy or submission to some sort of categorical boundaries.

It is worth underscoring this point. For Kristeva, the entry into the Symbolic in the Lacanian sense, though necessary and unavoidable for full participation in the life of human society, represents a closing-down of a multiplicity of more tangible modes of semiotic access to reality. Language is regulated by a set of rules that make meaning work in coherent ways by excluding possibilities: at any point on the syntactic chain, the speaker is obliged to choose from a ‘list’ of possible choices, to make a paradigmatic choice between alternatives. The Symbolic in the Lacanian sense is thus an impoverishment of signifying potential—which is perhaps why it cannot but be the realm of loss and nostalgic desire, as Lacan never ceases to point out. And it is surely significant that Peirce, who is also a central reference for Kristeva, is concerned about the impoverishment and curtailment of semiotic productivity, at pains as he is to point out (1931-58, I/II: 51) that ‘[t]ransuasion in its obsistent aspect, or Mediation, will be shown to be subject to two degrees of degeneracy’ and to warn that ‘[i]f the series is broken off, the sign, in so far, falls short of the perfect significant character.’ Kohn’s celebration of the Peircean symbolic raises the generative power of language to the level of complexity production. By contrast, Kristeva’s more sober assessment of the costs of participation in socially sanctioned language may suggest that Kohn is perhaps excessively enthusiastic about the emancipatory character of the symbolic aspects of language. All the more reason, then, for rethinking the connections between those modes. It is perhaps in connectivity rather than emancipation that true creative freedom resides.

Indeed, it is possible that Kohn over-emphasizes the emancipatory aspect of symbolic language precisely in order to downplay the ongoing entanglements of the three Peircean modes, for which he can only account in terms of ‘dependency’ (Kohn 2013: 54). The symbolic mode is consecrated as a mode of elevating oneself above the world, of becoming, as far as possible, un-dependent. Language goes hand in hand with the upright gait of the human being, and with the development of tools that mediate the human contact with the world, just as the gaze of the upright hunter is an increasingly ‘aerial’ and distanced one (Leroi-Gourhan 1964). Yet the process by which various modes of mobility, purchase upon the world, and use of language develop out of one another belies the apparent freedom and autonomy celebrated as the end result of human development. It appears increasingly likely that the world of objects, mediated by the interaction between hand (as ‘ur-tool’ [Tallis 2003: 22, 249]) and objects, has impacted fundamentally upon the formation of brain structure and brain mechanisms; the latter evolved in order to cope with and respond to the complexities of body-object-world interaction (Thrift 2004: 597). The world of objects is a world of actors who make humanity as much as it makes them. It is a world populated by objects as ‘affordances’ (Hodder 2012: 48-52). In other words, ‘Bodies and technologies function in a self-feeding relation where transformations in the one produce transformations in the other, which in turn feed back on both’ (Grosz 2006: 188). Recast in terms of language, the symbolic, therefore, grows out of but does not necessarily grow away from the indexical. The question, then, is whether the indexical and the iconic do not remain determining and more importantly, enabling, empowering, informative substrates within a fluid whole.

A similar argument is made, in effect, in Lévi-Strauss’ famous essay on ‘La pensée concrète’ in La Pensée sauvage (1962) [The Savage Mind (1966)]. Lévi-Strauss used the opposition of ‘engineer’ and ‘DIY-handyman’ [‘bricoleur’] to express the full complexity, extending into the realm of the symbolic, of so-called primitive peoples. Mythic thought was not fundamentally different to Western thought, it simply kept much stronger connections to the material substrata of signification:

D’ailleurs, une forme d’activité subsiste parmi nous qui, sur le plan technique, permet assez bien de concevoir ce que, sur le plan de la spéculation, put être une science que nous préférons appeler ‘première’ plutôt que primitive c’est celle communément désignée par le terme de bricolage … de nos jours, le bricoleur reste celui qui œuvre de ces mains, en utilisant des moyens détournés par comparaison avec ceux de l’homme de l’art. Or, le propre de la pensée mythique est de s’exprimer à l’aide d’un répertoire dont la composition est hétéroclite et qui, bien qu’étendu, reste toute de même limité; pourtant, il faut qu’elle s’en serve, quelle que soit la tâche qu’elle s’assigne, car elle n’a rien d’autre sous la main. Elle apparaît ainsi comme une sorte de bricolage intellectuel … Comme le bricolage sur le plan technique, la réflexion mythique peut atteindre, sur le plan intellectuel, des résultats brillants et imprévus. (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 26)

[There still exists among ourselves an activity which on the technical plane gives us quite a good understanding of what a science we prefer to call ‘prior’ rather than ‘primitive’, could have been on the plane of speculation. This is what is commonly called ‘bricolage’ in French … in our own time the ‘bricoleur’ is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman. The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if it is extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal. Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’ … Like ‘bricolage’ on the technical plane, mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane. (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 16-17)]

Lévi-Strauss is at pains to stress the sophistication and ‘emergent complexity’ of these modes of thought, rescuing them from the customary denigration that used to assign such thought to the dust-bin of history. If we have any doubts that such an ‘imagination matérielle’ (Bachelard 1942: 2) [‘material imagination’] or ‘material thinking’ (Carter 2004) may also subsist in all cultures, let us heed Freud’s detection of similar mechanisms in dream language:

Die Sprachkünste der Kinder, die zu gewissen Zeiten die Worte tatsächlich wie Objekte behandeln, auch neue Sprachen und artifizielle Wortfügungen erfinden, sind für den Traum wie für Psychoneurosen hier die gemeinsame Quelle. (Freud 1999, II/III: 309)

[The linguistic tricks performed by children, who sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects and moreover invent new languages and artificial syntactic forms, are the common sources of these things in dreams and psychoneuroses alike. (Freud 1975, IV: 303)]

Lévi-Strauss’s mid-twentieth-century polemic was situated at a civilized-primitive border. It can function as an analogy for a current skirmish located on a human-nonhuman border, in which Kohn is fighting a rear-guard action. What is remarkable about Lévi-Strauss’s argumentation is that he makes a strong case for the inherent sociality of mythic thought and its profound embedding in addressivity (compare Connor 1996: 10):

l’ingénieur cherche toujours à s’ouvrir un passage et à se situer au-delà, tandis que le bricoleur, de gré ou de force, demeure en deça, ce qui est une autre façon de dire que le première opère au moyen de concepts, le second au moyen de signes. Sur l’axe de l’opposition entre nature et culture, les ensembles dont ils se servent sont perceptiblement décalés. En effet, une des façons au moins dont le signe s’oppose au concept tient à ce que le second se veut intégralement transparent à la réalité, tandis que le premier accepte, et même exige, qu’une certaine épaisseur d’humanité soit incorporée à cette réalité. Selon l’expression vigoureuse et difficilement traduisible de Peirce: ‘It addresses somebody’. (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 30)

[the engineer is always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization while the ‘bricoleur’ by inclination or by necessity remains within them. This is another way of saying that the engineer works by means of concepts and the ‘bricoleur’ by means of signs. The sets which each employs are at different distances from the poles on the axis of opposition between nature and culture. One way indeed in which signs can be opposed to concepts is that whereas concepts aim to be wholly transparent with respect to reality, signs allow and even requite the interposing of a certain amount of human culture into reality. Signs, in Peirce’s vigorous phrase, ‘address somebody’. (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 19-20)]

Lévi-Strauss rehearses a trope of the inherent sociability and cosmic embeddedness, in other words, of the irreducible impetus of immanence that underpins mythic thought. The debate is still being conducted on the side of the human here, but it is worth bearing in mind that this is against the background of a fundamental denial of common humanity which was still widely current at the time Lévi-Strauss was writing (compare Lévi-Strauss 1952). (We may have difficulty imagining the very possibility of such explicit debates today, but the inhumanity of our European polities and their policies, carefully removed out of sight to the watery killing fields of the Mediterranean, has barely changed.) What Conrad (2010: 79) expressed as the colonizer’s slowly dawning ‘suspicion of their [the natives] not being inhuman … the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar,’ was as fraught a boundary-transgression as the difference between the human and the non-human is today. Lévi-Strauss stresses the social interrelatedness of something that had often been excluded, up until the moment of his polemic, from the realm of human sociability. What his argument emphasizes is a fundamental entanglement, couched in terms of addressivity, of the once denigrated semiotic undertaking of myth. The analogy with the polemic that Kohn is conducting and which I am combatting is not difficult to detect.

Let me conclude this chapter with a potentially scandalous proposition. It may well be that the symbolic is a subordinated sector of the indexical, rather than being emancipated from it into some sort of socio-linguistic upward mobility. Perhaps, at the end of the day, the indexical mode of language, defined by continguity, causality and association, is in fact the pre-eminent mode of language, its epitome. It is possible that the symbolic is always already imbued with the all-pervasive influence of the indexical, which it claims, fallaciously, to throw off or escape from. This would mean that human language is actually much closer to the language of other sentient and non-sentient beings that usually assumed. It would imply that the modes of connection are much more significant than the points of distinction. Kohn claims a proximity that segues into distance; by contrast, I would claim that what he constructs is a putative distance that in fact conceals proximity (see West-Pavlov 2018a), or even better, an ineluctable ‘enabling entanglement’ at the heart of language (Tsing 2015: vii; see also Hodder 2012). From this perspective, one could plausibly claim that everything uses language; and the seams and contact zones of different genres of language are zones of translation, in which the translative activity of language itself would be doubly manifest, as translation beccomes translated.