/lit/ - Literature

Can't sleep so i'm gonna post some late night autism :)
I continue to be interested in how social forces and power determine language and how language reflexively determines society and power. This is something that the philosophy of language from an analytic perspective can't grasp. Wittgenstein realized this when he quit trying to isolate the meaning of propositions as some inner logical kernel (Tractatus) but rather sought to locate it in the interactions between language, behavior, and social participants (PI)

For instance, one thing I am interested in is how a person's status determines what meaning their statement is accorded. It is perfectly possible for a respected expert in a given field to utter the exact same statement as a layman on the topic relevant to their expertise but the expert's statement will be accorded more meaning than the layman's. What this clearly demonstrates is that the meaning of the statement is not contained in the statement at all. At best it is correlated with it. The meaning is bound up in the utterer and their position in society.

Wittgenstein's no private language argument implies the only intelligible language must be shared public language. We can't have a language that only we know the meaning of. This would mean, however, that language itself is distributed in its meaning, it is a collective "cloud" entity, that does not reside in any of us as a static entity but rather flows through us and emerges from us collectively, like the primal intelligence of a beehive.

What baffles me is the seeming infinitude of language, despite it being the most commonplace and normal part of human life--one of its absolute defining characteristics. It gets even more exponentially fucky when you consider the internet and how it has created an even more complicated hive of language. It has all these bizarre amplifying and decontextualizing and replicating effects. There's no way I could get to the bottom of it!