Heirs to the Wreckage

I’ve recently been trying to understand a certain thinker, Jacques Lacan. I took an undergrad course on him and was enticed because he was fascinated with the role of language in our everyday lives. Language, and our “personas” in society are to some extent a mask, and few understood this better than him. Reflecting on my early childhood, perhaps I had somewhat of a basis to understand this. For if I had to name my first language, it wouldn’t actually be English- it would be Spanish.

 A language is more than a means of communication; it is a system that structures reality. To learn a language and communicate with others is to interact with a cultural structure and to inhabit a persona. When we interact through language, in public society, we are to some extent “play-acting”. English was present in my infantile household, but Spanish held the dominant influence. However, English dominated the outside world, the world of larger society. It was the language of classmates and teachers. I learned the slow drawl of American English (the English I had at home was different), let my jaw go slack where it was used to over-enunciating Spanish phonetics. I learned what words and turns of phrase would be understood by my peers and that built my sense of that world’s cultural norms. It’s a stretch to say I did this consciously, like any other child I simply adapted to my surroundings; but I knew that those surroundings were not the One World but one arbitrary world that could be donned and discarded. In other words, I know what it is to have the world’s language be somewhat foreign to you, to wear it like a sleeve to pursue acceptance and gratification from authority figures. To feel forever alienated from it because its culture, propagated through language, is external to you, and is influencing your being. You feel that by assimilating you’re sacrificing some authentic irreplaceable essence of yourself. And of course, you can never get it back, you can never go back to being a “pure” unaltered being; or perhaps you were never one to begin with. 

And eventually the mask of language, the mask of play-acting to an external social order, becomes your true identity. For instance, the word “red” is used to denote the color red. But to me it seems that an infant/toddler does not need this signifier as a reference. The concept of red simply materializes in their head, and “red” is merely what they use to apprehend its meaning in social reality. As time goes on, we lose this knowledge, and we begin to think in prose (in semantics) and less in unstructured thought. “Red” is what rings in our minds when thinking of the color red, rather than the raw concept that we had before. Scientists may attribute it to a normal change in neuroplasticity, but the explanation can be extended far beyond that. In any case, as a child I was aware that “red” and “rojo” were not the same. They referred to the same phenomenon- but through different lenses, with different cultural associations, and from different worlds. For if adults think in prose, the person who thinks “red” is vastly different from the person who thinks “rojo”. And it’s possible that I was more aware of the mask-like quality of both words as a result. 

I tell this anecdote because Lacan essentially claimed that this happens to everyone- this is my amateur attempt to parallel his theory. We are all (necessarily) drafted from a young age into social ideology, and this may seem rather obvious (we are shaped by our environments, we grow up under influences, etc.), but it calls into question how truly free and authentic our personas are, given that they are shaped by such external forces and signifiers. From this point, he theorizes that people will always possess an existential lack, a sense of incompleteness. For the signifiers that we rely on were not originally ours, and having to live up to them as infants leaves us with a sense of inadequacy. Nor will language ever perfectly, fully express the truth of our being, there’s only so much that can be communicated and only so much that will be understood. 

He (and more provocatively Žižek), indicates to me how quickly and permeably we fall into the grip of ideology, and how this can radically shape how we experience the world. He also indicates how ideology will never fully complete us, and normativity, conformity, is never perfect. Make no mistake, language is an ideology, a collective societal narrative on how one ought to express themselves. It is also necessary, because the only way to make sense of the world and interact with others is through some sort of social ideology.