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The futility of language is a concept which came up a number of times in the readings for this weekend, both through the abstractness/inaccessibility of the writings themselves and in the discussion of language directly. Specifically, Luce Irigaray opens “When Our Lips Speak Together” by saying that “if we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history.... If we keep on speaking sameness, if we speak to each other as men have been doing for centuries, as we have been taught to speak, we’ll miss each other, fail ourselves. Again” (205). She proceeds to construct a text that I could understand only on some oddly confused “poetic” level.

I admire the desire and the practice of creating a new language. According to linguistics, a language fits the needs of its community. According to muted group theory, language is the product of the dominant/dominating group, a tool to perpetuate its domination by not allowing for expression the specific experiences of marginalized people. I do not see how these ideas have to be mutually exclusive. Local dialects can prove both, and perhaps offer an alternative, however paltry, to muted group theory, as do the attempts by these French feminists to recreate language, which are clearly much more elaborate and, therefore, revolutionary.

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In “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” Judith Butler claims that power is a never-ending, always-changing structure: “If the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and again” (13).

This reminds me of Lacan’s rereading of Freud and, in particular, de Saussure’s Borromean knot used to explain a subject’s progression to and relationship with language. The claim there was that people are never complete, never stable, because they are always trying to get to a place (back to the “real,” the “baby blob”) that they could never possibly do. So, therefore, taking into account both claims, both inside and outside forces will always keep us as struggling, striving, incomplete, people.

This is an idea that needs to hit the masses, and quickly. After all, who doesn’t think we’re supposed to grow and mature until we are complete? How much existential turmoil is spent in this unending and futile process? (Although, I suppose, it keeps therapists in business.) As a twentysomething there has not been a moment when I have not struggled with this. For some years now, I have chalked it up to the fact that, because I am in between generations (I was born in 1981, right on the border between Generation X and the Millenial generation—the cusp, or fence, if you will), there are very few media outlets targeting my age group directly (I have a whole theory on this that I won’t go into now). As a result, there is little outside guidance as to what people my age are supposed to be like and do, except, of course, for having long since graduated college, but that’s a whole other theory, of the social clock...

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