The limits of language
A misreading of Wittgenstein
Let’s start with an obnoxious quotation by “ordinary” language philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. I am prompted to do so only because a meme appeared in my newsfeed this morning. You may have seen the somewhat hackneyed and clichéd quotation: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
Wittgenstein is talking about the limits of public language, meaning something like: we are constrained in imagining only a world that all of us agree exists together. There is no “outside” this common consensus, and this consensus governs what we think.
Philosophers routinely try to go “outside” of our agreements, to tie language to something more concrete. But “ordinary” people don’t worry all that much about what the word “God” or “soul” means; the words, despite any academic definition or concrete materiality, work perfectly fine. Thus attempting to “pin down” these words philosophically is equivalent to “taking language on holiday,” “outside of its natural habitat,” making the words un-mean for the sake, it is believed by philosophers, of greater clarity and meaning. Wittgenstein knows this is a red herring.
This extends to political speech as well. The limits of our political speech are the limits of our world. Which is simply to say, whoever controls speech (say the institutions of speech, including the news presses, social media, the funding agencies, and the universities who deploy these funds) controls reality. You may be tempted to think that beyond these propaganda houses there is some reality “out there” and that if university professors or journalists were sincere, they would be more interested in revealing the truth that exists beyond the “language games” demanded of them by their chosen profession. But to do so would be to extinguish the very profession they have chosen.
Wittgenstein says famously language is a game; there are rules you have to follow for your words to circulate. It makes no more sense to try to describe what is “outside” these rules than it does to ask, in the game of chess, why does knight beat rook? To ask why is to take chess on holiday.
If you understand the rules of the game, your speech will work and people will be drawn to you because your language will circulate. Within the parameters of already existing speech then are political possibilities articulated. You could conceivably expand these parameters, but that would involve a violent, Marxist, solution—i.e. overthrowing by force the stewards who own speech.
But if you believe “free speech” alone spoken eloquently and sincerely enough can punch a hole in the propaganda colossus so that people will “wake up” suddenly and realize the truth, you are no different than the philosophers Wittgenstein criticizes. You fundamentally do not understand how language and the world work.
Trump is a master of ordinary language, which is why educated elites hate him. He articulates himself and his goals in a way that respects the boundaries of what a given collective (his base) wants to hear. Of course, elites will take him to be a charlatan not because he can’t communicate with people but precisely because he can. When he speaks, language works. And when his language works, where that of his Liberal detractors falls flat (or has no bearing on how (at least half) the people of America vote), it only makes sense that those same Liberal elites will hate the people and the man who represents them fully in ordinary speech: that person is Donald Trump.
Listen to Trump’s address at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin on October 30th:
With your vote this November we are going to fire Kamala and we are going to save America.
We will cut your taxes, end inflation, slash your prices, raise your wages, and bring thousands of factories back to America (and in fact we are going to bring a lot of them right back to Wisconsin).
I will stop the chaos in the Middle East; October 7th would have never happened, all those people would be living today.
And I will prevent WWIII.
We will crush violent crime and give our police the support, protection, resources, and respect they so dearly deserve.
We will strengthen and modernize our military.
We will build a missile defense shield all around our country, all made in the USA and a lot of it made right here.
We will rebuild our cities including our capital in Washington, DC, which is in horrible shape, making them safe, clean, and beautiful again.
We will teach our children to love our country, to honor our history, and to always respect our great American flag.
And we will put in legislation: anybody burning the American flag, one year in jail.
We will get critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our schools and fast, and we will keep men out of women’s sports.
I will defend religious liberty, I will restore free speech, and I will defend the right to keep and bear arms.
[Instead of] defending foreign borders and protecting foreign lands, we are finally going to build up our country, we are going to defend our borders, and we are going to protect our citizens, we are going to protect our land, we are going to protect our country.
And we will stop illegal immigration once and for all. We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be overrun, we will not be conquered.
We will be a free and proud nation once again!
Everyone will prosper, every family will thrive, and every day will be filled with opportunity and hope and loaded up with the good ol’ American dream.
We’re going to have the American dream back.
But for that to happen, we must defeat Kamala Harris and stop her radical left agenda, and we have to have a landslide that is too big to rig.
Gotta make it a landslide!
For the past nine years, we have been fighting against the most sinister and corrupt forces on Earth.
With your vote this election, you can show them once and for all that this nation does not belong to them.
This nation belongs to you. It belongs to you.
It was hardworking patriots like you who built this country, and six days from now it is hardworking patriots like you who are going to save our country.
You are going to save our country.
After all we have been through together, we stand on the verge of the four greatest years in American history.
We can do that. We can do that. It seems so unlikely. It seems unlikely, but we can do that.
With your help from now until Election Day, we will restore America’s promise, and we will take back the nation that we love.
We are one people, one family, and one glorious nation under god.
We will never give in, we will never give up, we will never back down, and we will never ever surrender!
Together we will fight, fight fight! And we will win, win, win!
November 5th will be the most important day in the history of our country.
We’re gonna turn things around, and together we will make America powerful again!
We will make America wealthy again!
We will make America healthy again!
We will make America strong again!
We will make America proud again!
We will make America safe again!
And we will make America great again!
All impeccably delivered without a teleprompter! Now, if you cannot get onboard with a speech like that, I would say, you are not a Comrade. You cannot hear the people’s hopes, aspirations, and intelligence. Likely you don’t want to hear it. You would rather carry on with your material analysis of forces, trying to tie revolution or what have you to some sort of external criteria so that you can continue to believe you have objective laws on your side. The people’s fancies, which are subject to the whims of the best orator, are nothing at all for you to put your faith and trust in. You are above that.
But it is Trump who commands the power of the people, and this power can be used to effect change. If you can’t win over the people, i.e., if you can’t get your language to circulate amongst a broad consensus, you have no social power.
This power, of course, is not invincible. The goals Trump lays out will not, in the mean, come to fruition. But why give up at the outset, particularly when you are at the spearhead of a real movement? Why not, indeed, fight, fight, fight?
The linguistic feat alone is worthy of admiration. In an age of division, how can a man speak so publicly and candidly? How can one put together a plan of action that sounds not only coherent, but achievable?
There isn’t an academic alive who could speak so eloquently. For starters, any academic would immediately trip up here:
We will teach our children to love our country, to honor our history, and to always respect our great American flag.
What could possibly be wrong with that? In an ordinary language setting, this is certainly the correct thing to say. In fact, it is the only thing one should say. Yet no academic could ever find it in his soul to say it.
To put it in Marxist speak: Trump understands language’s use value. Academic Marxists are lost dealing exclusively with language’s exchange value (governed by publication, citations, and index rankings) which creates a hieroglyph of semantic meanings that has no bearing on the everyday lives of ordinary people. Academic Marxists, that is, believe in developing further the infrastructures of alienated speech, as if success on this front is the surest route to revolution. But the masses don’t read academic publications or monographs. So who are you talking to?
I am amazed at the discursive space Donald Trump has managed to create around himself in which ordinary words actually work. I look around at my academic colleagues (and myself), who spend decades doing research, poring over words, doing our utmost to make our words match the world. Yet Trump achieves this effortlessly because intuitively he knows something we are likely to repress: that words only work when they circulate in the minds of the people. If you are stuck doing “theory” thinking that you are aiding the struggle which is ongoing covertly, you are stuck in the philosophical airs that Wittgenstein criticizes. To put it bluntly, those you meet in private ZOOM meetings and at annual conferences are not the masses.
To end with another hackneyed quotation, Wittgenstein encourages philosophers to go BACK TO THE ROUGH GROUND!—which means, listen to the speech that the people actually want to hear. Ask yourself why it works? Don’t dismiss it, and please don’t “theorize” about it. Try to emulate it.
But I doubt very much you will see any Wittgenstein scholars at a Trump rally, which is why, in the grand scheme of things, philosophers are irrelevant—or certainly, not aligned with any sort of force that can initiate change. They would have to get down on the rough ground with the people to do that. They would have to stand with Trump. But in fact, Trump doesn’t need them. The people will suffice.
Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy extends also to Communists. Communists too need to get back to the rough ground! There should be a visible contingent of MAGA Communists at every Trump rally. But they will never do this, mostly because they would be unable to withstand being laughed at, ridiculed, and attacked. Yet these are all the things that the MAGA crowd (and certainly Trump himself) have had to endure well before 2016 (another reason why an alignment of MAGA and Communism makes perfect sense).
Alas, Communists too would rather bypass the people to continue publishing, once again missing the revolutionary moment. Perhaps Jackson Hinkle will one day run for President. But how would this be tenable? It would only work, at least at this historical juncture, by making inroads with the American working class, which means, through the Republican Party. If Communists were serious about organizing, they would begin by establishing MAGA Communist chapters all across the country. Instead, as far as I can tell, they still believe grassroots organizing begins with the CPUSA, the AFL-CIO, the Socialist Worker’s Party, or some other naval gazing organization divorced from the masses with no social power. Philosophy and Communism, at least in the USA and possibly within the academic world at large, will continue to be irrelevant.