limits of language

Language contributes to our capability and fallibility. The acquisition of language brings tremendous cognitive advantages, but it also constrains. Names, descriptions, propositions, narrative and poetics open up a vast arena of what can be thought about and known. The classificatory attribute of language minimizes ambiguity and allows for objective analysis, but it also tends to homogenize. If we confuse our linguistic labels for the actual territory that we are attempting to describe, we truncate our perceptual exploration of the individuality of things and events, and limit what we can perceive and know about them.

Andrew Brown (2005) Figure. Oil pastel and charcoal on paper .

Naming and classifying allow precision but can also impoverish what is being communicated. In functional prose the signifier can seem to diminish or dull what is being signified. When used well the poetic voice is more expansive and generative. Poetry utilizes rather than extinguishes the ambiguity inherent in language. More so than functional texts, poetry is open to a multiplicity of interpretations and so often evokes more than was consciously intended by the author. Well crafted metaphor and other figurative language have great economy and extraordinary power. Although poetry is composed entirely of words—like music and painting—it can take us to a place beyond words.

Stanford educator Elliot Eisner (1998: 14) encapsulates some key notions about language acquisition and cognitive function:

Some ideas are neither thinkable nor knowable without language. At the same time, language, as a privileged form of representation, exacts a price (Rorty, 1979). Language can homogenize; that is, it tends to treat things as members of a class—that is an oak tree, this is a cat… No doubt, classification is crucial. But oak trees are not all alike, nor are cats, dogs, houses, or clouds. To the extent that classification short-circuits the perceptual exploration of the individuality of objects and events, it undermines what can be known about them. In the ideal world we need to encourage and develop not only the ability to classify, but also the appetite to individuate.

Again in Wittgensteinian mode, Eisner (1998: 15) declares that “Words are so automatic a resource we forget that, aside from the forms they display, their meaning depends upon referents. We tend to take the map to the territory.” Eisner (1998: 10) is careful to distinguish the various forms of language:

One form of language is propositional: it is designed to provide precise relationships between subject and predicate and to diminish ambiguity—to the extent possible—between the linguistic terms employed and their referents. The language of science is an exemplar of propositional language. Mathematics, a nonlinguistic language, is the most compelling example of a precise “propositional” form.

As an educator with a particular focus in the arts Eisner has some compelling things to say about poetics. His comments relating to nondiscursive aspects of meaning seems to echo Heidegger’s view that we can only obtain fleeting and unsettling glimpses of the profundity of language.

Poetry employs meaning systems that differ as much from literature as literature differs from science. Poetry may have no propositions whatsoever. Indeed, the primary meanings of poetry, like some of those in literature, are nondiscursive; that is, poetic meaning is obtained from the forms the language takes. These forms convey what, paradoxically, words cannot say.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1998) The Kind of Schools We Need. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH.

ELLIOTT EISNER

American Professor of Art and Art Education [1933- ]