The Material Word: Some Theories of Language and Its Limits

Abstract

There is a visual pun on the cover of Silverman and Torode’s book-a picture of a square of cloth stamped with the three words of the title. The Material Word would have failed ifwe had refused to enter the text in this way, at its edges. The book consists of a series of papers, seven by each author, which argues that the word in black and white, but not the spoken word, is available for literal observation in a way that sociological phenomena are not available. The Material Word, therefore, seeks to shift sociology away from a concern with the interpretation of social action and towards the study of language as both its topic and resource. The elegance with which this projected shift is proposed and canied out in the book, makes it the most challenging recent product of the linguistic turn in social and literary studies. The kernel of the linguistic turn is not, of course, the isolation of language (instead of class, power or status) as a previously neglected independent variable, but is a recognition that the phenomena of society, politics and sexuality are inseparable from their spoken and written expression. The insistence that language is burdened by a social and political economy is, in one way or another, common to Wittgenstein, Austin, Garfinkel, Barthes, Denida and Foucault, all of whom come under Silverman and Torode’s scrutiny. Of course, each take a different direction from this commonplace. The direction taken by Torode and Silverman is near enough to Denida, but is uniquely their own. Torode and Silverman demonstrate a density in language, in that all spoken and written discourse proceeds in several ‘voices’ which constitute a necessary surplus. Their practice, based on this demonstration, is a political intervention which refuses to allow hegemonizing discourse to forget the diversity of ‘voices’ which it employs. They call their practice ‘interruption’. Torode writes that: