Language in Time

The overall aim of Rowan Williams’s recent The Edge of Words is to explore what the phenomenon of human language might have to say about the reality of God. Along the way, he has much of interest to say about human language itself.

He observes, for instance, that “we cannot ever simply say the same words twice with absolutely precisely the same meaning” (67). “There’s a mouse in the house,” I say. And then you answer with the same words: “There’s a mouse in the house.” Williams notes that “You can’t be doing exactly what I’m doing, simply sharing information about what you might expect to see in the kitchen. You may be checking that you’ve heard correctly, probably with a small upward inflection at the end of the sentence. . . . You may be expressing shock at the news” (67). It’s odd but true that “if someone else repeats what i have just said, that does not normally work as a guarantee that they have understood my utterance; quite often it may mean the exact opposite” (68).

This remains true even for formalized uses of language like the lines of a play: “Saturday’s performance of the school play is not the same as Friday’s: the same words in the same order (with luck, if everyone has learned their lines), but there will be differences bound up with the fact that 24 hours have elapsed. When Tanya speaks her lines in Act 2, she is at some level aware of where she got a laugh last night, of the fact that her grandmother is in the audience tonight and will be shocked when she has to swear on stage, that she grasped for the first time last night why the other character on stage at this point reacts as he does so that she will tonight be expecting his reaction in a slightly different way.” Whatever is said, whatever performed or enacted “becomes ‘material’ to the next utterance or performance, so that this latter cannot be in any very interesting sense the same” (68).

Williams combines these homey observations with the Wittgensteinian insight that understanding is not “a matter of gaining insight into a timeless mental content ‘behind’ or ‘within’ what is said” but rather “being able to exhibit the next step in a continuing pattern.” Understanding doesn’t bring the dance of conversation to an end; it means knowing what the next step is. As Williams puts it, “Understanding is not in that sense a ‘mental process,’ the summoning up of a key principle by conscious thought” but “the skill or confidence to go on, to follow the series through; a skill in the exercise of a habit, if you like” (68-9).

And this means, further, that “linguistic activity is always something that moves in time. There is an irreversible trajectory in language: what has been said cannot be unsaid, and what is now to be said has to reckon not only with the environment as such but with the speech of others which makes the environment we encounter always already represented“ (69). 

Williams puts these pieces together to emphasize the ongoingness of language, the absence of a final, definitive judgment that closes all conversation. Convergences emerge in out talk, but “whatever ‘victories’ of convergence may emerge, they do not simply end the game you happen to be playing, they establish the possibility of new and different ‘games’ or, better, practices of shared speech” (67). 

That might imply a differance that scatters in endless Derridean dissemination. In fact, it does imply endless deferral of meaning, so long as the we believe in an absolute absence of final words. That is, so long as we disbelieve in a God who is Word. Once we confess faith in that God, dissemination has a Messianic closure, a closure that gives shape and direction to the dissemination itself. When we believe in a God who is Word and who is Omega, we must stop believing that human language is a shapeless scattering. It is instead a movement toward an end, in which God will be all in all.