Speaking Matter

“The bare fact is,” says Rowan Williams (The Edge of Words), “that the material world speaks.” Material agents speak, “and this speech is not . . . a chance decorative addition to mechanical process, but an activity that is implicated in the entire complex of finite agency. If the world is a coherent whole, speech is bound into that coherence” (123).

This is true in several senses. Material objects “are always already ‘saturated’ with the workings of mind; we cannot abstract the object we examine from the means we are using to examine it. Drawing on Conor Cunningham, he argues that “‘something analogous to intelligence’ has to be assumed in the way even plant life adapts to its environment: the entire system ‘learns’ and ‘plans.’” Thus, “So far from consciousness or human intelligence being a somewhat embarrassing excrescence on the surface of rational material processes, it would be better to say that intelligence is literally the only phenomenon in the universe that makes sense of the overall direction of material existence towards coherent, sustainable, innovative, adaptable forms” (101-2).

Materialist would want to explain language by reference to material processes, but Williams thinks the opposite gets us closer to the truth: “We look to language to show us what matter is,” which is to say hat “language exhibits a pattern of cooperative agency in which the structure of life or action in one medium is rendered afresh (translated) in another. The material universe appears as an essentially symbolic complex. It is an exchange of ‘messages,’ a universe of coherent process and temporal stability, of form and motion, an intelligible universe, because the unfolding story of material evolution leads to speech, to the expression and sharing of intelligible structure, both a communicating of information and a reinforcing of mutual human cohesion which allows more and more creative ‘negotiating’ with other parts of the environment” (102). 

Williams points to genetics for support: “The notion of a genetic code and the immensely sophisticated concept of the genome take it for granted that there are in our genetic material regularities that can be identified as significant by other material receptors. A gene is not a small item, not even in the rather refined sense in which we could still just say this of an atom, but a shorthand symbol for a pattern of recurring elements within the ensemble of genetic material activating cell tissues; but it becomes a pattern only when there is a receiving and decoding ‘partner’” (102). On this understanding “cooperation and ‘recognition’ . . . are the effective motor of the evolutionary story” (103). 

Only language provides “the models we needs to grasp these processes in the non-human world.” It’s language all the way down. Beginning and end, it’s the word.