CTI Statement of Purpose - Language & Disciplinary Distinctions

Until the last few decades, language has been one among other objects of study for Historians and social theorists, but not a factor of fundamental methodological import. Literary critics and philosophers of language have, on the contrary, long been concerned with such basic issues as the distinctions between literary and non-literary uses of language, tropological and referential functions of language, and ordinary and exceptional utterances, as well as the way these distinctions determine a more general approach to linguistic phenomena. Yet they have, by and large, not taken into account relevant historical and sociological factors and have tended to remain within established disciplinary frameworks. In the wake of developments in language theory associated with Saussure, Frege, Wittgenstein, Jakobson, Austin, Heidegger, Chomsky, Foucault, and Derrida, to name only these, a more comprehensive and discriminating approach has become essential in order to understand how the disciplines themselves have been governed by linguistic structures and, what is more, how such a linguistic determination has affected their relations to each other.

The importance of language in the practice of philosophy has been a recurrent theme throughout the twentieth century, and there have been numerous signs of a comparable focus on linguistic phenomena in historical and social theory. But this development, as far as history and social theory is concerned, still has far to go. Much needs to be done to take into account the ever-increasing complexity of communications processes in daily life as well as the vastly augmented nature of electronically mediated languages. Thus the status of natural languages in relation to technological communications systems raises new and urgent questions.

The past century has witnessed two fundamental kinds of challenges to the autonomy and transparency of language—one epistemic (Freud, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, etc.), the other socio-political (Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, etc.). The philosophical, aesthetic, literary, historical, and social categories needed to analyze these developments in terms of the relations among the disciplines have yet to be elaborated. This represents another focus of our research.