On displacement

Framework

The core subject “language” is understood in accordance with the framework of cultural-historical psychology as put forth by Vygotsky and his circle (Yasnitsky, 2011), a framework that stresses the mediatedness of human activity. ¹ According to this idea, human activity is principally mediated, it employs mediational means such as concrete tools and language, and these mediational means shape the activities in essential ways (Wertsch, 1993). The proximity of tool and language, induced not the least by Vygotsky himself (1931/1997), affirms an instrumental view of language—“language” seems to be interchangeable with “tool” and best understood in terms of that term: an instrument individuals can put to use in order to reach certain aims, an instrument which is principally at the disposal of these individuals. Actually, the tool metaphor for language is firmly rooted in modern European thinking, language is said to be “the most useful tool of thinking” (Wundt, Bühler), or “the tool of tools” (Hegel; Keiler, 2002, pp. 187–188). In general, cultural-historical psychology and activity theory subsequently developing in the 20th century conceptualize language following that basic notion and treat language as “mediational instrument.”

In view of that largely unquestioned conceptualization it is important to observe Vygotsky’s own development of the tool–language nexus. His early research and writings indeed view language from an instrumental perspective, underscoring its functioning as tool within the semiotic mediation processes taking place intermentally and intramentally. Thus, his interest lies first in mediation itself, not yet in its means, simply seen as instrument. But from the 1930s on, Vygotsky gave up the tool metaphor for language and developed an increasing interest for the means of mediation itself, and, particularly, for the “meaning volume” of the word. Vygotsky realized that the psychological tool, i.e., the word, has an inner side, the “far side of the moon,” leading him to the basic assumption of the developing relationship between a sign and its meaning (1934/1987, Chapters 5, 6, 7). This lead Vygotsky to confer language—precisely as dynamic movement between thought and word—a key status in the new theory he envisaged for psychology.

Starting with the cultural-historical framework, and taking up Vygotsky’s lately emerging approach to language, I differentiate the “mediational means” in terms of “dialogic language.” Dialogic language is seen as informed by address and reply as the activity where mediation takes place. This is achieved by involving Vygotsky’s contemporary dialogic linguistics and language philosophy as given in Jakubinskij, Vološinov, and Bakhtin (Bertau, in press-b). Vygotsky’s contemporaries build not only a dialogic notion of language but also a dialogic notion of consciousness, working with concepts like “inner speech” and “inner audience” (Bakhtin, Vološinov) where “voice” appears to have a clear psychological function for the psycho-social organization and functioning of the socialized individual (e.g., Bertau, 2008). Continuing this Russian-Soviet dialogic vein and involving the framework of dialogical self theory (e.g., Hermans & Gieser, 2012), I further understand the subject as a dialogical self. The result of this double differentiation is the dynamization of entities to dialogical processes and the clear acknowledgment of otherness. Otherness describes the basic position of the individual as addressed and affected (“touched,” “altered”) by the other. This fundamental relatedness can be explained from a developmental point of view: at the moment of birth (even with conception) the subject enters into the world of others, which is a world constituted in language and constituted through the actual language activity of others, an incessant performance of meaning-making activities, manifested in ways of speaking and listening, of addressing and replying (Bertau, 2012a). Hence, the self comes to be a self by virtue of these other originating acts, developing as socialized individual, and that is: as self–other related individual. The resulting framework for the study of language as psycho-social phenomenon is hence a synthesis of cultural-historical and dialogic approaches to language and the self, founded on the notion of alterity (Bertau, 2011a, 2011b).

Notion of language

As stated, mediational means are conceived in terms of dialogic language and this conception is linked to a certain tradition of language notion. Indeed, understanding language as mediated activity along the lines of Soviet psychology is historically and conceptually related to Humboldt’s “energetic” definition of language saying that language is not an ergon, i.e., a work or product, it is energeia—a “doing-ness,” an activity. ² Hence language is the spoken word, it is the speech that happens, and the aspect of language as a product, or a system, becomes secondary to the language as a process itself. So, on the one hand, the processes taking place between at least two individuals are privileged—privileged is the praxis of language as an always situated, culturally and historically specific praxis cooperatively conducted by mutually oriented individuals. On the other hand, the aspect of performativity is foregrounded, highlighting the dynamics of forms and formations taking place in time and through time, thus transtemporal forms existing through their moment-by-moment, specific performance. Performativity means also sensorial, bodily experience of the forms performed—by both speaker and listener: hence, the phenomenality of language matters in such an approach, its appearance in terms of rhythms, tempo, tone of voice, ways of wording, pause and turn structures, kinds of address. This is reflected on the semiotic level in the understanding of the verbal sign as “vivid materiality” (Bertau, 2011a, 2011b; Vološinov, 1929/1986). To see language as performance between socio-culturally situated individuals, means to move it definitely over to a rhetoric understanding and to highlight its effective function.

Following this line of argument, it becomes further clear that a shift concerning the locus of language takes place: from single individuals to their in-between. This shift has two remarkable consequences. The first one is to acknowledge that the actually performed language activity shows a specific quality, conferring it its own status: it does not amount to an addition of every individual’s single act, rather, it is an autonomous gestalt beyond additionality. De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) champion such a view for interaction in general, inviting us to

go beyond a view that defines interaction as simply the spatio-temporal coincidence of two agents that influence each other. We must move towards an understanding of how their history of coordination demarcates the interaction as an identifiable pattern with its own internal structure, and its own role to play in the process of understanding each other and the world. (p. 492)

Following this reading, it is not possible to reduce the language activity to single acts, nor can it be traced back to the individual’s respective intentions. In effect, the notion of self-contained agent usually taken for granted must be given up in favor of an “active–passive” agent, permeable to the other’s acts, and to a common history of language activities. The specificity of the in-between is conditioned by the dialogicality of the verbal acts: they are interdependent, which means that the actual formation of the acts takes up past utterances as well as possible future ones. Speaking is to weave oneself in that dynamic net of positioned voices, making up the verbal culture and experience of a speaker community.

The second consequence of the shift from the individuals to the in-between means to take seriously the experience and embodiment of the language activity previously mentioned: that is, to take seriously the phenomenality of language in its communicative and psychological effects—voice for instance, is to be given an important role in this respect. In short, voice is a genuine psycho-linguistic phenomenon: a dense qualitative socio-cultural texture of living materiality that is of utmost importance for human beings. In my understanding, voice plays a major role in the formation and developments of a dialogical self (Bertau, 2012b; Bertau et al., 2012), of consciousness (Bertau, 2008), and in symbol formation with regard to language acquisition (Gratier & Bertau, 2012).

The “spacetime of language”

In order to give the autonomous gestalt emerging in the language activity performed by self–other related individuals not only a status in its own right, but also an adequate conceptual form, I propose the term “spacetime of language”: it acknowledges the fact that any language performance happens and generates a specific space situated in time and informed by the flow of time. Space is not understood as a container, it is not the eucledian three-dimensional space independent from time. Rather, it is a space built up and altered by language activities, a moving and wandering of interdependently emerging forms across time, such as words and utterances, entangled with gazes, postures and positions, mimics, gestures, and whole body movements. The verbal formations within the spacetime happen according to the spatial and temporal positionings of the partners, which, in turn, are conditioned (but not determined) by the partners’ socio-cultural positions. Worth noting, positions are enacted and formed verbally and via the physical space to which objects belong importantly. ³ So, the spacetime of language is exactly that specific in-between generated by the verbal formations of speaking-and-listening partners within this sensible space-in-time, partners touch and affect each other in their common Now by their voicings and wordings, themselves shaped by the (dynamically changing) positions and kinds of address the partners enact. Hence, the spacetime of language performed at the office of a male professor by that professor and a female student at a German university is for instance markedly different from a similar spacetime 100 years ago (1914)—it sounds different, and it looks different.

As this language spacetime is an evolving, unfolding dynamics, its forms are experienced under several aspects. First, as linguistic forms: specific words in a certain word order, coupled with specific intonations; second, the forms are experienced through their “chronotopology”: locus and direction of an utterance within physical space as well as within imagined-performed spaces according to dynamic structures of addressivity, coupled with tempo and rhythmicity (who is speaking to whom by what kind of addressive act, and from where to where, with changeable proximity); to this comes the possible entanglement of several chronotopes leading to a plurality of voices and positions forming the language spacetime (see Karsten, 2014); and, third, the forms are experienced according to the roles and positionings of the performers: self as-whom to other(s) as-whom, the positionings changing across the performance more or less markedly. Again, objects have to be included in these positioning processes forming the spacetime of language: they can be owed a voice (puppets, artifacts like computers), given a role by the partners leading to further positioning, they can also position the partners to each other from the start (a couch and a chair). So, what is observable across language spacetimes are forms in function, forms functioning for individuals and for their communicative and relational purposes.

Bühler and an extension

How does this spacetime of language function? This autonomous gestalt, which is generated by the partners, emerging from their verbal activities, and which affects them in a certain way? What exactly is the “doing-ness” of language, how does language put the spacetime into effect? Bühler’s general pragmatic approach to language is a good starting point, because it stresses the partners’ language activities as activity with specific psychological effects: displacement is here the notion signifying that dynamics are at work, thus very useful for our questioning.

“Mutual navigation” (gegenseitige Steuerung) is the term with which Bühler (1927) goes beyond Darwin and Wundt, stressing the functional and pragmatic dimensions of language, and, on the contrary to these thinkers, explicitly addressing an individual within a community: not a single speaker, but an individual as “sign-giver” to which a “sign-receiver” belongs, so that expression and reception are correlative acts. Contact and mutual regulation belong to the grounding idea of mutual navigation—they can take different concrete and more abstract forms. Navigating each other’s conduct (Benehmen) and experience (Erleben) in terms of a coordinated understanding, and regulating each other through different kinds of contacts: both notions pertain to Bühler’s (1927) understanding of language as practical “field implement” for each other’s orientation. Hence, Bühler’s (1934/2011) famous organon model of language includes two individuals and their world. The verbal sign—situated at the center of Bühler’s model—gets its semantic relations precisely from these three involved entities: it is symptom of the speaker (expressive function), signal for the receiver (appealing function), and symbol of the “things and states of affairs” (representative function). Thus, Bühler offers us a view of language which addresses two socialized individuals, mutually turned to each other, and for whom the verbal sign functions in specific ways. Language is and remains bound to this situation, it is nothing less.

The term “field implement” makes clear that verbal symbols are used not to reflect the world, but to mediate it: “the representational implement language … is a medial implement in which certain intermediates play a part” (Bühler, 1934/2011, p. 171). By insisting on the quality and working of language as an implement and by the related notion of the field, Bühler highlights the mediating of language as a commonly achieved doing: in need of a field commonly, lively, and presently experienced and established by consociates (to take Schütz’s 1971 term). In this, Bühler also contravenes the mind-centered understanding of “representation,” an understanding that privileges the power of the mind to represent, subordinating language to that power: the act of representing is in this case located in the individual mind, and not in the language—language becomes a transparent medium without its own “representational force.” In this way, two notions of “representation” appear. First, a notion privileging the mind and its power to represent; here, language represents “without presenting” (Friedrich, 2009, p. 44), i.e., without existing in its own right as specific medium, with a clear tendency to lose its link to the world: language is transparent. Second, a notion—Bühler’s notion we try to retrace—privileging the language practice of a system of socially organized individuals; here, language represents through presentation, it has a direct connection to the world, it itself represents, now—so there is no duplication of realities (here and now, changeable—there, essential/conceptual, unchangeable; Friedrich, 2009, p. 44). ⁴ With Bühler, one thus can accede to a dialogic and praxologic notion of language representation. It is a notion that remains with the language users and their language activity. In this, language appears to follow reality in a certain sense; it shows a certain “fidelity.” As Friedrich (2009) points out, Bühler agrees with Cassirer to reject the ideology of language as reflection or image of reality, but he does this with much more prudence, stopping at a point modern theoreticians of language transgress:

No, human language does not paint, neither as the painter paints nor as the film paints, it does not even “paint” as the musicians’ musical-paper does.

Nonetheless, fidelity in some sense must still be possible in its renderings. For without fidelity there is no “representation” that would be worthy of the name. It seems to me that some important contemporary theoreticians of language (Cassirer among them) have gone too far in their well-founded opposition to the ancient and medieval views on the “image function” of language and are in danger of emptying the baby out with the bath water. (Bühler, 1934/2011, p. 215)

So, by not going too far into detaching language from what it represents, i.e., from reality, Bühler accepts and acknowledges the paradox that language is at the same time not an image, but faithful to reality (Friedrich, 2009, p. 42)—it is exactly fidelity that prevents language from being casted out from the connection of thinking to reality. And, furthermore, it is fidelity to reality that maintains language’s relation to its users, who are living human beings anchored in a specific reality as necessarily mutually related individuals. This form of faithfulness is evocative of Humboldt’s understanding of language: for Humboldt, language unifies sign (Zeichen) and image (Abbild), it consists not simply of arbitrary signs emerging from an arbitrary act—on the contrary, it is a synthesis of sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) and intellect (Verstand; see Bertau, 2011a; Liebrucks, 1965; Trabant, 1990).

The symbol used guides the partners’ understanding, and the effect of the verbal symbol is thus to displace each other’s momentary attention toward an aspect of reality that is then jointly referred to. Mediation is fundamentally a movement to be followed and accomplished by both partners—without move, no understanding, which is to be distinguished from misunderstanding, where understanding occurs, although “at the wrong place in the world” (see Hörmann’s, 1976, “falsche Weltstelle”). So, language is in Bühler a “release mechanism” (Auslösung, later Appell, appeal) leading the speakers/listeners to an oriented perception. Hence, as Friedrich (2009) concludes, for Bühler the link between world and language is neither mediated by the mind, nor by representations as mental conceptions (Vorstellungen), but it is pre-formed by “language as structuring dimension of the phenomenological facts” (Friedrich, 2009, p. 58). By the language mediators, an orientation within a common field is put in train. It is in that sense, on the grounds of the guiding or navigating notion, that I would state that displacement is central to Bühler’s (1934/2011) pragmatic understanding of language functioning. ⁵ It highlights that in the moment of displacement, speakers/listeners see and think something in the world which would be neither seen nor thought by them without the mediation of language (Friedrich, 2009, p. 58), although within the limits of “a certain fidelity” to reality. Making present what is otherwise un-conceivable is the very accomplishment of language. Precisely then does language not subordinate itself to a mind that possesses the representational power, language does then not represent reality in the mind-centered understanding; rather, language, by its representation through presentation explores reality as a meaningful reality in its own rights—meaningful to social, mutually related individuals.

The following list gives Bühler’s (1934/2011) types of displacement, extended by three further types I propose (Bertau, 2011a, 2011b). Displacement can be carried out:

Effect and conditions of displacement

For Bühler, displacement serves mutual navigation, by which members of a “true community” coordinate each other through a semantic means—in such a community the meaningful behavior of the members is subjected to mutual navigation (Bühler, 1927, p. 39). Insisting on mutuality, Bühler highlights what he calls the “dynamic concordance of behavior,” a veritably occurring mutual regulation on the grounds of diverse forms of contact. Following Bühler’s ideas of mutuality and contact, I propose to explain the effect of language displacement by the fact that it generates sharedness beyond the actual, sensitive contact of, for instance, a touching hand. So, by more abstract language displacement, the individuals come to share a common affective and cognitive world—more precisely: on the grounds of common social practices, they assume they share common meanings and concepts, common feelings and evaluations.

Clearly then, displacement does not automatically occur and function by language activity, rather, it can well fail when interlocutors are not able to generate and hold affective and cognitive contact. This can represent much of an effort, displacement can be “a jump,” a risky movement to somewhere unknown until now—this is for instance what innovative metaphors ask to do. Of course, displacement can also be a completely habitual movement not felt any more. Generally, displacement necessitates by both partners an active re-directing in cognitive and affective terms. It is an actively realized attachment, a cognitively and imaginatively constructed relation as specific drive between speaker, listener, and their reference—meaning that is the “mutual relationship” of the three elements. ⁸ The movement to be accomplished is conditioned by the willingness to follow each other, i.e., an affective openness to the other’s “symbolic touch,” and by the ability to move, i.e., to change one’s perspective, to look at the world from another stance.

My intention in putting forth the notion of displacement is to stress the aspect of movement, which I think belongs genuinely to the function of representation, even more if looked at from a dialogic perspective of both language and the subject. In this, I use “displacement” more as heuristical term than as a kind of new master term. ⁹ Foregrounding “movement” through this heuristic term enables us to acknowledge the psychic, affective, cognitive change in stance affecting the communicating subjects as a “praxologic movement,” that is, accomplished as a common doing, within a common field of perception, of experience, of meaning. So, what the term allows us to grasp is, first, the praxologic dimension of that change; second, it allows us to see the specific effect of that change on the subjects and their praxis introduced by symbolic displacement. Indeed, as symbolic displacement, belonging to full-fledged language, the movement reveals its full power, although necessarily based in non-symbolic precursors: it continues to appeal, to direct, and guide, but necessitating and creating now a field that itself works on meaning, creating its own (sensorial, structural, and contextual) auxiliaries in order to direct the attention, to form the appeal. This amounts to fulfill the mutual guidance that goes beyond an instruction to behave in a certain way, as the signal does: the symbol “directs and guides the intentional stance or the attention” (Sinha, 2007, p. 1282). Exactly by this shift away from behavior the symbol needs and invokes conventionalization, structural elaboration, and intentionality. There is here a shift into something like self-referentiality of the communication system in its use by the subjects: they “turn, or apply it to itself,” as it were, and elaborate it in a specifically different way: as genuine symbolic system, surpassing the code (see Bühler, 1934/2011, I., §5).

Continuing the motif of common praxis, and according to the phenomenality of language I advocate for, I would like to stress here the materiality of the forms of contact we humans have developed: interaction and communication are not the results of an intersubjective foundation of the human mind, rather, it is through a concretely experienced and performed material-based praxis that we come to an understanding of the other, of ourselves, and of a common reality as a public realm of sense. Any kind of “sharing” and “intersubjectivity” is the result of praxis.

Displacement: Shared presence–absence

So, the language spacetime functions by displacement practices, and this generates a specific form of shared presence–absence. It generates first a specific now: being together in time and space, evolving across time in a coordinated manner. Second, being together not-there and not-now, being together absent, which further explains the specific now and deepens the feeling of sharedness—it is experienced as intersubjectivity, as “feeling of understanding” (Hörmann, 1976).

The specific now is: being together in a presented present, something absent is there for us as if put on stage and made present—visually and acoustically. Further, being together absent is being together on that stage we generate by our language activities, it is being together absent from our concrete, physical here-and-now. Of course, both processes are inextricably related into one process, and this quality of relation might be specific for symbolic representation. Both processes are felt as that simultaneity of here and not-here, and this experience deepens the cognitive-affective feeling/perception of togetherness—what we are used to calling “understanding.”

Of utmost importance is that the specific form of shared presence–absence is deeply informed by the means of its creation—language—not in terms of something like a tie or a channel (as in the transmission model), but in terms of a third power, a medium of own status. Language is that medium, is that power, is that Third. The “objectivity of language”—in the Humboldtian sense (Bertau, in press-a)—corresponds to this Third, it gives all speaking and listening its public character, making displacement a public affair, a social and socializing process. Hence, it is a social not-now where displacement displaces to, constructed by social, public practices. The symbol is more than conventional, it is public. A “shared” understanding is not symmetric, the minds do not (and need not) correspond to one another—the argument is to first look at practices, not at minds. A shared understanding is shared on the grounds of being social (sensu Bühler’s “true community”), that is: practiced commonly, through mutually recognizable forms in time.

As a result, one can say that language functions as a procedure leading the partners “astray” from their here-and-now. In leading language users astray, language displays its power to construct realities as socially shared, that is, understandable realities. The socializing power of language can be seen as residing in the movement the selves must perform and follow, that is co-constructed in a coordinated way, again and again: a movement leading them into the public, the shared, the social, indeed. In this reading, the sociality of selves is not an effect of the sociality of linguistic symbols (their “conventionality”), but of their dialogical movements leading them together into the public as Third.

Dialogical dynamizing of Bühler’s triad

As seen, Bühler (1934/2011) gives three basic displacing procedures, therewith distinguishing the indexing from the naming mode of language, the indexing mode belonging to the deictic field, the naming mode belonging to the symbolic field. Hence, the ocular demonstration and the imagination-oriented deixis are truly situated in the deictic field, whereas the anaphora functions as a pivot to the symbolic field and to the mode of naming, it is a passage to the symbolic field where “things and states of affairs” are not indicated, not showed, but named (see, e.g., Bühler, 1934/2011, II, 8).

Taking the perspective of a dialogical dynamizing of the triad self—other—things and states of affairs, i.e., of the three dimensions of the organon model, I propose to see displacement at work also in the symbolic field, and it occurs also in naming. Doing this, I do not negate the crucial change in quality introduced by the symbolic procedure, but I want to preserve the aspect of presenting characterizing Bühler’s deictics. To my mind, “things and states of affairs” are also presented in certain ways in the language activity, they are positioned by the language activity of self and other and they, in turn, position them: this is what I understand by the dialogical dynamizing of the triad. So to speak, I haul the “things and states of affairs” into dialogicality, and that is, into the dynamics of voices and positions: this “dialogic reality,” as it were, is made present by language, represented though presentation—within the limits of the fidelity of language to reality, in close touch with it.

In presenting each other aspects and modes of their reality the partners present and position themselves to each other and to themselves; they present their world and its meanings colored by affects related to a certain stance toward the reality in question, to the listening other, and to themselves in this specific speaking–listening situation. It is in that presentation that their world becomes their world: a commonly inhabited place in space and time, saturated with meanings which are understandable and public. So, what is presented are these selves who inhabit that world, who are able to see it like that: through these public generalizations, full of the value accents and tones of their community. To which they take a stance any time they speak and listen. It is to conclude then, that each time the dialogical selves speak, they transpose each other and themselves into that common–personal world, they move and look, they position each other plus themselves, and they are positioned: in this way, they perform and experience their selves.

Ravishment

Displacement demands an actively realized attachment, a cognitively and imaginatively constructed and experienced relation resulting in a specific drive between speaker, listener, and their reference. Taking account of that cognitive and affective drive or movement, as well as of the powerful Third and therewith acknowledging the effective, rhetoric function of language, I would like to propose the notion of ravishment as mode of displacement. Ravishment radicalizes the notion of displacement by opening it to the powerful, reality-generating effects of language performance. ¹⁰ Ravishment brings to clear light how symbolic language functions as a procedure leading the partners astray from their here-and-now, from their respective view on reality and into a reality of own rights. Language has thus the power to construct and present unknown realities, and therewith the power to relate each other into these realities—this is ravishment. In a psychoanalytical perspective we can speak of the desire to share this reality astray, to be “there” with the “significant other” (the one to which an individual is affectively related to, the psychoanalytical object). Regarding language acquisition, we can speak of the desire for language in order to be there astray with the other. In this context, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “whirlwind” of language, capturing the infant (and ourselves, as we must add). So, language acquisition can be described as being “captured by le langage, through the other’s parole” (de Lemos, 2000, p. 176). The power of the drive, of the movement induced by language lies in experiencing its potency to generate a specific reality, and to participate in that presentation—or: in the desire to join in that reality.