Language as Structure

A good example of a structure is a living language, which binds a particular people and their practices across the generations and across distances.  Language is a structure that is both a medium and an outcome during instances of communication.  This necessary medium, the irreducible linguistic structure, is implicit in every instance of intelligible communication.
 
Every intelligible sentence exchanged by talkers, for example, presupposes a practical mastery of the grammar, the syntax, and the morphology of the language in use.  The talkers do not make use of all the possible linguistic rules for every sentence, but every intelligible utterance entails, none the less, a prodigious and complex set of rules.  This set of rules becomes effectively present in its absence, in its evanescent instantiation in every sentence spoken.
 
“Language is what language does” (Social Theory and Modern Sociology), or “language is practical consciousness” (Karl Marx).  Language is practical, as it facilitates social intercourse, which reproduces it as a social product.  A living language is never private property, and it can never be withheld from the other talkers, who regularly appropriate it.
 
The regular use of language by every communicative person renders the linguistic structure not only present but also evanescent, as every intelligible expression momentarily reproduces and potentially modulates the structure.  As an intelligible expression unfolds in empirical time-space, the linguistic structure is reproduced in virtual time-space.
 
A good illustration of the practical, pliable, and evanescent aspects of the linguistic structure is the phenomenon of the ordinary conversation, which never entails strict rules.  Within the flow of conversation, some half-sentences, subjectless remarks, verbless expressions, and prepositional phrases can become crucial moments of communication. 
 
The actual intelligibility of grammatically vague or mangled expressions disrupts the linguistic structure and “corrupts” or modifies its rules.  Yet it is precisely the practical mastery of the rules of a particular language, as is usually the case with native speakers, which enables conversationalists every now and then to suspend some of the rules without thereby turning their talk into a babel of voices.  The competent suspension of rules is an instance of the presence-in-absence of structure.
 
Today, most non-aboriginal languages have grammatical rules and standard lexical items in writing, but the practical reality of a living language enables some widely-used slang and colloquial expressions to be accepted eventually into formal speech and writing.  Furthermore, every standard lexical item can acquire novel connotations or even additional definitions through frequent application outside the usual contexts.
 
In the same process, formal expressions can fall into such disuse that they eventually disappear even from specialized texts.  This is a continuous process of the appearance, disappearance, and modification of the verbal expressions and their connotations, and thus the linguistic structure is never, at any moment, simply itself.

A private act of an individual agent, however, does not introduce a modification of the linguistic structure or of any structure whatsoever.  A linguistic, normative, or domination structure can undergo modification within a system of interaction and not through a private individual act.

 
The actual intelligibility of vague or inexact expressions, especially during conversation, depends on a mastery not only of linguistic rules, but more so, of corporal and contextual rules and resources.  A mastery of these rules and resources entails a “ramified control of the body and a developed knowledge of how to ‘go on’ in the plurality of contexts of social life” (Constitution of Society).

The spatio-temporal nature of the body, its movements, and the setting of the interaction can often determine the meaning of expressions to a greater degree than formal linguistic rules can.  In the flow of a conversation, for example, a mangled verbal expression can become instantly intelligible within a certain timing, spacing, and positioning of the body and its movements: the speed of gestures, the rise and fall of the voice, the inclination of the head, the facial expression, and the overall posture.

The timing-spacing of the body in day-to-day contexts is an effective expression of the practical consciousness of the agent.  This practical consciousness includes the monitoring and the use of contextual resources, the resources on the interacting bodies, the resources these bodies bring, and the resources near at hand.  For example, power-dressing (religious, military, formal, fashionable, or expensive attire) influences interaction in many contexts.

Fetishism and Justification

For Karl Marx, the capitalist system conceals not only the connection between social labour and the surplus value produced by labour but also the social character of commodity production.  In this way, capitalism alienates the labourers from their products, their self-representations, and it establishes the “fetishism of commodities” in which “the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves” (Capital, vol.1).

For Marx, commodities are products of social labour, of vital labourers who are interlinked.  Commodity fetishism occurs when the perception that commodities are extensively exchangeable, barely refers to the personalities and interrelations of the actual producers in a particular mode of production.  Instead, there arises the perception that commodities are exchangeable by nature, just as the law of supply and demand appears to be a natural law of trade.

Commodities and money are exchangeable because they seem to possess innately the capacity to substitute for one another in objective and calculable proportions.  Such a general belief is a fetishism that conceals and supports capitalist exploitation and the alienation of labour.

Using Marx’s protest against alienated labour and commodity fetishism, Jose Miguez Bonino reinterprets the Pauline-Lutheran principle of “justification not by works.”

For Marx, labour both expresses and transforms the following: the integral person of the labourer, his or her relations with fellow labourers, and their interaction with nature.  Alienated labour is objectified as money and commodities, which appear to be utterly exchangeable and to possess capabilities and values on their own.  The apparently self-exchangeable nature of commodities conceals, homogenizes and deforms the particular personalities and interrelations of the labourers who produce them.

In justification through works, the religious practices become valuable in themselves, and they conceal from their performers the real status of their relationships with God and neighbour.

Self-justifying works are like commodities, they become calculable and impersonal objects.  These works earn calculable merits that oblige God to render in return the equivalent grace or justification.  The interaction of the votary with God is depersonalized and deformed into an exchange relationship.

Those justified by objective “works of the law” boast of their own worth or of their grasp of God’s will (cf Romans 2:17-20; 3:27-28).  They are like buyers who boast of the bargains they are able to buy, or like moneyed and mighty exploiters who boast of their money and might.

A true work of faith is done apart from the care over calculation and reward.  It is a genuine good work, whose value is inalienable from the personality and fidelity of the doer.  And the true work of faith necessarily personalizes the doer into a divine work of love for the neighbour.

For Miguez, justification is not an inward but an integral reality, just as faith, as both gift and response, is not merely psychical or intellectual but integral, a unity of belief and practice.  Justification is God’s gift through the mediation of Christ.

The Atheism of Marx

During the lifetime of Karl Marx (1818-83), most of the institutional churches and christian monarchs were opposing the labor movements. Because of his revolutionary humanism, Marx embraced atheism and denounced the religions that were condemning the struggle of the working class and which were extolling the status quo as divinely instituted.

Argentinean theologian Jose Míguez Bonino considers the atheism of Marx a functional critique of religion and not a denunciation of religion as such. The churches today should be open to this functional critique, for it parallels the biblical denunciation of idolatry.

Prophetic denunciation has been directed at such holy gifts as the temple (Jeremiah 7:1-15), the sabbath (Matthew 12:1-14), the law (Romans 3:19-31), faith (James 2:14-26), and the love of God (1 John 3:17-18). These are divine gifts, but God’s word condemns them whenever they are turned into mystifications of, and sacred veils for, injustice, inhumanity, legalism, and the amassing of things needed by roofless heads and unfed looks.

In the midst of dehumanizing mystifications, and in the midst of any god we ourselves have made whether it be capital, weaponry, the Leader, or the Party, “only an atheist can be a good Christian,” in the same way that “the early Christians were accused of being atheists and were judged and condemned as such for refusing to believe in the ruling gods of their society” (Míguez 1979).

These mystifications and gods represent a denial of the presence of the Holy Spirit either in our sensuous humanity or in the neighbor, who is a true temple of God (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, 6:19). “This is real atheism: God is denied in the neighbor and the neighbor in God” (Míguez 1976).

The basic ethic of the humanism of Marx can be summed up this way: “solidarity is better than egoism” (Míguez 1976). This basic ethic, however, is opposed by a deep-rooted element in Marx’s critique of religion which he most concisely expressed thus: “religion is precisely the recognition of man by detour through an intermediary” (On the Jewish Question).

In Marx was entrenched the yearning for absolute immediacy. He yearned for the removal of all mediations and intermediaries in social life, for he regarded even the best intermediary as partially alienating or subordinating. This is the heart of his rejection of both religion and the State. He envisaged the totally emancipated society to comprise of individuals who will be both co-operative and self-conscious. Social consciousness and self-consciousness will coincide completely.

For Marx, the genuinely free individual will know oneself fully, know one’s fellows fully, and be known by them fully. As he put it: “the religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to nature” (Capital, vol. 1). There will be no need for any Church or State to indoctrinate or to force people to be fit for social life.

Marx’s aspiration for absolute immediacy contradicts his ethic of solidarity, for solidarity can only be genuine when it is a unity among real others. Otherness would disappear if immediacy became absolute. “Solidarity is based on differentiation, on the existence of a real ‘other’ whom I do not absorb into myself or use instrumentally for my own self-realization” (Míguez 1976). Every real other has some aspect external to me, some capacity outside my control, and some degree of discretion, which I neither have given nor can take away.

Marx’s aspiration for absolute immediacy, more than his atheism, is a point of divergence between humanistic Marxism and Christian faith. Christians cannot disavow either the uplifting and humanizing mediation of Christ or the otherness of God. Christians believe that, if someday humanity became fully emancipated and united, it would be due to a great humanizing force that does not fully abide within either humanity or nature.

Sources Consulted:

Míguez Bonino, Jose. Christians and Marxists: The Mutual Challenge to Revolution. London, 1976.

Míguez Bonino, Jose. Room To Be People: An Interpretation of the Message of the Bible for Today’s World. Geneva, 1979.