Is Language a Form of Déjà Vu?
(Yes...now, what?)
Every word you use is a word you’ve heard before, and most likely, used before. So, too, every phrase.
Perhaps, these words and phrases carry with them the history of their use, so that when we speak we bring the entire history of the language with us, but most especially our personal histories. Words and phrases hold memories for us that we ourselves cannot consciously access.
The Israeli poet Hayim Bialik says that a word is like a stone loaded in a slingshot that has been drawn tight back by the past. To speak is to release the word and let it take aim. Thus, ancient words (or more familiar words, favorite words) have greater force.
You’ve all had the experience of doing something like this:
Even if you’ve never typed out each sentence, Google tells you that these possible sentences, these possible sentences are somehow are already contained in just a few leading words. It makes you wonder if Google isn’t just making manifest something that we do all the time, unconsciously: take a word or phrase and try to find the right use, the right setting for it, out of some box of possible uses that have been generated on the basis of the past.
Bible scholars call this idea intertextuality. The phrase, “How long, Oh Lord,” for instance, used in one place summons for the reader every other possible place in the Bible where it appears. The feeling created by intertextuality is Déjà Vu—the sense that we have been here before. Google reveals to us that not just the Bible, but language itself, is intertextual.
If all language is Déjà Vu, then how can we make anything truly new, using words? Memes are a popular term on the internet, and before that, were a common term in the evolutionary theory of Richard Dawkins. But memes are also related to mimes, the people who perform silently in face paint at tourist traps; and both are related to the Greek, mimesis, meaning imitation or representation, a term that has a long history.
It seems that as long as we speak, there is no way to escape the past. Revolutionaries seeking to untether themselves from tradition would not only have to shoot at the clock towers (as they did in the French Revolution, and as Walter Benjamin noted in his Theses on the Philosophy of History). They would have to abolish language itself. Yet whether a new language might be formed free of abuse, corruption, oppression, and all the bad things is another question. To me, it seems an impossibility, though perhaps a utopian gesture best preserved in works of poetry, which can sometimes stretch the language to its breaking point.