“While
there seems to be a danger in taking corridors as metaphors for literary
communication, the status of metaphor within language as a device of transport
between signifiers implies that the figure and the space fulfill the same
function, and have similarly attendant problems.”
~Kate
Marshall, Corridor
“A
writing that is not structurally readable – iterable – beyond the death of the
addressee would not be writing.”
~Jacques
Derrida, “Signature Event Context”
In a recent episode of The Newsroom Leona Lansing gives a short, but great, speech on the
ambiguity of the word “literally”; a word that, following its definition,
shouldn’t really be all that ambiguous…
I like Leona Lansing almost as much as I like
language. Literally.
The Oxford English
Dictionary cites the primary definition of the word “literally” as follows:
“In a literal manner of sense.” This
primary definition is followed by subsidiary definitions, of which the first
elaborates on the primary definition: “a.
In a literal, exact, or actual sense; not figuratively, allegorically,
etc.” The second subsidiary definition
falls in line with the first: “b. Used
to indicate that the following word or phrase must be taken in its literal
sense, usu. to add emphasis.” In both
senses, the word “literally” signifies something like a strict adherence to a
kind of materiality or tactility; in other words, and at the risk of falling
into tautology, “literally” means that something is what it is. If something is literally transcribed, then
its transcription matches the original; if someone literally went to pick up
groceries, then that person is physically in the process of going to get
groceries.
At this point, many readers have probably guessed where
I’m headed. The final subsidiary
definition of this primary definition departs from the traditional sense of the
word:
c.
colloq. Used to indicate that some
(freq. conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in
the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely,
utterly, absolutely’.
*Now
one of the most common uses, although often considered irregular in standard
English since it reverses the original sense of literally (‘not figuratively or metaphorically’).
I would be shocked to
discover someone unfamiliar with this tertiary sense of the word “literally”;
many of us hear it every day, and likely as many of us use it every day. The OED
cites the Herald-Times in Bloomington
for an example of the controversy over this use of the word: “2008, Herald-Times (Bloomington, Indiana) 22
Oct. a8/1: ‘OMG, I literally died when I found out!’ No, you figuratively died.
Otherwise, you would not be around to relay your pointless anecdote.” In this final sense, the word “literally” has
literally come to mean its exact
opposite; it now may be used in two different (antithetical) senses. “Literally” can literally mean “not
literally.”
As a phenomenon of language, “literally” provokes some
necessary questions of meaning. Although impossible to pinpoint, the literally phenomenon plausibly may be
said to have originated as a jocular form between friends, or as an instance of
social irony; in either of these cases, its use may very well have been
intentionally inaccurate: “Try this beer, it is literally the best beer ever made.”[i] The speaker would likely acknowledge, if
pressed, that her use of “literally” is ironic, and was intended as such;
unless she has tried every single beer and can recall the taste of each one on
command, it would seem unlikely that she can affirm a single beer as the
best. Even if we grant her the benefit
of the doubt and suggest that she meant it was the best beer she has ever had,
the problems of memory and the recollection of taste still arise.
After these early instances, the idiom began to catch on
and, upon achieving a degree of regular usage, the speakers no longer
necessarily intended their utterances as ironic, or were even aware of the
etymologic reversal of the word.
However, despite the almost automatic inclusion of the word (“It was literally the funniest thing ever,” “I
am literally going to punch you,”
etc.), few people protested or admitted confusion. Instead, the word slipped casually into our
ordinary conversation and assumed its apparently rightful place as a functional
idiom of the English language. Some
grizzled curmudgeons might growl and shake their heads before eagerly rushing
into a heated diatribe of the deplorable status of spoken English; but I can’t
help but smile at this perplexing phenomenon of “literally.”
It’s literally amazing.
Now, am I being literal; or am I being literal…?
Despite the pleasure it gives me to let this word dance
circles around us, I would like to try and understand it more. Perhaps the best way to start is to ask us if
any other words can be (or have been) used this way, and what the quality of
such uses is (i.e. what exactly is happening
when we use them).
The literally phenomenon occurs when
“literally” is used in an antithetical sense to its traditional meaning; or, in
other words, when we say “literally” but we actually mean “figuratively.” Another word for “figurative” would be
“metaphoric” or “allegoric,” and the OED
specifies this; the first subsidiary definition states that “literally,” in its
traditional sense, means “not figuratively, allegorically, etc.” There is thus a distinctly literary sense to
the word’s opposite meaning; if something isn’t literal, then it is
metaphorical, or allegorical, or figurative – it appeals to language in a way
that relates between words, rather than making a direct reference between words
and something that is actually happening.[ii]
Other words operate similarly. “Sick” has mutated to mean something along
the lines of “exciting” or “impressive” (e.g. “That song is sick!”). The words “up” and “down,” traditionally
opposites, have evolved to share the same meaning when appealed to in response
to whether or not one wants to do something: “I’m up for that,” or “I’m down
for that.” In these cases, the meaning
of the general sentiment trumps the meaning of the individual words. “Up” and “down” appear to mean the same thing,
and “sick” appears to mean something good or enjoyable as opposed to something
traditionally considered bad and lamentable.
Both of these cases exhibit the phenomenon in which opposites conflate,
or in which opposite words come to mean the same thing. However, “literally” stands out from the
crowd for one important reason: it is the word that we use to describe the very
situations we’re dealing with. In other
words, someone who isn’t privy to the alternative meaning of “sick” might be
forced to ask how the word is being used: “Are you using ‘sick’ literally?” “Literally” is what we might call a
meta-linguistic term; it is a word we use to talk about the meaning of words.
Ultimately, all language functions this way. The only way we can talk about language is by
using language, and this is one of the pesky difficulties surrounding the
production of meaning. But we can still
appreciate the singularity of “literally”; it is a word whose mutation has
effectively exploded our ability to talk about it: “Do you mean ‘literally’ literally?” But how can I ask this if the meaning of the
word itself is ambiguous? How can I be
sure that my “literally” will be understood in the traditional sense? While admitting that a certain level of
normative, or ordinary, linguistic operations ensures that such a question
achieves its desired meaning – that of whether an ambiguous use of “literally”
is being used in the traditional sense or not – we must still acknowledge that
such a conversation becomes, for all intents and purposes, nonsensical. It loses its internal relativity. When the word “literally” is opposed to
itself, how can we explain the success of our expressions?
In order to understand what is going on here, we have to
turn our attention away from the words themselves and to the phenomenon of meaning.
In an essay, “What Nonsense Might Be,” Cora Diamond addresses the
titular problem through an example posed by G.E. Moore: “Scott kept a runcible
at Abbotsford,” in which “runcible” appears as “nonsense word” (5). Diamond goes on to explain that what makes
the statement nonsensical “is not the meaning of the word ‘runcible’ but its absence of meaning. It is clear that if we defined ‘runcible’ in
a suitable way, we could turn the sentence from nonsense to sense” (7). Diamond argues that this understanding of
nonsense reflects Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory that there can be no “positive
nonsense,” or “nonsense that is nonsense on account of what it would have to
mean, given the meanings already fixed for the terms it contains” (16). This negativity of nonsense, in other words,
derives from the fact that a term must fall outside of a language game
entirely; not that it might mean something inappropriate due to its placement
in a different language game, but that it fails to function in any language
game. “Runcible” is, simply speaking,
not a word. Had we replaced runcible
with even the most inappropriate word – for instance, “disease” – we might
still comprehend some vague impression of meaning.
“Scott kept a disease at Abbotsford.”
Well, this is certainly an odd
statement. – How does one keep a disease? – Does he have a disease in a petri
dish? – But Scott’s a librarian. – Can’t librarians keep diseases in petri
dishes? – Can we come off it? – Oh! I
know. He must be talking about his wife.
– She is a disease. – Ha! Well, that
solves that.
As unlikely (or
offensive) as this chain of logic might seem, we can imagine how it may
materialize as the meaning of the phrase; and this brings us back to the
centrality of “literally.” While it may
be that Scott perhaps kept an actual disease at Abbotsford, meaning also
develops by comprehending the word in a figurative sense. The meaning effect, the production of meaning
out of seemingly inappropriate words, turns on the ambiguity between literality
and figurativeness. Even the most
ludicrous statement effects meaning if it is comprised of conventional words:
“The crabapple sprung a yellow of shortage soap.”
As apparently
nonsensical as it gets, no? And yet, as
soon as we process its superficial alienism, our minds immediately begin to
intuit how these words might relate, what qualities they share, or even how
they resist each other; and from this automatic process, we find that meaning
suddenly begins to spring into existence.
This is because meaning
is never a matter of inert matter.
Meaning comes from minds, and minds are linguistic and conceptual. Meaning arises from the interaction of ideas,
images, and words, spoken and unspoken.
Meaning cannot be dissociated from its figurative force. As Roland Barthes has developed in his
structural philosophy of language, sentences operate an different levels of
meaning: “A sentence, as we know, can be described, linguistically, on several
levels (phonetic, phonological, grammatical, contextual); these levels are in a
hierarchical relation, for if each has its own units and its own correlations,
necessitating for each an independent description, no level can in and of
itself produce meaning” (“Structural Analysis” 101). In another essay, Barthes expands his theory
of meaning to include what he describes as denotative and connotative messages,
which can be simply described as literal
and figurative: the denotative
message operates at the literal level of the words themselves, while the
connotative message calls upon the reader to intuit an unspoken complex of
meaning operating between the denotative message and its relation to the
signifying field (“Advertising” 174-5).
All of this is a fancy way of saying something rather
counterintuitive. We can say something
and literally mean something entirely
different, or possibly the exact opposite.
Meaning works in mysterious ways, and some of those ways exceed our
intentions; in other words, there is something strangely inhuman about meaning. The
connotative, figurative aspect of language haunts everything we say,
threatening every utterance with the potential for misunderstanding. In the case of “literally,” this hauntology
(to borrow from Derrida) encounters the supreme moment of its paradox – its
presence and absence – since multiple meanings inhabit the same word
simultaneously. In fact, an even more
intriguing phenomenon emerges when we realize that the literal definition of “literally” resists the etiology of
meaning. When someone says, “The mailman
left you an envelope,” a literal interpretation involves no interpretation at
all; it simply assumes a normative correlation between the words and the
purported delivery of an envelope.
However, let us imagine that the recipient is expecting a wedding
invitation; or perhaps she fears a court summons; or perhaps she expects
nothing, and the announcement of a letter inspires some confusion. All of these possibilities encounter the
blossoming of meaning, according to Niklas Luhmann: “The function of meaning is
the indication of, and control of access to, other possibilities” (Luhmann
48). We have no say in the matter;
excess meaning takes over our speech, whether we want it to or not. Meaning works to silence the speaking
subject, obscuring and burying the literal
and summoning the spirit of the figurative.
In other words, there is a zombie rising from the grave
of language.
The zombie is both dead and yet living, the living dead;
it is both human and nonhuman, the estranging quality of the inhuman. As a figure of modern fantasy, the zombie
occupies an important place in the cultural unconscious: ranging as far back as
Poe’s M. Valdemar (taken as factual upon its initial publication), the masses
have been fascinated by the figure of the living dead – primarily, I believe,
because humanity fears the living dead it perpetuates in its own image. The zombie masses are the popular masses, the
zombie drive is the murderous compulsion we all (at some time or another) sense
within us; but finally, and most importantly, the zombie registers the same
paradox engendered in our discussion of “literally.”
The zombie is, first and foremost, a body; but it is a
body that embodies meaning itself. The
zombie is that which it is not, both living and dead; just as literally must be
that which it is not, both literally
and figuratively.
In his book The
Parallax View (2006), Slavoj Žižek outlines the importance of the inhuman, as a concept, for his own
work. He describes the inhuman as “a
terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity,’
is inherent to being-human” (22). Does
our language exhibit a similar terrifying excess; and if so, how do we describe
this excess – this phenomenon of being both literal and figurative, of
generating meaning from this relationship between the literal and
figurative? And what does “literally”
have to tell us about this excess?
Science fiction scholar Seo-Young Chu tells us that figurative language “occupies
a special place in science fiction.
Occurrences of figurative language in SF texts and contexts have an
interesting tendency to elicit literal interpretation almost as a matter of
course, especially among readers well versed in SF” (10). When we discuss an individual of marginal
status – for instance, an antebellum slave – and describe this individual as
being treated inhumanely, or as inhuman
(to return us to Žižek’s term), we appeal to a figurative use of language in
order to make a point; African slaves actually are human, but were treated as though they were not. However, in a science fiction novel such as
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? we find the inhuman literalized in the figure of the
android. Androids are treated as
something other-than-human because they are other-than-human. This science-fictional move in fact does not
reify what it means to be human, but rather redirects the question of race
toward the question of what it means to be human.
The interplay between literal and figurative governs our
reception of these narratives. Our
contemporary critical discourse on slave relations suffers no illusion that
slaves are somehow less-than-human; we know that blacks are just as human as
whites. In a novel such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the
similarities are less obvious unless we read the novel at a critical level;
while the novel literalizes the concept of an inhuman other (in the form of an
android), it also channels the energies of the racial dilemma. Not only can we read Dick’s novel as both
literal (i.e. humans and androids) and figurative (i.e. whites and blacks), but
we must read the story of slavery and race relations as both literal and
figurative. In the original discourses
and traditions surrounding race relations from early Atlantic modernity, the logic
of Western thought identified blacks as literally
other-than-human. The human, which we
consider today as far more inclusive, is a historically exclusive and
restrictive institution – a constructed institution that emerged specifically
through a white, male, Euro-American logic, and was also designed in contrast
to that which didn’t conform to its implicit characteristics: white, male,
straight, Euro-American, etc.
Once we see this institution as constructed, we can
determine the role of linguistic excess.
The human, as Žižek tells us, is always something other than itself. As an
institution, it labors under the threat of dissolution. This is not because of any actual external
threat, but because of the arbitrary nature of our own beliefs about what the
human is. Thus, every time we use the
word “human,” whether we intend to or not, we
use it in a simultaneously literal and figurative sense. When, after making an error, we say “I’m only
human,” we mean: a) that we are this literal thing, this body with limbs and a
mind, capable of making errors, and b) that being-human connotes imperfection,
that “human” stands in metonymically for “flawed.”
The phenomenon of “literally” exposes that which is
common to language in general. The blunt
truth is that we never mean literally what we say. The very act of speaking, of participating in
language, necessitates an interplay of the literal and the figurative, so that
there will always be a meaning that exceeds denotative message. This idea makes some people nervous because we
do not want to imagine that language works without us; but while it cannot
speak itself, it does operate beyond our control. In fact, I would go so far as to say that
this idea not only makes people nervous, but absolutely terrifies them; because when you dig down far enough you begin to
realize that language is a bit like a zombie.
Dead letters, spoken utterances on decommissioned frequencies iterating
off into space. It was Jacques Derrida
who explained, in his essay “Signature Event Context,” that to “be what it is,
all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence
of every empirically determined receiver in general. And this absence is not a continuous
modification of presence, it is a rupture in the presence, the ‘death’ or the
possibility of the ‘death’ of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the
mark” (8). That is, the logic of
language entails that it persist beyond the death of the one who uttered it.
Language is literally the living dead.
Works
Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The
Advertising Message.” The Semiotic
Challenge. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1994. 173-178.
–. “Introduction to the
Structural Analysis of Narratives.” The
Semiotic Challenge. Trans. Richard
Howard. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 95-135.
Chu, Seo-Young. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional
Theory of Representation.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010.
Derrida, Jacques. “Signature
Event Context.” Limited Inc. Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1988. 1- 23.
Diamond, Cora. “What
Nonsense Might Be.” Philosophy 56.215
(1981): 5-22.
“Literally.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2014. Oed.com.
Luhmann, Niklas. “Meaning
as Sociology’s Basic Concept.” Essays on
Self-Reference. New York:
Columbia UP, 21-79.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2009.
[i] In fact, the first use in this
sense recorded by the OED is
shockingly early: “1769, F. Brooke Hist.
Emily Montague IV. ccxvii. 83: He is a fortunate man to be introduced to
such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.”
[ii] There are more complexities to
this than I have time to treat in this essay.
Certain theories of language contend that language is always a play
between words, or signifiers, and I do not necessarily refute this; but as far
as the meaning, or sense, of “literally” goes, it is useful to speak of it as
though it assumes a certain correlation to a non-linguistic, or physical,
occurrence.
