Broken Language: Commodity, Body, Factory

Language is broken. The complaint that language is broken, that language has degenerated into jargon or chatter, has been a nearly perpetual feature of thinking about language. Contemporary theoretical work sees language as broken in a more radical sense, as something to be surpassed to enter the ‘great outdoors’ (Meillassoux) of a materiality that is beyond the human and beyond language. Here I return to broken language as the broken ground of our critical work. I focus on Marx’s analysis of commodity-language, Freud’s analysis of hysteria as a language of the body, and the attempt to write a language adequate to the experience of the factory. In each case a broken language is something we have to work with to write or speak our experience, rather than something to be surpassed for a true language or a beyond language. In different ways Marx and Freud try to recover an adequate language, while also suggesting that such a language is a broken measure of a broken experience. This is condensed in the factory. While the factory is often treated as a site that has been surpassed in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries, the return to the factory is a return to a broken language as the site of our critical work. Instead of the various ‘jargons of authenticity’, the inauthentic experience of the factory can speak still to our experience of capitalist society as a society of violent abstractions.