The reason humankind rises above the animals is that, while enjoying behavior-language, it has also created the speech-act. It is precisely these two kinds of action (language) that jointly endow humankind with the capacity to construct the human world, to create culture and civilization, and to remake the human being itself. The Book of Genesis records: God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Here the Bible has told only of the world-creating function of language; one may say that the creative potential of the two kinds of action (language) humankind possesses is incalculable, and only by understanding these two kinds of action (language) can we go on to explore the human world, culture and civilization, and humankind itself.
I. The Birth of Language and the Origin of Culture
Cassirer and Susanne Langer subsumed human cultural activity under the general name of symbolic activity. Influenced by semiotic thought, Clifford Geertz regarded culture as a “web of meaning” and went on to propose a definition of culture: culture “denotes a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (1). It must be said that Geertz's defining culture by “symbols” and his stress on the “pattern of meanings” within it contain a profound understanding of culture. In Geertz's view, human symbols are manifold, including actions, language, and all manner of meaningful objects. Not only painting, music, dance, and dress are meaningful symbols; all human action, too, is the human being's activity of endowing the world with meaning, a cultural production containing symbolic meaning.
Since culture is generated in human activity, and since human activity—including action, language, and various other symbolic activities—all produces a world of meaning, the human world is bound to be a world endowed with meaning by the human being through symbolic activity, that is, a world of culture. Wherever human action reaches, wherever speech tells, even wherever the gaze falls, the imprint of culture is stamped. Culture must therefore permeate human society and indeed the whole human world, and human symbolic activity determines the framework of culture and the framework of the human world. Hence culture neither belongs exclusively to certain special domains, nor is it what “culture-stratification theory” makes it—certain particular strata of the human developmental process. Viewed from this conception, Geertz's cultural anthropology is in fact not a designation of some research field but a research perspective, a distinctive angle for viewing the human world from the standpoint of symbolic activity.
Not only is the human being's external world shaped by culture through the meaning conferred by symbolic activity; the human mind is likewise the product of symbolic activity. In discussing the problem of the human mind, Geertz criticized mechanistic and subjectivist views and stressed the close relation between cultural development and mental evolution. He held that the role of culture profoundly affects the changes of the organism; rather than say that this influence merely supplements, develops, and extends the organism-based capacities that logically and genetically precede it, it is better to say that it is more like a constituent part of those capacities themselves. The human capacities that develop from the organism take cultural development as their premise. “A cultureless human being would probably turn out to be not an intrinsically talented though unfulfilled ape, but a wholly mindless and consequently unworkable monstrosity. Like the cabbage it so much resembles, the Homo sapiens brain was produced within the framework of human culture, and apart from this framework it could not grow and develop”; “the human brain is thoroughly dependent upon cultural resources for its very operation; and those resources are, consequently, not adjuncts to, but constituents of, mental activity” (2, 3). Just as culture is constructed by symbols, and symbolic activity determines the framework of culture, so the human mind is likewise inseparable from symbolic activity: it is itself shaped by symbols even as symbolic activity constructs the cultural framework. In expounding the problem of ideology as a cultural system, Geertz further clarified the relation between symbolic activity and the human mind, pointing out that the essence of human thought is a public, not a private, activity, founded on shared symbolic activity. “Thinking, conceptualization, formulation, comprehension, understanding, what-have-you, consists not of ghostly happenings in the head but of a matching of the states and processes of symbolic models against the states and processes of the wider world…Every conscious perception is, as Kant pointed out, an act of recognition, a pairing in which an object (or an event, an act, an emotion) is identified by placing it against the background of an appropriate symbol” (4).
In Geertz's exposition of human cultural and mental development there lies implicit a profound idea not yet clearly stated. We may make a further theoretical extension and elaboration of it: symbolic activity constructs human culture, constructs the human world, and at the same time shapes the human mind. The human being, in using symbolic activity to produce human culture, at the same time shaped the human mind; apart from symbolic activity there is no development of culture or of the human mind. “The structure of a language itself embodies the philosophy peculiar to the social group that uses that language” (5). Human cultural production and mental development are constructed in step with the genesis and unfolding of symbolic activity. On the whole, symbols, the human mind, the human world, and culture are generated synchronously. Symbolic activity shapes both the human being's inner and outer worlds, determines at once the framework of human culture, the framework of the human world, and the structure of the human mind, and becomes the necessary bond relating and communicating human being and world (6, 7). The reason the human being can grasp and understand the world, and can use symbols to express the world, is that symbols originally relate human being and world, are the bond linking the human being with the world. It is precisely because of this relation that signs come to possess symbolic character and become symbols.
Geertz strongly stresses that human mental development is a gradual, protracted, and complex process in which manifold internal and external factors interweave and interact. He holds that cultural accumulation began long before biological evolution ceased, and very probably exerted a positive effect on the direction of evolution's final stage. Up to a certain point of cultural accumulation, the relation between the organism's own adaptability and cultural production reverses, whereupon culture comes to carry a more important, decisive significance for human development. “The slow weakening of the mechanisms of reproductive isolation, the lengthening of the period of individual sexual maturation, and the rise of cultural accumulation to the point where culture as an adaptive factor almost wholly overrode genetic constitution as a selective factor—their combined action so sharply lowered the rate of hominid evolution that any significant development of intrinsic intellectual variation among human subgroups seems to have been ruled out. With the decisive triumph of Homo sapiens and the cessation of the glaciations, the link between biological variation and cultural change was, if not severed, at least greatly weakened. From that time on, the biological evolution of this human line slowed to a walking pace, while cultural growth continued to accelerate without cease” (7). Thereafter the human being need no longer adapt to changes in the natural environment through changes of biological constitution, but mainly meets the natural world through cultural production. Cultural change gradually replaced the evolution of the organism, set the human organism apart from the natural world, and manufactured a rupture between human being and nature.
That cultural accumulation produced the rupture between human being and nature—this view undoubtedly contains a profound insight; but it still does not answer the question “why is it that only the human being has cultural activity,” and a theoretical blind spot remains. In fact, Geertz's blind spot is rooted in his not yet having examined in depth the structure and function of symbolic activity itself, discussing culture only in terms of symbolic activity in general.
The forms of human symbolic activity are rich and various, manifold and complex; yet they are all the human being's activity of producing symbolic meaning, all embody the meaning-relation between human being and world, and these meaning-relations are, in the last analysis, founded on two utterly different yet mutually fused types of action (language): behavior-language (movement, posture, expression, sound) and the speech-act (8). These are the two most fundamental, most important types within human symbolic activity; all other symbolic activities are built upon these two kinds of action (language), and what is bred and multiplied from them is often only the extension and evolution of the symbolic medium, whose character still depends on the nature and function of the two basic types of action (language). Of these two types, behavior-language already existed in the pre-human period and is the more primordial symbol system. When an action is repeatedly performed and imitated, it is structured and gains a shared meaning, becoming behavior-language. The speech-act, by contrast, branched off from behavior-language through generalization and abstraction, and is a symbolic phenomenon enjoyed by humankind alone. Therefore behavior-language and the speech-act—and the action-character and symbol-character of the symbolic process—are originally interrelated and cooperative, in an intimate, interfused relation.
Between these two types of action (language) there is also a fundamental distinction, and accordingly different modes of performance and function: behavior-language establishes difference by means of “figural information” and is itself bodily action, deeply embedded in the human body—a symbol system lacking independence; the speech-act establishes difference by means of the “concept / sound-image,” separating itself from the body through generalization and abstraction, and is therefore a symbol system possessing relative independence (9).
Because behavior-language is a symbol system lacking independence, it cannot distinguish human being from world, cannot distinguish the myriad things, cannot construct the world as the human being's “object-world.” Rather, it deals with the world through action, links human being and world, structures the world by means of behavior-language and draws it into the self, establishes a unitary relation between human being and world, and fuses world with human being—thereby grasping the world and, in turn, shaping the human being's own mind and body. The human being's process of constructing the world and assimilating it through behavior-language is the process of endowing the world with the human being's own action-structure and life-form, the process of “embodying” the world; the world thereby becomes an extension of the human being's body and action, suffused with the breath of life and a mysterious aura. One may say that, in relating to the world through action, the human being shapes both inner and outer worlds through behavior-language, structuring each of these two worlds and stamping it with the imprint of behavior-language. Behavior-language itself communicates the human being's inner and outer worlds. The magical thinking and pantheist thought of our human ancestors are closely bound up with the functional features of behavior-language. The many primitive cultural phenomena Frazer describes in The Golden Bough, Vico's “poetic wisdom,” and Lévy-Bruhl's “primitive thought” are also founded mainly on the functional features of behavior-language, with the speech-act plainly in a secondary, subordinate position.
The speech-act is different. As a symbol system possessing independence, it gathers the human being's sensory experience by means of the “linguistic concept” and generalizes and abstracts it; with its differential character it distinguishes human being from world, distinguishes the myriad things, and turns the world into the human being's “object-world.” When the world is no longer fused integrally with the human being but split into subject and object, estrangement arises. It is precisely the speech-act that first created the fissure between human being and the natural world. The linguistic concept at once links human being and world, building a bridge between them, and produces the rupture between them, presenting the world as the human being's object-world, while reflexively constructing human consciousness, so that at last the human being is able to cognize and grasp the world clearly. Without the speech-act there is no human consciousness, no human world as object; the human being could only remain in an animal state, and the world could only be the natural extension of human life. That is to say: in the activity of living, the experience the human being constructs through vocal action is continually gathered, generalized, and abstracted into linguistic concepts; the speech-act branches off from human behavior-language, and only then is human consciousness born and cultural self-consciousness and cultural production in the true sense begun. The emergence of the speech-act turns the organism's unconscious action into the human being's conscious, purposive action, into self-conscious cultural action. This is precisely why we classify only the buildings of human society as cultural and artistic activity, and do not regard the beehive as a cultural phenomenon.
Only when the speech-act branched off from behavior-language, when the split occurred between human being and world, between self and object, did symbolic activity truly become symbolic activity in the full sense. For all symbolizing represents some object or situation or meaning or chaotic experience—the “that”—by means of the “this” of a sign; it is founded on the basis that “this” and “that” are both distinguished and related, founded on the independence of language, and often symbolizes, by means of a relatively independent sign of relatively stable meaning, the chaotic experience that behavior-language has left in the human mind, symbolizes the things hard to express directly. At the same time, it is precisely the birth of the speech-act that allows human action, within certain ranges and aspects, to be interpreted to a certain degree, allows the “features” and “patterns” of these actions to be extracted from bodily action and become recognizable, perceptible objects of consciousness possessing symbolic character, prompting them to become symbols, to become behavior-language bearing symbolic meaning, and thereby prompting a portion of action-habits to transform into cultural customs that transmit meaning (10). That is to say, the speech-act, though born of behavior-language and inscribed with its imprint, from the day of its birth reflexively reinterprets, remakes, and illuminates behavior-language. But behavior-language is, after all, bodily action; it can only be inscribed on the body and cannot truly separate from the body to stand independent. Between action and body no boundary can be set; therefore behavior-language still retains its primordial function, and the dimness that the speech-act cannot interpret through and through. Behavior-language still hides behind a mysterious veil that consciousness cannot wholly penetrate; and it is precisely here that abundant life-potential is stored.
Culture is bound to be born at the same time as the birth of the speech-act. The speech-act, with an exceedingly perfected symbol system, produces the rupture between human being and the natural world, retards the human being's keeping pace with the evolution of nature, and produces the imperfection of the human organism, so that the human being cannot but rely on cultural production and mental development to remedy that imperfection. Once the human being is ruptured from the natural world and nature becomes the human being's object, the desire to understand and master nature is aroused; thenceforth culture becomes a necessity the human being uses to fill the gulf between human being and natural world, becomes a dependency inseparable from human existence for even an instant. Humankind not only actively bridges the fissure between human being and natural world through new cultural production, but even intends to transcend and control nature, no longer passively adapting to nature through changes of the organism. The biological evolution of the human being came to a halt, and cultural production and mental development became the chief marks of human development. The unity of human being and nature also dissolved, ecological balance was broken, and the harmonious coexistence of the two began to suffer an unprecedented threat. This means that the genesis and branching of the symbol system itself is of major significance for cultural activity: it determines the framework of human cultural activity, determines the relation of human being and nature, determines the human world; and the emergence of the speech-act, which possesses independence, is the key step by which the human being leapt out of the animal kingdom and became “human” in the true sense. One may say that, whether in the macro-world or the micro-world, the fissure the human being discovers between himself and nature is the space of possibility for cultural development, a space that changes as human cognition deepens. Primitive ritual was the most important means by which early humankind bridged the fissure, and from it the various branches of culture were bred—of which religion, science, and literature and art are merely different symbolic ways and paths of patching the fissure.
On the one hand, the speech-act inaugurated human cultural production; but this did not thereby exclude behavior-language—rather, on the foundation of behavior-language, the two jointly participate in cultural production. Human cultural activity always harbors two kinds of action (language) fundamentally different in nature, and the human being lives within the field of tension constructed by these two. The two kinds of action (language) each play their role, mutually generating and mutually restricting, and it is precisely their cooperation-and-contest that drives the unfolding of culture.
II. The Decline of Ritual and the Propagation of Culture
When the speech-act split the harmonious relation of human being and nature and presented nature before the human being's consciousness as object-world, nature became not only the human being's immense allure but also a terrifying existence; the human being tried anew to draw near to nature, to understand it, to master it. Yet at this moment of the speech-act's birth, behavior-language still held an absolutely dominant position for the human being; therefore the human being could not relinquish his intimate entanglement with nature, and all manner of “participation” relations (Lévy-Bruhl) were still interwoven between him and nature. When nature appeared before the human being in the mode of “object,” it was bound already to be suffused with the human being's own figure and feeling, long since structured and embodied by the human being and thereby endowed with humanity and spirit. Animism is rooted precisely on the foundation of human behavior-language, and the world became a world inhabited by a host of spirits. Speaking of the features of mythic thought, Meletinsky says: “Some features of mythic thought arise from the fact that ‘primitive' man has not yet sharply separated himself from the surrounding natural world and has transferred his own attributes onto natural objects; he endows natural objects with life, with the joys and sorrows of human beings, makes them engage in conscious and fitting economic activity, gives them human form and a certain social organization, and so on. In our view, this ‘undifferentiatedness' results not chiefly from an instinctive sense of identity with nature and a natural cognition of nature's own suitability, but precisely from the inability to distinguish nature essentially from the human being” (11). Plainly, the “mythic thought” Meletinsky speaks of is primitive thought or poetic thought, that is, the mode of grasping the world dominated by behavior-language. Mythic thought created the world of spirits and at the same time impelled the human being to create primitive ritual in order to receive and cope with this world of spirits, to re-coordinate and re-bridge the relation between human being and world. Primitive ritual is the initial form of human wisdom, a means by which the human being tried slyly to use the spirits to subdue nature and to re-harmonize the relation of human being and nature. In a world where human being and nature, human being and the myriad things, are split—a world that harbors crisis and peril and is full of uncertainty—without the shelter of primitive ritual the human being could not muster the courage to go on existing in this world. Primitive ritual is supported by mythic thought; when the participant enters the carnival state of ritual, the unconscious (the memory of behavior-language) is fully aroused, he is fused once more into one with the world, and regains the primordial sense of belonging and security.
Primitive ritual contains almost all the factors of human culture. Because primitive ritual is the human being's dealing with spirits, ritual must establish strict procedures, and participants must scrupulously follow norms of conduct; therefore primitive ritual is a regulation of human action, reinforcing human modes of action through ritual procedure and maintaining and transmitting the symbolic meaning of behavior-language. When ritual gradually sheds its superstitious coloring, it turns into festivals and customs surviving in the world. And the strict proceduralization of ritual became the foundation of later social institutions and of scientific-cultural institutions—only that institutions are the linguistic reflection upon, and rational reconstruction of, ritual procedure.
The differential function the speech-act possesses wins it immense power. Ever since its birth, the speech-act, by virtue of its differential function, has unceasingly driven out darkness and chaos, dispelled various phantoms, and expanded the limpid world. The sacred aura that behavior-language had projected onto things was washed away; even the living body itself was dismembered, and the spirits accordingly dimmed and had to withdraw. When the spirits vanished from the human being's nearby, daily life, retreated into a distant, unknowable realm, and further transformed into an inner faith, religion was born. Thus religious ritual may be said to be precisely the sublimation of primitive ritual, the abstraction and spiritualization of the host of gods that once clamored at one's side. The disappearance of the spirits left primitive ritual only an empty husk, which gradually crumbled into scattered shards and broken tiles, and the integral, undifferentiated harmonious world thereby fell apart. From a certain angle, politics, scientific knowledge, literature and art, and so on, are all relics left over after the collapse of primitive ritual. Politics needs, by means of sacred ritual, to fashion artificially a “god” of the secular world, a sage enthroned above the common people and worshiped by them, and to use ritual structure and the institutions it constructs to administer and rule the people. Sacred ritual once again summons forth the human being's unconscious (the memory of behavior-language), making him bow ecstatically before the sage and willingly obey his command. The rational disenchantment that follows upon language forces the spirits to flee in all directions, so that the human being cannot but doubt the spirits he once worshiped; the residual astonishment is converted just then into the intention to explore the mysteries, and urges the human being to draw strict procedures from ritual to engage in scientific inquiry and accumulate knowledge. Literature and art make use of the husk of primitive ritual, a ritual form in which the gods are absent, and borrow the “liminal space” created by ritual form to re-realize a deep fusion and balance between consciousness and the unconscious, speech-act and behavior-language, spirit and body, reason and sensibility. The crumbling and collapse of primitive ritual is, in the last analysis, caused by the differential function and rational impulse of the speech-act. The birth of the speech-act split the integral, fused relation of human being and nature and created for the human being a poetically suffused object-world, an Olympus inhabited by a host of gods; yet it is precisely its differential function and rational impulse that ceaselessly dismember this object-world, sweep away and drive out the spirits at will, and demolish the temple of ritual—while at the same time carrying out a differentiation upon human activity itself, mapping out boundaries for the various domains of activity.
In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, John R. Searle discusses the connection between the speech-act and intentionality, and, on the basis of Austin's typology of speech-acts, expounds in depth the intentional states of the various types. Searle holds that the speech-act is closely bound up with intentionality: “in the performance of each illocutionary act with a propositional content, we express a certain intentional state with that propositional content, and that intentional state is the sincerity condition of that type of speech-act”; and the connection between the illocutionary act and the expressed sincerity-condition of intentionality is internal—the way the speech-act represents the world is the way the mind represents the world—so that the intentionality of the speech-act coincides with the intentionality of the mind. “To perform a speech-act is eo ipso to express the corresponding intentional state” (12).
Searle clearly indicates that different types of speech-act have different directions of fit. First, the assertive speech-act, including stating, describing, and asserting. This type matches in a certain way an independently existing world, and according to whether it can do so we may make judgments of truth or falsity; it has the “word-to-world” direction of fit, which at the same time implies the “mind-to-world” direction of fit. Second, the directive and commissive types—commanding, instructing, requiring; promising, swearing, guaranteeing—which are not held to match an independently existing world and cannot be judged true or false on that basis, but are held to bring about a change in the world so that the world matches the propositional content of the speech-act; that is, they have at once the “world-to-word” and the “world-to-mind” direction of fit. Third, the declaration speech-act, such as declaring war or declaring a meeting open. Since the gist of the declaration is to bring about, through utterance, some new state of affairs, it has at once a double direction of fit—both “word-to-world” and “world-to-word”—representing something as being the case and thereby causing it to be the case. For this to work, the speech-act must be performed within a specific extralinguistic institution in which the speaker is endowed with a certain power, so that his speech-act has force and can make new facts come into being. Fourth, the expressive speech-act, an expression of a relevant psychological state, which therefore has no direction of fit. Similar to the expressive speech-act is fictional discourse.
In “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” Searle analyzes fictional discourse in depth; although it contains some self-contradictory statements, it still provides us a very valuable view—namely, that fictional discourse suspends the direction of fit between word and world. Searle holds that the words and other linguistic components in a fictional story likewise possess their everyday meaning, but they lack the semantic and pragmatic principles that the assertive speech-act must obey; that is, fictional discourse relinquishes the principle that the assertive speech-act match the world and guarantee the truth-value of discourse, and replaces it with another set of conventions, thereby turning the illocutionary into a pretended speech-act. “The pretended illocutions which constitute a work of fiction are made possible by the existence of a set of conventions which suspend the normal operation of the rules relating illocutionary acts and the world” (13). Special rhetorical devices, poetic meter or lineation, a story's marker opening “Once upon a time…,” the embedding of a stretch of everyday discourse within a fictional story, or even a genre label such as “novel,” “poem,” “drama,” and even the reader's reading attitude—all of these may suspend the direction of fit between word and world, turning the speech-act into a pretended game and the text into a fictional literary text. The essence of literary fiction, therefore, does not depend on whether the meaning of the discourse matches the real world, but on the conventional, temporary suspension of the direction of fit between word and world (14).
The speech-act develops and changes as the domains and modes of human activity expand and grow more complex; changes in the domains and modes of human activity prompt the speech-act to differentiate more functions and to establish multiple connections between word and world, human being and world: the word-to-world direction of fit (assertive); the world-to-word direction of fit (directive, commissive); the bidirectional fit of word and world (declaration); and the suspension of the fit between word and world (expressive, fictional). We may find that human cognitive activity is threaded through with the assertive speech-act—a process of continually distinguishing the object-world and requiring human cognition to match the world. Although at the inception of language's creation of the human object-world the world was already entangled with the human being's figure and suffused with human subjectivity, the speech-act nonetheless sternly draws apart the distance between human being and object-world, analyzes this object-world ever more deeply, and washes away the residual phantoms of the object-world, so as to make word fit world. But the problem is that there exists no purely objective object-world: the object-world, at the moment of its genesis, was already constructed according to the distinctions of the language system, that is, already interpreted by language; the so-called word-to-world direction of fit does not in fact truly point toward a purely objective world. Strictly speaking, then, the process above should be: when the speech-act once more carries out a new distinction upon this world and opens a new breach, this necessarily provokes a conflict between the new interpretation of the world and the old, requiring the new and old interpretations to be examined, weighed, and coordinated, and a comprehensive reinterpretation to be made anew. This is a process of the hermeneutic circle. This process is precisely the course of the development of human cognition, the course of the development of scientific knowledge.
The correspondence between the structure of the world and the structure of language is rooted in the fact that the world itself is distinguished and constructed by the language system, generated synchronously with language; hence the artificiality and subjectivity of the speech-act must be projected onto the world. This process harbors at once two possibilities: first, the speech-act, with its own clarity, clears away the vagueness and the shadows of the mind brought by behavior-language; second, when the speech-act gathers, distinguishes, and filters human experience with its conceptual system, a great deal of precious experience gained through behavior-language is lost, and the original experience of the world is even forcibly distorted by linguistic structure. Dewey expressed wariness of this danger. Dewey held that human experience is not equivalent to knowledge, nor is it a mode of cognition, but is “what is experienced,” which is related to another nature in another way, so that experience reaches the interior of nature and possesses depth. This experience, distinct from knowledge and cognition, won Dewey's high affirmation. In fact, this experience is precisely the experience constructed by behavior-language, lying outside the speech-act—the process by which the human being deals directly with nature and gains experience by receiving and fusing with nature through behavior-language, that is, intuitive experience. Therefore Dewey says: “When real objects are identified, one by one, with objects of knowledge, all affectional and volitional objects are inevitably excluded from the ‘real' world, and are compelled to find refuge in the privacy of an experiencing subject or mind…The only way to avoid a rigid separation between the mind that is the center of the experiential process and the natural world that is experienced is to acknowledge that all modes of experiencing are genuine manifestations of some real properties of nature” (15). Faced with the predicament of human cognition, phenomenology advocates returning to original experience through phenomenological “intuition” and “reduction.” Dewey, however, advocates neither neglecting the immediacy of experience nor slighting the linguistic mediation of cognition, but combining the two. He says: “In fact, all epistemological discussion depends on an abrupt and unconscious shift back and forth between the realm of immediate possession and the realm of language” (16). In the course of the development of human cognition, there is always interwoven a contest between speech-act and behavior-language; yet in the end it tends toward the fit of word and world.
The directive and commissive speech-acts are embedded within human practical activity. These two types effectively organize human social practice so as to make the world fit the word, fit the human will. Human practice, as a purposive activity, has as its root feature precisely the making of the world fit the human will. Throughout the human practical process, the speech-act not only plays an important organizing role through directives and promises, but also, by means of linguistic reflection, adjusts its own will and action in good time, corrects practical deviations, sets new goals for practical activity, and continually raises its efficiency. The declaration speech-act, while fitting the world, creates all manner of institutional facts, thereby regulating human action and forcing the world to fit institutional facts, to fit the word.
Because the expressive and fictional speech-acts temporarily suspend the direction of fit between word and world, they are bound to make the world created by the word an independent world, a world temporarily detached from the various social conventions, a “liminal space” in Victor Turner's sense (17). This is a free space; here social convention, having lost its real context, becomes void, the repression it caused is revoked, and the human being's deep unconscious and the memory of behavior-language are fully activated and liberated. Literature and art depend precisely on the liminal space constructed by the fictional speech-act; the independence of literature, literariness, the aesthetic, and the affective all lodge in this space.
The independence and differential function of language ceaselessly manufacture all kinds of ruptures and breaches, and thereby open up one space of possibility after another for human culture, knowledge, and literature and art. The rational impulse, the impulse of modernity, social stratification, and disciplinary differentiation all arise from the differential function of language. Human knowledge is not only disseminated through language but is itself constructed by virtue of language's differential function: humankind uses language to classify nature, to classify social institutions, to classify actions, to classify bodily functions—and so natural science, political science, sociology, ethics, anthropology, history, and medicine are born. Language's differential function wins reflexivity for itself, and so metalanguage, metatheory, metafiction, and metahistory appear. The independence of language not only enables it to distinguish objects, to reflect upon action and thought, and through reflection to divide the domains of different actions and thoughts, thereby providing a foundation for constructing different disciplines, but also enables it to reflect upon language itself, and through reflection effectively to perfect and develop language in actual use and to promote the differentiation of linguistic functions. One may say that no other symbolic activity possesses, as the speech-act does, forms and functions so nimble, flexible, complex, and changeable; and language's reflection upon action and thought is reciprocally cause and effect with its reflection upon language itself.
If, from the inception of language, the human being could not but bridge the fissure between human being and nature through primitive ritual—and if, in ritual activity, behavior-language still held the dominant position—then the differential and rational functions the speech-act possesses enabled it ultimately to seize the strong position and to play, in human activity, the role of planner, director, organizer, and administrator, while the position of behavior-language steadily declined, falling inevitably into an auxiliary, subordinate, and passive place. The differential function endows the speech-act with the power to decompose and dismember everything, thereby driving out the sanctity of life and the mysteriousness of the world. The speech-act's partitioning of the world, its disenchantment of the world, is the process of humankind's loss of its homeland and the human being's loss of sanctity. Only literature and art still maintain the balance and deep fusion of the two kinds of action (language), continuing to guard the suffused aura left behind after the gods departed, to guard the poetic homeland belonging to the human being, to guard the human being's own sanctity. The human sciences are the phantom left over from the rational disenchantment of language, the human being's effort to penetrate the phantom with a rational eye, and the helpless self-mockery after that effort fails. The integral, indivisible character of behavior-language determines that humankind ultimately cannot distinguish and grasp it with linguistic concepts, cannot regard it with an analytic eye, cannot confine it with mere logical thought.
In the process of the genesis and evolution of human culture, there appeared an irreversible phenomenon—the complex relation of cooperation-and-contest between behavior-language and speech-act: at the very inception of human culture, behavior-language held the ruling position; as culture developed and flourished, the relation between the two kinds of action (language) at last achieved balance; and thereafter the speech-act broke through this balance and seized the position of hegemon, forcing behavior-language to become its servant. This process reveals precisely the true ground behind the evolution Hegel described—of art from the symbolic to the classical and then to the romantic type—while the ancient Chinese diagram of yin-yang and the eight trigrams displays, in another way, the mutual generation, mutual complementarity, and waxing-and-waning of the two kinds of action (language).
III. The Structure of Human Civilization
On the structure of human civilization, John Searle has offered an exceedingly incisive interpretation from the angle of the speech-act. Searle is especially partial to the declaration speech-act, holding: “With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech-acts that have the same logical form as Declarations” (18). In Making the Social World, Searle expounds fully how the speech-act creates human civilization. He holds that humankind possesses the capacity to assign functions to persons and things—a function that operates not by virtue of physical structure but because its status is collectively accepted and recognized; only by virtue of that status can the corresponding person or thing perform the function, and this function is called a “status function.” Status function therefore depends on “collective intentionality,” and to possess a status function is to be granted “deontic power.” The reason the declaration speech-act has the force to construct institutional reality is that the utterer of the speech-act, or the speech-act itself, is collectively accepted and recognized, wins collective intentionality, and thereby acquires status function and deontic power. Once we acknowledge its deontic power, the declaration speech-act provides our action with a reason independent of our natural inclinations and desires, and thus requires us to act in accordance with that reason; it therefore possesses the capacity to constitute rules. Every institution is a system of constitutive rules, and “all institutional facts are linguistically created and linguistically constituted and maintained” (19). Human civilization is thus built up from various institutional facts and is therefore founded on the declaration speech-act.
It must be said that Searle's exposition is rigorously logical; but the problem is that he ponders the structure of civilization solely from the angle of the speech-act and neglects the role of behavior-language. The picture of human civilization he sketches is therefore in fact a replica of Plato's “Republic”—a purely rational construction refined according to one's own subjective will and purged of any heterogeneous factor. Human civilization is likewise the fruit of human symbolic activity, constructed under the cooperative action of behavior-language and the speech-act. Throughout the history of civilization there exists a contest of force between the two kinds of action (language); but on the whole, the overall structure of the two has undergone a gradual transition from emphasis on behavior-language toward emphasis on the speech-act. On the one hand, the declaration speech-act continually constructs new institutional facts, reorganizes social order, and guides and regulates human action; on the other hand, the non-rational factors within behavior-language incite the human being to deviate from institutional facts and return to human nature and instinct. The development of civilization is always lodged within this field of tension. Only thus can we understand human civilization in its primitive state, and the various turns and reversals that appear in the course of its development.
Social custom, as another normative force, is founded directly on behavior-language; it is the conscious transmission of action-habits of important significance. These action-habits are formed by a specific people in the process of adapting to a specific environment; possessing important survival value, they are ritualized, and so custom is always stamped with a vivid national and regional imprint and constitutes the “institution” that is not an institution of that people. Victor Turner once made a deep study of the Isoma ritual of the Ndembu of Zambia, pointing out: “The symbols of Isoma and their relations are not just a set of cognitive classifications for ordering the Ndembu universe. They are also, and perhaps as importantly, a set of evocative devices for rousing, channeling, and domesticating powerful emotions, such as hate, fear, affection, and grief. They are also informed with purposiveness and have a ‘conative' aspect. In brief, the whole person, not just the Ndembu ‘mind,' is existentially involved in the life and death issues with which Isoma is concerned” (20). This example shows that ritual, as social custom, is closely related to behavior-language: by means of ritual and through the memory of behavior-language it awakens and guides the emotions and actions of the Ndembu, and becomes their means of connecting with and experiencing the world, of structuring and ordering it. From this one can also see that institutional facts are, as Searle says, constructed by the declaration speech-act; but at the source they evolved precisely from social custom, being the rational reflection upon, and linguistic reconstruction of, the rules implicit in custom—so they have a lingering kinship with behavior-language. Hence Mary Douglas says: “The minimal institution is simply a convention” (21). If custom grows directly from behavior-language itself and, through ritual, reinforces the stability of behavior-language's meaning, maintaining its coherence and efficacy from within, then institutional fact has gradually lost its direct link with this source in behavior-language; it lays more stress on setting rules for action from an external utilitarian purpose, and is a coercive regulation of action from without. It is precisely this alienation of purpose that makes institutional facts often at variance with human nature. Bakhtin's affirmation of the carnival square is in essence due to the fact that carnival incites the human being to break institutional constraints and to indulge the liberating force of human nature.
In The Relevance of the Beautiful, Gadamer speaks of two basic experiences of time. One is the everyday, practical experience of time, in which time is always partitioned, arranged, disposed of, and whiled away; whether in extreme busyness or extreme boredom, time is filled up by something or by nothingness, while time itself is lost—at odds with human nature and with the existence of life. Gadamer calls this time “empty time.” The festival is wholly different: “To make time stand still and tarry is to celebrate. The calculating, arranging character with which people ordinarily dispose of time is, in the festival, abolished by this standing-still of time.” This time is “one's own time” (22). The festival sweeps away the helplessness of time's being arranged and disposed of, and lets the human being revel freely according to his own life, acting as his nature bids. The various external institutional facts are suspended, and the human being can at last freely exercise his own action. The unfolding of festival time is the process of the free performance of the human being's behavior-language, and that is why it is truly one's own time.
The important role of behavior-language in the construction of human civilization lies also in this: the tension formed between the living reality shaped by behavior-language and the institutional facts founded on the speech-act often makes it possible for institutional facts themselves to undergo continual adjustment so as to suit the development of human life. Homosexual conduct, for instance, was originally regarded as heresy and forbidden; but it is precisely because such conduct always existed, and its meaning was continually rewritten, that it was gradually recognized as “another” mode of sexual love, which finally led to the alteration of the corresponding institution. That is to say, although institutional facts strive to regulate and reshape behavior-language, behavior-language itself naturally harbors a potential continually to criticize and correct social civilization.
From Plato's “Republic” to John Searle's “structure of human civilization,” we cannot but see the important place of the speech-act in the whole of Western civilization, and the bias produced by the theorists' habits of thought, such that they can hardly avoid sinking into the mire of logocentrism. Indeed, the speech-act plays a decisive, foundational role in the construction of human civilization. As a differential, independent medium, language not only partitions human being and world, dividing the world into the myriad shapes of the boundless cosmos and differentiating the human being into “atomized” individuals, but also makes it possible for the human being to unfold reflection through the linguistic medium, gradually cultivating human reason and letting each person grow into an independent rational subject. And the “arbitrariness” that Saussure identified as the first principle of language destines language to depend on collective convention; otherwise it cannot achieve communication and understanding and ceases to be language. The arbitrariness and the conventionality of language are closely related: the more arbitrary, the more it cannot do without conventionality, without collective acceptance and recognition (23). Language itself is the most basic institutional fact, and all other institutional facts are founded upon it and take it as their model (24). To use a language means to respect and obey its meaning-system and grammatical rules, means to accept a way of life. On the one hand, language, by means of difference, shapes the human being into an independent rational subject; on the other, it relies on conventionality to rebuild interpersonal relations and re-map social order. Without the foundational role of this function of the speech-act, humankind could hardly have moved from clan society toward contract society.
Behavior-language is different. While connecting and fusing human being with world and human being with human being, it continually deepens the human being's affective investment in the other, strengthens the affective bond between the two, and bridges the state of separation. But because behavior-language is not an independent medium and cannot but be conditioned by concrete spatio-temporal conditions, it can neither shape a rational subject nor establish a contract society of vast territory; on the contrary, it can only become an effective adhesive of blood-related kin-groups, solidifying kin relations, and is often confined to the narrow space of the clan, or even the family. This affective relation also changes with distance—which is the root of the formation of the “acquaintance society” of “love with distinctions of degree.” Society, and even the state, is but the enlargement of clan and family, an imitation of the organizational mode of clan and family. The deepest root of why Heidegger felt so keenly that modern Western civilization produced the split of subject and object—so that the human being thereby lost the homeland of existence—and conceived a special fondness for Eastern civilization, lies precisely in the fact that the Han culture unwittingly preserved and stressed the role of behavior-language, thereby reconciling the relation of human being and nature, dissolving the gulf produced by the subject-object split, truly returning to the “identity” of human being and nature, and creating a poetically rich spiritual homeland in which the mind finds a place of return; whereas the “modern technology” he condemns is but an aggravating, secondary cause.
Any social civilization is jointly constructed by the two kinds of action (language)—speech-act and behavior-language—and is a contest of force between two different modes of organization and construction; they form a continually changing field of tension, thereby endowing a specific people with its own distinctive form of civilization.
Religion and law both belong to institutional facts. Religious doctrine, as a declaration speech-act, has for the believer an incomparable status function, for its promulgator is the supreme God or the saint who transmits God's word, and its doctrine accordingly has an authority beyond question (25). The promulgator of law is the “god” of the secular world, which thereby endows law with authority. Once some other secular force overrides it, the authority of law is subverted, fairness and justice cease to exist, and the substantive significance of law dies. Money is another basic institutional fact similar to language. The “disembedding” (Giddens) function of money, like language, continually decomposes and reconstructs social relations; its importance in modern society even exceeds and replaces the role of language, becoming the most important means by which society is constructed and the process of modernization is driven. The reason money has so immense a “disembedding” function is fundamentally that it has separated from “thing” and become a sign of independent, mediating value: it is not “some thing” apart from money itself, yet by its value it can represent every “thing,” and so reconstructs the relations of human being and thing, thing and thing, human being and human being—that is, reconstructs social relations and rebuilds social civilization. Only, this institutional fact, money, is likewise founded on the declaration speech-act, and our analysis of the speech-act in fact already contains an analysis of money and other institutional facts. It must be noted that money, as a medium directly representing value and able to be privately appropriated by individuals and yet circulated and exchanged, may indeed further strengthen contractual relations, but cannot, as language can, construct a rational subject through reflection; it is very likely, by its own value-properties, to cultivate calculating, speculation-prone individuals of self-interest and to distort interpersonal relations. It therefore needs precisely the rational subject and contract society constructed by language as its premise, and needs to be balanced by other institutional facts.
Ever since the birth of the linguistic concept, institutional facts founded on the speech-act have continually been generated, accumulated, and come to play an ever more important role. These institutional facts depend on, restrict, conflict with, or deconstruct one another, but all are constructed through the declaration speech-act and conditioned by the linguistic model. This reality shows that, throughout the history of human activity, there exists an unstoppable, manifest trend: the structural relation of the two kinds of action (language)—behavior-language and speech-act—within symbolic activity is also gradually changing, the speech-act increasingly gaining the dominant position while the space of action of behavior-language is steadily compressed. This is a process in which institution continually erodes, remakes, and devours custom—the process of humankind's movement from the in-itself to the for-itself, from benightedness to civilization, and the process of human action's gradual rationalization and society's gradual modernization (26). Comparatively, those forms of civilization long inclined chiefly toward behavior-language not only could not produce a Greek-style democracy, but, because the rational subject and the contract spirit were insufficiently developed, could not but suffer many constraints in the course of transforming toward modern civilization.
Yet for human society behavior-language remains indispensable. Lose this important bond of behavior-language, and a society constructed solely on institutional facts can only be a poetry-less, cold society, and the human being too will wither for the loss of his spiritual homeland. Behavior-language is the ground on which the human being experiences the world, gains his own sense of life, and feels the warmth of others' lives; the devaluation of behavior-language means the fading of the world and the withering of life. In fact, the critique of Enlightenment modernity by aesthetic modernity arises precisely from the malady of logocentrism brought by the speech-act, and strives to re-attain the balance between the two kinds of action (language). “If we are trying to invent a new body…which is no longer nearly paralyzed by being subject to the binary law of the either phallic or castrated—a wholly new body—then our best hope, our most effective politics, will be the practice of what we might call a poetics of the body” (27). From this one can also see that, as human civilization develops and institutional facts accumulate and intensify, humankind will ever more need the nourishment of literary and artistic activity. It is precisely in literary and artistic activity that both behavior-language and the speech-act gain their deepest, fullest arousal and mobilization; and therein brims abundant human sensibility, harboring humanity's primordial memory and providing us a homeland of existence we can never forsake.
IV. The Genesis of the Subject and the Self
Language not only inaugurated cultural creation and shaped human civilization; it also shapes human subjectivity and the self. Subject and self can only be constructed in language. Language distinguishes human being from world; while constructing the human being as the subject of cognition and practice, it regards the world as object, draws each person into the structural system of language, into different positions, establishes different relations among “I” and “myself,” “I” and “you” (plural), “I” and “he” (they), and assigns different persons and functions, thereby prompting the human being gradually to recognize the self and cultivate self-consciousness. Apart from language there is no subject and no self, and no individual human being.
On the close link of subject, self, and language, Benveniste has offered an excellent exposition, pointing out that human self-consciousness becomes possible only through contrast within discourse. I say “I” only when speaking to someone, and that person to whom I speak becomes “you” in my utterance. It is precisely in utterance that every speaker sets himself up as “subject” and calls himself “I” in speech, thereby obtaining, through linguistic activity, objective evidence of his subject-identity. “Language makes subjectivity possible because it always contains the linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivity…Language provides, as it were, many ‘empty' forms which each speaker, in exercising discourse, appropriates and relates to his ‘person,' at the same time defining himself as I and his interlocutor as you. The instance of discourse thus constitutes all the coordinates that define the subject”; and the personal pronoun is “the first support” by which subjectivity in language is made manifest (28).
Benveniste expounds in depth the close link between the speech-act and subjectivity and the construction of the self. While distinguishing human being from world and human being from human being, language draws them anew into a new system of linguistic relations and, according to linguistic structure, sets positions for subject and object, fixing myself within the linguistic relations of I, you, and he and confirming each with its function. But the subject and self thereby given are bound to be merely a linguistic “empty slot,” an intangible, reality-lacking hollow position lodged within linguistic relations.
On the question of the relation of language and subject, Agamben, inheriting Benveniste's view, offers his own interpretation. Agamben touches on human subjectivity in discussing the relation of experience and language. In his view, ever since Descartes proposed “I think, therefore I am,” the human subject has undergone a fundamental transformation; this is no longer the old subject of experience—this Cartesian subject is merely the subject of a verb, a pure linguistic-functional entity. This means that experience occurs only outside the individual qua subject, while the individual merely looks on at it with relief. “For if, contrary to what Husserl believed, the subject is merely the speaker, then we can never reach in the subject the original status of experience—a ‘pure and, so to speak, still mute experience.' On the contrary, the constitution of the subject in and through language is precisely the expropriation of this ‘mute' experience: from the very beginning, it is always already ‘speech'” (29). Especially as modern persons, they submit to the coercion of a certain form of experience, controlled and manipulated like swarms of rats in a laboratory. When this sole possible experience leads to dread, the resistance to experience becomes a reasonable defense, and so the human being can only undergo experiences without possessing experience. The day the subject is born is the moment experience is lost: on the one hand, in constructing the human subject, language at the same time separates the subject from experience, reducing experience to “mute experience”; on the other, the subject, by sequestering itself from experience, becomes a hollow subject, a subject detached from history. Only in infancy, when the subject has not yet formed, is there preserved “the experience of the transcendental limit of language.”
Agamben does not stop here; he advances his view by means of Benveniste's distinction of langue and parole. On the basis of Saussurean linguistics, Benveniste further expounds the split between langue and parole, sign and meaning, sign-system and discourse, and regards this split as the boundary distinguishing human being from animal. The animal is not without language; on the contrary, it is one with language, always and as a whole simply language. Therefore, “animals do not enter language, they are always already within it. Man, by contrast, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this single language and, in order to speak, must constitute himself as the subject of language—he must say ‘I.' Thus, if language is truly the nature of man—and on reflection, nature can only mean language without speech, the ‘perpetual origin' of Aristotle's definition, and to be the essence is always already to be within language—then the nature of man is split at its source, because infancy brings the rupture and difference between language and speech” (30). The rupture between language and speech is sutured only in human infancy, for infancy is at once the transcendental origin of language and the time when babbling speech begins; it is precisely infancy that posits within language the split between language and speech. Thereupon the subject constructed at the moment of the split between language and speech cannot but become both the subject of language and the subject of speaking discourse. His every learning or speaking is an entry into parole, always dealing with parole as “I,” constructing the subject in speaking, while at the same time relegating the subject to language. Human infancy gathers together experience, langue and parole, the knowledge in formation, and the subject. Language is at once the site where experience is transformed into knowledge and the site where the individual gains subjectivity, and at the same time it defines and constitutes their transcendental relation. Therefore, when in infancy the human being gradually appropriates language and speech and transforms the pure, pre-Babel language into human discourse, he opens the journey from nature to history, from experience to knowledge, from individual to subject.
When Agamben places the construction of the subject at the juncture of the split between speech and language, this is bound to endow the subject with new connotations. First, the subject is at once the subject of language and the subject constructed by speech, always concrete and particular and always lodged in a specific context; the subject is thus historicized even as it is a linguistic-functional entity. Second, the historicized subject is constructed in the condition of the split between language and speech; the subject's process of historicization is therefore an individualized appropriation of language and a creation of speech, and, having freed itself from the totality of language, it differs from Althusser's “subjected being” passively tamed by ideology, possessing agency and openness through appropriation and creation. Third, the subject is generated at the linguistic site where infancy's experience passes over into knowledge, and so always takes experience as ground and background—that is, the subject is founded on experience. Plainly, in Agamben's theoretical exposition the hollow subject is concretized and historicized, and experience is at the same time brought back into the theoretical field of vision and reconnected with the construction of the subject, although the two still remain external to each other.
Agamben's interpretation seems already to have pushed the theory of the subject to its limit; once the relation of subject and experience is probed more deeply, the “subject” is bound to split and be alienated into “object,” which in fact turns toward reflection on the “self.” For this we must return to Lacan's “mirror theory.”
In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” Lacan examines the crucial link in the formation of the self: the “imaginary.” Lacan holds that at birth the infant has only fragmentary sensations of its own body; only between six and eighteen months, by seeing its own image in the mirror, does it begin to realize that it has a complete body. It integrates the fragmentary bodily sensations into a complete visual gestalt, identifies the image in the mirror as the self, and takes pleasure in controlling the mirror image by its own movement. “The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopedic, and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. Thus, the rupture of the circle from Innenwelt to Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications” (31). In this process the subject is first split and alienated into the mirror image, constructs the fragmentary body into a unified image, and is enamored of this image; only thus can it identify the mirror image as itself and thereby form self-consciousness. Lacking this process of splitting and alienation, the self cannot be constructed. The self is therefore founded on the subject's imaginative function; it refuses to accept the broken bodily sensation and the truth of alienation. Here we must stress again: the infant's game of controlling the mirror image is of importance—it is precisely by controlling the mirror image that it distinguishes the self-image (which it can control) from the other (which it cannot), and thereby recognizes the self.
Thereafter Lacan further expounds the relation of the “symbolic” to the construction of the subject: when the infant enters language, it enters the symbolic order of language; not only does the self gain a clearer definition, but the subject too is constituted precisely through language. The human being constructs the human world according to the symbolic order of language and at the same time constructs himself with language; therefore the human being as speaking subject can be born only in language. If the self is constituted by the imaginary relation of the subject with its own body, then the subject is constructed within the symbolic order and is determined mainly by language.
Lacan's exposition discloses an important link in the formation of the self, yet leaves a doubt: if the imaginary precedes the symbolic—that is, precedes the emergence of language—then the infant could not clearly see its own mirror image. For only language can distinguish human being from world, construct the world as object-world, and at the same time construct human consciousness; before this the infant has no consciousness but only the unconscious. This means that, before the formation of language, the infant cannot constitute its own object of consciousness and cannot “see” the mirror image. Or, as Lacan later put it, the unconscious is structured like a language; that is, although the infant has not formed consciousness, it already possesses linguistic structure and can therefore see its own mirror image. But here too lies a contradiction: for once there is language, consciousness is bound to be formed, and there is no longer only the unconscious, nor any separate “imaginary.”
In fact, the contradiction above is rooted in Lacan's misrecognition of linguistic structure. The human speech-act cannot be inherited, whereas behavior-language can be inherited and constitutes the human unconscious. For instance, the newborn infant can suckle and very soon can distinguish human expressions, and so on. The infant's differentiation of the erogenous zones of its own body is likewise not founded on linguistic difference but made by virtue of the difference of behavior-language. Behavior-language's features—dependence on the body, lack of independence—mean that it can only relate to the world through action, structuring the world and drawing it into the self to understand it; it cannot construct a consciousness premised on the “object,” but only the unconscious. Therefore the so-called structure of the unconscious can only be the structure of behavior-language, not the structure of the speech-act. Since the speech-act branched off from behavior-language, it is bound to share the structure of behavior-language. But the structure of behavior-language must pass through transformation before the structure of the speech-act can be generated; the relation of the two is not direct but indirect—which is precisely why Chomsky is questioned by contemporary scholars.
Lacan's “imaginary” of the “mirror stage” should be precisely the transitional stage of behavior-language's generation into the speech-act—or what Schwab calls the “transitional space.” At this stage the infant has not yet begun to learn language and cannot say “wo” or “I,” yet begins to germinate a linguistic consciousness; that is, it begins to utter some sound, such as “a,” to denote everything related to itself. This sound is not yet language, yet it has already begun the course of abstracting and remaking behavior-language, begun to gather the scattered sensory experiences concerning itself. This process is the process of the genesis of imagination and the coalescing of the mirror image—the stage where the speech-act is about-to-be-born but not yet born, that is, Lacan's “imaginary.” When the infant truly begins to learn language, it gradually enters language and reconstructs the self and the subject according to the symbolic order of language.
When we regard the mirror stage as the transitional space of behavior-language's generation into the speech-act, the barrier between the imaginary and the symbolic is removed, and we can on this basis reinterpret mirror theory: the genesis of the speech-act makes the mirror image present itself as a figure before the infant; the expression and bearing this figure displays are directly the infant's own behavior-language, and the speech-act is the differentiation, integration, and reconstruction of behavior-language. Self-consciousness is therefore in essence the speech-act's cognition and reconstruction of the behavior-language the individual possesses: through the speech-act the human being presents his own behavior-language as object and differentiates, reflects upon, and confirms it, thereby grasping his own features and the distinctive link between self and other, being “defined” in the social context, and constructing self-consciousness. “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego” (32). This process is self-identification. The features of the individual's behavior-language determine the features of the self, and the inner coherence of the individual's behavior-language maintains the continuity of the self. Language itself is a mirror that constructs human self-consciousness through reflection, and the real mirror constitutes an important link within this (the role of the mirror, too, is inseparable from speech-act and behavior-language), further helping the human being form a complete image of the self. “In determining the stage of narcissism, the image of one's own body plays a decisive role” (33). In the process of self-identification, behavior-language is not merely the object of linguistic reflection; it at the same time accompanies the speech-act and together they compose the tension-structure of the two kinds of action (language). The mode in which behavior-language draws the object into, and fuses it with, itself in fact constitutes the inner motive force of self-identification, constitutes the root of “narcissism.” Behavior-language at once projects itself onto the image and intends to reabsorb and fuse the object, thereby bringing about narcissism. The speech-act, by contrast, intends to estrange the relation of human being and image, regarding them as objects of cognition and reflection. One may say that throughout the construction of the self the two kinds of action (language), and the field of tension thereby constituted, run continuously. And when the exercise of behavior-language turns from the self toward others and other things, this becomes the “aggressiveness” Lacan speaks of, the inner drive for dealing with others and other things, the root of “sympathy,” which together with the speech-act jointly shapes the structure of human cognition and practice.
The shaping role of story upon the self is likewise founded on this tension-structure. Story uses discourse to recount the human being—in essence, using the speech-act to narrate the human being's own behavior-language. In this process behavior-language is at once the object of narration and follows the narrating discourse, jointly with the speech-act creating an imagined world and letting the human being fall into this imagined world and empathize with it, while the speech-act reconfirms the self being narrated and constructed. It is precisely the tension-structure formed by speech-act and behavior-language that keeps the human self in continual genesis and reconstruction, making the self a centrifugal self open to social history.
Since the self is the individual's cognition of his own potential, the speech-act's differentiation and confirmation of his own behavior-language, founded on the basis of behavior-language, the features of the self are determined by the features of behavior-language: it is behavior-language that frees the self from the hollow framework of language and endows it with a full corporeality. “The self, as a determining factor, is present commonly and universally in its operations in all situations, which is the chief reason we so rarely notice it. It is closer and more pervasive in experience than the air we breathe” (34). The speech-act's confirmation of behavior-language is the self's digging into the unconscious, the self's intention to illuminate the unconscious and thereby monitor and manage behavior-language, to reshape behavior-language according to the demands of a specific environment, to perform behavior-language at will, and to coordinate the relation between behavior-language and social convention. The socialization of behavior-language is an indispensable, important component of human socialization, even its very foundation. Yet because behavior-language is attached to the human body, and there is no boundary between action and body, the speech-act cannot wholly grasp behavior-language—which destines self-consciousness never to exhaust the human unconscious, never to exhaust the memory of behavior-language. Those deep-lying unconscious contents are always the self's “other,” an unfathomable iceberg hidden beneath the water, forever existing within chaos, secretly governing the self, mysteriously winking and beckoning to it. On the one hand, this lays a profound crisis within the self, so that the self now and then faces the predicament of being subverted; on the other hand, the endless conflict thereby constituted also becomes the force driving the reconstruction of the self.
The reason humankind rises above the animal kingdom is that it enjoys two fundamentally different kinds of action (language) and, by these two, constructs a complex connection between human being and world. The animal is wholly identical with nature; it is attached to nature and belongs to nature. The human being, by the genesis of the speech-act, is split from nature and opens a breach between human being and nature, while at the same time bridging this breach through cultural creation, thereby expanding the human world and constructing a wholly new relation between human being and world. One may say that the larger the fissure language tears open, the larger the space of human cultural creation, and the more the human world is expanded—and this expansion is not confined to the external world but is at the same time directed at the human being's inner world. In all human activity, behavior-language and the speech-act are always interwoven; the two kinds of action (language) jointly shape the human world, human culture and civilization, the human mind and body, and so there exists an isomorphic relation among the human world, human culture and civilization, and the human mind and body. This means that the human being, while tearing apart various relations with the speech-act and expanding the space of existence and creation, at the same time seeks anew a new unity—a new harmony reached through the two kinds of action (language) running through human activity, coordinating with each other and jointly attaining it.