Language: wooden and woollen
The French phrase langue de bois[wooden language] is well known. It is a
polemical expression that generally serves to refer to the language of the
other, the opponent’s language. When it has a content, it targets the stereotyped,
repetitive language of politicians who shelter behind stock formulae. In
particular, it has been used to describe the way in which the leaders of a
working-class movement in decline express themselves. However, critics of
wooden language ignore two features of this form of expression. It marks
the desire for a collective expression that refuses the individualised expression
of the emotions (and ambitions) – the preferred mode of address of bourgeois
politicians, who trade on their ‘sympathetic’, ‘frank’ talking (which does not
preclude utterly shameful lies), which is ‘close to the language of ordinary
people’. And, because it expresses a position, it also expresses an opposition:
wooden language is decisive, it designates the enemy, it assembles friends
and allies. Here, we are very close to the slogan. The critique of wooden
language therefore invariably forms part of the dominant philosophy of
language, in its two main characteristics: the individualism of speech and the
search for consensus at any price. This is why bourgeois political speech,
which is as stereotyped and repetitive as the other, prefers woollen language
to wooden language.
This expression was coined by François-René Huyghe.^15 I broach the subject
starting from a remarkable article by Marie-Dominique Perrot, ‘Mondialisation
du non-sens’, published in 2002 in the journal Recherches.^16 She analyses a
UN brochure published in 2000 in Geneva, Un monde meilleur pour tous[A
Better World for All]. This is how she summarises her central argument:
Global language, which is the only language capable, like a magician, of
revealing the strange imaginary object that is a planetary-wide consensus,
obtains its result at the price of an exorbitant sacrifice extracted from language:
renouncing meaning, proceeding as if social actors did not exist, claiming
that the improbable has the same value as experience... The lowest
denominator thus sought ends up – when one succeeds in putting it into
words – no longer meaning anything.^17Contrasting Short Glossaries of Philosophy of Language • 217(^15) See Huyghe 1991.
(^16) See Perrot 2002.
(^17) Perrot 2002, p. 204.