The third is tautology. Thus, openness is good because it is open, or openness
is openness.^20 Self-referentiality ‘naturalises things that are self-evident’. Here,
we re-encounter a magical conception of language (incantation, repetition,
recitation of ritual formulae), on which woollen language is based, just as
wooden language is.
The fourth is metaphor. Here, Perrot refers to the theory of metaphor in
Lakoff and Johnson, which notes that the only really living metaphors are
dead metaphors, for they are the ones which linguistic communication has
adopted and reuses ad infinitum:^21 they thus become as undetectable as the
presuppositions, as naturalised as the tautologies.
The fifth grammatical marker is vagueness. It is one of the basic properties
of natural languages that they speak vaguely, by ‘weakly defined terms’,
signifieds that are undecidable or used higgledy-piggledy, signifiers with
plastic value, whose ‘positive connotation is acquired automatically’.^22 The
title of the UN brochure is composed exclusively of such terms.
A final marker is what Perrot calls the anti-performative, or ‘when saying is
not doing’. She cites the Genevan linguist Berrendoner, who claims that if an
act is impossible to perform, saying that one is performing it is equivalent
to performing it. Paradoxically, all the markers of the performative then
become markers of inaction.
And this is the conclusion reached by Perrot:
We are dealing with language here. Hollow words, stereotyped formulas,
the mediocre or formatted vocabulary of world-speak do damage to the
richness and complexity of reality, drape problematics in a veil of indifference.
Form and content cancel one another out. This attack on language as creator
and vehicle of meaning threatens the fragile capacity of human beings to
live in society.^23
In a sense, woollen language realises the communicative ideal of Habermas,
since it aims at consensus and puts it into practice. But it is at the price of
any genuine linguistic exchange – that is, of any debate. Wooden language
was hewn in the wood from which bludgeons are made: it served agôn, that
Contrasting Short Glossaries of Philosophy of Language • 219(^20) Perot 2002, p. 215.
(^21) See Lakoff and Johnson 1980.
(^22) Perrot 2002, p. 212.
(^23) Perrot 2002, p. 220.