Postone locates in aspects of capitalist society and epistemology, and the form of abstract-
concrete reasoning used in U.S. law. Like Postone, I point to a potentially liberating as-
pect of this double edge, one that exists side by side with a dangerous possibility of
abstraction away from attention to injustice and inequality. For an argument with af-
finities to this, see Yngvesson, Virtuous Citizens, 119–127: “The ‘double reality” of these
[legal] processes is that they are both about domination and refusal, about complicity with
power and struggles against relations of power.”
- Jane Larson, personal communication.
- Or, to make patent a fairly obvious connection with some central issues in juris-
prudence, in interpreting orders from the sovereign, not to mention in many other more
complexly posed issues surrounding law and interpretation. - See Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality; Sapir, Selected Writings.
- This determinist reading was already part of the Herderian tradition’s cultural
understanding of language. - See Lucy, Grammatical Categories and “Whorf’s View of the Linguistic Media-
tion of Thought”; Silverstein, “Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology” and
“Whorfianism.” - Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, 139–140. Thus, Whorf compared English
and Hopi as a way of illustrating how differences between language can affect the back-
ground assumptions with which speakers habitually approach the world:
Such terms as ‘summer, winter, September, morning, noon, sunset’ are with us a
nouns, and have little formal linguistic difference from other nouns. They can be
subjects or objects, and we say ‘at sunset’ or ‘in winter’ just as we say ‘at the corner’
or ‘in an orchard.’...
In Hopi however all phase terms, like ‘summer, morning,’ etc. are not nouns but
a kind of adverb, to use the nearest SAE [Standard Average European language] anal-
ogy. They are a formal part of speech by themselves, distinct from nouns, verbs, and
even other Hopi “adverbs.”... These ‘temporals’ are not used as subjects or objects,
or at all like nouns....
Our own “time” differs markedly from Hopi “duration.” It is conceived as like
a space of strictly limited dimensions, or sometimes as like motion upon such space.... Hopi “duration” seems to be inconceivable in terms of space or motion, being
the mode in which life differs from form. (Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, 142,
143, 158)
We see here the contrasting ontologies implicit in the structuring of grammatical
categories.
- See Silverstein, “Language Structure” and “Metapragmatic Discourse.” Anthro-
pological linguist Michael Silverstein and literary theorist Jacques Derrida have both
pointed, from somewhat different perspectives, to a focus on words as a form of objecti-
fication. See Chandler, “The Problem of Purity,” for an exposition of the continuities be-
tween these two traditions. - See Silverstein, “Shifters,” “Language and the Culture of Gender,” and “Meta-
pragmatic Discourse”; see also Hanks, Referential Practice. For relevant background, see
Garvin,A Prague School Reader; Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 2; Sapir, Selected Writings;
Saussure,Course in General Linguistics; Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality; Jakobson,
“Closing Statement,” “Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb,” and On Language.
For an overview and introduction, see Mertz, “Beyond Symbolic Anthropology.” - For the uninitiated, let me briefly introduce some key concepts. These concepts
emerge not only from linguistics but also from the broader field known as “semiotics,”
230 Notes to Pages 16–18