The fantasy of language

"I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions."  — Donald Davidson, A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs 

What is involved, then, in a discursive setting if we don't have "a clearly defined shared structure"?  According to him, "radical interpretation," "passing theory," "triangulation." Or: "We have discovered no learnable common core of consistent behavior, no shared grammar or rules, no portable interpreting machine set to grind out the meaning of an arbitrary utterance." There are only "strategies" because "there are no rules for arriving at passing theories, no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to rough maxims and methodological generalities." In other words, there is no final arbiter for meaning, no foundational center or framework. Any general framework will "by itself be insufficient for interpreting particular utterances." Again, we note that this is already a widespread notion in literary theory today.

In any interpretative strategy, any presumed formal basis of reading is "insufficient" not only as a means leading to interpretation but also as an arbiter of the "correctness" of interpretation. Since “understanding a language is a matter of continually adjusting interpretative presuppositions” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Davidson), any reading constitutes its own rules "on the fly." By extension, we can probably even say that, perhaps, the grand explanatory frameworks (i.e., theories of language) used to describe how language and meanings work may actually just be formalizations or petrification of interpretative strategies (reading or the generation of meaning). Here, meaning leads to an over-production of language, a surplus of signification. More pointedly: the very fantasy of language itself is a surplus included in the over-production of meaning. Language, instead of serving as the origin of meaning, is the by-product of the surplus of meaning. In short, the act of reading creates its own abstract conceptualization of what language looks like.

Seen this way, the goal of language is self-reproduction. Whether or not what it produces is something whole or broken, material or immaterial, true or false, shared or not shared, same or different, legible or illegible, it begins there, as a fantasy to which we attach more of language or more of whatever we think of as not language, meaningful or otherwise. Meaning produces language, which produces more meaning to produce more of language: a surplus of many, many theories, or fantasies, of language. Language, therefore, can only exist in language.