The Agonistic of Tongues

It was Jean-Francois Lyotard who wrote in The Postmodern Condition that ‘to speak is to fight… and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics’.2 The rules of language, Lyotard points out, ‘do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not’.3 Before Lyotard, Benjamin Lee Whorf, in a hypothesis later modified by Edward Sapir, maintained that we dissect nature, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significance as we do ‘along lines laid down by our native languages’, because we are parties to an agreement ‘whose terms are absolutely obligatory’ (Whorf’s emphasis) codified in the patterns of language within the speech community, with the grammar of each language guiding the individual’s mental activity, analysis of his impressions and synthesis of ‘his mental stock in trade’.4