Is language limited? We might answer the question with reference to a tragi-comic empirical precept: everything is limited, in the end, in one sense or another. We are mortal; we exist in an unknowable and strange universe, of which we understand very little. Each one of us is limited, by finitude, by vantage point; our species is limited, and, we might reasonably assume, will one day become extinct.

Furthermore, these words I am deploying – ‘the universe,’ ‘time’ – are linguistic concepts, not perpetual realities. The word is not the thing. Moreover, the thing is most likely not the thing as we understand it; it is completely possible we have not grasped the meaning of it at all.

Despite this, we eagerly apply words to the formlessness around us, and our anointed experts deliver new taxonomies in language, which rise to prominence and then fade, to be replaced by other taxonomies in turn. Meanwhile, another species, with another language and another mode of being-in-the-world, might propound different concepts altogether, and re-taxonomise the prevailing formlessness in completely different ways.

Language must be limited, per se. Furthermore, any attempt to calibrate the limits of language, in language itself, must be limited. We are limited in our understanding of the limits of a limited system, precisely because it is limited and cannot express everything, including its own limits! We cannot stand aloft in some perpetual realm, calibrating what ‘reality’ truly is and how language fails or succeeds in expressing it.

Even this fantastical image suggests that ‘reality’ stands apart from ‘language’; that the two might be detached and considered separately. Yet, language is within us; we are brought to consciousness through language, inducted into a system of squeaks and murmurs. Consciousness and language are intertwined. If you corrupt language, concertedly and in line with a particular ideology, then you potentially corrupt consciousness in turn – we might cite the example of the ‘Nazification’ of the German language under the Third Reich. Or, you make it extremely hard for people to enunciate dissident views and be understood by others.

Language can enshrine obsolete ideologies, preserve ossified metaphors, or can be deliberately manipulated, for the purposes of propaganda and political control – varieties of Orwellian newspeak. We experience such semantic occlusions everyday, even in societies that purport to be ‘free’: ‘extreme rendition’, the ‘War on Terror’, ‘The Patriot Act’, ‘Austerity’.