Asparagus and Fishing Nets

Reflections on the relation between language and reality

The obvious is the enemy of philosophy, and by extension, any attempt to know the truth — and almost nothing is more obvious than our intuitive, everyday understanding of language.

That understanding goes something like this. The world is already “out there”, separate from us, and we describe it using language, primarily through the process of corresponding words to things.

Jacques Lacan used the image of an asparagus to describe this view:

“The name is not like the little asparagus tip emerging from the thing.”

To understand language in this way is to believe that words inhere to things, that it’s the preexisting thing that gives us the word, that words furnish a world of things that has already been encountered by us.

What’s the alternative to this view? It’s to understand language as a network, set against an undifferentiated reality which could not yet, in itself, be described as a world, but which, only through the intervention of that network, becomes intelligible to us as such.

As Lacan puts it, continuing his earlier quote:

“One can only think of language as a…