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The Contemporaneousness of the Non-Contemporaneous (6. to 8.12.2002)

WORKSHOP:

Languages, "Translations" and Processes of Knowledge

Language Criticism as a Method of a Beginning of a Cultural-Scientific Didactics

Michaela Buerger (Genua)

The fact that the concept "language criticism" is not to be found in a reference work with the title "Language. Introduction to Modern Linguistics" gives pause to reflect and shows how little even today many processes of knowledge are interlinked. We talk about total medicine and total thinking, but - as it appears - within the field of language we deny the justification for the existence of a discipline like language criticism. One could think that the fields of Literary Studies (preferably Austrian) and Philosophy should deal with it.

In view of the ubiquity of language it is hardly to be believed that language criticism does not mean anything concrete to most people and that even for Humanities' scholars often only calls up the memory of deep (or high?) philosophical knowledge from Humboldt to Wittgenstein. The teaching of "Language Criticism" should at least use the study of one's own history as an introductory module, in order to confront the students with the "thinkable" and the "expressible." Then, however, it should proceed in the direction of an applied, pragmatic, ultimately practical language criticism. The terrain of this language criticism is the approach to language phenomena in an open, non-ideological manner, as a criticism of speaking (writing) and thinking, as a question and analysis, an expansion, not a delimitation, for in this way one will arrive at the boundaries of meaningful language criticism, which is to say: purism and manipulation.

In the area of cultural science this beginning of didactics exists already, because language in every context is object and/or society oriented.

THE UNIFYING ASPECT OF CULTURES