I'm with Peter Russell's insight that language = culture. You don't take it as far as some, however, and say language = culture = consciousness. That may be extreme but--as you so astutely point out with regard to our unique (language-dependent) image-making facility--anything to do with awareness without the linguistic filter can only be "imagined", or projected from the semiotic image we already have.
Yet I, too, certainly understand that we are "prisoners of our own device" with regard to linguistic subjectivity. We've extended the *duration* of subjectivity further into an abstract past and projected future and have thus gained much control of our environment. We can "imagine" and "think" in all sorts of unworldly spaces. But like Adam & Eve after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, we have lost the paradise of experiential immediacy, of direct participation or even identity with World Natura.
Language only seems to isolate us, however, and such psychopathic aberrations as solipsism, multiple personalities, narcissism, and morbid depression are balanced by the fact of language as poesis: a making. It is through language we share and create culture--just as we are doing right here. We are part of the hermeneutic circle which emphasizes the pivotal role of language but also the intermingling of part and whole and, finally, the inherent creativity of interpretation.
We've lost the world and gained ourselves. To decide what kind of a deal this is may depend on one's values. (But in such a deal, one must always be aware of both the "hidden costs" and the "fine print".)
Gregoire Nixon
nixon@geneseo.edu
"What is prior to the assumption of the symbolic, the real in its 'raw' state, may only be supposed, it is an algebraic *x*....The subject of desire knows no more than that, since for it reality is entirely phantasmatic." (Julia Kristeva, *Language: The Unknown*)
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