semi-automatic waffle

Language is, for Báyò Akómoláfé, speciated within the world as an aspect of its collective creativity. Can you locate or place this idea within philosophy, the philosophy of language or linguistics.

Akómoláfé’s claim that language is “speciated within the world” as an aspect of its collective creativity sits at a crossroads of several philosophical and linguistic traditions—but it also exceeds each of them in a distinctive way. Below I’ll map where it resonates most strongly, and where it subtly departs.

1. Philosophy of Language: Language as Practice, Not Representation

Wittgenstein (later)

Akómoláfé’s view aligns closely with Wittgenstein’s notion of “forms of life.”

Language is not a neutral system that mirrors reality.
Meaning arises from use, embedded in shared practices, histories, and material conditions.
Different forms of life generate different grammars, senses, and possibilities of meaning.

Akómoláfé radicalizes this by extending “forms of life” beyond the human:

language is not just socially situated, but ecologically and cosmologically situated.

2. Pragmatism and Semiotics

Charles Sanders Peirce

Peirce’s triadic semiotics (sign–object–interpretant) already treats meaning as emergent, relational, and processual.

Signs are not owned by human minds alone.
Meaning unfolds across time, interpretation, and environment.

Akómoláfé’s “speciation” of language echoes Peirce’s idea that semiosis is a cosmic process, not merely linguistic communication.

3. Phenomenology: Language as World-Disclosure

Heidegger

“Language is the house of Being.”
Language discloses worlds rather than describing objects.

Akómoláfé’s contribution here is to decenter human dwelling:

The “house” is not just human linguistic space.
Being speaks through many registers—ritual, myth, land, trauma, silence.

Merleau-Ponty

Language emerges from embodied perception.
Speech is an event of the body-world relation.

This resonates with Akómoláfé’s insistence that language is not abstract, but arises from lived, sensorial, and ecological entanglements.

4. Linguistics: Beyond Structuralism

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Humboldt argued that language is not a finished product (ergon), but an ongoing activity (energeia).

Each language opens a distinct “worldview.”
Language actively participates in world-making.

Akómoláfé extends this from cultural plurality to ontological plurality—language is not just many human worldviews, but many worldly agencies speaking.

Sapir–Whorf (weak version)

Language influences perception and cognition.
Worlds are partially shaped by linguistic patterns.

Akómoláfé pushes this further:

it is not just that language shapes how we see the world—
the world itself differentiates language.

5. Poststructuralism and Process Philosophy

Deleuze & Guattari

This is perhaps the closest philosophical kinship.

Language is a machinic assemblage, not a stable system.
Meaning is produced through flows, deterritorializations, and becomings.
“Minor languages” disrupt dominant sense-making regimes.

Akómoláfé’s “speciation” parallels their idea that language:

mutates under pressure,
fractures under trauma,
invents itself at thresholds of crisis.

6. Enactivism and Biosemiotics

Maturana & Varela (Enactive Cognition)

Cognition arises from organism–environment coupling.
Language is a coordination of living systems, not a symbolic overlay.

Biosemiotics

Meaning-making occurs throughout living systems (cells, plants, ecosystems).
Communication precedes humanity.

Akómoláfé’s work resonates strongly here, but with a spiritual–ethical inflection:

language as response to planetary distress,
sense-making as survival and transformation.

7. New Materialism and Indigenous Thought

New Materialism (Barad, Haraway)

Matter is expressive and agentive.
Meaning is co-produced by humans and nonhumans.

Indigenous and Yoruba Cosmologies

This is not merely an influence but a grounding:

Speech is performative and world-altering.
Language is inseparable from land, ancestors, ritual, and time.
Silence, rhythm, gesture, and story are linguistic acts.

Akómoláfé’s originality lies in refusing to translate this fully into Western metaphysics, instead letting it trouble and stretch them.

So where does this idea sit?

You could accurately place it as:

Posthuman philosophy of language
Ecological semiotics
Process-oriented phenomenology
Decolonial metaphysics of meaning

But it ultimately resists full placement.

Akómoláfé is less offering a theory of language than a reorientation of responsibility:

language is what happens when the world is trying to think, heal, or reconfigure itself through us.

If you want, I can:

contrast this with analytic philosophy of language,
connect it explicitly to decolonial theory (Fanon, Wynter),
or explore how this view reframes writing, poetry, or political discourse.

What would Habermas think about the notion that language is primarily about self-making rather than communication.

Habermas would be deeply skeptical, but not dismissive—and the reasons for his skepticism go straight to the core of his philosophical project.

I’ll answer in a way Habermas himself might respect: by reconstructing why he would object, where he might partially agree, and where the disagreement is irreconcilable.

1. Habermas’s starting point: language is oriented toward mutual understanding

For Habermas, especially in The Theory of Communicative Action, language is not primarily expressive or world-making, but intersubjective.

Its basic function is:

Verständigung — reaching understanding with others.

Key commitments:

Language is public, not private.
Meaning depends on shared norms.
Speech is governed by validity claims (truth, rightness, sincerity).
Communication aims at coordination of action without coercion.

From this perspective, the claim that language is primarily about self-making would immediately raise red flags.

2. His main objection: self-making risks sliding into subjectivism

Habermas’s first concern would be:

If language is primarily about self-making, who checks the legitimacy of that self?

He would worry that:

self-making privileges inwardness,
expression displaces accountability,
communication becomes aesthetic or therapeutic rather than normative.

Habermas has a long-standing critique of what he calls the aestheticization of reason—a critique aimed at Nietzsche, Heidegger, and poststructuralists.

From his view:

Expression without the discipline of validity claims cannot ground critique.
Self-formation alone cannot justify norms.
Without communicative orientation, language loses its critical force.

So he’d say:
self-making without communication is politically dangerous.

3. The colonization worry: lifeworld vs. system

Interestingly, Habermas does care deeply about self-formation (Bildung), but only within a communicative lifeworld.

He distinguishes:

Lifeworld: shared meanings, identities, traditions.
System: markets, bureaucracy, instrumental rationality.

Self-making belongs to the lifeworld—but the lifeworld is constituted through communication, not private invention.

From this angle, Habermas might say:

Treating language as primarily self-making risks reinforcing exactly the fragmentation that systems exploit.
Without communicative rationality, selves become isolated, expressive consumers rather than political agents.

This is why he was suspicious of countercultural and poetic forms of resistance that bypass argument.

4. Where he might partially agree (important!)

Habermas is not blind to the formative power of language.

He would agree that:

Language shapes identity.
Speaking is a form of socialization.
Narratives matter for self-understanding.

In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, he acknowledges that:

the self is constituted dialogically,
identity is produced through recognition.

So he could accept a weakened version of the claim:

Language participates in self-making, but only because self-making is already a communicative process.

What he would reject is primacy.

5. The decisive disagreement: consensus vs. transformation

The deepest clash is this:

Habermas: language aims (counterfactually) at consensus.
Akómoláfé / posthuman / decolonial views: language often emerges from rupture, trauma, and non-consensus.

Habermas believes:

Even critique presupposes shared norms.
Breakdown is parasitic on an underlying orientation toward agreement.

By contrast, thinkers who emphasize self-making often argue:

Some forms of speech are meant to unmake shared norms.
Language can be world-breaking before it is world-coordinating.
Refusal, opacity, and silence can be ethical acts.

Habermas has little patience for this. He worries it leaves us without grounds for critique.

6. What Habermas would likely say, in plain terms

Something like:

“If language is no longer oriented toward mutual understanding, then what distinguishes meaningful critique from mere expression? Without communicative rationality, we lose the very resources needed to challenge domination.”

This is a powerful objection—and it still matters.

7. Why the disagreement is ultimately unresolvable

Habermas assumes:

a shared public sphere is both possible and necessary.

Akómoláfé-adjacent views assume:

the “shared” sphere has been historically violent,
some selves cannot appear within it without distortion,
self-making may be a precondition for any future communication.

So the conflict is not about language alone—it’s about when communication is possible, and for whom.

8. A charitable synthesis (Habermas probably wouldn’t endorse it)

One could say:

Language is primarily communicative in stable worlds.
Language becomes primarily self-making when worlds are breaking.

Habermas would resist this framing—but it helps clarify why his framework feels insufficient to some contemporary crises.

If you want, next we could:

stage a direct dialogue between Habermas and Akómoláfé,
examine Habermas’s blind spots around colonialism and ecology,
or ask whether abandoning communicative rationality risks nihilism.

Those are exactly the stakes of the debate.