The bar-bar-ians

Someone I work with recently told me what he’d learned about ancient Greek culture, and in particular the word ‘barbarian’. He told me that the modern sense of barbarians as those who are uncivilised was not particularly shared by the Greeks in their use of the word. He had read that for the Greeks, barbarians were simply those who were not Greeks, who spoke foreign languages, whose speech was not decipherable, sounding like bar-bar – bar-bar-ians. He told me that for him, being autistic is a bit like that. He lives among people whose speech he feels he does not decipher well, does not understand their mores, and is not understood in return.

I looked up the etymology of this word, barbarian, and found indeed that the modern word dates to the mid C14th, as “foreign, of another nation or culture”, and from the 1590s, “of or pertaining to savages, rude, uncivilised”. This has a relation via Latin to the Greek barbaros “foreign, strange; ignorant”, or barbaroi – “all that are not Greek”, from a Proto Indo European (PIE) root barbar – “echoic of the unintelligible speech of foreigners (compare Sanskrit barbara – ‘stammering’…)”.

 I don’t doubt that the Greek barbaroi may have brought some of this PIE sense of barbar with it.

With this idea of the foreigner who in modern times might be considered barbarians – rude, uncivilised, savage – I like that there is something of it outside of this construction of meaning, which is simply the bar-bar of unintelligible speech. And if we come around to the issue from what is bar-bar in speech, then we might say for instance that poetry is a practice of letters that shows this bar-bar of language – already there, hidden behind the “civilised” practice of meaning, and rendering beautiful what is foreign already in language, whether they be foreign languages or not. Likewise psychoanalysis might be considered a bar-bar-ian practice, which opens us to the always already foreign aspect of language, it’s non-sense, beyond the civilised meanings we start our analyses with. And psychoanalysis is indeed a practice which forefronts the faultline in communication, of understanding and being understood, and in which what is ciphered and deciphered is not meaning, but the way the bar-bar of the unconscious of language hooks into the body – if it forefronts this, it is so that we can each make use of what is bar-bar-ian about us, lest we be drawn to the barbarism that meaning conveys.

Alasdair Duncan

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