Trademark expands capital accumulation and creates a norm of privatized language

It is worth assessing some elements of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to gain a different perspective on the same problem, namely, the impossibility of privatising language. Language is one form of knowledge. As such, it is not innate but belongs to a continuous historical social process of creation, transformation, and reproduction, thus one particular mode of intellectual appropriation. Tis particular mode, however, entails in-itself an immense resolving power for its generality and abstractness; it is one of the most general forms of a determined type of knowledge and, as such, is contained in most forms of specifc knowledge. On the other hand, forms of knowledge, such as music, which can relinquish language (as distinctive from musical codices), must subordinate itself to language if it is to be privately appropriated because it presupposes specifc forms of normativity, which in turn presumes language.

How can the limits of private intellectual appropriation be demarcated? Can all human intellectual dimensions be privately appropriated? Could language be privatised? Specifc words are already undergoing a process of privatisation in which trademarks, “giving producers exclusive control over the marks or names they used to designate their products” (Hull, 2019, p. 98), expand from their formal scope in a progression of derivative privatisation. Gordon Hull calls this trademark dilution, that is, “the owner of a mark can seek legal redress against noncompeting, nonconfusing uses of similar marks”; this arbitrary manoeuvre is founded in the ever-expansive capitalist logic itself, namely, the protection of brand value (Hull, 2019, p. 98).

(Exchange-)Value is a pure social relation (of power) which seemingly renounces any connection with material reality, that is, “not an atom of natural matter enters into their value concreteness” (Marx, 1962, p. 62); thus, such a justifcation of protection appears circular: value appropriation justifes the appropriation of value. What are the conditions for language to be privatised? The atomisation of individuals who detached themselves from language in order to reappropriate it. However, if private appropriation is possible, namely, the separation and isolation of language, then a separate, isolated, independent language should be existentially conceivable.

Shaping an unconditional language, namely, a private language, presupposes nothing external and is supposed to be complete in-and-foritself. “Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there we should like to say, is a spirit” (Wittgenstein, 2013, p. 36. §36). As seen, Hegel asserts that pure-being is simultaneously pure-nothingness (see supra). However, he also states that private appropriation (also intellectual) is an indispensable condition for individual freedom, the actualisation of the person within the abstract right. In this sense, freedom anchored in private appropriation of language, as an isolated being, would mean freedom as nothingness. Te contradiction found in §69 (Hegel, 2013), in which intellectual property(private) cannot be found a matter of unlawfulness but merely of honour, on the one hand, while writers and publishers must be protected, on the other, perfectly expresses this problem (see Hegel, 2013, p. 149, explanatory note §69).