How could be helpful the language philosophy raising and answering policial and social questions?

"This book wants put on limits of the thinking, 

or better, not to the thinking but the expression 

of the thinking; because making limits to the thinking 

we would have to be able that think on the two sides 

of the limit, and therefore we would have be able 

to think what is cannot be think. This limit only 

can be made in language and what is outside 

the limit is -and will be always- a totally nonsense"

Wittgenstein

I

Even this matter is very noisy and complicated to be solved in a few pages, in addition, even if we could solve this thing in paper the real trouble is to solve this on the reality, something very difficult; even knowing all these things, the question must be planted taking in mind that we are against a real trouble, and the high education in a center of production of knowledge. Of course this is not new, I am taking these ideas from a Wlad Godzich's text, called "literary theory and critique of the culture", in which he writes:

"the economic recession from the seventies and the period of the high inflation with closed that decade pushed so many students, and even more than students the university administrators, to something that is best known as "new vocationalism", an utilitarian conception of the university that anounced that its actual transformation in a center of supplying of the new strenght productive of the postindustrial society: the knowledge (Godzich, 1998:9) 

Godzich says that is very problematic the specialization of the language at the moment to communicate knowledge between the disciplines, and one of the causes that he show, one of many others, is to understand the university like a formation center, a process that was called in United States (country in which he stand his analyzes) like "new vocationalism". This phenomenon is a product of the social and economic conditions that made in the seventies and eighties that the United States government tried to make that people go for working, and they used the university for that aim.

So well, from the language philosophy this matter is more complicated if we take in mind some of the aphorisms about the first Wittgenstein at his 'tractatus'. He defines language as 'limit' and doing that he is also defining language as possibility. What is not thinkable is not thinkable, is what he says using a tautology. However, if the language is the limit of the world in so far as it has sense, which consequences have this in a situation like is described by Godzich, namely the specialization of language and the confinement between many different languages?

However we must have pretty clear from where is talking Godzich and how he understands the language to translate it to a political ambit. In effect he stands from a point of view in which he see the difference between "language" and "written culture", being the first an "universal mediator" (Godzich, p. 17). In order with that, he understand the written culture as a product of the need to transmit knowledge which is public, being the written culture an ambit that belong to a public domain; from there is from he is discussing about the specialization of the language, firstly the political language and then the literary critic language. After that he says easier:

the existence of the domains of the practice activity which are characterize by special languages is legal, in agreement with the basic principles of the ideology of the written culture, only if those special languages can be translated in an universal language and if the product of that translate is understandable universally. (Godzich, 1998: 17)

If the trouble is that, it is understandable that the literary theory has points in common with the formation of the language, more so if taking in account that the analyzes made by literary theorists used to be formal, with independence of the contents of the text. The words of Wittgenstein, "the figure represent which is representing, independently of its true or falsehood, through the figuration form" (Tractatus, 2.22). In order of those ideas it's not discussing the existence of the specialized language by itself but the translatability of those languages.

With all of that, the question of the language has to include an essential considearation and is how we want to communicate something, because language is not only words. Although is with words which allow the think, is possible to translate ideas to images, to sounds, and in that sense the specialized language is not a problem of traductability anymore and become a problem of 'instrumentalization':

while one would have expected that a crisis of written culture conducive to a greater appreciation for the multiplicity of functions performed by the language, especially its ability to encode and transcode the cultural experience and provide guidelines for interpretation, management and processing, a encounters a new manipulation of language, in which it is fragmented into a multiplicity of autonomous languages?, unrelated, and the competition to acquire is restricted to only one of them (Godzich 1998: 13)

II

So, if we wait a moment and begin to think this business in relation with the actual situation from our country (Colombia) and we start to ask what we are understanding by education and ask for the purposes of the legal reform (made by the colombian government), ultimately the problem is not the investment of private companies but the disappear of the public education. Although in the discus students are arguing weakly ("our country needs poets", as if only on public universities people could study literature), the discuss is made at many levels: on the one hand we have the disappear of public education and, on the other hand, the role of the university as formation center of manpower. Perhaps we have to discuss the role of the education technical and technological, but in what I am interested is in this: students and politicians are not communicating between themselves.

The student mobilization is an 'expression' of a situation, and beyond the facts, there is a group which is product of a general perception: the economic factor implicit on the reform that maybe has anything in common with the value of the university but in fact has elements in common with the money that the student has to make once he/she manage become a professional. This way of understanding the topic is, in words of Godzich, a product of a state of things that have factors of unemployed and other things. In fact this is a good example: while the manifestations are made by students, how we could offer something from the language philosophy?

What philosophy makes is to offer concepts and categories, ways to analyze, search of methods of expression newfangled, extend horizons. This is not ignored by Wittgenstein and because that he purposes to put "limits of the thinking" because "what is not sayable must be shown". With that assertion we are susceptible of sum up this "shown" to an aesthetic question: in effect, by looking for new ways to see, to analyze and to interpret this matter is aesthetic in so far as it is 'creation', but the problems don't change, because of it this conception can be move to politics and culture, a try that its pretty far to be new and it could be traced in Goldmann and Luckács, for example.

III

In effect if we assume with Wittgenstein that the world is the things that happen, the language is not there only to allow us to speak of those things but to produce those things. Van Dijk says in his work "Text and context" that a very important discover of language philosophy is precisely to find that we made more than only talk when we are talking, because the relation word-world is pretty more fundamental than a simple act of "show", something that is resolved by Wittgenstein with his concept of "possibility", where the language let us a space to express new things, getting us away of informative tautologies and allowing us to express things in propositions that, true or false, are on their structure -from the language- possible, with independence of the context of enunciation, what bring us the possible of literature, in last instance:

the studies of literature have been installed on the much more appreciate territory of feeling and experience. At who belong this experience and what kind of feelings he/she experiments, is a different question (Eagleton, 1988: 39)

IV

With these reflections I believe that is possible to translate the words on a facts, like the students, whose show their position and fight for it. For that, the culture and politic problem is how people perceive the march and, mainly, its understandable why are the students protesting. I am making this comment because a politician said that the students must be "electrified" and put them on a classroom. He said that because he didn't understand the march, and the role of the philosophy is precisely to change that way to understand the trouble and then be able to offer an answer to the topics. So this is mine.

Philosophy has the ability to bring tools of analysis useful at the moment to discuss. Although is true that university must not be understand as a formation of manpower, is also true that in a social conditions like our country has we couldn't live dreaming with a scholar and educated society, because in Colombia the education is a synonymous of poverty; a perception that is easy to see on people which think that to study must a making-money business because if this is not it you are losing your time -especially if you study humanities. Now, in the territory of the law 30, the reform of the education, the professor Cajiao show an essential problem and he says that students, in their attempt to drop the reform they are lose sight of the good stuff that the reform has. And the other big problem that he shows is that the resources that really goes to education are useless:

topics like enlargement in times of learning of the students, learning other languages and the linkage with high school must be studied very deep to become them in some more really than just affirmations. Some of these programs have already begin and it's worth to evaluate if they are being effective or if they are being a spend of money that, finally, are not producing anything (Cajiao, 2011)

This revision is a business of citizens but philosophy can bring the tools for it, like determinate the quality of education, what is a special factor which has not been treated with the necessary attention and which is, maybe, one of the most important discusses about the reform, through this question: how many students will manage enter to an university with high standards of quality?

So, the theorycal purposes made here are only an example of a guide to resolve and to face political and social problems. Beyond of Wittgenstein said, beyond Godzich said, their considerations can be applied to the reality: for example, if words are the limit of my world, in political language, what does it mean this affirmation? Perhaps that social moves, in this case students move, is a language that don't say anything but show something. What is happening is that we have to overcome the conformity, and this is a trouble that stands in the limit between what is possible to say and what is necessary to show, specially, in the way in which we are expressing ourselves.