The functional death of the liberal subject: Fragmented language, democracy without intelligibility

"Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt." L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (5.6)

To inhabit a language is to inhabit a world. From the Sprachspiele of Wittgenstein's late work we know that all signification depends on shared rules that make speech acts recognizable: affirm, ask, promise, dissent. Liberal democracy was conceived as the space where a plurality of language games converged on a minimum ground of mutual translation; that ground allowed citizens to demand reciprocal reasons and that political coercion was legitimized under the ideal of advertising.

The liberal subject (autonomous, reflective, capable of justifying his preferences) never existed ontologically as the majority voter; it was always a regulatory fiction, but it fulfilled for two centuries a decisive performative function since it turned each presumed voter into a "locus of imputation of reasons", a guarantee that the law was, at least in principle, the result of a process of public justification. That fiction operated thanks to three pragmatic assumptions. First, syntactic universality, where the relevant statements could be formalized in such a way that different interlocutors identified the same underlying logical form and, therefore, could decide its validity. Second, the availability of common epistemological criteria to discriminate facts from opinions; without shared epistemology, the claim to truth becomes unintelligible. Third, the mutual recognition of agency, where each speaker attributed to the other the competence to revise beliefs in the light of new arguments. From the conjunction of these assumptions emerged the image of the liberal public person, someone capable of entering and leaving doctrinal positions without losing his civil identity.

The contemporary degradation of that device is not primarily ethical or technological, but pragmatic-linguistic. The segmentation of discourse into semantic bubbles fostered by media architectures that maximize identity cohesion and affective arousal fractures the background in which speech acts acquire intersubjective value. The liberal legal person signs contracts and exercises rights, but the public person who gave meaning to the formula "government of the people" dissolves into clusters that optimize affinities rather than logical coherence. The public sphere, as Habermas described it, is emptied of its epistemic dimension and filled with persuasive performances measurable in screen time and engagement metrics. What he defines as the basic structure of rational communication is lost: “Communication participants mutually understand their interventions as statements that can be true or false, as legitimate or illegitimate orders, as sincere or insincere statements." That mutual understanding is neither automatic nor guaranteed: it requires a common language, a shared background of semantic rules and pragmatic conditions that is fractured today. Two identical sentences on its surface (“freedom is threatened”) now belong to disjoint language games, referring to threats, diagnoses and solutions that do not share the same verification space. The fault is not sincerity, but transitivity; it is not that the speakers lie, but that their claim to truth lacks a performative route to be accepted, refuted or even recognized by those who do not share their semiotic ecosystem.

This linguistic rupture and, as we stated above, language games that represent realities radically transform the function of suffrage. Political liberalism ideally equated each vote to a chain of arguments that a citizen could articulate to others but when the reasons stop circulating between watertight compartments, the isomorphism collapses as the vote persists, as an affective signal without deliberative anchoring. The result is a paradox that marks current politics where impeccable choices are presented in procedure that produce decisions that become epistemically opaque for entire blocks of the population. Disagreement ceases to be a conflict over testable propositions and becomes hermeneutical asymmetry: the contenders do not argue “the same,” nor do they recognize the other's competence to dispute the meaning of the key terms of the litigation.

The functional death of the liberal subject consists precisely in this structural inability to act as a justifying agent. It is not an ontological eclipse,the biological individual subsists, but the loss of its normative role, this subject that marked the ideal of contemporaneity is no longer the point where reasons that could link others converge. Instead, a topology of self-referential semiotic clusters emerges. The legal person signs contracts and exercises rights, but the public person who gave meaning to the formula "government of the people" dissolves into clusters that optimize affinities rather than logical coherence. The public sphere, as Habermas described it, is emptied of its epistemic dimension and filled with persuasive performances measurable in screen time and engagement metrics.

The consequence of this linguistic problem is not just a deficit of deliberative politeness, it is ultimately the crisis of the three great liberal promises. Freedom is reduced to immunity from physical interference, detached from rational autonomy to evaluate reasons; equality persists as an arithmetic of immeasurable preferences, not as argumentative symmetry; plurality becomes an identity display, without the requirement that statements be subjected to effective public scrutiny. Liberal democracy, deprived of its justifying subject, becomes a procedure without theory of common meaning, a ritual of aggregation of wills whose meaning can no longer be justified in the language of public reason.

Does this mean that the Enlightenment ideal of self-government has expired? Only in the form it assumed under the premise of a universally justifying individual. The challenge is not to restore an anthropological figure that never existed, but to design material conditions so that heterogeneous collectives recover a minimum degree of semantic interoperability. This implies generating institutions that produce common epistemic goods even when the particular actors do not spontaneously converge; developing discursive traceability protocols that allow tracing the genesis and reliability of the statements; and decoupling, even partially, the circuits of deliberation from the affective incentives that colonize attention. Only in this way can politics be reconstituted as an exchange of reasons and not as a clash of soliloquies. Because as long as language games remain isolated, the worlds they constitute will continue to diverge, and democracy deprived of its basic assumption of mutual intelligibility will be reduced to a formal mechanism whose legitimacy no one will be able to translate into common terms.