Protest

During professor's lecture on Monday she talked about three main ideas; signification, agency, and value. When she was specifically talking about agency, on her slideshow she wrote "to submit to language is to submit to society." I may be confused about what she meant when she said this. For example, transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau used language to not conform with society and argue society's rules. Transcendentalism did begin as a protest against society so I was wondering how transcendentalists could submit to and protest society at the same time?