Preface and Acknowledgements
This book was inspired by something I was researching, something I was teaching, and something that annoyed me. The research was on M. M. Bakhtin: in the course of looking at his intellectual trajectory, I could see there was a distinct moment in the late 1920s when he turned what had been an ethical philosophy into a theory of discourse and novelistic style. In a brief period of time, the architectonics of moral experience became the dynamics of prose style, the dangers of Kantian theory became poetic monologism, and the moral force of his earlier philosophy became a property of certain kinds of language. I had heard of ‘linguistic turns’: now I was seeing one in person. Everyone who reads Bakhtin thinks the force invested in what he called ‘novelistic discourse’ is extravagant; I realized that, to some extent, that force had been transplanted.
At about the same time, my teaching responsibilities included introducing students to the works of Saussure. Like any responsible teacher, I thought about how to make this as interesting as possible for the students (and, I suppose, for myself as well). This quest led me to look into the history of Saussure’s work in general linguistics and the process whereby what had been a few lecture courses became a central work in the human sciences. Saussure thought of language as a social institution; I therefore should not have been surprised to learn that some of his ideas about language were not, strictly speaking, linguistic in origin, but had been borrowed from other spheres of social theory: from sociology, crowd theory, social contract theory, and neoclassical economics. When Saussure revolutionized the study of language, he was writing about language, but never just language, in the sense that one can never write about the structure of any social institution in complete isolation.
What annoyed me was quite straightforward. The advent of structuralism and post-structuralism in the humanities had led to a great deal of confident, excited talk (in which I was a very willing participant). Much of that talk was about how language mediated between ourselves and the world around us, how it structured that world for us by means of its ‘differences’, how it could disguise or hide the very process of structuring, and how its inner slipperiness meant we could no longer be certain of very much. Over time these claims became more elaborate—people working in literature, political theory, history and cultural studies would adopt an account of language and then use it to make substantial historical claims or political claims in their discipline, as if theories of language (Saussure, Wittgenstein, speech act theory, Foucault) had political or social affiliations. We probably don’t need much in the way of examples here. Lyotard’s argument against grand narratives in The Postmodern Condition appealed to and relied on Wittgenstein’s philosophy.1
1 ‘[T]he observable social bond is composed of language “moves”’, Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 11.
Preface and Acknowledgements
Judith Butler thought the idea of the performative, drawn initially from speech act theory, together with Foucault’s concept of discourse, demonstrated the fragile nature of identity in general and gender identity in particular, with serious consequences for feminist and queer politics.2 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argued that post-structuralist theories of signification—artfully combined with a certain reading of Gramsci—demolished Marxist claims for the primacy of proletarian struggle in political revolutions.3 Gareth Stedman Jones claimed if you took the linguistic turn seriously enough, you arrived at a different interpretation of eighteenth-century political radicalism.4 In some cases, writers told us both that it was impossible to grasp the world yet possible to grasp—to understand—how and why language made it impossible to grasp the world. Given what I’d figured out concerning Bakhtin and Saussure, I was coming to realize that people were able to draw political tendencies and conclusions out of accounts of language because the accounts already had political and social ideas embedded in them. You couldn’t talk about language without talking about a great deal else.
There was a moment when I thought I would do something quite polemical in relation to what annoyed me, but that moment passed, happily, and I knew that I needed to look not at the theories of language that were circulating around me, but at the theories that had got the ball rolling at the beginning of the twentieth century. The more I looked into the matter, the more interesting and urgent it became. For the early twentieth century was also the moment in Europe when societies had to figure out what to do about the democratization of their political and social worlds and how to square this democratization with the ever more popular idea of the political nation-state. Language itself was involved in that crucial political struggle, but it also had become a way to think about that struggle, to think about what a nation was, what consent was, how we made collective decisions, or didn’t, and what the basis of a democratic social order might be. The extravagance of the investment Bakhtin had made in language and the extravagance of the investment structuralists and post-structuralists were making in language suddenly had a potential source—and I had a potential thesis.
Elaborating that thesis and finding evidence to support it turned out to be a rather lengthy endeavour. I already had Bakhtin and Saussure to hand, and any study of linguistic turns had to reckon with analytic philosophy, which had given us the phrase ‘linguistic turn’ in the first place. I didn’t have to look hard for more linguistic turns; in fact, I hardly had to look at all. Several figures I’d been interested in all along—Walter Benjamin, the Russian linguist G. O. Vinokur, Gramsci— were implicated in the phenomenon I’d just framed for myself and many others were a single degree of separation from the writers I’d assembled (Cassirer, Russian
2 Thus: ‘This theoretical inquiry has attempted to locate the political in the very signifying practices that establish, regulate and deregulate identity.’ Signifying practice, in its turn, was a theory of language drawn from the world of post-structuralism, mostly Foucault. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 147.
3 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).
4 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Determinist Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s’, History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 19–35.
Preface and Acknowledgements
Futurism and Formalism, Ogden and Richards, Sorel). I could have gone on adding names to the list indefinitely.
To many friends and loved ones, this appeared to be my plan. I have to thank them in the first place for persuading me that it was not a good plan. Several of them helped bring the project to a conclusion by agreeing to read the manuscript in part or as a whole. Individual chapters (or early papers that eventually became chapters) were read by Craig Brandist, Mika Lähteenmaki, Galin Tihanov, Terry Eagleton, Patricia Marino, Harsha Ram, Tony Crowley, Richard Hogg, Bruce Robbins, Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Paul Hamilton, and Jonathan Doering. Each provided me with detailed criticism and useful suggestions about where to look next and often they pushed me to think harder about matters I’d tried to finesse. Nigel Vincent read Part I in its entirety and gave me the benefit of his wide-ranging erudition, but he also alerted me to linguistic traditions I’d been unaware of, saved me from some foolish generalizations, and prompted me to calibrate my rhetoric to the matter at hand. Sascha Bru read the manuscript in its entirety and knew right off the bat what I was trying to do: his generous advice helped broaden the horizons of the work, sharpened its argument, and helped me be bolder when being bold was called for. John E. Joseph, my wonderful reader for OUP, responded to the project with notes and advice that were erudite, insightful, sympathetic, and witty: his careful and demanding engagement with the text made the process of revising it rewarding and even enjoyable. Scott McCracken read through the manuscript several times, often at disturbingly short notice: his pointed and shrewd criticisms, combined with his unwavering belief in the project as a whole, shaped the work profoundly and have put me eternally in his debt. It would have been a different, much poorer book without him.
Papers based on the research have been delivered at Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Salford, Lancaster University, Stirling University, the University of Sussex, New York University, Yale University, Queen’s University (Ontario), the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the Toronto Semiotic Circle, and at many conferences. In every case, colleagues listened carefully and made excellent and thoughtful suggestions about what to do next, not all of which, regrettably, I could follow up. As will become abundantly clear in the following pages, I cannot claim to be expert in any of the fields I’ve covered, save the work of Bakhtin. Given the range of what is attempted here and, frankly, the difficulty of the project, I have depended, even more than usually, on input and criticism from a wide range of colleagues in humanistic scholarship. As ever, my name is on the cover, but the project is collective. Nevertheless, where there are errors and hasty, ill-advised conclusions, the blame lies with me.
Of course, one needs collegiality of the day-to-day kind, and for this I want to thank my colleagues at the Universities of Manchester and Waterloo, who offered warm support and a stimulating environment—I’ve greatly enjoyed working with them and I want to offer particular thanks for the intellectual companionship of David Alderson, Richard Kirkland, Howard Booth, Tony Crowley, Kevin McGuirk, Randy Harris, Michael McDonald, Win Siemerling, and Rebecca Tierney-Hynes. I want also to offer thanks to the many librarians who have helped
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Preface and Acknowledgements
me directly and indirectly in my work, including those at: the British Library; the libraries at the Universities of Manchester, Waterloo, and Toronto; McMaster University Library; Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard; Helsinki University Library; Sterling Library at Yale; and the Russian State Library in Moscow. Without their intelligence and dedication, the scholarship necessary for a project like this would be impossible. One needs space to work and think, of course—those libraries and my home provided much of the space, but many of the ideas in this book depended on time in the Jet Fuel coffee shop in Toronto (thanks to the staff there) and long walks with the dog in nearby Riverdale Park (thanks to the City of Toronto).
At an early stage of the research, the Leverhulme Trust granted me a research fellowship that allowed me to focus on this research for a full academic year: I’m grateful to them for this invaluable aid and for their continued support for scholarship in the humanities.
Authors provide text; publishers create books. This one was created by the excellent work of my editors at Oxford University Press, Jacqueline Norton and Aimee Wright, my production managers Alamelu Vengatesan and Seemadevi Sekar, and my patient copyeditor Joanna North. My deepest thanks to them and the other people who made this book.
I have enjoyed working on the book: quite a lot, to be honest. Those around me, I have reason to believe, have enjoyed it a good deal less. I thank my partner Joanne Hurley for supporting what seemed to be a crazy, endless project and for giving me a reason to look forward to every day. My children Jacob and Roisin urged me to finish, occasionally evinced interest in the work, and made the last several years a boundless, undeserved pleasure. I am fortunate to have the support and love of my sister and her partner, as well as the joy of knowing my brother and his. The efforts of my family have been complemented by the kindness and patience of many friends, who kept my spirits up and my confidence high. I can’t name them all, but you know who you are, though you don’t know just how much you’ve done for me over the many years.
Parts of Chapter 5 were previously published in the journal Modernist Cultures, as ‘Language in 1910 (and after): Saussure, Benjamin and Paris’; they are reproduced with permission of Edinburgh University Press though PLS Clear. I want to thank the editors, Andrzej Gasiorek and Deborah Longworth, for kindly giving the material its first airing.
Note on Translations and References xiii
1. Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 1
PART I. ORDER
2. ‘Grammar, for example, can only be studied in the crowd’: Reason, Analogy, and the Nature of Social Consent 29 (Ferdinand de Saussure)
3. The Ship of Logic on the High Seas of Discourse 53 (Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a little Gilbert Ryle)
4. Saussure and the Soviets 105 (S. I. Kartsevskii, G. O. Vinokur, L. Iakubinskii)
5. On the Diversity—and Productivity—of Language 128 (M. M. Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Saussure)
PART II. MYTH
6. Do They Believe in Magic? The Word as Myth, Name, and Art 159 (C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Frege, George Orwell, Bakhtin, Saussure)
7. Myth You Can Believe In 184 (Ernst Cassirer, Viktor Shklovskii, Velimir Khlebnikov, Roman Jakobson, Benjamin)
Excursus: Reversing Out—Sorel’s Heroic Myth, Gramsci’s Slow Magic 237
8. High Anxiety, Becalmed Language: Ordinary Language Philosophy 247 (Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin)
Conclusion: Motorways and Cul-de-Sacs—What the Linguistic Turns Turned To 271 Bibliography 285 Index 315
Note on Translations and References
I have used existing English translations for all texts in French, German, and Italian, except where none are available. If the translation has been amended in any way, this is indicated in the notes. Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics has two existing translations, an early one by Wade Baskin and a later one by Roy Harris. I have used Harris’s in almost all cases, but where Baskin’s is preferred I mention this in the accompanying note.
Translations from Russian are my own, though I have naturally benefited from the existing ones. The complicated case is, of course, Bakhtin’s. Almost every existing English translation has relied on a Russian text that we now know was severely edited or censored, owing to a number of circumstances. I’ve therefore translated from the recent scholarly edition of Bakhtin’s works, the Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], published between 1996 and 2012 in Moscow under the editorship of S. G. Bocharov, except where the text in question was a book published during Bakhtin’s lifetime, i.e., the books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais. For all Bakhtin translations the first page reference will be to the Russian text I’ve used, the second to an available English translation, details of which I provide in the notes.
1 Introduction
Linguistic Turns as Social Theory
We talk and write incessantly, and some of our talking and writing is devoted to the language we use when doing it. But there are times when talk about language expands and acquires a new urgency, leading to dramatic changes in the way we think about it. The moment when rhetoric flowered in ancient Athens and Syracuse was one such episode; the explosion of interest in the origin of language in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe was another. Such sudden intensifications of concern are provoked in part by changes in the condition and form of language itself, but they reach fever pitch because in these moments language is invested with larger worries: worries about new forms of communication, about the relationship of discourse to politics, and about the existence and nature of the social order itself. To adapt a comment of Antonio Gramsci’s, every time the question of language surfaces, ‘it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore’.1
This book is devoted to a recent moment of this kind. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, a striking number of intellectuals in Europe were gripped by the sense that confusions about language were everywhere and everywhere responsible for both local intellectual disorders and larger social ones. They believed that language itself was fundamentally misunderstood and that its significance for the society around them had been fundamentally misunderstood as well. They responded by executing a series of ‘linguistic turns’, in which they both reorganized their intellectual fields around language and argued for a new understanding of language itself. The results—in philosophy, in linguistics, in literary criticism, in anthropology, in political theory—were dramatic and long-lasting. But scholars have tended to examine these turns in isolation, as episodes in the development of individual figures and disciplines. In this book we look at these turns in concert, as a whole, as a comprehensive reconceptualization and revaluation of language in the modernist moment.
Scholars have not examined the turns in concert because they have not thought about 1890 to 1950 as a historical moment of linguistic turns. They have typically understood it as the moment of ‘the linguistic turn’, in the singular, executed uniquely in philosophy. Even the philosophers whom we now credit with this
1 Gramsci, in the original, refers specifically to the problem of an Italian ‘national language’; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), Prison Notebook 29, §3 (183).
Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950
turn—some combination of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin—did not know that was what they were doing at the time, though they felt they were doing something revolutionary. It was only in 1952, when the dust was beginning to clear, that Gustav Bergmann observed that ‘[o]f late philosophy has taken a linguistic turn’.2 Bergmann thought the advance guard of what was then called ‘linguistic philosophy’ had transformed the discipline by means of (as Bergmann later put it) a ‘fundamental gambit as to method’: the conviction that philosophers should ‘talk about the world by means of talking about a suitable language’.3 From the final decades of the nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth, philosophers in England and Austria had recast familiar philosophical issues as problems with language: in order to understand what an object was, what it meant to be responsible, or what it meant to know something, one had to understand the word ‘object’, the word ‘responsibility’, and the verb ‘to know’—understand either by logical analysis or by an assessment of how it is used. The change prompted the rise of a ‘linguistic philosophy’ that thought of itself as revolutionizing the discipline; for several decades it looked like the move that would finally set philosophical discussion on the right path.
But at the same time that Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein wondered about the nature of logical symbols, the literary critic Viktor Shklovskii cried for the ‘resurrection of the word’, the native metaphoric energy of which was being slowly dissipated by habit. Seeing words, hearing words, apprehending them in their original density would make not only for better art, he claimed, but better everything else as well: the resurrection of the word would also be ‘the resurrection of things’.4 Shklovskii’s plea for the powers of the word would find itself complemented by developments in the study of language proper, in which Saussure argued that linguists had not been looking at language at all, but at a confused and disordered set of facts. Saussure would redirect the attention of linguists (and, when his text reached Russia, literary critics) to a new object, ‘language in general’, which would have a systematic form and shape no one had acknowledged before. When Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—the book destined to become the old testament of analytic philosophy—was published, C. K. Ogden (who would translate the Tractatus into English) and I. A. Richards began work on a critique of the ‘word magic’ that was making normally sane and rational Europeans do crazy things. As they were preparing a study of ‘symbolism’ that would destroy the magical force of language, Ernst Cassirer, the accomplished neo-Kantian philosopher of science, was concluding that a systematic philosophy of the modern age should take the shape of a ‘philosophy of symbolic form’ that would explain the power of magic as well as the force of language. As its second volume came out, Antonio Gramsci, the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party and former advanced student in historical linguistics, was imprisoned by Mussolini; in the
2 Gustav Bergmann, ‘Two Types of Linguistic Philosophy’, Review of Metaphysics 5.3 (1952): 417.
3 Gustav Bergmann, ‘Strawson’s Ontology’, Journal of Philosophy 57.19 (1960): 607.
4 Viktor Shklovskii, Voskreshenie slova (St Petersburg: Z. Sokolinskago, 1914), 1. Translation: ‘The Resurrection of the Word (1914)’, in Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt (eds.), Russian Formalism (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 41.
eleven remaining years of his short life, he would demonstrate that linguistics offered a model for the working of political leadership and ideological change. Left-wing politics would also find inspiration in a philosophy of language in the work of Walter Benjamin, although Benjamin’s conception of language and his conception of political commitment were as different from Gramsci’s as could be. There is perhaps no more confused assimilation of philosophy of language to politics than that propounded by Bakhtin, who spent a decade on a mammoth project of ethical philosophy, which he then, in the space of a couple of years, rewrote as a theory of ‘novelistic discourse’ in the late 1920s.
It’s a remarkable constellation of thinkers, all of whom decide within a relatively brief span that they need the study of language to solve problems that are disciplinary and theoretical, but not only disciplinary and theoretical. Since Benjamin himself made the concept of a ‘constellation’ theoretically respectable, though, we have tended to forget that constellations were originally instances of reading too much into coincidental facts, of projecting human conceptions onto the indifferent and random appearance of the stars. Is the simultaneous appearance of so many linguistic turns also a coincidence? It could be: but the wager of this book is that it is not. And if the argument works, then we need to look at these turns, up till now seen and interpreted in isolation, in a very different light. From within each discipline or sphere, a linguistic turn appears to be the fruit of sustained reflection on a set of issues unique to that discipline, be it logic, linguistics, or literary criticism; it’s a moment of intellectual insight and progress, even revolutionary progress. If we see the same turn, however, as one element of a constellation, it appears in a different guise. Maybe one field turns to language to solve problems peculiar to its discipline. When several do, when attention to ‘language’ is simultaneously the key to advance in philosophy, to the revitalization of literature and literary criticism, to neo-Kantian philosophy of culture, to the reform of English political thinking, to the renewal of European communism and syndicalism, something else is going on.
In the period from 1890 to 1950 ‘language’ didn’t just attract the attention of a couple of stray but innovative thinkers—it seized the imagination of intellectuals throughout Europe. A couple of the resulting romances—the turn in analytic philosophy, the rise of linguistic structuralism—are well known because they left a great many progeny, but others—short-lived, childless affairs—have been neglected. That not every turn was equally successful lends weight to the suspicion that intellectual issues were not the only thing urging a greater role for language. That even the successful, ‘productive’ turns had an endpoint is perhaps even more telling. At its inception the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy was regarded as an irrevocable step forward, but we see now it was an historical moment. When Russian Formalists turned literary criticism into the theory of poetic language, they thought they had put criticism on a respectable, scientific path, and for a while it seemed they were right. As late as 1982 a confident Paul de Man would equate literary theory itself with ‘the introduction of linguistic terminology in the metalanguage about literature’; but then Theory itself would stall, and the linguistic turn in literary criticism would give way to a cultural turn, to political criticism,
Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950
to psychoanalysis and the love of literature.5 The linguistic turns we will explore look like on-ramps to scientific progress, but the path they take turns out to be circuitous: not a useless detour but a route which is nevertheless eventually abandoned.
Many linguistic turns, but not, as it happens, many turns to a single object. For one of the most curious features of this constellation is that, although each writer claims to have grasped the necessity of confronting language, the word, the symbol, in all its intractability and complexity, each writer has a quite different idea of what language is. Language will be a system to some, a form of behaviour to others, a sphere of symbols conveying logical ideas (imperfectly) to another group, a set of tools, pictures, or games to Wittgenstein, depending on when you asked. Even Bergmann, when he first named ‘the linguistic turn’, had to admit that ‘[f]rom this common origin two distinct types of linguistic philosophy have developed’ that, though courteous to each other, lacked ‘mutual appreciation’.6 There is, in short, firm agreement on the need to get to grips with language and to acknowledge that it is not a mere medium of communication, and equally firm disagreement on what sort of thing language might be instead.
This odd difference of perspective, however, makes more sense if we think of ‘language’ not as an object to which one turned, but as a problem that compelled or demanded attention. In the early twentieth century language became a problem, not only in the intellectual sense of being hard to comprehend, but also in the sense that it was causing problems, serious problems of a social, cultural, political, and philosophical kind. What the linguistic turns of the time share is not a definition of language, but anxieties and hopes that coalesce around it, that seem to stick to it and express themselves through it. In the period of European modernism language became invested with new possibilities—with an extraordinary force, for good or ill. A force that demanded some kind of assessment and reckoning, an engagement with a ‘language’ that had somehow lost its way.
The predicament is neatly captured in the title of Walter Benjamin’s notorious 1916 essay, ‘On Language as Such and Human Language’. It’s as if the language that confronts the intellectuals of the time is internally ruptured, turned against itself, imbalanced or out of whack. Benjamin would contrast the immediate power of what he called pure language with the human language that had fallen ‘into the abyss of the mediateness of all communication, of the word as means, of the empty word, into the abyss of prattle’.7 The complaint that language had been drained of its native force would be echoed by Shklovskii, who regarded the language we actually spoke as a thin, insipid medium, robbed of its ‘poetic’ magic. Writers like Wittgenstein or J. L. Austin would point their fingers in a different direction (at other philosophers for the most part) and talk about the ways in
5 Paul de Man, ‘The Resistance to Theory’, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 8.
6 Bergmann, ‘Two Types of Linguistic Philosophy’, 417.
7 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 72. I have altered the translation of the title, as ‘Human Language’ seems to me preferable to the antiquated phrase ‘Language of Man’.
which our language was led astray, although they would only hint at the larger ramifications. Whereas for someone like Heidegger no ramification could ever be large enough: he therefore spoke urgently and melodramatically of the need ‘to regain the unimpaired strength of language and words’, because ‘the misuse of language in idle talk, in slogans and phrases, destroys our authentic relation to things’.8 Idle talk, slogans, and phrases were commonly mentioned dangers, pressing practical issues that demanded a response. But what is distinctive and striking is that in nearly every instance the language to which writers turn lacks coherence or ontological consistency, as if language, however conceived, possessed both an inner elegance and a set of bad habits from which it had to be forcibly weaned. Language had acquired a certain density, but it was not inert or thing-like: on the contrary, it appeared as something with inner tendencies and pressures, which could push it in one direction or another. Its analysis, therefore, was never merely contemplative: it was always the struggle for a certain kind of language and a certain form of lucidity, a struggle which would unlock a force, coherence, and lucidity lying within language itself.
The forcefulness of language was not entirely its own: some of it was, so to speak, borrowed. Look, for example, at the justification for philosophy’s linguistic turn made by one of the field’s most prominent figures, the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine, who suggested in his book Word and Object that ‘[w]ords, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes, and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best.’9 Philosophy had been marred by constant skirmishing and fruitless battles between competing Weltanschauungen (world-views); focusing on words would make philosophical discussion civil and progress possible. But the language in which Quine talks about language is telling: the civilizing force language exerts is that of the marketplace, and markets, according to Quine, are spheres of peaceable human interaction, where the logic of commerce renders ideological difference moot. What looks like a turn to mere words, to the stuff of language, is in fact an appeal to language-as-a-market, an appeal to language because it’s a market and an appeal to markets as a way to keep the peace. That appeal had some history behind it. As the political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon has pointed out, in the nineteenth century the market emerges as the model for ‘a self-regulating civil society’, in which the impersonality of transactions replaces all political authority, political struggle, and political will.10 One could therefore appeal to the market as an alternative sphere of public authority, an alternative to the strife and drama of politics. Quine’s opening line in Word and Object had been ‘Language is a social art.’11 But to describe the manner and mode of language’s social being, to describe what kind of society language might be—and what pressures that society would
8 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959), 13–14.
9 W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 272.
10 Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘The Market, Liberalism, and Anti-Liberalism’, in Democracy Past and Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 53.
11 Quine, Word and Object, ix.
Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950
bring to bear on the discussions of philosophers—he had had to go beyond language, calling on the resources of social theory.
Not everyone was as forthright as Quine. Some writers turning to language— Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Shklovskii, for example—invoked concepts of social theory rarely and obliquely; others—say, Ogden and Richards—thought a linguistic turn would have a direct payoff politically and socially. Where intellectuals didn’t borrow concepts or theory, however, they borrowed force and tension, a force and tension that language could embody, host, or refract, depending on how one imagined the ‘social art’ of language related to the larger social world surrounding it. Which is to say that while it is no doubt true that the ‘language’ writers turned to had problems, was in some sense distorted or awry, these problems were not just its own problems. The disagreements that Europe’s linguistic turns were supposed to resolve were inevitably couched in terms of an intellectual discipline, but the continent on which they took place was racked by a kind and level of disagreement that threatened its very existence. In the early twentieth century the ruptures, forces, and inconsistencies that defined language, that made it compelling and fascinating, stand metonymically for ruptures and inconsistencies that seem to plague the European body politic, ruptures expressed in certain specifically linguistic phenomena to be sure—in novelties like the radio broadcast, the mass newspaper, the talkie film, state propaganda—but in no way exhausted by them.
Metonymically: which is to say, part for whole, cause for effect, container for the contained, and so on. Metonymically: as when Ogden and Richards would point to the way word magic or myth was inflaming the newly enfranchised masses; or Shklovskii and Orwell to the way cliché and habit were wearing away our linguistic attentiveness; or Sorel to how parliamentary wrangling was weakening the resolve of the working class; or Saussure to how language itself was conservative and impossible to revolutionize. In each case, there is a genuine linguistic issue with powerful discursive forces in play, but also something more—the absorption of larger social and political problems into language, not because a society is ‘like’ a language (though we find that kind of metaphoric modelling, too) but because the sociopolitical ruptures and forces of the day work themselves out in part through language. Metonymically, finally, because this seems to me the right way to think about the relationship language has to the social world (and by extension, linguistic theory to social theory) in general. If I may lay a few of my theoretical cards on the table (not all: this is seven-card stud for theorists) I believe an adequate philosophy of language, one grounded in social theory, doesn’t think of language as a reflection of the social world, a function of it, or something ‘caused’ by it, but as an institution which is always ‘part’ of it, but not always part of it in exactly the same way. Metonymy is the figure that fits that bill.
LANGUAGE AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
What kinds of social ruptures? Studies of European modernism—its literature, music, visual art, emerging popular culture—invariably refer to one or more ‘crises’
of the early twentieth century. The description is obviously justified: this is, after all, the time in which Europe tore itself apart in two massive wars, inflicted continuous suffering on the peoples who lived in its colonies, witnessed the emergence of political movements like feminism and civil rights, and discovered the mass media and the modern city. Even its rare moments of political ‘normality’ are haunted by Walter Benjamin’s apt observation ‘[t]hat things “just keep on going” is the catastrophe’.12 But a crisis is also a crossroads or turning point, a moment for decision, and the crisis relevant here is a particular decision that European societies continually made and then remade, obsessively, in the first half of the twentieth century. For they needed to make, but could not make, a decision about ‘democracy’.
In Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, Mark Mazower notes that democracy was not, current triumphalism notwithstanding, ‘rooted deeply in Europe’s soil’.13 It was, in fact, extraordinarily fragile in the period between 1918 and 1939, when its institution was at best halting and unconvincing, and when support for democracy and its principal mechanism, the parliament, often turned out to be less than half-hearted. The short-lived Weimar Republic, from the outset a kind of messy compromise with few real adherents, continually under threat from the socialist Left, the aristocratic ‘Junker’ Right, and the newly emerging fascist movement, was the poster-child for this kind of anaemic democracy. Matters had initially looked more promising. When the Russian, AustroHungarian, and Ottoman Empires tumbled, opening the door to the establishment of new ‘national’ democracies, elaborate constitutions provided a framework for new nations. Constitution-making aimed, in Mazower’s words, ‘to “rationalize” power and sweep away the inconsistencies and irrational residues of the old feudal order’.14 The paradigmatic form would be the democratic republic affirming the sovereignty of the people and vesting their power in a strong parliament: this kind of arrangement sprung up, with variations of emphasis, in postwar Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Greece, Ireland, and Hungary, among other places. In those countries that already had parliamentary rule, the pressure for democracy took the form of extensions of the suffrage and the rise of independent working-class movements. In Britain the business begun in the Reform Acts of the nineteenth century continued into the twentieth century, as universal male suffrage was granted in 1918 and a powerful and militant feminist movement pushed for the rights that would be granted in 1928. By the beginning of the First World War, extensions to the franchise had doubled or even tripled the electorate in Belgium, Finland, and Norway, while universal manhood suffrage had been granted in Austria and Italy.15 Such developments, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted,
12 Walter Benjamin, ‘N [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’, trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth, in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), N9a, 1 (64).
13 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998), xi.
14 Mazower, Dark Continent, 5.
15 Figures from Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995), 85–6. For a vivid account of how Habsburg Empire voters embraced their recently granted
Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950
‘were viewed without enthusiasm by the governments that introduced them’, which sought various means of controlling the newly enfranchised ‘people’.16 Democracy, or democratization, was not, however, only a matter of parliamentary democracy. It also meant the entrance of popular groups, working-class or agrarian, onto the political scene in other ways: through the creation of mass parties and unions, through strikes and demonstrations (often the catalyst of constitutional change), through new cultural institutions—newspapers, theatres, educational associations, and the like—that created the basis for a kind of ‘mass’ urban culture that did not yet need the assistance of media technologies. And, in this context, ‘urban’ is as important a qualifier as ‘mass’, for this was a culture centred in European cities that grew dramatically and that spawned the great working-class neighbourhoods that would become centres of political action and resistance in the twentieth century. The emerging twentieth-century democracy was not a democracy of peasants, who coexisted, in Marx’s famous phrase, like potatoes in a sack, at once similar and separate, but a democratic movement that drew its strength from urban patterns of association.
‘By the 1930s’, however, ‘parliaments seemed to be going the way of kings.’17 It turned out that there were other ways to organize modern European societies than parliamentary democracy, and these forms could accommodate ‘mass’ society in a more authoritarian manner: some would even claim to be more democratic than the parliamentary regimes they displaced. Nations and their peoples remained, but liberal democracy ‘might have to be sacrificed if the Nation was to survive’.18 There was Communism in Russia and the other Soviet Socialist Republics, fascism in Germany and Italy, and a variety of right-wing authoritarian regimes in Hungary, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere. The new fascist regimes differed from the classic monarchical-aristocratic regimes in their embrace of mass politics and populist ideologies. Those who railed against parliamentary rule and its messy procedures invoked not just the good of the Nation, but the principle of democracy itself in their arguments. Thus Georges Sorel would rail against parliamentary socialists for defanging popular struggles best expressed by violent acts, and Carl Schmitt would insist that ‘the distinction between liberal parliamentary ideas and mass democratic ideas cannot remain unnoticed any longer’.19
Schmitt’s example reminds us of something else: democracy itself had its ambiguities. Conceived of as the political expression of nation-building projects, as the means by which a people asserted its political right and power, it could easily take a decidedly illiberal or racist form. Schmitt argued that the principle of democracy entailed a unified ‘people’ or demos, not the wrangling of parliamentary parties, and that ‘dictatorial and Caesaristic methods not only can produce the acclamation rights, see the marvellous opening of Pieter M. Judson’s The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–4.
16 Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 86. 17 Mazower, Dark Continent, 2.
18 Mazower, Dark Continent, 25.
19 Carl Schmitt, ‘Preface to the Second Edition (1926): On the Contradiction between Parliamentarism and Democracy’, in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 2.
of the people but can also be a direct expression of democratic substance and power’.20 The problem was not merely one of Schmitt’s fantasizing. As Mazower points out, ‘the new democracies tended to be exclusionary and antagonistic in their ethnic relations’: states built on the basis of nationality inevitably spawned national minorities which appeared prima facie to be threats to national unity.21 The problem was not confined to the newer democracies, either: in the 1890s France had shown just how uncomfortable its elites were with the modern society on its horizon when it tore itself to pieces in the Dreyfus affair. That democracy didn’t imply any kind of liberal respect for different nationalities, or any kind of ‘multicultural’ thinking about citizenship or nationhood was made clear in the treatment accorded to Jews in modern Europe. Mazower again:
Because democracy was about the creation of national communities, it was generally anti-Semitic, or at least more ready to allow anti-Semitism to shape policy—through separate electoral colleges, for example, or entry quotas into the universities and civil-service posts—than old-fashioned royalists had been.22
How to handle this mass society, a society full of urbanized people, working and lower middle class, now educated and enfranchised, ready to participate, in one way or another, in the cultural and political life of the nation? Modern Europe could not make up its mind.
In this context, the question of democracy was more than a matter of deciding on appropriate government institutions or procedures. It was the question of social and political order itself, the urgent matter of figuring out how to maintain order and cohesion in societies that had been rendered dynamic and unruly by the political and economic transformations of the nineteenth century. Rosanvallon has described these changes as leading to ‘the extension, and one might even say the unleashing, of the political’, that is, a burdening of political life with new tasks it must assume when the old ‘natural’ order has been dissolved by capitalism and political revolution.23 The entrance of ‘the people’ onto the political and social stage makes the social order itself amorphous, even unrepresentable:
The people is like Janus: it has two faces. It is at once a danger and a possibility. It menaces the political order at the same time as it grounds it [ .] Whence the central problem: it is at the very moment that the principle of popular sovereignty triumphs that its face, in a sense, becomes problematic.24
The result is an endless anxiety—one that haunts us still—about the constitution of the social order itself. For ‘the people’ both define the substance of the nation and yet appear to ruling classes as an unpredictable and destabilizing force within it.25
20 Schmitt, ‘Parliamentarism and Democracy’, 17. 21 Mazower, Dark Continent, 41.
22 Mazower, Dark Continent, 59.
23 Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘Toward a Philosophical History of the Political’, in Democracy Past and Future, 61.
24 Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘Revolutionary Democracy’, in Democracy Past and Future, 84–5.
25 On current anxieties about how democracy is rendering societies ungovernable, see Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2009).
Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950
If we go back to the beginning of this period, when anxieties about the social order and the role of the people within it were intensifying, we see that several intellectuals concerned with language make an interesting move. In the late nineteenth century, after the Paris Commune, a few linguists make the novel claim that language has always been ‘of the people’. ‘Universal suffrage has not always existed in politics; it has always existed in the domain of language’, claimed the nineteenth-century French linguist, Arsène Darmesteter.26 If it had, linguists were not always willing to recognize it. Carita Klippi has shown how Darmesteter, Michel Bréal, and Victor Henry gradually made popular usage the test of what belonged to ‘the language’, displacing an earlier belief in the priority of written sources and standard forms.27 This ‘linguistic communism’, as Pierre Bourdieu dubbed it, was not without its ambiguities.28 On the one hand, it broke with the prescriptivist idea—embodied in earlier dictionaries and guides to elocution— that popular usage tended to degrade or corrupt a language that had, at an earlier point in time, been purer or more logically structured. At the same time, it could be taken to imply that because language was the product of collective activity, everyone in that collective played an equal role in determining its shape and substance. It is, of course, the reflected image of the problem facing democratizing nations. The political community of the nation was expanding until it included most of its adult citizens; ‘language’ was expanding so that it represented the speech of more or less the same group. It was this isomorphism that made it possible for problems in the political and social field to be represented and worked through as problems in the linguistic field.
LANGUAGE AND THE PEOPLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Of course, the identification of language with nation and people was nothing new: it had been established by an earlier generation of language-obsessed intellectuals, the comparative philologists of the nineteenth century. For ‘language’ lay at the centre of the nineteenth century’s intellectual universe as well. The invention of comparative philology as a method and a discipline by Friedrich Schlegel, Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, and Jacob Grimm gave the study of language both an empirical and scientific character and a strikingly practical orientation. On the one hand, comparative philology produced a method: linguistic forms, at both the phonetic and the morphological level, would be explained as the result of systematic, often ‘lawlike’ historical change, change which could be charted by careful observation
26 Arsène Darmesteter, The Life of Words as the Symbols of Ideas (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1886), 109.
27 Carita Klippi, ‘Vox populi, Vox Dei: The “People” as an Agent of Linguistic Norm’, Language & Communication 26 (2006): 356–68.
28 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language’, in Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 43.
Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory
and arguments that were open to empirical checking and refutation. The results of comparative philology would be elaborate, scientific accounts of the genealogy and development of the world’s languages. On the other hand, although its source materials came from language that was variable and constantly changing, its conclusions centred on distinct ‘languages’, with a comprehensible internal structure. During the springtime of nations, this could not be an innocent gesture. Possession of a distinct language with a well-attested history appeared to be a sine qua non of any group aspiring to independent nationhood in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. So while comparative philologists created the history of Europe’s languages, those languages were codified and purified in grammatical studies and historical dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary, Littré and Grimm among them, and lovingly refined in novels, now thought of as elements of a ‘national’ literature.
That these two strands of the comparative philological project could not be disentangled, that the political dimension could not be fenced off from scientific aspirations is evident from one of the most detailed and thoughtful histories of the period, Anna Morpurgo Davies’s Nineteenth-Century Linguistics. The story Morpurgo Davies wants to tell is of the emergence of a ‘data-oriented linguistics’, in which ‘progress was seen as defined by the accumulation of concrete results and by the diminishing number of unsolved problems’.29 But as Morpurgo Davies herself demonstrates, this project can never quite shake off something one would have hoped was alien to it: ideas of cultural nationalism, aspirations to tie one’s own language to a distinguished ancestor, the desire to link the genealogy of languages to the movements of distinct ‘peoples’ across Europe and Asia. At the beginning, Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 book On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians will open with ‘a purely linguistic demonstration of the genealogical links between Sanskrit and the other languages [ancient European ones, KH]’, but these will be followed by Orientalist disquisitions on Indian philosophy and speculations on the migrations of peoples.30 Schlegel will also initiate both a commitment to the typological classification of languages—in his case, an overarching distinction between organic and mechanical languages—and the evaluative conviction that one class of language is culturally or epistemologically superior to the others (a pattern that will work itself all the way down to Cassirer, as we shall see later). Franz Bopp, the first to hold an institutional chair in the subject of ‘general linguistics’ will, in the careful words of Morpurgo Davies, ‘create a working style which survived when some of his assumptions and his conclusions had gone out of fashion or had been forgotten’.31 And then, of course, there is Jacob Grimm, author of the comprehensive Deutsche Grammatik of 1819–40, collector of folklore, co-discoverer (with the Dane, Rasmus Rask) of systematic phonetic change, and ardent German patriot. On the one hand, a man wholly devoted to the detailed empirical examination of all things
29 Anna Morpurgo Davies, History of Linguistics, Volume IV: Nineteenth-Century Linguistics (London: Longman, 1998), 19.
30 Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics, 70.
31 Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics, 135.
