Word begins from the premise that, if we consider words only in terms of language and as images, we overlook a range of bodily, sensory, affective and non-conscious relations with words. We overlook, too, their epistemological, methodological, experiential and political implications. This book seeks to redress this neglect by exploring words themselves in histories of language and contemporary theory, in print and typography, and through a series of empirical examples which include religion, embodiment, photography and performance. Word is a reminder that words live richly in the world. It is an invitation to recognise those non-linguistic word-relations that are already existing, and to bring new and generative encounters with words into being.
Word begins from the premise that, if we consider words only in terms of language and as images, we overlook a range of bodily, sensory, affective and non-conscious relations with words. We overlook, too, their epistemological, methodological, experiential and political implications. This book seeks to redress this neglect by exploring words themselves in histories of language and contemporary theory, in print and typography, and through a series of empirical examples which include religion, embodiment, photography and performance. Word is a reminder that words live richly in the world. It is an invitation to recognise those non-linguistic word-relations that are already existing, and to bring new and generative encounters with words into being.
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Overview
Word begins from the premise that, if we consider words only in terms of language and as images, we overlook a range of bodily, sensory, affective and non-conscious relations with words. We overlook, too, their epistemological, methodological, experiential and political implications. This book seeks to redress this neglect by exploring words themselves in histories of language and contemporary theory, in print and typography, and through a series of empirical examples which include religion, embodiment, photography and performance. Word is a reminder that words live richly in the world. It is an invitation to recognise those non-linguistic word-relations that are already existing, and to bring new and generative encounters with words into being.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783481446 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/16/2015 |
| Series: | Disruptions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Word
Beyond Language, Beyond Image
By Mariam Motamedi Fraser
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Mariam Motamedi FraserAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-144-6
CHAPTER 1
Words and Language
My broad purpose in these first two chapters is to illustrate how the significance and value of words are often displaced at precisely the moment when they seem to be most intensely the centre of attention — in debates regarding language, for example, as I explore in this chapter, or in print and in printed stories, as I discuss in chapter 2.
Clearly, it would be impossible to provide, here, an exhaustive review of the place of words in histories of language. Instead, I draw attention to a series of key word-world relations, as they have been described in a modest number of histories and genealogies that have a bearing — although not always exclusively — on words and language. This chapter is intended to be suggestive, rather than comprehensive. Overall, it has two main aims. First, I want to propose that stories of words are not always identical to those of language, and that the unfolding of significant events (such as the birth of the experimental sciences in the seventeenth century, or of 'grammars of dissonance' in the nineteenth century) can have very different implications depending on whether they are viewed from the 'perspective' of one or the other. My suggestion is that accounts of words and of language can, and indeed sometimes should, be distinguished. My second aim is almost incidental to the first. It is to illustrate, by way of this analysis, that the relations between words and things, or (more complexly) between words and worlds, and how they are mediated (by God, for instance, or print, or writing), are not given for all time. Word-assemblages have been different, and they could be different still.
This point acquires political urgency when one considers that the histories and genealogies that I explore in this chapter mostly address themselves to Roman letters, and to language in Europe between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries; and yet, for good or ill, their relevance extends far beyond these narrow alphabetic and spatio-temporal borders. I describe words and language, as Sanjay Seth puts it, in '"modern, western knowledge" — "modern" to denote its relatively recent emergence, "western" to indicate the cultural specificity of these historical origins' (Seth 2007, 1). This domain, 'modern, western knowledge,' is important to me because it shapes the intellectual fields in which I am located, and also, more significantly, because it has generated a series of normative word-world relations that are very often the vehicles through which struggles over ways of existing in the world (religiously, politically, ethically, physically) have been waged both historically and today. The structure of this chapter itself bears witness to this point, for while Michel Foucault's inspired analysis of language in The Order of Things provides something of a theoretical spine for the discussion that ensues, I draw on his archaeology as much to critique as to support it. I explore how it is tested, for instance, by histories of language in religion, as well as of colonialism, and potentially by 'the Orient.'
The histories and genealogies of word-world relations that I address in this chapter raise and contextualize themes that are important throughout this book. But conversely, as I illustrate in conclusion, the political paradoxes and theoretical cul-de-sacs in which these histories often trap words (albeit inadvertently) reverberate through them too, as well as through some of the academic disciplines that are and have been associated with them. Indeed the subplot to this chapter concerns the roles that words, language and languages have historically played in orienting, at least to some degree, the divergent paths that Oriental studies, Area studies, and postcolonial studies have taken. It is for this reason that some of the 'problems' for words that I discuss here (such as the jettisoning of words in favour of language) are relevant to the epistemological imbroglios that sometimes characterize poststructuralist theory, while the methodological 'responses' of what might be called 'post-poststructuralism' have critical implications for the directions that words could alternatively follow.
ON THE ADAMIC DOCTRINE: WORDS AS THINGS
Since my intentions in this chapter are to explore different conceptions of the relations between words and worlds, it seems appropriate to begin with an example of a language in which words are understood to be not signifiers of the world, but isomorphic with it. In the histories that I am concerned with here, that language is Biblical and is associated with Adam. Indeed, Hans Aarsleff dubs it 'Adamic.' Thus instead of starting, as many essays on words do, with St. John, 'In the beginning was the Word ...' (John 1:1 KJV), this one commences with Adam. Or more specifically, with the destruction of Adam's language at Babel.
'Every so often,' Umberto Eco writes, in the search for the perfect language, 'someone will oppose Genesis 10 to Genesis 11' (Eco 1997, 10). The difference is this. Genesis 11 tells of how 'the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech' (Gen. 11:1 KJV), and then of how the whole earth loses this one language as a punishment for attempting to build a tower 'whose top may reach unto heaven' (Gen. 11:4 KJV). 'Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth' (Gen. 11:9 KJV). In Genesis 11, a multiplicity of languages comes about on account of human pride and ambition. In Genesis 10 however, it is explained (with far less drama) with reference to the migration of members of Noah's family after the flood. By the sons of Noah, Genesis 10 says, 'the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations' (Gen. 10:5 KJV). The implication is that tongues were divided before Babel.
The Bible is not the only source of stories that attempt to account for the existence of different languages in the world. What makes it significant, however, is that, once these differences become an issue in Europe (Eco 1997, 10 — 18) — in a Europe constituted, Eco argues, not by 'great political events and battles' but precisely by its many 'vulgar tongues' (Eco 1997, 18) — it was to the language of Adam, to the language that existed prior to the division of language, that many sought to return. The Irish grammarians, for example, were among the first to claim privileged access to an original language that, they argued, could heal the 'wound' of difference. Eco describes their defence of Gaelic over learned Latin thus:
[T]he Irish grammarians refer to the structural material of the tower of Babel as follows: 'Others affirm that in the tower there were only nine materials, and that these were clay and water, wool and blood, wood and lime, pitch, linen, and bitumen ... These represent noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition, interjection.' Ignoring the anomaly of the nine parts of the tower and only eight parts of speech, we are meant to understand that the structure of language and the construction of the tower are analogous. This is part of an argument that the Gaelic language constituted the first and only instance of a language that overcame the confusion of tongues. [...] This first-born and consequently supernatural language retained traces of its original isomorphism with the created world. As long as the proper order of its elements was respected, this ensured a sort of iconic bond between grammatical items and referents, or states of things in the real world. (Eco 1997, 16 — 17, references omitted)
The supernatural language of the Irish grammarians of the seventh century preceded the birth, in the Renaissance, of what Hans Aarsleff (1982) calls the Adamic language doctrine. According to the Adamic doctrine, all languages, whatever their differences, contain within them elements of the original (and therefore perfect) language which was created by Adam to name the animals before the Fall. Because Adamic language is natural and divine, words are things both in the sense that they are a part of creation, and also in the sense that things in the world can be known through them. (Or perhaps, more accurately, in them). 'The authority of scriptural revelation,' Aarsleff writes, 'ensured that languages held a nomenclature, that words did name species and essences. This was an essentialist and innatist doctrine' (Aarsleff 1982, 25). In this respect Adamicism is both language and epistemology: '[i]f there were any truth in it, the word for gold, for instance, might by suitable means be made to reveal the nature and essence of gold' (Aarsleff 1982, 26). Since 'the relation between signifier and signified is not arbitrary,' and since 'the linguistic sign is not double but unitary' (Aarsleff 1982, 25), words provided a better route to knowledge than either the deceiving senses or imperfect reason (Aarsleff 1982, 26).
One of the most distinctive features of Adam's language is that words, being 'a thing in nature,' were to be studied not for their meaning, but for their intrinsic properties. As Foucault describes it in his analysis of 'the prose of the world,'
[l]anguage is not what it is because it has meaning; its representative content ... has no role to play here. Words group syllables together, and syllables letters, because there are virtues placed in individual letters that draw them towards each other or keep them apart, exactly as the marks found in nature also repel and attract one another. (Foucault 2002, 39)
Even though the vanity of men at Babel had incurred the loss of words as isomorphic with the created world, for 'the sixteenth century being' words, according to Foucault, nevertheless continued to partake 'in the world-wide dissemination of similitudes and signatures' (Foucault 2002, 39). The Persians, for instance, among others, write from the right to the left, following the course and direction of the first heaven; the Greeks, among others, write from the left to the right, following the course and direction of the second heaven; the Chinese, among others, write from the top to the bottom, in conformity with the order of nature; and the Mexicans write from the bottom to the top, or in spiral lines, in accordance with the sun in the Zodiac (Foucault 2002, 41). Insofar as there is no difference between marks and words in God's world, Foucault argues — in a point that seems to be in keeping with Aarsleff's conception of Adamicism as both language and epistemology — 'divinatio and eruditio are both part of the same hermeneutics' (Foucault 2002, 37).
It is tempting to map Aarsleff's (and others') description of the language of Adam onto Foucault's description of the period 'up to the end of the sixteenth century' in which 'resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture' (Foucault 2002, 19). This would be a mistake however, Aarsleff objects, first because he considers resemblance to be no more than an expression or symptom of Adamicism, which is the 'more fundamental quality' that defined the relations between language and knowledge; and second because Adamicism endured, Aarsleff argues, until at least 1700. 'I am convinced,' Aarsleff writes, 'that Locke's argument about the cheat of words [which is the belief that 'words are as good as things, "as if the name carried with it knowledge of the species or the essence of it"' (Aarsleff 1982, 24, references omitted)] was aimed not so much against the common thing-word habit, which all of us tend to follow in a pragmatic way, but against its much more serious embodiment in the Adamic language doctrine' (Aarsleff 1982, 26). Aarsleff considers it significant, for example, that Locke, in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (which was published in 1689), apparently felt obliged to insist, nearly one hundred years after the date that Foucault identifies as the end of the age of resemblance, 'on Adam's ordinary humanity ... in regard to language' (Aarsleff 1982, 26). If there were imperfections in knowledge, Lock argued, then these derived not from poor interpretations or feeble hermeneutics (which was a matter of concern to those who looked for the mark of God in words) but, rather, from language. God, Locke continued, had willed on his subjects the powers to learn and the capacities to do so. Such learning could not, however, be extracted from words themselves, from which 'it was impossible to know more than what he defiantly called the "nominal essence"' (Aarsleff 1982, 26).
It is worth noting — particularly in anticipation of the following discussion on the abiding influence of Christian religion on words — Aarsleff's advice to his modern readers, which is not to confuse the familiarity of Locke's philosophy of language with an epistemological assault on God or the Bible. Locke wrote with 'the men of the Royal Society,' and especially with Robert Boyle, in mind (Aarsleff 1982, 54). But when these men argued that words were not natural and that notions were not innate, they did so in order that the Books of Creation and Scripture be separated and independent — not in order that the first replace the second. On the contrary, Boyle valued religion precisely because it offered the hope of 'degrees and kinds of knowledge, to which we are here but strangers' (Boyle in Aarsleff 1982, 61). Locke's Essay, Aarsleff continues, was never intended to offer a complete theory of knowledge — even though Leibniz treated it as such — nor was it a rejection of God per se. As Talal Asad neatly explains it, the attempted purification of language that was witnessed during this period (and to which I will return below) signalled a shift from 'God's words to God's works': 'Nature' acquires new status as 'the real space of divine writing' (Asad 1993, 41). It was in this context, and for this reason, that the Essay sought to challenge not God, but Adam and his Godly words.
By challenging Foucault's periodization — or, more constructively, by staying focused on some of the continuities in the intellectual history of language — Aarsleff is able to draw attention to the things that are lost, or misplaced, or perhaps even purposely incised, in order for Foucault's archaeology to be persuasive. Contra Foucault's description of the sixteenth century as an age of resemblance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the classical era, and the nineteenth century (onwards) as modern, Aarsleff (1982) — 'the scholar best versed in the philosophy of language of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' (Hacking 1988, 135) — finds continuities in various philosophical, scientific and historical conceptions of words and language that stretch across these periods and which complicate them considerably. Indeed Aarsleff argues not only that the Adamic doctrine 'finds its greatest period' (Aarsleff 1982, 22) during the seventeenth century, but that the 'cheat of words' preoccupied language theorists, in one form or another, right through to the 1900s (Aarsleff 1982, 25). I return to Aarsleff below.
If Foucault omits to address the implications of the persistent ingression of Christian religion into language (as Aarsleff implies by foregrounding the sustained preoccupation with the Adamic doctrine), he also plays truant (Weheliye 2014, 56), as Alexander G. Weheliye puts it, to colonialism and, in Michael Dutton's account, to 'the Orient.' These latter pretermissions, as I will be suggesting, are themselves entangled in the linguistic history of religions and, in particular, Protestant reform and export. They are especially significant from the perspective of Word, for they begin to signal that the paths of words and of language are not necessarily coincidental. While it is usually the case that words are dragged with language through the seismic transformations that Foucault describes, they are not always and, where they do follow alongside, they do not always do so with identical implications.
Thus: two of the following sections of this chapter share the common theme of 'elimination.' In the first ('Elimination I'), I briefly introduce Foucault's account of the transparency of language that defined, in part, the classical age. This transparency is closely connected, as Foucault would have it, to natural history and to the curiosity that would ultimately lead to the discovery of 'the sciences of life' (Foucault 2002, 136). Foucault's analysis raises the question, however, as to what extent he himself was suffering from a case of the repressive hypothesis (Foucault 1990) when he assumes that the model of lucent language in natural history was coterminous with the elimination of the density of words during the classical era and onwards. I have already suggested, with reference to Aarsleff, that the language of Adam — which was essentially a language of words as things — extended well into and beyond the classical period. I continue this discussion of the relations between religion and words by drawing on Webb Keane's study of the 'semiotic ideology' of Calvinism during and after the Protestant Reformation, and of its impact on the colonial Dutch East Indies and on postindependence Indonesia. While Keane's analysis does indeed find points of resonance with the classical episteme (and, in this way, would appear to support Foucault's periodization over Aarsleff's), his point — as I illustrate — is precisely not that any single word-world relation 'defeats' or replaces another but that, together, such relations become new sites of contestation and struggle.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Word by Mariam Motamedi Fraser. Copyright © 2015 Mariam Motamedi Fraser. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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