Conclusion

The conclusion examines the situation after the Second World War. It shows how the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy ended and how the social democratic settlement in Western Europe gave birth to the new linguistic turns known as structuralism. The author explores the former by examining the career of Richard Rorty and the latter by looking at how Roland Barthes combines ideas from Saussure with a project for a radical analysis of French everyday life in the Mythologies. The book concludes with a review of how the various linguistic turns overinvested in the idea of language.

Myth You Can Believe In

Chapter 7 discusses the enthusiasts of myth, writers who argue that it represents the lifeblood of language without which any polity is doomed. It begins with a discussion of Ernst Cassirer’s theory of myth, before turning to the Russian Formalists and Futurists—ready to resurrect the word—and concluding with Walter Benjamin’s insistence on the power and magic of pure language. For Walter Benjamin, for Viktor Shklovskii and many of his Futurist brethren, the ‘word as such’ has to be rescued from the deadening ‘bourgeois’ language of the present. Language is out of whack, but what has distorted it is precisely its misuse as a mere tool of communication, against which one has to defend language as naming. The problem is not, according to these writers, that myth threatens the liberal polity, but that liberalism itself, embodied in the deadening language of public life, threatens democracy.

High Anxiety, Becalmed Language

Chapter 8 looks at ‘linguistic philosophy’ in middle and late Wittgenstein and in J. L. Austin. In ordinary language philosophy, myth emerged not from charismatic demagogues but from the fervid minds of scientistic intellectuals. Wittgenstein and Austin share the conviction that ‘language as such’ is the antidote to the metaphysical entanglements that arise from this scientism. But this ordinary version of ‘language as such’ is not simply present to the naked eye and ear, but is only available as the end result of strategies of philosophical clarification, which make language a manifestation of life. The chapter therefore focuses on Wittgenstein’s idea of the perspicuous representation and Austin’s techniques of drawing out distinctions. It turns out that clarification is an ambiguous exercise: Wittgenstein’s belief that ‘language always works’ runs aground when he compares language to music, which, it turns out, doesn’t work, at least not in the twentieth century.

‘Grammar, for example, can only be studied in the crowd’

Chapter 2 shows us how issues of argument and consent in democracy were explored in the treatment of ‘analogy’ in Saussure’s new linguistics. Analogy may seem like a minor linguistic byway; in fact, in it are condensed a series of critical questions about linguistic order. By the twentieth century, analogy was understood as the principle that underlay the systematicity and orderliness of language, but it was also understood to be a psychological process. Did it involve reasoning (which would mean that the consent grounding language was a reasoned consent)? This was the question Saussure wrestled with in his lectures on general linguistics. In this chapter we watch the wrestling and see how a conservative version of ‘language as such’—language as such as embodying an unconscious consent—emerges victorious.

Introduction

Chapter 1 focuses on the distinctiveness of the ‘linguistic turns’ of early twentieth-century Europe, differentiating them from nineteenth-century work on language and insisting on the need to think of these multiple turns as a whole, as a constellation across Europe. That there is such a constellation, demanding our attention, is the first of the book’s three organizing claims. The second is that language draws such a crowd because crowds have become a problem: in the linguistic turns of the early twentieth century, language is a metonym for problems of social order and social division, democracy and consent, nationality and difference. Hence the third claim: that the distinguishing feature of these linguistic turns is a commitment to some version of ‘language as such’, a force or structure within language that can provide the vitality, the order, the lucidity, or some combination of these, necessary to cure language of its present ills.

Saussure and the Soviets

Chapter 4 focuses on three particular linguists, all of whom consider whether, from the perspective of Saussure’s work, a linguistic revolution is possible. One, S. I. Kartsevskii, does not want such a revolution and believes Saussure tells us why it is not possible. Another, G. O. Vinokur, both desires it and believes Saussure has provided tools for its realization. A third, Lev Iakubinskii, shares Vinokur’s enthusiasm but sees Saussure’s linguistics as an obstacle. The problem is not one of misinterpretation, for this varied reception reveals the striking inconsistency and ambiguity of Saussure’s conservative conception of consent and change in language.

Excursus

The excursus examines the writers Georges Sorel and Antonio Gramsci: political thinkers who make linguistic ideas, ideas of myth in particular, central to their political strategies. Sorel will look to myth as an alternative form of organizing and motivating the political masses; Gramsci will look to Sorel as a source for ideas about popular mobilization, which he, however, will embody not in an instantaneous call to arms, but in the institutional struggle for hegemony. Gramsci pays particular attention to the institutions of the press and journalism: he transforms the mythic, heroic element of Sorel into an element of prose style.

The Ship of Logic on the High Seas of Discourse

Chapter 3 looks at the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy as it emerges from Gottlob Frege, gains momentum in Bertrand Russell, and finds elaboration in the early and middle work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The characteristic move of linguistic philosophy will be the clarification of presumably ‘muddled’ ordinary statements: the bringing to the surface a lucidity that is lurking within language, needing only to be coaxed out. The author shows how in the works of Frege, Russell, and early Wittgenstein, the drive to clarity entails a stripping away of every intersubjective, rhetorical element in discourse. He then argues that a language clarified by professional philosophers is a substitute for the objectivity of the public sphere. The chapter concludes by showing how intersubjectivity returns first as irony in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and then as the belief that language always ‘works’: that it fails only when external circumstances disturb its inner workings.

Do They Believe in Magic? The Word as Myth, Name, and Art

Chapter 6 is devoted to writers hostile to the mythical element of language, who believe that myth must be defeated and who have a strategy for defeating it. The strategies are varied: Ogden and Richards turn to science, Frege to logic, Orwell to a particular kind of prose, Bakhtin to the novel, and Saussure to language itself. Antipathy to myth and word magic is sometimes framed in explicit political terms (in Ogden and Richards, Orwell, and Bakhtin) and sometimes not. The claim in this chapter is that myth figures as a tendency of ‘language as such’ that must be vigilantly monitored and countered with alternative forms of discourse; lurking within the fear of myth is nervousness about the demagoguery within popular democratic politics.

On the Diversity—and Productivity—of Language

Chapter 5 borrows Walter Benjamin’s description of the ‘narcotic historicism’ of nineteenth-century Paris (expressed in its arcades, panoramas, wax museums, and architecture) and applies it to comparative philology, suggesting that, in effect, it creates ‘museums’ of language. In this perspective, some forms of twentieth-century modernism appear as attempts to liberate the force bound up in historicist forms; Saussure, Bakhtin, and Benjamin unleash the productivity and creativity of language that had been explained (and confined) in the phonetic laws discovered in the previous century. Bakhtin does so by counterpoising heteroglossia with myth; Saussure does so by invoking a model of linguistic change modelled on urban life and the republican social contract; Benjamin does so in his theory of translation, which aims to recover a native linguistic energy from the diversity of actual languages. In their different ways, these paeans to linguistic productivity draw attention to another feature of mass democracy: its urban character.