The Writing of Spirit

Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science

Sarah M. Pourciau

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823275632, 9780823275625
• eBook ISBN: 9780823275649
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Contemporary thought has been profoundly shaped by the early-twentieth-century turn toward synchronic models of explanation, which analyze phenomena as they appear at a single moment, rather than diachronically as they develop through time. But the relationship between time and system remains unexplained by the standard account of this shift. Through a new history of systematic thinking across the humanities and sciences, The Writing of Spirit argues that nineteenth-century historicism wasn't simply replaced by a more modern synchronic perspective. The structuralist revolution consisted rather in a turn toward time's absolutely minimal conditions, and thus also toward a new theory of diachrony.Pourciau arrives at this surprising and powerful conclusion through an analysis of language-scientific theories over the course of two centuries, associated with thinkers from Jacob Grimm and Richard Wagner to the Russian Futurists, in domains as disparate as historical linguistics, phonology, acoustics, opera theory, philosophy, poetics, and psychology. The result is a novel contribution to a pressing contemporary question—namely, what role history should play in the interpretation of the present.

PART I

“The Eternal Etymology”: From Sprachgeist to Ferdinand de Saussure

The whole labor of the linguist who wants to account, methodically, for the object he studies comes down to the extremely difficult and delicate task of defining units.1

The search for a linguistic object—the question of what language actually is—runs like a red thread through the fabric of Ferdinand de Saussure’s otherwise disjointed notes and would surely have dominated the book he so famously never wrote. A science of language like the one he hoped to found requires, after all, an object accessible to scientific investigation. The task of locating such an object, however, turns out to be significantly less tautological than it sounds: to the question “What does the linguist study?” one cannot simply answer “language,” as, according to Saussure, the botanist can answer “plants,” or the geologist “rocks,” for no fixed boundaries separate languages from each other geographically or historically. Transformations occur as a continuous process of minute shifts, making it impossible to say definitively where one language leaves off and the other begins, or to distinguish, except by convention, between dialects and autonomous tongues. Saussure repeatedly declares the unraveling of such language-based confusions the primary duty of every practicing linguist, taking care to point out that it is a duty he believes his (German) predecessors to have honored more in the breach than the observance.

Our point of view is in effect that the knowledge of a phenomenon or of an operation of the mind [l’esprit] presupposes the prior definition of some kind of term [ . . . ] which has at some point a foundation [une base] of some kind. This foundation need not necessarily be absolute, but it must be expressly chosen as an irreducible foundation for us, and as central to the entire system. To imagine that it is possible in linguistics to manage without this sound mathematical logic, on the pretext that language [langue] is a concrete thing which “becomes,” and not an abstract thing which “is,” is in my opinion a profound error, inspired originally by the innate tendencies of the Germanic spirit [l’esprit germanique]. (WGL, 17–18/34)

Several crucial elements come to light in this passage—taken from the collection of manuscripts first discovered in 1996, in the conservatory of the Saussure family’s Geneva townhouse2—which are absent, or nearly so, from the better-known and more judicious formulations compiled by Saussure’s students in the Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics, 1916). The link between a well-defined linguistic unit and the figure of a foundation or ground, the problem of false concreteness in relation to a theory of historical unfolding, the rhetoric of depth (“profound”), inspiration (“inspired”), origin (“originally”), teleology (“tendencies”), interiority (“innate”), and spirit (“l’esprit germanique”) that accompanies Saussure’s diagnosis of German error—all will turn out to play a substantive role in a turn-of-the-century linguistic project that demands to be read, so the following pages will argue, as a battle with the Germans over the nature of the linguistic endeavor.

The battle begins and ends with the question of the foundational unit, what Saussure here calls terme, and elsewhere, with a dizzying inconstancy that reflects the dilemma he is struggling to name, seme, signe, unité, or even, less frequently, mot. A precise definition of the basic building blocks, he contends, would give the linguist somewhere to stand and linguistics somewhere to start. Failure to recognize that such a definition is necessary, on the other hand, undermines all attempts to discover a common linguistic ground. German linguists of the nineteenth century seek to “explain” the existence of attested form a by linking it etymologically to an older form b, such that both a and b can be considered manifestations of a single word. The old Germanic gagani, for instance, becomes the modern German Gegend (region, neighborhood), the medieval Latin cuppa, the modern German Kopf (head). What remains entirely unclear, however, in the absence of any explicit definition of the concept “word,” is the status of this transformation. Where, exactly, is the identity that could justify the insistence on the sameness of these forms? Each form, after all, is itself a unit, capable of functioning in its own historical moment independently of earlier and later manifestations. The phonetic “traces” that make language historical for the linguist remain largely imperceptible to the average speaker, and play little or no role in the present-tense functioning of language; in a very real sense, they “exist” only for the etymologist, who thus turns out to stand in a dubiously occult relation to his or her chosen object of study.

The implications of the question, as Saussure makes clear, go far beyond a critique of etymological praxis:

Take for example the series of vocal sounds alka, which after a while, passing from mouth to mouth, has become ōk [ . . . ]. Where, at bottom [au fond], is the LINK between alka and ōk? If we go down this path, and it is inescapably necessary that we do so, we will soon find that we must demand an answer to the question where is the LINK between alka and alka itself, and in this moment we will realize that there nowhere exists as a primordial fact a thing that is alka (or anything else). (WGL, 138–39/200–201)

Etymological relation, no matter how stringently demonstrated, will never in principle be able to explain the phenomenon of historical identity because the problem explodes the parameters of existing etymological method. As the condition of possibility not only for language history but also for language per se, the continuity of words across time and space poses itself above all as a question for the present tense. To the linguist looking for ground, the dilemma alka-ōk is merely a special case of the more general dilemma alka-alka, ōk-ōk, for, unlike the flora and fauna of the nineteenth-century organicist analogies, alka and ōk are not things with bodily contours. Since no two speakers articulate exactly alike, and since even the same speaker articulates differently on different occasions, their respective modes of material existence are necessarily plural and varied. An ostensibly “single” word will always be “represented” by acoustically divergent strings of sounds, pronounced in widely varying moments and places. Meaning, too, varies substantially from one instance to another. And yet, within functional language systems, ordinary speakers will have no trouble recognizing these different utterances as manifestations of a self-identical unit of language; they will align alka with alka, ōk with ōk, and ask no questions about the tie that binds.

This mysterious stability, perceived across a potentially infinite variety of phonetic forms and linguistic functions, confronts the would-be purifier of linguistic terminology with a daunting definitional challenge. While the units must in some sense “exist” in order for communication to occur, articulating their boundaries—the true task of a linguistic notation—proves next to impossible:

The mechanism of language—always taken AT A GIVEN MOMENT, which is the only way to study the mechanism—will one day, we are convinced, be reduced to relatively simple formulas. For the moment one cannot even dream of establishing these formulas: if we try to fix some ideas by sketching out the main traits of what we imagine under the name of semiology, i.e., a system of signs as it exists in the mind of speaking subjects [l’esprit des sujets parlants], totally independent of how it came into existence [de ce qui l’a prepare], it is certain that we will still, in spite of ourselves, be obliged to unceasingly oppose this semiology to the ever-present etymology [la sempiternelle étymologie]; it is certain that this distinction, when inquired into more closely, is so delicate that it draws all attention exclusively to itself, very powerfully, and in countless foreseen and unforeseen cases may well be treated as a subtle distinction; it is certain, consequently, that the moment is not yet near when one could operate with full tranquility outside of all etymology [hors de toute étymologie]. (WGL, 25/43)

The future tense separating the “one day” of simple formulas from the fruitless fantasies of the present marks the passage above as a manifestation of the very dream it simultaneously pronounces futile. Saussure envisions here, as the precondition of a science still to come, a language susceptible to remainderless formalization. He names the science “semiology,” and imagines under this name a sign system so characteristically “Saussurean” that its definition could double as a formulation of the famous arbitrarity thesis. He insists, however, that such a definition must indefinitely remain purely provisional, since the more definitive contours of a truly scientific notation would require the currently unthinkable exclusion of a sempiternelle étymologie. Saussure’s attempt to accomplish what he himself declares in this passage to be impracticable, by exiling a profoundly German-spirited etymology from the ostensibly neutral territorium of a Swiss course in “general linguistics,” transforms the field of language science. The question, however, of how this transformation actually works—and of what it does, in the process, to the ineradicable dimension of history it acknowledges while refusing to countenance—remains oddly open even today, one hundred years after Saussure’s death in 1913. The present study’s approach to an answer will require a more detailed investigation into the precise nature of the problem Saussure considers his German predecessors to have posed, which will in turn enable new insight into the solution he dreams about offering.

Chapter 1

Language Ensouled

Grammatical Life

The nineteenth-century founders of a Germanic “science of language” (Sprachwissenschaft) claimed to revolutionize language study by turning their attention from timeless grammatical norms to empirical language change.1 Pointing to an eighteenth-century tendency to conceptualize language primarily as the instrument of a universal Logos—and so as the expression par excellence of a quintessentially human capacity for reason—path forgers such as Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, and Jacob Grimm accused their predecessors of neglecting the “real” linguistic object. The rationalist prioritization of clear and distinct speech,2 which required the means of expression to disappear as far as possible into the message, prevented rationalist thinkers, so the claim goes, from treating language in its irreducible, historical particularity. The highest form of expression for philosophers from Descartes to Kant was the one least likely to thrust itself between speaker and listener as an object worthy of independent consideration. Against this classical understanding of language-as-medium, with its countless attempts to exchange the messy contingency of natural languages for the rational purity of an artificial or Adamic one, nineteenth-century linguists insisted instead on the scientific, philosophical, and historical significance of language conceived as thing. Language in the de facto multiplicity of its empirical manifestations—which is to say language in time—offered for them the only possible path to the timeless essence of a philosophical “language-as-such.” The linguistic potential that unites and defines mankind, they argued, can manifest itself only in the form of particular, mutually incomprehensible idioms, since, regardless of the universal grammar that may or may not underlie all language use, the ordinary speaker experiences only confusion when confronted by a foreign tongue.

Historians of linguistics often locate the first indications of this perspectival shift in the sudden Sanskrit fever that swept through educated circles, both linguistic and lay, following the publication of The Sanscrit Language (1786) and “The Third Anniversary Discourse” (1788) by the British philologist Sir William Jones.3 It is in the “Third Discourse” that Jones makes his crucial and much-cited reference to the possibility of a “common source”: “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”4 Jones’s enthusiastic endorsement of Sanskrit as a bridge to the (specifically European) Ur-language made a particularly strong impression on Friedrich Schlegel, who began studying Sanskrit in 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I. “The Eternal Etymology”: From sprachgeist to Ferdinand de Saussure
• Part II. Tending toward Zero: From Runes to Phonemes
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index