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 genea