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Representational Crisis: Contradiction and Determination in Verbal Criticism

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02773940903417515

1930-322X

William Rodney Herring,

Historical Linguistics and Language Studies

Abstract During the late nineteenth century, language authorities in the United States were distressed by what they saw as a pervasive misuse of words. A particular type of language authority, the verbal critic, attempted to mitigate misuse by establishing and insisting upon "correct" meanings of words, and the writing of these verbal critics were remarkably popular at the time. Verbal critics' goals are not always clear-cut: they often lament the ignorance of those who "abuse" words, and at other times, they express their purpose as offering instruction in how to speak properly. Indeed, verbal criticism is full of contradictions, which this article explains in terms of a widespread crisis in representation, a crisis that seemed to threaten speakers' ability to communicate, affected late-nineteenth-century social structure, and mirrored political and economic debates over monetary policy, as well. Acknowledgment I thank the editor and anonymous readers for RSQ for their helpful comments and suggestions, which enriched this article, as well as my thinking about verbal criticism. A number of references cited or discussed in footnotes were brought to my attention by the readers. Notes 1Edward Finegan discusses Mathews's professorship (71), and Kenneth Cmiel tabulates the publication history of this and other such works (263–266). The number of copies in print comes from the title page to the 1896 edition. 2See Finegan, passim and Baron, 188–225 for more on this distinction between doctrines of correctness and usage. Plato's Cratylus offers the classical articulation of this distinction, with Cratylus arguing for correctness or "naturalism," described by Hermogenes as words with "a truth or correctness in them, which is the same for Hellenes as for barbarians" (383b), and Hermogenes arguing for usage or "conventionalism." 3As Assistant Keeper of the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum from 1838–50, Garnett composed a number of essays on philology that were later collected by his son (also Richard Garnett) as The Philological Essays of the Late Rev. Richard Garnett (Citation1859). The younger Garnett prefaced the collection with a "Memoir" explaining that Garnett aspired to join the clergy, in preparation for which he was required to "obtain a thorough acquaintance with Latin, of which he knew little, and with Greek, of which he knew nothing" (ii). Although, his son notes, Garnett's learning about Latin and Greek was "especially Scriptural," he nevertheless, in 1829, "entered upon an entirely new sphere of social intercourse and literary activity": writing about philology. As his son observes, Garnett "entered upon his new career at the most auspicious period imaginable, when Rask and Grimm and W. Humboldt" had begun writing about linguistics (x). However, Garnett's contributions to the discipline have gone largely unnoted by contemporary linguists, revealing perhaps that Garnett's "acuteness" derives more from his service to Mathews than it does from his service to more general studies of language. 4See p. 313. Cmiel studies eight newspapers: "the four refined papers were the Boston Daily Advertiser, The New York Times, the New York Evening Post, and the Chicago Tribune. The four popular papers were the Boston Herald, the New York Tribune, the New York Sun, and the Chicago Times." 5This way of approaching the debate between critics and scholars (the scholars were as elitist as the critics) turns out to be a way of missing another important similarity that I will consider later: the critics too had a democratic impulse. After all, given verbal criticism's immense popularity, what should we infer? Did readers consume books that merely made them feel inferior? Or did they find in these texts instruction for speaking in more refined or cultured ways? Cmiel has shown that Ayres and White, after publishing for refined newspapers in the 1860s and '70s, had their columns picked up by populist newspapers in the 1880s, and verbal criticism became "a part of popular adult education" (146). Adams Sherman Hill's Our English, for example, originated as a series of Chautauqua lectures. 6Plato's distinction between belief in beautiful things and beauty itself (Republic 476c) usefully distinguishes nominalists from realists (as well as particulars from universals). 7This is not to say that no one compared words to money prior to the nineteenth century. At least as early as John Locke, philosophers were noting the imprecision of words' representation of ideas and money's representation of value. (For Locke on language, see Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, particularly chapters II, "On the Signification of Words" and IX, "Of the Imperfection of Words"; on money, see Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money.) However, discussing language as money (as opposed to language and money or language and/as a precious metal) does seem to have been rare until the nineteenth century. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen's New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (Citation1999) collects a number of works attempting "to rediscover the contact points among literature, culture, and economics" (9). Although the essays in the collection are primarily concerned with how critics informed by economics can approach the study of literature, the editors' introduction, particularly pp. 10–17, provides a helpful review of what they call economic criticism, recent attempts by theorists to link literature and language to money and economics. 8Although this evolution of the trope suggests it "had shifted from its earlier appreciation of beautiful coins," presumably to appreciation of a medium of exchange, the important point for Carr is that the trope's repetition demonstrates that "the history of nineteenth-century readers is marked by borrowing and adaptation, and by the persistence of traditional associations and definitions that nevertheless adapt to changing times and values" (145). But finding the same kind of value in language that one finds in money, I am arguing, has a particular significance in the late nineteenth century. 9Mathews cites Farrar on this point, coincidentally on his own page 261. 10The point for Painter is that inflationary policy hurt workers and farmers, giving rise to Populist resentment. Milton Friedman ultimately agrees, albeit from a much different orientation, that deflation was devastating. More concerned with economic growth than with the effect on the working classes, Friedman concludes that "Whether or not a verdict of guilty would have been appropriate in a court of law for 'the crime of 1873,' that verdict is appropriate in the court of history" because a "bimetallic standard … would have produced a considerably steadier price level than did the gold standard that was adopted" (78, 76). 11The other significant plank of the Populists' platform was an endorsement of direct election of U.S. senators. For more on Populism as a response to monetary policy, see Trachtenberg 175. 12Ritter's conservative and antimonopolist positions map neatly onto the deflationist and inflationist positions I have been discussing. An excellent history of the "financial question" during the period 1865–96, Goldbugs and Greenbacks argues that existing scholarship has managed to recognize "the significance of the farmer-labor tradition" without accounting for the "prominence the antimonopolists gave to the financial question." Even "common citizens" were invested in debates about money, Ritter argues, because these debates concerned "the belief that the preservation of economic opportunity was essential for meaningful democracy" (ix–x). 13This question over the role of persuasion in Marxism, of course, has everything to do with rhetoric. James Aune's Rhetoric and Marxism is concerned with just this issue, in only a slightly different register. For instance, Aune asks how rhetoricians might bridge the theoretical gap between structure and struggle—that is, the difference between rhetoric being a tool for interesting, but finally defeatist, analysis and being a tool for producing discourse that might effect real change (13). 14Even earlier political economists (Smith and Ricardo) recognized the existence of surplus-value—the unpaid portion of production—but what "they had regarded as a solution" Marx "considered but a problem" (149–151). 15Production must itself be understood as more complex than the mere set of steps individual workers take to generate a product if we are to understand how it effects class positions that come to be occupied by workers. Production comprises the labor process and relations of production, the former of which is a material condition of production (which, Althusser argues, means "a denial of every 'humanist' conception of human labour as pure creativity"). The relations of production entail foremost "relations between men and things, such that the relations between men and men are defined by the precise relations existing between men and the material elements of the production process" (171–175). Moreover, insofar as these relations include "agents of production," we must distinguish between "direct agents," whose labor power directly and materially infuses the product with use-value, and non-direct agents—the owners of the means of production—whose "labour power is not used in the production process." The arrangement of these agents and their instruments of production designates "a certain political configuration." And it is this political configuration that has a structural effect on other elements (e.g., the economic and the cultural) in the social totality: "the nature of the relations of production … establishes the degree of effectivity delegated to a certain level of the social totality." In other words, what we have here is not a pre-existing arrangement of levels in the social totality. Rather, the mode of production is the name we give to the "site" and "extension" of each structural element (176–177). 16In this sense, Kenneth Cmiel misses the point when he writes, "The very success of verbal criticism was undermining the original goals" (139), since the goals of verbal criticism included giving readers the verbal tools for upward mobility. 17The tragedy has, nevertheless, been feared and even predicted on numerous occasions. Locke's theory of language allowed not only for the "Imperfection of Words" (Book III, Chapter IX of Essay Concerning Human Understanding), but also—as a result—for the "Abuse of Words" (Chapter X), proposing "Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfection and Abuses" (Chapter XI). As recently as 2004, Samuel Huntington warned that the "persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages." Such linguistic anxieties, and there have been plenty in the intervening years, tend to correspond to other cultural changes. Huntington was responding to increased immigration, Locke the coinage crisis of the 1690s. Locke's case is similar to the late nineteenth century's insofar as he too was concerned with theories of representation for both language and money. In a fascinating reading that brings together these theories, Carol Pech shows that Locke identifies the value of money through metonymy and also (elsewhere) describes the problems of language as beginning with metaphor and synecdoche. "That Locke goes on to examine the problems posed by synecdoche through the example of a precious metal (i.e., gold) is significant to understanding his writings on money" (283). These writings reveal, Pech ultimately argues, that Locke fetishizes precious metals in order to "disavow the ways in which symbolic modes of signification have begun to sever the connections between currency and natural substances" (286). Additional informationNotes on contributorsWilliam Rodney Herring William Rodney Herring is a Lecturer in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver, 2150 E. Evans Ave., Penrose Library Room 202, Denver, CO 80208-5203.