Battle in the mind fields by John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks

Abstract

Reviewed by: Battle in the mind fields by John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks Randy Harris Battle in the mind fields. By John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xix, 725. ISBN 9780226550800. $45 (Hb). Kenneth Burke, the great rhetorician, literary critic, sociologist, grammatologist, and one of the very few major theorists of language in the period they cover who doesn't appear in this brilliant new intellectual chronicle by John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks, has an evocative parable of human existence. He calls life an 'unending conversation' at the historical moment we are born. It's like a cocktail party, he says, for which we are all, each and every one of us, unavoidably late: When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (Burke 1941:110–11) G&L give us an allegorical party, too, vibrant concentrations of conversational gravity swirling through the room, merging with, spinning away from, or sweeping past one another. Conversations rupture. Conversations continue. New voices come. Old voices go. But some of the old voices also endure, leaving their concepts and perspectives behind, some in little slivers of terminology, some in grand ideational skeins fanning out across the room, carried aloft by the new voices. Some old voices, too, have a special trick. They leave robots behind to repeat their utterances verbatim, robots called books. In G&L's version, the party happens on a hotel patio. They man the concierge desk, an invaluable service. We are all coming late, remember, and the conversations are going full throttle when we get there. G&L meet us with a vast schematic chart of the past conversations. No one can retrace all that has gone on before we arrived, but guides like these two can plot out some of the bigger and more consequential conversations in enough detail to give us a much better sense of where we have been, and therefore a much better idea of what we are talking about when we talk about linguistics. You can see a tiny corner of their schematic in Figure 1. We are in that allegorical party now, you know. This journal is one of the more important conversational hubs—'near the beer', as G&L's schematic tells us (576). We have mingled our way through the swirl of theoretical terms and along the philosophical currents that make up linguistics to get here. Let me tell you a bit more about this book before you move along. We should acknowledge, first, that G&L's patio is a decidedly Euro-American patio. There are no samosas or suya at the snack table, no saki at the bar. G&L adopt a thoroughly conventional and unchallenged notion of linguistics, as the scientific, item-and-arrangement study of the natural human products known as languages. This view sees linguistics as growing directly out of nineteenth-century European philology, in the special hands of a few giants. At this point you might be inclined—or if not you, some other gentle reader—to ease away and avoid this book as one more tired entry in the Monumental White Men History of Ideas genre. That would be a mistake. I certainly would not claim that the Euro-American trajectory of linguistics is flawlessly correct, nor that it cannot be enriched and corrected by many of the...