Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory by Ken Hirschkop

Abstract

Reviewed by: Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory by Ken Hirschkop Craig Brandist Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory. Ken Hirschkop. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 353. $85.00 (cloth). There was not one single "linguistic turn" in the period 1890–1950, but many, and the variety among the "turns" to "language as such" had as much to do with the social and political orientations of thinkers as with their conceptions of mind and language. Theories about language were, in effect, theories about society by other means. This is perhaps the central thesis of Ken Hirshchkop's provocative and engaging new book, which draws together the work of a bewildering variety of philosophers, linguists, literary and political theorists from across Europe. While it is commonplace to recognize that a conception of society, at least at the level of background assumptions, underlies all writing on language, Hirschkop here makes a stronger claim. For a wide range of thinkers, writing in a tumultuous age when the collapse of European Empires under pressures of war and revolution resulted in the rise of mass political democracy, language constituted a "metonym" for society. Questions of linguistic stability and change, authority, and agency were dimensions of wider questions of social and political transformations. The modalities through which this metonym was enacted prove to be complex and instructive. In a brief but stimulating excursus, Hirschkop argues the most "effective metonym" was achieved by Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci, who drew upon his linguistic training to theorize the struggle for hegemony while incarcerated in one of Mussolini's prisons (246). The bulk of the book is, however, dedicated to showing that theorizing about society was key to a variety of thinkers who at least on the face of it were much less politically engaged: Ferdinand de Saussure through Ernst Cassirer to Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. If one of Saussure's main achievements was, through his treatment of language as a social institution, to show the neogrammarians what they had done, it was linguists in revolutionary Russia (inter alia Sergei Kartsevskii, Grigorii Vinokur, Lev Iakubinskii) who would show what Saussure had done by making language change and standardization primarily a question of politics (105). [End Page 615] Hirschkop is probably best known for his 1999 monograph Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy, in which Bakhtin's turn from ethics and aesthetics, to language and sociology in the late 1920s, is shown to circle around questions of democracy that are seldom invoked in any direct way. In the intervening twenty years Hirschkop has published nothing on this scale, but more occasional work, such as the coauthored Benjamin's Arcades Project: An unGuided Tour (2006), suggested some of the areas he was investigating. Linguistic Turns, which has evidently been gestating for a considerable period of time, also discusses Bakhtin, but relatively briefly, as the question of democracy and "collective will" is shown to be a much more general movement, and Bakhtin's discussions of style, carnival, and the novel are shown to be symptomatic of, and particularly illustrative of, wider intellectual currents. It is clear why such work took a long time to come to fruition, for Linguistic Turns displays formidable erudition in a variety of areas, and some serious thinking about how a constellation of concerns manifest themselves in a variety of intellectual traditions and social contexts. The result is a work that will be of considerable interest and value to intellectual historians, social and cultural theorists as well as those concerned with the intersection of linguistic and social theory. Moreover, a set of ideas which are in themselves intellectually demanding and occasionally rather technical, are here presented in an admirably clear fashion with no small measure of creativity, elegance, and wit. The book is structured in two parts with an introduction and conclusion. Part one, "Order," focused on "how a society grounded in 'the people' can be both consensual and orderly," begins with a consideration of Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, approached from the apparent side-issue of analogy, which turns out to be much more central than is generally conceived (22). Next, we...