Afterword

The Writing of Spirit traces the genesis of the twentieth century’s best-known and most influential such principle, arguing in the process that it has been widely and deeply misinterpreted, in ways that fundamentally distort its contribution to the debate about how systems, in general, get formed. In the afterword, Pourciau supplements this historical account with a brief look at two of the most significant contemporary solutions to the language-as-interface puzzle, in the hope that doing so will provide a clearer picture of how the structuralist proposal still challenges us to think differently today. Pourciau’s goal is rather to illuminate the present-tense import of the unfamiliar conceptual terrain toward which the structuralist project, alone among its peers, seeks to direct our attention.

Jakobson’s Zeros

Chapter 6 treats the transformation to which the Russian structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson, following the deflationary tradition of Saussure, subjects the neo-Pythagorean acoustic poetics discussed in Chapter 5. The focus rests on a new reading of what Jakobson calls the “linguistic zero,” which he defines as the featureless half of a binary opposition between presence and absence. The chapter argues that this absolutely crucial and much-analyzed aspect of phonological theory can be shown to develop in rigorous, polemical conversation with the systems theories of 19th century language spirit. The zero operates, in essence, as a placeholder for the subtracted soul of structure. In the process, it manages to fulfill the seemingly impossible, because seemingly contradictory, condition of infusing by subtracting, grounding by evaporating, unifying by differing, inspiring by deflating.

Verse Origins

Chapter Three treats the 19th century emergence, and polemical Saussurean reinterpretation, of a specifically Germanic poetics of enspirited letters. The ancient compositional technique of alliteration (Stabreim), which gives shape to the oldest-known Germanic poetry, is interpreted by 19th century German language scientists as a powerful tool for explicating the structuring energy of their language. Primal poetry, philologically reconstructed, thus comes to operate as a projection screen for language scientific fantasies about the writing (down) of language spirit. Saussure’s response to this tradition, the chapter argues, takes the form of a battle with the Germans over the origins of both verse and written letters. In the context of his famously enigmatic “anagram studies,” and in line with his language-scientific vision of a fully dis-enspirited linguistic notation, Saussure imagines the roots of Indoeuropean rhythm as a rule-governed, letter-based procedure for emptying poetry—and by extension, language itself—of all spiritual content.

Saussure’s Dream

Chapter Two investigates the transformations to which Ferdinand de Saussure, who was educated in comparative linguistics at the German center of Leipzig, subjects this nature-philosophical model of language change in his private notes. It argues that the Saussurean vision of a purely differential notation takes aim not, as has traditionally been assumed, at some naïve, Cratylan investment in the motivated character of the sign, but rather at the far more sophisticated model of 19th century language spirit: Saussure, like his predecessors, insists on the scientific necessity of a language-internal dynamism; he accepts this fundamentally nature-philosophical premise, however, only in order to deflate the twin notions of interiority and dynamism on which it rests, by uncoupling them from the profundity of any conceivable animating force.

Pythagoras in the Laboratory

Chapter Five unfolds the startling consequences of this Wagnerian harmony theory both for the development of avant-garde poetic principles (particularly in France and Russia), and for the concurrent, late-19th century emergence of a new discipline called “psychophysiology” (a forerunner of modern-day experimental psychology). It argues that the widely received theories of Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, and their followers, strive to translate the nature-philosophical “energy” of Wagner’s sounding spirit into a natural-scientific dialect of countable psychic vibrations and measurable psychic “tones.” The result is a new model of language science and a new understanding of poetics, which together both fulfill and pervert the thrust of their early 19th century predecessors.

Wagner’s Poetry of the Spheres

Chapter Four moves beyond the boundaries of the comparative linguistic tradition to explore Richard Wagner’s extraordinarily influential, poetico-musical “realization” of the philological fantasy about Germanic verse origins, as described in Chapter Three. This chapter argues that Wagner’s dramatic project in the Ring cycle, which was inspired by his intense engagement with the language theories of Jacob Grimm, must be understood as an attempt to harness the rhythms of ancient alliterative verse to an all-encompassing, neo-Pythagorean model of cosmic-acoustic accord, such that the meter of his own, mid-19th century alliterations—when united with the harmonic modulations of his music—merges with the “meter” of the world spirit progressing through history.

Language Ensouled

Chapter One traces the 19th century development of a new way of thinking about language structure, and about systematicity more generally, in the work of German linguists like Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp, and their successors. It argues that this new perspective grows out of a widespread backlash, prepared and supported by Friedrich Schelling’s “nature-philosophy,” against the Kantian understanding of system. The most significant German scientists of the period presuppose, as Kant does not, the extra-human reality of the orders they analyze, and thus also the extra-human reality of analyzable structure per se. In the realm of Idealist philosophy, the result is a new theory of History, writ cosmically large. In the realm of language science, the result is a newly rigorous etymological methodology, designed to render writeable the laws of empirical language change, and by doing so, to articulate the essence of a teleologically-unfolding “language spirit” or Sprachgeist.

Introduction

The Writing of Spirit revises a crucial aspect about the rise of the “natural sciences” by reinterpreting the historical development of modern system theories within the paradigmatic realm of natural language. Pourciau argues that the process through which twentieth-century linguists first successfully purged their systems of soul has long been misunderstood precisely because it has never before been conceived primarily as a process, and thus also as an ongoing confrontation with its own nineteenth-century preconditions. Much exciting work has been done in recent years, and is currently being done today, on the relevance of a new “organicist” understanding of system for the radical transformation of German thought around 1800, in domains such as life science, literature, and philosophy. Less attention has been paid, in this context, to the domain of language science, despite its exemplary status for the time period in question, and still less to the relationship between the spirit of early nineteenth-century systems and their spiritless twentieth-century successors.