The Making of Fine Art

In Müller's lectures, as the preceding chapter has shown, language frequently appears as a self-regulative process that emancipates itself from its speakers and operates according to its own laws. His example may therefore be taken to show that, in the Victorian period, the very attempt to identify the roots of language with a structure of reasonable thought could often cause the medium of verbal communication to divide into a set of ideal signifiers on the one hand and a world of empirical referents on the other. While this division may not immediately have evoked the ‘spectre of an autonomous language’ or ushered in ‘a linguistic crisis’, it certainly contributed to a refreshed awareness of the contingent (and hence fragile) connection between words and things. In fact, Edward Tylor's endeavours to reconcile the increasingly idealised meaning of words with the material practice of gesturing and drawing may already be seen as an attempt to (re)connect the specialised concept of ‘language as thought’ with a more general notion of ‘meaning-making as practical work’ that encompassed both verbal speech and various other ways of translating experience into signs. In this way, the use of language was reintegrated into the very meshwork of activities, out of which other philologists sought to abstract it by defining the realm of words as the epitome of a transcendental system of intelligent (and specifically human) thought.

Yet, such differences notwithstanding, what all nineteenth-century contributions to the discussion of the nature and organisation of human speech had in common was that they participated in the reconception of a medium, namely language, whose grounds and purposes were widely perceived to be in need of elucidation. The gradual rise of philology as a science was just as much implicated in this reconception of language as the emergence, often said to have occurred during roughly the same period, of a special sense of ‘literature’ as specifically ‘imaginative’ writing. Thus, according to Michel Foucault, the establishment of this narrow concept of ‘literature’ was a response, among other things, to what he calls the ‘demotion of language to the mere status of an object’. ‘Literature,’ thus conceived, ‘is the contestation of philology’ because it represents a way of working with language that deliberately refuses to make its meaning known in abstract terms.