Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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“impurity” is related to the function of the sign itself: in order for the sign to operate as a sign, it needs to be repeatable. The sign’s necessary iterability—the fact that the sign, standing for something else, is repeatable in a variety of contexts—makes the presence of an originary moment or meaning simultaneously necessary and impossible. The sign’s susceptibility to repetition, and consequent failure to coincide entirely with what it is supposed to represent in any instance, marks each instance of its occurrence. The “impurity” inherent in the sign is what defines it as a sign: iterability accounts for the authentic, the seamless “presence” of meaning, that is always preceded by the inauthentic.
While Derrida’s account usefully complicates the ideological formation of language, marxist terms underscore its material construction. If language is “practical consciousness which is inseparable from all social material activity,” as Raymond Williams affirms, if it makes visible the material consequences of ways of thinking and acting in different worlds, then Johnson’s positioning of language and lexicographers is undeniably ideological.19 From a related critical stance, Haraway cautions against assumptions of objectivity in conventional processes of standardization. Her call to read the political worlds that reference works inhabit permits us to see the impulse to circumscribe as one that is ideologically fraught. The fiction of stabilizing language that the lexicographer performs is politically linked to establishing a place for the author within the literary and academic marketplace, a place not dependent on aristocratic patronage or the tyranny of academies and yet not bound by the equally oppressive bonds of hack writing. It would seem then that the resistant “spots of barbarity,” while masquerading under cover of a monolithic mother tongue, perform what can be called continual disruption.20
Johnson’s desire to shape language by recourse to its earlier manifestations (e.g., Elizabethan works) is informed by the (im)possibility of fixing an originary moment. While Elizabethan England may have represented to Johnson and other eighteenth-century readers a nostalgic moment of enviable national coherence, Johnson himself articulates the unsettling and destabilizing work which lexicography performs even in the act of circumscribing that ostensible coherence. Johnson writes that he has
fixed Sidney’s work for the boundary beyond which I make few excursions. From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind for want of English words in which they might be expressed. (289)
But he goes on to contend that
When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language and preserve it from corruption and decay. (294)
Johnson establishes the impossibility of his task to confine and secure linguistic meaning and usage to a specific historical period. Elizabethan writers stand for Johnson as a powerful cultural fantasy of national coherence. This is a putatively idyllic moment of absolute (although, unlike the French, inherently just) monarchy, global exploration, and military strength. An increase in consumerism in eighteenth-century society and succeeding dependence on commercial expansion, however, threatens the logic of this cultural fantasy.
One way of analyzing the possible threats Johnson perceives to the integrity of language is to identify how language and labor come to be associated in ways other than intellectual. Johnson warns against the “folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives” (283). English works are used by Johnson as examples of “genuine diction” just as lexicographical drudgery paves the way for works of “genius,” or language is “employed” in the cultivation of literature. An English work ethic thus stands for a specifically English morality, positioned directly against the slothful uselessness of “foreigners.” Johnson’s xenophobic response to adopting foreign words that might “reduce us to babble a dialect of France,” together with his desire for a “pure” Englishness, construct the Dictionary as an undertaking of cultural representation. Johnson notes the etymological roots of words may be from Latin or French “since at the time when we had dominions in France, we had Latin service in our churches,” and “the French generally supplied us … [with] … terms of domestic use”; ironically, then, the British are “babbl[ing] a dialect of France” even if their appropriation of French words as a result of their “dominion” in France is an imperial one (296, italics mine).21 Johnson seems to be willing to entertain the possibility of a French supply of language (xenodochy) while rejecting the notion that such a source of valuable material could possibly affect or alter the original structure of English (xenophobia). Interestingly, the same sort of francophobic response Johnson has toward these “useless foreigners” complements his xenophobia toward Great Britain itself. The list of Elizabethan works Johnson deems pure enough to serve as references in his Dictionary not only fetishizes a particular literary period but the writers he names—Sidney, Hooker, Bacon, Spenser, and Shakespeare—are all English (as opposed to British). There seems to be a certain cultural imperialism, to borrow Said’s phrase, at work in Johnson’s national representation: the boundaries that he “fixes” for a definitive language do not stray beyond the borders of England to Scotland or Wales.22
But language proves recalcitrant, even if it is the medium through which the imperialist literary products of “learning and genius” are made possible. One of its major forms of resistance is the inherent impurity of the sign that resists being “fixed” in an originary etymological moment but, rather, shifts its meaning from moment to moment. As he admits, Johnson cannot hope to change or alter language, but merely attempt to direct its movement. Faced with this verbal impotence, however, Johnson maintains a thoroughly bourgeois sensibility: “we retard what we cannot repel,” he reasons, “we palliate what we cannot cure” (296). Thus he modifies his desire, his fantasy of circumscription, proscription, and authorial control, as “duty.” In keeping with his representation of a work ethic, Johnson claims that “every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe” (278). Language as representation is ideologically informed. In the Preface, it is a reflection or communication of a unified and integral cultural and national identity. Yet language is dependent on its constitutive contextual iterability that by definition is cut off from its referent, intended signification, and context of communication. Language as a means of representation, as “practical consciousness,” is as “impure” as the sign, and its reflection of an integral national identity is equally flawed, changing, and contextually iterable.
Faced with this malleability, Johnson constructs an empirical model of a national language and identity that depends on the fiction that an individual can redirect the course of words and meaning. This model is one that he has uncovered while applying himself to the “perusal of our writers … noting whatever might be of use to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase accumulated in time the materials of a dictionary,” whose progress he charts according to “such rules as experience and analogy suggested to me; experience, which practice and observation were continually increasing; and analogy, which, though in some words obscure, was evident in others” (278, italics mine). Language is determined by Johnson’s experience and observation: cultural identity is not discovered or revealed but proscribed and prescribed.
Another problem with Johnson’s project of representing an integral culture through its language is the difference he establishes between oral and written language.23 Containing language within the lexicographical project is made urgent by Johnson’s rearticulation of the possibility of a contextual rupture. The potential for rupture is always present and partially accounts for what is disruptive about language and problematic about lexicography. Johnson’s warning against babbling foreign dialects is predicated on the notion that the representation of a unified national identity through language depends on controlling and limiting