Pragmatics5:2. I 85-195" InternationalPragmatics Association DOI: 10.1075/prag.5.2.04sil

FROM THE MEANING OF MEANING TO THB EMPIRES OF THE MIND: OGDEN'S ORTHOLOGICAL ENGLISHl

MichaelSilverstein

As part of a project I have been engagedin on "Modern Prophetsof Language,"2 I havebeen investigating the creationof so-calledBASIC English,the word BASIC beingan acronymfor ^British- American- Scientific- /nternational - Commercial, the variousrealms or spheresin which it is to be useful at least as an auxiliary language,if not a first language.Of course, for British, American, and even Australian,New Zealander,etc. speakersof Englishas their primary language,this takesthe form of a specificlexical register that contains,other than numerals and such,850 permissibleor included lexical primes. For others, as for example the immigrantstaught it in Massachusettsduring the 1940s,it became the primary exposureto at least a form of usable English,one that functionally instantiates somethingof what we now recognizeas a pidginizedvaiery of English. It would be of some interest in its own right to examine Basic English trom thesepoints of view. One might try to see whether or not, for example, a non-English-speakinglearner could go on and build on the pidginizedvariety so as to convertit into a functional lexical register of more fully developed English competence.Ancl one might try to see what paradigmsof lexical conjugates3are associatedwith the lexicalregister of BasicEnglish in sucha person'scompetence, andhow various indexical values emerge in the use of suchconjugate sets. But that is not my purposehere.

' I thank Michael Locher for his help as my researchassistant during the initial period of bibliographicsearch and gathering of materials on Ogden and Richards, tasks he carried out with distinction.

2 A ,nunur.ript of this title was produced as a preliminary report for a lecture to the Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan on 23 October 1992.I thank these institutions and their respectiveheads, ProfessorsJames Winn and Richard Ford, as well as Professor Bruce Mannheim, for the arrangements and support that facilitatedthat project and presentation. For this project, in addition to the compilation of an archiveof newspaper,magazine, and journal articles, and the reading of the works of the authors themselves,a number of other sourceshave been especiallyuseful for basic biographical information; for Ogden,see Florence & Anderson (eds.) 1977, and for Richards, Russo 1989.

3 Th. t.rm comes from Geertz's (1968 [1960]: 287) usage "setsof linked conjugates"for the paradigmsof lexicalizedregister-alternants in Javanesehonorification. For a more adequate analysis, seeSilverstein 1979: 216-27; Errington 1985 and 1988. 186 Michaet Silverstein

Nor, moreover, is it my purpose merely to practicewhat I have come to call "smirk anthropology,"here in particular "smirk linguisticanthropology:" I do not wish merely to hold up the specimenof my own culture to the necessarilyironic - and frequently ridiculing or dismissive- postmoderngaze, the ostensivedisplay being actuallyall there is of an argumentin sucha rhetoricalmove, which indexes a recognitionthat it would be drowned out by knowinglaughter. To be sure,there ls something of crackpot sciencehere in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, respectivelythe impressarioand the ringmasterof this transcontinentalcircus. But Ogden and Richards' real problem in this respectwas not that they were wrong, even ludicrously wrong, for we are all 'wrong' in the technical senseif we are scientists.The examplethey presentus here lies in showing(1) the particular location- institutional,ideological, and processual- of 'language'as a phenomenon (and phenomenonof contemplation)in the Anglo-Americansociocultural universe, and particularly (2) the location of social rights that render authoritative or legitimate people's construals of language,with all their profound practical consequences. This I take to be the centralimportance of the particularexample, the wild, attention-grabbingsuccess of the BasicEnglish movement for nearly twenty years, from about 1930,when Ogden'sscheme was becoming widely known, to 1950,when he closed up his Orthological Institute in London. For in the Anglo-American socioculturaluniverse, language is somethingin what one would indeed call the "publicsphere." And in this particularmoment of high intellectualmodernism and heightened inter-War despair of the well-intentioned liberal left, it was the mobilizationin the publicsphere of the paraphernaliaof appliedscience, even such lnsurgentscience as Ogden professedin "ortholclgy,"the intersectionof psychology, philosophy,and linguistics,4that was the basisfor the authority with which Ogden and Richardseventually reached their wartime successin the governmentalrealms of both America and Britain (gainingthe attentionand approvalof both FDR and Churchill).Literate, literary man of scienceand practical,scientifically-inclined man of letters, Ogden and Richards united the imaginativeduality at the cultural boundarywhere languageas a phenomenonis in fact theorizedby the institutional structuresof the educatedelite. And, of course,in the culturalideology of this elite,language is the indicator of thought"So in this respectin particular,Ogden and Richardselaborate on the dualisticfolk-view of language-form-as-accidenceand conceptual-thought-as-essence in our nontechnicalcultural view of the matter.At thisboundary of literateart and

4 Obr"*" that this intersection clevelopedas an "insurgency"within the American academy in two forms in recent decades,first as "cognitivestudies" at, e.g.,Harvard-MlT and then more broadly as "cognitive science"in a number of these and other institutions, incorporating the mmputer as both vehicle and metaphor for the object of study-and-simulation,mind. In a sense,Ogden was far in advance of his contemporaries in theorizing the existenceof interesting work at this triple intersection, in the Mertonian sense of the historical sociology of screntific knowledge. Note, however, that both Ogden's orthology and later cognitive scienceare firmly rooted in the tradition of conceptualizing an autonomous, individual mind as the locus of knowledge,action, etc., rather than recognizing an order of social (or sociocultural) factuality that is predicableonly of groups of people to the extent one can recognize organization of the groupness and of individuals' membership-oricntation to that groupness. Ogden's orthological English 187 mentalscience Ogden's orthology, like Korzybski's"general semantics," wishes to apply a therapy of reworking language-formto cure the diseaseof conceptual thought.A talkingcure, as it were,where, in contrastto psychoanalysis,the control overthe mode of talk that the lexicalenregisterment of BasicEnglish demandsof itsusers will leadthem into denotationalutopia, marked by clear,unambiguous, and easilycommunicated thoughts" Note how consonantare theseaspects of the BasicEnglish movement with intellectualtrends in Europeand Americaduring this period,all beingexpressed in the emergenceof a suspiciousnessof ordinaryphenomenal language-as-discourse (notto be countereduntil the heighdayof J. L. Austin et al. and the last yearsof Wttgenstein,at Ox- and -bridge,respectively). As a socierlphenomenon that for themconstituted the parspro tota of all humansymbolic behavior, language-as-disc- oursecame to view for intellectualsand professionalsin the public sphere as somethingto be givena critical,theoretically-based interrogation or "reading"on behalfof the culture-hero,the individualhuman psyche, who could,in a sense,be victimized- the term is decidedlyof our own politicalera, note - by being led astray by its own talk. Imaginewith what great force this was driven home to Ogden and Richards on ArmisticeDay - the originalone - in 191fi,as they watchedOgden's bookstore in Cambridgebeing thoroughly trashed by an angry mob led by the medical students.Ogden had been publishingpacitist-leaning and mildly German-tolerant materialin the war years;this was his punishmentby the crowdof semioticvictims who were,our theoristsconcluded, reacting more to the "emotive"than to the "symbolic"and "referential"meanings in the verbal and other signsthat were the toolsof publishing(as of other intellectiveendeavor). Thus, they report,was The Meaningof Meaning(Ogden & Richards1923) born as a project and thesison that occasion. Through this connection, one can perhaps appreciate how vividly the "madness"of the War was presentedto the Cambridge-Bloomsburyitenetwork (the Woolfs,the Bells,Bertrand Russell,Keynes, the Stracheys,etc. etc.),and how such anincident of the publicsuppression and destructionof the artifactsof thoughtwas construableas essentiallythoughtless. That is,it couldbe seenas a result- like the Waritself - of the way that languagein a pathologicalform mediatessocial, i.e., aggregateand communicable,pathologies of thought that lead inevitably to war, destruction,and socialpathology. (Note then that the individual'sinherent, logical reasonablenessis maskedby pathologiesof languageand thus leads, under the communicativereconstruction of sociality-of-monads,to what appears to be a social-levelpathology.) And even the intellectuals and professionalsconcerned with language elsewherethan Bloomsbury- even thosein German-speakingEurope, indeed! - wereformulating parallel kinds of theoriesthat were at once clarifyingthe nature of mathematico-logicalthought, holding "natural" languages up to this clarificational modelby seeingthem throughit, and at the sametime flnding"natural" languages 188 Michael Silverstein deficientwith respectto it by conceptualundercoding or semioticsuperplenitude.s There is thus the potential for a kind of ex cathedrapriestly access to the refined or purified version of language-used-for-pure-symbolic-and-creative-thought,an enregistermentof an almost diglossicsituation for those who have mastered the discursivestyle of scientific-expositoryregister. Now Ogden,to be sure,was not recommendingthat everyonelearn how to perform the kinds of operationson everydayEnglish to render it orthologically purified, even as Basic. But he was taking the stanceof the sociallyaware and concernedscientist - just as,inversely, Richards was alwaysencouraging the masses 'em (of Harvard students,at any rate) to be eachand everyone of his own practical critic. And as concernedscientist, Ogden was formulating and launching a tool toward the end of clarifiedand rationalized"pure" denotation, free of messily-enco- ded emotion and calibratedto "reality." And with such a metric, developed out of Jeremy Bentham's theory of "(linguistic) tictions," which Ogden edited and published with an extensive commentary, the natural English language is found wanting: Too luxuriously hypertrophiedin lexicon,with manywords and lexicalizedexpressions that seemto be usedto denote "the samething"; with, indeed,many words that seemto be used to reter to what Benthamand Ogden and their like considernothing at all. Like Bentham,Ogden had no use for verbs,in fact preciouslittle use for predicationat all as a functionalconcept. And one can seethat he might well have been happy as one of Jonathan Swift's Sagesof Lagado,who dispensedaltogether with words in favor of the "real" things of verbal referring,which they merely exhibited (demon- stratioostentivo). For "real" things,successfully and correctlyreferrable-to by means of "literal" lexicalsimplexeso independent of other, contextualencumberments, was what Ogden was after. Hence, by eliminating synonymsand other elements of lexical-conjugatesets that are "emotively"-based,by invokingphrasal and compositio- nal paraphrasiswhenever possible (e.9., tears : e!€-woter),Ogden and his devoted assistants,principally Miss L.W. Lockhart, managed,by Spring, 1928,,to achievea pruning or slash-and-burnclearing through the OED and yield 850 such lexical primesor word-unitsas the elementsof BasicEnglish. 'positioned' What is of interest is rtot the obviously nature of the resulting list.?To be sure, the fierce sociohistoricallocatability of the items (e.g.,ink, porter)

- One has in mind here the development of formal mathematical logic (in which Russell was a major early player) and the usc of it to clarify the nature of scientificempiricism in the philosophy of science,under conceptions of operationalism, physicalism,logical constructivism,and so forth, one such trend culminating, for example, in Vienna Circle doctrines and perspectivesthat proved to be so influential for more than a generation in such fields as psychologyand linguistics especially in America.

u Not" that, in phrasal-hcad position, with rheir minimal obligatory inflections, if any, such lexical simplexesoccur as word forms, sometimesidcntical with the citation forms of metalinguistic operations by native speakers.

7 In ,y*potium presentation, this was reprocluced and clistributed from the chart in lronard Bloomfield's presentation copy of Ogden's PsycheMiniarure series essay,Debabelizarion ([.ondon: Kegan, Paul, Tfench, Tlubner & Co. 1931), now in the library of The University of Chicago. The February, 1934 inscription "To ProfessorBloomfield from the Author'sends Bloomfield to pp. 155 Ogden's orthological English 189 is almosttoo sadfor us to contemplateretrospectively, given the pretensionsof the list to universaliryin the mode of John Wilkins and other 17th century Puritan scientists.And also quite apparent is the expectedsemiotic myopia of the native speakersOgden & Co. suchthat the whole grammar of Englishdisappeared from 'plural' viewin their creation,except for the morphologicalparadigm of -s and a few other such things.The real grammar, organizingthe grammatical categoriesof Saussureansense for us linguists in highly intricate and complex patterns of arrangement,appears here as merely commonsensicalmodes whereby, for the nativespeaker, lexical units are combined in "natural" phraseology.After all, shouldn'tthe grammarof transitivetake as quasi-causative to intransitivego be, well, obvious?Tell that to a contemporarylike Sapir,Bloomfield, or Whorf!8.

ff., where he could have read:

"lt will thus be seen that Basic English fulfils in a high degreeoll the conditions laid down by professorsSapir, Bloomfield, Boas, Gerig, and Krapp as requisite for the successof an InternationalAuxiliary Language."

Wecan understand, perhaps, why Bloomfield quietly passedthc volume on to the library, saving the institutionpaying for it.

8 Whorf adclressesBasic English directly in a passageof his ca. 1936manuscript, posthumously published(Carroll [ed.] 1956: 65-86) called "A linguistic consideration of thinking in primitive communities."Noting (1956: 82-83) that such "social prophets" as H.G. Wells had been promoting "Ogden'singenious artificial language called Basic English," Whorf goes on to observe that

"Basic English appeals to people becausc it seems simple. But those to whom it seems simple either know or think they know English - there's thc rub! Every languageof course secmssimple to its own speakersbecause they are unconsciousof structure. But English is anything but simple - it is a bafflingly complex organization, abounding in covert classes, cryptotypes,taxemes of selection,taxemes of order, significantstress patterns and intonation patternsof considerableintricacy. English is indeed almost in a class by itself as regards prosodiccomplexity, being one of the most complex languageson earth in this respect;on the whole, it is as complicated as most polysynthetic languagesof America, which fact most of us are blissfully unaware of. The complex structure of English is largely covert, which makes it all the harder to analyze. Foreigners learning English have to absorb it unconsciously- a processrequiring years- by dint of constantexposure to bombardment by spokenEnglish in large chunks; there existsat this time no grammar that can teach it. As with BasicEnglish, so with olher artificial languages- underlying structuresand categories of a few culturally predominant European tonguesare taken for granted; their complex web 'a of presuppositionsis made the basis of a false simplicity. We say large black and white hunting dog' and assume that in Basic English one will do the same. ... The English adjectivesbelong to cryptotypeshaving definite position assignments,and their formula is a definite and complex one, but lo, the poor Indian organizeshis thinking quite differently. The person who would use Basic English must first know or learn the immensely intricate 'English covert structure of actual as she is spoke.' "We see here the error made by most people who attempt 1o deal with such social questionsof language - they naively suppose that speech is nothing but a piling up of LEXATIONS, and that this is all one needs in order to do any and every kind of rational thinking; the far more important thought materialsprovided by structure and configurative rapport are beyond their horizons. It may turn out that the simpler a language becomes overtly, the more it becomes dependent upon cryptotypes and other covert formations, the 190 MichatlSilv'erste in

It is of particularinterest that Ogden,who evenas a Cambridgeundergrad- uilte carriedorganizations and publicationson his backand shouldersas their chief or only responsiblepartv, operatedoutside of academraper se,having no regular Cambridgeor Londonappointment in a recognizablefield. But everthe intellectual entrepreneur.Ogden promoted the adoptionof Basicthrough the institutionsof applied sciencein the public spherethat he himselfcreated and staffed.By I93I, Ogdenand Richard.swere situated trans-Atlantically, Ogden in Cambridge-and-Lon- don, Richardson an extendedvisit in Cambridge,Mass., where he was to remain after 19-39.In the early 1920s,Ogden had createdPryche,whichwas an organof his OrthologicalInstitute and of the humanistsensibility of the movementhe hopedto fosterin educatedhighbrow circles. He founded,edited, and vigorously contributed to. Kegan,Paul's hilematiorrul Library of Pltilosoplryand Science(of which some 110 volumcs were ultimately to be published),his reprint-packagingPsyche Miniatures serics(many extractedtrom Ogden'sown prosein the magazine),and others as well. F{etounded - and. it might be said,essentially constituted - the Orthological Institute,first in Carnbridge,then in Bloomsbury.He wrote voluminouslyfor the nriddle-to-high-browpress - even in America, SaturdayReview, Harper's, etc. Richards,too, was.from his nominalHarvard appointmentas lecturerin the English compositionand rhetoric programat its Schoolof Education(he was only much later to become the prestigiousUniversity Professorhe was in later years), somethingrnore of a pr-rblicintellectual, vigorously publishing accessible material on bringing science- especiallyorthological science (though he did not, in this cis-Atlanticcontext, faithfully adhere to the term) - to criticismand thereby,through readingand writing,to thought. So note the toundationlaid among the educatedreading public, and the semblanceof authority thesewriters were building up for themselvesand their programmaticextcnsions-of-self. We can trace the index of the increasein their emergenceto publicview in the magazineaccounts of their work on BasicEnglish and related mattcrs. Over the courseof time, from 1923,when The Meaning of lv[enrtittgwas published,Ogden and Richardsappear as authorsin book reviewsof thcir textualproductions, to be sure.But increasinglyin the press,there are what we citn Ierm persornliaarticles, focused on the personagesthemselves as well as on their specifictexts. And by the time of the SecondWorld War,the work promoting Basrcthrough teachingtexts and a vast panoplyof media innovationsbecomes a recurrent f'eaturc that combinesthe personaliaaspect of the work with the contributionof thismetonymic British-American transatlantic cooperation to win the

more it concnealsuncclnscious presuppositions, and the more its lexationsbecome variable and indcl'inablc. Wouldn't this be a pretty kcttle of fish for the would-be advocatesof a 'simple' internationaltongue 1ohave had a hand in stewingup! For sound thinking in such fields we greatly nccd a competcnt world surveyof languages."

Obscrve the echocs hcrc both of Bloomfield's innovative 1933 terminology "eme"-icizinggrammar in terms ttf minimal units of formal grammatical arrangement,called taxenrcs,that are completely aul.onomousof the facts of surfacesegmentability or lexicalform, and, in its moralistic punch-line, of Sapir's earlier discussionsof international auxiliary language,to be basedon universal grammar ol grammatical processesand grammatical conccpts,and illustrated in the monographs "Tbtality," "Grading," and "The expressionof ending-point relations...,"and other work stimulated by Sapir's cllcountc:rwith Alice Vanderbilt Morris of the International Auxiliary Language Association. O,gii en .t ort ltt tI t tgit' t t I F-ngh.; h Ir)i war and get on with the rcconstructionof the world orcler.'['his rnrtrc'xcnt in exposureis not, of course, by accident. As early ?lsan editrlrial on "J'hc futluc of English"that Ogden published in the January, 1928 Pn'clic (r'olurnc 8. nunrl"rer,l). he trumpetsthe importance of the ortholoqicalapprrxrch to this question;

Philologistswill surely be the last to discovcrthc frcaringol modcrn p-rvchologlon tlrcrr devotcdlabours, the last to appreciatethc uscsof the gramuphoncin lin.rluistictcchtirtlrir'. andthc lastto realizethat on the applicationol'thcir laboursund that tuchnirlucttrc tu!urr of Empircs may now depend.

The futureof Africa lieswith thoserwho can masterAfrican llrngua{cs,artd st.rll nrori;' u ilh thosewho can devisca m()re practicalmcdium 0f communic;rtitln,in c()nililerccattd in racial interchange,for our black brcthren. That mcdium is likcly to frc sontc lirrm r;l Amcrican,but there is no reasonwhy it should not be F.nglish.Thc l'uturc:,in lact. u'ill bc with the languagewhich can simpli[y itsclf most rapidlv,and tfresrmplific:ation ol Englrsh is one of the mtlst important branchesof Orthologv.

JWlith a commandof 1000easily'menrorizcd namcs of common objr.:cts.situations. antl occurrcnces,and some500 linguisticdcviccs lbr opcratingand conncctinr lhcm. a lirrcitncr couldmakc himselfmore fluent and intclligiblcafte r a thrce monthscour\c in English than most Scotchmenand anv bucolic al'tcr [ifty vcars.Chauccr's English. lv{ilton'shnrlirh. or Oxford English, would then take thcir placewith [-atin, Wclsh,or Chemicallirrnrulac a] acc()r.nplrsluucnts for antiquarian,litcrary, local, scientific, t.lr pcllite socicl-v, and thc busincssol rntcrnltiuirel communicationmight leap forward a thousand ycars.

So the dream of winning, &S it were, thc World Wirr of words. and of rrakinir English- particularlyBritish-based English - already has its roots in how Ogde n links simpliticationof vclcabulary,"ntrmes," nc)te, "of comrnon objects. sitLrati

If languageis the fundamcn(alinstrumcnt of human coopcrati()n,and if th.crcir .rrr 'organic flaw' in the nature of languagc, we may well expcct to l'ind this rtrtantc lllrw 'naturc revealingitself throughout the tcxtureof st-lcicty.If the ol our thinking is dctcrnrrncd by the nature of our productiveforces,'u it bccomesvitallv nccerssaryto consider rvhet part

9 Not. here the superstructure/(infra)structure relationshrpcharactcristic of N{arx-rnlluenccd formulations,which would be both said and (of necessity)unsaid tbr thc sawl readcrship o[ T/rc NewRepublic. I have found no evidenceof this particular Marxist turn-ot'-phrascin Ogden - quitc thecontrary - but Burke's political affiliations and positions wcre, of course, and are well-knou'n. Note further down in the quotation the niccly Vygotsky- or Bakhtin-likc functionalism of "our speech[=language], which evolved out of use,again echoing the practice-bcfure-thoughl/structurc 792 Michael Silverstein

the genius of man's key productive force, language,has played in determining the nature of 'real his thinking, his notions as to what issues'are, and thence his ways of dcaling with them. For such reasons,a thoroughly documentcd technique of linguistic skepticism might be considered as essentialto human welfare as any single line inquiry. ' "...W" have reached a point in culture where our speech,which evolved out of use, must be made still more useful - othcrwise it will continue to servebest the needs of salesman- ship, political landslides,wars and Hitlerrte 'sanitation.' "

One can only be impressedby the prescienceof Burke (was he writing tongue-in-cheek?) in invoking the Benthamite orthological project as a machine-shopfor instrumentsto counter Nazism. For this is what ultimately prevailed,in the end. Indeed, Franklin Rooseveltand WinstonChurchill eventuallycame around, in mid-war, to endorseand even embraceBasic English as a kind of PaxAnglopho- nica for the post-Axisworld. Churchill, in his addressat Harvard (then Richards' university)on 6 Septernber1943, declared that "The empiresof the future are the empires of the mind," and sought such empires by "spread[ing] our common language even more widely throughout the globe and, without seeking selfish advantageover any, possessourselves of this invaluableamenity and birthright" (cited in Tinte22.82 [20 September1943]).tu By this time, Richardshad long since been collaboratingwith Walt DisneyStudios to produceanimated teaching cartoons to take Basicto suchplaces as China,one of the sitesof imperialstruggle yet to be resolved.And Ogden had begun negotiations,eventually ill-fated, to have His Majesty's government take over the work of the Orthological Institute in this practicalrealm of Basic. So the curious crppositionalirony existed,as Churchill was acceptinghis honorary Harvard degree that September,of having the American professional linguisticestablishment mobilized at i65 Broadwayin New York City to crank out the Army l.anguagecourses in a variety of intensitiesso as to make contactacross languagesand culturesfeasible, while on the WestCoast Walt Disneyand Richards had been preparing for linguistichomogenization through the instrumentalityof Basic. That ultimately things changedin the demobilization,the Army Language Program becoming the famous clr infamous"oral-aural" or "direct" or (barbarous) "linguistic"method teachingprogram in departmentsof languageand literature across Amerrca, the Basic program for places like China falling with Chiang Kai-Shek'sgovernment to be replacedby Mao's appliedlinguistics, is merely an historicaleventuality of a continuouscultural era.

orientation hcrc.

10 Alb"tt Gu6rarcl wrote in answer to this Churchillian and, as he discovered,orthologist's attitude in the 20 September 1943 issue of The New Republic (109.400),in his review of Basic Englbh and lts Usesby I.A. Richards, then recently publishcd. Entitletl "Linguistic imperialism,nGu6rard's piece finds that "Mr. Richards betrays,or rathcr displays,the magnificent insularity which is the pride of the Anglo-Saxon mind" - with a wonderful pun on insulaity - and invites Richards to show 'a 'orthological'clothing" 'All that he is not chauvinist in by agreeingthat dreams of imperialism' should be exorcized,including linguistic imperialism, which sums up all the rest." In retrospect,we can, I think,see the o^rrtr"roJ! ,.:^":::;;"T:r.:: of ideologicallicensing of the Ogdenian project, and the very emblematic embodimentof that project in the Ogden-Richardsdyad and its particular institutionallocation. At its heighdayemblentatizing an Anglo-Americanpartnership betweenBritain (and Cambridge)and the United States(and Cambridge,Mass.), betweena main OrthologicalInstitute and its branch office at the particularly anglophileoldest private university (historically connected to the other Cambridge), Ogdenand Richards were distinctivelypublic figuresin the circlesin which,in those years,"educated public opinion" translatedinto important decision-making.In the United States,certainly, support by The Rockefeller Foundation for a Harvard projectconstituted an important imprimatur of legitimacyand authority, for example.Such a projectwould, perhaps, more easilyenter into the consciousness of an FDR (Harvardclass of 1904),surrounded as he wasby people suchas Stuart Chaseand others of his "Brain Tiust." (Harvard and the Rockefeller Foundation were"private" institutions, to be sure,but still perhapsa mere quarter-stepaway from governmentalpower at this time.) Of course in Depression-eraand Wartime America and Britain, the ideologicalproject focused on savingthe polity from fascisms,communisms, etc. on rightand left,while amelioratingthe lot of truly sufferingpopulations within the orbit of liberal political institutions,based on individual rights - grounded in absolutesbeyond those institutions,recall, in political theory - and the rational participationof individuals.It is in such a context that the specific dualismsand dichotomiesof the Ogden-Richardsproject - like Count Korzybski'sproject of "GeneralSemantics" that flourishedcoevally - havesuch an appeal:The ameliora- tionand spreading of rationalityas a therapeuticantidote to thesepolitical threats, which are constitutedas the antithesisof individual, freely-exercisedrationality. BasicEnglish is the instrumentalroute into rational English (that most rational of languages!),a route that is quick,efficient, and achievablein the pressedcircum- stancesof a world needing a quick fix before it spins out of control. So as The Meaningof Meaningarticulated the distinctionbetween referential (read: Rational) and emotive (read: Irrational) functions of words, BASIC was presented and promotedas the quick way into the strictlyreferential content of English,the strict adherenceto which,it can be seen,constituted a longed-forcondition beyond the malaiselocated in this very dualismof the human psyche.llOgden and Richards' position,grounded in philosophicalanalysis and the paraphernaliaof academic,even scientific,research, is licensedas embodying the distinterestedposition of rationality asmuch as it theorizesthat very positioningand a route to it for everyone-and-any- onewho will learnBASIC. It is,in short,"science" applied, i.e., applied science, with thereforethe confidencethat this licensedauthority brings. The questionnow is, to what extentwe ourselvesas studentsof languagein our societystill live in this locationin the public sphere.We might note that the veryconcept of a "public sphere"might be analyzedas really cclnstitutedout of a

l1 'rationality' As notedby Russoin his comprehcnsivebiography of Richarcls,this dichotomy of 'affect' vs. underpinsall of Richards' literary criticism, which, like the Basic English project, flowed out of the orthological analysisof sign phenomcna and mind in the Edwardian Cambridge milieu of humanism.See esp. Russo 1989:35-385. i9.i itlrt:huelsrlvtr.stein prrfcctirin of ccrttrin ncccssilryconditions for rational discourseto be broadcast from unvwherc-arrcl-hence-evcrywhere-yet-nowhcre- such as Wilkin and Bentham arrrl Ogden ancl ... hrn'c treen after - onto a structure of supposedly inhabitable rolc-rci:rtrons abstracrabie frclm everything else sociocultural,especially positioned irrtcrcstsdiflcrcntiullv valurized. But here is. perhaps,where our own expository erpertisc al';out languagc actually makes its authoritativeness indexically - even en']trlcmirtically- maniicst. Tliere are. to be sure, theories around in our prot'ession- rii-ucirdcnricfrcld - think of Anna Wierzbickaor of George Lakoff - which duplicate rr; l.rrgc pirrt {)ne or another of the presumptionsof the Ogdenian mission,with at irast arsnruch cvangcli*rl fervor. And there are "applied linguistics"projects galclre littdcr suclt it tjcp;trtlttental rubric, from saving to reforming to suppressing irrnguaucsand r,arietics.each rnakingits authoritativeappeal to governmentswhich, as thc old savrng rmplies. crcate "languages"out of "dialects"by calling in the army rurdrrlr nirw on their behalf. But as anthropologists we must examine the very cuiturally and historically specific class-and sector-bound modernism of this cluster of instiiutionalizedactivities. Scl doing constitutesa probing of the possiblyessential, or inhercntly presupposin_{,relationship between the very concept of a "public sllhere" and its "public" on the one hand, and, on the other, the location in some ernboclitrblescientific authority of the mysticalpower to create or project "language" trom tcxt (entextualizations) in the applied science mode. These authoritative sclcntific statements have the dangerous eftect of seeming abductively to turn otherwrse leaden surfac:e tokens of ideologically democratic rationality into underlving goldcn sernrotictypes. And we nrust beware of the tendenciesto alchemy rn each of us thut mrrv secrr to come with the prot-essional-intellectuallicense.

Reltrcnces

lJurkr.:.Kcrrncth 1ltl3-l) l-hc nrcaningol'C.K. Ogdc-n. New Republic 78:328-3I.

[:rnngton.J. .loscph ( l9t'i-5) On thcnaturc of thcsociolinguistic sign: Describing the Javanese speech icvcls.In L,.N.{crtz. .t R.J.Purmcnticr (cds.), Seniotic ntediotion. Orlando, Fla.: AcademicPress, l,\7-31()

Erringttrn,J. Joscph(lgfil'i) Struc'ture und stylein Juv,anese:A seniotic t,iew of linguisticetiquette. Philadclphia:Linrvcrsitv tif PcnnsvllaniaPress.

Flrrrencc.P. Sargunt.J.R. Andcrson (1977)C.K. Ogden:A collectiv,enrcntoir. London: Elek Pcmberton.

(roertz,(llitlord (l96lJ[960i) Lrngurslicctrquctte. In J.A.Fishman (cd.),Readings in the sociologt ttJ hnqua'4t'"Thc Haguc: Mttuton.

Cucrard, Alhcrt ( 1913)Rc'"icw of BasicEnglish and its uscsby l.A. I{ichards.New Republic109:400.

Ogdcn, C'K (l92tJ) Thc fulure ol English.Pstche 8:3.1-8.

C)gdcn. C.K., I.A. Richards ( i9l3) Tht nrcaning ol'nteaning: A study of the infiuence of languoge upon thougltt uttt! of the sL:itnceoJ'n'ntholisnr. Lclndon: Kegan Paul, Tlench, Tiubner. Ogtlcn's orthologicat Engli.;h 195

Russo,John Paul (1989)LA. Richards:His lifc and work. Baltimorc: Johns Hopkins Univcrsity Prcss.

Silvcrstein,Michael (1979) Languagc structurc and linguistic idcologv. In P. Clync ct al. (eds ;, Ilrc elentents.Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Societv, 193-2+.1.

Whorl Ben;amin l-re (1956) LonEtagc. thottght, and rcolity: Selcctedv+'rititrss of'Bcnjuntitt Lt't' ll'lnrl' (ed.,J. B. Carroll).Cambridgc, Mass.: MIT Press.