TO THB EMPIRES Englishl

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

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