E. F. K. KOERNER
University of Ottawa
In the sciences, one confronts some puzzling facts and attempts to devise principles that will explain them. In ideological warfare, one begins with Higher Truths dictated from above. The task is to select the facts, or invent them, in such a way as to render the required conclusions not too transparently absurd at least for properly disciplined minds.
Noam Chomsky1
0. Introductory remarks
Among the participants in this `theme session' on "Language and Ideology" I need not dwell on the history of the term `ideology' at any length. If the French non-Marxist sociologist-philosopher Raymond Boudon, in a 330-page monograph devoted to the origin and diverging uses of `id閛logie' (Boudon 1986), did not succeed in coming up with a universally accepted definition of the term, nor succeeded in rescuing it from its largely negative connotations, I shall not try to bore the audience with my own attempt. We know that when the French philosopher A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy (17541836) in 1796 coined `id閛logie', it was intended to refer to nothing more than a theory of ideas, conceived within a sensorialist view of mind in the tradition of Condillac with practical and socially beneficial intentions, notably in the arena of public education. Given the Republican convictions of Destutt and his followers, the Id閛logues soon came under fire from Napoleon who shifted the term to the political realm, accusing them of ignoring political reality for abstract ideas. Marx, in The German Ideology written during 18451846, followed up on Napoleon's negative slant and used the term to refer to a false consciousness that is contradicted by the reality found in everyday material life. `Ideology' has since been much more a term of abuse than a well-defined concept of scholarly discourse. Perhaps this meeting today will succeed in putting a more positive spin on both the concept and the term.
It has become fashionable during the 1990s to make use of the word `ideology' in book titles (cf. Joseph & Taylor 1990, Simpson 1993, Huck & Goldsmith 1995, Schieffelin et al. 1998) there is even a textbook on the subject (Eagleton 1991), and as far as I can see, in each case something different is meant by `ideology', if it is given a definition at all. Kathryn Woolard (1998), while offering a fairly informative account of the different strands of uses of the term (5-9), states, discouragingly: "I use the terms `linguistic ideology,' `language ideology,' and `ideologies of language' interchangeably [], although differences among them can be detected in separate traditions of use" (p.4). Maybe, given such state of affairs, I should offer at least something like an operational definition for the present purpose after all?
As it will become obvious from what I am trying to say today, the subject of my own paper differs significantly from most of the papers presented here. I am not talking about language and ideology, but of linguistics and ideology, i.e., my focus is not on the use or abuse of language in the promotion of particular ideas or actions, but on specific, conscious or subconscious underpinnings of arguments made or maintained within the science of language, i.e., the field of linguistics, which is often presumed to be guided only by value-free scientific principles in the search of truth. In other words, my paper deals with the discipline, the profession of linguistics, not language uses and linguistic discourses of any kind, if `linguistic' is interpreted in the sense of German sprachlich (French langagier), i.e., "pertaining to language", not sprachwissenschaftlich (French linguistique).
1. The place of ideology in linguistic historiography
At least since the establishment of the so-called `Boppian paradigm' of comparative-historical linguistics, historians of the field have succeeded in presenting us with an image of the field as objective, value-free, in one word `scientific'. One looks in vain, in the textbook histories from Benfey, Delbr點k, and others in the late 19th century until those by Robins, Malmberg, and others of the late 20th century, for any recognition of the fact that in the work of 19th-century scholars from the early Romantic era until and including the positivist era of the Neogrammarians and their successors we in fact encounter at least ideological latencies which in certain conjonctures of history have come to the fore in a manner for all to see, if such a general awareness exists.
When talking about `linguistics and ideology', one may be thinking of Marrism which from the late 1920s till the early 1950s held sway in the Soviet Union as perhaps the most obvious example. And still one does not find a chapter devoted to this phenomenon and this period in Russian linguistics of the first half of the 20th century generally in the regular historiographical literature until, sauf erreur, very recently. The idea of ideology in linguistics surfaces in two recent books, ?ern 's Historia de la Lingstica, translated into Spanish by the author from his native Czech version of 1996 ( ?ern 1998), and in Andreas Gardt's Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland (Gardt 1999).
In ?ern 's book the subject of "ideolog韆 en la lingstica" (p.481) is mentioned in passing in various places, usually in conjunction with the name of Nikolaj Jakovlevi c Marr (18651934) and/or Marxism (pp. 2, 170, 199-200, 298), and it is obvious that these few passages about three pages altogether in a book of more than 500 pages were motivated by his native country's Communist past and the failed uprising in Czechoslovakia against the post-Stalinist regime in 1968 (see especially pp.481-482). Nowhere in his book does the author attempt a definition of `ideology' (which he seems to use as if it was a regular concept probably meaning something like "political superstructure") or an analysis of what this ideology meant in terms of the conduct of linguistic research.
The most recent publication that takes up the topic of my paper though its author, again, nowhere defines the term `ideology' is Andreas Gardt's Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland (Gardt 1999), whose title is remi niscent of Theodor Benfey's (18091881) well-known book of 130 years ago, but it is also there where the parallel beween the two accounts ends. Gardt's history is a much more modest undertaking and evidently the work of a Germanist, not an Indo-Europeanist. Yet Gardt's book contains passages that one could not expect to find in Benfey's voluminous study and which are of interest to scholars with an awareness that linguistics has always been, acknowledged or not, a discipline strongly influenced by external forces, intellectual, economic, and political. Although I believe that Gardt does not go far enough in his analysis of what he terms `Sprachnationalismus' (1999:301-319) people like Weisgerber, who has in recent years been clearly indicted as culpable of various acts of `mother tongue fascism' among others, does not receive more than a slap on the wrist (243-244) one must welcome his effort to open up the discussion of a subject that has thus far been excluded from the annals of linguistic science.
This general non-recognition of ideological consideratins playing a role in linguistics and its methodology is deplorable not simply because of the lack of social consciousness and sense of intellectual responsibility which t