The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language (Material Texts) - Hardcover

Chenoweth, Katie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812251490 ISBN 13: 9780812251494

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Of all the cultural "revolutions" brought about by the development of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the most remarkable but least understood is the purported rise of European vernacular languages. It is generally accepted that the invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of language that has profoundly shaped modernity, and yet the exact nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has remained curiously unexamined.

In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and the vernacular as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics. Under François I, the king known in his own time as the "Father of Letters," both printing and vernacular language emerged as major cultural and political forces. Beginning in 1529, French underwent a remarkable transformation, as printers and writers began to reimagine their mother tongue as mechanically reproducible. The first accent marks appeared in French texts, the first French grammar books and dictionaries were published, phonetic spelling reforms were debated, modern Roman typefaces replaced gothic scripts, and French was codified as a legal idiom.

This was, Chenoweth argues, a veritable "new media" moment, in which the print medium served as the underlying material apparatus and conceptual framework for a revolutionary reinvention of the vernacular. Rather than tell the story of the origin of the modern French language, however, she seeks to destabilize this very notion of "origin" by situating the cultural formation of French in a scene of media technology and reproducibility. No less than the paper book issuing from sixteenth-century printing presses, the modern French language is a product of the age of mechanical reproduction.

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Katie Chenoweth is Associate Professor of French at Princeton University and directs the Derrida's Margins Project there. She is the director of the Bibliotheque Derrida collection at Editions du Seuil in Paris.

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Prologue
Originary Prints

Originary prints. Everything begins with reproduction.
—Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference

Of all the cultural "revolutions" brought about by the development of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the most remarkable but least understood is the "rise" of European vernacular languages. Walter Benjamin opens his essay on the technological reproducibility of the artwork by noting that "the enormous changes brought about in literature by movable type, the technological reproduction of writing" were, already in 1936, "well known." Historians today typically agree that movable type played "an essential role in the formation and fixation" of vernaculars like English, French, and Spanish, standardizing and codifying these languages according to new grammatical and orthographic norms. They recognize that printing gave rise to what Benedict Anderson calls print-languages, that is, mechanically reproducible idioms "below" Latin and "above" spoken vernaculars, which rose to power and allowed new proto-national communities to be imagined. It is generally accepted that the invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of language that profoundly shaped modernity. And yet the exact nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has remained curiously unexamined. This book sets out to better understand the relationship between printing and vernacular language that takes shape in the sixteenth century by looking closely at the history of one language—French—over the course of two remarkable decades, roughly 1529 to 1550. What happens to the French language in the print shop? How is the langue maternelle redefined or reinvented typographically? How does printing technology come to imprint itself on the national tongue, at its very root? What are the cultural and political stakes of fashioning a mechanically reproducible vernacular? And what other mutations—in the relation between technics and language, in the definition of the human, in the history of life itself—does this vernacular "rise" announce?

The Prosthetic Tongue charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains—from typography, orthography, and grammar, to politics, pedagogy, and poetics—over the course of two transformative decades in the sixteenth century. A veritable "new media" moment, the period between 1529 and 1550 witnesses a proliferation of technological effects within the body of the French language: the introduction of accents and new characters, the development of phonetic spelling reforms and royal language policies, the publication of the first French grammars and dictionaries that make the "mother tongue" a textual and pedagogical object, among others. The key initiators of this movement are humanist printers (Geoffroy Tory, Robert Estienne, and Étienne Dolet, to name a few) who set out to modernize the vernacular by deploying the materials, techniques, and underlying technological framework of the print shop. During this period, the French language comes to be increasingly mediated: mechanized, regulated, codified, and instrumentalized in unprecedented ways. And yet, as it is reinvented for the age of mechanical reproduction, the vernacular tongue will also come to appear more "natural" and "alive," more "native" and "maternal" than ever. I will argue that this, too, is a technological effect: by extending the reach of the voice typographically, printing endows the vernacular with a new spectral presence and an augmented form of "life." In this way, printing will at once intensify the technicity of the tongue and conceal that same technicity by producing new cultural fantasies of naturalness, nativeness, appropriation, and presence. Printing will introduce new effects of technological mediation while also instituting vernacular language as a privileged medium of self-presence, the idiom in which one hears oneself speak. In short, printing will operate as a prosthesis for the tongue that conceals its own prosthetic nature. Blindness to the prosthesis is the law.

This book thus seeks to allow what is technological at the "beginning" of the modern French language to come into view. My privileged theoretical interlocutor in this project is Jacques Derrida, whose work—best known under the name "deconstruction"—ceaselessly interrogates that which presents itself as "natural" or "living," as well as the originality of any "origin." When asked in the 2002 documentary film Derrida to describe the origin of deconstruction, Derrida appears at first to evade the question by pausing to note the mediated and artificial character of the situation in which he and his interviewer find themselves—before observing that he has, in fact, already begun to answer the question by performing one of deconstruction's quintessential gestures.

Before responding to this question [on the origin of deconstruction], I would like to make a preliminary remark on the utterly artificial character of this situation. I don't know who will watch what we are in the process of filming or recording. But I would like to underscore rather than efface the technical conditions and not feign "naturality" where it does not exist. I've already in a way started to respond to your question about deconstruction, because one of the gestures of deconstruction consists in particular in not naturalizing, in not acting as if what isn't natural were natural, as if what is conditioned by history, technics, the institution, society were given as natural.

Deconstruction entails, among other things, showing what is historical, technical, or institutional in that which might otherwise pass itself off as natural. "There is no deconstruction," Derrida will write elsewhere, "which . . . does not begin . . . by calling into question the dissociation between thought and technology . . . however secret, subtle, sublime or denied it may be." Deconstruction, as Arthur Bradley remarks, "remains the most self-conscious philosophy of originary technicity" inasmuch as it "destroys any concept of a pure, natural, or non-technical point of origin." Technics emerges in Derrida's thought as the originary and irreducible condition of "the entire sphere of the living." The central deconstructive gesture of this book will be to de-naturalize the modern French language—and, with it, the general category of the "vernacular," the "mother tongue," or the "living" language—by revealing how it has been historically constituted and conditioned by printing technology.

So-called vernacular language (the term comes from the Latin vernaculus, meaning "native," "domestic," "indigenous") is particularly susceptible to fantasies and ideologies of naturality. The "vernacular" or the "mother tongue" has always seemed to produce itself, as a figure of pure physis, or nature,unaffected by the externality or technicity of grammar or writing, for example. During the late medieval period and throughout the sixteenth century, vernacular language was regularly regarded as "natural" as opposed to Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the ancient textual languages characterized as "artificial." The most influential articulation of this natural/artificial distinction is that of Dante in the early fourteenth century. In his De Vulgari Eloquentia (1302?1305; editio princeps 1529), Dante affirms the superior "nobility" of vernacular language, which all infants "acquire from those around them when they first start to distinguish sounds," over the secondary technical artifact he calls gramatica, or grammatical language. While the vernacular is intimate and immediate, acquired from the breast with the nurse's milk, gramatica with its "rules and theory"...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812251490
• ISBN 13: 9780812251494
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 360
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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