The historicity of language, on the contrary, reveals its history immediately, and without intermediary; they communicate with one another internally. Whereas nineteenth-century biology was to advance more and more towards the exterior of the living being, towards what lay beyond it, rendering progressively more permeable that surface of the body at which the naturalist's gaze had once halted, philology was to untie the relations that the grammarian had established between language and external history in order to define an internal history. And the latter, once secure in its objectivity, could serve as a guiding-thread, making it possible to reconstitute - for the benefit of History proper - events long since forgotten.
V LANGUAGE BECOME OBJECT
It may be observed that the four theoretical segments that have just been analysed, perhaps because they constitute the archaeological ground of
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philology, correspond and contrast, term by term, with those that made it possible to define general grammar [47]. Working backwards from the last of these four segments to the first, we find that the theory of the kinship between languages (discontinuity between the broad families, and internal analogies in the system of changes) is opposed by the theory of derivation, which presupposed constant factors of attrition and admixture, acting in the same way on all languages of whatever kind, as an external principle and with unlimited effects. The theory of the radical contrasts with that of designation: for the radical is an isolable linguistic individuality, inside a group of languages, and serving above all as a nucleus of verbal forms; whereas the root, encroaching upon language from the side of nature and the primitive cry, exhausted itself till it was no more than an endlessly transformable sound which had as its function a primary nominal patterning of things. The study of the internal variations of language is also opposed by the theory of representative articulation: the latter defined words and gave them an individuality that distinguished them from each other by relating them to the content they were able to signify; the articulation of language was the visible analysis of representation; now words are characterized in the first place by their morphology and by the totality of the mutations each of their sounds is capable of undergoing. Above all, the internal analysis of language is opposed by the primacy accorded in Classical thought to the verb to be: the latter held sway on the frontiers of language, both because it was the primary link between words and because it possessed the fundamental power of affirmation; it marked the threshold of language, indicated its specificity, and connected it, in an ineffaceable way, to the forms of thought. On the other hand, the independent analysis of grammatical structures, as practised from the nineteenth century, isolates language, treats it as an autonomous organic structure, and breaks its bonds with judgements, attribution, and affirmation. The ontological transition provided by the verb to he between speaking and thinking is removed; whereupon language acquires a being proper to itself. And it is this being that contains the laws that govern it.
The Classical order of language has now drawn to a close. It has lost its transparency and its major function in the domain of knowledge. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the immediate and spontaneous unfolding of representations; it was in that order in the first place that representations received their primary signs, patterned and regrouped their common features, and established their relations of identity or attribution; language was a form of knowing and knowing
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was automatically discourse. Thus, language occupied a fundamental situation in relation to all knowledge: it was only by the medium of language that the things of the world could be known. Not because it was a part of the world, ontologically interwoven with it (as in the Renaissance), but because it was the first sketch of an order in representations of the world; because it was the initial, inevitable way of representing representations. It was in language that all generality was formed. Classical knowledge was profoundly nominalist. From the nineteenth century, language began to fold in upon itself, to acquire its own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of its own. It became one object of knowledge among others, on the same level as living beings, wealth and value, and the history of events and men. It may possess its own concepts, but the analyses that bear upon it have their roots at the same level as those that deal with other empirical forms of knowledge. The preeminence that enabled general grammar to be logic while at the same time intersecting with it has now been lost. To know language is no longer to come as close as possible to knowledge itself; it is merely to apply the methods of understanding in general to a particular domain of objectivity.
This demotion of language to the mere status of an object is compensated for, however, in three ways. First, by the fact that it is a necessary medium for any scientific knowledge that wishes to be expressed in discourse. It cannot itself be arranged, deployed, and analysed beneath the gaze of a science, because it always re-emerges on the side of the knowing subject - as soon as that subject expresses what he knows. Hence two constant concerns throughout the nineteenth century. The first is the wish to neutralize, and as it were polish, scientific language to the point at which, stripped of all its singularity, purified of all its accidents and alien elements - as though they did not belong to its essence - it could become the exact reflection, the perfect double, the unmisted mirror of a non-verbal knowledge. This is the positivist dream of a language keeping strictly to the level of what is known: a table-language, like the one Cuvier was probably dreaming of when he attributed to science the project of forming a 'copy' of nature; scientific discourse was to be the 'table' of things; but 'table' here has a fundamentally different meaning from the one it possessed in the eighteenth century; then, it was a matter of dividing nature up by means of a constant table of identities and differences for which language provided a primary, approximative, and rectifiable grid; now, language is not so much a table as a picture, in the sense that, freed from
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the intricacy that gives it its immediately classifying role, it stands a certain distance apart from nature in order to draw some of it into itself by means of its own passivity, and finally to become nature's faithful portrait [48]. The other concern - entirely different from the first, even though in correlation with it - was the search for a logic independent of grammars, vocabularies, synthetic forms, and words: a logic that could clarify and utilize the universal implications of thought while protecting them from the singularities of a constituted language in which they might be obscured. It was inevitable that a symbolic logic should come into being, with Boole, at precisely that period when languages were becoming philological objects: for, despite some superficial resemblances and a few technical analogies, it was not a question, as it had been in the Classical age, of constituting a universal language, but of representing the forms and connections of thought outside all language. And since language was becoming an object of science, a language had to be invented that would be a symbolism rather than a language, and would for that reason be transparent to thought in the very movement that permits it to know. One might say in one sense that logical algebra and the Indo-European languages are two products of the dissociation of general grammar: the Indo-European languages expressing the shift of language in the direction of the known object, logical algebra the movement that makes it swing towards the act of knowing, stripping it in the process of all its already constituted form. But it would be inadequate to express the fact in this purely negative form: at the archaeological level, the conditions of possibility of a non-verbal logic and a historical grammar arc the same. The ground of their positivity is identical.
The second compensation for this demotion of language is the critical value bestowed upon its study. Having become a dense and consistent historical reality, language forms the locus of tradition, of the unspoken habits of thought, of what lies hidden in a people's mind; it accumulates an ineluctable memory which does not even know itself as memory. Expressing their thoughts in words of which they are not the masters, enclosing them in verbal forms whose historical dimensions they are unaware of, men believe that their speech is their servant and do not realize that they are'submitting themselves to its demands.
