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>> 231 Epilogue “Language in Dissolution” and “A World without Words” Two very different texts occur to me as forming the end to this book. One, Roman Jakobson’s 1956 essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” I return to, having read it many times over the past decade. The other, David Goode’s 1994 A World without Words: The Social Construction of Children Born Deaf and Blind, I’ve been reading for the first time. Jakobson’s essay is a classic of rhetoric , linguistics, poetics, and literary theory that is remarkable also for its attempt to serve as an intervention into clinical practice. Goode’s book consists of case studies of deaf-blind children which then serve as grounding sites for thinking about the phenomenology of human consciousness and social relations—that is, of consciousness without language and how those with language can form relationships with the non-linguistic. To read and think about these texts is to rehearse the themes and arguments of The Disarticulate. Taking them together, we see how figures with impaired language or cognition are placed in texts, generate speculation on impairment, on language as such, particularly on tropes, on subjectivity as linguistic or non-linguistic; we see the figures of the impaired serve also as indices pointing back toward those actual people with cognitive or linguistic impairments and so are obliged to think of the social and ethical conditions of their lives, their material and social needs, their potentials for agency, their requirements for care. As we see anew in these two final texts, scientific and clinical discussions of those I have termed dys-/disarticulate inexorably 232 > 233 form them into sentences. They suffered from a “continguity disorder,” which led to the “degeneration of the sentence into a mere ‘word heap,’” in Hughlings-Jackson’s term (106). Jakobson’s originality lay in connecting these two sorts of aphasia with two ancient terms of rhetoric and poetics: metaphor and metonym. Metaphor, as he described it, is the identification of similarities, and the selection of a proper term based on some similarity. Metonym is an expression of spatial or logical relation. Therefore, the “similarity disorder” entails a disabling of the metaphorical capacity of language while the “contiguity disorder” is a disabling of the metonymic. In Jakobson’s argument, impairments of speech can now be understood in relation to the foundational components of language, and so linguistics—“the science of language”—can take its rightful place among the biological sciences and no longer be “passed over in silence, as if disorders in speech perception had nothing whatever to do with language” (96). But the essay now becomes more puzzling. Having made this strong analogy between tropes and language disorders and stated his intention that his argument be received as an intervention into clinical discourses, Jakobson shifts the essay toward literary analysis. Different types of aphasia (similarity and contiguity) correspond to different basic tropes (metaphor and metonym). And these different tropes then correspond to different literary periods and genres. Metaphor characterizes romanticism and symbolism and, more generally, poetry; metonym characterizes literary realism and prose narrative. Modern literary theory as Jakobson saw it in 1956 neglected prose, metonym, and realism in favor of a focus on poetry, romanticism/symbolism, and metaphor. Thus, somehow , in the conditions of modernity, a language of plenitude that would employ both metaphor and metonym had become split and fallen. “The actual bipolarity [of language] has been artificially replaced . . . by an amputated, unipolar scheme” (114), which, as I take it, constitutes modernism —a dys-/disarticulated, “amputated,” “word heap” that suffers, like an aphasic subject, from a contiguity disorder. Part of the amputation involves loss of the referent, which is the domain of “pragmatical prose.” Poetry, on the other hand “is focused upon the sign” and so is deemed by modernists as the sole proprietor of all “tropes and figures” (114), which now must be regarded as empty of reference or context. 234 > 235 real, the traumatic, the other. Jakobson, in 1956, reiterates the linguistic tensions of modernism and anticipates the sublimes of contemporary neuroscience. And yet the essay has a fairy-tale quality to it as well. The development of language and the breakdown of language, for Jakobson, turn out to be exact reflections of each other. We come into language and out from language along the same route. But this is not true, as cognitive linguist Sheila Blumstein informed me. An adult with damage to language areas of the brain does...

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