Restoration and Repression: The Language Projects of the Royal Society

Restoration and Repression:zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQP The Language Projects of the Royal Society JOEL REED Historians studying the eighteenth century need not look to V. N. Voloshinov to realize that “the word is the most sensitive index of social changes”; writings of the early 1700s show an awareness of language’s social context two hundred years before Voloshinov made his observa­ tion, even if those doing the work would find themselves opposed to Voloshinov’s motivations.1 At the close of the seventeenth century mem­ bers of the Royal Society were doing the most important work on the English language, Thomas Sprat and Bishop John Wilkins in particular. We might in retrospect call their work socio-linguistics and, in Sprat’s case, a kind of discourse analysis, for they were especially concerned with the social context of language usage, with the two-way relationship between language and the society which speaks it. Of course, an impor­ tant distinction between Voloshinov and his predecessors in socio­ linguistics is that while Voloshinov’s project was linked with one of the most important revolutions of our century, we can link the Royal Socie­ ty’s linguistics to the most significant counter-revolutionary movement of theirs: the Restoration.2 Paralleling the restoration of the monarchy were Sprat and Wilkins’s efforts to restore language to an earlier, mythic purity, a double return of the repressed that is by no means coincidental. The politics of Royal Society linguistics is at least as significant as the Society’s scientific con­ 399 400 / REED tributions to the study of language for what it reveals about the political and ideological shifts at the turn of the century. In their work we see an important conjunction of the beginnings of scientific discourse, the epi­ steme of rational experimentalism that Timothy Reiss investigates, and a much older theological discourse which in the context of the Restoration could only be called a politico-theology.3 Royal Society discourse analy­ sis was particularly concerned with the relation between a fallen language and a fallen state, and with the proposition that a language saved from the fall, a language redeemed, could play a part in saving from corrup­ tion the state which speaks that language. This linguistic politico-theology was developed in two closely linked texts. Sprat’s fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA History of the Royal Society (1667) and Wilkins’s Essay Towards A Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) were printed for the Royal Society only a year apart, though the chronology of the texts must be complicated by the fact that Wilkins had completed his Essay in 1665, and it was nearly completely in print in 1666 when it was destroyed by the London fire.4 Thus, deciding which came first, Sprat or Wilkins, and which text is the primary or original one in the politicotheological linguistics, is more complex than it might seem from publica­ tion dates; the matter is complicated still further when we realize that Wilkins acted as a supervisor and ghost writer of Sprat’s History.5 Of course, this conjunction does not suggest that we regard these texts as identical; Wilkins’s invention of a universal language is precisely an example of the kind of research that Sprat refers to as the Royal Society’s principal work, while Sprat’s text, rather than being a particular scien­ tific study, has other functions. His history was written only five years after the Society received its charter from Charles II, but Sprat takes advantage of his project to work in a statement of intentions —a mani­ festo of sorts —as well as a “Defence and Recommendation of Experi­ mental Knowledge.”6 But an investigation of the development of a new discourse that relies heavily on the older theological forms allows us to see their work, at least on language and language history, in a close and even complementary relation. The Restoration plays an important role in their linguistic projects, both as a political and ideological ground, for what motivates Royal Society linguistics is precisely the restoration of an Adamic language and a return to an earlier time and social order that can be used to push forward new national projects. In a...