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On the Diversity—and Productivity—of Language

Chapter 5 borrows Walter Benjamin’s description of the ‘narcotic historicism’ of nineteenth-century Paris (expressed in its arcades, panoramas, wax museums, and architecture) and applies it to comparative philology, suggesting that, in effect, it creates ‘museums’ of language. In this perspective, some forms of twentieth-century modernism appear as attempts to liberate the force bound up in historicist forms; Saussure, Bakhtin, and Benjamin unleash the productivity and creativity of language that had been explained (and confined) in the phonetic laws discovered in the previous century. Bakhtin does so by counterpoising heteroglossia with myth; Saussure does so by invoking a model of linguistic change modelled on urban life and the republican social contract; Benjamin does so in his theory of translation, which aims to recover a native linguistic energy from the diversity of actual languages. In their different ways, these paeans to linguistic productivity draw attention to another feature of mass democracy: its urban character.