The Origin of the Dictionary and the Rise of English in Foucaultian Terms
Introduction
There is a significance of the English dictionary in the disciplining of the academic field now known as “English”. I would like to suggest that the English dictionary serves as a kind of symbolic central tower in the panoptican of English studies. The dictionary has a kind of invisible power that subjects us to write correctly and, at the same time, gives us our identities as proper English students who can write correctly. With this I have tried to echo Foucault’s theory of power, that it both oppresses and, more importantly, produces us as subjects of a certain system.
I will be doing a little bit of Foucaultian archaelogy, looking at the history and purpose of the English dictionary – culminating on Samuel Johnson’s monumental A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755 – and how the dictionary has shaped the literary consciousness of English Enlightenment.
At the turn of the 18th century, however, there was an explosion of English dictionaries published in the market, beginning with John Kelsey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum in 1708, and ending with John Walker’s A critical pronouncing dictionary and expositor of the English language in 1794. In between is Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary, which went through many editions; Johnson himself was constantly revising the dictionary up until his death. Going through the catalogue of 18th Century online collection, I was able to find at least 40 different English dictionaries published in the 18th century, and all of them went through at least a handful of editions and revisions.
So why is there this great explosion of demands for the dictionary? After all, people have been writing all this time: in the history of English literature we have seen the genius of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, and they did not need dictionaries. In our consideration, perhaps it is best leaving out anytime before the 17th century, since hardly anyone actually knew how to write anyway: writing was a privilege of the elite. But by the time of
Purpose of the Dictionary
Linguistic historians point out that between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century there is a pedagogical shift from the studying of (Latin) grammar to the studying of (English) usage. At the time of Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, the grammarians dominate the study of language. Specifically, Latin is the main body of knowledge that students (of presumably upper class aristocrats as well as those of the clergy) had to master. By the time of Johnson’s dictionary, he is able to speak of “assist[ing] the students of our language”. The English language, by mid 18th century, has become a language to be studied, and therefore to be used correctly and perfectly.
Indeed, we ought not to be surprised by this indication: it is in the 18th century that we see the rise of the English language into prominence. From an economic view point, the 18th century did see the rise of a certain group of people which many historians termed as the “middle class”: these are people who began to profit from the expanding trade and commercial activities that were for sure on the rise at the turn of the 18th century. The world of commerce spoke not Latin but English. Correct and efficient standardizations of communication are vital for prosperous trades. From a political point of view, the 17th century in general saw the dominance of Louis XIV; the French language and culture were extremely influential. Nearing the end of the 17th century, English was exhausted from decades of civil war, which was more or less put to rest by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, with the installment of William and Mary. Conscious or unconscious, England has a need to unify itself into a National character, and what better way to do it than having a nationally unified language, upheld by the supreme authority of the dictionary? In fact, getting rid of the French influence is the subject of many dictionaries and grammar texts in the 18th century; Samuel Johnson, in the Preface to his dictionary, notes that the dictionary would help English speakers not to “babble a dialect of
Foucaultian Archaeology of the Dictionar
I have suggested that the dictionary is symbolically the central tower of the panopticon. For Foucault this is not a metaphor because the panopticon is literally how power operates. But in order for us to understand how the authority of the dictionary operates, we need to consider the panopticon as a metaphor. If the dictionary is the central tower, then individual cells represent individual learners of the English language. Recall Foucault’s two ways of training subjects: hierarchical observation and normalizing judgment. Without the dictionary, there is no normalizing judgment: English users are a blob of people who all have their own ways of speaking “English”; there are already many different dialects of the language, each with its own little variations. This did not matter in the 17th century, since English was not the necessary language of communication for important issues (such as politics and, more importantly, the scripture). Everyone who dealt with these important issues knew their classical languages. But in the 18th century, when commerce began to be prominent, and a new generation of “middle-class” who did not have classical training began to rise, there emerged a need to standardize the language: there needed to be some kind of normal English, so that people of the entire country can communicate without trouble. Once the dictionary is constructed, how to standardize the language becomes a much simpler task: the vague question of “how to use English correctly?” now can be categorized as how to spell correctly, how to use different forms of verbs, how to use a word correctly, how to pronounce each English word correctly, and so on. In each category the dictionary becomes the objective authority whereby normalizing judgments can be grounded upon.
Not only judgment upon the English language is normalized, it is also hierarchized. This is why many (if not most) of the advertisements of the dictionaries try to sell the dictionaries as tools that will allow writers to write with more elegance. (If you are not upper class, at least you can sound upper class!) For Foucault, where there is a site privileged by a mass of people, there will be differences; where there are differences, there is power. The English language, now a privileged site, now with a normalizing judgment, symbolized by the mighty authority of the dictionary, begins to slot different people into different hierarchal positions according to the value of the differences. A certain range of vocabulary, a certain kind of pronunciation or dialect, a certain kind of sentence structure (“The structure of his sentence is French”), and so on, all contribute to how a certain way of using the English language rank within the hierarchical system. Shakespeare? Sometimes he is too vulgar;
The dictionary also metaphysically surveys (to play on the word “surveillance”, although the dictionary will most certainly point out my usage error) the users or subjects of the English language; in other words, we have internalized the power matrix opened up by the dictionary: without the dictionary, there would be no authority to judge us; there would not be so many categories in which we as writers are judged by; we would not be thinking that we are constantly judged; we would not automatically go look words up in the dictionary whenever we feel like that we are not writing correctly in English – the notion of “correct English” would not even exist. We literally think that we are constantly being gazed at by a personified dictionary, and that is why we automatically regulate our literary behaviours. We ought not to be surprised to see that at the precise moment of Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language we have truly reached an age in which English emerges as its own language; the 18th century brought to England the climax of English poetic elegance as well as English prosaic prowess – Johnson himself was a brilliant writer of essays and poet of satires.
I must reiterate that power, for Foucault, is both oppressive and productive. We cannot think that power is only oppressive. Power is oppressive because it subjects us to its gaze and its systems of hierarchy; but more importantly, it is also productive because it allows us to become subjects of that system – it gives us an identity we can cling onto and identify ourselves as. Without the dictionary, anyone is just part of a random group of “English speakers”; the dictionary sorts out who we are – it identifies us both positively (“we are capable of spelling latinated words”) and negatively (“we are not those who does not know what latinated words are”). As Foucault writes, “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.” (194)
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