Deafness, Gesture and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy 9027205035, 9789027205032

Table of contents :
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Deafness as deficiency
2 Deafness as deficiency continued: The “Wild Child” in the 18th century as a conceptual twin of the deaf person
3 Deafness as difference
4 Deafness as difference continued: Pierre Desloges’s account of signing from a signer’s perspective and Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb
5 The origins of language
6 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

gesture studies 8

Deafness, Gesture and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy Josef Fulka

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Deafness, Gesture and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy

Gesture Studies (GS) issn 1874-6829

Gesture Studies aims to publish book-length publications on all aspects of gesture. These include, for instance, the relationship between gesture and speech; the role gesture may play in social interaction; gesture and cognition; the development of gesture in children; the processes by which spontaneously created gestures may become transformed into codified forms; the relationship between gesture and sign; biological studies of gesture, including the place of gesture in language evolution; and gesture in human-machine interaction. Volumes in this peer-reviewed series may be collected volumes, monographs, or reference books, in the English language. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see benjamins.com/catalog/gs

Editor Adam Kendon

University College London

Volume 8 Deafness, Gesture and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy by Josef Fulka

Deafness, Gesture and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy Josef Fulka Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/gs.8 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2019055547 (print) / 2019055548 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 0503 2 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6148 9 (e-book)

© 2020 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents

Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Deafness as deficiency Deafness and the “deficiency paradigm”  17 Historical excursion: Hobbes  20 Deafness in the context of 18th-century philosophy: Condillac’s theory of knowledge and the deaf of Chartres  24

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Chapter 2 Deafness as deficiency continued: The “Wild Child” in the 18th century as a conceptual twin of the deaf person 35 Condillac’s and Rousseau’s view of wild children  35 Itard’s view of deafness in Treatise on the Maladies of the Ear and of Hearing  39 Concepts of language and the education of Victor  43 Chapter 3 Deafness as difference Deafness, norm and normativity  55 Historical excursion: St. Augustine  61 18th-century empiricism and deaf education  68 Chapter 4 Deafness as difference continued: Pierre Desloges’s account of signing from a signer’s perspective and Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb Pierre Desloges  77 Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb: General background  82 Gestures without speech  85 Diderot’s view of deafness and sign language  93

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Deafness, gesture and sign language in the 18th century French philosophy

Chapter 5 The origins of language Historical excursion: Lucretius  102 The natural origin of language in De Rerum Natura  102 Lucretius’s view of language and animal communication as interpreted in Montaigne  106 The problem of human-animal continuity in Lucretius and in discussions today  108 Lucretius and the nomothetic theory of language origin  111 The 18th century: Rousseau and Condillac  113 Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge  115 Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality  121 Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language  127 Rousseau’s Émile  131 Later developments with regard to sign language  136 Bébian: Sign language of the deaf as a surviving form of the language of action  137 Edward Tylor’s view of sign language  142

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Chapter 6 Conclusion

149

Bibliography

155

Index

163

Acknowledgements

The present work could not have been carried out without the help and support of several people and institutions. On the Czech side, I would like to express my gratitude to students, friends and colleagues at the Department of Deaf Studies at Charles University in Prague, where I have been teaching, for several years, courses dedicated to the topics that are closely connected with the contents of the present book. I would like to thank the Czech Fulbright Foundation which has granted me a scholarship that enabled me to spend several months at the University of Texas at Austin (Department of Communication Studies) and to carry out a considerable portion of the necessary research. My most sincere thanks go to Jürgen Streeck from the above-mentioned department for having accepted me as a Fulbright visiting scholar, for his kind interest in my work and for many illuminating discussions we had on the subject. I would also like to thank the members of his research group who have provided me with most valuable feedback during our wonderful Friday sessions: among those, let me mention at least Kate Mesh and Eryn Whitworth. Above all, I would like to express my infinite gratitude to Adam Kendon who has carefully read and re-read my manuscript and provided me with so many critical remarks and suggestions for improvement that it practically makes him a co-author of the present study.

Introduction

The present study is an examination of how certain issues concerning deafness, sign language and gesturing have been treated in the writings of a selection of philosophers, with a special focus on French philosophers from the 18th century. Since Antiquity, many philosophers have been interested in deafness (and related matters) because it raises a cluster of problems and questions that have always been felt to be of great importance. These include among others: if a deaf person can have no access to language (as has often been believed), how might they be able to communicate? If they have no language, what sort of thoughts might they be capable of? If they use gestures to communicate, can this be considered as a form of language? If so, can this form of language throw any light upon how language came into existence in the first place? Even though these questions have haunted philosophers for centuries, the following study concentrates on one particular time span for two reasons: first, it would be too ambitious to present an exhaustive overview of how these questions were treated in the history of European philosophy, especially given the approach chosen here and based on close reading of particular texts, and second, in treating these issues, the 18th century French philosophers certainly deserve a special place, for reasons that will be mentioned later in this introduction. Three lines of inquiry will be followed here. The first concerns the 18thcentury empiricism and theory of knowledge and perception. It is especially in this context that many writers approach deafness as a kind of deprivation. Here a deaf person is often regarded as someone deprived of access to language, and this idea usually implies that the deaf are thereby deprived of the symbolic or abstract dimension of thought. The second, on the other hand, concerns the interest that certain writers of the period – like Pierre Desloges and Denis Diderot – manifested in sign language proper. It will be argued that this interest gives rise to a diametrically opposed image of deafness: deafness as difference. Here a deaf person is seen as being endowed with a kind of linguistic expression different from that of the hearing people, and sign language is not viewed as being inferior to spoken language. And finally, the third concerns the 18th-century thinkers’ fascination with the question of language origins. It is especially the question of gesturing in broader

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sense that will be of concern here. Many of the 18th-century philosophers, as is well known, have seriously considered the possibility that early forms of linguistic communication had something to do with gesturing. In the context of the 18thcentury debates on the origin of language, a third image of the deaf appears: deaf as a witness of language origins, as someone in whom the early gestural form of communication has “survived” up to the present. It must, of course, be borne in mind that this triple distinction is made mainly for analytic purposes and that the three realms outlined above largely overlap in the given period. Some of the philosophers who will, in what follows, appear as the representatives of the deficiency approach (like Condillac and Itard), certainly do mention sign language of the deaf. Diderot, who will be presented as a representative of the approach based on difference, is certainly interested in the nature of perception. Both Diderot and Condillac, at the same time, do treat the question of language origins etc. In the 18th century, all of the issues treated here were interwoven and closely connected to one another.

Gesturing and signing: Outline of a historical development One important remark must be made at the very beginning. In discussing the selected texts that seem particularly relevant for our subject matter, gestures and signing shall be treated together, even though from the standpoint of modern research, these are often considered as distinct. This requires some clarification. This methodological choice is dictated by the historical perspective adopted in this study: all of the writers discussed here wrote before it was thought important to make this distinction. This came to be so only after the demonstration in the 1960s, that the signed communication observed in deaf communities has structural linguistic features. As a result, sign languages, so-called, could qualify as languages, in the way that this is understood by modern linguistics. Once its linguistic status was recognised, however, it was felt necessary to sharpen the boundary between “sign” and “gesture”, thereby emphasising that what was being done when signing was not “gesturing”. Unless allowance is made for the fact that the writers considered here wrote well before this distinction was emphasised, their writings are sometimes in danger of being misinterpreted. The need of drawing a sharp distinction between “sign” and “gesture” (and, accordingly, to affirm the linguistic character of signing as opposed to “mere” gesturing) is a result of a complicated historical development, not devoid of ambiguous features, rather than being an “objective” overcoming of a previous lack of knowledge. On the one hand, the dismissal of sign language as “mere” gesturing has certainly been one of the key arguments of the opponents of signing and the history



Introduction

of sign language is undoubtedly a history of its oppression, as many scholars have argued (see, among others, Lane 1984). On the other hand, in certain contexts, the idea that the signing of the deaf was a kind of language was not uncommon, and no need was felt to raise the issue of its relationship to gesture. In his treatise on the sign language of North American Indians, published in 1880, Garrick Mallery, for example, posits the language-like nature of signing quite plainly: It cannot be denied that the deaf-mute thinks after his instruction either in the ordinary gesture signs or in the finger alphabet, or more lately in artificial speech. By this instruction he has become master of a highly developed language […], but that foreign language he has obtained through the medium of signs. This is a conclusive proof that signs constitute a real language and one which admits of thought, for no one can learn a foreign language unless he had some language of his own […]. (Mallery 1972: 16, emphasis added)

Later in the same book, Mallery goes on to make a distinction between gestures (and what he has in mind is obviously sign language) and speech in the following terms: due to their “pantomimic character”, gestures are more apt to express dramatic action and visual concepts, while speech is better suited for abstract thought. But he concedes, at the same time, that this alleged superiority of speech might be due not to any “inherent incapacity” of sign language, but simply to its insufficient development caused by purely external factors. It may well be true, Mallery concludes, that under more favourable conditions, “man could by his arms, hands, and fingers, with facial and bodily accentuation, express any idea that could be conveyed by words” (Mallery 1972: 102). These words of Mallery’s were quoted simply in order to show that the relationship between gesturing, signing and speaking was sometimes rather subtle and did not necessarily involve any clear judgement of value as to the superiority of one over another. Why, then, was it deemed necessary, at a certain moment of history, to distinguish between signs and gestures? In the early 20th century, there was a marked decline of interest in signing, and in gesture more generally. This was due to several factors: one of them was the dominance of oralism over sign in the education of the deaf, which spread widely following the decision in favour of oralism that was taken at the second International Congress of Educators of the Deaf, held in Milan in 1880. There was also the rise of social Darwinism which led to a reinterpretation of human history in evolutionary terms: gestures and signing, which had (especially in the 18th and early 19th century) often been viewed as a form of original language of humankind, suddenly acquired animal-like or “subhuman” features (Baynton 1996: 54–55). Moreover, Baynton shows that this new view of history was closely connected with the emergence of the notion of norm and normality, which gradually supplanted

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the Enlightenment concept of human nature and hugely contributed to a change of how the language of the deaf was perceived – instead of being a trace of the natural and universal language of the human race, it fell on the side of the abnormal and unnatural (Baynton 1996: 132–148). On the anthropological and linguistic front, the rise of structuralism, which led to an emphasis on the synchronic structure of language and other social systems, rather than upon historical development, contributed to a loss of interest in the questions connected with the problem of language origins to which the study of gesture had much relevance, and was at least partly responsible for this recession (Kendon 2004: 62–83). It is in this context that the necessity of distinguishing between signing and gesturing must be understood. The above-mentioned development (see Baynton 1996; Lane 1984 for detailed discussion) has resulted in a general belief that the communication of the deaf was essentially non-linguistic: that it was precisely “mere” gesturing or pantomime. This belief remained dominant until the early 1960s. It is, therefore, easy to see that the recognition of manual communication of the deaf as having the status of “language” in the sense in which this is understood in modern linguistics had very important consequences for the social status and self-esteem of members of signing communities. Since 1960, we have witnessed a long emancipatory struggle of deaf communities mostly in the urban West (the United States, France, Italy, etc.), a struggle in which the question of the status of signing as language has played an absolutely crucial role. In 1960, William Stokoe published (Stokoe 1960) what can justly be called a revolutionary “discovery”, a discovery in the sense of identifying a new scientific object: he showed that the signing used by the deaf he observed at Gallaudet (a college, now a University for deaf students) where he was teaching, had a structural systematicity comparable to that of spoken languages.1 Whereas signing by the deaf had often been dismissed as primitive, corporeal, material and lacking abstraction, Stokoe showed that they were using a system of symbolic communication that was organized in ways quite comparable to what is found in spoken languages. He showed that signs can be contrasted with one another in terms of limited sets of handshape types, movement patterns and locations,2 and thus could be said to have something comparable to a phonology. Accordingly, in signing we find “duality of patterning” in the structure of signs, which is widely considered to be a key feature of any language (see Hockett 1960). Further, Stokoe showed 1.  It is probably in this respect that Stokoe’s discovery may truly be called revolutionary: others before him may have been convinced of linguistic nature of signing, but Stokoe has proved the linguistic character of sign language on the basis of its structural analysis. 2.  These he termed “cheremes”, a term now no longer used since these are now regarded as “phonemes”.



Introduction

that signed expressions were organized according to syntactic rules. Signing, thus, could be regarded as language and was analyzeable in terms very similar to those applied in the analysis of spoken languages. In short, sign languages can be regarded as languages in their own right, fully equal in structure and function to spoken languages (Stokoe 1960; see also Maher 1996). In other words, sign language – just like spoken language – has what is called “double articulation”, and the minimal units are, except for their manual modality, equivalent to phonemes. This had farreaching consequences as far as the status of signing communities was concerned, and it was from this time onward that the question of the relationship between gesturing and signing became of crucial political importance. Once signing came to be recognized as a form of language, the community of its users accordingly came to consider itself as a linguistic and cultural minority. This, of course, is true of the deaf communities in the Western urban societies (Europe and the United States), often characterized by a segregation of their deaf members, especially in the realm of education.3 Here, the recognition of signing as language has helped to develop a sense of linguistic and cultural identity of which the members of the given community can take pride. Accordingly, the notion of Deaf (with a capital D) as a cultural group with its own language and culture was promoted (for a more detailed discussion, see Padden, Humphries 2005; Ladd 2003; Lane 1999; Delaporte 2002). This particular “political” situation – involving a need to prove, beyond all doubt, that sign language is a true language – was reflected, in turn, in linguistic research concentrating on sign languages, especially in the first period of the development of this field. Logically, this situation has led to a stress being placed on those very features of signed languages that qualify them as languages: first, the difference (in nature) between signs and “mere” gestures, and second, the grammatical and syntactic aspects that signed and spoken languages share (leaving aside those features which seem to be more specific to sign languages rather than spoken ones, such as a higher degree of iconicity, specific use of space etc., for it is precisely these features that have long served to devalue sign language and to qualify it as inferior to speech).4 3.  It must, however, be noted that these basic characteristics of the deaf emancipation are not universally applicable to all communities with deaf members. In certain non-industrial societies, there are, for example, the cases of “village sign languages”: in those communities with a high degree of hereditary deafness, the deaf often participate in everyday activities alongside the hearing and their signing is accepted and shared – to varying degrees – by the hearing people in their community (de Vos, Zeshan eds., 2012). 4.  In recent years, however, when the linguistic character of signing can no longer be denied, the debate on the distinction (or non-distinction) between gesturing and signing has re-emerged in a new form. When, as just explained, this distinction is made in order to make sure that signing by the deaf is not looked upon as being the same as the seemingly spontaneous and

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With the emergence of a sense of community among many deaf and the development of an awareness that communities of signers shared a distinct language and culture, there has arisen a new need to trace the history of those communities and of their language – and this brings us back to the initial issue of signs and gestures. The present study is an attempt to present one of the versions of such a history (other versions have been written, see for example Lane 1984; Cuxac 1983). Even though it was primarily motivated by research in the history of philosophy, many other domains, of course, had to be taken into account (rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, deaf studies, and a few more). It will also be necessary to move across different “traditions” when it comes to interpreting particular texts (according to Adam Kendon, in regard to the treatment of gesture there are four such traditions: the moral tradition, the rhetorical tradition, the artistic tradition and the philosophical tradition/Kendon 2000: LXV–LXVII/). The transversal movement seems inevitable because those traditions often do not have a clearly delimited boundary, certain ideas migrate across them and sometimes it even seems that these “traditions” may rather be seen as different accents that the study of gesture has acquired across the centuries at different points in history. Nonetheless, the history of philosophy was the primary field in which the present work is grounded. It soon became apparent that in most texts, sign language and gestures are not considered distinct phenomena (or at the very least, the boundary between them is not delimited clearly). Sign language is often deemed to be simply a unwitting kinesic actions that may be seen in speakers, it can be formulated in a categorical manner. However, when we undertake a comparative examination of the different ways in which humans, hearing or deaf as they may be, make use of their kinesic resources, the issue of “gesture” versus “sign” is no longer clear cut. As Kendon has put it, “humans have at their disposal the gestural medium which can be used in many different ways and from which many different forms of expression can be fashioned” (Kendon 2004: 107). Whether a kinesic system of communication is accorded the label “language” or not, and whether a given kinesic expression is to be regarded as “linguistic” or not, is not a hard and fast matter. How complex and nonspecialised in use must a communication system in this modality be before it deserves the label of “language”? What criteria do we use to decide whether a gesture system, such as homesign, is to be called a “language” or not? Further, it is now more widely accepted that signers make extensive use of forms of expression that cannot easily be analysed in terms of discrete categorial units with a phonological structure (that is, showing duality of patterning). Use is often made of simultaneous constructions (which are not possible in speech). Further, many expressions in sign languages share semiotic features with those found in co-speech gestures. The boundary between what is a “sign” in signed discourse, and what is a “gesture” cannot always be cleanly decided. The question of the relationship between “gesture” and “sign” assessed from various points of view, including the question as to whether and when “gesture” is a part of signing has received considerable discussion. See, for example, Okrent (2002), Emmorey (2002), Liddell (2003), Vermeerbergen et al. eds. (2007), Andrén (2010), Kendon (2004, 2008, 2017), GoldinMeadow and Brentari (2017).



Introduction

complex system of gestures: the French expression le langage des gestes or le langage d’action, used in 18th-century reflexion on the origins of language, for example, encompasses many meanings, ranging from gestures and home-signing to sign language proper. Sometimes, it is not even clear what philosophers had in mind when they spoke about the communication of the deaf. Did they consider it to be a language or a system of gestures, perhaps just a little more sophisticated than the one hearing people use? A study concentrating on historical materials cannot ignore this fact since the absence of a precise line of demarcation between gestures and sign language is often the very starting point of reflexion on the manual mode of communication, whatever its nature and purpose. What’s more, these topics are closely related to other subject matters, such as the question of perception, of language acquisition or the question of the origins of language. All of these need to be taken into account if we are to avoid simplifications and a one-sided reading of the texts, which explains the excursions that will be made below into domains that may not immediately appear related to the principle subject.

Methodological difficulties There is, however, one danger – or at least a difficulty – attached to such an enterprise. From what was just said, it is clear that a historical account of phenomena that have been uncovered by recent research probably cannot be impartial. Contemporary texts on sign language, gesture, language acquisition, and related topics have enabled us to look at the past in a new way – and many of them will be referred to in what follows. It is difficult not to have those texts in mind and not to use them as a reference when reading the texts of earlier writers. On the one hand, there is nothing illegitimate about this; it is even inevitable. On the other hand, this view of the past through the lens of the present state of affairs may undoubtedly distort our perspective to a certain extent, maybe even to a point where the interpretation becomes less productive than it might really be. The reasons are always the same: now that we have ample evidence that sign language is a natural language and that deaf communities are linguistic communities, it is tempting to project that knowledge onto the past and to “evaluate” the texts written on the question (indeed, written before the question actually became one) in the light of this newly acquired certainty. In practical terms, what this roughly means is: once we come across a text dealing – in one way or another – with deafness, sign language or related matters, we would be inclined to automatically ask whether the author thinks, for example, that sign language is a language or not? And this becomes a basis for judgment. If the answer is affirmative, the author is on the right side of the barricade, he or she would have a “progressive” or “positive” view of

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deafness; if not, we would tend to dismiss him or her, in the best case, as ignorant. The problem, of course, is that the question itself is a new one; for centuries, it did not denote any real problem whatsoever, and it would in fact be very misleading to classify the “older” authors according to artificially created moral criteria, based on whether they did or did not give a certain answer to a certain question that they did not and could not ask themselves. Thus, we find ourselves in a kind of double bind. On the one hand, “impartiality” or “objectiveness”, when it comes to these matters, is impossible because the whole history of sign language and deaf communities, as we know it today, is determined by a modern question. The very object of this history has to be constructed retrospectively. On the other hand, of course, the whole endeavour may amount to an anachronism, to the insinuation (or plainly the ascribing) of both positive and negative views and moral attitudes to authors who were, given the context in which they lived and wrote, “innocent”. Therefore, there seems to be no other choice but to proceed onto thin ice and manoeuvre between a perspective dictated by contemporary texts and research on the subject (for it is those texts and this research that brought the historical material to our attention and it is impossible to simply put it aside) and an effort to remain faithful if not to the spirit, then at least to the argument of the texts we interpret. Another major difficulty concerns the status of the very object of our inquiry. When the older authors speak about the deaf and their language, it is often far from being clear whom or what exactly they speak about. Present day deaf studies mostly view the deaf as linguistic subjects and members of a community with rich cultural heritage, capable of assuming their own voice. The historical material treated here, however, shows to be much more ambiguous in this respect. Only one author among those studied in the present book was deaf himself: Pierre Desloges. In many other cases, given the lack of precise information, we are condemned to speculate only as to who exactly the deaf mentioned in the texts were (or even if they had any real existence at all). Often, the textual evidence seems to suggest that the given author was not speaking about members of deaf community, but rather of home-signers – such is the case, for example, of the well-known case of the deaf from Chartres, interpreted by Condillac and others. Sometimes, we even have certain doubts whether the deaf mentioned in philosophical texts were not simply the authors’ conceptual invention, for it seems that for many of the early writers the deaf person is an imaginary construction, a conceptual tool enabling the exploration of certain philosophical issues, rather than a figure based on direct observation. Hobbes’s Leviathan is a good example of a text where deafness appears to be a purely imaginary condition conforming to Hobbes’s conception of language, rather than being related to any kind of empirical evidence. Moreover, the same is true of texts which offer what might be considered a much more “progressive”



Introduction

view of deafness: the exact extent of Diderot’s interaction with the deaf, for example, remains unknown despite his claims to have known a deaf person. Briefly, while in the domain of deaf studies, deafness, nowadays, denotes a cultural fact and cultural condition (signing, living in a signing community, having a culture), the deaf subjects referred to in older texts were often either constructs, invented by the hearing, or home-signers, that is, isolated deaf individuals surrounded by the hearing, without the authors making any clear distinction between them. This fact, often neglected or not stressed enough in the literature on the subject, makes, again, an analysis of the texts dealing with deafness a very precarious undertaking, for there is always a danger of projecting a modern notion of deafness onto the past. What emerges from these texts is a multi-faceted image of the deaf and their language, created, for the most part, by hearing philosophers and educators. This image may be both positive and negative, but it remains an image. And it must be borne in mind that the object of the present study is precisely this image, as well as its wider philosophical context. The aim here, of course, is not to speak for the deaf (for the author is certainly not qualified to do so), but neither is it, strictly speaking, to speak about the deaf. The aim is to study certain elements of a very complex imagery on the part of the hearing to which deafness and related matters have given rise in one particular period. Furthermore, even a very elementary look at the history of deafness thus conceived reveals that the imagery in question did not develop in a linear manner, as a simple one-way progression from ignorance to knowledge. St. Augustine’s view of deafness, for example, seems, according to modern standards, much more “progressive” than that of Hobbes many centuries later. This history, therefore, cannot be understood in cumulative or teleological terms, as a process leading towards more and more “enlightened” understanding of the deaf and their language.

The relevance of the 18th century In what follows, the special focus is placed on the 18th-century French philosophy. The philosophy of the French Enlightenment, as far as the topic of deafness, gesture and sign language is concerned, deserves a privileged place. It might be argued that this is the first time in Western history when these issues became subject of a systematic treatment and interest. They were certainly not absent in philosophy before (as we will attempt to show in “historical excursions” preceding each chapter), but it was rather in the form of scattered fragments and remarks that make it difficult to ascribe any general meaning to them. If there is a “history of deafness” (however problematic this term may be for reasons stated above), it is since the 18th century that its outlines become much more graspable than they

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had been before. This systematic attention devoted to the three topics that are of concern here is, as already suggested, motivated by three sets of questions whose importance for the French Enlightenment thinkers was absolutely central. 1. The first concerns the nature of sensory perception and its relation to human subject’s mental contents (or “ideas”, to use a generic term then employed). A few very brief general remarks, therefore, must be made concerning the type of questions that were asked and the background from which they emerged. To a large extent, Enlightenment philosophy draws its fundamental incentives from empiricism, especially in its Lockean version. Locke’s refusal of the existence of the so-called “innate ideas” represented a fundamental starting point for nearly all of the thinkers that will be considered in what follows. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke famously refuses any content in the human mind that would precede the material furnished by sensory perception, that is, the idea of innate principles that resemble “characters, as it were stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it” (Locke 1979: 48). The importance of this refusal of innate ideas cannot be emphasized enough as it developed, in the 18th century French philosophy, into one of its most central topics. It would be wrong, however, to view the French philosophers as mere epigones of Lockean empiricism. Lockean philosophy determines major issues and questions tackled, but the originality and inventiveness with which they were approached is striking. It is not without interest that Locke mentions, a few lines after the passage just quoted, the example of “children and idiots” to support his argument. These beings, according to Locke, represent living proof of the inexistence of innate principles, for they “have not the least apprehension or thought of them” (Locke 1979: 49). The 18th-century French Enlightenment, as we shall see, will be literally obsessed with either speculative treatment or empirical observation of human subjects who allegedly prove the nonexistence of innate ideas: not only the two specimens mentioned by Locke, but also the blind, the so-called wild children, and, of course, the deaf. It may seem that at the period considered here, all of those diverse subjects were mentioned in very similar, if not identical contexts  – they were meant to prove the absence of innate ideas in human mind and to show the importance of sensory perception for acquiring our access to reality. We will, however, attempt to show that among those “non-standard” subjects, the wild children and the deaf occupy a more particular position, despite the fact that according to modern standards, they can be hardly put on a par or lumped together as analogical. They are both often mentioned in order to show the impact of isolation, and therefore of the



Introduction

absence of communication – or of limited communication – on human mind and its cognitive capacity (which is not the case, for example, of the blind). What is at stake here is not only the problem of sensory perception itself, but perhaps more importantly, the problem of language and its relationship to thought. The 18th-century sense of empirical observation has also given rise to questioning concerning specific ways in which sensory perception furnishes the material from which the image of reality in the human mind is constructed. If innate ideas do not exist and all mental content is constructed from material supplied by the senses, how exactly does this material enter our minds and how exactly does this construction take place? What kind of information does each of the senses provide and how do the different senses contribute to create a coherent image of reality? Hence a very important and widely debated question of the so-called supplementation of the senses (suppléance des sens): can an individual deprived of a sensory input of certain kind – visual, auditory – learn to supplement or to compensate for the missing information by means of another sense? This tendency to “dissect” human perception and to view each of the senses as so many separate “tunnels” leading to our perception of reality accounts, again, for treating together what may nowadays be considered as rather diverse empirical material. In what follows, the point is to show that the 18th-century interest in gestures, deafness and sign language grows from a very complex epistemological background and is incomprehensible without taking this background into consideration. This will be the object of the first two chapters, with a special focus on a negative image of deafness, labelled here “deafness as deficiency”. Within this paradigm, the deaf is essentially treated as a socially isolated being and it is this isolation (perhaps even more than sensory deficiency of any kind) that is seen as the reason for his limited access to abstract reasoning. Hence the analogy between the deaf and the wild child, sketched by Condillac and developed by Jean-Marc Itard. This negative view of deafness may obviously seem particularly irritating to modern sign language scholars, and even more so to the deaf themselves. It is, however, important not to deny its existence, the more so that even nowadays, it plays a crucial role in the conflict between what is often referred to as the “medical” and the “anthropological” view of deafness (the former viewing deafness in terms of privation, the latter in terms of linguistic and cultural difference): it is, therefore, of the utmost urgency to undertake this “archaeology of privation”, to paraphrase Michel Foucault’s expression. 2. In the same period, however, a fundamentally different image of the deaf person appears. In certain texts, the deaf is no longer treated as deficient or even

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languageless, but rather as an exemplification of difference, as being in possession of specific communicative capacities that may, when studied closely and without prejudice, even enlighten the hearing as to the nature of their own communication (that is, communication in spoken language). This, again, requires some explanation. The 18th-century French thinkers, as has often been stated, deeply believed in the universality of reason and perfectibility of mankind: Ernst Cassirer has aptly stated that Enlightenment philosophy “encounters the world with fresh joy and the courage of discovery, daily expecting new revelations” (Cassirer 2009: 4). This conviction not only does not exclude, but entails the philosophers’ deep interest in difference and otherness. The two above-mentioned aspects are, in fact, two sides of the same coin: in order to achieve a rational understanding, one has to get rid of prejudice and all preconceived notions, and as a consequence, one must critically examine and call into question the very principles on which our culture is based. And one of the most fundamental tools of this critical examination and of radical reconsideration of the notions of human culture, human nature, language, cognition and perception was, for the 18th-century philosophers, what might generally be called a confrontation with alterity. The figures that serve, in the 18th-century philosophical texts, as an incarnation of difference, are manifold, the most famous being probably that of a savage (in Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage’, for example) or that of a traveller coming from a distant land and capable of viewing our culture from the outside (Montesquieu’s Persian Letters are a canonical example here). But there are also various forms of otherness recruited from inside our own culture that come to inhabit the space of theoretical reflexion. Among those, the deaf count undoubtedly among the most prominent ones. It is in this context that some authors manifest a genuine interest in sign language of the deaf and in their specific way of relating to the world. It is no longer a question of the deficiency view of deafness; the communication of the deaf is viewed as just as efficient (if not more efficient) as that of the hearing. This interest was very closely linked to the general interest in language and in various issues that linguistic communication (be it verbal or non-verbal) gives rise to. Language has been recognised not only as a vehicle of thought, that is, as a means of communicating one’s mental content to others. It was seen, above all, as a principal instrument of social interaction which, in its turn, was deemed to have a powerful influence on the formation of the human mind. One of the big questions tackled by the Enlightenment philosophers was precisely the following: how does human interaction (and language) contribute to the development of our capacities to judge, compare, combine, and communicate our ideas? No less central was the question of the relationship



Introduction

between the “ideas” in the human mind and their linguistic expression: does the way we use language reflect the order in which different ideas enter our mind? Do different languages reflect this order in different ways? Some authors were convinced that observing sign language of the deaf may help us to provide answers to the above-mentioned set of questions. In Diderot’s Letter on Deaf and Dumb, for example, the language of the deaf (as well as the non-verbal, gestural expression of the hearing) opens up an “experimental” path enabling us to observe the “natural” order of ideas entering our minds, while in spoken languages, this order is often obscured or even inverted by their arbitrariness and by what Diderot terms their “artificiality”. Such a perspective on deafness and sign language will bring us closer to what would nowadays be called an “anthropological” view of deafness. The important point to stress is that the notion of “difference”, mentioned in the title of the respective chapter, is to be understood in positive terms. It does not denote inferiority of any kind and sometimes – as in the case of Desloges – it may even imply an attempt to demonstrate, in certain contexts, the superiority of sign language over spoken language. It is on this “differential” paradigm that the third and fourth chapter will concentrate, focusing more particularly on Pierre Desloges and Denis Diderot. 3. The fundamental idea behind the above-mentioned conviction is that signing (and gesturing) represents a kind of universal language, more natural than the diverse spoken languages: a “universal, figurative langage d’action as the foundation for all later forms of language” (Rosenfeld 2001: 39). If we take the preceding reasoning only one step further, we come across another fundamental idea widely spread among the 18th-century thinkers: if we observe the language of the deaf, we might catch a glimpse of how our own language had functioned before it became diversified and distorted by the progress of civilization. The idea of sign language as a language uncorrupted by civilization, as a language that does not “lie” and that expresses ideas directly, without “processing” them through arbitrary signs, was one of the most important topoi in all of the apologies of sign language that appeared in the given period (Desloges, Bébian). Thus, manual communication became, in the thought of the 18th-century philosophers, a locus of a kind of nostalgia. This brings us to the third topic that concerns one of the most important dimensions that the French philosophers have added to Locke’s version of empiricism: a “diachronic”, historical accent, a “projection of empiricist epistemology onto the historical screen” (Stam 1976: 45). The 18th century was obsessed with the question of origins both individual and collective: How did language develop? How did human society come into existence and what role could language have played in that process?

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Due to the empiricist orientation of the French Enlightenment, the questioning concerning the origins of language was dictated, above all, by the attempt to account for the origin and genesis of language without relying on Biblical references. In other words, the aim was to propose a scenario of language origins that would enable us to understand how the linguistic convention, that is, the arbitrary connection between language and referent, could have emerged without divine intervention of any kind (Rosenfeld 2001: 34). As we shall later see, manual communication offers itself as a remarkably efficient explanatory tool here. Condillac, Rousseau and many others have considered gesturing to be something that enables us to bridge the gap between non-conventional, idiosyncratic proto-linguistic expression and conventional language. It is here that we come across a certain paradox. The “historical scenarios” presented to provide possible answers to the questions mentioned above were, for the most part, more concerned with the question “how” rather than “when”. The origin of society and language (the two are, again, very closely related) were not situated in a particular historical period and if any indications concerning historical time were given, which happened rarely, they were usually extremely vague. Despite the speculative character of genetic inquiries into origins of language and society, some empirical evidence, however, must be gathered to provide at least a minimal starting point for giving an answer to the above questions. There are basically two ways of obtaining such evidence. The first consists in postulating a correlation between ontogenesis and phylogenesis: if we observe development of an individual (of his perception and language acquisition), we may be able to get a glimpse of what might have happened when the linguistic structures of the human species itself were in statu nascendi. Long before the 18th-century thinkers, the first one to posit such a correlation was Lucretius in De natura rerum, to which some attention will be devoted in due time, for his illuminating conception of language origins represented a key reference both for Rousseau and Condillac. The second way consists in examining counter-examples: how does a human being behave if he or she does not have an access – or has only a limited access – to language and social life? This, too, might also provide us with some insights into how those capacities came to be established. In the context of the questioning concerning the origins of language and society, a third image of the deaf individual appears: deaf as a “surviving” witness of what might have been the early forms of human communication as such. In Condillac and Rousseau, with whom most of the third chapter will be concerned, this image does not appear explicitly, for convinced as they were that gesture was a crucial component of mankind’s early communication, they did not believe that this early language was exclusively gestural: in their view it





Introduction

consisted rather in the combination of the gestural and the vocal. Their writings, however, have set the tone for a certain way of thinking about gesture that, in turn, was directly concerned with sign language – this is the reason for their texts being extensively dealt with in the present study. In their discussions of deafness and sign language, authors like Bébian or Tylor, largely drawing on the 18th-century debates on the origins of language, proclaim that observing the deaf and their signing helps us to grasp the nature of human communication before languages became differentiated and “civilized”. The deaf, in this perspective, appears no longer as an emblem of deficiency or difference, but rather as an atavism, as a living token of the long-lost past when human communication was transparent, universal, and, so to speak, innocent.5 The 18th century, then, represents a historical knot where all of these questions and topics were intertwined and where this triple image of the deaf emerged in a particularly salient form. This is what makes it, as far as the history of thinking about both gesturing and signing is concerned, a key historical period. Much of what followed in the 19th or even the 20th century may be, in one way or another, traced back to the French Enlightenment. It, therefore, deserves our attention despite the fact that many particular insights and hypotheses presented back then may seem outdated or obsolete nowadays. As has already been suggested, the starting point of the present study is not based on a teleological vision of history, itself founded on a supposition that history necessarily progresses from “knowing less” to “knowing more”. On the one hand, therefore, we attempt to show that many questions that are nowadays still highly relevant for both sign language studies and gesture studies arose from the complex epistemological texture of the 18th-century philosophy. On the other hand, there is no need to deny that the same is true of many prejudices that still continue to survive up to the present day, at least in the minds of non-specialists.

This leads us to one final remark. Despite 18th-century French Enlightenment philosophy being our principal focus, it must be stressed that the topics and questions tackled in this particular period have a trans-historical existence: they had existed, in various forms, since Antiquity, and they continue to exist up to the present day. This conviction is reflected by the organization of each of the chapters. 5.  It has been stressed that this idea has played a certain role in Abbé de l’Epée’s revolutionary educational project, the aim of which was to use sign language (or rather what he has called “methodical signs”) as a means of educating the deaf. According to Epée, the signs, due to their iconic character, are more “natural” than spoken language and may, therefore, become a “global idiom”, enabling people to understand each other despite their speaking different spoken languages (Rosenfeld 2001: 96).

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Before concentrating directly on the 18th-century authors, the given chapter is preceded by a digression in the form of a “historical excursion”, examining a text by a classical author (Hobbes, St. Augustine, Lucretius), which illustrates, in a representative way, the specific problem or attitude treated in each of the discussions that follow. These authors should not be regarded as precursors of any kind; rather, these historical case studies are included in order to show that the given problem or attitude is but an incarnation of a larger structural whole that exists across centuries. In each chapter, after this opening part, a more detailed discussion follows of how the 18th-century philosophers have explored the issue in question. As stated above, this study in no way pretends to be exhaustive, nor does it take the form of an overview. Only certain texts are taken into account (often considered as symptoms of more general ideas and attitudes) and many choices were made as to what material shall be used and interpreted. As for the texts that will be dealt with, some of them will be interpreted in greater detail, some of them will only be mentioned rather briefly; in some cases, more attention will be paid to the context of the given philosopher’s thought, while in others we will concentrate more closely on specific passages that seem relevant to our purpose. That the danger of misinterpretation is always close at hand need not be stressed, of course; on the other hand, the incessant calling for prudence and reclaiming the “context” may result in nothing specific being said at all.

Chapter 1

Deafness as deficiency

Deafness and the “deficiency paradigm” Viewing deafness as deficiency relies on what many believe to be a kind of common sense. Deaf people are viewed as individuals who lack something – they lack auditory access to the world. More problematic, however, are the consequences this physiological fact brings about, for this is where the domain of the physiological ends and, imperceptibly, imaginary and social constructions and projections begin.6 The reasoning is as follows: because the deaf cannot hear, they cannot speak, consequently they do not have access to language, and because they do not have access to language, the whole dimension of the symbolic is denied to them, with all that this implies for the abstract dimension of thought, social interaction, adaptability, mental health and many other things. Such a view is, of course, based on the hearing perspective. The prelingually deaf, who never had auditory access to the world (or had it for a very limited period of time), do not experience any lack of this kind. But this is what most of the hearing people do not realize. When we try to think about what deafness must be like, what we, hearing individuals, are doing, is projecting our imaginary construction onto the deaf, a construction based on a naive and misguided attempt at Einfühlung, on taking the world as we know it and simply taking the auditory input away from it. The world of the deaf must be my world minus the sound. Harlan Lane, who qualifies this erroneous – or worse, egocentric – view of deafness as “extrapolative error”, puts it in the following way:

6.  If the two domains can be distinguished at all. Whenever it is discovered that a child is deaf, his or her deafness immediately becomes the depository of other people’s (especially his or her parents’) fantasies, fears, doubts etc., of sentiments which are  – apart from exceptional cases when the child’s deafness is not viewed by parents as a handicap – for the most part negative. From the very beginning, deafness  – this seemingly “physiological” fact  – inhabits the space between the parents and the child in this fantasmatic form. How, then, could it be possible to distinguish between a “materiality of the body”, as Judith Butler would have put it (Butler 1993), and a “construction” imposed upon that materiality?

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Deafness, gesture and sign language in the 18th century French philosophy

To imagine what deafness is like, I imagine my world without a sound – a terrifying prospect, and one that conforms quite well with the stereotype we project onto members of the deaf community. I would be isolated, disoriented, uncommunicative, and unreceptive to communication. (Lane 1999: 10–11)

We can see right away that this construction bears implicitly negative meanings – lack, privation, deficiency. There is no language; the best the deaf can do is to have recourse to some sort of pantomime accompanied by twisted facial expressions, which probably cannot express the subtleties of abstract thought. Deafness, therefore, is a disease and should be cured. And from this negative view, a whole set of stereotypes is born, something that the French psychoanalyst André Meynard calls “the deficiency paradigm” (le paradigme déficitaire). According to Meynard, this paradigm amounts to four fundamental propositions: (1) deafness as infirmity; (2) spoken language as a cure; (3) language as an instrument; (4) gesture as an obstacle to spoken language (Meynard 2002: 41).7 Disease is, in our common view, coupled with the idea of a cure. And Meynard adds that there is, in this negative view of deafness, only one cure thinkable – spoken language, which will restore the deaf to civilization and social life, mediated by noble and immaterial speech. In the deficiency paradigm, the deaf are essentially seen as “an eternal infant to whom the spoken language must be taught” (Meynard 2002: 41). And as a consequence, a “pedagogical” counterpart of the deficiency paradigm comes into being – so-called oralism. Oralism is a generic term for a set of practices whose aim is to make the deaf acquire spoken language, a form of language he or she is, by his or her very physical constitution, not suited to acquire. Oralism – and the omnipresent image of the “speaking deaf ” or the “talking deaf man”8 as a goal to be attained  – is almost as old as the negative representation of deafness itself. Such a brief statement is, of course, extremely simplistic from a historical point of view, but it does capture the basic idea that oralism is based upon. It is important to note that oralism often has a certain theological or religious accent to it, even in a secular or a “scientific” context. Whenever oralism comes into play, one particular metaphor is almost always present: that of a miracle, incarnated in the figure of the “speaking deaf ”. The speaking deaf: an impossibility made possible, a living contradiction made a reality. Examples have abounded since the 7.  While the first, second and fourth proposition seems clear enough, the third one – language as instrument – may seem a little enigmatic at first sight. It plays, nonetheless, a very important role in the deficiency paradigm, to which we shall return in the following chapter. 8.  Surdus loquens is a title of a short treatise on oralist educational method, written by J. K. Amman and published in 1692, which knew great success all across Europe. The Talking Deaf Man, an English translation of Amman’s book dating from 1694, was reprinted in 1972 (Amman 1972).



Chapter 1.  Deafness as deficiency

very beginning of its history: the Venerable Bede tells us the story of Bishop John of Hagulstat, who made the sign of the cross over the tongue of a mute, and the mute began to speak. The secret method of J. R. Pereire, a friend of Rousseau and Diderot, and the most famous of the 18th-century oralists, has always been accompanied by the aura of miracle.9 And the list could go on. The list could actually go on right up to the present day, for oralism is far from being a thing of the past. With the advances of medical science, it assumed a different form – that of a surgical procedure. With the appearance of cochlear implants – devices that are implanted in a patient’s inner ear and that transform sound into electric impulses that directly stimulate the auditory nerve  – a new “cure” became available, the presentation of which in the media at least in some cases stressed its “miraculous” nature (Komesaroff 2007: 88–119). It would perhaps be an oversimplification to present the current debates on cochlear implants as merely a clear-cut clash between a (good) cultural and a (bad) medical perspective. These two extremes do not account for the multiplicity of concrete ways in which subjects relate to their deafness (or hearing loss). But this polarization is functional insofar as the basic difference in both views is obvious enough: it remains that the image of a deficiency that needs to be “set straight” is the basic starting point for the discourse promoting the device – it can be presented in a relatively mild form, but it is never absent. The problem is that this cure is probably no more miraculous than the classical oral method: lengthy periods of oral training are required after the operation and, for most subjects,10 the results are far from satisfactory. In short, the miracle of the “speaking deaf ” has not – once again – taken place.11

9.  Harlan Lane gives a much more prosaic interpretation of Pereire’s “miracle”: according to him, it consisted in working with hard of hearing rather than profoundly deaf pupils, in constant hard work rather than in any “miraculous” method, and, of course, in a certain predisposition of the audience (in Pereire’s public demonstrations) to believe that a miracle had, in fact, taken place. Lane concludes: “Perhaps Pereire had no particular secret at all. Like those of many other oralists, his method was empirical, a fine word meaning catch-as-catch-can. He took students who showed promise and had some prior education, used the senses available to them, communicated effectively in their native sign, to which he added fingerspelling and writing, and worked tirelessly at his task” (Lane 1984: 84). 10.  We are speaking about prelingually deaf people. Cochlear implants might be very useful for people deafened later in life, who had a chance to acquire spoken language. 11.  Cochlear implants and the surgical procedure it involves have become a subject of heated ethical debates. Deaf communities have manifested a very negative attitude especially towards implantation of young children, unable to give their consent to the procedure (Komesaroff 2007; Lane 1999: 203–238; Paludnevicienne, Leigh 2011; Christiansen, Leigh 2002).

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20 Deafness, gesture and sign language in the 18th century French philosophy

This very brief outline should give us a basic idea of the first image of deafness that will be treated here: deafness as deficiency. In this paradigmatic conjuncture, the deaf person appears as being less, rather than being different. The deaf appears as language-less, deprived of abstract thought, isolated, unable to communicate and to understand moral values. As suggested above, this imaginary construct is not devoid of its historical dimension. It is to some elements of this dimension that we shall now turn.

Historical excursion: Hobbes The idea of a deaf person as a being without language is an old one. Among the first people to express this view was Aristotle. In his Politics, he proposes a wellknown distinction that founds the difference between humans and animals on the use of speech – humans produce articulate sounds, while the vocal sounds emitted by animals reflect but pleasure and pain: For, as we assert, nature does nothing in vain; and man alone among the animals has speech. The voice indeed indicates the painful or pleasant, and hence is present in other animals as well; for their nature has come this far, that they have a perception of the painful and the pleasant and indicate these things to each other. But speech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and unjust and other things of this sort.  (Aristotle 1984: I, 2, 1253a)

This passage had to be quoted in extenso, for this Aristotelian distinction has serious implicit consequences as far as his attitude towards deafness is concerned. In accordance with this view, the deaf person, who does not speak, lacks intelligence. In The History of Animals, Aristotle stresses the absence of speech in the deaf: The different viviparous quadrupeds utter different voices, but they have no power of speech; this power is peculiar to man. The possession of this power implies the possession of a voice, but the converse is not true. All persons who are deaf from birth are dumb as well: though they can utter a sort of voice, they cannot talk.  (Aristotle 1970: IV, 9, 536b)

When understood against the background of the previously quoted sentences from The Politics, these words of Aristotle’s seem to suggest quite clearly that the deaf person, who utters a sound, but does not produce articulate speech, is closer to an animal than to a human being, or is, in the best of cases, situated on a boundary between the two.



Chapter 1.  Deafness as deficiency

And indeed, should there be any doubts remaining as to whether this absence of speech affects the intelligence and mental capacities of the deaf, they are dispelled in the following sentences from Aristotle’s treatise On Sense and Sensible Objects, where it is claimed that the blind person, who has sensory access to articulate language, is more intelligent than the deaf person: Of these faculties [seeing and hearing], for the mere necessities of life and in itself, sight is the more important, but for the mind and indirectly hearing is the more important. […] Indirectly, hearing makes the largest contribution to wisdom. For discourse, which is the cause of learning, is so because it is audible; but it is audible not in itself but indirectly, because speech is composed of words, and each word is a rational symbol. Consequently, of those who have been deprived of one sense or the other from birth, the blind are more intelligent than the deaf and dumb.  (Aristotle 1964: I, 437a)

Not only do we witness here, for the first time in Western philosophy, the deficiency construct of deafness in the proper sense of the word, in which the scene is set for what would eventually develop into the “psychology of the deaf ” that Harlan Lane analyzed with great acuity (Lane 1999: 50–66). When we situate the deaf with regard to what is nowadays referred to as “anthropological difference”, that is, the difference separating humans from other life forms, we also find another set of connotations often associated with deafness: the connotations of animality, infancy, or of the deaf as something sub-human. When we imagine a being without language, several conjectures are possible. Not having language at one’s disposal does not only mean lacking an instrument with which to express one’s thoughts, for in such a case we would have to consider thought as utterly independent of language (the thoughts are there, but cannot be expressed). The consequences are much more complex, and they depend on how we approach the relationship between language and thought and the role of language in human interaction. On this point, the opinions of philosophers vary, depending on what exactly they want to say about language and sociality. But generally speaking, when philosophers have come to consider, hypothetically and usually as a counter-example, an imaginary human being deprived of language (and a deaf person is an ideal incarnation of this imaginary construction, since he does not “speak”, and in consequence has no language), two possibilities have emerged. Lacking language may entail the absence of an important dimension of thought (and in some cases, even the absence of thought as such), the dimension generally defined as symbolic or abstract. It may also mean – and it usually does mean – a lack of social contact with other human beings, for this contact, with all its richness and nuances, is considered to be built on the basis of some form of linguistic

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interaction. Isolation and the incapacity for abstract thought: these are the most common characteristics connected with deafness in the “deficiency paradigm”. Among the texts that show how deafness is invoked in the way outlined above, one of the most salient examples was chosen for closer examination: Hobbes’s Leviathan. The fourth chapter of the opening part (entitled “Of Man”) is devoted to speech, one of man’s basic capacities – together with sense and imagination, treated by Hobbes in earlier chapters. Speech is an invention; better yet, it is “the most noble and profitable invention of all others” (Hobbes 1965: 18), for human social life is unimaginable without the mediation of speech. Speech is, indeed, what makes humans’ social existence different from that of animals. Without speech, “there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves” (Hobbes 1965: 18). The general purpose of this invention – explicitly qualified as divine – is to “transfer our mental discourse, into verbal” (Hobbes 1965: 18). This “translation”, however, is to be understood in a specific sense, different from what the expression usually connotes, i.e. a conversion of something pre-existent into something else (a text written in one language into a text in another language, for example). Speech does structure the thought itself; without it, the thought would be significantly impoverished. Translation has a profound impact on what is translated, it is as though the “original”, i.e. the actual thoughts, existed only in a rudimentary form, in a sort of incomplete manuscript, and it is only through translation that they can develop into a structured and intelligible text. According to Hobbes, this impact of language on thought consists of two elements. First, speech helps to fix and stabilize our mental content, using names to give it stable form. In other words, it is an instrument of memory: the nebulae of hazy thoughts become structured, and – in the form of those structures – may be recalled whenever needed. By this same means, thoughts become utterable. Therefore, once the outcomes of our mental efforts are connected to verbal marks, the efforts themselves need not be repeated. That words are utterable does away with the need to make certain mental operations over and over again – “so the first use of names is to serve for marks, or notes of remembrance” (Hobbes 1965: 18–19). Second, speech has an intersubjective dimension; we may communicate our thoughts to others, make the outcomes of our mental efforts shared  – and, of course, benefit from what others have to tell us. This feature of speech is not limited to purely intellectual content; words are used to signify fear, desire and other affections, “and for this use they are called signs” (Hobbes 1965: 19). Both functions of speech are thus closely connected to the power of abstraction: names themselves may be divided into proper names, designating a singular thing, and common names, subsuming diverse particular individuals under one



Chapter 1.  Deafness as deficiency

category or class  – “there is nothing in the world universal but names; for the things named are every one of them individual and singular” (Hobbes 1965: 19).12 It is at this point that things are complicated by the appearance of a human being who is capable, perhaps, of thinking in some elementary form but is deprived of the benefits the two aforementioned properties of language provide: nothing is fixed in his memory, nothing has the potential of becoming generalized through language and communicated to others. Whatever effort he makes, he has to make it over and over again if presented with a different version of the same problem, even if the problem has previously been solved successfully. And this being is none other than the deaf and dumb person. Let us quote the whole passage at length: A man that hath no use of speech at all, such as is born and remains perfectly deaf and dumb, if he set before his eyes a triangle, and by it two right angles, such as are the corners of a square figure, he may, by meditation, compare and find, that the three angles of that triangle, are equal to those right angles that stand by it. But if another triangle be shown him, different in shape from the former, he cannot know, without a new labor, whether the three angles of that also be equal to the same. But he that hath the use of words, when he observes, that such quality was consequent, not to the length of the sides, nor to any particular thing in his triangle; but only to this, that the sides were straight, and the angles three, will […] register his invention in these general terms, every triangle hath its three angles equal to two right angles. And thus the consequence found in one particular, comes to be registered and remembered, as a universal rule, and […] delivers us from all labor of the mind, saving the first, and makes that which was found true here, and now, to be true in all times and places. (Hobbes 1965: 20)

These lines exemplify, in a most instructive manner, how imagery works in philosophical texts, when it comes to speaking about deafness. Rather than a description, Hobbes’s deaf person seems to be a conceptual invention, and as such, it is fully consistent with his ideas on language. This point is important: the deaf person conforms to Hobbes’s argument rather than being a mere “illustration” of it. Because the deaf, in Hobbes’s view, do not have access to language, they do not have access to the mental horizon that the use of language opens. Therefore, they are condemned to repeat the same elementary mathematical task over and over because even if they manage to discover the rule which, under “normal” conditions, allows for generalization, this discovery never reaches the domain of the abstract and the general and keeps losing itself in the domain of the singular. The hypothetical mental life of the deaf is determined by repetition – all mental labour is spent on repeating, on treating each singular situation as absolute rather than as 12.  The category designed by a universal name is established by the things’ “similitude in some quality, or other accident” (Hobbes 1965: 19).

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an instance of something general. Perhaps, rather than like animals, the deaf are like automatons or machines. Their reasoning cannot be generalized and it cannot be communicated. And just as the deaf cannot communicate with others, others cannot communicate with them. These two aspects are the two sides of the same coin: the absence of language. Hobbes’s view can be summarized quite simply: Hobbes is not saying that there is no thought at all in someone who has no language. Some basic mental processes are taking place, but they remain elementary, confused, fragmented, and lost in the diversity of the concrete and the singular. In this respect, Hobbes has set an important precedent for other philosophers to follow. As we will see in the following section, the image of such an individual acquired considerable complexity as it was discussed in the 18th century.

Deafness in the context of 18th-century philosophy: Condillac’s theory of knowledge and the deaf of Chartres In the 18th century, the aforementioned image appears to be inseparable from a larger set of questions and problems that concern human perception in general, as well as the impact of social life on the development of the human individual. It will therefore be necessary to address some issues that go beyond deafness in the strict sense of the word. Surprising as it may seem, these “empirical” considerations are often connected to a certain fictional dimension of the 18th-century thought and reflected upon with the aid of negative counter-examples of an individual who is deprived of one of the senses (the deaf, the blind) or an individual who grows up, for a prolonged period, without any social ties. It has been widely believed that these counter-examples, some of which are purely fictional, while others seem to be based on some kind of empirical evidence, could provide us with answers concerning the human beings’ sensory access to reality, as well as the role of language and social existence in the human cognitive and affective capacities. Against this background, two figures appear that seem to be closely interrelated in the given period: the deaf and the wild child. The following chapter will concentrate precisely on what makes them interrelated in the mind of certain 18th-century philosophers. The chapter to follow will concentrate more specifically on wild children and especially on one actual case of a wild child found at the very end of the 18th century, and analyse the impact that contemporary philosophy (and, above all, the considerations concerning deafness) might have had on the concrete educational approach chosen by his educator. It has already been mentioned in the introduction that the philosophy of the French Enlightenment was characterized by an elementary tension: an emphasis



Chapter 1.  Deafness as deficiency

on rationality and clarity of reason, a struggle against prejudice and a belief in the perfectibility of mankind on the one hand, and a rather unusual discursive means of “staging” philosophical issues and questions on the other. This tension is manifested in the very form in which philosophy is presented: distinction between a philosophical and literary text is often difficult to establish, strategies usually associated with “literary” writing are often used to illustrate philosophical theses and vice versa. When Pierre Macherey says that “philosophy and literature are like two sides of the same discourse” (Macherey 1995: 234), nowhere does this seem truer than in the 18th century – their constant intermingling often even reached a point where it became impossible to clearly distinguish one from the other.13 There is yet another point of intersection. The discursive universe of Enlightenment philosophy is crowded with remarkable “characters”: a child, a traveller, a savage, a deaf-mute, a blind man, a madman. All of these – and many others – appear in the philosophical writings of that period serving a particular purpose. At first sight, these “conceptual” figures or “experimental subjects” (Rosenfeld 2001: 236) form an astounding array of heterogeneous subjects or non-subjects. But however different they may be, they do have one thing in common. They are out of the ordinary – if by ordinary we understand a fully developed human being without a physical or mental “deficiency” of any kind, having acquired language in a standard way, and well integrated into the society. They represent a difference, an alterity, an otherness, that is. The strategic role they play in different philosophical constructions is variable: they may represent wisdom, purity, origin, cultural diversity; they may illustrate certain points concerning sensory perception, the effect of social life on our development, the nonexistence of innate ideas. But all of them are counter-examples. They come from the “periphery” to cast new light on what is at the “centre”. They are an incarnation of the philosopher’s “purified gaze”, of his “innocent eye”, not contaminated by the prejudices that are the common lot of those who do not take a step aside when looking at the object of their inquiry. Michel Foucault put it well in one remarkable paragraph in The Birth of the Clinic, bringing together the image of childhood, the traveller and the blind: What allows man to resume contact with childhood and to rediscover the permanent birth of truth is this bright, distant, open naivety of the gaze. Hence the two great mythical experiences on which the philosophy of the eighteenth century had wished to base its beginning: the foreign spectator in an unknown country, and the man born blind restored to light. […] The discourse of the world passes through open eyes, eyes open at every instant as for the first time.  (Foucault 1994: 65)

13.  Rousseau’s Émile or Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew are just two examples among many.

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The general empiricist inspiration of the period helps to explain the importance of one of those characters that haunted 18th-century philosophers and that will be of particular concern here: the idea of the isolated individual. The spirit of this philosophy is well described by a neologism coined by the Marquis de Sade: isolism.14 The genesis of ideas, of thought, of social instincts is best explained when it takes place in its purest form, that is, in an individual who does not acquire them automatically – be it because of a sensory deprivation of some sort or an isolation due to external conditions. The 18th century is literally swarming with both literary and philosophical images of isolated human beings, or  – when it comes to explaining the birth of sociality or sexual drives – isolated couples.15 It is no wonder that Robinson Crusoe was one of the most popular books at that time, and the one Rousseau considered the only text he would allow his Émile to read. Philosophy, therefore, often becomes a sort of speculative laboratory where the philosopher experiments with an imaginary isolated being. Let us begin with what is perhaps the most illustrative example of this approach: Condillac’s statue (its relevance for our topic will become obvious in due course). In Treatise on the Sensations (1754), Condillac invents his famous statue, a sort of metaphysical “mannequin” without any sensory access to the world, who is being, so to speak, “dressed up” in different senses16 in order to accomplish what Julia Douthwaite calls “sensationalist scenario of mental awakening” (Douthwaite 2002: 130). It is through this process of combining senses that the statue eventually develops memory, a sense of self and other cognitive paraphernalia characterizing the human subject. Significantly, Condillac begins with the sense of smell, which, he believes, contributes the least to knowledge of the world. He then proceeds 14.  The word isolisme appears in de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir and New Justine. The occurrence of this word in de Sade’s writings is stressed by Eric Marty (Marty 2011: 185). 15.  The image in question is not only a matter of philosophical speculation – even utterly unexpected genres, such as the genre of pornographic novels or treatises on education, are affected by it. For example, Imirce ou la fille de la nature, written by Abbé du Laurens, published in 1765 and banned for its allegedly pornographic contents, begins with following sentences: “I was born in France, I don’t know in which province; I had no father, no mother; my childhood lasted up to the twenty second year of age; before that, I saw neither sky nor earth. A rich philosopher bought me a few days after my birth, and kept me in a cellar together with a boy of my age” (Du Laurens 1993: 71; my own translation). For a good overview of the image of isolation in the 18th century, see Douthwaite (2002). 16.  In an inverted order, this procedure is employed in an interesting 2011 film Perfect Sense, where people are being deprived of their senses – one by one – due to an unknown infection. The film, of course, concentrated especially on the love story taking place between the two principal characters rather than on the no less interesting possibilities offered by this “epistemological” background.



Chapter 1.  Deafness as deficiency

to the sense of hearing, which (like smell) does not imply an idea of space unless combined with other senses. Then he adds the sense of taste, the sense of sight, and the sense of touch,17 and proceeds to analyse what forms of knowledge arise from the combination of the senses. Why did Condillac take such pains to engage in such an experiment? The question is answered at the very beginning of the Treatise, in a passage that brings us right to the heart of the matter: We cannot recollect the ignorance in which we were born. It is a state which leaves no traces behind it. We remember our ignorance only when we remember what we have learned. We must already know something before we can attend to what we are learning. We must have ideas before we can observe that we once were without them. (Condillac 1930: XXIX)

The paradox evoked here is remarkable. It could be described as the paradox of an “impossible beginning”. The way in which we have acquired our ideas and developed our capacities of sensory perception is inaccessible to us. It happened – to use a modern phrase which, nonetheless, expresses perfectly the whole problem – in a past that has never been present, in a past that can never be recalled, because the very capacity of recollection came only after it was over. One might say that a simple way of grasping what happened in this irretrievable past is to observe children and to transfer this observation onto ourselves – this is the path Rousseau

17.  It is to those particular senses (sight and touch) that one of the most interesting points in Condillac’s analysis is connected. Unusual as it may seem, even the sense of sight does not provide information about space unless it is informed by the sense of touch. Eyes, in fact, do distinguish light and colours  – but not space. It is touch that “teaches other senses to judge external objects” (Condillac 1930: 58). And Condillac goes on to say: “It will no doubt appear extraordinary to my readers when I say that the eye in itself is incapable of seeing space outside itself. We have contracted so firm a habit of judging at sight the objects surrounding us, that we find it difficult to imagine that we did not do so when our eyes were first opened to the light” (Condillac 1930: 58). In order to understand what appears to be an unusual form of reasoning, it needs be noted that Condillac was well acquainted with – and brought an important contribution to – the so-called Molyneux’s question, posed for the first time by William Molyneux and seriously considered by Locke, Berkeley and Diderot, among others: will a man born blind, who, later in his life, becomes able to see, distinguish between a square and a triangle and attribute the correct names to the two shapes? Locke’s answer was negative, and it was later confirmed by William Cheselden, who conducted a successful surgical procedure on a boy born blind – the boy indeed had great difficulty moving around in three-dimensional space without the help of touch. The Molyneux’s question is explicitly mentioned several times by Condillac (Condillac 1930: 60; 171–180). For a more detailed analysis of the Molyneux’s question, see Bolton (1994: 75–99) and especially Morgan (1977).

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has opted for in Émile.18 This, however, is not the way Condillac has chosen in Treatise on the Sensations. Despite the fact that the status of Condillac’s statue is not entirely clear in this respect – for Condillac does sometimes make reference to real children in order to elucidate certain points in his theoretical itinerary, as if he were unable to choose, at times, between a speculative approach and empirical observation19 –, it is clear enough that it is certainly not a child. Between Condillac’s statue and a real human being in the process of development, there is at least one fundamental difference: the senses attributed to the statue do not evolve in any way; they are already fully formed; the whole process consists merely in the adding and combining of the senses, not in their development. Other philosophers did not fail to remark on this. When Rousseau, in Émile, presents an ironic portrait of what he calls the “first man”, it is well possible that he is alluding precisely to Condillac’s statue.20 If we do not take into account the development and gradual “training” of the senses themselves, as these processes occur in a real human being, and if we tentatively imagine a fully developed individual endowed with fully developed senses, but who has had no previous sensory perception (in other words, a child with the physical appearance of a fully grown adult), what we get is nothing more than a pitiable idiot. Such a being would not know how to use the senses, would not know how to perceive, and would therefore provide little information on the origin of perception: Let us suppose that a child had at his birth the stature and the strength of a grown man […]. This man-child would be a perfect imbecile, an automaton, an immobile and almost insensible statue. He would see nothing, hear nothing, know no one, would not be able to turn his eyes toward what he needed to see. Not only would he perceive no objects outside of himself, he would not even relate any object to the sense organ which made him perceive it; the colours would not be in his eyes, 18.  Émile, as we shall see, comprises remarkable observations of children’s behavior and language, readily overlooked by those who accuse Rousseau of having created a purely speculative image of childhood. 19.  See for example his comments on the sense of touch: “Now, the first discovery a child makes is its body. It is not, however, strictly speaking the child who makes the discovery but nature that reveals it all complete. Yet nature will not reveal to the child its body, if it has not first of all made it perceive the sensations which it experiences as modifications of his soul” (Condillac 1930: 80). 20.  And possibly also Buffon’s hypothetical image of the “first man”, as it appears in his Natural History. Buffon invites us to imagine “a man that would resemble the first man in the moment of his creation, i.e. a man whose body and organs would be perfectly developed but who would have just awoken to himself and to everything that surrounds him. What would be his first movements, his first sensations, his first judgments? If this man would have wanted to tell us the story about his first thoughts, what would he have to say to us?” (Buffon 2004: 219; my own translation).



Chapter 1.  Deafness as deficiency

the sounds would not be in his ears; the bodies he touched would not be on his body; he would not even know that he had one. (Rousseau 2010: 189)21

Condillac’s statue meets a different fate than that of education. When it finally comes to possess all the senses, Condillac’s approach suddenly changes, as does the setting. What had formerly been a purely experimental itinerary, now acquires a certain pastoral flavour. Having now become a fully developed man, well equipped with sensory perception, Condillac sets him in an uninhabited landscape (there are forests and animals, but no human beings) and the final chapter of the Treatise is devoted to a robinsonade of a “solitary man enjoying all his senses”, to his learning to satisfy his needs, making more and more complicated judgments, avoiding unpredictable dangers and acquiring the instinct of survival (Condillac 1930: 195–209). There are two obvious facts to be stressed: first, the whole process takes place without the presence of any other human being. Condillac’s statue remains perfectly isolated even as the Treatise draws to its close. In this respect, Condillac is indeed rigorous. Second, as a logical consequence, the whole process takes place without any intervention of language whatsoever. The statue remains completely mute. No communication, either verbal or nonverbal, takes place, because there is no one to communicate with. This long preliminary will help us to understand the exact nature of the reference to deafness in Condillac’s work. The reference to a deaf individual, to which we shall now turn, is closely connected precisely with this conceptual image of an isolated being. But this time, it is the question of language and communication that comes into play – that is, precisely the question that is entirely absent from the Treatise. The avoidance of language in the Treatise is deliberate on Condillac’s part. In Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, published eight years before Treatise on the Sensations, language is, to the contrary, a fundamental issue. Condillac was not content with his Essay precisely in this respect; he kept reproaching himself that signs22 had occupied too much of his attention, that he had “given too much to signs”23 and that only by rewriting the text without recourse to language and 21.  Y. Vargas comments as follows: “Rousseau believes that this [Condillac’s] theory is wrong in so far as it does not imply the time for a given sense to be established […]. Man is not an immediate geometrical deduction, but a process and temporality” (Vargas 1995: 33). 22.  “Sign” is a general notion designating various means by which we are able to fix and to remember our ideas; language stricto sensu is only one of those means. 23.  He says so in a letter to Maupertuis from June 1752. This statement is extensively commented on by J. Derrida (1980: 92sq).

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signs as the vehicles of our ideas, relying only on sensory perception and its variations, could his thought be rid of the remnants of idealism.24 This absence of language is explicitly reflected on in the Treatise, where Condillac distinguishes two kinds of knowledge: the practical and the theoretical. The use of language is required only when theoretical knowledge comes into play, as it involves a use of distinct and classified ideas. Practical knowledge, on the other hand, relies on an instinctual or habitual base, and if it does consist of elementary judgments, these are not reflected on or analysed – practical knowledge “consists of confused ideas which rule our actions without letting us see how they make us act” (Condillac 1930: 195). According to Condillac, language is not required to acquire a habit, for example. And Condillac makes – rather unconvincingly – a reference to language acquisition in children to show that judgements do precede language: Can we believe a child begins to judge before it begins to speak? Certainly it could not feel the need of learning a language if it did not feel the need of expressing judgment. It must, then, have already formed judgments when it begins to speak, that is to say, when it begins to make analysis of its thought with words.  (Condillac 1930: 196)

Even though Condillac believed that excluding language from the study of the formation of our ideas would enable him to reach, so to speak, greater analytical purity, in some respects the Treatise might be considered to be a step backwards compared to the Essay,25 for the ideas on language in Condillac’s earlier book are far from being devoid of interest. The Essay is a text composed of two parts, a “synchronic” one, describing the functioning of the human mind, and a “diachronic” one, describing origin and development of the use of signs.26 Not surprisingly, Condillac maintains that the materials of our thought are furnished by sensations and mental operations based on them. He adds, however, that it is only by the use of signs that the full development of mental faculties such as imagination, contemplation and memory is possible. They become even more indispensable when 24.  This is the interpretation proposed by A. Charrak: “Treatise of the Sensations may be considered as an attempt to rewrite the history of the initial progress of human mind, that the first book (Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge) had inappropriately placed in the strict dependence on words” (Charrak 2003: 90). 25.  H. Aarsleff, however, proposes a different interpretation according to which the statue, even in the closing pages of the Treatise, is not supposed to be a fully developed human being but an entity whose existence is “private and asocial” and whose “mental life is, as it were, the one of an animal” (Aarsleff 2002: 104–106). 26.  We will return to the second part of Condillac’s Essay in the chapter dealing with the origin of language.



Chapter 1.  Deafness as deficiency

the mind comes to operate with “complex ideas”, i.e. ideas that are formed out of a combination of several perceptions (Condillac 2001: 71). Here, the sign functions as a necessary instrument for combining several different ideas in a larger whole, enabling the mind to treat it as a single idea (Condillac 2001: 80). Without signs, which fix ideas and allow a treatment and combinations of them that would otherwise be impossible, the mind would never be able to accomplish other operations than the most fundamental ones. Different kinds of signs – gestures, sounds, numerals, letters  – allow us to “control” our ideas and, as Condillac puts it, to “raise ourselves to the most sublime knowledge” (Condillac 2001: 82). It is at this point that the image of the deaf appears, again, precisely as a counter-example. All human beings receive the same kind of sensory “material”. If there are differences in the ability to handle this material, to bring it to a certain level of abstraction, it is because there are differences in our ability to handle signs. When Condillac imagines the effect of the inability to use signs, the effect of “sign deprivation”, as we might be tempted to call it, he proceeds by degrees: without certain kinds of signs it would be simply more difficult to access the knowledge they mediate. The absence of other, more fundamental signs would have a much more serious effect, and the absence of any signs whatsoever would hinder even the most fundamental mental operations: If you deprive a superior mind of the use of written signs, he will be blocked from access to much knowledge that a mediocre mind would attain with ease. Deprive him, furthermore, of speech, and the fate of those who are mute will show you the narrow bounds in which he has been enclosed. Finally, deprive him of the use of any sort of signs so that he will not even be able to use the smallest gesture to express the most common thoughts – then all you will have left is an imbecile.  (Condillac 2001: 83)

Typically, Condillac does not seem to be very concerned with the fact that the deaf person lacks a certain kind of sensory input; what seems to be a real concern is the fact that he is lacking signs. The problem is not hearing as such; the problem is absence of speech, inability to communicate, and the isolation it brings about. This is what makes, at least in Condillac’s work, the example of deafness very specific. The deficiency represented by deafness relates directly to the inability to use signs. That is why the deaf, rather than the blind, is used here as an example. Condillac affirms the implicit primacy of the sense of hearing for the acquisition of knowledge, the primacy posited by Aristotle and confirmed by Hobbes. Indeed, Condillac’s vision of deafness is not much different from the one we found in Hobbes. It is not that thought does not exist at all (this fate is reserved only for a completely languageless – or better, “sign-less” – being, without the ability to use even the most simple form of signs, such as elementary gestures). Thought

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does exist, but it is limited only to basic operations performed on the basis of sensory input, an operation that allows the individual to express immediate needs. Abstract reflection, of course, cannot be performed, because there are no signs – or there is a very small number of them – permitting the handling of complex ideas. Good empiricist that he is, Condillac illustrates this with several case studies. There is even a special section entitled “Facts that confirm what was proved in the previous chapter”. The first such fact is of particular interest: it is the case of the so-called “Deaf of Chartres”, a case that was reported to the Parisian Academy of Sciences by Fontenelle in 1703. Condillac cited Fontenelle’s report extensively, and so shall we: At Chartres a young man of twenty-three or twenty-four, the son of an artisan and deaf-mute from birth, suddenly began to talk, to the astonishment of the entire town. It was known that three or four months earlier he had heard the sound of bells and been extremely surprised by this new and unknown experience. Afterwards something like water issued from his left ear, and he then heard perfectly with both ears. During the next three or four months he was listening without saying a word, making it a habit to repeat very softly all the words he heard and strengthening his command of pronunciation and of the ideas connected with words. At long last he was prepared to break the silence, and he made known that he spoke, though as yet only imperfectly. Good theologians immediately began to interrogate him on his past state, with questions chiefly about God, the soul, and on the moral good and evil of human actions. He did not seem to have carried his thoughts that far. Though his parents were Catholic, though he attended mass, was instructed in making the sign of the cross, and in kneeling in the posture of a person at prayer, he had never joined any intention to all those actions nor understood what others connected with them. He barely knew what death was, and he never thought about it. He led a mere animal life, wholly occupied with sensible and present objects and the few ideas he received by the eyes. From these ideas he did not even draw what he would have seemed able to draw from them. It is not that he did not naturally have a mind, but the mind of a person who is deprived of human intercourse is so little exercised and cultivated that he does not think except when he is absolutely forced to do so by external objects. The principal fund of the ideas of mankind is their mutual converse.  (Condillac 2001: 84)

Having expressed the regret that he was not able to interrogate the deaf himself (because theologians limited themselves to asking questions about innate knowledge, and not about the exact nature of the ideas he had when he could not hear, as well as of the limited reflection he was able to make using this poor sensory material), Condillac goes on to present his own hypothetical interpretation of the case. The mind of the deaf, as he believes, did not develop any activity on its own, it was rather acted upon by the impressions of the moment. It was not that he was



Chapter 1.  Deafness as deficiency

entirely unable to use signs and communicate. He was not a monadic subjectivity closed entirely upon itself; some limited interaction did take place between him and others. As to the nature of this interaction, Condillac is quite clear. The deaf of Chartres was, in modern terminology, a home-signer: “It is true that, growing up in society, he received some assistance that made him connect some of his ideas to signs. He no doubt knew how to use gestures to communicate his principal needs and the things that could satisfy them” (Condillac 2001: 85).27 What he did not have, nonetheless, was a fully developed language allowing him to “work through” this basic material; the connection between the few signs and the corresponding number of ideas he possessed was entirely submitted to his immediate physical needs and perceptions. Much more extensive social interaction would have been required for him to move beyond this stage. It is also worth noting that another ancient myth is present in this description, the myth of the deaf as an animal-like being – in the passage quoted above, it is clearly stated that the deaf of Chartres “led a mere animal life”. Condillac uses different terms, but in many respects, his description coincides with that given by Hobbes: the tie between the signs the deaf used and the ideas attached to them was too tight. Ideas did not develop beyond the individual level to reach a necessary level of generality and did not become attached to arbitrary signs characteristic of language: “Since his attention was entirely absorbed by the sensations of the moment, it ceased with those sensations. So he did not have the exercise of contemplation and even less that of memory” (Condillac 2001: 85). Because the deaf did not receive any “external assistance”, all his ideas are completely dominated by the present – there were no signs that “stood for” the idea of an absent object. Indeed, in most cases, the deaf forgot that he had a sensation as soon as it was over, and when the same sensation appeared later on, it was not experienced as the same sensation repeating itself, but as an entirely new one, because there was no existing sign to denote its identity. Therefore, he did not have much motivation for moving beyond the singularity of sensations and making a comparison between them; and because he did not make many comparisons, “he rarely formed any judgment” (Condillac 2001: 86). This explains certain peculiarities of his behaviour, which was “entirely determined by habit and imitation, 27.  On this occasion, it is important to clear up one misunderstanding. Here, Condillac is dealing with the deaf person as essentially a languageless being, illustrating the question of innate ideas and the impact of isolation on human individual. The question of sign language is not treated in this context because the deaf person does not sign (apart from those few gestures used to communicate his “principal needs”), and neither is the question of the (gestural) origin of language, which will be dealt with much later in Condillac’s text and which will involve neither the question of signing nor deafness (for it is gesture and voice emitted by hearing individuals, and not signing, which mark the origin of language).

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especially in regard to things that bore little relation to his needs” (Condillac 2001: 86). This is what his religious life consisted of: he simply imitated the others without having any distinct idea of what he was doing. Imitation, says Condillac, is the very principle of our action if our life is not enriched by social interaction and our ideas remain determined by immediate circumstances. As Condillac says, anticipating another remarkable case study he presents immediately after, a man abandoned in the forest and living with bears would not have any choice but to imitate bears, their cries and their way of behaving – indeed, “we are so strongly prompted to imitate that even a Descartes in the same situation would not try to walk only on his feet” (Condillac 2001: 87). This analysis of Condillac’s enables us to highlight the true sense of the word “deficiency” when it comes to deafness. Deficiency, as we have seen, is not only (and not even primarily) a sensory deficiency per se. It is a deficiency that relates to the use of language and to the capacity to communicate, that is, to human intersubjective existence. This is the fundamental difference between deafness and blindness and it is entirely right to say that for Condillac, the deaf from Chartres is not the equivalent of Cheselden’s blind man (Chottin 2018). For there are different problems and issues at stake. At stake is not only the effect of the incapacity to hear on human cognitive abilities, but primarily the incapacity to have access to language and communication that the absence of hearing brings about. Hence the deaf as an example of isolation. This image of the deaf corresponds perfectly to the one that Harlan Lane has sketched in the sentences quoted earlier, when he spoke of “extrapolative error”: “I would be isolated, disoriented, uncommunicative, and unreceptive to communication” (Lane 1999: 11). It is exactly these characteristics that are ascribed to the deaf in the texts that we are dealing with here. Even though Condillac’s deaf person seems to share, with minor differences, the characteristics already mentioned by Hobbes, the comments on him are significantly more detailed. What, in Hobbes, was an ad hoc example, is suddenly placed at the centre of attention. The reasons, obviously, are dictated by context – language and its connection to ideas being the central topic of Condillac’s Essay, much more attention is paid to those in whom this connection does not function properly and is not established in a standard way. What is more, the preceding case study is interwoven into a more complicated set of references. We shall now turn to one of those references, which we consider to be of particular importance. If the deaf person is isolated as a social being, he is not isolated as an example. In the very next paragraph of Condillac’s Essay, he receives a most intriguing companion: the wild child.

Chapter 2

Deafness as deficiency continued The “Wild Child” in the 18th century as a conceptual twin of the deaf person

Condillac’s and Rousseau’s view of wild children By referring to wild children in the present chapter, it may seem that all we are doing is drawing facile analogies or collecting curiosities at best. Not at all. The purpose is to show that they participate in the same imaginary fabric from which 18th-century thought is woven; in the 18th century (and far beyond), the deaf person and the wild child are conceptual twins – and not only because they illustrate the same kind of mental underdevelopment in Condillac’s Essay. They share – and are consciously ascribed – the same set of attributes: isolation, absence of language, cognitive incapacity.28 One might argue that the analogy between the deaf and the wild child is a strange one, if not a false one. But against the background of what has previously been said about the meaning of the notion of deficiency, it will appear more understandable. Being isolated is the common trait ascribed to both the deaf and the wild children. This, rather than the hearing loss itself, is what the analogy is based on. It may be objected that this isolation is not the same in both cases – the deaf of Chartres was not entirely deprived of communication, despite its limited character, while the wild child, in most cases, has no interaction at all with other human beings. But it must be remembered that for Condillac, the two types of isolation differ in degree only, not in nature; it is merely a matter of the extent to which the human subject is deprived of language and social interaction. This is why he does not hesitate to use both wild children and the deaf to illustrate the same kind of phenomena, as will become clear from what follows. Wild children, i.e. children deprived, for a prolonged period, of contact with other members of the human species, have existed since time immemorial.

28.  And it is no accident that the closing chapter of Harlan Lane’s penetrating study of an 18th-century wild child is devoted to deafness, sign language and early development of deaf education (Lane 1976: 205–254).

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Some cases may be reasonably considered to have been proven as real,29 others are probably a hoax, and some may have been diagnosed as wild children by mistake.30 In some historical periods, many cases are described within a span of several years; in others, no case is mentioned for several centuries – those occasional “epidemic” occurrences, again, seem to speak against the idea that all cases are genuine. Given the nature of the major philosophical debates in 18th-century empiricism, there is little wonder that the known cases of wild children have received much attention. Older known cases  – sometimes rather poorly documented  – were given new interpretations. And when a new case appeared at the very end of the 18th century, it caused quite a stir – and it is largely thanks to philosophical questions and debates that we now dispose of a fairly well documented case study of a wild child named Victor. What caused some controversy, however, is the issue of what exactly these children were supposed to prove. Do they represent human nature in its pure form, uncontaminated by cultural influences? Do they tell us something about the existence of innate ideas? Are they able to teach us something about the nature of perception? The first of these hypotheses is vigorously refuted by none other than the great analyst of the “state of nature”, Rousseau himself. Though it may seem a surprise at first, Rousseau’s rejection of this hypothesis appears completely logical if we pay some attention to his argument. The key text, in this respect, is his Discourse on Inequality, written in 1754 and published a year later. The treatment of the question of inequality entails a hypothesis of the “state of nature”, and it is in relation to this state that several cases of wild children are mentioned in a footnote. First of all, the state of nature, as Rousseau conceives it in the Discourse, is not at all a concrete historical period or a concrete stage of human development, but rather a theoretical hypothesis that enables us to cast a critical glance at the present state of society as well as the status of the individual. In Rousseau’s own words: […] It is no light enterprise to separate that which is original from that which is artificial in man’s present nature, and attain a solid knowledge of a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, and which will probably never exist, yet of which it is necessary to have sound ideas if we are to judge our present state satisfactorily. (Rousseau 1984: 68)

29.  For a general overview, see Malson 1972 (second part of the book, pp. 95–179, consists of a complete translation of the reports on Victor of Aveyron). 30.  H. Lane and R. Pillard describe the case of a “baboon boy” in Burundi, considered to have lived in the company of monkeys. Nonetheless, the authors have discovered that his allegedly animal-like behavior was caused by autism (Lane, Pillard 1978).



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Given this description of the natural state, it is easy to understand that Rousseau is not inclined to treat it in terms of biology or anatomy.31 When it comes to wild children, he strictly rejects the idea that they might represent a “regression” towards a more archaic (or even “natural”) form of behaviour. The wild children, in Rousseau’s view, do not exemplify any natural state (simply because of the fact that the natural state of man is not related to any historical period), but just like Condillac’s man living with bears, rather a certain propensity towards imitation, which is “naturally” possessed by every human being. As such, they are not witnesses of the lost natural state, but rather “cultural” curiosities that do not tell us anything about what human beings looked like before becoming civilized. After having listed a few cases of wild children (a child found in 1344 near Hesse, a child found in 1694 in Lithuania, “the little savage of Hannover” and two wild children found in Pyrenees) who were reported to have walked on all fours, Rousseau refuses to view their alleged animal-like behaviour as an atavism.32 In Rousseau’s words, the example of infants, being taken at an age when the natural forces are not yet developed nor the limbs strengthened proves nothing at all […]. Particular facts have very little force against the universal practice of all men, even of peoples that, having had no communication with others, could not have imitated others. A child abandoned in the forest before it has learned to walk, and suckled by some beast, will have followed the example of his nurse in learning to walk like her; habit might have given him a dexterity he did not acquire from nature; and just as persons without arms succeed, by force of practice, in doing with their feet everything that we do with our hands, he will finally have succeeded in using his hands as feet. (Rousseau 1984: 142)

Nevertheless, a second possibility remains, though it is far from being free of the same ambiguities as the first one. This time, what is at stake is the state of mind of the isolated subject, its cognitive and perceptive abilities, and not the subject’s status as a possible analogy to an early stage of human development. It is this 31.  “However important it may be in order to reach a true judgment of man’s natural state, to look back to his origins and examine him, so to speak, in the first embryo of his species, I do not propose to follow his organic system through all its successive developments. I shall not pause to investigate in the animal system what man must have been at the beginning in order to become in the end what he is. […] On this subject I could offer only vague and almost wholly imaginary conjectures” (Rousseau 1984: 81). 32.  Given the human anatomy they undeniably possess, their way of moving around is – to say the least – very unpractical. Among several observations Rousseau makes on this subject, let us quote at least the first one: “[…] The way in which a man’s head is attached to his body, instead of directing his eyes horizontally like those of all other animals, and as he has himself when he walks erect, would have kept him in walking on all fours with his eyes fixed on the ground, a situation very little favorable to the preservation of the individual” (Rousseau 1984: 141).

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second possibility for which Condillac has opted in the Essay. He is not lured into seeing the wild child as a tabula rasa of any kind, just like Rousseau is not lured into seeing the wild children as surviving examples of the natural state; the wild child is not an exemplification of anything natural. In Condillac’s Essay, the wild child appears – as an example – in the same context as the deaf man of Chartres; it opens up the possibility of considering the effect of isolation on one’s mental life. But there is one additional feature. The wild child illustrates the problem of the “impossible” beginning, as stated in the opening sentences of the Treatise (quoted earlier). Normally, we cannot remember how our ideas and mental operations came about: the wild child, who did not develop in a “standard” way and only encountered civilization and language later on, after having been found, is, in a sense, a palpable illustration of this impossibility. The case cited by Condillac is one of a “bear” child, found in Lithuania in 1694. The brief reference to the Lithuanian child immediately follows the analysis of the deaf man of Chartres, which strongly suggests that Condillac intended the two cases to illustrate the same kind of “sign deprivation”, with only a difference in degree: In the forests between Russia and Lithuania a boy of about ten, who lived among the bears, was found in 1694. He gave no sign of reason, walked on hands and feet, had no language, and formed sounds that had nothing in common with human sounds. It took a long time before he could utter a few words, which he still did in a very barbarous manner. As soon as he could speak, he was asked about his former state. But he could not remember any more than we can recall what happened to us in the cradle. (Condillac 2001: 88)

Isolated as he was, the deaf man did remember – at least this is what Fontenelle’s report tells us – what preceded the moment when he gained a sense of hearing. This is undoubtedly because his was not a perfect form of isolation and, as Condillac admits, some limited communication took place between him and other people in his environment. The wild child, who did not see a single human being for many years, had no memory of his past at all. When he learnt to speak and to communicate, he was reborn; the final reference to us ourselves, who do not remember what happened in the cradle, is very clear on this point, and it is also clearly a bridge leading to the opening sentences of the Treatise – it is enough to compare the two passages.33 The child is the incarnation of the impossibility of remembering the beginning. This impossibility applies equally to ourselves; in the Lithuanian child’s case, however, the beginning  – entry into civilization, which marks the very beginning of life in ordinary circumstances – is delayed, and this 33.  And in the Treatise, in fact, the Lithuanian child does reappear in the closing chapters (Condillac 1930: 224–227).



Chapter 2.  Deafness as deficiency continued

is what makes him precious material for observation. Condillac proceeds, after all, like a modern scientist who is interested in how an isolated child acquires language, for example, because this non-standard acquisition may cast some light on the standard one. In any case, Condillac is not at all surprised by the child’s incapacity to remember. This incapacity was, in his words, “easy to predict” (Condillac 2001: 88). Because the child’s mind had been exclusively preoccupied by the present and had not been trained by reflection, as soon as he was finally able to answer questions, all the “feeble traces” of what he could have remembered had already vanished. In this sense, the child was not really reborn when he was found and taught to speak; he was, indeed, born in the strong sense of the word. As far as mental capacities are concerned, there was no birth prior to this one, and neither was there any prior existence, because the very notion of time and its passing did not make any sense to the child, who was fully absorbed by present sensations. The boy, says Condillac, would be very surprised if he learned that he had had an existence before his coming into contact with civilization, and he would be inclined to believe that he had always existed precisely in the state he was in when he first started reflecting upon himself (Condillac 2001: 88). The status of the wild child’s role as the deaf person’s Dopplegänger becomes now more obvious and graspable. And it would be entirely false to believe that Condillac’s remarks were condemned to remain only on paper for future philosophers to interpret. A real wild boy – not a recorded case from history, but a child in flesh and blood – was found and captured in the late 18th century, when Condillac was no longer around to see him. The wild boy has entered history under the name of Victor of Aveyron. His educator was Jean-Marc Itard, a young physician associated with the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris and specializing in the field of deafness and hearing disorders. A few words about Itard and his view of deafness should not be without interest, as they may clarify some issues connected with the deficiency paradigm and cast some light on Itard’s motivation for taking the approach he took when educating Victor.

Itard’s view of deafness in Treatise on the Maladies of the Ear and of Hearing In the final chapter of his Traité de maladies de l’oreille et de l’audition, published many years after his adventure with Victor was over, Itard paints an eloquent tableau of the mental and moral capacities of the deaf individual, as he conceives of it. As this work was obviously the fruit of many years of work and endeavours, we can assume that much of what Itard wrote in that chapter may have already

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been present in his mind when he set out to “civilize” the savage of Aveyron. The chapter, entitled “Of congenital deafness” (De la surdité de naissance), shows how much Itard is committed to the deficiency paradigm. According to him, deafness, again, is not only a physiological condition but has a larger exemplary status. Congenital deafness is of interest not only to specialists but to philosophers too (Itard 1821: 403; my own translation), for the simple reason that it brings us very close – the closest possible, from an empirical point of view – to answering the question of the moral and mental development of an isolated individual, that is, the same reason for which Itard had taken such an interest in Victor some years before. “Moral isolation” and a “more or less incomplete development of mental faculties” are the expressions that, in Itard’s view, best described what he calls the pitiful state of an “uninstructed” deaf person (Itard 1821: 411).34 The individual’s inability to hear and speak makes him into a “being which, in the midst of civilization, does not at all communicate with those around him (ses proches); a being who, similar to a beast, is endowed with voice, but deprived of speech, for the reason that speech is an art of imitation which is acquired by ear and in the society of speaking men” (Itard 1821: 414–415).35 Because of this basic characteristic, it is only logical that the wild child or a child raised in isolation is considered a strict analogon of the congenital deaf, and Itard goes on to invoke the famous experiment of the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus, described in Herodotus and involving two children raised without any speech ever having been addressed to them, in order to find out what the original language of the human species was. The analogy, we can see, is again not with deafness itself (because wild children need not necessarily be deaf) but with the state of isolation such an individual is, either voluntarily or involuntarily, condemned to. In other words, Itard follows here the same logic as Condillac did earlier. Speech is acquired in human society and whether we do not hear others or are effectively separated from them amounts to the same condition – Itard clearly endorses Aristotle’s view that hearing is the single most important sense of imitation and instruction. The inevitable result of this is “intellectual poverty”: the deaf person is subject to a double privation (that of speech and that of hearing), setting a double barrier between him and the “world of the intellect”. His ideas and sensations are unable to reach other people, while the ideas and the knowledge 34.  It appears that in Itard’s Treatise, the expression “uninstructed deaf-mute” corresponds to the individuals nowadays referred to as home-signers. This is true not only of Itard but of many other authors writing on deafness. 35.  Itard’s view, as we easily notice, is clearly Aristotelian. Aristotle is evoked on p. 417, where Itard alludes precisely to the passage from The History of Animals we quoted earlier. The idea that the condition of the deaf is inferior to that of the blind is mentioned on p. 422.



Chapter 2.  Deafness as deficiency continued

of others are, at the same time, unable to reach him (Itard 1821: 419–420). This image corresponds exactly to the Hobbesian example evoked earlier. The deaf person sees but does not understand: the spectacle of the world, its “moving and varied images”, not animated by voice nor sound, may capture his attention, but are deprived of meaning. The deaf person, according to Itard’s curious description, is “a most extraordinary being who, observed from the outside, has all the manners and mores of a civilized man, but inside, all the barbarism and ignorance of a savage” (Itard 1821: 420). His condition is even worse because, after all, the savage does possess the art of speech; the deaf person has no idea of death or immortality (Itard 1821: 421); no interest in social and political matters (Itard 1821: 421); no understanding of religion (Itard 1821: 426); very little capacity of love (Itard 1821: 428).36 However, as a sort of counterpoint to this unfavourable description, Itard adds what he considers to be the “advantages” or “compensations” of isolation: the deaf are protected from prejudices to which our social existence is subjected so often, and from those forms of “reasoning” and fashionable “sophisms” which, in civilized society, are capable of inducing a “deplorable scepticism” in those who are weak enough to succumb to them (Itard 1821: 424–425). By this addendum, Itard unwittingly reminds us of the ambivalence the image of the deaf has been invested with since time immemorial: the deaf person’s “innocence” is but another side of his inferiority. If this enumeration seems to fit perfectly the idea of the deficiency paradigm, there is, nonetheless, an important corrective to be made. What Itard was speaking of all along was an “uninstructed deaf person” (most probably a home-signer, that is), deprived of rich and fully developed communicative contact with his environment, just like the deaf man of Chartres was.37 As such, the deaf may be inferior, but this does not mean he is not perfectible (Itard 1821: 437). Among the means of cultivating one’s soul, speech is undoubtedly the most effective. Speech is learned by imitation; and due to our physical disposition, vocal signals (signes vocaux) 36.  Itard speaks of parental love here (“The deaf are incapable of loving their parents as much as we do”); when it comes to partnership and sexual relations, he does mention the deaf’s ability to love (admitting at the same time that he did very little observation on this matter), but states that there is a tendency to displace this sentiment towards its less pleasant forms: he reports a case of a deaf man who has loved his wife very intensely (il aimait violemment sa femme) but his attachment, unfortunately, expressed itself only in an immoderate sexual appetite and very strong and unmotivated jealousy (Itard 1821: 430–431). Itard used this “evidence” to make a strong anti-Rousseauist point: “Man is loving and good only because he is enlightened and civilized. This incontestable truth has survived eloquent sophisms of certain philosophers speaking against civilization” (Itard 1821: 427). 37.  The deaf of Chartres is mentioned on p. 450–452 as one of Itard’s “case studies”.

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represent the privileged vehicles of meaning. But this does not mean that they are the only ones: had we no other means of expressing our “ideas and passions” than the “outward movement of our limbs” and no other sense than sight by which to receive those signals, we would no doubt have made use of them to make ourselves understood and to communicate.38 Therefore, “it is unreasonable to believe that an isolated deaf-mute could give us a just idea of what all men would be like, had they been created so as to be deprived of the sense of hearing” (Itard 1821: 438). A society composed of these hypothetical men, a “mimic” society (la société mimique), to use Itard’s expression, would have progressed towards civilization just as quickly as we did. The art of writing, so useful for such progress, would have probably been invented even earlier because “lesser effort of imagination is needed to paint the signs than to figure the sounds” (Itard 1821: 438). It is, again, isolation which is the proper cause of the underdevelopment of the deaf person’s mental capacities and moral notions: it is through his isolation, not because of his physical disposition and sensory privation, that he is deprived of the most valuable and effective instrument of moral progress, this instrument being communication with others.39 “Would you like to know up to which point he could be equal to ourselves? Make everything equal, let him be born and live among those who resemble him, and you will soon have the society of which I have just spoken” (Itard 1821: 439). Such a society, after all, did exist, and it was only due to the limited number of its members and to the short duration of its social existence that its progress was not as rapid as it could have been: Itard was speaking, of

38.  It is interesting to see that this reasoning of Itard’s  – whether he was conscious of it or not – echoes an idea expressed, many centuries earlier, in Plato’s Cratylus (422e–423a). At one point of the dialogue, Socrates reflects upon the possibility of expressing ourselves without the use of spoken language and asks the following question: “Answer me this: if we hadn’t a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn’t we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?” Socrates’ interlocutor Hermogenes agrees and Socrates continues: “So, if we wanted to express something light in weight or above us, I think we’d raise our hand towards the sky in imitation of the very nature of the thing. And if we wanted to express something heavy or below us, we’d move our hand towards the earth. And if we wanted to express a horse (or any other animal) galloping, you know that we’d make our bodies and our gestures as much like theirs as possible. […] Because the only way to express anything by means of our body is to have our body imitate whatever we want to express” (Plato 1997: 139–140). 39.  The influence of Condillac is plainly visible in those lines. For Condillac describes, separately and in different parts of his Essay, both the effect of isolation and lack of communication on human cognitive and moral development (the deaf from Chartres and the Lithuanian child) and the progressive birth of human communication (genesis of language).



Chapter 2.  Deafness as deficiency continued

course, about the deaf at the institute that he had been affiliated with for a long time (Itard 1821: 440).40 There is, then, a convergence of two basic ideas in Itard’s chapter on congenital deafness: (1) the negative effect of isolation on human development; (2) the notion of the perfectibility of the human being and the belief that this negative effect may be overcome. And these are the two fundamental incentives and guiding principles of the educational method he had used on Victor. Victor’s situation is similar to that of a deaf person (because of isolation, not because of any physical or mental predisposition), and this condition is not unchangeable if the correct approach is used and if isolation is abolished. It is now to the case of Victor that we will turn.

Concepts of language and the education of Victor Victor of Aveyron was a twelve-year-old feral child found in the Lacaune district at the very end of the 18th century.41 He has been examined by eminent physicians – Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre and Philippe Pinel, who concludes, in his report, that the boy suffered from a congenital mental disorder.42 Even though the child was not deaf, he lacked speech: that is why he was finally transferred to the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, run by Abbé Sicard, the successor of Abbé de l’Epée, the famous founder of deaf education in France. It is here that the story of Victor’s education begins. It is undertaken and it is told by Itard; as time progressed, Itard 40.  After a lengthy description of his own  – unsuccessful, as he openly admits  – method of teaching the deaf to speak, he concedes, at the very end of his treatise, that “spoken signs, compared with the written ones, give rise to difficulties, slow progress and misunderstandings that are absent from the language of signs, which is, I repeat, the natural language of the deaf-mutes and which has the great advantage of establishing communication among them” (Itard 1821: 519–520). As for Itard’s method, it was different both from that of Pereire and Epée, insofar as it concentrated – using sometimes rather drastic means – on mobilizing the sense of hearing itself, while both the “classic” oral method and the method of signs, different as they were, “did not require any work on the part of the ear” (Itard states this difference on p. 493, quoting also the names of Wallis, Amman and Sicard). For Itard, the principal aim was to give “them” hearing, not only to teach “them” how to speak (presuming that the second will follow from the first). Itard’s attempts to cure deafness through “sensibilization of the auditory organ” represent a new conjuncture of medicine and education that was hitherto not present in oralism (see Lane 1999: 212–213; Lane 1984: 132–144). 41.  The child was first spotted in 1797, but it was not until 1800 that he was definitely captured (Lane 1976: 3–29). 42.  Harlan Lane quotes Bonnaterre’s and Pinel’s report at full length in The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Lane 1976: 33–48; 57–69).

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wrote two reports, the first in 1801 and the second in 1806, describing in detail the basic principles of the educational process, the concrete steps undertaken and the progress achieved. Itard’s decision to educate the feral child was significantly motivated by his philosophical readings. Itard was an avid reader of Locke and Condillac and his educational project grew out of the theoretical background provided by the two authors: It is the works of Locke and Condillac which have shown the powerful influence exercised by the isolated and simultaneous action of the senses on the formation and development of our ideas. The bad use made of this discovery has destroyed neither its truth nor its practical applications to a system of medical education.  (Itard 1972b: 143)43

And it is this philosophical background that at least in part led Itard to reject Pinel’s conclusion and to maintain that the child’s symptoms were not those of “incurable idiotism”, but that his apparent mental disorder was more likely a consequence of long isolation and that the right educational approach might successfully restore him to social life. Instead of being a “hopeless idiot”, the child is a “being highly interesting, who deserves, in every point of view, the attention of observers” (Itard 1972a: 93). Why is that? It is because the child is an impersonated solution of a “metaphysical problem”, summarized in the following terms: “[…] to determine what would be the degree of understanding, and the nature of ideas of a youth, who, deprived, from his infancy, of all education, should have lived entirely separated from individuals of his own species” (Itard 1972a: 99). It is the human nature that is at stake, not an individual abandoned child, and the opening sentences of the preface of Itard’s first report leave no room for doubt that his vision of human nature is fully indebted to his philosophical views. For what he states in these opening lines is a general observation on human nature: Cast on this globe, without physical powers, and without innate ideas; unable by himself to obey the constitutional laws of his organization, which call him to the first rank in the system of being, man can find only in the bosom of society the eminent station that was destined to him in nature, and would be, without the aid of civilization, one of the most feeble and least intelligent of animals […]. (Itard 1972a: 91)

This view, according to which man is inferior to animals in his instinctual capacities and physical strength, but is destined to become superior to them 43.  In the end of the first report, Itard expresses the conviction that the facts gathered from his observation of Victor represent “a material proof of the most important truths; of those truths, for the discovery of which Locke and Condillac were indebted merely to the force of their genius, and the depth of their reflections” (Itard 1972a: 138).



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because of his social development, was not only quite common in 18th-century philosophy;44 it was also destined to undergo remarkable future developments in unexpected contexts.45 The “clinical” picture of the feral child that Itard presents in the introduction to his text is a faithful likeness of the Lithuanian child and the deaf-mute described by Condillac: his eyes wander aimlessly from one object to another, being so little “instructed” (the expression is Itard’s) by the sense of touch that the savage would not be able to distinguish an object in space from a painted one (Itard 1972a: 97),46 he is insensible to changes of temperature,47 his hearing is not sensible to strong sounds, such as the explosion of fire-arms (even though he is able to recognize feeble sounds, such as the cracking of a nut), his sense of smell is unable to distinguish between perfumes and putrid odours. Furthermore, his senses were

44.  It is formulated, with remarkable clearness and on the basis of no less remarkable arguments, in La Mettrie’s Machine Man (1747): “Despite all of man’s prerogatives over animals, to put him in the same class as them is to do him a great honor. It is true that up to a certain age he is more of an animal than they because he is born with less instinct. Which animal would die of hunger in the middle of a river of milk? Man alone. […] Therefore nature made us to be beneath the animals, or at least in order to show up all the better the miracles worked by education, which alone can remove us from that level and finally lift us above them” (La Mettrie 1996: 18). In relation to our topic, the following La Mettrie’s lines are also worth quoting: “But can the same distinction be extended to the deaf, those born blind, idiots, lunatics, wild men or those raised in the woods with animals; to those whose hypochondria has doomed their imagination; or to all those brutes in human form who only display the crudest instincts? No, all those who are men only in body but not in mind do not deserve a special class.” 45.  In the form of the famous theory of “fetalization”, developed by L. Bolk. This idea of a fundamental insufficiency of the newly born human being is to play an important role in the “mirror stage”, as described by J. Lacan. Lacan states it using the following terms: “In man […] the relationship to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor incoordination of the neonatal months. The objective notions of the anatomical incompleteness of the pyramidal tracts and of certain humoral residues of the maternal organism in the newborn confirm in my view that we find in man a veritable specific prematurity of birth” (Lacan 2002b: 6). In his illuminating commentary on the mirror stage and discussion of Bolk’s influence on early Lacan, B. Ogilvie quotes the beginning of Itard’s report as a precursor of the fetalization theory (Ogilvie 2005: 89–90). 46.  The allusion to Locke, Condillac and Molyneux’s question is very clear. 47.  “We have more than once found him in the kitchen, taking away […] potatoes out of the boiling water, and I know that he had, at that time, a skin of very fine and delicate texture” (Itard 1972a: 105). The same insensibility has been reported in numerous cases of wild children. Susan Curtiss makes a very similar observation in her case study of an isolated child called Genie (Curtiss 1977: 9).

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“uncoordinated” – a fact that Itard proves with a curious experiment.48 As for his intellectual capacities, the boy is incapable of any sustained attention except for the objects of his immediate needs, nor of any subtle intellectual operations. In short, Victor is indeed an empirical illustration of Locke’s and Condillac’s speculative theses. Nonetheless, what we have here is, after all, a real child, not Condillac’s statue. The education takes place in the real world, not in the philosopher’s mind, and Itard has to come up with a “realistic” educational project without betraying the philosophical authorities. Itard’s educational undertaking, therefore, involved “civilizing” the child by means of a progressive education of his senses,49 leading, later on, to the development of his mental capacities. The principal stages of the process are announced as follows: (1) to attach the child to social life; (2) to awaken his nervous sensibility with “the most energetic stimulants” and powerful mental affections; (3) to extend the sphere of his ideas by arousing new needs; (4) to lead him to the use of speech by “subjecting him to the necessity of imitation”; (5) to submit the objects of his physical needs to simple mental operations, and to transfer, later on, these operations onto the objects of instruction (Itard 1972a: 102).50 For our purposes, there is no need to comment on the process of Victor’s education at full length. Instead, we will focus on one part of Itard’s report, describing the effort to teach Victor “the use of speech”, because it is precisely the question of speech and signs that is the founding trait of the analogy between the deaf and the wild child, outlined by Condillac and clearly taken over by Itard. Itard’s way of proceeding clearly shows, on the one hand, the direct influence of Condillac on his view of language and its acquisition, and also, on the other hand, his unwillingness to abandon his preconceived idea about what language should be. First, Itard proceeds to “attach the boy to social life”51 and to “educate” his senses. Without this, without the boy’s sensory capacities being extended, there 48.  “I have often given him large quantities of snuff, without exciting any disposition to sneeze; which is a perfect proof, that in this case there did not exist between the organ of smell, and those of respiration and sight, that kind of sympathy which is apt to induce either sneezing, or the secretion of tears” (Itard 1972a: 105–106). 49.  The term “education of the senses” is not uncommon in 18th-century educational theories: it is consistently used, for example, in Rousseau’s Émile. 50.  I have decided  – in accordance with Harlan Lane  – to render the French word besoin, frequently used by Itard, as “need” rather than “want” (used by the English translators of the Report). The reason is that the concept is inspired directly by Condillac, and “need” – used equally by H. Aarsleff in his translation of Condillac’s Essay – appears to be the most appropriate term. 51.  Itard writes: “If one may judge of the past life of this child, by his present disposition, we may conclude that, like some savages in the warmer climates, he was acquainted with



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would be no hope for the successful acquisition of language. In order to enhance the boy’s nervous sensibility and increase the number of his ideas, Itard invents various physical and affective means to achieve his goal, namely, hot baths, “dry frictions to the spinal vertebrae, and even the tickling of lumbar regions”,52 as well as the excitation of strong affective states (both positive and negative). After a period of three months, Itard’s efforts were rewarded: the boy became sensible to cold, showed signs of pleasure when he touched his velvet trousers (which Itard interpreted as a considerable achievement since Victor’s sense of touch had become much more refined than it was before), distinguished between various smells and acquired more civilized eating habits. However, Itard’s educational methods had no effect on the boy’s senses of sight and hearing (the reason being, in Itard’s view, the “complex” character of these two senses which, therefore, required longer training). As for extending the sphere of the boy’s ideas, Itard used several kinds of toys and invented several types of games in order to make the boy’s attention more sustained, and in the end of this section of the report, after describing how the boy was beginning to show a newly awoken affection for his educator, he even expresses something akin to tenderness: People may say what they please, but I will ingenuously confess, that I submit, without reluctance, to all these little remarks of infantile fondness. Perhaps I will be understood by those who consider how much effect is produced upon the mind of an infant, by compliances, apparently trivial, and small remarks of that tenderness which nature hath implanted in the heart of a mother […].  (Itard 1972a: 116)

But let us now consider the section on language. When Itard judged the boy sensible enough, the time came to endow him with communicative skills. The boy’s unusual disposition – that of being able to hear quiet sounds, but not loud ones – is interpreted again as an effect of his long isolation. Hearing was one of the boy’s principal means of self-preservation, and as such, he was only able to distinguish those sounds that had an immediate relation to his needs. That is why, according to Itard, the savage hears perfectly when a nut is cracked, but does not pay any four circumstances only; to sleep, to eat, to do nothing, and to run about in the fields” (Itard 1972a: 103). Itard starts gradually transforming those predispositions, and does so with success: “[…] I endeavored, and was gradually successful, in my attempts to render his excursion less frequent, his meals less copious, and repeated after longer intervals, the time he spent in bed much shorter, and his exercise more subservient to his instruction” (Itard 1972a: 105). 52.  This last means had, nonetheless, one unfortunate side-effect, which led Itard to abandon it, for “its effects were no longer confined to the production of pleasurable emotions; but appeared to extend themselves to the organs of generation, and to indicate some danger of awakening the sensations of premature puberty” (Itard 1972a: 107).

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attention to articulate human voice. Itard’s interpretation of the child’s disposition as being dictated by his attachment to immediate needs clearly bears strong influences of Condillac’s philosophy, for Condillac sees the behaviour of “his” isolated subjects – both the deaf of Chartres and the wild child from Lithuania – as being determined precisely by the same driving force. At the same time, Itard claims to draw on his own medical experience. Hearing a sound and recognizing the sound as articulate are two very different operations: “For the first, there is need only of a certain sensibility in the nerve of the ear; the second requires a particular modification of this sensibility” (Itard 1972a: 118). Among the deaf in Sicard’s Institute, there are several individuals who seem to hear perfectly all kinds of sounds, but are not capable of imitating articulate words: “Thus, it appears that speech is a kind of music to which certain ears, although well organized in other respects, may be insensible” (Itard 1972a: 118). In the case of the wild boy, however, Itard is rather optimistic and believes that, the boy not being a congenital idiot, the effects of isolation may be overcome; the boy will, eventually, understand and produce human speech. Itard had noticed that the boy, in spite of being insensible to certain sounds, reacted with particular alertness to the vowel “o”;53 that is why the name “Victor” was chosen for him. When it came to teaching Victor how to speak, Itard decided that he would have to employ what he calls “the objects of the boy’s needs”. And there was one “object of need” that seemed perfectly suited to Itard’s plan: it was water, because the pronunciation of the French word – l’eau – coincides with Victor’s favourite vowel. Itard’s strategy unfortunately proved unsuccessful. In vain did he hold a glass of water in front of the thirsty boy, repeatedly pronouncing the word eau and hoping that the boy would imitate the sound in order to get the desired water. “The poor child tormented himself in all kinds of ways; betrayed a desire for the water by the motion of his arms; uttered a kind of hissing, but no articulate sound. It would have been inhuman to have insisted any longer on the point” (Itard 1972a: 121). On this particular occasion, Victor’s “innate propensity to imitation”, as Itard calls it (and the term is, again, borrowed from philosophers), seemed to fail. Itard then set for a different strategy and applied the same method to a different object. Because Victor has always shown a great predilection for milk, Itard has opted for an object of pleasure – rather than an object of need – and tried to 53.  “One day, whilst he was in the kitchen, busy in boiling potatoes, two persons, behind him, were disputing with great warmth, without his appearing to pay the least attention to them. A third came in, who joining in the discussion, began all his replies with these words: ‘Oh! It is different!’ I remarked, that very time this person permitted his favorite exclamation escape him, ‘Oh!’ the Savage of Aveyron suddenly turned his head” (Itard 1972a: 119).



Chapter 2.  Deafness as deficiency continued 49

make the boy pronounce the word lait. Surprisingly, after a few days, Victor did, in a distinct but somewhat crude manner, pronounce the desired word. This was the first articulated sound the boy had ever produced and, said Itard, “of course I did not hear it without the most lively satisfaction” (Itard 1972a: 122). But Itard’s satisfaction was not to last long and for a very curious reason. At precisely this point Itard experienced a great disappointment and his interpretation of the boy’s behaviour is one of the most fascinating passages in the whole report. Victor did pronounce the word, there is no doubt about that; the problem is that he did not pronounce it as expected. Itard expected Victor to say the word before having obtained the desired object. Victor did the very opposite: he pronounced it only after the milk was given to him. And there is one more considerable deviation from Itard’s expectations: Victor’s articulation of the word was accompanied by overt signs of pleasure. It was not till the moment, when, despairing of a happy result, I had actually poured the milk into the cup which he presented to me, the word lait escaped him again, with evident demonstrations of joy; and it was not till after I poured it out a second time, by way of reward, that he repeated the expression.(Itard 1972a: 122)

So what exactly was the reason for Itard’s disappointment? Victor pronounced the word, but he did not grasp “the use of language”. Itard was adamantly convinced that language is and must be an expression of needs. But Victor did not utter the word to express a need that he wanted satisfied, but did so to express his joy after it was satisfied. This exclamation cannot be a sign of need because it comes out only at the moment when need no longer exists. In Itard’s view this was not language, for the word had no meaning attached to it. Here is Itard’s grim summary of the experiment: It is evident from hence, that the result of the experiment was far from accomplishing my intentions; the word pronounced, instead of being the sign of need, it appeared, from the time in which it was articulated, to be merely an exclamation of joy. If this word had been uttered before the thing that he desired had been granted, my object would have been nearly accomplished: then the true use of speech would have been soon acquired by Victor […]. Instead of this, I had obtained only an expression of the pleasure which he felt, insignificant as related to himself, and useless to us both. In fact, it was merely a vocal sign of the possession of a thing. (Itard 1972a: 122)

In Itard’s view, the word was simply not accompanied by intention (the intention being a sign of need); it was nothing more than a spontaneous cry of joy. It was, to use the 18th-century philosophical parlance, prompted by “passion” rather than

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“need”. Itard’s disappointment at this alleged failure was so great that he abandoned his method altogether.54 Why, we might ask, was Itard so obstinately attached to the idea of language as an expression of need? His philosophical background, again, seems to have been at least partly responsible for this. Let us return briefly to Condillac’s Essay. Need was one of the key concepts not only in Condillac’s theory of ideas, but also in his theory of the origin of language, presented at the beginning of the second part of his book. The hypothesis that it is this part of Condillac’s Essay that might have considerably influenced Itard’s view of language is supported by the fact that Itard directly quotes this passage in the introduction to his report and credits Condillac with formulating an “an ingenious supposition” about the origin of language: “Condillac […] supposes two children abandoned in a profound solitude, in whose case the sole influence of their cohabitation must give scope to the exercise of their memory and their imagination, and induce them to create a small number of artificial signs” (Itard 1972a: 92). Itard actually believed that Condillac’s theory could be transformed into an educational method. Condillac’s supposition is indeed ingenious, as we shall see in one of the following chapters, but Itard’s reading, operating a shift from phylogenesis to ontogenesis, turned it into a ready-made truth to which Victor simply did not conform, much to Itard’s disappointment. Condillac recounts his theory of how language was born in the form of a “myth”, set in an ancient biblical time. We will return to Condillac’s text in detail further below; for present purposes, we will therefore limit ourselves to just briefly summarizing it: But I am assuming that two children, one of either sex, sometime after the deluge, had gotten lost in the desert before they would have known the use of any sign. […] The question is to know how this budding nation made a language for itself.  (Condillac 2001: 113)

Their first attempts to communicate, therefore, take the form of a language of action, of simultaneous vocal and gestural expressions, dictated directly by their needs. Condillac considers this language of action to be the language of “natural signs”, that is, of spontaneous meaningful expressions that are, however, not yet conventionalized. The children have used this rudimentary language to signify their needs to each other, without any prior convention being needed in order to understand what they had in mind. Their needs were, so to speak, directly externalized by their gestures and their cries (Condillac 2001: 114). Condillac believes that this is 54.  He did try, however, to teach him alphabet and written language, using the method inspired by Abbé Sicard and, later on, repeated his attempt to teach him to speak – unsuccessfully – by adopting an oral method promoted by J. R. Pereire (see Lane 1976: 150–153).



Chapter 2.  Deafness as deficiency continued

how language came into existence without the necessity of recourse to any kind of divine intervention. And influenced as he was by Condillac, Itard thinks that Victor should have begun to speak in the same way, by signifying his needs – in his report, Itard himself uses the term “language of action” to refer to Victor’s gestural expression of his needs, such as holding a bowl out in front of him to obtain milk.55 One question is whether Victor would have learned to speak (and, in a broader sense, whether his education would have been more successful) had a different method been used. It is, of course, impossible to report anything but conjectures on this. Harlan Lane formulated several hypotheses on the matter. On the one hand, Lane suggested that Itard’s method, which is, in its very principle, analytical, i.e. it concentrates on isolated words rather than syntax, may simply have been wrong. On the other hand, it was also possible that Victor, who was approximately twelve years old when he was found, was already past the so-called critical period of language acquisition56 and would have been unable to learn how to speak under any circumstances, no matter what method was used. His third hypothesis – consistent with Pinel’s report – was that Victor suffered from a mental disorder or perhaps some form of autism: this third view might also explain certain specific features of his behaviour (not only his mutism but also sudden mood swings,57 etc.). The problem is that there is no way to verify such a claim and determine whether these symptoms did or did not precede his isolation. What is more, several feral children (including the “modern-day wild child” named Genie) have manifested the same symptoms, and it is very unlikely that they would have all been suffering from the same (congenital) mental disorder. Harlan Lane’s most plausible hypothesis, and one consistent with Itard’s original view, consists in 55.  Following Condillac, Itard claims that what Victor used is “that primitive language of the human species, originally employed in the infancy of society, before the labor of many ages had arranged and established the system of speech, and furnished to civilized man a fertile and sublime means of indefinite improvement” (Itard 1972a: 126). And Itard continues: “Without a doubt a day will arrive, when more multiplied needs will make our young Victor feel the necessity of using new signs. The defective use which he has made of his first sounds, will, of necessity, much retard the approach of this epoch, but will not prevent its ultimate arrival.” This expectation, however, did not turn out to be justified. Victor never learned to speak, his education was abandoned and he died in 1828. 56.  The hypothesis of critical period was first proposed by Lenneberg (1967). It consists in asserting that after having achieved a certain age – as to this age, the estimates vary, but the linguists usually situate the critical period around puberty – the individual is unable to learn language in the ordinary way. 57.  Noted several times in Itard’s text, for example in the following passage: “Sometimes, instead of joyful emotions, he exhibited a species of madness; he wrung his hands, applied his fists to his eyes, gnash his teeth, and became formidable to persons about him” (Itard 1972a: 103).

51

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asserting that Victor’s behaviour, including his inability to learn to communicate verbally, is a consequence of his isolation: “Victor’s symptoms, then, including his mutism, may overlap with those of congenital retardation or autism, but are explained by neither; instead they are the results of his long isolation in the wild, as Itard maintained all along” (Lane 1976: 179). Independently of all these hypotheses, despite the fact that Itard was probably essentially right as to the true causes of Victor’s mutism and that his educational efforts undoubtedly implied a number of ingenious ideas, his way of proceeding – at least in the passage just quoted – is strongly permeated by what we might call, in psychoanalytic terms, an imaginary or phantasmatic undertone on the educator’s part. The educator knows in advance what the goal of the education is and especially how to achieve it, and the child is here merely to comply. In this specific case, Itard has retained, probably on the basis of his reading of Condillac, only one idea: language is, in its very essence, an expression of need, and the whole educational process is subordinated to this starting point. Itard is not to blame; nearly all major treatises on education written in the 18th century followed essentially the same principle.58 But the fact remains that his approach may be read as a symptom of a certain view of language – and education as such – whose consequences are more far-reaching than it may seem. In his interesting reinterpretation of Itard’s report, the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni hit the nail on the head: what Itard does is reduce desire to need (Mannoni 1969: 191).59 Itard has created a “biological and utilitarian world” (Mannoni 1969: 191) in which the only purpose of language is to communicate needs. Every affective aspect connected with language – which, as we may have noticed, is far from being absent in Condillac’s text, where pity and suffering are mentioned as the key elements of language development  – is meticulously avoided, and language is reduced to its purely instrumental function. The joy and pleasure Victor expresses when pronouncing the word “milk” – in other words, the marks of his desire – do not have any place in Itard’s preconception; it is as if Itard had never seen a child learning to speak. This leads Mannoni to propose an ironic inversion of Itard’s own words: “If Itard had listened to Victor without preconceived ideas, 58.  It has been observed frequently in Rousseau’s Émile, in Mme de Genlis’ educational novel Adèle et Théodore, in Mme d’Épinay’s Conversations d’Émilie, and many other texts. The child is here to prove the success of the educator, whose effort sometimes hardly encounters any resistance (as in Rousseau), and if it does (as in Mme de Genlis or Mme d’Épinay), it is easy to overcome and makes the educator’s triumph even more noteworthy. For an excellent overall study of this (and other) aspects of 18th-century pedagogy, see Durand (1999). 59.  By desire, Mannoni does not mean, of course, sexual desire alone: desire is a generic term for any form of affectivity and any expression of drives.



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the goal would have been accomplished: then the true use of speech would have been grasped by Itard” (Mannoni 1969: 193). All of this would be, perhaps, acceptable as a historical curiosity  – and we might tend to dismiss it as such – if Mannoni had not shown that there is a more disturbing aspect to Itard’s approach: it is an expression of a widespread educational “myth” in which the child is simply “charged with a certain function in the world of adults” and is treated as a “natural and virginal substratum of experience and knowledge which can be deposited directly onto it” (Mannoni 1969: 200) – or, to use another metaphor Mannoni does not employ, a child is but a vessel to be filled with something which, in the educator’s point of view, it lacks. We are, in fact, very close to privative conception of deafness and to the idea of spoken language as a remedy (Itard, after all, did adhere to oralism). There is an individual who lacks something; that something he or she lacks is communication; what the individual needs to be provided with is not really a language (with all that it implies for human subjectivity), but an instrument of that communication. The instrument, in the oralist perspective, is of course the spoken language. Some of the implications of this view of the individual, language and education will be shown in the next chapter. As we have seen, neither sign language nor gesture was the direct object of concern in the preceding chapter. This is, in itself, very significant, because it shows one of the fundamental cornerstones of the deficiency paradigm. The authors we have been dealing with have associated deafness not only with sensory deficiency, but with isolation, with absence of language and, as a consequence, absence of communication – this went even as far as to posit an analogy with the complete absence of communication that is typical of wild children. To put it plainly, it is quite logical that the deficiency view of deafness is primarily concerned with what the deaf cannot do rather than with their specific linguistic and cognitive capacities. This tendency is reflected in one important empirical fact: the emblematic figure of the deaf that appears to illustrate the deficiency view of deafness is that of an “uninstructed deaf-mute” or, in modern terminology, a home-signer (such as the deaf of Chartres). This individual is not a part of a signing community and if any manual communication is mentioned, it certainly does not have the character of full-fledged sign language. But another view of deafness is possible. There were other philosophers who found the manual communication of the deaf worth considering, if not in itself, then at least as a genuine point of concern in relation to other matters. This does not mean they overcame the conception of deafness as deficit; far from it – the “deafness as difference” paradigm, briefly outlined at the beginning of the next chapter, is an ideal one, and in many respects remains so even nowadays. But there are a few texts in which the germs of a different paradigm can be found, even if only indirectly or in the form of genuine curiosity. It is to them that we shall now turn.

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Chapter 3

Deafness as difference

Deafness, norm and normativity “The Country of the Blind”, a beautiful novella by H. G. Wells, tells a story that is deeply relevant for the topic treated here. A mountaineer named Nuñez finds himself, after falling from a slope while mountain climbing, in a small, isolated, and inaccessible valley in the Andes and discovers, much to his surprise, that this remote corner of the world is inhabited. His surprise becomes even greater when he realizes that the valley is nothing other than the legendary Country of the Blind he had heard about in stories and tales: long ago, after an epidemic of an unnamed disease, the small population of the valley had gone blind. As generation followed after generation and newly born children never had any visual experience, the population forgot what seeing is and became perfectly accustomed to their blindness – in other words, blindness became the norm. The people never left the valley and never encountered anyone who could see. They invented their own mythology and cosmology. They cultivated fields and led a happy life. When Nuñez appears and discovers that the small population of the valley is made up exclusively of blind people, his first thought is, of course, that sight will represent a great advantage; he even believes he is destined to be the ruler of the small world – an old proverb, “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king” keeps coming to his mind. But that’s where the problems begin: nobody understands him when he starts talking about sight and seeing. Every concept connected with sight and visual experience had disappeared from the mental universe of the little blind nation, and all the words related to such concepts had become extinct or meaningless. This was the very opposite of what he had expected. Instead, whatever he said about sight and vision was interpreted as a sign of his imperfection and simple-mindedness: […] Pedro went first and took Nuñez by the hand to lead him to the houses. He drew his hand away. “I can see,” he said. “See?,” said Correa. “Yes, see,” said Nuñez, turning towards him, and stumbled against Pedro’s pail. “His senses are still imperfect,” said the third blind man. “He stumbles and talks unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand.” […] “There is no such word as see,” said the blind man after a

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pause. […] “Has no one told you, In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King’?”, asked Nuñez. “What is blind?,” asked the blind man carelessly over his shoulder. (Wells 2004: 373, 377)

All Nuñez’s attempts to seize power are useless; Wells ironically refers to Nuñez as the “King of the Blind […] clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects” (Wells 2004: 377). In the end, Nuñez – who falls in love with a blind girl – is even asked to undergo surgery, for the blind believe that his eyes are, in fact, a kind of tumor, putting pressure on his brain and causing him to behave strangely and talk the nonsense he talks. It is at this point that he decides to escape from the valley.60 Wells, in fact, says a great deal about how a norm is constructed. There is nothing handicapping about the existence of the blind as it is described in the story. On the contrary, it is Nuñez who is handicapped, “clumsy and useless”, despite possessing the sense of sight. A norm is not necessarily a matter of an “objective” physical or mental condition. It has to do with a point of view and power relations (not always, of course, but more often than we believe): the majority considers its way of being as the norm, while any other form of existence is automatically considered to be a deviation. In the case of the signing community, this way of transforming difference into deficiency is particularly striking. It happens from time to time that the ethnocentric certainty of one’s own superiority comes to be shaken. If for some reason there is a change in circumstances and the “normal” subject finds himself (like Nuñez) alone among the “abnormal” ones, this experience can be most distressing  – but also very revealing. This is how André Meynard describes his distress and uneasiness when he began to learn sign language (an experience that every hearing student of sign language knows very well): I remember the beginning of my (psychoanalytic) practice, the reactions of distress, of shame, of awkwardness when I tried to become familiar with the signed language. Suddenly, I no longer knew how to speak, to hear, to understand; ears and voice no longer guarantee the habitual ease with which we so often believe to have an exchange with others […] I believe it is important not to hide or to erase this experience of distress. (Meynard 2010: 62)61 60.  Later on, in 1939, Wells revised the story and wrote an alternative ending: in this second version, the valley is destroyed by an avalanche. Nuñez and his wife are the only ones who escape, because Nuñez is able to see that the accident is about to happen, but no one listens to his warning. So the power of sight is confirmed after all. In the first version, however, this rather useless moral is not included in the story. 61.  Oliver Sacks chooses similar words, describing his visit to the campus of Gallaudet University during the Gallaudet revolution in 1988: “The campus is buzzing, visibly, with conversation – everywhere there are pairs or small groups signing. There is conversing everywhere, and



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference

Sometimes, we discover (just like Nuñez) that the “deficient” minority does possess some skills that may in turn make us “deficient”, that the “primitive” language used by the deaf, for example, is not really that primitive and, in some cases, may be a considerable advantage.62 The modern-day idea of “Deaf-gain”, that is, of a specific deaf way of contributing to human diversity, defined as “the notion that the unique sensory orientation of Deaf people leads to a sophisticated form of visual-spatial language that provides opportunities for exploration into the human character”, rests on this very assumption (Bauman, Murray 2010: 216). In the “Country of the Blind” imagined by Wells, other values reigned than those Nuñez had considered to be universal and unquestionable. Sight was not valued; other things were. But leaving the realm of literary fiction behind, some authors have remarked that, in the case of signing community, such an “inversion of values” is not uncommon. For example, it is signing skills that are valued, not spoken language. It is the acceptance of the “deaf ” way of life, not adherence to the hearing majority. Padden and Humphries recount an extraordinary “deaf ” version of the Cinderella story in which this inversion is fully visible: in this version, Cinderella is an ORAL girl.63 She is given a pair of magic gloves that give her great signing skills, with which she captivates the son of the president of the Deaf Club. When she is leaving the Deaf Club, she loses one of the gloves, and with the help of this forgotten glove the “prince” is able to find her, after which they live happily ever after (Padden, Humphries 1988: 53). These simple facts should persuade us that there is something profoundly wrong with the negative representation of deafness, that what we are dealing with is not a deficiency of any kind, but rather a cultural and linguistic difference (or even an ethnic one, as Harlan Lane and his colleagues have suggestively argued: Lane 2007: 42–69; Lane, Pillard, Hedberg 2011). The signing community has a fullfledged language of their own, a language whose function is not only instrumental, I can understand none of it; I feel like the deaf, the voiceless one today – the handicapped one, the minority, in this great signing community” (Sacks 1989: 132). 62.  Harlan Lane, for example, has conducted the famous “doll house experiment” in order to show that in many circumstances, sign language is actually more effective and practical than spoken language. The experiment consisted of several pairs of hearing and deaf subjects, who were asked to place a few pieces of furniture in a doll house according to a photograph (one subject giving the instructions and the other one accomplishing the task). The deaf subjects who used sign language were significantly quicker in accomplishing the task than the hearing subjects who used spoken language. The reason is the spatial character of sign language – the deaf were able to give instruction concerning the position of the furniture using the space itself (Lane 1999: 123–125). 63.  The label ORAL, i.e. deaf not using sign language, bears generally negative connotations in American deaf community.

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but also – and perhaps more importantly – affective. This last point is of utmost importance. Not only does it mean that the language of a given community, i.e. sign language in the case of the deaf, is cherished by that community as a means of transmitting its cultural heritage and accumulated wisdom.64 There is yet another meaning to it – which can be equally, albeit implicitly read in the story of Cinderella. Language, as is now well known, plays an indispensable role in shaping a human being’s subjectivity. This influence of language occurs, of course, on a cognitive level: language helps us to inscribe an order to our perception of the world and of ourselves, and if a child is not exposed to language and communication early enough, he/she is likely to suffer from considerable cognitive damage – the cases of “wild children” representing convincing proof of this. However, language also plays a fundamental role in a human’s affective development (in fact, its cognitive and affective aspects are inseparable). When it comes to this question, some very interesting evidence can be drawn from psychoanalysis rather than linguistics. Psychoanalysis  – and especially Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of language on this basis – considers language to be not only (and perhaps not primarily) a cognitive instrument, but also and especially a certain affective milieu in which and through which a subject’s subjectivity is formed. If the subject’s relation to language fails for some reason, some damage – in the form of neurosis or psychosis – is imminent. Language has something to do with what Freud termed “drive” (Trieb), and if we switch to Lacanian terminology, we can say that the subject finds its subjectivity and desire in relation to linguistic reality, to speech or, as Lacan later came to call it, to a signifier.65 It is not acquired in a purely instrumental way; simply observing the way little children babble, play with the syllables, enjoy repeating nonsensical words, and attempt to initiate communication with others long before they produce well-formed utterances of their own, should persuade us of how much pleasure and affect is involved in the process of a subject developing a relationship to language.66 64.  Because 90% of prelinguistically deaf children are born to hearing parents, the deaf heritage is transmitted in an unusual way: from deaf peers and deaf adults rather than from parents. 65.  “Psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the law that has shaped him in its image. […] May this experience finally enable you to understand that the whole reality of its effects lies in the gift of speech; for it is through this gift that all reality has come to man and through its ongoing action that he sustains reality”, says Lacan (Lacan 2002a: 103). 66.  In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, one of his later essays, Freud himself analyzes this early affective relation to language in the form of what is referred to as Fort/Da game: a child playing with various small objects and accompanying his behavior by vocalizations expressing obvious pleasure and satisfaction (Freud 1986: 14–15). In the Freudian perspective, this affective bond



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference

The deaf subject, in this respect, is no different. The only difference is that the drive, the affectivity, and the “pleasure principle” connected to language find a way of being expressed in a visual-manual modality (Meynard 1993: 148). Deaf children do engage in manual babble. The deaf child does attempt to communicate with others. The “adult” forms of this same pleasure principle abound in the deaf community – sign plays, jokes, etc., are an essential and indispensable part of deaf culture. In other words, just as the “language drive” manifests itself – in a subject who does not have perceptive access to spoken language – in a different modality, so does the affectivity connected to it. It is situated in the visual, not in the auditory channel. André Meynard – whose Lacanian background makes him perfectly apt to do so67 – transforms this observation into a powerful argument in his criticism of cochlear implants. The reader may remember that when we referred to Meynard’s notion of the “deficiency paradigm”, the third of the four statements constituting the paradigm – language as an instrument – has been left unexplained. What Meynard maintains is that in the oralist tradition, including the discourse surrounding cochlear implants, language is considered almost exclusively on an instrumental basis, as something that is necessary in order for someone to be able to communicate (as if language were nothing else), regardless of its affective dimension, which cannot be provided by means of something to which the deaf child does not have perceptive access.68 Although we may debate about the benefits gained and advances achieved through cochlear implantation, the fact is that language acquisition in children with implants does not follow the same pattern as “natural” language acquisition and that the language thus acquired – if there is any – loses the familiarity which would enable the full development of its affective “substratum”.69 It is easy to understand now why we spent so much time on the short passage in Itard’s report on the savage of Aveyron: it is exactly the same is not limited to children. It survives, in various forms, even in adult language – in the form of jokes, humor, word plays etc., pointing back, as Freud melancholically suggests, “to the state of childhood in which we were not aware of the comic, were incapable of wit and did not need humor in order to feel happy in life” (cit. in Jones 1955: 337). 67.  Meynard, who masters perfectly French sign language, is a practicing psychoanalyst and member of La lettre lacanienne, a Lacanian psychoanalytic group. 68.  This instrumental view could be summarized as follows: “Language is the basis of communication between people. The message involved in communication is conceived, transmitted, received, and understood” (Clark 2003: 721). 69.  “Asking a child to make sense of, and be able to reproduce, spoken language received only through a cochlear implant is somewhat like asking the child to recognize and draw a picture of an exotic animal never seen before that is standing behind a tall picket fence. Only parts of the strange animal are visible through the spaces between the wooden slats of the fence. The child

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approach as the one pinpointed in Octave Mannoni’s interpretation of Itard’s text, and it is guided by the same fantasy. Desire is reduced to need, language is reduced to instrument, deaf children are little savages in need of being civilized – or empty shells in need of being filled with linguistic skills. In the oralist perspective, the affective support of language acquisition does not seem to play any fundamental role. Its rejection is a direct correlate of what Meynard calls “the idealization of the vocal”, which is in turn a counterpart of the phobic fear of gesture, perceived as an obstacle to the acquisition of spoken language (Meynard 2002: 70).70 This is the conjuncture into which the deaf child is often inserted once his or her deafness is discovered. This conjuncture involves more than just language learning. It marks the relationship between a child and his or her parents in the most general sense. A very different set of relationships may form, and usually develop in such a way unconsciously, between a little child “marked” as deaf and his usually confused and desperate parents than between parents and a “healthy” child.71 Therefore, this conjuncture has a profound impact not only on his cognitive abilities, but on his mental life and imagination.72 The case studies of children with implants cited by Meynard are not stories of salvation or miracles: they reveal fragile subjects, often hindered in their affective development and profoundly distressed by their incapacity to communicate in signs.73 Against the background of this anthropological, linguistic and psychoanalytical evidence, a different image of deafness emerges: an image of difference rather must complete the image in his or her mind, imagining the shape of parts of the animal that are not directly visible” (Spencer 2002: 223). 70.  Even nowadays, we sometimes encounter an absurd argument that the deaf child’s exposure to sign language will block his or her capacity to acquire spoken language, despite abundant literature proving the contrary. 71.  The child, as Meynard puts it, will “read” his or her own deafness on the face of his mother, and this reading will have considerably affected his or her mental development. In employing this metaphor, Meynard alludes to a classical text by D. W. Winnicott, “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development” (Winnicott 1971: 111–118). 72.  Benoît Virole puts it in slightly more sophisticated terms: “The fantasies of those (profoundly deaf) children reveal the importance of private constructions elaborated in order to give meaning to a world deprived of significations vehiculated by the signifiers of spoken language” (Virole 1990: 45). 73.  For example, the case of Christelle, a fourteen-year-old implanted girl who complains about “having a piece of metal in my head […] which is of no use to me”; or the case of Corinne who, facing what she calls “indifference” of her hearing peers, has frequent recourse to daydreaming, inventing imaginary people with whom she can sign. “Signs are like air, when I sign, I can breathe,” she declares (Meynard 2010: 143, 220).



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference

than deficiency. If we accept the “paradigm of difference”, a different approach to otherness is possible, one based on curiosity, and not on a preconceived idea of superiority. In history, texts based on this approach are comparatively rare, but there are some. In the following historical excursion, we present a close reading of two texts by St. Augustine that seem to point precisely in this direction.

Historical excursion: St. Augustine It is impossible to sum up attitudes towards gestures and sign language in a period as long and complicated as the Middle Ages, which lasted roughly a thousand years of Western history. In his book on gestures in medieval art and thought, Jean-Claude Schmitt showed the very interesting changes that the question of gestures underwent between Antiquity and Middle Ages – one of which involved emphasising the moral aspects of gestures owing to their corporeal character.74 Apart from this, there is also a remarkable body of literature on “monastic sign languages”, undoubtedly one of the most interesting cases of alternate sign languages75 – gestural systems invented by the monks in Cluny (the first record seems to come from about 910 AD), which soon spread across Europe and were used to communicate in circumstances when the spoken language was not allowed.76 74.  Schmitt shows that in the Middle Ages, gestures acquired increasingly important moral connotations. If gesture is a “window on the soul”, this expression receives a new, moral meaning; gesture is a window on virtues and vices inhabiting the body of the gesturer. A particularly striking example is the classification of gestures by Hugo of St. Victor, wherein each gesture is connected to a specific vice; the purpose of the classification, as Schmitt remarks, is therefore both “ethical” and “negative”. This classification, formulated in the context of monastic life (in Hugo’s De institutione novitiorum), was conceived as an element of a disciplinary system, of what Foucault would call “discipline of the body” (Schmitt, in fact, makes reference to Marcel Mauss’s term “techniques of the body”). See Schmitt (1990: 173–205). 75.  The term “alternate sign language” was first introduced by Adam Kendon in Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia (Kendon 1988). It refers to sign languages created in speaking communities in order to provide an alternative mode of communication in situations where the use of speech is impossible for environmental or ritual reasons. As such, alternate sign languages should be distinguished from primary sign languages, that is, sign languages created by deaf speakers. 76.  On monastic sign languages, see especially Sebeok and Sebeok (1987). This anthology comprises not only reprinted ancient documents, but also nearly all of the texts written on the question, including R. Barakat’s Cistercian Sign Language (p. 67–322), which undertakes an analysis of one of the present versions of monastic sign language, including an extensive dictionary. As for more recent literature on the subject, see Bruce (2007), and A. de Saint-Loupe, Y. Delaporte, and M. Renaud (1997). Yves Delaporte’s text (“Langue des moines et langue des sourds”, p. 65–90), challenges – in a critical dialogue with Barakat’s study – a common presupposition that alternate

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But the fact remains that an exhaustive overview is – or at least has been so far – beyond the strength of a single human being. Despite the stress being put on the moral aspect of gestures, there are writings that treat the phenomenon of gesturing and signing in a most surprising way which clearly contradicts the commonly accepted notion of the Middle Ages as a “dark” and reactionary period. Two dialogues by St. Augustine  – De magistro and De quantitate animae – count undoubtedly among the most remarkable ones. Again, prudence should be called for at the very beginning. The few mentions of the deaf in Augustine’s treatises by no means suggest that Augustine was a sort of Stokoe avant la lettre; no distinct view of deafness can be extracted from these scant references. What can be asserted, on the other hand, is that what Augustine does say about the deaf – despite a certain ambiguity – seems to differ quite fundamentally from what Hobbes or Aristotle had to say. This difference may be summarized in two points: (1) a deaf person is not an isolated person being deprived of communication; (2) the signs of the deaf – for Augustine has well noticed that the deaf do produce signs to communicate – represent a worthy object of our attention, for their observation may teach us something about the nature of communication in general. De magistro is a philosophical dialogue that was written around 389 AD. The text is dedicated to Augustine’s deceased son Adeodatus, and is conceived as a posthumous conversation between him and Augustine himself. According to Augustine, all the answers Adeodatus gives in the dialogue are authentic (Thonnard 1952: 9). The subject of the conversation is nothing less than language itself. Before the passage that is of interest to us, Augustine and Adeodatus exchange some ideas about what language is and what it consists of. The principal functions of language identified in the opening chapter are to remind (commemorare) and to teach (docere), both of which should be understood in a very broad sense of fixing intellectual contents and transmitting information. What follows is a debate on the elements of language, that is, words and signs. Adeodatus claims that all words are signs and that a sign is only a sign in so far as it signifies something. Augustine puts this presupposition to the test by asking Adeodatus to analyse word by word a verse from Virgil: Si nihil ex tanta superit placet urbe relinqui – “If it pleases the gods to leave nothing of our great city standing” (Augustine 1938: 9).77 Adeodatus does stumble across the first word, reading it as a sign of a doubt, but the second word already represents an insurmountable obstacle: according to Adeodatus’ sign languages, unlike the sign language of the deaf, have limited grammatical and syntactic resources. Delaporte attempts to show that the Cistercian sign language, as Barakat describes it (but fails to acknowledge), shares many features with primary sign languages, including the handshapes and productive grammatical structure. 77.  The verse comes from Virgil, Aeneid, II, 659.



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference

initial assumption, the word nihil, nothing, should not be a sign because “nothing” is certainly not something. The two protagonists agree that nihil must therefore signify an “affection of the mind” (affectio animi), which “does not see the thing and yet finds, or thinks that it finds, that it does not exist” (Augustine 1938: 7). Whereupon Augustine changes the topic as well as strategy: up to that point, Adeodatus has been explaining words by replacing them with other words; now he asks his son to show “the things themselves of which these are the signs (illa ipsa quorum haec signa sunt)” (Augustine 1938: 8). And this is where the crucial passage begins. Adeodatus protests: in the present discussion – and because of its very verbal nature – there are no other means than words to get our point across; Augustine has asked questions using words and it is only fair to use the same means to answer them. If you, Augustine, ask me the question without words, I shall answer in the same way, says Adeodatus. Augustine admits that, yet maintains – and the reader notices that he is actually dodging rather than countering his son’s objection – that there is a way of indicating things without the use of words, and gives a trivial example of a “wordless” way of signifying – an elementary case of deixis. If I say the word “wall” (paries) and ask what it means, it can be easily “explained” by pointing at a wall. But this works, Adeodatus replies, only for physical things or bodies (corpora) that are present at the time they are spoken of and are within the interlocutors’ perceptive field. Augustine counters: but what about colour, i.e. a quality of the body, which can also be shown in the same way, by pointing a finger? Pointing, it would seem, works not only for bodies but for their qualities as well. Adeodatus then extends the notion of corpora to apply to all things perceived by the senses, or better yet – as he corrects himself – all things perceived by sight, for there certainly are things that are perceived by the senses but cannot be indicated by pointing a finger, such as sound, odour, taste, weight and others. Augustine replies: Have you not seen men when they discourse, so to speak (quasi sermocinentur), by means of gestures with those who are deaf, and the deaf themselves who, equally using gestures, question and reply and teach and indicate everything they wish (omnia quae volunt), or at least a great many things (plurima)? When they use gestures they do not merely indicate visible things, but also sounds and tastes and other things of this sort. For actors in the theater present and exhibit entire dramas for the most part by means of pantomime without using words.  (Augustine 1938: 9–10; trans. slightly modified)78 78.  Adeodatus agrees on this, but adds a somewhat malicious – but by no means silly – remark that may easily escape the reader’s attention, because Augustine skips it in order to continue his argument (and it seems to suggest that Adeodatus’s answers, as recorded in De magistro,

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What can we gather from this without succumbing to an exceedingly anachronistic reading of the text? On the one hand, one thing seems to be certain: gestures of the deaf signify – or are apt to signify – invisible things. Actually, Augustine uses – and this is significant – a series of different verbs denoting a distinctly intellectual activity, and what is more, an activity usually connected with language: the deaf “discourse, as it were”,79 they “question” (quaerant), “reply” (respondeant), “teach” (doceant),80 “indicate” (indicent). And in this way, they are able to put across aut omnia quae volunt, aut certe plurima  – everything they wish or at least a great many things. And given the use of those verbs, it seems also clear that the deaf not only are not devoid of a certain signifying practice,81 but that they are equally not devoid of thought. At this point, the reader is obviously tempted to ask the straightforward question: is it a language or not? Before dealing with this question, it may be useful to take a look at another of Augustine’s texts, De quantitate animae, a dialogue written a little earlier than De magistro (in the end of 387 or at the beginning of 388). In this dialogue between Augustine and his young friend Evodius, a few pages are devoted to the question of whether the soul has a spatial dimension, and more specifically, whether the soul grows up together with the body as a human being develops, implying the problem of whether the soul is capable of increasing its volume. At this point of the dialogue, the question of language, again, comes to be at stake, for during the dispute, Evodius raises the following question: why is a child not able to speak when newly born but has to acquire this skill as he or she grows up? Augustine’s answer involves presenting a sort of “semi-speculation”: let us imagine a human born and growing up among people who do not speak, and therefore do not express themselves in (verbal) signs, but in gestures. To be more precise, Augustine speaks about people “who do not talk, but by nods and gestures express the thoughts they have to communicate” (non loquerentur, sed nutibus are indeed those of a real person). Adeodatus’s answer, alluding to the word ex from the verse analyzed previously, is the following: “I have no objection to make except that neither I nor even a pantomimic actor himself can show you without words what ex [from] signifies” (Augustine 1938: 10). 79.  The use of “quasi”, in this context, does suggest that despite of being capable of designing invisible things, the gestures of the deaf are not on the same level as our own language. 80.  Docere, on the other hand, is a verb used at the very beginning of the dialogue to denote one of the two basic purposes of language. 81.  I have borrowed this expression from Julia Kristeva simply in order not to use the misleading word “language” at this point. Reference to Kristeva’s notion of signifying practice is not, after all, superfluous. Kristeva has called for a semiotics of gesture, in all its varieties including sign language, as early as 1969 (Kristeva 1969: 80–112).



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference

membrorumque motu cogitationes suas sibimet expromendas signarent). The use of the substantive cogitationes clearly indicates that in Augustine’s view, the dimension of thought is not absent in these subjects (Augustine 1947: 92). If a child grew up in these circumstances, would he or she not pick up gestures rather than the spoken language? Evodius exclaims that such circumstances  – people not using spoken language and having a child – are unthinkable (Qui enim tales homines, inter quos quemquam natum cogitare possim?), but Augustine replies: But surely, have you not seen at Milan a young man of excellent physique and refined manners, yet so mute and deaf that he is understood by others only by means of signs and that only in the same way could he express what he wished? I also knew a farmer and his wife who could speak, yet they had four sons and daughters […] who were deaf and dumb: dumb, because they could not speak; deaf, because they could take in signs only through their eyes (nulla signa nisi oculis colligebant). (Augustine: 1947: 92)

It is therefore well possible to imagine a deaf couple being transposed by accident to a solitary place where they could live (in aliquam quocumque casu delati solitudinem ubi tamen vivere valerent) and could there give birth to a hearing son (Augustine 1947: 93). What means of communication would the child acquire, despite not being deaf? Gestures, of course, the ones used by his parents. But Evodius interrupts Augustine’s mental experiment by reminding him that this has nothing to with his argument – it does not matter whether the child speaks or gestures, because both speech and this kind of gesturing “belong to the soul” (Augustine 1947: 93),82 so Augustine has consequently not refuted the objection that the soul may actually grow with the body and therefore have a spatial dimension. So Augustine decides to proceed in a different way: he forces Evodius to admit that everything we learn is a kind of art, and it would be absurd to contend that learning an art  – like rope-walking, for example  – makes our soul larger. But Evodius persists and proposes distinguishing two kinds of art: the kind acquired automatically through simple imitation, like language, and the kind acquired by instruction,83 like rope-walking. When we speak about the soul growing up and becoming bigger, this only relates to the first kind of arts. But what about people who learn a second language? Does their soul grow and expand in volume?, asks Augustine. Evodius’s answer is simple: if we are able to learn a second language, 82.  This point is important: both speech and gestures serve to “interpret” the thought and are, at this precise moment, situated on the same level, as far as the relation to the central problem of the soul’s growing is concerned. 83.  By learning through instruction, Evodius means voluntary activity aiming at mastering the given skill.

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it is only because we already know a first one. Our soul may have been growing while we were learning the first one, but learning a second one is not really distinct from learning how to walk on a rope – we do it with the help of teachers and by consciously learning grammar and vocabulary. In his reply, Augustine goes back to his initial example: does this mean, therefore, that if the hearing child raised by deaf parents finds himself, later in his life, among people who can hear and speak, and learns the spoken language without having known any language before (cum aliam nullam linguam nosset), his soul will actually increase in size (Augustine 1947: 95)? This point of the dialogue is extremely interesting: in his final reply, Augustine’s assumption is that the child had not learnt any language before, i.e. that the gestures he had learned from his deaf parents are not a language. And this is not a “hidden” assumption – it is clearly and explicitly stated. For Evodius, the only way to get out of this would be to prove that the gestures that the child had learned actually are a kind of language and that when the child later acquires speech, he is in fact simply learning a second language. This would perfectly fit the logic of his argument and permit him to hold his position. It is one of those rare moments in which we are led to the very verge of explicitly asking the crucial question: is it a language or not? We are only one little step away. But this is also the very spot at which the whole argument ends abruptly. For Evodius simply drops his reasoning and changes the topic. Evodius’s answer is: I would never dare to say that (nunquam istuc ausim dicere), and I yield to reason. I no longer regard the ability to speak as an argument for holding that the soul is larger, lest I be forced to admit that the soul acquired all the other arts by growing larger; for, if I should say that, this absurdity would follow, that the soul shrinks whenever it forgets anything. (Augustine 1947: 95)

Why, we might ask, is the question not posed? We know the answer already: there was no question to be asked. This imaginary experiment involving sign language – or gestures, for again, Augustine does not make a distinction between the two – is nothing but a means of tackling a different problem, a problem that without a doubt was infinitely more serious in Augustine’s eyes: that of the spatial dimension of the soul and whether or not it can change in size. Augustine had other things to do than to prove the language-like character of sign language, in which he was no more interested than sign language scholars nowadays are interested in the problem of measuring the soul. This lack of interest in the sign language per se probably explains what appears, from a modern standpoint, as incomprehensible ambiguity. On the one hand, signing, as Augustine sees it, undoubtedly does have the properties of language. One learns it from one’s parents and it serves to signify concepts in one’s mind.



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference

On the other hand, in the lines quoted above, Augustine uses the phrase cum alliam nullam linguam nosset, that indicates that signing cannot be considered to be a language in its own right. Similar ambiguity also explains the uncertainty he has left us with in De magistro. True, he does use terms that imply intellectual activity, but at the same time he is constantly qualifying what he says with words like “so to speak”, “a great many things”, etc. The reason is not difficult to grasp. At this point of the text, Augustine and his son are not looking for a definition of language, but for a definition of a sign, which is obviously larger than the definition of a word or even of language. “When we speak we make signs” (Augustine 1938: 12), but on the other hand, “words are not the only signs” (Augustine 1938: 12): there are signs that do not require speech, like the gestures of the deaf, or pantomime, which explains why the two appear, so to speak, on the same conceptual level in the dialogue. It is not because sign language is pantomime, but because both sign language and pantomime are signs, without being spoken words. As for the complexity of meaning conveyed by the two systems, Augustine does not make any presupposition because, again, this is not the purpose of his analysis. The two systems are not considered in themselves, but as examples of signs, which are not identical to words. They also illustrate the fact that, as we learn a little later in the dialogue, there are different categories of signs pertaining to different senses: words pertain to hearing, gestures pertain to sight (Augustine 1938: 13). But what is in question are not two modalities of language, but two modalities of signs, and there is no need – just as there was not in De quantitate animae – to ask whether the gestures of the deaf are elements of a language-like system or not. They are signs, for they clearly may be used to signify something to someone else, and for Augustine’s purpose, that is perfectly sufficient. However sceptical one might wish to be, it must, on the other hand, be admitted that we are, indeed, very far from Hobbes or Aristotle. First of all, Augustine speaks about what the deaf do, not about what the deaf cannot do. Not a word about the deaf being deprived of abstract thought or of not being able to generalize a problem of two triangles, for example. The deaf do gesture, and their gesturing is obviously capable of expressing everything they need, even intangible things. Second, what the deaf do is not primarily compared to what we do; their gesturing is not compared to spoken language (implying that spoken language is superior).84 It may be argued that this specific attitude towards deafness is due to one important fact that will immediately strike the reader of Augustine’s dialogues. Augustine’s 84.  Of course, it would be easy to find such comparisons by way of implication. In De quantitate animae, for example, it is implied that the child learning to gesture from his deaf parents is not learning a language. But Augustine, at the very least, does not develop any “psychology of the deaf ”, emits no judgments as to mental capacities of the deaf.

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analysis consists of observations, not of a priori judgements. The deaf he mentions appear to be much more than imaginary conceptual inventions; the precise references he indicates – the deaf man of Milan, for example – seem to be a convincing proof of this. In Hobbes or Aristotle, no such references were given. No less significant is the fact that both in De magistro and De quantitate animae, the passages on deafness and sign language are introduced by preambles referring to personal experience and observation (“Have you not seen…?”, “I also knew a farmer and his wife…”). That is, they appear to be expressions of a genuine “anthropological” interest rather than of preconceived notions. Despite the fact that these brief passages about the deaf are but short digressions on the way to another goal, they contain some elements of what we would be tempted to call an anthropological view of deafness.

18th-century empiricism and deaf education The key elements of Enlightenment philosophy (interest in sensory perception, interest in language development, the idea of the perfectibility of human nature) converge towards an overwhelming importance of education and pedagogy in the period considered here. The ties between pedagogy and philosophy became particularly tight, and more importantly, the interaction between the two disciplines was mutual. Rousseau’s Émile represents the most obvious example of a treatise where the dividing line between them is impossible to trace, but many other authors writing on education (Mme de Genlis, Mme d’Épinay and others) clearly draw from philosophical incentives, while many philosophers including Diderot and Condillac frequently appeal to pedagogical experiments conducted by 18th century educators. The 18th-century pedagogy did not limit itself to attempts at coming up with the best educational system, but was also seriously concerned with questions of perception and its ontogenetic development, as well as the question of language acquisition and, of course, with the influence of language on the social life of the human subject. Moreover, pedagogy is not exempt from what we have earlier called a “fictional” dimension of the 18th-century thought: educational methods are often presented in the form of a literary (or quasi-literary) narrative and the “pedagogical novel” is one of the thriving genres of the 18th-century literature (Durand 1999). Given this general interest, it is not surprising that in the period considered, we see the first organized efforts of deaf education in the proper sense of the word.85 Even though deaf education is not the primary aim of the present study, 85.  It originated and evolved in a very complicated and rich historical context that cannot be summarized here. Harlan Lane’s When the Mind Hears (Lane 1984) remains probably the most compelling and detailed account of its vicissitudes and its complex historical circumstances.



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference 69

some elementary facts should perhaps be mentioned, the more so that in the previous chapter, the negative image of deafness was centred around what was referred to, by the 18th-century authors, as “uninstructed” or “uneducated” deaf. It is precisely this figure that was endowed with all the negative attributes such as isolation, lack of communication and absence of social interaction. One of the aims of deaf education in its early stages was to “civilize” the uninstructed deaf by delivering them from the state of isolation in which they were doomed to live. In the Preamble to his Course of Instruction for a Congenitally Deaf Person, published in 1803, Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard praises the benefits of education by contrasting them with an eloquent tableau of the pitiable fate of uninstructed deaf-mutes. The education, according to Sicard, represents the only means enabling the congenitally deaf individual to come into contact “with the great family to which, by his external form, he belongs” (Sicard 2006: 84). In describing the mental disposition of an uneducated deaf person, Sicard reiterates the sensualist premises of the 18th-century philosophy. All ideas come to us through the senses or from mental operations to which the sensory material is submitted (thus giving rise to abstract notions). Sicard’s portrait of an uninstructed deaf is not without resemblance to the one painted earlier by Hobbes: because it is primarily through words that we are able to fix and conserve ideas in our minds, the person who does not hear and speak “has no symbols for fixing and combining his ideas” due to the “total communication gap between him and other people” (Sicard 2006: 85). The array of epithets used by Sicard to account for the corresponding mental state goes, as far as its evocative force is concerned, far beyond the rather sober language of Hobbes’s. This deaf person is “a mere ambulatory machine”, his constitution is “inferior to that of animals”, his sensory impressions are necessarily “transitory”, his mental images are “fleeting”, he is “reduced to an awful solitude”, he has no idea of moral notions (Sicard 2006: 86–87). We clearly recognize the same set of attributes that we have already encountered in the previous chapter. However, this “natural state” of deafness, as Sicard calls it, is not irreversible. Sicard, in fact, goes on to contrast this image with a different description, that of the deaf children in his own school for the deaf, the children who “have been seen to be merry, communicative, sensitive, and even honest – similar in every respect to other children” (Sicard 2006: 87). This miraculous transition is accomplished by means of education. There is hardly anything to be expected “of one or two deaf persons scattered among families that regard them as a calamity and a source of shame” (Sicard 2006: 90). On the other hand, the deaf who come into contact with other deaf, thus creating a hypothetical “society of deaf people”, would by no means be inferior to the hearing. Their sign language, as Sicard admits, would perhaps even be “richer than ours”, and at the same time devoid of ambiguity, “always giving an accurate picture of the mind’s affections” (Sicard 2006: 89).

70 Deafness, gesture and sign language in the 18th century French philosophy

These words of Sicard’s show the importance ascribed to education in the given period. Education, in the case of the deaf, is nothing less than a civilizational process, overcoming the “natural state” of initial isolation and making them capable of interaction with other members of their species. When it comes to sign language proper, Sicard not only admits that it might be – in its fully developed form – just as effective as spoken language in conveying information, but he also envisaged a few possible advantages of signs in comparison to spoken word. At this point, he mentions two characteristic features that were, in the 18th century, commonly associated with sign language and that we will encounter over and over again in the following chapters. The first one of those is universality: “this figurative language even has a definite advantage over spoken language, for it is not restricted to any one dialect” (Sicard 2006: 97). The second (closely connected to the first) is its transparency: while the meaning of words in spoken language is inseparable from its conventional character, “signs have real meaning in themselves”. According to Sicard, this makes sign language “truer, richer, and imitatively more accurate” than spoken language (Sicard 2006: 98). These two alleged attributes of sign language  – universality and transparency  – play an important role in the mutual interaction between 18th-century philosophy and deaf education. It was commonly believed, both by educators and philosophers, that the deaf spontaneously use a “global idiom” (Rosenfeld 2001: 96), independent of differences between spoken languages and referring back to an archaic past when human communication was uncorrupted by the vices of civilized life. That is why many philosophers, intrigued by questions concerning human communication, were so interested in deaf education, while the educators frequently drew on empiricist philosophy in their pedagogical endeavours. It may be useful to mention several concrete, and sometimes rather unusual, forms of this interaction. The most canonical example is that of the famous Abbé de l’Epée, the founder of the first public school for the deaf (the above-mentioned Sicard became his successor at the institution) and arguably the most important figure in deaf history. He was not the first educator to try to educate a deaf person, but he was the first to try to educate the deaf in signs alone, or in other words, the first to oppose the oralist tradition.86 And as sometimes happens with important historical figures, Epée’s myth overshadows the true historical facts; Epée “became larger than life” (Quartararo 2008: 7). From 1834 up to this day, feasts are organized annually by the French Deaf community to celebrate the anniversary of Epée’s birth (Mottez 1993: 143–155). He has been celebrated in literature (Musset 1987: 8–56). 86.  In Institution des sourds et muets par la voie des signes méthodiques, he opposes his method to that of J. R. Pereire (and other oralists), founded on the manual alphabet and designed as dactylology (Epée 1776: 14–35).



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference

In deaf folklore, Epée appears as a true mythological figure, who led deaf people out of darkness into the light and endowed them with a language of their own.87 Things, however, were more complicated. It has been pointed out many times that Epée did not really invent sign language. His educational method, illuminated by “the beacon of a sound metaphysics” (Sicard 2006: 93), consisted in taking some signs that already existed in the French signing community at the time, and trying to “organize” them into a language that, as far as the grammar and vocabulary is concerned, would be a copy of spoken French, simply translated into manual signs. Epée invented a name for his system: he called it “methodical signs”. Epée’s ingenious idea, and the cornerstone of his educational method, consists, in his own words, in “bringing in through the window what cannot come in through the door, namely, to insinuate into the minds of the deaf through the visual channel what cannot reach them through the auditory channel” (Epée 2006: 51). In other words, it consists in teaching the deaf in signs, rather than in spoken language. As for his motivation, Epée invokes “religion and humanity” as his chief driving force, rather than any philosophical interests (Epée 2006: 51). This does not mean, however, that philosophical inspiration was absent from his endeavours. It has been noted that Condillac’s philosophy – emphasising the expressivity of natural signs – was probably one of the key sources to which Epée’s method is indebted (Rosenfeld 2001: 94). Epée, however, did not content himself with the already existing signs that he learned from his deaf pupils. He undertook, so to speak, to “help” this natural language of action and developed it into what he believed was a more sophisticated means of communication, capable of conveying everything that could be expressed in spoken language, including abstract or “metaphysical” ideas. In recent literature, Epée’s approach has been analysed in some detail and there is already a substantial body of literature that can be referred to (see, among others, Lane 1984; Cuxac 1983); therefore, it will suffice to provide only the most 87.  Padden and Humphries describe a folktale circulating in the French deaf community, a story about Abbé de l’Epée encountering two deaf women in the middle of a dark night, realizing his vocation – to educate deaf children – and inventing a sign language for them to use. They were surprised to hear this – historically incorrect – story over and over again, in every deaf club they visited. Finally, it dawned on them that the story was not an account of what had “really” happened, but a myth: “We finally realized that the story is not about Abbé de l’Epée. Instead it has come to symbolize, in its retelling through the centuries, the transition from a world in which deaf people live alone or in small isolated communities to a world in which they have a rich community and language. This is not merely a historical tale, but also a folktale about the origin of a people and their language. Epée’s move out of the darkness of the night into the light and warmth of the house of the deaf girls is an entirely appropriate central image in a folktale whose origins are not at all unlike folktales in other cultures” (Padden, Humphries 1988: 29).

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elementary information. “Methodical signs” is the first version of signed French rather than sign language. Epée’s method is guided by what he himself calls “analysis” (Epée 2006: 53), another term commonly used in philosophical treatises of that time. It consists in linearizing the language, i.e. depriving it of a substantial part of its natural expressive potential. For this very same reason, methodical signs also proved to be extremely impractical. Sign language is organised in a different way than spoken language and uses different means of putting the information across. These exact means include simultaneity, use of space and movement (which serve to incorporate additional information into the signed message), facial expression and other devices (for an elementary comparison of signed and spoken languages in this respect, see Lane 1999: 14–16). Excluding them and replacing them with literal manual “translations” of spoken language requires the invention of a great many “artificial” signs that do not have separate lexical equivalents in sign language because the information concerned is conveyed in a different way: signs for prepositions, genders, prefixes, suffixes, tense markers, and many other things.88 Gender, for example, was rendered by putting one’s hand to the hat to express the masculine article le, while the feminine article la was expressed by putting one’s hand to the ear, that is, to that part of the body to which a female’s bonnet extends (Epée 2006: 59). Another example are tenses: the Abbé complained that the deaf express the past merely by waving their hand, carelessly or negligently (indifféramment), over their shoulder, either once or several times, and decided to “call on art” to “assist” the natural language of signs (Epée 2006: 66) by bringing order into it. So he proposed that the deaf wave their hand once when the present perfect (imparfait) was to be expressed, twice to express the perfect tense (parfait), and three times to express the past perfect (plus-que-parfait) (Epée 2006: 67). Apart from that, Epée’s “analytical method” has led him to decompose the words themselves and render a single spoken word with several signs, the principal idea being that “anything, no matter how abstract, can be clearly explained by an analysis in simple words that ultimately need no explanation” (Epée 2006: 53). Thus, the sentence “I tremble” was rendered by four signs: (1) a sign for the first person singular; (2) the movement of someone trembling; (3) a sign for the presenttense verb; (4) the sign for a negation, signifying “neither active nor passive” (Epée 2006: 70). Harlan Lane gives another telling example. In Epée’s system, the word 88.  In those early times  – and, unfortunately, not only in those early times  – uninstructed observers believed that these lexical units (prepositions, tenses etc.) are missing from the sign language, concluding that sign language was ungrammatical, primitive and inferior to spoken language. But they are not really missing: they simply do not have a distinct lexical form because sign language, being spatial-visual, has different ways of getting the information across. What the spoken language expresses by prepositions (into, out of, onto etc.) is often conveniently expressed by different kinds of movement and placement in space.



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference

“unintelligibility” was composed of the following signs: (1) a sign for an internal activity; (2) the sign representing the activity of someone who reads internally; (3) a sign representing possibility (corresponding to the suffix – ible); (4) the sign transforming the adjective into a substantive (thus creating “intelligibility”); (5) a sign for negation (creating “unintelligibility”) (Lane 1984: 61–62). It is no wonder that the translation of a single line from Racine required forty-eight methodical signs, while in sign language proper the verse could be expressed in five or six signs (Lane 1984: 62). None of what is stated above is meant to belittle Epée. Perhaps he did not invent the language of the deaf, but he did something equally important. By opening a public school for the deaf, he enabled the creation of the deaf community.89 The name of Abbé de l’Epée has to be mentioned here – and not only out of piety. Epée’s method of educating the deaf, partly inspired by Condillac’s concept of decomposition and analysis of ideas, aptly reveals the strong tie between the education of the deaf and epistemology of knowledge (Virole 2009: 37). It is equally significant that in his Grammaire, written in 1775, Condillac returned the compliment and praised Epée’s method as an efficient tool that leads his pupils “from sensible ideas to abstract ideas by simple and methodical analyses” (cit. in Rosenfeld 2001: 102). But the interest of the 18th-century philosophers was not limited to Epée’s “manual” method. This was equally the case of J. R. Pereire and his oral method. Both Rousseau and Diderot knew Pereire, attended his public presentations and mention him in their writings. In order to illustrate the philosophical conclusions drawn from Pereire’s version of oralism, let us look briefly at some of Rousseau’s texts. In Essay on the Origin of Languages (which will be examined in more detail in the following chapter), Rousseau comments on Pereire’s method in the following way: […] if we had never had anything but physical needs, we might very well never have spoken and would have understood one another perfectly by the language of gestures alone. We might have established societies little different from what they are today, or ones which might have even proceeded to their better end. […] Master Pereyre and those who like him teach mutes not only how to speak but to know what they are saying, are first compelled to teach them another language, no less complicated, with whose aid they help them understand spoken language.  (Rousseau 1998: 292)

89.  Harlan Lane sums up: “Still, it was Abbé de l’Epée, son of the king’s architect, who first turned to the poor, despised, illiterate deaf and said ‘teach me’. And this act of humility gained him everlasting glory. […] For this reason, the deaf everywhere have always excused him for failing to see that the sign language of the French deaf community was a complete language in its own right, not merely a collection of signs […]” (Lane 1984: 63).

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The passage seems enigmatic – what is the “another language” Rousseau speaks of? First of all, Pereire’s oral method, of course, did not exclude signing as a “language of instruction”, as we might call it. Furthermore, it is not excluded that Rousseau is referring to a manual alphabet, which represented an important intermediary stage between signs and spoken language. Pereire used a manual alphabet, in which the handshapes did not only designate graphemes, i.e. letters (as finger alphabets usually do), but also phonemes, i.e. sounds. Therefore, the same handshape was used to designate a certain sound, even if it occurred in words where it was expressed – in the written form of the word – by different letters; for example, the “s” sound in the French words soupe, façon or nation would have the same handshape, designating a certain position of the speech organs (the example is taken over from Lane 1984: 82; on Pereire and his oral method, see ibid.: 67–111). On a more general level, however, the passage has much wider philosophical implications, for it indirectly tackles a question that plays a central role in the 18thcentury debate on the origins of language: how is it possible to learn a language ex nihilo, without previous knowledge of another language as the foundation with which to master the grammatical rules and meaning of signs in the language we are learning? To put it simply, how is it possible to “learn a language without a metalanguage” (Virole 2006: 23)? This paradox was considered to be both ontogenetic and phylogenetic: on the phylogenetic level, it concerns the question of historical origins of language (more on that later), while on the ontogenetic level, it concerns language acquisition in children (a question that Rousseau, as we shall see, treated in a remarkable way in his Émile) and the education of deaf persons.90 In Rousseau, reference – at least a possible one – to Pereire is of equal importance when it comes to the question of the supplementation of the senses. In the second book of Émile, when Rousseau indulges in an epistemological exercise of “metaphysical anatomy” (as Diderot called it in his Letter on the Deaf and Dumb and as Condillac practiced it in his Treatise on the Sensations), in distinguishing different human senses and analysing the kind of knowledge they provide, he is confronted with the problem of the relationship between the sense of sight and the sense of touch and of the latter possibly supplementing the former. Rousseau’s own contribution to the question of supplementation of the senses, quite possibly inspired by Pereire, consists in suggesting that touch may supplement not just sight, but hearing too: 90.  The reader might remember that this is exactly the same question Garrick Mallery was coping with in the passage quoted in our Introduction. The difference is that Mallery has drawn an entirely different, and entirely logical, conclusion – that sign language must be a language allowing for thought. Without sign language being the language of instruction, no spoken – or written – language acquisition is possible.



Chapter 3.  Deafness as difference

Since a trained touch supplements sight, why could it not also, up to a certain point, supplement hearing, given the fact that sounds set off vibrations which can be sensed by touch in sonorous bodies? In placing a hand on the body of a cello, one can, without the aid of eyes or ears, distinguish solely by the way the wood vibrates and quivers whether the sound it produces is low or high, whether it comes from the A string or the C string. Let the senses be trained in those differences. I have no doubt that with time one could become sensitive enough to be able to hear an entire air with the fingers. And if this is the case, it is clear that one could easily speak to the deaf with music, for sounds and rhythms, no less susceptible of regular combinations than articulations and voices, can similarly be taken for the elements of speech. (Rousseau 2010: 279)

Lurking behind this hypothesis is undoubtedly the old oralist idea of “transsensorial mimologism” (Virole 1990: 13), of teaching the deaf to articulate using tactile sensations – feeling the vibration of the teacher’s vocal cords –, an idea Rousseau had probably come across through Pereire. The mutual ties between the 18th-century empiricism and deaf education bring up another question that will be the subject of the following chapter. Are there any texts that show an interest not in the way the deaf are taught to speak but in the way they communicate when they gesture? Is there a lesson to be learned from the gestures of the deaf as such, rather than from the attempts to make them speak like we do? The question itself suggests an answer. There are such texts, texts that contribute to what is referred to, in modern literature, as the anthropological view of deafness. Below, we will concentrate on two remarkable documents, in chronologically inverted order. The first one is the first book written and published by a deaf person, Pierre Desloges’s Observations d’un sourd-muet sur “Un cours élémentaire d’éducation des sourds-muets”, publié en 1779 par M. l’abbé Deschamps (1779), the second one, discussed in greater detail, is Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751).

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Chapter 4

Deafness as difference continued Pierre Desloges’s account of signing from a signer’s perspective and Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb

Pierre Desloges Desloges’s little book is not a philosophical treatise, but it does have a philosophical background. The debates on language, thought and perception, as developed by contemporary philosophers, constantly echo in Desloges’s defence of sign language. The argument of the book and the strategies employed to prove its point are so remarkable that the Observations certainly warrant mention both as a contribution to philosophical debates on language as such and as a treatise on sign language. In the opening pages of his book, before tackling the question of sign language itself, Pierre Desloges introduces himself. He was a Parisian bookbinder who became deaf at the age of seven following a childhood illness (smallpox). As for his capacity to perceive sounds, he claims to be sensible to loud noises, but only due to the vibrations that they produce; he is also able to distinguish, for example, a sound of a violin from that of a flute, but only if he places his hand on the instrument (Desloges 2006: 31). According to his own words, he spent his young age living in isolation from other deaf people, unaware of the very existence of sign language and using – apart from writing – only unconnected and isolated signs. It is only at the age of twenty-seven that he became acquainted with the Parisian deaf community and its language. It is here that he has learned what he calls “the art of combining signs to form distinct pictures with which one can represent various ideas, transmit them to one’s peers, and converse in logical discourse” (Desloges 2006: 32). The Observations, in this respect, are a valuable document in itself: Desloges provides us with a description of several signs from Old French Sign Language and gives us certain hints about its grammar.91 But he also presents a remarkably 91.  For a general introduction to Desloges’s work, see Fischer (2002: 391–406).

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vivid image of the deaf community itself, an image very different from the images of isolated deaf individuals we have encountered earlier: There are congenitally deaf people, Parisian laborers, who are illiterate and who have never attended the Abbé de l’Epée’s lessons, who have been found so well instructed about their religion, simply by means of signs, that they have been judged worthy of admittance to the holy sacraments, even those of the Eucharist and marriage. No event – in Paris, in France, or in the four corners of the world – lies outside the scope of our discussions. We express ourselves on all subjects with as much order, precision, and rapidity as if we enjoyed the faculty of speech and hearing. (Desloges 2006: 36)92

It is worth noting that when Desloges describes his own progression from using “scattered” signs to acquiring “the art of combining them”, he makes a clear distinction between home-signers and the signing members of the deaf community, a distinction that, as we have seen, most authors writing on the subject have failed to make.93 While denouncing the fallacy of viewing sign language as “limited to physical things and bodily needs”, he remarks that such impoverished means of communication is used only by “those who are deprived of the company of other deaf people or who are abandoned in asylums or isolated somewhere in the provinces” (Desloges 2006: 36). The deaf living in big cities like Paris, however, were far from being limited to using just these elementary signs: “So it would be a gross mistake to regard us as some species of automata fated merely to vegetate in the world. Nature has not been as cruel to us as is commonly assumed; it always compensates in one of the senses for what is absent in the others” (Desloges 2006: 37). It is here that Desloges’s basic argumentative strategy becomes obvious: it involves inverting all the lieux communs concerning both sign language and its speakers. While Hobbes and others viewed deaf individuals (even though it is not clear which deaf individuals they refer to) precisely as automata, unable not only to communicate, but 92.  Desloges also explicitly rejects the idea that Abbé de l’Epée was the inventor of sign language: “[…] this opinion is untenable, for I have already shown that my illiterate comrades who do not attend the gifted teacher’s school make extensive use of sign language, that they possess the art of giving a visual representation of their thoughts and ideas, and even the ones most independent of the senses” (Desloges 2006: 41–42). 93.  Therefore, Renate Fischer is right to note that Desloges’s book includes “the first clear emphasis on the community aspect of communication […] the contrast to hearing scholars of the time cannot be ignored. In general they did not acknowledge sign language as the communication device of a specific group of language users. They focused instead on scattered instances of signing in deaf persons or applauded hearing teachers – but not their deaf students – for isolated signs they performed” (Fischer 2002: 395).



Chapter 4.  Deafness as difference continued

to accomplish the most elementary intellectual operations, Desloges concentrated on the advantages that those alleged automata are endowed with: “The privation of hearing makes us more attentive in general. Our ideas concentrated in ourselves, so to speak, necessarily incline us toward reflectiveness and meditation” (Desloges 2006: 37). Because of this approach, Desloges’s Observations can be read as a powerful defence not only of sign language as such, but – in a broader perspective – of the “differential” paradigm of deafness. Instead of individuals who are simply deprived of one dimension of sensory perception (and of communication), we have a description of deafness as a specific existential condition, whose relation to the “normal” human existence is not understood in terms of privation or negation. This positive approach towards deafness seems to be strongly connected to Desloges’s constantly stressed awareness of being a member of a deaf community. It is no longer the isolated deaf that are in the centre of his attention, but a community of people sharing the same language and values. This makes Desloges’s viewpoint very specific and very distinct from that of other contemporary authors writing on deafness. The confidence with which Desloges stresses the advantages of sign language and of a “deaf ” way of life stems from the fact that not only is he deaf himself, but that this particular condition makes him a member of a group of his peers with whom he can easily communicate. When he praises Epée’s approach based on the use of methodical signs, he uses an “anthropological” metaphor that leaves us in no doubt as to the fact that he considers the deaf to represent a full-fledged linguistic community in its own right. Epée’s ingenuity, says Desloges, consisted in his having observed that the deaf already have a natural language of their own. He simply learned it from them and endowed it with “methodical rules”. In other words, the learned teacher considered himself like a man suddenly transported to a foreign people to whom he wanted to teach his own native language; he judged that the best way to manage this would be to learn the country’s language so as to give easily understandable instructions. (Desloges 2006: 34)

The same is true of Desloges’s treatment of sign language itself. Where other authors tend to view sign language as an emblem of primitiveness for the reason that the relationship between a sign and its referent seems to be more direct than that mediated by a string of arbitrary phonemes, Desloges proposed viewing this property as an advantage. Hence the constant references to the – implicit or explicit – metaphor of painting in Desloges’s text:

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The language we use among ourselves, being a faithful image of the object expressed, is singularly appropriate for making our ideas accurate and for extending our comprehension by getting us to form the habit of constant observation and analysis. This language is lively; it portrays sentiment, and develops the imagination. No other language is more appropriate for conveying great and strong emotions. (Desloges 2006: 37)94

Sign language is, so to speak, a painting of sentiments and ideas: it directs human intelligence and imagination in a natural way to express whatever is needed.95 This metaphor of painting is of extreme importance and in the decades to come, its destiny has been remarkably ambivalent. In the 18th and 19th century, it was repeated, in the first place, by nearly all the advocates of sign language (Bébian and others). When understood in a positive sense, signing – as compared to painting – connotes expressivity and immediacy that cannot be found in spoken language. Therefore, sign language becomes an emblem of what is natural, universal and straightforward, “for everything, absolutely everything in nature carries with it its own sign” (Desloges 2006: 37). In other contexts, this same metaphor, however, and independently of the use Desloges and his successors made of it, has received negative meaning. Some of the detractors of sign language would later connect the same properties with much less favourable connotations: being “the faithful image of the object expressed”, sign language, according to them, pertains to uncontrolled bodily impulses and forces that blur the intellect of the speaker. Giulio Tarra, a fervent oralist and one of the principal opponents of the “manual method” during the Congress of Milan would, for example, emphatically state that in comparison with the “fantastic language of signs”, speech “[…] elevates the spirit much more naturally, calmly, with prudence and truthfulness” and permits to avoid the danger of the “exaggeration of sentiments”, that Tarra deems to be connected to signing (cit. in Cuxac 1983: 136). But in his defence of sign language, Desloges went even further: he proposed considering concrete situations in which sign language proves to be more effective than spoken language in order to prove its worthiness or even superiority. As an exemplary situation, he chose one requiring a description of space:

94.  A little later, Desloges speaks about sign language as being “the richest in expressions, the most energetic, the most incalculably advantageous in its universal intelligibility” (Desloges 2006: 45–46). 95.  “You will realize that this simple, natural means of communication spares the imagination a great deal of trouble and work. We guide the imagination this way – as if by degrees – toward the object we wish to represent” (Desloges 2006: 43).



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Paris is so large that one is obliged to have a written address for people whose residence one is trying to find for the first time, and despite this precaution it is often difficult to locate the dwelling in question. Nevertheless, I can successfully direct any illiterate deaf friend of mine to any building in Paris, whether shop or town house or first or sixth-floor room, provided that I have once seen it myself. I would use fewer signs to give him the person’s address than I would write in words. (Desloges 2006: 44)

It would be false, however, to consider Desloges’s little book as merely a defence of what is natural. Desloges, in fact, presents a remarkable classification of signs based on the nature of the relationship between the sign and the referent. The first class of signs he mentions in this respect are what he terms “ordinary” or “basic” signs. These are the true “natural” signs, commonly used by all people (hearing and deaf). The difference is that while hearing people use them “unreflectively”, in the case of the deaf, they represent true linguistic means of conveying information. These transparent signs include, according to Desloges, especially pronouns (in the form of pointing) and interjections, and represent a kind of universal gestural basis shared both by the hearing and the deaf. Apart from these basic devices common to both systems, there are, however, also more complicated signs that are specific to deaf signers. The second class is composed of what Desloges refers to as “reflected” signs. These signs do have a “natural” relation to their referent but require, on the part of the speaking – or signing – subject, “a bit of reflection before being combined and understood”. And finally, there are “analytic” signs, which “aim to represent ideas that do not, strictly speaking, have any natural signs and so in sign language are based on analysis” (Desloges 2006: 44–45). Desloges, therefore, is not stressing just the strictly natural character of signing but is also reflecting on the degrees of iconicity and on how objects and ideas that are “absolutely independent of the senses” are represented (Desloges 2006: 45).96 Signing does involve reflection and analysis, at least on a certain level. Here, Desloges’s claim comes remarkably close to the argument that was recently proposed by Sarah Taub (Taub 2001): the creation of iconic signs is not an inferior intellectual activity but follows complex rules; it is, therefore, inadequate to consider this creation as a simple process, however “natural” and universally available the sign language may seem.97 96.  Representation of these objects takes place in the following way: “If […] I can imagine secondary ideas to accompany this first idea (i.e. the idea independent of the senses), I find a host of natural signs that I combine in a twinkling and that express this idea very clearly” (Desloges 2006: 45). 97.  Desloges recounts an anecdote which is a good illustration of this point: “I recall once being with a hearing person holding a small black cane and asking her in sign language what the cane

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Desloges’s approach to the question of sign language and the signing community leads us to make two remarks. First, however “uneducated” the author claims to be, we cannot ignore his recurring use – whether conscious or not – of philosophical terminology: reflection, analysis, imagination, all of which were terms commonly used in 18th-century philosophical writings. The Observations, therefore, may – and even should – be read against the backdrop of contemporary philosophical debates. Second, Desloges lays the ground for the “differential” view of deafness98 – he certainly did not have in mind all the subtleties of the present debates on sign language, but still, the pronoun “we” that he constantly uses when speaking about the deaf community indicates difference rather than inferiority of any kind. The use of this pronoun is, in fact, an epistemological breakthrough. In the Observations, it is no longer a question of an isolated individual, an inferior human being deprived of access to auditory perception and used, in the writings of hearing philosophers, as a pretext for their imaginary mental projections, but a collective body capable – through the author of the book – of speaking for itself.

Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb: General background There is yet another way of constructing deafness as difference, a way very different in both its aims and the means employed to achieve them. This time it was proposed by a hearing man, in a fascinating text which deserves all our attention. In this chapter, we will concentrate on how deafness and signing are treated in Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb. Letter on the Deaf and Dumb is a somewhat neglected piece of writing, both in the domain of philosophy and the domain of deaf studies. In the former, it remains in the shadow of the more famous Letter on the Blind, to which it is usually considered a mere supplement. But even if both Letters share certain features was made of. She answered aloud, ‘of whale’. Uncomprehending, I entreated her to explain it to me in sign. She made several ridiculous gestures that could apply to a number of animals. As she perceived that I did not understand at all, she asked for a pencil to write the word down. A deaf friend of mine who was present and who had recognized the substance, immediately made the gestures for a fish swimming and then for a gigantic animal. These two signs were sufficient to make clear to me that the cane was made of whalebone, for the first gesture had indicated the general category of fish” (Desloges 2006: 44). 98.  R. Fischer warns us that “it is tempting to see Desloges’s comments about the Parisian deaf community and sign language as being similar to the modern concept of the deaf community as a linguistic minority, but this would certainly be historically inadequate” (Fischer 2002: 395). On the other hand, the change of accent in Desloges’s text, concentrating on the communitarian “we” rather than on an isolated deaf individual, is indeed striking.



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in terms of the method they employ, the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb is an original contribution to different questions, including the one concerning the origin of language. When it comes to deaf studies, on the other hand, Diderot’s Letter is hardly mentioned at all, especially in the English speaking context. In The Mask of Benevolence, Harlan Lane dismisses the Letter in one sentence, quoting it as an example of what he calls “language bigotry”: “So distinguished a scholar as Denis Diderot argued that the study of French grammar could reveal principles of thought, because the order of words in French corresponds to the order in which they arise in the mind” (Lane 1999: 108). This is not exactly true, or more precisely, while Diderot does make an éloge of French as a language that reflects the natural order of ideas in the human mind, on the whole the statement leaves out the most remarkable reflection on gestures and the language of the deaf made by Diderot at the beginning of his multi-faceted and digressive text (and it is these opening passages in particular that will be of concern here), which might be read as a significant contribution both to psychology and linguistics. Letter on the Deaf and Dumb treats, in its own way, the complicated question of the relationship between language and thought. The actual context out of which the work emerged was a debate opened by Abbé Charles Batteaux  – to whom Diderot’s text is addressed  – in his Lettre sur la phrase française comparée avec la phrase latine, published in 1748. The debate itself is known as the debate on inversions. But while Batteaux was treating primarily the question of inversion in French and Latin, Diderot’s text, under the pretext of studying the “origin of inversions”, embarks on a set of more general questions concerning “natural order of ideas” in the human mind and the origin of language, not to speak about his aesthetic insights, which occupy the largest part of the Letter. First of all, the Letter is a critique of linguistic abstraction. One would immediately tend to read the passages on gesture and sign language as a confirmation of the old idea that sign language is a code that lacks the capacity for abstraction. But that would mean not paying attention to the individual “idiom” of Diderot’s philosophy. For Diderot, the “concreteness” of gesture does not imply any negative connotations. In his view, this concreteness is precisely something that spoken languages – unfortunately – have lost. And it is not only concreteness; it is also a certain vitality, immediacy and energy, a bodily character, we might say. Herbert Josephs, author of an excellent monograph on gesture in Diderot’s philosophy, has explained this as follows: “Language, after a multitude of centuries, had become capable of the highest operations of reflective thought; but in the process, the vital forces of the body’s senses had been drained through the filter of an educated mind, leaving only the empty shell of abstract forms” (Josephs 1969: 33). The abstraction to which the process of refinement of grammar and linguistic structures has led as languages developed does allow for a greater sophistication of ideas, but it is also a

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source of all kinds of errors, residing in vague and general notions deprived of any meaning (Josephs 1969: 14–15). The general character of language fails to capture the individual character of human experience – in language, the experience may be communicated, but it is no longer what it used to be when it was lived; in order to become communicable, it ceased to be singular. Gesture, then, seems to be a sort of mediator between the affective and the rational. It certainly is an expression, i.e. it does externalize an idea or an experience, but it does so in a more immediate way than spoken language, where signs are detached from their referents. Gesture is, as Josephs puts it, “an idea in movement” (Josephs 1969: 51).99 But is this not, one might object, a repetition of a well-known prejudice? A prejudice that consists in relegating everything affective, concrete and irrational to the side of sign language,100 while what is abstract and rational is on the side of the spoken language? Not necessarily, because affectivity and concreteness are not interpreted in negative terms, as mere affectivity and concreteness (as it undoubtedly will be interpreted later, during the Congress of Milan, for example). It is perfectly adjusted to the concreteness, continuity and synthetic character of experience, which the spoken language, with its discrete and arbitrary character, is not, in a certain sense, fit to describe. If we read the beginning of the Letter simply as a description of the difference between two modes of expression – and Diderot’s text does allow such a reading – then we can see the Letter not only as a fascinating anthropological treatise, but also as a very relevant contribution to the questions that linguistics and psychology are still tackling to this very day. The argumentative structure of Diderot’s text is rather complicated and sinuous. At the beginning, after having distinguished between the natural, instituted and scientific order of ideas (the first of these reflecting the order in which ideas enter our minds, and the other two reflecting the abstraction created in a wellestablished language), Diderot asks the question of the origin of inversions. What the reader logically expects on Diderot’s part is some kind of “historical” analysis, much in the spirit of Condillac or Rousseau. But instead of constructing an imaginary origins scenario, Diderot chooses a different approach, an experimental one. 99.  Josephs rightly reminds us that this view of gestures is certainly not limited to Letter on the Deaf and Dumb. Gestures and other kinds of body language are omnipresent in Diderot’s writings; Diderot’s characters very often accompany their speech with very vivid bodily expressions, gestures and even pantomime – suffice it to read the Rameau’s Nephew, which Josephs analyzes in great detail. According to Josephs, this constant doubling of the verbal and the corporeal corresponds not only to an esprit du siècle, but also to the general character of Diderot’s philosophy, which, in its turn, corresponded to his own personal characteristics (Josephs 1969: 49). 100.  Or to the side of gesture, for in Diderot’s Letter – once again – the distinction between gesture and sign language is not clear.



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But it is, perhaps, unnecessary to go back as far as the creation of the world and the origin of language to explain why inversions crept into and were preserved in languages. It would be sufficient to make an imaginary journey to a people whose language one was unacquainted with; or, what comes to almost the same thing, to experiment with a man who would forgo the use of articulate sounds and try to make himself understood by gestures alone. (Diderot 1916b: 163)

A reader acquainted with Diderot’s writings may quickly notice that this is the way Diderot proceeds very often – when trying to explain a certain general rule or a general phenomenon, he often chooses, as a porte-parole, either a speaker with very unusual characteristics, such as Rameau’s nephew, or a speaker in a very unusual position,101 or a certain via negativa. Both Letter on the Blind and Letter on the Deaf and Dumb explore this third option. In order to account for some properties of sensory perception, Diderot chooses a blind man; in order to explain the origin of inversion, he chooses a deaf man. He himself explains the reason in a general epistemological precept given a few pages further on: ignorance is better than prejudice. For us, as people who can hear and speak, the residue of prejudice and preconceptions surrounding the subject studied – the origin of language and inversions, in this case – is so thick that despite even the keenest attempts to be “objective” we cannot avoid certain preconceived notions: “You will doubtless think this a singular way of obtaining true notions of the formation of a language. But pray consider, how much less far from truth ignorance is than prejudice, and that a man born deaf and dumb has no prejudices with regard to the manner of communicating his thoughts” (Diderot 1916b: 166–167). There is, in fact, a whole epistemological programme expressed in these lines, one fully corresponding to the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy. Diderot may well speak of ignorance, but this ignorance is no obstacle to knowledge. Quite the contrary, it is the only means of achieving an unbiased view. This general starting point leads Diderot to study the phenomenon of manual communication on several levels. Before embarking on the question of sign language per se, he proposes a curious experiment, that of a “theoretical mute”.

Gestures without speech Diderot does not start by examining the language of the deaf as such. In the passage quoted above, he speaks of a man who “would forgo” the use of speech and who chooses to use gestures instead of speech. This is obviously not a deaf person, 101.  In D’Alembert’s Dream, for example, d’Alembert, the principal speaker in the dialogue, is asleep.

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but what Diderot calls a theoretical mute (muet de convention). What seems sure is that a theoretical mute is a hearing person, but beyond that opinions may differ as to exactly who this person might be. For what exactly does this person do? Andrea Benvenuto, one of the rare researchers who have examined Diderot’s Letter from the perspective of deafness, believes that the theoretical mute is a hearing signer: it is a “person who hears and speaks, but who also masters the language of the deaf ” (Benvenuto 2009: 70). According to such an interpretation, the experiment proposed by Diderot would consist simply in a translation of spoken language into sign language, the speakers having the advantage of being able to explain – in metalinguistic terms – the choices they have made. Such a translation – something like an exercise in interpreting – would “permit to confirm the linguistic character of the gestural signs of the deaf and to justify the recourse to the figure of theoretical mute” (Benvenuto 2009: 70). Such a reading is improbable for two reasons. First of all, Diderot, like Augustine, does not seem to pay much attention to the question of the “linguistic character of the gestural signs of the deaf ”, and much less does he care about its “confirmation”. He certainly does believe that gestures played a considerable role in the origins of language, but it is an altogether different matter than proving that sign language has a linguistic character. Diderot’s question is that of word order. Second, despite the fact that Diderot undoubtedly was a brilliant and openminded thinker, it seems unlikely that even he would have adopted this line of reasoning and thought of “mastering” the sign language of the deaf. The fact is that the exact relationship between the gestures of the theoretical mutes and the sign language of the deaf is not entirely clear. In an ambiguous paragraph where Diderot describes the conditions of his experiment in more detail, he writes the following: The translators must be warned to avoid ellipsis, for the language of gesture is difficult enough without increasing its laconism by the use of this figure. By the efforts of those born deaf and dumb to make themselves understood, we see they express all they are able to express. I should therefore recommend our theoretical mutes to copy them, and, as far as is possible, to form no sentence where the subject and the attribute with all their dependencies are not expressed.  (Diderot 1916b: 165)

In short, “they would only be allowed the choice of the order in which they would present ideas, or rather the gestures representing these ideas” (Diderot 1916b: 166). We can only speculate about what he had in mind, making such a comparison and speaking about an “imitation” of the deaf on the part of a theoretical mute. The most probable answer is the following: “to copy” the deaf does not mean to learn their language (in the way we learn sign language nowadays). The deaf simply



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use gestures to communicate. Diderot’s expression “language of gestures”, again, designates the manual modality of communication as such, encompassing both the language of the deaf and the gestures of the hearing,102 differing perhaps by their degree of complexity, but not differing in nature: the gestures of the deaf, being their only means of communication, are probably more subtle and better executed, but they are still gestures and, as Diderot clearly states, it requires considerable effort on the part of the speakers to make themselves understood (a common presupposition when hearing people speak about sign language: the deaf, of course, have to make a considerable effort to make themselves understood by hearing people, not by other deaf). If this is correct, Diderot’s recommendation to his theoretical mutes to “imitate” the deaf would have to mean nothing other than their using the “deaf ” way of making gestures, because the deaf are simply better at doing this.103 So if we again resist the temptation to ask the “linguistic” question Diderot could not ask, we can perhaps restate the problem as follows: Diderot does not believe that there is a difference in nature between the sign language of the deaf and the gesturing of the hearing, but even in the simplest gestures that we use as hearing people there is still a germ of language and a symbolic dimension, a gesture being, as Josephs has put it, an idea expressed in movement. So Diderot’s idea is perhaps different than some kind of sign language interpreting: the theoretical mute is someone who simply replaces, for a moment, his verbal expression with improvised gestures (not any conventional signs). And the question is simply this: will the order of ideas change? Will ideas be expressed in the same order in spoken language and in gestures? This is the principal objective of Diderot’s preliminary experiment: to compare and to study the difference between word order in the spoken language and the order of ideas expressed by improvised gestures in hearing subjects who – on the basis of a conscious decision – choose 102.  Such a reading would be supported by the detailed discussion of theatrical gestures included in the Letter, which represent yet another means of non-verbal communication. 103.  As Edward Tylor has noted – in a very similar spirit – several decades later in his Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865), a treatise including two very intriguing chapters on sign language to which we shall briefly return later: “Indeed, the deaf-mutes in general surpass the rest of the world in their power of using and understanding signs, and for this simple reason, that though the gesture language is the common property of all mankind, it is seldom cultivated and developed to so high a degree by those who have the use of speech, as by those who cannot speak, and must therefore have recourse to other means of communication” (Tylor 1964: 12). A similar observation is made by Ch. Darwin in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. All signs are of “natural origin”, and if the gestures of the deaf do not always appear natural or comprehensible, it is due to “the practice of the deaf and dumb and savages to contract their signs as much as possible for the sake of rapidity. Hence their natural source or origin often becomes doubtful or is completely lost; as is likewise the case with articulate speech” (Darwin 1979: 62).

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to express themselves by non-verbal means. This is also the reason why Diderot has created the fiction of a “theoretical mute” before addressing the issue of sign language as such: unlike the deaf person, who expresses himself solely in gestures, the theoretical mute, being capable of expressing himself in spoken language but simply choosing not to, makes the comparison possible. And such an experiment would also be easier to conduct because the theoretical mute is not deaf, so the instructions can be given and the questions asked in spoken language; no communication problems are likely to arise. Such a man, who would perfectly understand the questions put to him, would be an excellent subject for experiment; and from the succession of his gestures definite inferences could be drawn as to the order of ideas which seemed good to the early men in order to communicate their thoughts by gestures, and under what circumstances articulate sounds were invented. (Diderot 1916b: 163)

Diderot’s further observations on this experiment are remarkable. He is well aware that such an exercise should not be confused with mere pantomime. Pantomime involves imitating a story or an action. The proposed experiment is not an imitation of this kind: it is not to be identified with what Diderot calls “ordinary pantomime”, because it involves translating “speech into gesture”, rather than an action (Diderot 1916b: 163). He also assumes there could be individual variations in the gestural expressions used by the subjects in the experiment, so after the experiment the subjects would consequently be asked to justify the order of gestures they had employed. If this interpretation is correct, the question Diderot speculatively poses – the experiment itself remained only a proposition and was probably not carried out – is perfectly relevant. The question is the following: when speaking non-signers do not, for some reason, express themselves in spoken language but in gestures, does their gesturing differ (a) from the gesturing they use to accompany their spoken language under normal circumstances; and (b) from the word order they use when speaking? Here, a digression into modern research on gesture will be useful to see that Diderot’s proposition was by no means a naive one. The experiment outlined by Diderot was, in fact, conducted two centuries later by Susan Goldin-Meadow (Goldin-Meadow 2003b; see also Bloom 1979 for a similar experiment, and McNeill 1992 for a summary of Bloom’s work). Whether she was aware of the odd-sounding proposition made two centuries earlier by a French Enlightenment philosopher, we do not know. The purpose of the experiment, however, was roughly the same. When gestures are used by hearing persons as part of a gesture-speech complex, their rhythm, order and nature is coordinated with spoken language and follows the same pattern. In her work on home signers, Goldin-Meadow came to ask the following question: what happens



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if, as she puts it, the gesture assumes the full burden of communication (GoldinMeadow 2003b: 199)?104 Will the pattern of the gestures change and become more complex? Or to put it another way, will “the gestures the adults produced without speech be segmented and combined into sentence like strings” (Goldin-Meadow 2003a: 232)? In order to find out, in her experiment hearing non-signers were asked to reproduce – in gestures, without the use of speech – videotaped action involving people and objects moving in space. Goldin-Meadow’s findings would have been of particular interest to Diderot. First of all, the structure of gestures did change: “[…] The adults produced clearly articulated gestures that were often combined into connected strings. Moreover, the strings were reliably ordered, with gestures for certain semantic elements occurring in particular positions” (Goldin-Meadow 2003b: 202). In one respect, Diderot was mistaken in his assumptions: there was no individual variation in the order of gestures (the fact is that he probably imagined something a little more complicated than what the subjects in Goldin-Meadow’s experiment were asked to describe, something that would probably be impossible to carry out). But more importantly, it is obvious that the question he asks and the “exercise” he proposes to answer it are far from senseless: the experiment does not perhaps provide an insight into the origins of language, but it does suggest something concerning the “natural order of ideas” (or whatever modern terminology we may choose to describe it). According to Goldin-Meadow’s findings, whenever the hearing adults gestured without the use of speech, not only were their gestures produced following the same order, but this order was not identical to the word order in spoken English (Goldin-Meadow 2003b: 202). The typical pattern in the gesture of these adults was “stationary object – moving object – action” rather than “moving object – action – stationary object”, typical for English (or French, or Czech) word order. It may be useful to give a concrete example from Goldin-Meadow’s experiment. One of the scenes involved a donut-shaped object rising in an arc out of an ashtray and landing on a nearby table (Goldin-Meadow 2003b: 202). The adult whose gestures are reported as an example designed first the ashtray, then the donut-shaped object, and then the action. A typical English sentence would obviously follow a different order. The results were even more 104.  In the context of study of home-signing systems, this question is of particular importance. Goldin-Meadow had noticed that in home-signing deaf children, i.e. children not exposed to sign language, gestures have acquired certain language-like properties, despite the fact that they did not have any language model at their disposal – they were, so to speak, in a “language-creating situation” (Goldin-Meadow 2003b: 200). Goldin-Meadow’s logical explanation is that “it is only when the gesture is called upon to carry the full burden of communication (as opposed to playing an adjunct role) that it assumes language-like structure” (Goldin-Meadow 2003b: 199). The experiments conducted with hearing adults were supposed to test this hypothesis.

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interesting when the subjects were asked to describe both intransitive (as in the case just quoted) and transitive sequences – the pattern the gesturers consistently produced in this second case was a so-called “ergative pattern”, in which the patient precedes the action (“cheese eat”) rather than the “accusative pattern” (“eat cheese”) typical for the majority of spoken languages (Goldin-Meadow 2003b: 205; see also a good summary by Emmorey 2002: 206–209). And even more importantly, these patterns were exactly identical to those produced by the little deaf home-signers Goldin-Meadow had observed earlier (Goldin-Meadow 2003b: 104–107). Therefore, ergative structure is not used exclusively by children and its use cannot be due to “a childlike way of organizing information”. Goldin-Meadow hypothesizes that it may represent a solution to a universal problem of conveying information, independently of the communicating subject being a child or an adult (GoldinMeadow 2003b: 205).105 What does this prove? One interesting thing, at the very least. The basic question Diderot was asking concerned what he called the “natural order of ideas” in the human mind, implying that the spoken language we use may or may not reflect this natural order, and is therefore at least partly independent of it. The question of a natural order of ideas – or the natural order of experience – that exists independently of language may, after decades of structuralism and Whorfian linguistics, now seem desperately obsolete. Yet it appears there is a different – and consistently different – way of ordering information when the speaker is forced to express himself or herself through gestures, which, in this same context, seem to acquire a more language-like character.106 So somehow Diderot’s initial question is pertinent. But in what way? Where does this consistency come from and why is the pattern of spoken language different? The most natural hypothesis is that this consistently different ordering has something to do with the fact that in the case of gestures, communication takes place in a different, visual modality. Gestures are particularly apt for conveying holistic images, movement, things in space, and they are particularly good at encoding visual information. It may be that ergative patterns are simply more suited 105.  What is more, this non-English pattern appeared in a variety of communicative situations and even in non-communicative contexts, and therefore appears to be independent of the speaker’s specific intention to convey information to another subject. 106.  According to Goldin-Meadow’s findings, the gesture systems invented by adults did involve segmentation and combination of units, but not a system of internal contrasts, i.e. the level of morphology, which could be observed in the gestures of deaf children. The reason for not developing morphological properties may be simply a lack of time for doing so, but perhaps also the fact that the given subjects were adults, already disposing of a fully developed system of spoken language (Goldin-Meadow 2003b: 208).



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to encoding a pre- or extra-linguistic experience of the world (in other words, the very “natural order of ideas” that Diderot sought to discover). This would explain the persistence of such patterns both in children and adults, and also in subjects from different cultural contexts – they simply do not seem to be conditioned by the particular spoken language the speaker had acquired. After all, what we see is cheese and the action of eating is performed on this pre-existing cheese, rather than the other way round; there seems to be an “ergative” order to the experience itself. In this context, the word “natural”, perhaps, does not have to be abhorred and its use in connection with similar phenomena appears to have a long history, stretching well beyond Diderot himself. Several authors concerned with gestures and sign language did employ the same expression when they were speaking precisely about inversions. Garrick Mallery, for example, explains their “natural” character by a very salient example: Inversion, by which the object is placed before the action, is a striking feature of the language of deaf-mutes, and it appears to follow the natural method by which objects and actions enter into the mental conception. In striking a rock the natural conception is not first of the abstract idea of striking or of sending a stroke into vacancy, seeing nothing and having no intention of striking anything in particular, when suddenly a rock rises up to the mental vision and receives the blow; the order is that the man sees the rock, has the intention to strike it, and does so; therefore he gestures, “I rock strike”. (Mallery 1972: 115)107

Much later, William Stokoe went as far as to say that this way of representing experience is “built into our bodies” (Stokoe 2001: 35). In this perspective, then, the visual-motor way of communicating does follow certain constant paths which are dictated by the character of the experience itself.

107.  When Mallery speaks about inversion, what he has in mind is slightly different from Diderot (and, as we have seen, much closer to what Goldin-Meadow observed). It concerns the order of “object and action” rather then that of substantive and adjective, which is Diderot’s primary concern (Baudiffier 1983: 115–136). It is well possible that Mallery’s observation, in its turn, draws on Edward Tylor’s remark on the “syntax” of sign language, including the mention of the “natural order” of ideas: “[…] the deaf-mute strings together the signs of the various ideas he wishes to connect, in what appears to be the natural order in which they follow one another in his mind, for it is the same among the mutes in different countries, and is wholly independent of the syntax which may happen to belong to the language of their speaking friends. For instance, their usual construction is not ‘black horse’ but ‘horse black’; not ‘bring a black hat’ but ‘hat black bring’; not ‘I am hungry, give me bread’ but ‘hungry me, bread give’” (Tylor 1964: 19). Mallery has acknowledged his debt to Tylor on more than one occasion. It is clear, then, that the debate on sign language and inversions certainly did not stop with Diderot. Making its “archeology” and following it across the works of various authors would be a most interesting undertaking.

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This presupposition may perhaps also explain another thing, this time, concerning directly sign language. Of course, it is a well-known fact that sign language is not universal in the sense of being one universal system of communication understood all over the world. On the other hand, comparative studies of many sign languages have shown that different sign languages (or at least many different sign languages) are rather similar in their structure.108 For deaf speakers, it is usually easier to find a way to communicate with each other, even if they speak different sign languages, than it is for hearing speakers speaking different spoken languages. Sign languages, as Sarah Taub puts it, are “remarkably similar in their structural types” (Taub 2001: 225). What’s more, the structures that different sign languages share are also shared – albeit in a more rudimentary form – by home-sign systems and by gesturing unaccompanied by spoken language, as described, for example, by Goldin-Meadow. According to Taub, the reason for this is what she calls the “visual motivation” or “motivation by iconicity”, which is common – on various levels of complexity – to all of those systems (Taub mentions Goldin-Meadow’s experiments explicitly). Once we are expressing ourselves in the visual/gestural modality, that is, with our hands and in space, we cannot help but make certain choices, involving a certain kind of spatial mapping (Taub 2001: 226–227).109 These considerations in fact open up a whole new field of inquiry. In this field of research, there would be a continuum between gestures and sign language, based on the varying degrees of complexity of language-like properties shared by gesturing and signing, and also on a certain common way of organizing experience – in other words, seemingly obsolete 18th-century ideas, including Diderot’s speculations, are back in full force. All this of course raises as many questions as there are answers, for example the one asked directly by Goldin-Meadow: “Why then did language become the province of the oral modality? Why is speech the 108.  Even though some considerable differences have been discovered in “village sign languages”. 109.  While Taub speaks generally of lexical iconicity, a particularly important place in this line of research should be ascribed to the work of the French linguist Christian Cuxac and his study of “transfer operations” in sign language, involving iconicity of “higher” degree and defined as “operations which permit to transfer retroactively  – and through deforming them slightly (en les anamorphosant faiblement)  – the real or imaginary experience to the tri-dimensional discursive universe called the ‘signing space’” (Cuxac 2000: 24). On this higher iconic level, the visual motivation of manual-gestural communication, as well as the procedures used to transfer it into a linguistic form, becomes even more salient. Marie-Anne Sallandre – in a doctoral thesis directed by Cuxac – even considers this to be one of the “weak points” of Taub’s approach: “In our view, the principal weakness [of Taub’s book] consists in the fact that the starting point of reflexion is an isolated sign, and not discourse” (Sallandre 2003: 62).



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most common form of linguistic behavior in human cultures when it could just as easily have been gesture?” (Goldin-Meadow 2003b: 210).110 And  – we might add – if the ergative pattern reflects the natural order of experience, why is it that most spoken languages are not ergative?111 The aim of this excursion was to show that Diderot’s proposal of demonstrating the “natural order” of ideas by having a hearing and speaking person experimentally replace words with gestures, i.e. by forcing gestures to bear “the full burden of communication”, certainly cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. Points and questions raised in Diderot’s Letter, after all, are thus not exclusively limited to proving the supremacy of spoken French and making a contribution to a long history of “language bigotry”.

Diderot’s view of deafness and sign language What, then, does Diderot say about the deaf themselves, and their language? Because the “theoretical mutes” can speak (when they want to or are allowed to), it seems likely to him that their gestural “discourse” will be “contaminated” to some degree by the spoken language (we have, however, just seen that this does not necessarily have to be the case). But there I see a difficulty. As thoughts, I know not by what contrivance, enter our mind very much in the form in which they appear in speech when they are tricked up, it is possible that this will cause some difficulty to our theoretical mutes; perhaps they would be tempted to imitate the order of the words in the spoken language they are already familiar with; a temptation which assails almost everyone who writes in a foreign language. (Diderot 1916b: 166)

Be that as it may, Diderot is convinced that the gestures of a theoretical mute do not provide sufficient insight into how the gestural expression functions in a man who has had “no notion of language”. He therefore proposes looking at a real deafmute. His interest is deployed on two interrelated levels. The first level is, let us say, an “epistemological” one, the level of perception and supplementation of the senses; the second field of interest is the gestural language of the deaf as such.

110.  The reader may remember that this line of reasoning, again, was not uncommon in the 18th century: exactly the same question was asked by Rousseau in the passage we have quoted earlier (p. 73) from Essay on the Origin of Languages. 111.  There are a few ergative languages across the globe, but a vast majority of languages are accusative.

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These two levels correspond perfectly to the problem formulated in the initial question, the problem of language and its relation to perception. In the realm of epistemology, Diderot coined an expression that gives a fairly clear idea of his interest: “metaphysical anatomy”. This idea itself is mentioned as a mere digression in the opening part of the Letter, as one of the many Diderotian pensées-catins112 which make reading the Letter – and Diderot’s other writings – so pleasant and so difficult at the same time: This leads me to another idea that is a little alien to the subject of my letter, but in a letter digressions are allowed, especially when they lead to useful results. My idea would be to analyze, as it were, a man, and to examine what he derives from each of his senses. I have sometimes amused myself with this kind of metaphysical anatomy. (Diderot 1916b: 164–165)

This idea of breaking man down and considering each of his senses separately is so close to Condillac’s philosophical undertaking in the Treatise on the Sensations that Condillac himself felt compelled to comment on this affinity in order to avoid the possible accusation of plagiarism.113 Diderot claims to have known a deaf person – in the Letter, he affectionately calls him “my deaf ”. Out of curiosity, and using his favourite method, Diderot inquires into how the deaf person might judge (this term is important) perceptions which he has no direct sensory access to. The ideal material with which to test this would be music. The procedure Diderot chooses is ingenious: he confronts the deaf person with a fashionable invention, a machine that transforms sounds into colours.114 The purpose of this experiment is obvious: because the deaf person has no notion of music but is able to see the colours, it becomes possible to elicit his judgement and ask him what exactly he makes of this music that he cannot perceive stricto sensu. Here again we are dealing with the supplementation of the senses, with bridging the gap between two kinds of sensory perception. The experiment involves, so to speak, transferring a sensation that cannot be perceived by one sense onto another sense, it involves “translating” that which cannot be grasped by the ear into what can be by the eye. It is important to stress the considerable difference between Diderot’s treatment of the supplementation of the senses and the epistemology of Rousseau. In 112.  “In my case my thoughts are my wenches” – this sentence from Rameau’s Nephew is by far the best description of Diderot’s digressive style (Diderot 1971: 33). 113.  This note is not included in the English translation. It is, however, to be found in standard French editions under the title “Réponse à une reproche” (see for example Condillac 1947: 318–319). 114.  The machine in question was proposed by father Louis-Bertrand Castel in 1725.



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the passage from Émile quoted earlier, Rousseau proposes to “train the senses” of the deaf person in order to enable him to perceive sounds by means of the sense of touch (Rousseau 2010: 279). There is no question of “sensory training” in Diderot: the aim of his experiment is purely observational and does not imply the idea of the deaf person as impoverished in any way. Diderot’s guiding question is simply the following: what will the deaf man think about music when it is mediated by the sense of sight (rather than touch)? Diderot, in other words, is interested in his judgement, not in “training” his senses in order to supply for something that is missing. Diderot’s deaf person was very impressed. His “admiration” – the word comes from Diderot – stemmed from the following judgment: Our deaf-and-dumb friend imagined that the inventor was also deaf and dumb, and that his harpsichord was the instrument by which he communicated with other men; he imagined also that each shade of colour represented a letter of the alphabet, and that by touching the keys rapidly he combined these letters into words and phrases, and, in fact, spoke in colours. (Diderot 1916b: 171)

So the deaf person’s judgment consists in considering music – music transformed into colours – to be a kind of language in which a distinct shade of colour corresponded to a distinct letter of the alphabet; so the term of comparison was a spoken or written language, composed of discrete elements, just as a musical composition is made up of distinct notes combined in a certain order. But, according to Diderot, the deaf person does not stop there. He goes on to generalize his judgement. He, in Diderot’s words, did not “rest on his laurels” and came up with an idea concerning the purpose and function of music in general. He was convinced that music, in fact, is a specific means of “communicating thought” and that musical instruments themselves may be considered to be analogous to the organs of speech (Diderot 1916b: 171). The problem is that this passage, again, is rather ambiguous. First of all, Diderot may have simply invented everything the man said. It is even very likely that he did and that deafness as he imagines it is nothing but a “literary” construction. But even if this “referential” interpretation is disappointing, on the level of the textuality itself, the fact remains that deafness is still understood from the perspective of a differential rather than a deficiency paradigm. For Diderot seems to say two things: first, the deaf person is capable of reasoning, and of quite abstract reasoning at that (and Diderot probably would not have said that if he thought a deaf person was not capable of this, so there is no mental inferiority attributed to one who is deaf); second, and more importantly, his reasoning is essentially correct and perfectly sound. It does not really matter that music is not language. The reasoning is wrong from our perspective, but not from that of the deaf person, who certainly did not

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make any mistake in his inferences. Music, after all, may not exactly be a language, but it does imply a kind of communication: You will say that only a man who had never heard music or a musical instrument could have happened on such a theory. But please consider that this theory, although obviously false to you, seemed almost proved to a deaf-and-dumb person. When the deaf-and-dumb man calls to mind the attention he has observed us pay to music and to musicians, and the evidences of joy or grief depicted on our countenances and in our gestures as we listen to beautiful music, and when he compares them with the similar effects produced by speech or by visible objects, he cannot imagine that music has no definite meaning and that vocal and instrumental music arouses in us no distinct impressions. (Diderot 1916b: 171–172)

What is more, this deaf man, who was placed in the same situation as many philosophers had been – and here, Diderot resumes his criticism of abstraction – when they were forced to speak about something they had no direct perception of,115 does better than most of them. Diderot states this with what seems to be a mixture of admiration and irony. Whenever philosophers have tried to conceptualize and to explain matters that surpassed their sensory capacities, their theories have often strayed further from the truth than the deaf person’s theory of music. The deaf was not wrong in considering music to be a kind of language, “for, after all, if we do not express our thoughts as distinctly by means of musical instruments as with our lips, and if musical notes do not convey our ideas as distinctly as speech, yet they do convey something” (Diderot 1916b: 172). From all of these passages, it is clear that Diderot does not endorse the deficiency paradigm. The above statement may, of course, be ironic in meaning: philosophers are so silly (or shall we say dumb?) that even a deaf person is capable of better reasoning. But even if he was being ironic, and even despite the literary and speculative dimension of Diderot’s Letter, these passages could not have been written had Diderot believed that the deaf person is incapable of reasoning and deprived of abstract ideas. This leads him to present an alternative, non-deficitary view of deafness, without any ambition of supplying for the missing sense (as was the aim of oralism). The same is true of his remarks on sign language, even though we are facing a similar predicament here: we do not know exactly what Diderot was writing about and what kind of empirical material (if any) his observations were based upon. It is quite likely that he was not actually writing about any real sign language used by the deaf in his day. Two passages in the Letter are informative on this. The first one is: 115.  It is probable that Diderot’s critique aims, once again, especially at idealism of the Cartesian type.



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I was playing chess one day, and the dumb man was watching. My opponent fought me to a difficult position, and the dumb man quite understood, and, thinking the game was lost, he closed his eyes, drooped his head, and let fall his arms as a sign that he considered me checkmated, or done for. Consider for a moment how metaphorical is the language of gesture. (Diderot 1916b: 169)

And the second one: Suppose I am at table with a deaf-mute, and he wishes to tell his servant to give me some wine. He first beckons to his servant, then looks at me, then he imitates the action of a man pouring out wine. In this sentence it hardly matters which of the last two signs comes first: the deaf mute, after beckoning to his servant, may either begin with the sign representing his order or that denoting the person whom the order concerns; but the position of the first gesture cannot be altered. Only an illogical mute could displace it. (Diderot 1916b: 175)

Again, one question immediately comes to mind: do these sentences, like the ones on music, reflect direct experience, or is this just literary invention? The same suspicion arises when, in the final pages of the Letter, Diderot speaks, with a characteristic 18th-century esprit, about an “informal conversation” he had with a deaf and dumb person.116 For a non-signer, an attempt at such an “informal conversation” would usually be a frustrating experience. All the doubts we may have amount to a simple question: From what position is Diderot speaking? What kind of experience does his text draw upon? How much literary invention is involved? Or, if we were to convert the question into anthropological terms, what was – to use Clifford Geertz’s expression – Diderot’s specific way of “being there” (Geertz 1988: 1–24)?117 The first possible answer would be that Diderot has simply invented his “deaf friend”.118 Does that mean that he has also invented the gestures described in the 116.  It is true that this expression reflects something of an ethnocentric narcissism, evoking an image of an easy going “ethnographer”, at home in any communicative situation. Hearing people writing on sign language sometimes had this rather irritating habit of congratulating themselves whenever they “conversed” with deaf people, no matter how primitive their “conversation” was. One day, Edward Tylor, visiting a school for the deaf, had the idea of using an inversion when signing “red tent” and did not forget to relate the favorable impression he made: “I drew in the air the outline of a tent, and touched the inner part of my under-lip to indicate ‘red’ […]. The teacher remarked that I did not seem to be quite a beginner in the sign-language, or I should have translated my English thought verbatim, and put the ‘red’ first” (Tylor 1964: 20). 117.  By “being there”, Geertz designed not only the anthropologist’s personal acquaintance with the material studied, but especially his authorial presence in the presentation of that material. 118.  In the sources we have been able to consult, opinions are remarkably divergent. J. Rée believes that Diderot’s deaf was “nameless and probably fictional” (Rée 1999: 135). N. Mirzoeff, on

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passages quoted above? On the other hand, we know that he might have seen a deaf person – at the very least – during Pereire’s presentations. So the second possible answer would be that Diderot did at least observe the deaf; he even might have tried, in fact, to have some kind of “conversation” with a deaf person (Diderot’s curiosity and experimental spirit are well-known and we know that he did speak to the blind when writing the Letter on the Blind), but what he witnessed might have been rather a “pidgin” form of gesturing, a manner of gestural communication used by the deaf to communicate with the hearing. Both examples just quoted seem to point in this direction – all of the gestures used by the deaf are pantomimic, iconic or deictic. And because such “conversation” must necessarily be always simplified and clumsy, this may well be the reason not only why Diderot did not distinguish between sign language and gestures (because it seems that what the deaf person used in the conversation were gestures, not signs), but also the reason for some of his observations on what he perhaps considered to be the language of the deaf person but what was actually an effort, on the part of the deaf person, to overcome the communication barrier between himself and a hearing person, making the communication as transparent as possible.119 Despite all this and at the risk of over-idealization, Diderot’s Letter is an attempt – probably the first serious attempt in Western tradition – to look at deafness from a real anthropological point of view. Yes, many of Diderot’s judgements and statements may be questioned, and many of them are undoubtedly false in the light of modern research. Still they are the kind of errors made by an anthropologist, errors of an anthropological nature – for example, if the present interpretation of

the other hand, takes Diderot literally and believes that “Diderot conversed with a prelingually deaf friend to test his theories on the origins of language […]” (Mirzoeff 1995: 31). A. M. Wilson, author of Diderot’s biography, takes a position that is a compromise between these views and affirms that the Letter contains “some firsthand observations on the behavior of deaf-mutes” (Wilson 1972: 121). S. Baudiffier opts for fiction in this respect, but keeps a backdoor open: in the Letter, we find a long digression concerned with “the observation of more or less fictitious deaf and dumb (sourds et muets plus ou moins fictifs)” (Baudiffier 1983: 125). A. Benvenuto proposes what is probably the most plausible hypothesis – Diderot had some firsthand experience of the deaf thanks to Pereire’s presentations that he attended (Benvenuto 2009: 74). Other interpreters avoid the question altogether. 119.  Let’s consider for example the following judgment: “In talking to a deaf-mute it is found to be almost impossible to describe to him indefinite portions of quantity, number, space, or time, or to make him grasp any abstract idea. One can never be sure that he realizes the difference in tense between I made, I have made, I was making, and I should have made. It is the same with conditional propositions” (Diderot 1916b: 177). This is a common anthropological fallacy to consider language as primitive because it is different from the one we speak.



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the Letter is correct, taking an observer-oriented, simplified communication to be the communication of the “indigenous”. The error Diderot does not commit is the one that consists in taking an overtly “ethnocentric” starting point. Even though deaf people cannot hear, Diderot’s terminology is not that of lack – in the “musical” experiment, nowhere is it stated that absence of hearing is a deficiency of any kind. Nowhere is there mention of the messianic task of giving “them” speech or of the miracle of the “talking deaf ”; nowhere is it a question of making “them” the same as we are. There is a fundamental tendency to preserve the difference and learn from it: what Diderot said – and very openly so – in the end of the Letter on the Blind, may just as well be quoted to sum up the approach he adopted in the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb: People try to give those born blind the gift of sight, but, rightly considered, science would be equally advanced by questioning a sensible blind man. We should learn to understand his psychology and should compare it with ours, and perhaps we should thereby come to a solution of the difficulties which make the theory of vision and of the senses so intricate and confused. But I own I cannot conceive what information we could expect from a man who had just undergone a painful operation upon a very delicate organ which is deranged by a smallest accident and which when sound is a very untrustworthy guide for those who have for a long time enjoyed its use. (Diderot 1916a: 116–117)

This passage serves as a very important summary of Diderot’s position: not only the question of communication and language, but also the very question of sensory deprivation and of supplementation of the senses may be viewed from different perspectives – from the perspective of difference, as Diderot views it here, or from the perspective of deficiency. It is this general tone of Diderot’s text that makes him, perhaps, the first anthropologist of deafness. His very questions are anthropological: What do “they” think? How do “they” communicate? And even, what can we learn from “them” about ourselves? After all, the full title of Diderot’s text is Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Use of Those Who Hear and Speak. Diderot may have been mistaken in many respects, but this is what makes him a founding figure in the history of a non-deficitary view of deafness. In order to change the “conceptual framework” we adopt when speaking about deaf communities, Harlan Lane pleaded for replacing “the normativeness of medicine with the curiosity of ethnography” (Lane 1999: 19). Did not Diderot, at least partially, step up to such a requirement?

Chapter 5

The origins of language

The previous chapters have focused primarily on two approaches towards deafness, viewed either as deficit or difference, and we have presented detailed discussions of some of the ways in which these two views of deafness have functioned in the work of some Western philosophers. In this chapter, we will move to a slightly different realm that, nonetheless, is very closely related to the questions treated earlier. In the 18th century, the topics of gesture and sign language are often inseparable from a broader questioning concerning the origin of language: how did language as such come into existence and what possible role does the gestural modality of expression play in the early stages of humankind’s linguistic communication? Those concerns may not appear to be directly connected with the issue of deafness, for at stake is the origin of language as such, both in its vocal and manual modality. Indeed, both authors primarily dealt with in this chapter – Condillac and Rousseau – refuse to attach any priority to either of those modalities, as far as the origin of language is concerned; for both of them, the early language is composed of both gestures and vocal signals, even though they may be assigned – especially in Rousseau’s work – different functions. Nonetheless, the questions just mentioned represent the background of many later texts concentrating more specifically on sign language, as we shall see in the closing part of this chapter. In those texts, sign language – or language of action – seems to bear a trace of something archaic (even in Diderot’s Letter, as we have seen, this idea was not absent); strange as it may seem, it is a way of communicating from which something can perhaps be deduced about the ways mankind as such had communicated in the ancient past when language was only beginning to emerge. And correlatively, a different image of the deaf person appears: an image of innocence, a psychological projection enabling us to bridge a temporal gap between the beginnings of human communication and its present form. Rather than being a figure of either deficit or difference, the deaf individual becomes a living witness of our own lost and irretrievable past.

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Historical excursion: Lucretius The following historical excursion will be considerably longer and more detailed than the previous ones. The reason is that while Hobbes and Augustine were interpreted as mere exemplifications of a certain stance towards deafness in Western history, Lucretius’s status is somewhat different. Lucretius is a true founder of one particular way of thinking about language. His theory of the origins of language has had such a considerable influence on many later thinkers – and on the 18th-century philosophers in particular – that it seems necessary to explain his principal arguments in a more exhaustive manner, to pinpoint some of the ways in which they were developed in centuries to come, and also to stress their relevance for contemporary discussions about the nature of language. The text we will now turn to – a passage from Lucretius’s De rerum natura – proposes a theory of language origins in which language is seen as the natural outcome of human development. Moreover, Lucretius also highlighted some of the problems and paradoxes that would come to play a key role in any reflexion on the origin of language in the centuries that followed. The importance of this work by Lucretius cannot be emphasized enough. It covers all of the key issues: criticism of the idea that language was developed ex nihilo, either by a divine instance or by an individual who possessed no metalanguage (this argument, as we shall see later, is directed against Plato’s theory of language origin, presented in the Cratylus), the idea that ontogenesis is reflected in phylogenesis, and vice versa, as well as the role of gesture in language acquisition. These questions and ideas, first articulated by Lucretius, were all later taken up and developed, albeit in a different context and independently of him, by language origin theories in the 18th century.

The natural origin of language in De Rerum Natura De rerum natura is a poem that tells the story of the world, nature and humankind. It begins with descriptions of atoms falling in a void and continues right up to the frightening account of the plague epidemic that hit Athens in 430 BC. The outlook of Lucretius has been characterized by Louis Althusser (Althusser 1994: 553–594) as “aleatory materialism” (a materialism governed by chance). It is, therefore, not surprising that Lucretius attempts to account for the genesis of language in thoroughly materialist terms. The radicalism of the Lucretian solution is nonetheless striking. In recounting the origin of mankind in Book V of the poem, Lucretius paints a picture of the “first people” who inhabited the earth, the savages who “built upon tougher and bigger bones within, […] not easily overcome by heat or cold, or by



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strange diet or bodily decay” (Lucretius 1995: 5, 922–927; 185). The question is how did these uninstructed human beings begin to communicate. It was not the result of some demiurgic inventive capacity on the part of one of them (which would make him not only capable of inventing the words, but also of spreading his invention among his less fortunate peers), but rather arose out of necessity. This early language was a spontaneous, half-oral, half-gestural form of signalling employed by these early inhabitants of earth, who used “their hands and stammering speech” to get their message across (vocibus et gestu cum balbe significarent) (Lucretius 1995: V, 1019; 187). There was a natural expressive need in these people, which forced them to use whatever means available to make themselves understood; language developed gradually out of inarticulate vocal and gestural expressions. The key passage in De rerum natura that addresses these questions is as follows: And Nature compelled them to utter the sounds of language, And names were coined for their utility, Rather as speechless infancy itself Draws children on to gestures – when, for instance, The babies point at things they see before them. For everyone senses how to use his powers. Before the first horns sprout from the bull-calf’s head With it he’ll butt in a fury, thrust, attack, And the cubs of lions and the panther’s kittens Will tussle each other with pawing and clawing and biting, Although their teeth and nails are hardly formed; And we see callow birds trust to their wings, Seeking a fluttering help from their young feathers. So to think that someone in those days dealt out The names for things, and taught men their first words, Is stupid. How could this person mark all things, Utter the various sounds the tongue can make, At a time when others couldn’t do the same? Besides, if others hadn’t used their voices Amongst themselves, what planted the idea Of language’s use? What gave him that first power To know, to see in his mind what he wanted to do? One master, too, to tame so many pupils, Force them to learn by heart the names of things, And teaching them, like making the deaf hear – Not easy to see how! They wouldn’t stand it, Wouldn’t be able to hear the gobbledygook Of noises drumming against their ears in vain.   (Lucretius 1995: V, 1025–1052; 188)

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To answer the question of how language might have come into existence, Lucretius posits a continuous process that evolved from semi-linguistic expressions into a conventional system of names. Scholars have not failed to notice that Lucretius’s theory raised questions that have never ceased to be of relevance, even in the contemporary literature on the subject.120 Several points in particular make Lucretius’s account a true landmark in this type of questioning. The force that drove humans to put names on things is neither divine intervention nor demiurgic will, but rather need, dictated by nature itself. In modern terminology, we might perhaps use the word “instinct”. Lucretius draws a double analogy to account for this instinct. In the first and more important one for our purpose, he posited a parallel between phylogenesis and ontogenesis, between the hypothetical development of the human species and the empirically observable behaviour of a human infant. Because what is being described in this account of the origin of language is some kind of “infancy” period of humankind, some insight into how language might have originated may be obtained by comparing this early stage with the development of an individual. A child is instinctively (by “infancy” itself) drawn to making gestures (non alia longe ratione atque ipsa videtur / protrahere ad gestum pueros infantia linguae: “Rather as speechless infancy itself / Draws children on to gestures”). There is a spontaneous communicative need that impels him or her to do so. The example Lucretius gives is that of a particular type of gesture: pointing at things visible in one’s environment (the children digito quae sint praesentia monstrent).121 The first thing to note would be 120.  Gordon Campbell states: “[…] in modern anthropology the origins of language are the subject of considerable debate and speculation, sometimes along very similar lines to the ancient arguments, especially in focusing on gesture as the key to language development, or on instinctive animal sounds as proto-language. Despite two thousand years of investigation since Lucretius, it seems that no consensus has been reached, and the question is still wide open” (Campbell 2003: 284). Campbell (2003) is a detailed line-by-line commentary on Lucretius that the reader would find well worth consulting. 121.  Comp. the famous passage in Augustine’s Confessions, which is also an interesting counterpoint to Augustine’s De quantitate animae: “Yet I was no longer a baby incapable of speech but already a boy with power to talk. This I remember. But how I learnt to talk I discovered only later. It was not that grown-up people instructed me by presenting me with words in a certain order by formal teaching, as later I was to learn the letters of the alphabet. I myself acquired this power of speech with the intelligence that you gave me, my God. By groans and various sounds and various movements of parts of my body I would endeavor to express the intentions of my heart to persuade people to bow to my will. But I had not the power to express all that I wanted nor could I make my wishes understood by everybody. My grasp made use of memory: when people gave a name to an object and when, following the sound, they moved their body towards that object, I would see and retain the fact that the object received from them this sound which they pronounced when they intended to draw attention to it. Moreover, their intention was evident from the gestures which



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that Lucretius was right and that children do exactly this. They do communicate through gestures, in such a way that their gesturing (and, as we shall see, their crying) may be viewed as a language-like behaviour even before they use language.122 The parallel between ontogenesis and phylogenesis, so tempting for many other thinkers to follow, seems to be, in the end, the most viable theoretical option, if we are to get a glimpse into the unspecified past in which language emerged.123 It is obvious that there is a risk of creating a false analogy (one term of which is represented by empirically observable facts, while the other remains dependent on pure speculation), of succumbing to a fallacy that consists in seeing two similar processes where their similarity cannot be tested. On the other hand, it is difficult to see a better alternative. are, as it were, the natural vocabulary of all races, and are made with the face and the inclination of the eyes and the movements of other parts of the body, and by the tone of voice which indicated whether the mind’s inward sentiments are to seek and possess or to reject and avoid” (Augustine 1991: 10–11). Augustine’s is a very insightful description, putting more stress  – in accordance with his “confessional” intent – on the “intentions of the heart” rather than external objects; in many respects, he prefigures Rousseau’s analysis of language acquisition in Émile (to which we will pay attention shortly), including the mention of the intonation of voice and, again, the universal language of gestures. Augustine’s description, of course, is that of a “standard” language acquisition, where the child learns from adult language models. In what follows, I will contrast it with a “non-standard” model, implied in Condillac’s description of language origin. 122.  Among many studies on this matter, see Volterra, Caselli, Capirci and Pizzuto (2005: 3–40). In the opening section of this study on the role of gesture in the emergence of language in children, the authors overtly state their intention “to frame our observations within the context of current discussions of the origins of language, a topic that has been debated, from different perspectives, since antiquity” (p. 4). Lucretius is not cited, but the authors mention Condillac, Diderot, Vico, Humboldt and others. The authors’ remarkable observations on the subject are concluded by a statement perfectly corresponding to Lucretius’s view: “Long before the children learn to speak, they are able to communicate, meaningfully and intentionally, with their caretakers. In learning a language, children are acquiring a more effective and elaborate means of doing something that they can already do in a more primitive fashion” (p. 36). See also Caselli (1994: 56–67). 123.  Campbell remarks that Lucretius’s analogy is, in fact, a double one: on the one hand, Lucretius compares the acquisition of language in children to the origins of language in “prehistoric people”, and on the other hand, he compares the child’s gesturing and prehistoric spoken language. “Thus, we have a double analogy: both – the process of the development of the first language is analogous to the process of language development in children, and – spoken language is analogous to gestural language. This adds the further complication that the analogy is both diachronic and synchronic” (Campbell 2003: 299). This apparent “complication”, however, does not have to worry us that much: when Lucretius speaks of children’s gesturing, he most likely also has in mind the vocal expressions accompanying it, and when he speaks about the language of prehistoric people, he probably is convinced that it consists of gestures as well as of vocal component. The verse quoted earlier – Vocibus et gestu cum balbe significarent – seems to confirm this presupposition.

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Lucretius’s view of language and animal communication as interpreted in Montaigne What follows in Lucretius’s text is an array of comparisons whose shared feature is to deny, at least in the domain of communication, what is nowadays referred to as “anthropological difference”. In animals, we observe the instinct that leads them to “use” their natural abilities even though at an early age they do not yet dispose of the physical means to make this use effective. The human capacity to develop language is accounted for through an analogy to the non-linguistic behaviour of animals. Thus, the bull-calf behaves as if it had horns it does not have yet, the lion cub claws and bites before it has teeth and nails, the little bird tries to fly before its feathers have grown. The animals behave, instinctively, as if they could do what they cannot do yet – in other words, there is a “virtual” prefiguration of a capacity in a living being before it is “actually” present. The little animals, so to speak, surpass themselves: there is a discrepancy between their instinct and their physical capacities. And just like them, a little child tries to communicate even before he or she is able to utter words. Even if this analogy may seem strange, it needs to be remembered that its purpose is to demonstrate only the existence of innate forms of behaviour in human beings and animals (Campbell 2003: 310). It is only a few verses later that the analogy is extended through an explicit parallel between human speech and the sounds emitted by animals.124 This last parallel is interesting for several reasons. The first is historical. These lines of Lucretius’s are later quoted in a sceptical attempt to blur the distinction between animal and human communication (indeed, between man and animal as such), effected by Michel de Montaigne in Apology for Raymond Sebond, published in the second book of his Essays. Moreover, Montaigne’s text mentions both sign language and gestures (as well as the hypothetical case of an isolated child), and it is therefore useful to clarify some of the misunderstandings it has caused. The problem is that it is very difficult to interpret the particular passages treating these phenomena and to assign their proper place in Montaigne’s more general argument. Montaigne’s Apology draws on a large number of ancient sources and the sinuous path by which it proceeds – constantly “switching” between quotations and Montaigne’s own text – is not easy to reconstruct. Moreover, the status of the apologetic genre is itself ambiguous, because his text, claiming to be an apology for the Catalan theologian Raymond Sebond, often proceeds, in fact, independently of Sebond’s arguments and even contradicts them on numerous points. Montaigne’s thesis, nonetheless, consists in equating human and animal communication in 124.  The passage is relatively long; it extends itself over twenty lines (1056–1090) and stresses the ability of animals to produce sounds and make them dependent on their “mood”.



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general. Animals, in fact, are able to communicate even across species125 and even the absence of a voice does not prevent them from doing so, for communication may also take place through movements. And at this point, Montaigne makes an unexpected shift in his text by quoting, all of a sudden, Lucretius’s remark on children and how they make up for their lack of speech with gestures, thus marking a transition from the previously treated realm of animal communication to that of human beings, and not vice versa. And he goes on to say: “Why not? Do not our mutes dispute, argue, and tell stories in the same way by means of signs? I have seen some so supple and so well-versed in this, that in fact they lacked nothing of what was needed to make themselves perfectly understood” (Montaigne 2003: 16). This passage is immediately followed – on the same level of argument – by a string of examples of human non-verbal communication: that of the lovers who express themselves and understand each other through their eyes and by numerous expressive faculties of the human body as such (not only by hands, but also with the head, eyebrows, etc.). So once again, quoted outside of its context and separate from the complex referential framework into which it is set, and separate also from Montaigne’s general sceptical tone and the very intricate way in which the examples he gives both complement and refute each other, it may seem that this passage is dealing with sign language and it may even seem that signing, taken by itself, is “identified as language” (Mirzoeff 1995: 16). But at this point in Montaigne’s essay, it is communication in a very broad sense of the word that is in question. The deaf may well have language, if we decide to read Montaigne in this way; but if this is so, lovers exchanging gazes are also using a language. In other words, an interpretation of Montaigne’s text that centres on this mention of sign language alone will fail to account for the fact that, once again, it is mentioned only as one of many examples of communication, some of whose modalities are quite far from what we would nowadays define as linguistic communication. Moreover, Montaigne’s aim is to use this list of communicative behaviours of all sorts, shared by humans and animals, to naturalize or “animalize” the human language in general (and further on to “deconstruct” the anthropological difference itself). Jonathan Rée, after quoting only this particular sentence on sign language, adds that “according to Montaigne, in fact, the deaf shared this skill [of communicating through signs] with animals” (Rée 1999: 121, 148). But what Montaigne actually says is that the possession of language – or rather communication  – as such (be it spoken or gestural) does not constitute a privilege of man. Spoken or vocal communication is also shared by both animals and humans. If animals happen to have no voice, they use gestures, just as humans do in certain situations or under certain conditions (and this does not mean that they 125.  “The horse recognizes anger in a certain bark of a dog” (Montaigne 2003: 16).

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necessarily have to be deaf). No specific judgement about the language of the deaf is pronounced (and this absence of a judgement or hierarchy of any kind is wholly consistent with Montaigne’s scepticism): nor is it said that it is closer to animal communication than speech, nor that it constitutes a language.126 The language of the deaf, whose units are described as gestures (gestes) in the 1580 edition and signs (signes) in the 1588 edition, is merely one element among others gathered to support Montaigne’s larger sceptical thesis concerning man as such and seeking to prove “that it is not through true discourse, but through a foolish and opinionated pride, that we prefer ourselves to the other animals and cut ourselves off from their condition and their society” (Montaigne 2003: 47).

The problem of human-animal continuity in Lucretius and in discussions today Later on, in the 18th-century discussions of language origins, the previously mentioned Lucretian motive has a double function. On one hand, it is claimed that “language of action” is, in fact, shared by humans and animals.127 On the other hand, in these discussions, language (or at least a certain form of language) needs to be explained as a human faculty. The difference is usually – but not exclusively – treated in the following way (Rousseau, as we shall see, is quite clear on that point): animals do have a certain language of action, but what they do not have is a conventional language. So a certain language-like behaviour may be present in animals, but not as a fully developed communicative faculty, disposing of “the richness of signs” and capable of refining one’s ideas, as we have already seen in Condillac’s analysis of the “bear child”. The whole issue of language as a key factor in the human/animal divide or continuity can be traced back to Antiquity and fol-

126.  For an excellent and erudite analysis of Montaigne’s text, as far as this precise question is concerned, see Demonet (2002: 81–102); on sign language, see p. 89, and especially pp. 94–96, where the author admits difficulties concerning the textual nexus of the animal language, sign language and the quoted lines from Lucretius, as well as “complex and mysterious” way in which gestural and verbal “systems” are connected in Montaigne’s essay. 127.  But it is important to note that the expression itself  – language of action  – may denote very different things from one author to another, and the content of the expression may even vary in one author’s different uses of the term. Renate Fischer is right to remind us that in Condillac’s work, the term langage d’action is linked, on the one hand, to early phylogenetic stages of language development (in the Essay), and, on the other hand, it designates an “artificial” language, just as efficient as a spoken one (in Condillac’s Grammaire, written in 1775). See Fischer (1993: 429–455) and Rosenfeld (2001: 101–102).



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lowed across the centuries – Descartes’ position in particular is rather interesting with regard to sign language128 – up to the 19th-century evolutionist context.129 Apart from this, the debate on whether the continuity thus posited, continuity between human beings and animals, is or is not tenable, continues to be particularly heated even in our day. Is there a continuity or discontinuity between animal communication and human language? In contemporary discussions – philosophical, anthropological, linguistic – of anthropological difference, the issue of language is of particular importance. It is one element in particular in the current debates that has a certain bearing on the question we will be looking into, and it should therefore be mentioned here. Some researchers believe that the necessary – and specifically human – condition of language acquisition resides in the phenomenon of “joint attention”, i.e. in the capacity to construct a “referential triangle”, to share with another person a certain relation to a third object (be it another human being 128.  In the much despised Descartes, language-like behavior is not coextensive with spoken language, as one might expect. For Descartes, the language of the deaf is perhaps more primitive than spoken language and prompted by “very little reason” (Descartes was not the first nor the last to think so), but it definitely is language-like behavior pertaining to human communication and human reason, however limited it may be, which animals do not possess. For Descartes writes: “For it is very noticeable that there are no human beings so unintelligent and stupid, including even mad people, who are incapable of arranging different words and composing from them an utterance by which they make their own thoughts understood; whereas there is no other animal, no matter how perfectly and favorably born it may be, which acts similarly. This does not result from the fact that they lack organs, for one sees that magpies and parrots can utter words as we do, but they still cannot speak as we do, that is, by showing that they think what they say; whereas human beings who are born deaf and dumb, and are thus deprived, as much as or even more than beasts, of the organs that are used by other people to speak, are accustomed to inventing some signs themselves by which they make themselves understood to those who are usually in their company and have the time to learn their language. And this shows not only that beasts have less reason than human beings, but that they have none at all” (Descartes 1999: 41, emphasis added). This is one more reason to be careful about pronouncing any hasty judgments on “Cartesianism”, such as that “linguistics […] is still hampered by an ancient belief, stated by Plato and reaffirmed by René Descartes, that mind and language are unrelated to the lowly material universe […]” (Stokoe 2001: 78). 129.  These considerations, of course, open up a complex historical issue of the position of sign language in the “human vs. animal” debates. This position, as is easy to understand, has always been a very ambiguous one – does sign language fall on the side of communicative behavior shared to some degree by humans and animals, or does it already pertain exclusively to the sphere of the human? Both positions have been defended and supported by contradictory arguments. For an interesting overview of the debate on sign language in the context of 19thcentury evolutionism (but the question itself can be traced much farther in history), see Esmail (2013: 102–132). The work of E. Tylor, which played an important role in this debate, will be briefly commented upon later in this chapter.

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or an inanimate thing). In the development of a human being, the capacity of joint attention appears somewhere between the ninth and twelfth months of age. At that time, a child becomes capable of perceiving another human being as an “intentional agent”,130 a centre of intentions and mental states that are at the same time independent of and analogous to those of that child him/herself. One of the most readily observable symptoms of joint attention is a “triadic declarative gesture” (Tomasello 1999: 87–89): when pointing at an object, a child is capable of verifying that another person present is looking at the same thing as they are and shares the attention devoted to that thing.131 Michael Tomasello, who has developed a “usage-based theory of language acquisition” stemming precisely from this set of observations, argues that it is this pre-lingual basis (joint attention involves a new set of various cognitive competences and communicative behaviours, such as gaze following, social referencing or imitative learning) that constitutes a “common intersubjective ground for communication” (Tomasello 2003: 41). Language, then, emerges from this basis through a gradual process of grammaticalization. What is more, joint attention provides, according to Tomasello, a plausible explanatory model for not only the ontogenetic but also the phylogenetic aspect of the emergence of language. Tomasello presents this hypothesis in modern terms: “When Homo sapiens began to understand that other people have intentional and mental states, they naturally wanted to manipulate these states for various cooperative and competitive purposes. This engendered the creation of symbolic conventions […]” (Tomasello 2003: 291). In his account of language genesis, Lucretius actually does mention an interactive behaviour of this sort132 just before the passage we have been commenting on. In the passage itself, nonetheless, intersubjectivity does not seem to play any role and the speaker (the child) develops language on the basis of his/her individual instincts alone. 130.  “Intentional agents are animate beings who have goals and who make active choices about behavioral means for attaining those goals, including active choices about what to pay attention to in pursuing those goals” (Tomasello 1999: 68). 131.  In this respect, the importance of indicative gesture had already been underlined by Tran Duc Thao who sees it as an “original form of consciousness”. A more particular, and more fundamental, form of indicative gesture is what Thao calls “the circular arc form”, which is common in children and which represents a wholly “incarnated” form of the joint attention mechanism: “The child who shows his mother a jar of jam can either point his index finger directly at the object, or he can make a circular movement, the hand being raised first towards the mother and then towards the object” (Tran Duc Thao 1984: 5). 132.  “Then neighbors who wanted neither to harm each other / Nor to be harmed, began to join in friendship / Setting aside as special the women and children, / Signaling with their hands and stammering speech / That the weak must be pitied, as was just” (Lucretius 1995: V, 1016–1020; 187).



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So unlike Lucretius, Tomasello believes that the phenomenon of joint attention is precisely what enables the development of speech as a specifically human faculty. Joint attention is unique to human beings and communication based on reading of the other person’s communicative intentions is qualified as “uniquely human” (Tomasello 2003: 314). It is not that animals – like apes – do not gesture. They certainly do. But Tomasello argues that, despite the fact that the apes may use gestures to direct another ape’s attention to an object (and that they operate on what he calls “split-level intentionality”), it remains that they use gestures essentially to request or demand action, and that their communication remains “individualistic” – they do not engage in truly cooperative activities.133 So the old Lucretian argument opens the door to further questioning, which is of more than merely historical interest.134

Lucretius and the nomothetic theory of language origin Let us now turn to Lucretius’s final argument. In order to understand what exactly Lucretius is saying in the final lines of the excerpt quoted above, it is necessary to begin with a very brief digression. These lines of Lucretius’s represent, in fact, an explicit and ironic attack on the theory of language origin, as it had been presented by Plato in the Cratylus, the first systematic treatise on language in European philosophy. We do not need to enter into the details of Plato’s argument: Cratylus, as is well known, is a dialogue on the nature of language, or on the nature of names, to be more precise. For our purposes, suffice it to say that the dialogue consists in contrasting two fundamental views: Cratylus, one of the speakers, believes that each thing has a natural name (and what’s more, only one natural name) on its own, while his opponent Hermogenes holds an apparently more “modern” point of view and is convinced that all names are arbitrary and based on pure convention. It is, however, important to note that one of the fundamental ideas in the dialogue is the statement that names are invented: naming is considered to be a 133.  What we are drawing on here is a summary of Tomasello’s position, as presented in the last one of his lectures delivered in 2006 and published under the title Origins of Human Communication (Tomasello 2008: 319–345). 134.  A very interesting philosophical interpretation of joint attention has been proposed by É. Bimbenet. Bimbenet tries to interpret Tomasello’s findings through Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, putting stress on “perspective multiplicity” which characterizes – in Merleau-Ponty’s view – our bodily being in the world and is opened up precisely by the phenomenon of joint attention. Symptomatically, indicative gesture is therefore interpreted as “an anticipation of language directly in the body” (Bimbenet 2011: 378).

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special skill (tekhne) with its own instruments – names. In order to do the job of naming properly, the names must have been crafted by someone whom Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue, designates as nomothetes – the inventor of names, the expert who creates proper names, or, as Plato himself calls him, “the kind of craftsman most rarely found among human beings” (Plato 1997: 389a). By inventing names, what the nomothetes performs is an abrupt act of passing (or rather jumping) from a non-linguistic, asymbolic universe into one with a ready-made set of names and meaning. And not only does the nomothetes invent names: he also teaches the others how to use them so that language may become a universal tool for transmitting information. De rerum natura, to the contrary, proposed a theory of language origins in which language is not seen as a product of conscious and deliberate invention of any kind, but as the natural outcome of human development. Lucretius’s attack on the nomothetic theory of language consists essentially in highlighting the paradoxes such a theory gives rise to. All of these paradoxes will be revived in the 18th century and both Condillac and Rousseau will deal with them and try to overcome them in one way or another. Lucretius’s view of the nomothetic theory is very ironic: this theory is straight away presented as “stupid”. It is stupid because it is impossible. To suppose that there must have been someone135 who somehow knew language and taught it to others means to suppose – inexplicably – that this someone had a fully developed capacity that the others lacked. This capacity would make a huge difference indeed: it would amount to inventing names and pronouncing them correctly  – how come one person could do this and the others could not? And where could this very idea of inventing language have possibly come from? Are we supposed to believe that one day it simply dawned on someone to invent and use language, while even the idea of language itself was not known to anyone? Unlikely. Furthermore, the nomothetic theory involves also teaching this invention to others. This is even more inconceivable. It would mean that this someone must have transmitted his skill to others and made them see all the advantages it entails. And it is here that Lucretius’s most important argument comes out: it consists in showing that such a conception of language origin implies a vicious circle. It is impossible not only because of the purely practical difficulties involved  – there would have been a great number of pupils to teach, not to mention the problem of simply bringing together enough of them without language (Campbell 2003: 308); it is impossible per se. The one who spoke would have had to teach the others by no other means than through language itself, yet language was precisely what they did not have. So even if he did speak to them about language, they would not have 135.  Campbell justly remarks that Lucretius’s critique is particularly pertinent in the case of human, rather than divine nomothetes (Campbell 2003: 306).



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understood. The very capacity to understand what language is about is linked to prior knowledge of that language itself. To explain the invention to others would require that the others are familiar with the invention. The argument touches on the question of metalanguage: there is no other way of explaining how language works than by language itself, and this explanation must be understood by others, that is, it presupposes the possession of the language that is to be explained. And between the nomothetes and his pupils, there is no common ground for teaching them how to communicate in language, because this very ground is always already linguistic. The teaching itself presupposes, as its medium, that which is to be taught. That Lucretius compares this failure of the nomothetes’s hypothetical educational attempts with vain attempts to teach the deaf (lines 1049–1052) to speak is perhaps purely incidental. It is probably used only as a metaphor for someone not willing to learn something he or she cannot perceive or something which does not make any sense, as is precisely the case of the nomothetes’s pupils.136 However, this comparison is perfectly valid even if it is taken literally. Perhaps unwittingly, it captures the key difficulty oral deaf education has always been grappling with, a difficulty that has remained essentially the same across centuries. How to teach a language to those having no sensory access to it? And how to teach them without an intermediary metalanguage – i.e. how to teach them to speak using the very spoken language they are supposed to be learning? The whole history of oralism – up to the modern method of mainstreaming deaf children in hearing classes – is one extensive comment on these ancient lines of Lucretius.

The 18th century: Rousseau and Condillac For the 18th-century language origins discussions, the Lucretian paradox is an important starting point. The paradox is that of means and end. How could a convention be established without the use of communicative means, for the functioning of which this same convention is presupposed? Or, as Frain du Tremblay put it in his Treatise on Languages (1703): “Speech is the means by which men agree on everything; thus they would not be able to agree on speech itself without speech. If it would be impossible to make glasses without seeing, it would likewise be impossible to make a language without speaking” (cit. in Thomas 1995: 40; for a comment on this paradox, see also Virole 2006: 22–23). 136.  In the commentary accompanying the Latin original we are using, this line is simply qualified as a “proverbial for an impossibility. The men are ‘deaf ’ because, not understanding the new language, they wouldn’t listen to it” (Lucretius 1970: 733, n. 1052). But it is clear that in deaf studies, this line did not escape notice (see Virole 1990: 14).

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The possible answer is already indicated by Lucretius: it consists, on the one hand, in drawing an analogy between phylogenesis and ontogenesis, and, on the other hand, in paralleling – or perhaps rather mixing – gesture with speech. “Language of gestures” or “language of action”: these are the terms meant to overcome that paradox. Why? Why have recourse to gesture in order to explain the gradual genesis of language, the emergence of meaning and convention from where there was none? The reason is that gesture is naturally expressive. There are gestures – emblems or “quotable gestures” (Kendon 2004: 335–344) – which do depend on conventions, but there is also a gestural expressivity that seems to be natural and that has certain traits in common with the meaning conveyed by language. Modern literature on the subject – for the gestural origin of language is an intensely debated topic – gives us some interesting examples. Let us take one, borrowed from the “forefather” of sign language linguistics himself, William Stokoe. In his defence of sign language and gestural expression, not unlike that of Desloges, Stokoe says that the greatest mistake of those looking for the origin of language – and this criticism is certainly not aimed at “ancient philosophers”, whom Stokoe held in great esteem137 – is to look for an abstract moment when the first word was magically uttered. Such an attempt to locate the origins of language is completely wrong from the very start. It explains, still rather poorly, the semantics of speech or, to be precise, of individual words. It does not account for the origin of language in so far as it leaves aside how the words are connected: syntax, to put it in one word. The “first word” may be based on an imitation of natural sounds or it may be uttered by accident, but such a theory does not give us any clue as to why the words should become connected according to some grammatical rules. Gesture, on the other hand, does give us such a clue, simply because it builds on certain, say, “quasi-linguistic” properties encoded directly in our corporeal existence. Stokoe and his colleagues ask us to participate in a simple demonstration: “If you will, swing your right hand across in front of your body and catch with it the upraised forefinger of your left hand (reverse these directions if you are left-handed)” (Armstrong, Stokoe, Wilcox 1995: 179). A seed of syntax is there, in this elementary action: an agent (right hand), verb (motion of the hand), and object (the finger of the left hand). Thus, the gesture is capable of accounting for the genesis of syntax, it “embodies” the syntax instead of encoding it in an arbitrary string of sounds. Much of this natural 137.  “Ancient philosophers found it self-evident that humans communicated with gestures before they used speech. Once speech became a synonym for language, however, any such search became unthinkable” (Stokoe 2001: 179). Stokoe does not mention, however, that for these ancient philosophers, the early forms of communication are not limited to gestures alone – they consisted in combining the gestural and vocal expression.



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(again!) way of conveying information is, according to Stokoe, present in sign language, which is “more natural than spoken languages because a visible sign often carries a visual clue to what is signifies” (Stokoe 2001: 177). We will see that Stokoe is indeed much indebted to 18th-century thinkers, even in terms of a certain rural charm implied in these references to nature and in terms of the claimed innocence of signs as opposed to speech.138 Even the very idea of gesture – rather than voice – being capable of expressing grammatical relations is not new: A. Bébian came up with something very similar many years before.139 This presupposition, premised on a sort of language-like and universally understandable character of gesture, without gesture being conventional language, is fundamental both for Condillac and Rousseau. Much has already been written on the matter.140 Therefore, what follows is a close reading of specific passages in Rousseau and Condillac with regard to more particular topics.

Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge The first important text is one we have already encountered: the beginning of the second part of Condillac’s Essay on The Origin of Human Knowledge. While the first part was concerned with a “synchronic” description of the human mind and its faculties, as well as with the way ideas relate to signs and are, in their turn, elicited by them, the second part concentrates on “the origin and progress of language”. The origin of language is presented  – as it will be innumerable times after Condillac – in a form of a hypothesis whose purpose, as is clear enough from its very character, is precisely that of solving the “nomothetic” aporia. The section is opened with a “preamble” of a somewhat theatrical character, not unlike the setting of a stage on which the action of a play is to take place. Condillac situates the origin of language to an unspecified historical period. The only reference is biblical, but it is presented precisely with the intention of avoiding the recourse to any kind of “Adamic” scenario of language origins. According to Condillac, Adam and Eve are not really the most appropriate characters 138.  The word “innocence” is not there but it is certainly not wrong to read it between the lines. 139.  “So, most often, the voice was a mere auxiliary in the original primitive language […]. The gesture can, without any auxiliary, express both ideas and the relations between ideas; without a prior convention, the voice can provide only a few signs for expressing thought. The gesture takes from the external shape, from the typical way of being, features belonging to the very essence of things” (Bébian 2006: 155). See, later in this study, the section on Bébian for a more detailed commentary. 140.  Stam (1976) is a useful introduction to the problem.

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to refer to as far as the origin of language is concerned, because “as they came from the hands of God, they were able, by special assistance, to reflect and communicate their thoughts to each other” (Condillac 2001: 113). This statement is an implicit refusal of the nomothetic hypothesis; what is needed is an explanation of how language might have come to exist without “special assistance” of any kind. Condillac’s starting point is condensed into a simple statement: “But I am assuming that two children, one of either sex, sometime after the deluge, had gotten lost in the desert before they would have known the use of any sign. […] The question is how this budding nation made a language for itself ” (Condillac 2001: 113). The staging is ingenious in itself. First of all, there are two individuals; this elementary form of intersubjectivity is a necessary condition of any possible development of communication, and we already know that this is what makes the Essay different from Condillac’s Treatise, where the experimental “material” is reduced to one individual only and, quite consequently, the question of the origin of language is not treated. Second, the individuals are of different sex, thus raising the possibility of procreation and of transmitting the “invention” of language to their offspring (who are, as we shall see, to play a particularly important role in the development of linguistic communication). Indeed, the couple is already called a “budding nation” (Condillac 2001: 113). What happens is the following. While the children lived apart, their minds closely resembled those of wild children. There was no lasting impression made upon the mind by any object they encountered, there was very limited exercise of the imagination, their perception was unsupported by reflection. A tree “loaded with fruit” that served to satisfy their needs vanished from their minds shortly after the need had been satisfied. We have already seen that the child of Lithuania and the deaf youth from Chartres did not act differently. The situation changed when the two children were together. The paragraph where Condillac describes the nature of their communication must be quoted extensively: When they lived together they had occasion for greater exercise of these first operations, because their mutual discourse made them connect the cries of each passion to the perceptions of which they were the natural signs. They usually accompanied the cries with some movement, gesture, or action that made the expression more striking. For example, he who suffered by not having an object his needs demanded would not merely cry out; he made as if an effort to obtain it, moved his head, his arms, and all parts of his body. Moved by this display, the other fixed the eyes on the same object, and feeling his soul suffused with sentiments he was not yet able to account for to himself, he suffered by seeing the other suffer so miserably. (Condillac 2001: 114)



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There are several motifs intertwined in this dense paragraph which need to be disentangled. The basic impulse for the communicative efforts is need (a presupposition which received some criticism from Rousseau and which was used, in somewhat exaggerated version, by Itard as a basic premise in the education of Victor). But Condillac says much more. According to him, language is also the result of a very particular mental mechanism. For however speculative Condillac’s theory might be, these lines are, in fact, an extremely accurate description of nothing less than joint attention. The origin of language is clearly linked to a shared attentional frame and to a referential triangle: there are two subjects, an object they both perceive, and a conception of the other as an intentional agent.141 When Condillac is praised in the modern literature on the subject, it is usually because of the “language of action” or “self-explanatory signs”, gesture and cry combined, which is expressive without being conventional.142 But it should also be stressed that the way Condillac determines the circumstances of this proto-linguistic production is just as fascinating, the more so in that this behaviour is guided “by instinct alone”, and not by reflection, which has yet to develop (Condillac 2001: 115). In other words, Condillac is in perfect agreement with Tomasello – or the other way round, depending on our preferences – whose phylogenetic theory of language origin is based on the presupposition that joint attention is elicited by collaborative activities (Tomasello 2008). It is on this basis that the “conventionalization” of language took place. Certain ideas were connected to certain natural signs at first, but later on, as the operation of the mind developed, the signs were “improved” and acquired an increasingly arbitrary character. But it was not a smooth process: “Still, the first progress of this language was very slow. The organ of speech was so inflexible that it could articulate only very simple sounds with any ease” (Condillac 2001: 116). And it is here that Condillac comes up with a second ingenious idea, the idea that Benoît Virole called the “inversion of generational transmission” (Virole 1990: 15). It is the children who hasten the development of language and who become, so to speak, the teachers of their parents:

141.  “[…] the other fixed the eyes on the same object, and […] he suffered by seeing the other suffer so miserably”. 142.  Condillac’s theory, according to one of those tributes, “is of interest because it raises the issue of semantic transparency, and the possibility that human language did not always have the level of structure that is arbitrary with respect to meaning” (Morford, Singleton, GoldinMeadow 1995: 314).

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This couple had a child who, when pressed by the needs he could make known only with difficulty, agitated all parts of the body. His very flexible tongue bent itself in some extraordinary manner and pronounced an entirely new word. The need still persisting again caused the same effects; the child moved the tongue as before and once more articulated the same sound. Full of surprise and having at last figured out what the child wanted, the parents gave it to him while at the same time trying to repeat the same word. The trouble they had pronouncing it showed that they would not by themselves have been able to invent it.  (Condillac 2001: 116)

True, Condillac adds that “by that sort of procedure, the new language was not much improved”, and connects this inversion with spoken words or “sounds” rather than gestures, but it does not really matter. What matters is that Condillac offers a very interesting solution to the problem he is confronting in this part of the Essay: how could language come into existence if there was no language beforehand? The idea he presents is that it is, in fact, children who become the “inventors” of language and who lead their own parents in the language development: in other words, the children invented, by themselves, what their parents were not capable of inventing. This might appear surprising at first, but only to the extent that our common idea of language acquisition is one corresponding to the way most of us have learned language: we are born into a linguistically rich environment, our parents are in possession of a fully developed language system, they transmit this knowledge to us and after having gone through certain specific stages of acquiring language, we end up knowing more or less what they do. But there are situations in which language learning does not take place in this way, situations in which the child does not have an adequate language model at his or her disposal. And Condillac, of course, describes precisely this situation: the situation of inventing the language, not that of a child being born into an already existent language system. The parents did invent some signs, but the linguistic input they can provide for the child is far from satisfactory. In this respect, Condillac’s speculation about children doing better than their parents, as far as the language development is concerned, receives some confirmation in recent literature that provides us with several examples of this unusual way of acquiring language. It might be useful to jump to the present (just as we did in the chapter on Diderot) and to mention some of them. The linguist Derek Bickerton has noted the role that the children of pidgin speakers play in the process of creolization. Indeed, he holds that creolization as such  – i.e. the transformation of a pidgin language into a native language  – is accomplished by children. In a sense, these children find themselves in a similar situation as Condillac’s imaginary child (despite, of course, the fact that the adults for the child are fully



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evolved languaging creatures).143 The point is not, of course, that they – as Condillac would have it – “pronounce an entirely new word”, but that they, as Bickerton puts it, inexplicably “produce a rule for which they have no evidence” (Bickerton 1981: 6). They create new syntactic rules where there had not been any – in other words, they challenge the “conventional wisdom” that children learn language by simply absorbing and processing the adequate language they receive from their more competent language models. Jenny Singleton and Elissa Newport described a similar process in their case study of seven year-old “Simon” (Singleton, Newport 2004: 370–407; see also Newport 1999: 161–178; Goldin-Meadow, Mylander 1994: 165–177). Simon’s deaf parents were both late learners of American sign language, which they never acquired to such a level as to create consistent and regular patterns and to provide adequate language models for their child. From the parents’ “probabilistic patterns”, involving “multiple forms competing somewhat unpredictably to represent the same meaning” (Singleton, Newport 2004: 403),144 Simon was able to create a system of rules his parents were not capable of creating: he learned whatever was regular in his parents’ language and increased this regularity to achieve a systematic grammar that his parents did not have. And probably the best-known example of such an inversion of language acquisition is the already legendary case of the emergence of Nicaraguan sign language. In the early eighties, the first school for the deaf was opened in Nicaragua, bringing together various home-signers from all over the country. The creole which developed from the original pidgin, that itself had formed out of the various idiosyncratic home-signing systems of the previously isolated deaf individuals, is now a full-fledged sign language, possessing all the properties of standard sign languages – and not surprisingly, it was the younger cohort of signers, the newcomers to the school, under the age of 10, who did the job of “abrupt creolization” and acquired a considerably higher degree of fluency in signing than the older students

143.  Bickerton writes that the position of these children “differs crucially from the position of children in more normal communities. The latter have a ready-made, custom-validated, referentially adequate language to learn, and mothers, elder siblings, etc., ready to help them learn it. The former have, instead, something which may be adequate for emergency use, but which is quite unfit to serve as anyone’s primary tongue; which, by reason of its variability, does not present even the little it offers in a form that would permit anyone to learn it; and which the parent, with the best will in the world, cannot teach, since that parent knows no more of the language than the child (and will pretty soon know less)” (Bickerton 1981: 5; see also Bickerton 1999: 49–74). 144.  The authors emphasize that such a probabilistic pattern is not known to exist in any natural language.

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(Kegl, Senghas, Coppola 1999: 179–237; Senghas, Coppola 2001: 323–328; see also Polich 2005 for detailed account of historical circumstances).145 So Condillac’s speculative model of language creation is, obviously, much more than a historical or philosophical curiosity. It underscores several features of the invention and development of language that are far from being a pure fantasy. First of all, language creation is an act that consists in bridging a mode of expression that undoubtedly has some proto-linguistic features, but cannot be described as conventional, and a linguistic system in the ordinary sense of the word. This primary expression is symptomatically a vocal-gestural complex of some sort. Second, this process is very lucidly described as being conditioned by something which very closely resembles shared attention. And third, this development does not occur as the transmission of an adequate language from parents to children – without the child’s input, no genesis of language would have taken place. If we decide to take Condillac seriously, some doubts do emerge. It is a very fascinating account of the origin of language… but there is still something highly improbable about it. An image of real individuals of some sort (two parents and one child) hovers on the horizon, instead of that of human species as such acquiring and developing what would eventually become a language. That’s why the real-life analogies just stated look so impressive: they involve individuals already possessing the capacity to learn language, individuals who, in spite of not having adequate language models, already have their phylogenetic heritage to build upon (this is one of the reasons why it is highly problematic to consider the development of creoles and sign languages as models for how language as such came into existence). But how did this heritage itself develop? Is the birth of a new language (a creole, for example) analogous to the birth of language as such? Briefly, in Condillac’s account, all seems to work a little too smoothly, as the labour of a few generations, a result of a few trials and errors, guided by a language instinct that, nonetheless, is precisely what needs to be explained. It is certain that Condillac, who speaks of the “very slow” progress of the first language, did not mean it to be read that way, but the image he paints is perhaps simply too plastic and automatically suggests such a reading. The first one to raise this kind of objection was Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality.

145.  In her study, however, Polich calls into question the idea of “abrupt creolization”: she shows that the processes behind the emergence of the Nicaraguan sign language were much more complex and took place over a long period of time.



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Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality In Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau’s treatment of the question of the origins of language revolves, again, around the puzzle that was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. He admits his indebtedness to Condillac’s Essay, but remarks that Condillac “assumes what I call into question, namely, some sort of society already established among the inventors of language” (Rousseau 1984: 92). This objection, it seems, is and is not valid at the same time. It is not valid if we read Condillac’s text as a description of an ideal case of language development, setting two individuals in laboratory conditions of some kind. In this sense, Condillac’s account is a theoretical presupposition, and as for the “society already established”, it is a great question whether this is of any great concern to him. On the other hand, it is valid because Condillac describes the origin of language precisely in the form of a “philosophical fable”, exempt from all historical circumstances and leaving some very important questions aside. How does it happen that individuals  – a large number of them – do actually get together and begin to cooperate? “How language could have become necessary, for since men had no communication with each other nor any need for it, one cannot conceive the necessity of language or its possibility, were it not indispensable” (Rousseau 1984: 92)? So Condillac’s account is remarkably modern and supported by a considerable body of evidence, if it is considered as a hypothetical description of how isolated individuals start to communicate when they are brought together by external (social) causes, such as the creation of a new school for the deaf, or when they communicate in an already established collective unit, such as family, but the problem remains a real one if it is supposed to explain how language as such came into existence in the distant past.146 There was simply nothing to bring these people together. It may have happened that Condillac’s children had met here and there and established some kind of convention to communicate their needs, but that does not explain the genesis of true language, shared by many individuals. Rousseau does not presuppose any collective body (family included) prior to the emergence of language. Such a collective body must have been gathered together precisely on the basis of communication of some sort, and therefore communication could not have developed within it but must have preceded it – brief, we are back in Lucretius’s aporia. To suppose that early communication started to “happen”, for example, within a set of family relations means to “explain the state of nature with ideas derived from civil society” (Rousseau 1984: 92). Furthermore, the 146.  This tension has been noted in secondary literature. R. H. Robins justly remarks that “Condillac treats the origin of language in the historical perspective and as a model of its development at the same time” (Robins 1983: 97).

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nomadic life people used to lead must have hindered these collective bodies from coming together and forming a larger whole, which means that languages must have been highly individualized – a sort of ancient vocal equivalent for home-sign. Before being a set of conventional signifiers and signifieds, language was a creation of individual “significators”.147 But this is where the problems emerge. Rousseau says, implicitly quoting Condillac: Notice again that it is the child who has all his needs to express, and hence has more things to say to his mother than she has to say to him; from which it follows that the child must have to take the greatest part in inventing language, and the language he uses must be for the most part his own production  – all of which multiplies languages by as many times as there are individuals to speak them. This is further compounded by a wandering, vagabond life which would leave no time for any language to acquire stability: for to say that the mother teaches the child the words he must use to express his desire for this or that object is to explain well enough the teaching languages already formed, but it does not explain how languages are formed in the first place. (Rousseau 1984: 92–93)

Trying to answer those objections, one is at risk of becoming trapped in various vicious circles. And when we displace Rousseau’s questioning a little bit, we discover that it is not at all irrelevant. The first idea would be to answer simply that this is only a problem of time: a new linguistic system develops very quickly, especially – as Rousseau has well seen – when children are present, so whenever it happened that some families did (re)‍unite (by chance or for any other reason), the idiosyncratic systems of communication simply merged to create a new, larger one, until different languages came into existence. But then, of course, one might counter that such a hypothesis presupposes the communicative ability and cognitive equipment that man possesses precisely because he is a speaking being, which he was not, or at least not fully, at that time. How does a “language instinct” develop without a prior existence of language? All of the cases of non-standard language acquisition mentioned in connection to Condillac were special cases, astounding ones, no doubt about that, but embedded in a world where people have been speaking for millennia. But what is at stake here is the development of the human language faculty as such (this is one of the dangers of drawing an analogy between ontogenesis and phylogenesis – the two are not exactly equivalent).148Despite not 147.  This very appropriate term was coined by Jean Starobinski: “Linguistics speaks of the signifier and the signified but lacks a term for what I shall call the significator, the person who creates meaning – the dominant element in primitive language” (Starobinski 1988: 312). 148.  Derek Bickerton hints at this difficulty in his criticism addressed to Chomsky and what he calls Chomsky’s “idealization of instantaneity” which, according to Bickerton, is perhaps legitimate in the case of ontogenesis, but certainly not phylogenesis: “In a child’s acquisition,



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having concrete language models, the fascinating children like Simon or deaf Nicaraguan kids are born as members of a speaking species, they have an incredible capacity for learning language, they use it whenever they are allowed to and they even use it in an innovative way, creating a system where there was none or only a very impoverished one. But the question here is how did that speaking species as such come into existence. In a sense, this is what Rousseau asks  – and it is not a naive question. Not having any plausible answer at hand, Rousseau simply presupposes this difficulty was overcome. Let us suppose that somehow, man becomes a being capable of inventing language and that all material conditions are fulfilled. What we encounter then is another aporia: after that of language and society, it is that of language, thought and abstraction. Here we meet a fresh difficulty, even worse than the previous one, for if men needed speech in order to think, they needed still more to know how to think in order to discover the art of speech. And even if we could understand how the sounds of the voice came to be taken as the conventional interpreters of our ideas, it would still remain to be explained who could have been the conventional interpreters of this convention for ideas that have no perceptible object and could not therefore be indicated either by gesture or by the voice. (Rousseau 1984: 93)

It is hard not to despair at reading those sentences of Rousseau’s. At every step, he adds another difficulty, another negation, making the passage from a nonlinguistic state to a fully developed language completely inconceivable.149 Men could not have felt any social need for speech in the first place; even if they did, they could not have invented language; and even if they did, they could not have made it express abstract ideas. On second thought, what Rousseau is describing is not exactly the genesis of language. What he does is “cut up” the whole process and superpose structural predicaments (language and society, language and thought, the faculty of language is already there, has been there for tens of thousands of years, waiting for kids to rediscover it, or perhaps merely to switch it on. In the species’ acquisition, there was a time when there was no faculty at all, zero, zilch, a time when that faculty had to be built from the ground up” (Bickerton 2009: 186). 149.  Jean Starobinski is convinced that Rousseau knows very well what he is doing and that the accumulation of paradoxes is deliberate. It is a strategic move, showing how difficult and painful it must have been to pass from the “silent stage” to the universe of signification: “By listing innumerable impediments to the invention of language, he forces us to see that an immensely long period must have intervened between the age of primitive man and the first use of language” (Starobinski 1988: 307). According to Starobinski, there is an implicit polemic against Condillac who “compresses linguistic history into a few generations”: “Rousseau is original in part for introducing a number of embarrassing contradictions where Condillac sees only gentle transitions” (Starobinski 1988: 308–309).

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language and abstraction), showing that it is practically impossible to pass from one level to another. But because somehow – even though “we can hardly formulate any defensible hypothesis about the birth of this art of communicating our thoughts and establishing intercourse between minds” (Rousseau 1984: 93) – the process did happen, we are obliged to formulate some hypotheses as to what might possibly have taken place. “The most universal and energetic language” that man must have used is the one that comes naturally – and Rousseau obviously has recourse to ontogenesis, as we shall see when we compare his argument to certain passages in Émile, which we will do shortly  – the one that the child uses in order to express needs: “the cry of nature” (Rousseau 1984: 93). Crying is prompted by instinct, there is no convention needed to account for it, and it is undoubtedly expressive. The first step is established in order to explain how language came into existence. The only problem is, Rousseau believes, that it is not exactly the most effective means of everyday communication: it conveys strong emotions, but not subtle ideas. To explain the emergence of language as such, Rousseau’s way of stating the problem makes it clear that he does not pretend to offer the solution of the difficulty highlighted earlier: When the thoughts of men began to extend and to multiply, and more intimate communication was established among them, they looked for a greater number of signs and a more extensive language. They multiplied the inflections of the voice, and combined them with gestures, which are by nature more expressive, and which depend less for their meaning on any prior agreement.  (Rousseau 1984: 94)

We have not managed to escape the vicious circle. We do not know how or why the extension and multiplication of ideas came about. Indeed, it seems that it came somehow “before” language, as a condition of its own development. And we should also notice that for Rousseau, gestures came even later, as a way of doubling in a supplementary way the expressivity of the voice, and that they did not arise simultaneously with the primordial cry. Each of the two components of the gesture-language complex was intended to indicate objects perceived by one specific sense: gestures were used to indicate visible things, while onomatopoeic sounds pertained to the realm of audible ones. Voice ultimately prevailed as a vehicle of thought for several reasons: gesturing, according to Rousseau, was effective only when it came to things that were immediately present (Rousseau, therefore, did not consider any possibility of establishing a “gestural” convention, at least in this particular text) and could not be used to communicate in darkness or through the obstacles that make visual contact impossible. Furthermore, the use of voice may account for the growing



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need for abstraction, as it bears – or may bear – less resemblance to what it signifies. Rousseau’s argument is not entirely solid. First, it excludes the possibility of conventional gestures (and no “scientific” knowledge of sign language is needed to posit it), and second, it does not explain the transition from the original, “imitative sounds” to conventional ones. If gestures were not able to surpass their “concrete” stage, why should the voice? There is, it appears, a certain phonocentrism in Rousseau’s second Discourse. On the other hand, Rousseau is well aware of another difficulty, doubling those he had already mentioned: the replacement of gestures by voice must have happened by “common consent”, and it is not really clear how such consent could have been made by people “whose crude organs had not yet been exercised” (Rousseau 1984: 94). The ensuing passage is a curious one. It describes the first vocal language as being at the same time too general and too concrete. It is not a paradox. The generality Rousseau speaks about concerns the immanent structure of language: parts of speech were not distinguished, one word stood for a whole proposition and even when grammatical categories did become more subtle, they were still incomparable to sophisticated structures of languages as we know them now. So when Rousseau says that “the first words men used had a much wider signification in their minds than do words employed in languages already formed” (Rousseau 1984: 94), what he has in mind is a lack of inner differentiation. The concreteness, on the other hand, concerns the relations of the words to their denotata; Borges could undoubtedly make a good short story based on such a situation. Rousseau believes that this first language was “nominalistic”, so to speak, to such an extent that this eventually prevented its effective use. At first, each single object received a particular name; at a certain point, it must have become simply impossible to retain all of the names, and generic categories must have been invented on the basis of the empirical observation of certain common features shared by different individuals. Whether such a language, too general and too concrete at the same time, is conceivable or not is a different story. What’s important is that these two seemingly contradictory qualities converge to designate one fundamental characteristic of the first language: the lack of abstraction. For it is clear that generality, here, is not synonymous with abstraction in the sense of abstract ideas; it is even opposite of it. Rousseau goes on to multiply the difficulties – it is especially the creation of general, “purely intellectual” ideas that gives many reasons for worry.150 After 150.  This is the feature of language which distinguished man from animals, as Rousseau clearly states: “What is more, general ideas can only be introduced into the mind with the assistance of words; and the understanding can grasp them only by means of propositions. This is one of the reasons why animals cannot formulate such ideas and can never acquire that capacity for

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having pondered these seemingly unsolvable issues, he returns to the initial question and concludes in a resigned tone, with an implicit hint at the possibility of divine intervention: I shall stop with these first steps […] for myself, alarmed as I am at the increasing difficulties, and convinced of the almost demonstrable impossibility that languages could have been created and established by purely human means, I leave to anyone who will undertake it, the discussion of the following difficult problem: which was the more necessary, a society already established for the invention of language, or language already invented for the establishment of society?  (Rousseau 1984: 96–97)

Rousseau later earned considerable criticism for having left things at this paradox. It is not without interest that these critical remarks have often appeared in texts dealing directly with sign language. Roch-Ambroise Auguste Bébian refutes Rousseau’s paradox in Essay on the Deaf, evoking, as an intermediary stage between natural expression and convention, the language of natural signs, that is, “a language which has preceded any other language in the early stages of society, just as it precedes any other language in the early age of man. It is a language of an infant who does not yet babble, […] a language of a traveller in a land whose language he does not know […]” (Bébian 1817: 97–98; see also p. 80 for critical remarks on Rousseau).151 Another, similar reproach came from Marie Joseph de Gérando, the author of On Education of Deaf-Mutes. Rousseau’s hesitation and final recourse to a divine instance is not at all necessary. Because none of us can possibly remember our “first instruction”, which required, when we were babies, the same kind of mental operations as those leading to the institution of language in the irrevocable past, there is yet no reason to despair and to declare the problem insolvable. All we have to do is watch little children (which Rousseau later did, as we shall see) and/or deaf-mutes: Rousseau’s reasoning […] is utterly destroyed by the phenomenon represented by congenital deaf-mutes (les sourds-muets de naissance). The deaf-mutes, when brought together, establish a language of signs, which, despite of being based on analogy, is a true conventional language and which, further elaborated with self-improvement that depends on them. When a monkey passes without hesitation from one nut to another, do you think he has a general idea of the type of fruit it is, or that he compares the two particular nuts with their archetype? Assuredly not; the sight of one of the nuts recalls to his memory the sensation he received from the other, and his eyes, modified in a certain manner, signal to his sense of taste the modification it is about to receive” (Rousseau 1984: 95). 151.  These passages are not included in the English translation of Bébian’s Essay, published as a part of the anthology edited by Harlan Lane (Lane 2006). I quote them from the original 1817 French edition. The translation is my own.

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time and reflexion – in the way it could be brought to perfection in a nation of deaf-mutes – would be susceptible to acquire all the richness of our languages. Rousseau’s reasoning is equally refuted by the experience of all children which are initiated in the use of our artificial languages. For these languages being arbitrary and conventional, it is necessary for conventions to be established between a child and those who surround him, not in order to create those languages, but in order to endow them with their value […].  (de Gérando 1827: 18; my own translation)152

The fact that both Bébian and de Gérando felt a need to return, in their treatises on deafness, to this particular argument of Rousseau’s shows, again, the close ties between the 18th-century debates on language origins and those concerning deaf education and the nature of signing. Among the authors writing on deafness, Rousseau’s second Discourse was obviously considered to be a relevant reference, even though it has primarily served as a target for polemical remarks. The Discourse on Inequality, however, was not Rousseau’s last word in these matters. In his other writings, he tries to solve the Lucretian paradox in a more sophisticated and elegant way.

Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language In some of his later texts, however, Rousseau did not surrender so easily. It is his Essay on the Origin of Languages (probably written in 1755, but published posthumously) that provides an important corrective to this earlier view, in particular concerning the question of language-gesture relation. Rousseau retains the basic idea that gesture and voice represent the two principal “general means by which we can act upon the senses of others” (Rousseau 1998: 290), but makes a sustained effort to distinguish 152.  For de Gérando, then, there is a first language, the language of action, which is natural and dictated by needs, and on the basis of this first language, conventions may be established without any paradox being involved. This is further demonstrated by the phenomenon of language acquisition in children, which involved two stages, a first one being based on natural language and the second one on articulate words (de Gérando 1827: 32–57). As for the deaf, there is no reason for optimism – de Gérando was far from being as progressive as it may seem from the lines quoted. It is true that he opposed Condillac and asserted that the deaf do have memory and are capable of some mental operations even before instruction (de Gérando 1827: 71), but the language of the deaf is viewed as considerably inferior to spoken language and the mental capacities of the deaf are deemed to be considerably impoverished: “All the reasons of moral and intellectual inferiority, to which the unfortunate deaf-mute seems to be condemned, are linked […] to one principal circumstance: that he is deprived of the use of our artificial language” (de Gérando 1827: 177). This entails “serious, numerous and deplorable disadvantages attached to deaf-mute’s condition” (de Gérando 1827: 196). On de Gérando, see Lane (1984: 144–154).

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more specifically the distinct features of the two means. Gesture, he repeats, depends less on conventions and is more expressive. This is due to visual perception itself, which is more differentiating than the auditory one. There is, however, one thing about gestures that was not clearly stated in the Discourse. It concerns motivation, the reason why we produce gestures at all. This reason, which also represents the basis for a specific difference of gestures as compared to voice, is need. It is true that the short chapter Rousseau devoted to gestures is not entirely clear in this respect. Our gestures, the ones that accompany speech, “signify nothing but our natural uneasiness” (Rousseau 1998: 290).153 This gesticulation, however, made us forget a more complex and more subtle art, which is that of pantomime.154 After having crowded a few paragraphs of the Essay with examples, taken from ancient literature, of “the most energetic language” in which “the sign has said everything before one speaks”, Rousseau proceeds to make a fundamental distinction: gesture cannot be equalled in presenting a precise imitation of what is depicted by them; a language that addresses itself to the eyes of the interlocutor is guaranteed to be the most effective one. But sound, added to this visual depiction, is able to enflame our passion to the extent that gestures could never achieve on their own. Gestures excel in painting “the thing itself ”, the voice excels in adding an affective colouring to it. Hence the distinction between gestures as pertaining to the domain of needs and voice as pertaining to the domain of passions. Needs usually relate to an object (which is easily “painted” by gestures), while voice refers to the inner state of the speaker. “If we never had anything but physical needs, we might very well never have spoken and would have understood one another perfectly by the language of gesture alone” (Rousseau 1998: 292). Because the human is a being of passion, the voice gradually prevailed over the visual language of the hand. 153.  Rousseau then proceeds to give an “ethnological” example: “Only Europeans gesticulate while speaking. […] When a Frenchman has quite strained himself, quite tormented his body to say a lot of words, a Turk removes his pipe from his mouth for a moment, softly speaks two words, and crushes him with one aphorism” (Rousseau 1998: 290). 154.  Rousseau draws an analogy between this forgotten art and ancient hieroglyphs. Not only is he not the first nor the last one to say so, but the comparison is a topos which pervades the whole modern history of thinking about gesture: Condillac, Diderot, but later also Tylor and Mallery all had recourse to this comparison, a key referential source being a French translation of a fragment of Bishop Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses (1738–1741), published under the title Essai sur les hiéroglyphes des Égyptiens (1744), a book that exercised a considerable influence in its time. The comparison is, in fact, a logical one: it pinpoints, in the visual aspect of gestures, their closeness to drawing and conveying information through movement. In a similar vein, Yau Shun-Chiu has recently proposed an analogy between the way gestural signs are produced and the way Chinese ideograms and divinatory signs are written, both systems being “spatial-visual modes of expression” (Yau Shun-Chiu 1992: 152).



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Independently of stressing the difference in motivation between gestures and speech, Rousseau makes two very important remarks concerning the phenomenon of communication in general. First, he posits the existence of a “language instinct” independent of the concrete channel – visual or auditory – it may “take hold of ” to express itself. In this sense, both spoken language and gestures are languages,155 both are the realization of one basic faculty, the faculty of communicating our ideas, and each of them is apt, under certain circumstances, to communicate everything that needs to be communicated. Briefly, “of the two senses by which we are active, a single one would suffice to form a language for ourselves” (Rousseau 1998: 292). From this observation, Rousseau concludes that “the art of communicating our ideas depends less on the organs we use for that communication than on a faculty that belongs to man, which makes him employ his organs for that use, and which, if he lacked them, would make him employ others to the same end” (Rousseau 1998: 292–293). Not only is this remark, according to modern findings, perfectly correct, but Rousseau has obviously come to grips with another question: why then, if humanity is in possession of both “channels”, did the auditory channel prevail over the visual one? All theories dealing with the gestural origin of language have to tackle this issue. Rousseau’s answer is: language was invented to express passions, not needs. If we had but needs, no spoken language would have existed. The second remark concerns the anthropological difference. There is, as far as language is concerned, a clear difference between men and animals. It is not that animals do not communicate. But Rousseau, much like some 20th-century semioticians, distinguished between language and communication. His examples are beavers and ants, i.e. animals engaging in collaborative behaviour; these animals certainly do have a “natural language” (or code, as we would say nowadays), one that is “in gesture and speaks only to the eyes” (Rousseau 1998: 293). But precisely because all such languages are natural, they are not acquired; the animals that speak them do so from birth, they all possess them, and everywhere the same one; they do not change them, nor do they make the slightest progress in them. Conventional language belongs only to man. (Rousseau 1998: 293)

The fact that Rousseau mentions, when he speaks about animal communication, primarily a visual code that speaks “only to the eyes”, could perhaps mislead us as to the nature of anthropological difference in relation to language. The line of 155.  As we might expect, Rousseau gives a very wide array of examples of the language of gestures – these include very different ways of gesturing, but also – as we have already seen in the preceding chapter – the sign language of the deaf. All of these are different particular cases of the “language of gestures” in general.

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demarcation is not, as one might think at first, drawn between gestural and vocal language (the gestural one belonging both to man and animals and the vocal one belonging exclusively to men). The distinction is made between natural and conventional language. That the two examples of animal communication Rousseau has quoted concern the visual and not the vocal mode of communication does not make any difference. Gestural language may become conventional if it is used by men (including the deaf), while vocal signals cannot form a conventional language if they are used by animals.156 The argument that gestures are dictated by needs, while the use of the voice is motivated by passions, seems to be aimed directly against Condillac. True, Rousseau does not mention any names, but among the authors who “claim that men invented speech in order to express their needs” (Rousseau 1998: 293), Condillac is certainly one of the most prominent. This hypothesis, according to Rousseau, is untenable – what brings people together are passions, not needs. Neither hunger nor thirst, but love, hatred, pity, anger wrested the first voices from men. Fruit does not elude our grasp, one can feed on it without speaking, one stalks in silence the prey one wished to devour; but in order to move a young heart, to repulse an unjust aggressor, nature dictates accents, cries, complaints.  (Rousseau 1998: 294)157 156.  Rousseau, as we observe, is quite Cartesian on this point. He does not speak about vocal signals, but his argument clearly points in this direction, and Rousseau must have not ignored the fact that animals do use sounds to communicate. We cannot agree with the reading D. A. Thomas gives of that passage. For Thomas, “whereas activities relating to need are silent and solitary, those connected to the passions are social, relating one human being to another. The voice, as the expression of these passions, is specifically human: an animal can be hungry or thirsty, but only a human being can feel love, hate, pity, or anger” (Thomas 1995: 104, emphasis added). Such a reading – even if it looks very plausible at first – nonetheless omits the preceding paragraphs, where Rousseau gives an example of Indian traders, who can make themselves understood by hands alone, and goes on to say: “Give man a physical organization as entirely crude as you please: doubtless he will acquire fewer ideas, but provided only that there be some means of communication between him and his fellows by which one might act and the other feel, they will succeed at length in communicating altogether as many ideas as they have to one another. Animals have a physical organization more than sufficient for such communication, and none of them has ever made this use of it” (Rousseau 1998: 292–293). So the point is that man, however crude his physical organization may be, will invent a way of communicating his ideas – either by voice or gesture – while the animal will not – neither by voice nor gesture. This is further corroborated by the previously quoted sentences where Rousseau posits a human “linguistic” faculty, capable of finding its way either by an auditory or visual channel. 157.  In order to do justice to Condillac, we must, of course, add that the affective aspect was far from being absent from his account. It was, as we recall, the pity one individual felt for another that prompted the first, proto-linguistic expressions of the two children.

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In Rousseau’s view, language is born from an overflowing of men’s passions, not from any kind of lack nor need. And as a consequence of that, the first languages were not some sort of rudimentary cries uttered by starving human beings: they were “tuneful and passionate before being simple and methodical” (Rousseau 1998: 294). Instead of naming things and objects of need, they sang of human passions and desires. For this same reason, they were, from the very beginning, figurative before being literal.

Rousseau’s Émile The third important work in Rousseau’s treatment of the origin of language is Émile (1762). Émile is a curious book, both as to its genre and to its composition. If 18th-century thought is notorious for mixing philosophy and literature, Émile is an almost perfect example of such an “impurity” – sometimes, it is plainly impossible to distinguish between a novelistic and philosophical treatment of the subject. This ambiguity is doubled by the composition itself: the text is interrupted by long systematic digressions – the most famous example probably being “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar”, inserted into Book VI – and a dialogical “staging” of concrete educational episodes. The content of the book is no less baffling: Émile, we usually hear, is a treatise on education. But how often does a treatise on education begin in an apocalyptic or “teratological” tone, as Émile does: Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters.  (Rousseau 2010: 161)158

As a correlate of this generalized deformity in which the process of education is to take place, there is the monstrosity in a way of Émile himself. For Émile is not a real child. He truly is a “man without qualities”: he has no concrete physical appearance, no distinct personal features, and even no distinct narrative voice; he has been aptly called a “child-zero”, or a degree zero of a child.159 It is because he 158.  Yves Vargas, in his very useful and detailed introduction to Émile, gives the following laconic comment on those opening lines: “Whoever wants to lose all hopes in education, is advised to read the first paragraphs of Émile” (Vargas 1995: 7). 159.  The expression “enfant-zéro” comes from A. Philonenko (Philonenko 1984: 98).

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has to fulfil several roles at once: he is both the exemplification of any child and the exemplification of human nature as such. That is why Rousseau has carefully depicted him as a – somewhat disconcerting – conjunction of ideality and statistical average.160 What do we know about Émile? We know that he is an orphan. This is the starting point of Rousseau’s educational isolationism: not only does Émile have no parents, but he has no friends and never resists the educational process, which takes place almost exclusively in the closed world inhabited only by Jean-Jacques and Émile himself. And we know that he is “a child well formed, vigorous, and healthy” (Rousseau 2010: 179–180). This is the basic description and delimitation of the material that Rousseau works with to conduct his educational experiments. All of this, it seems, would confirm the commonly pronounced ironic judgement according to which Rousseau is the worst educator in the world, someone who, having not had any pupils (and if he had, it was a disaster) and having got rid of his own children, then went on to compose a treatise on education. But this is not strictly accurate at least in one respect. The reader of Émile is immediately stricken by Rousseau’s ability to speak of children as such, not of children considered to be little adults. The theory presented in Émile is truly a “child-centred” system of education. Rousseau’s educational system is certainly not devoid of teleological aspect, its aim being to bring up a good citizen, but it is also guided by the principle of a natural and inviolable rhythm of human development. Childhood is not characterized by imperfection of any kind. A child is not a child only in order to become an adult: there is a specific perfection in every age we go through, one appropriate to our way of perceiving the world and using our mental capacities. Rousseau states it in a passage that has become famous: “Humanity has its place in the order of things; childhood has its in the order of human life. The man must be considered in the man, and the child in the child” (Rousseau 2010: 210). Rousseau is remarkably faithful to this principle when it comes to the empirical observation of children. The theoretical feat of Émile is amplified by Rousseau’s astute insights into children’s development and behaviour, which are not only well ahead of their time, but might figure in any modern textbook on child development. Rousseau’s remarks on language acquisition are among such insights. The pages Rousseau devotes to the development of language in children are undoubtedly meant to be an indirect contribution to the problem of the origin of language, treated, this time, on the ontogenetic level. It is for this reason that Rousseau is no longer compiling a list of the paradoxes and obstacles hindering the birth of language and instead concentrates on the continuity of the whole 160.  In other words, Émile is a norm in the sense that Georges Canguilhem (Canguilhem 1991) has given to this term: precisely a combination of ideality and average values.



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process. The process is indeed continuous: Rousseau does not situate the birth of language at the moment when the child utters his or her first word or first utterance, but much earlier. He develops a theory of language acquisition in which even a child’s earliest vocal expressions are already endowed with communicative intention. Children’s screaming expresses “the discomfort of the needs” (Rousseau 2010: 193).161 And this is the beginning of language. Long before children learn to speak “properly”, they already have a language appropriate to their age. Children’s crying, in fact, is the first, universal language of mankind. In a passage that cannot fail to remind us of the second Discourse, Rousseau writes: All our languages are works of art. Whether there was a language natural and common to all men has long been a subject of research. Doubtless, there is such a language, and it is the one children speak before knowing how to speak. This language is not articulate, but it is accented, sonorous, intelligible. The habit of our languages has made us neglect that language to the point of forgetting it completely. Let us study children, and we shall soon relearn it with them. Nurses are our masters in this language. They understand everything their nurslings say; they respond to them; they have quite consistent dialogues with them; and, although they pronounce words, these words are perfectly useless; it is not the sense of the word that children understand but the accent which accompanies it.  (Rousseau 2010: 194)

This passage is fascinating; out goes the image of Rousseau as an inexperienced educator who knew nothing of children. For what else is being described here than motherese, the special language modality that mothers – and nurses – use to speak to infants? The description Rousseau gives is virtually identical – including the vocabulary – with those that we find in contemporary books on the subject.162 The crying and tears to which philosophers, as Rousseau complains, rarely pay attention are, in fact, a true language, “the first link in that long chain of which the social order is formed” (Rousseau 2010: 194). The child’s crying may be the universal language of mankind,163 but the communicative intentions animating it 161.  In his ontogenetic version of language development, Rousseau seems to have switched back to the theory of needs rather than expression of passions. 162.  See for ex. Karmiloff, Karmiloff-Smith (2001: 47). After having given a few examples of infant-directed speech, the authors remark: “Clearly, it is neither the grammar nor the meaning of motherese that initially holds the attention of infants. The words and meaning are really irrelevant at this stage. Rather, it is the melodic features of the acoustic signal itself, with its exaggerated prosodic contours.” 163.  Rousseau’s claim of universality, let us add, is not entirely correct. In a comparative study of French and German newborns, it has recently been found that babies do not cry in a uniform, “universal” way and that they are, in fact, already preparing for the specific melody and rhythm

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may differ164 and are not deprived of certain “moral” accents, existing even before the child has any distinct moral notions. Rousseau, despite all the differences in their views generally, might be indebted to Augustine in this respect. For he gives us a disconcerting, dramatic and profoundly Augustinian example of negative emotion in children; the example is that of a child struck by his nurse: He immediately kept quiet. I believed he was intimidated. […] I was mistaken. The unfortunate was suffocating with anger; he had lost his breath; I saw him become violet. A moment after came sharp screams; all the signs of the resentment, fury, and despair of his age were in his accents. I feared he would expire in this agitation. (Rousseau 2010: 195)

The child feels and expresses injustice before being able to name it. And in a no less Augustinian vein, Rousseau adds that from the original helplessness, these cries may develop into attempts to dominate: “The first tears of children are prayers. If one is not careful, they soon become orders” (Rousseau 2010: 195).165 This early communicative means comprise not only vocal, but gestural communication as well. If Rousseau’s subject, even here, is the origin of language, then the gestural modality of communication  – whose importance we saw in Rousseau’s “phylogenetic” theories – cannot be put aside. The development of language of the concrete language they are “growing into”. But this is only a further support of Rousseau’s assertion that crying is, in fact, a language-like behavior (Mampe, Friederici, Christophe, Wermke 2009: 1994–1997). 164.  Rousseau, as we see, develops a sort of “semiotics” of child’s crying. In this respect, he was preceded – apart from Augustine – by John Locke, who distinguishes two sorts of crying: “Either stubborn or domineering or querulous and whining”, with further subspecies: clamor, sobbing, bemoaning etc. But Locke, when it comes to crying, is much less tolerant than Rousseau. Instead of being a universal language, “crying is a fault that should not be tolerated in children not only for the unpleasant and unbecoming noise it fills the house with, but for more considerable reasons in reference to the children themselves, which is to be our aim in education” (Locke 1996: 83). 165.  Compare this passage from Augustine’s Confessions, transformed into a first-person narrative: “Little by little I began to be aware where I was and wanted to manifest my wishes to those who could fulfill them as I could not. For my desires were internal; adults were external to me and had no means of entering into my soul. So I threw my limbs about and uttered sounds, signs resembling my wishes, the small number of signs of which I was capable but such signs as lay in my power to use: for there was no real resemblance. When I did not get my way, either because I was not understood or lest it be harmful to me, I used to be indignant with my seniors for their disobedience, and with free people who were not slaves to my interests; and I would revenge myself upon them by weeping. This is the way of infants I have learnt from those I have been able to watch” (Augustine 1991: 7). Let us appreciate the psychoanalytic – indeed, Kleinian rather than Freudian – flavor of Augustine’s remarks.



Chapter 5.  The origins of language 135

in a child is indeed treated as a parallel to the process of historical genesis of language, and gesture is not excluded from it. It is only given a larger meaning – it is not considered a manual gesture, but a form of non-vocal communication in a broader sense: To the language of the voice is joined that of gesture, no less energetic. This gesture is not in children’s weak hands; it is on their visages. It is surprising how much expression these ill-formed faces already have. Their features change from one instant to the next with inconceivable rapidity. You see a smile, desire, fright come into being and pass away like so many flashes of lightning. Each time you believe you are seeing a different visage. Their facial muscles are certainly more mobile than ours. (Rousseau 2010: 194)

And just as crying and the change of expression on a child’s face are not some kind of negligible grimaces, but a language fully appropriate to a certain age, there is also – when the child comes to use words instead of crying – a grammar adequate to children, the peculiarities of which are not to be taken as imperfections of any kind or as undeveloped germs of later, fully constituted linguistic structures, but as adequate attempts to come to terms with the problems posed by language acquisition. The alleged “mistakes” in a child’s handling of language are not “mere” mistakes, destined to be set straight later; they represent a legitimate – and sometimes very elegant  – attempt to orient oneself in language and in the world. In this respect, if we are to look for modern analogies, Rousseau’s approach to children’s grammar is closer to that of Dan Slobin than that of Chomsky.166 Speaking about children’s language and “a grammar of their age”, Rousseau mentions that the syntactic rules adopted by children are more general than ours, but at the same time, he expresses admiration for the exactness of certain analogies that children follow and that may appear mistaken only to adult speakers who have long abandoned them (Rousseau 2010: 200). It is quite regrettable that, apart from these remarks,167 Rousseau does not inquire any further into the linguistic development of children and presupposes, later on, language as already acquired.

166.  “Rather than using adult grammar as a model from which to infer child grammar, as Chomsky and others do, Slobin looks at children’s own productions to infer the types of operating principles involved in building up what he calls a basic child grammar” (Karmiloff, Karmiloff-Smith 2001: 126). 167.  And apart from an extremely interesting passage on literature, taking La Fontaine’s fable “The Crow and the Fox” as an example of how not to make children study; Rousseau analyses the fable word by word in order to show that the literary means employed are simply beyond the reach of the child’s ability to understand (Rousseau 2010: 248–253).

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Later developments with regard to sign language It is now time to sum up. The insights both Condillac and Rousseau offer are astounding, but they were not the only ones to offer such insights. They were only the most notable theorists to take up a question so “popular” that the overflow of treatises on the origins of language famously resulted in the subject being banned by the Linguistic Society of Paris in 1866. And the question itself gave rise to remarkable theories both before and after Condillac and Rousseau.168 After a period of a weakening of interest in the question of gesture in relation to genesis of language169 – with a few notable exceptions, such as André LeroiGourhan (Leroi-Gourhan 1993; Copple 2003: 47–94) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1981)  –, it experienced a massive comeback in the second half of the twentieth century. Since the late sixties onwards, the Gardners’ reports on Washoe, that appeared to prove that chimpanzees are able to learn to act symbolically via manual expressions, whereas all attempts to teach them to speak were failures, have had an important impact on the renewal of the “gestural origins” theory (Hewes 1973: 5–24). This has contributed to a renewed interest in the sign language acquisition by deaf children which, in its turn, prompted researchers to study the structure of sign language itself – it is the work of Ursula Bellugi and her colleagues that is of particular importance here (see Kendon 2002: 35–52 for a historical overview). It is only logical that under these conditions, new speculations will have emerged on the gestural origin of language  – not entirely new, in fact, because despite the more recent evidence from linguistics and psychology that the authors use, what they say usually boils down to something remarkably similar to Condillac’s hypothesis. William Stokoe and his colleagues, among others, have put considerable effort into elaborating such a theory (Armstrong, Stokoe, Wilcox 1995; Armstrong, Wilcox 2007; Stokoe 2001). In his plaidoyer for the gestural origin of language, Michael Corballis reserves words of great esteem for Condillac. After having summed up the same pages we have been commenting upon, he laconically adds: “That just about says it all” (Corballis 2002: 127). There is one more important thing. Neither Condillac nor Rousseau sees the original language as being exclusively gestural. For Condillac, the first 168.  Let us mention at least the name of Giambattista Vico and especially Herder, who wrote his own Treatise on the Origin of Language in 1772, in which both Condillac and Rousseau are subjected to systematic criticism. For a reading of Vico’s Scienzia nuova in regard to modern theories of language genesis, see Danesi (1993). For the basic outline of Herder’s argument, see Stam (1976: 117–130). 169.  For the circumstances and reasons for this weakening, see Kendon (2004: 62–72).



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“proto-linguistic” expression is a gestural-vocal complex; Rousseau’s position is more complicated, especially in the Essay, where each of the two modalities  – gesture and vocality – is assigned a different function, but there is no reason to believe that one has preceded the other chronologically. Despite that, Condillac in particular has been abundantly cited, not only in literature devoted to gestures, but also in literature devoted to sign language (de Gérando is only one example among many) as an advocate of the idea that language originated only in gesture. The idea that gesture is the primordial form of linguistic expression has been such an attractive one that Condillac’s recognition that vocal expression must also have been involved in language emergence from the first tends to get overlooked. We will conclude this chapter with a consideration of why this is so. Why is it that those for whom the gestural modality serves as their main means of linguistic expression (users of sign language, that is) are seen as providing us with palpable traces of the lost origins of mankind? One significant and widely spread belief contributes to reinforcing this idea: it is that there is a “universal language of the hand”,170 the language of gestures, and that signers are the ones who use this universal language in the most “expert” way. What is universal is likely to be original. Furthermore, in this gestural language, there seems to be a closer tie between the sign and the referent, making it an ideal candidate for bridging a gap between a non-meaning and meaning, which is the very gap that needed to be overcome in ancient times, when language was being invented. In the light of both of these ideas, signers are the ones who can offer us a glimpse of that lost past. The confluence of those elements, mixing synchrony and diachrony, empirical observation and imagination, results in the following equation: original = universal = iconic. Two works considered in the following section are, each in its own way, good exemplifications of this conviction (and also of its implicit ambivalences): RochAmbroise Bébian’s Essay on the Deaf and Natural Language and Edward Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind.

Bébian: Sign language of the deaf as a surviving form of the language of action In 1817, Roch-Ambroise Auguste Bébian, himself a hearing man, but a fluent signer, one of the most fervent opponents of the oral method, but also an 170.  The expression comes from Quintilian’s De institutione oratoria: “[…] Amidst the great diversity of tongues pervading all nations and people, the language of the hand appears to be a language common to all men” (Quintilian 1891: 364).

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outspoken critic of Epée’s methodical signs, which, in his view, disfigured the natural language of the deaf,171 wrote a work titled Essay on the Deaf and Natural Language, which perfectly illustrates this point, sparking disagreements among modern commentators as to whether Bébian speaks, in fact, about gestures or about sign language proper.172 Bébian’s Essay opens with a reiteration of the argument put forth by Diderot. Far from being a deficitary and handicapping condition, deafness represents a way of avoiding many prejudices and errors (Bébian 2006: 130). Bébian’s book – much like Desloges’s a few decades earlier – is a defence of the “natural language” used by the deaf. The adjective “natural” is given a very specific meaning which, again, shows very strong ties to philosophical debates on the origins of language. “Natural signs” are precisely those that “have a direct and natural relation to ideas, and that by themselves and without prior convention recall ideas” (Bébian 2006: 132). Bébian enumerates all the “affections of the soul”, which are “expressed”, without instruction of any sort, by the language of the hand, movements of the body and facial expressions (Bébian 2006: 132). This is the language of gestures regarded as “humankind’s proper language” (Bébian 2006: 159),173 which represents, nonetheless, the privileged means of communication among the deaf. 171.  While praising Epée for having used signs as a means of educating the deaf, Bébian speaks of methodical signs as “disfiguring” their natural language to a point of rendering it “unintelligible” (Bébian 2006: 148). 172.  Against the “Deaf nationalists” who claim that “for example, the modern French Sign Language is the same as the system which Bébian took to be the true language of nature”, Jonathan Rée argues that “such claims are unsustainable and inherently improbable” (Rée 1999: 313). The target of Rée’s criticism is Harlan Lane’s The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Lane 1976: 220), where the author does indeed make reference to Bébian’s “natural signs”, considering them to be the signs of LSF (but nowhere does Lane speak about modern French Sign Language). Rée is right on one point: the fact is that Bébian, praising the natural character of signs, went so far as to criticize those signs which have lost their similarity  – or “analogy”, as he calls it  – to the referent or “idea” they represent to such a degree that they may be considered purely arbitrary. Whenever a deaf encounters someone who does not share the same background, he returns immediately to “natural signs”, expressing “the very essence of the idea” (Bébian 2006: 153). On the other hand, however, the same Bébian constantly urges us to observe the “natural language” of the deaf rather than methodical signs, and given his own fluency in that language, it is highly probable that he does speak about a widely shared sign language as it existed and was used in that period. There is nothing “unsustainable and inherently improbable” in such a conjecture. And that this natural language of the deaf was seen by Bébian as one modality of manual communication in a larger sense of the word, should certainly not surprise us. 173.  For a similar expression (“signs […] natural to all men in all places”), see also p. 133. See also the opening pages of Bébian’s Mimographie, published several years later: “There is a language which exists in all places and at all times, whose form is everywhere the same, because



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It is interesting to see that it is precisely this notion of the natural character of signs that Bébian uses to express a certain reticence towards Epée’s method of teaching the deaf. After having briefly – and critically – summarized the history of “the instruction of the deaf by speech” and after having pronounced some brief obligatory praise of Epée’s educational method, Bébian goes on to stress that Epée himself “did not realize the fertility of the principle he had discovered” (Bébian 2006: 140). Bébian’s argument is the following: whenever it came to endow the deaf with signs for abstract ideas, Epée’s error consisted in refusing to take those signs “from nature” and in opting for the etymological method of decomposition, inspired by the etymologies taken over from spoken language (Bébian 2006: 140). Whenever Epée entered the realm of abstraction, his methodical signs ultimately became what we would nowadays call signed French or, to use Bébian’s own expression, “a kind of syllabic spelling of French words” instead of the “direct translation of thought and its living image” (Bébian 2006: 140). Unlike Epée, Bébian is convinced that even the most abstract idea can be rendered in this concrete form of a “living image” and that there is no need of having recourse to hypertrophied etymologies. In Bébian’s defence of sign language, or of what he calls “true sign language”, the natural character of signing is closely connected with its avowed “simplicity” (Bébian 2006: 148). This simplicity, however, should not be considered as an equivalent of primitiveness of any kind. The word “simplicity”, in Bébian’s treatise, is given essentially positive connotations. In other words, signing resembles the kind of communication that the members of the human species used in their natural state as described, for example, by Rousseau. It is simple not in the negative sense of being crude and primitive, but in the positive sense of being straightforward and close to nature: indeed, the “true sign language”, according to Bébian, “faithfully represents thought, and leaves out all inessentials”, whereas the methodical signs, that is, gestural calques of spoken language, are often “utterly incompatible” with this language of nature (Bébian 2006: 148). This observation leads Bébian to pinpoint – more vigorously than Desloges – the specific difference “in spirit” between signing and spoken language. He stresses that the specificity of sign language and its independence from speech has not received enough attention and addresses heavy criticism to the idea of introducing it is an expression of our organic constitution which never varies; a language which preceded all languages and governed their formation; a language which, in its general form, is equally understood in the Huron’s hut and in the Arabian’s tent […]. It was spoken by our first fathers, and will be understood by our last nephews. […] It is a language of those who have no language; it is a language of deaf-mutes, or, rather, the proper language of the human species” (Bébian 1825: 1–2; my own translation).

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“artificial” signs into the natural language of the deaf. In this context, he goes even so far as to speak overtly of “corruption from spoken language” (Bébian 2006: 149). Among the specific features of signing, Bébian mentions, among other things, the importance of non-manual components of signs, especially of facial expression which is an inherent element of the “language of action” (Bébian 2006: 144). Simplicity of sign language, whose source, unlike that of speech, is “inherent in our nature” (Bébian 2006: 149), accounts for its transparency, often conceived by Bébian not only in strictly linguistic, but also in overtly moral terms. The principal advantages of gestural language – and here, Bébian’s argument resembles that of Desloges – consist in its inability to lie and its immediacy, in short, in its innocence. It is a language that “cannot deceive”, because it consists in “expressing the mental operations” rendered invisible by spoken language; it is the “voice of nature”, which “follows the idea like its shadow” and offers its “accurate representation” (Bébian 2006: 151–152).174 Furthermore, the lesson it may teach us is an historical one too: to observe the deaf, establishing – through their communication – a regularized system of signs, is a noble spectacle of great philosophical interest, a spectacle of “nature at work in the development of intellectual and moral man”, enabling us to witness the “formation of human intelligence” (Bébian 2006: 154). This moral accent leads Bébian to formulate, in a very Rousseauist vein, a pronounced critique of civilization (represented here by spoken language) and of the corruption it brings about. In sign language, “intellectual ideas are always expressed clearly and easily” (Bébian 2006: 150). From an historical standpoint, the true disaster arose at the moment when this natural language was replaced with conventionalized speech. Here, Bébian draws a remarkable distinction between voice and speech. Voice, according to him, does – or at least may – belong to the realm of natural language. Natural vocal expressions, similar in all languages and largely connected to emotions, are referred to as “interjections”, that is, inarticulate cries, sighs or groans (Bébian 2006: 155) that, in the early forms of communication, have accompanied gestures. We easily recognize Condillac’s influence here, but unlike Condillac, Bébian sketches a comparison between the vocal and gestural component of the language of action in order to demonstrate a primacy of gestures with respect to interjections. While gesture enables the gesturer to express “both ideas and the relations between ideas” (Bébian 2006: 155), the voice does not have the same ability without being conventionalized, that is, without becoming speech. It is quite remarkable that, despite his generally empiricist starting point, Bébian draws here on an old scholastic distinction between the essence and the accident 174.  This inability to deceive, of course, cannot be taken literally. One can obviously lie in sign language. What Bébian has in mind is something that could be called a structural incapacity of deception in the sense that sign language does not obscure the relation between sign and referent.



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(albeit in a very primitive form): gesture imitates the external shape of an object, its “typical way of being” or “features belonging to the very essence of things”, while voice is capable of imitating merely “an accident”, something that “does not strictly belong to the object that produces it” (Bébian 2006: 155–156).175 Bébian’s own speculative historical account of how the gestural-vocal complex of the “language of action” became replaced with articulate speech leaves one crucial question unanswered: why did this replacement happen at all? Interjectional sounds, which did not have any precise meaning in themselves, acquired comprehensible signification only through gestures with which they were coupled. But because particular sounds were often coupled with particular gestures, they became more and more conventionalized and eventually replaced the very gestures they had accompanied at first (Bébian 2006: 156). This is how different languages emerged. But Bébian leaves us at a loss as to why this happened. Why did one component of the gestural-vocal complex – the less important one, as Bébian expressly states – finally prevail over the second one? Bébian gives us no answer. He contents himself with saying that “as speech improved, the natural language was abandoned” (Bébian 2006: 157), and he goes on to criticise spoken languages for their lack of concreteness and their polysemy that finally makes them an obstacle to communication rather than its effective means. Bébian’s Essay, as we see, combines incentives clearly inspired by Condillac and Rousseau with the author’s own reflection upon sign language proper. Sign language, or at least “natural sign language”, uncontaminated by methodical signs, is seen as a surviving form of the original, archaic language of action. Because of its direct relation to ideas, it is less metaphorical, more transparent, more immediately comprehensible and as a result less prone to errors than spoken languages. And because “the sign follows the thought step by step, like a shadow that takes on all its different shapes” (Bébian 2006: 154), it represents a potential fundament for a universal language, capable of bridging the communicational barriers among different peoples in a way that spoken language would never be capable of (Bébian 2006: 158). Despite certain shortcomings in argumentation, Bébian’s treatise is interesting, among other things, for its explicit tendency to relate the defence of sign language to the debates about language origins (in Desloges, this diachronic aspect was much less present). It is here that the third image of the deaf emerges: the deaf person as a surviving witness of the long lost origins of human communication. It is a person that, even nowadays, expresses himself in the form of the original language of humankind as such. 175.  We may notice a certain incoherence of Bébian’s argument: when he was previously referring to “sighs” or “groans”, these interjections could be hardly considered as imitative. The sudden switch from expressive to imitative interjections is not justified in Bébian’s text.

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This image is not devoid of ambiguities. In Bébian, it is conceived in positive terms. Sign language is synonymous with simplicity, straightforwardness, and incapacity to deceive. It is, however, only logical that the same idea of sign language’s archaic character may be related to a very different set of connotations. In other words, it may become a kind of projecting screen for a great variety of fantasies claiming to be scientific truths; it may be invested (in a psychoanalytic sense) with very diverse meanings, ranging from very positive to very negative. Primordial innocence may be inverted into the absence of abstractions and sinful corporeality (this being, as we have already seen, the principal argument against sign language during the Congress of Milan), and purity of thought may be recast as mental and cognitive deficiency (the twist that has motivated oralist efforts from the beginning to the present day).176 In Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind, published in 1865, a certain type of these ambivalences is perhaps more readily observable than in others.

Edward Tylor’s view of sign language Like Bébian, Tylor turns precisely to sign language in order to look for the origins of human communication. The opening part of Researches into the Early History of Mankind perfectly exemplifies the theoretical constellation (with all its ambiguities) just described. Tylor hypothesizes that gesture is more original than speech – in the chronological sense – and that observing the deaf grants us a glimpse into what language looked like in its early stages: The idea that the Gesture-Language represents a distinct separate stage of human utterance, through which man passed before he came to speak, has no support from facts. But it may be plausibly maintained, that in the early stages of the development of language, while as yet vocabulary was very rude and scanty, gesture had an importance as an element of expression, which in the conditions of highly organized language it has lost. (Tylor 1964: 10)177

176.  Sophia Rosenfeld has carefully studied some of the inversions and shifts that this idea of deafness underwent in the course of the 18th century itself. See Rosenfeld (2001: 227–246). 177.  The question of the origin of language as such is further explored in the first volume of Tylor’s Primitive Culture, published in 1871 (Tylor 1958: 160–239). Here, Tylor pays attention not only to gestures but to “emotional and imitative language” (so goes the title of the chapter) in general, including its vocal modalities. In the origin of language, there is what Tylor labels “emotional tone, whereby the voice carries direct expression of the speaker’s feeling” (Tylor 1958: 166) rather than articulation of distinct sounds that developed only later. Therefore, apart from gestures or, more generally, “changes of the bodily attitude, corresponding in their fine

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At the same time, one cannot resist using Tylor’s Researches as a pretext to make clear, once again, how difficult and confusing it is to read documents of this type through the lens of contemporary research on the subject. As we shall see shortly, Tylor’s text has left certain modern readers, who have considered his views in the light of modern sign language research, rather perplexed. It seems that these readers were immediately tempted to ask the obligatory questions, dictated by binary oppositions: What is Tylor’s standpoint? Does he think that sign language is a language, or does he think it is not? Does he think it is universal, or does he think it is not? Tylor, however, does not provide answers to any of these questions, because he does not have any standpoint that would lend itself to the above oppositions. Or, to put things differently, he provides answers both positive and negative. His text might be read, from the contemporary point of view, both as a remarkably acute observation of how sign language works and as an attempt to show that sign language, in fact, is more primitive than spoken language. There is little wonder that considering his work retrospectively, researchers have come up with diverse – indeed, completely opposite – assessments as to his positive or negative contributions to the history of sign language research. It simply depends on which aspects of his argument we decide to stress, or, perhaps, to overstress. Let us quote one of these interpretations: Unlike previous authors, Tylor had considerable experience of deaf adults and deaf children, and was particularly interested in the nature of the language. The descriptions of individual signs he sets out are particularly illuminating, his knowledge of the grammar of sign is exceptional and makes it quite obvious that linguists have been only rediscovering the structure of BSL (British Sign Language) over the last ten years. […] It is obvious that Tylor had considerable insight into sign language, which might have been of great value to educators and linguists alike if his publications had not been overtaken by the changes of attitude and philosophy which occurred around the time of the Milan Congress.  (Kyle, Woll 1985: 55)

And another one: […] despite Tylor’s polite disclaimer, the prevailing message is that the more gesticulation used, the lower the position on the evolutionary ladder. […] The gradations with changes of the feelings” (Tylor 1958: 164), the origin of language is to be looked for in “interjectional and imitative sounds with their derivative words, as well as certain other parts of language of a more of less cognate character” (Tylor 1958: 162). Apart from the language of “rude”, “barbarous” or “primitive” tribes (the expressions are Tylor’s own), useful evidence is provided by children’s language, because “[…] rudimentary speech had its origin among men while in a childlike intellectual condition, and thus the self-expressive branch of language affords valuable materials for the problem of primitive speech” (Tylor 1958: 237).

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ongoing Platonic/Cartesian separation of rational mind from irrational, sensate body was accompanied by a particularly Victorian reading of the Christian disdain for an uncontrolled body. These factors were complemented by the social evolutionary fervor of the time which placed gesture in a more “primitive” or, in Tylor’s term, more “natural” category than speech. (Farnell 1995: 29–30, 38.)178

Even though it is common that certain texts allow for very different readings, it is nonetheless striking that one particular text gives rise to such diametrically opposed interpretations. The reason for this apparently inconceivable divergence is very simple: both commentators adopt a modern point of view, apply this to a text written before such a view became possible and, making – from this modern point of view – blatantly conflicting statements, exaggerate that side of the conflict they feel akin to, and find a convenient historical interpretation that fits the image the author thus created. So, on the one hand, we have a sign language linguist avant la lettre whose fruitful work was forgotten because of an unfortunate turn of history, and, on the other, we have a Victorian monster, mixing an alleged Platonic/ Cartesian disdain for the body with evolutionary dogmatism. In both cases there is an obvious projection at work which tells us perhaps more about the interpreter than about the author he or she is referring to. What exactly does Tylor say if we could ask him those questions he could not ask himself and which should ostensibly indicate his “position”? In the guise of answers, let us simply juxtapose quotations. In certain passages, Tylor seems to claim quite clearly that sign language is natural. When he says, for example, that “the gesture-language is the common property of all mankind” (Tylor 1964: 12), such an expression clearly implies its natural character. At the same time, he seems to consider sign language as more primitive than spoken language, while the word “primitive” does not appear to be endowed with positive connotations. For according to Tylor, sign language is “in great part a system of representing objects and ideas by a rude outline gesture, imitating their most significant features […]. To seize the most striking outline of an object, the principal movement of an action, is the whole secret, and this is what the rudest savage can do untaught […]” (Tylor 1964: 10, 16). At this point, however, Tylor comes across one considerable problem: this language, natural and primitive as it is, is surprisingly difficult for a 178.  This essentially skeptical view of Tylor is perpetrated by Jennifer Esmail: “For Tylor, physical gesture and abstraction in language were inversely related, and therefore signs – shared by those perceived as ‘primitive’, including indigenous North Americans, deaf people, and children – were obviously a less sophisticated form of communication. […] This strange alignment of apes, prehumans, indigenous peoples, and deaf children was one that relied upon racist, ableist, and speciesist linguistic Darwinist principles that constructed a hierarchy of language forms beginning with primitive signs and culminating in writing and Western literacy” (Esmail 2013: 123, 124).



Chapter 5.  The origins of language 145

speaking and hearing adult to learn. How is this possible, when even the “rudest savage” can speak it without any learning? Not because it is a language that deaf children acquire in the same way we acquire the spoken language, so that a late learner with a different linguistic background is confronted, when trying to master it, with the same kind of difficulties that learning of any second language would involve (this would be the obvious answer from a modern point of view). Tylor, who makes an exemplary confusion of ontogenetic and phylogenetic here, comes up with a surprising explanation: it is because we are simply too intelligent to learn it, because we have forgotten our (phylogenetic) origins, because we have acquired the habit of thinking in words to such an extent that – as a director of the Institution for Deaf-Mutes explained to Tylor – “it is difficult for an educated speaking man to get the proficiency in it which a deaf-and-dumb child attains to almost without an effort” (Tylor 1964: 16). Is sign language universal? Yes, the expression “the common property of all mankind” certainly does indicate universality: The best evidence of the unity of a gesture-language is the ease and certainty with which any savage from any country can understand and be understood in a deafand-dumb school. A native of Hawaii is taken to an American institution, and begins at once to talk in signs with the children, and to tell about his voyage and the country he came from. A Chinese, who had fallen into a state of melancholy from long want of society, is quite revived by being taken to the same place, where he can talk in gestures to his heart’s content. (Tylor 1964: 47)

Yet at the same time, curiously, it has independent “dialects”: “[…] There is so much in each (dialect) that differs from the others in detail, though not in principle, that they may, I think, be held as practically independent, except as regards grammatical signs” (Tylor 1964: 15). Can it be made into a language through the use of methodical signs? On the one hand, Tylor’s answer is positive: the grammatical signs invented by hearing teachers may “express ideas which do not come within the scope of the very limited natural grammar and dictionary of the deaf-anddumb” (Tylor 1964: 11). Yet at the same time, he claims that these partly artificial systems are probably very useful in teaching, but they are not real gesture-language, and what is more, the foreign element so laboriously introduced seems to have little power of holding its ground there. So far as I can learn, few or none of these factitious grammatical signs will bear even the short journey from the schoolroom to the playground […]. (Tylor 1964: 18)

Tylor’s answer is, from a modern standpoint, no less ambiguous if we ask whether this language has the properties commonly ascribed to what we nowadays designate as natural languages, properties like grammar and syntax. According to Tylor, it does have one, but not the other: “The gesture language has no grammar, properly

146 Deafness, gesture and sign language in the 18th century French philosophy

so called; it knows no inflections of any kind, any more than the Chinese. […] It has however a syntax, which is worthy of careful examination” (Tylor 1964: 19).179 In short, according to modern standards, sign language as described by Tylor is a scientific monster, a mixture of irreconcilable statements. It is and is not universal, it is and is not natural, and it is and is not language, all at the same time. It is not a scientific object of any sort, in the sense we tend to understand it. Not knowing what to do, we can make it into anything we like – a series of acute observations on how sign language functions (because Tylor does offer these and was undoubtedly one of the few theoreticians manifesting a real curiosity in the matter) or simply a conservative, “Victorian” set of prejudices (because it does not fit the image we have of a progressive view of the same matter). Even Tylor’s own “considerable experience of deaf adults and deaf children” is debatable: “It is in Deaf-and-Dumb Institutions that the gesture-language may be most conveniently studied, and what slight practical knowledge I have of it has been got in this way in Germany and in England” (Tylor 1964: 11). Whether we decide to interpret this sentence as an expression of modesty, veiling his “considerable experience”, or as the imposture of an ego- and ethno-centric thinker is up to us. Be that it as it may, this ambivalence reveals perhaps yet a deeper form of ambivalence. What is the driving force behind all of these theories  – Condillac’s, Rousseau’s, Tylor’s, and those of many other thinkers? In the Treatise on the Sensations, the moment when human perceptive faculties develop is posited as properly impossible. This beginning cannot be remembered in any way; any evidence concerning it must be gathered from hearsay, or from observing other children (as St. Augustine did centuries ago). It is impossible because it can never be experienced. As the psychologist Henri Wallon once wrote: “The child cannot but experience his childhood. It is up to the adult to have a knowledge of that childhood” (Wallon 1968: 11).180 If this is true of ontogenesis, the problem is obviously even more pressing for phylogenesis. How did it happen? What did the childhood of our species look like? How did we begin to do this or that – to speak, for example? As fascinating as this question is, the answers will always remain on the level of speculation. Edward Tylor put it well: “But we know so little about the origin of language, that even the great philologists are forced either to avoid the subject altogether, or to turn 179.  As for this “careful examination”, we have already quoted some of Tylor’s observations concerning word order in sign language. 180.  This sentence nicely sums up a dilemma which structured, to a large extent, philosophical debate on childhood developed over centuries: is the child only an imperfect adult, or is there, to the contrary, a value in childhood in itself, the child even being “father of the man”, according to Wordsworth’s famous adage?



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themselves into metaphysicians in order to discuss it” (Tylor 1964: 10). It is, of course, not only because there is no one to remember that past. It is because the period over which speech developed was probably so long that it largely surpassed not only an individual’s lifespan, but many generations. But because the question is – and always will be – compelling, it has become the site not only for speculation, but for fantasy. And this speculative and phantasmatic drive consists in looking for analogies: something observable has to be found in the world we live in and within the lifespan we embrace, something that would give as a clue, in a condensed form, as to what might have happened in the mythical past. First, there is the analogy between ontogenesis and phylogenesis: perhaps we might learn something from children. Then there are the savages, whose language and mores we do not understand, so we readily transform the geographical distance that separates us into a temporal one. And then there are the deaf, who obviously communicate, but whose language seems so much more primitive and less “artificial” than ours – so is it not possible that they could perhaps embody the origin we are looking for? The idea that that there is something archaic about sign language – an idea which certainly does not have to bear a negative meaning – may emerge in quite unexpected domains, and is far from being absent in recent literature. Let us conclude by mentioning a very interesting example of how persistent this idea might be. French psychoanalyst Benoît Virole has recently proposed to reformulate some of the fundamental presuppositions of psychoanalytic theory in the light of sign language linguistics. Virole’s argument is quite compelling (whether it could have a general bearing, however, is a different question). Sign language obviously is a signifying practice equivalent, in many respects, to spoken language, namely in its differential character: “The gestural sign belongs to the register of the symbolic inasmuch as its meaning, within the system of signs which constitute the language (langue), is dependent on the presence of other signs” (Virole 1990: 69). Yet there is a difference which consists in the dynamic nature of sign language, in its continuous character as opposed to the “vocalic fragmentation” in spoken language – signs are produced in space, may merge into one another, imply variations in movement etc. – and in what Virole calls a fundamental figurability of that language (here, Virole makes an allusion to Freudian concept of Darstellbarkeit, which functions as one of the key features of dream work). Sign language is “the only language which enables us to observe the formation of original signs on the basis of the iconic encoding of the real” (Virole 1990: 77). Sign language thus offers a “dynamic model of iconicity”, situated between the somatic and the psychic, between the meaning and the body (just like the Freudian drive); as such, it might serve to elaborate what Virole calls a “dynamic topography”, distinct from the static, structural models prevailing in psychoanalysis. Virole stresses that this analogy (to use the term again) does not imply any judgment as to the subjective

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disposition of those speaking the sign language. It does not mean, for example, that the speakers of sign language are closer to their unconscious than the speakers using the spoken language. There is neither more nor less unconscious, nor a different unconscious in the deaf. But the dynamic of the exchanges between the psychic reality and the external reality takes place through synesthetic ways of passage which, in the hearing subjects, belongs to the unconscious life. (Virole 1990: 36)

And he openly admits that his “metapsychological” speculation “brings us back to the insight of Enlightenment philosophers who believed in the existence of certain original archaic features present in the signs of the deaf ” (Virole 1990: 77; see also Virole 2006: 314 for the development of the same argument) – with this reserve, of course, that for Virole, those archaic features are situated in the “archeology” of the subject, not that of the human species. In other words, the tendency to view sign language as an “archaic” form of communication (both on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic level) seems to be remarkably tenacious. And it is only natural that this tendency (as well as the speculations and analogies it brings about) gives rise spontaneously to imaginary projections that bear both positive and negative meanings; they become literally invested with a desire – a desire to get a glimpse into our impossible childhood.

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Let us now review the basic aims of the present study, the materials that were examined and the way they were interpreted. The principal aim was to study certain works of 18th-century philosophers with regard to a cluster of questions related to the phenomena of deafness, gesture and sign language. It becomes apparent that these phenomena – the mention of which is surprisingly frequent in Western philosophical thought – are almost always treated as “symptoms” of more general questions: of perception, of language origins, of the very possibility of abstract thought and a few others besides. The contexts in which these phenomena are treated may, of course, differ considerably from one thinker to another; however, they do allow for a certain classification. Two images of deafness emerge. In the first two chapters we discuss what we propose to call deafness as deficiency, that is, deafness considered as the absence of one dimension of sensory perception, as an absence of capacity (or limited capacity) for abstract thought, and also as a cause of limited access to language and communication. In the context of this paradigm, little attention seems to be paid to sign language itself and deafness is generally considered in negative terms: as absence, incapacity, limitation, and above all, isolation. Within this paradigm, the figure of the deaf individual is curiously coupled, in some philosophical texts, with the figure of a wild child, that is, a child deprived of language and interaction with other members of the human family. This analogy is further illustrated by the concrete case of Victor, a wild child found at the end of 18th century, whose education was based on premises derived from the empiricism of the time. In chapters 3 and 4, we discuss what might be termed deafness as difference. From this perspective, deafness is viewed as not being a limitation – to the contrary, the observation of deaf individuals and of their language may provide us, according to some philosophers, with interesting insights as to the way our own perception and our own language works. The writings of Pierre Desloge and Denis Diderot (discussed in Chapter  4) provide good examples of this non-deficitary conception of deafness.

150 Deafness, gesture and sign language in the 18th century French philosophy

Finally, in the fifth chapter, the role that manual communication plays in the 18th-century language origin theories is examined, with special focus on selected writings by Condillac and Rousseau. In the final sections of the chapter, we show that there is a strong connection between these language origin theories and the interest in sign language which certain thinkers viewed as a “survival”, or holdover, of an archaic, primordial form of communication of the human species as such (Bébian, Tylor). There is no need to stress that the aim of the present study was not to write a detailed historical overview of what philosophers had to say about deafness, sign language and gesture. Instead, the aim was to pinpoint the “symptomatic” nature of those phenomena and to investigate what kind of more general issues they are related to in particular philosophical writings. In order to do this, it seemed more productive to present a detailed reading of a limited selection of texts, rather than to sketch a broad historical tableau. It also seemed more productive to concentrate on one particular historical period, rather than to skip from one period to another. The 18th-century French philosophy, with its interest in sensory perception, the existence  – or non-existence  – of innate ideas or the question of language origins, offered itself as an ideal field of investigation, for as was pointed out in the introduction, it is in this period that the issues in question became the object of sustained philosophical enquiry. The purpose, therefore, was to show that the topics treated here are inseparable from a certain philosophical context that extends well beyond them. This contextualization is of utmost importance: reading the texts on sign language, gesturing and deafness without taking into account that the three phenomena are nearly always treated as exempla, as illustrations of broader – and sometimes very crucial – philosophical problems, may give rise to anachronistic interpretations and to very questionable conclusions as to what the philosophers in question might have “thought” about them. The most fruitful way of proceeding seemed to be that of making a close reading of certain – sometimes very short, sometimes more extensive – selected passages, the advantage being that instead of providing general  – and usually problematic  – statements of the type “Rousseau thought that…”, the reader is able to follow the text itself and is free to agree or to disagree with the interpretation offered here. The history of gestures and sign language thus conceived appears rather resistant to clear-cut value judgements. Even though some texts examined here certainly seem more progressive than others, it would be anachronistic to classify the authors as being simply “right” or “wrong” – it would amount to supposing that there was a distinct object called “deafness” or “sign language” that would give rise to “right” and “wrong” judgements on the part of the 18th-century authors. There was no such thing: in many cases, it is difficult, if not impossible, to extract a



Chapter 6.  Conclusion 151

distinct “opinion” on those matters from the texts examined. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, this history is, in its very essence, a history impregnated by the imaginary. Indeed, the figure of the deaf person, as it appears in the writings of Western thinkers, is endowed with many heterogeneous meanings. It is because the deaf and their language have very often played the role – together with other conceptual “characters” in the 18th-century philosophical landscape – of a projecting screen for innumerable fantasies and conjectural judgements bearing meanings both positive and negative, depending on the context. Deafness may thus become an emblem of a certain exoticism (hence the frequent comparison between the deaf and savages), of a certain innocence and archaism (hence the close connection between the language origins theories and the 18th-century view of sign language) or of isolation due to sensory deficiency (hence the comparison with wild children). In other words, whenever it comes to the question of deafness, signing and gesturing, there is always some kind of imaginary at work – in most cases, the imaginary of the hearing people. The present study seeks to identify, using a concrete body of textual material, at least some of its elements and to demonstrate how ambivalent it may become. If this is so, one crucial question remains: why bother to study this history at all, and more importantly, why bother to study precisely its imaginary dimension in all its ambivalence, instead of simply preserving its “progressive” side and casting aside all the texts that nowadays appear problematic or obsolete, if not offensive? It is with this question that we would like to conclude. Michel Foucault once characterized his philosophical undertaking as an attempt to write “the history of the present”. As such, he opposed this “history of the present” to a mere “writing a history of the past in terms of the present”, that is, looking at the historical material exclusively with respect to the present state of affairs (Foucault 1995: 31). This distinction is crucial. For as far as deafness and sign language are concerned, writing a “history of the past in terms of the present” consists in assuming implicitly that we have now managed to get rid of all prejudices and preconceived notions, that we know everything there is to know and that we are capable, from a progressively acquired objective standpoint, of judging the past in an unbiased way. This is a very naïve and conceited presumption, to say the least. Writing a “history of the present”, on the other hand, consists in calling into question what might be termed a “teleological” view of history, according to which history is a simple, linear progression from imperfection to perfection, from ignorance to knowledge. It consists in preserving all the ambivalence of the historical material in order to learn from it and to show to what extent the present state is shaped precisely by the past that it sometimes pretends to have “overcome”. Thus, an attempt to write a “history of the present” does not consist in treating the ancient prejudices as if they were true or still valid, but in pointing

152 Deafness, gesture and sign language in the 18th century French philosophy

out that the imaginary projections, some of which were analysed previously, are not simply things of the past, despite the fact that they may have recently taken a more sophisticated form. Let us take one brief example from contemporary literature: in The Mask of Benevolence, Harlan Lane has admirably analysed what he calls the “audist psychology of the deaf ” (Lane 1999: 50–66). This “psychology”, dictated by a paternalistic approach of hearing experts towards deaf people, consists in a set of largely negative attributes ascribed to deaf subjects: lower IQ, tendency to mental disorders, inferiority of sign language etc. (Lane compares these attributes to those ascribed by the colonizers to the colonized). Despite the fact that this “psychology” presents itself as scientific and appears to be founded on rigorous research and testing, the results of which were published in peer reviewed scientific journals, Lane shows that on closer inspection, there is no consistency behind such statements and that the “psychology of the deaf ” seems to be little more than precisely an imaginary construction of the above-mentioned “experts”: “There is no psychology of the deaf. It is, in fact, not clear that there can be one. The term may inevitably represent the pathologizing of cultural differences, the interpretation of difference as deviance” (Lane 1999: 65). This is a telling example that even the alleged scientific approach is not devoid of fantasies and imaginary projections and it would be imprudent to believe that with the recognition of sign language as a full-fledged language, we have irrevocably shaken off the shackles of the deficiency paradigm. For the remnants of this paradigm undoubtedly still survive not only in the layman’s mind, but also in what presents itself as scientific research. Apart from this, no one can deny that the “deficitary” and “differential” views of deafness, that can be traced back many centuries, continue to be at the heart of many recent debates and discussions, especially in the controversies surrounding cochlear implants. The idea of implanting deaf subjects in order to endow them with spoken language clearly follows in the footsteps of the deficiency paradigm the historical foundations of which we have attempted to trace, the aim of the procedure being to “cure” deafness, viewing it through the lens of “negative biology” (Ladd 2007: 8) and thus eliminating it as a cultural and anthropological issue. Who, then, can say that there is nothing to learn from the complicated set of prejudices, but also of remarkable insights concerning deafness and manual communication, as they have appeared in Western history? Many aspects of contemporary discussions (both positive and negative) stem from a long historical development to which the 18th-century French thought, with all its remarkable richness and complexity, has added one of the most significant contributions. As such, it undoubtedly deserves a detailed study and a closer look at what exactly were the 18th-century authors saying on the matter, in both positive and negative sense.



Chapter 6.  Conclusion 153

This methodological decision to avoid pronouncing anachronistic value judgements does not reflect any kind of neutral stance on the author’s part. The very decision to look at the subject matter from the perspective outlined above proves his conviction that deafness is a cultural fact, not a mere sensory deficiency, and that he fully subscribes to the “differential” paradigm. The author hopes to render better service to this conviction by pinpointing, without simplifying, the textual ambiguities that the older authors have left us with, rather than by blaming them for not getting things “right”.

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Index

A Aarsleff, Hans  30, 46 abstraction  4, 22, 31, 83–84, 96, 123, 125, 139 accusative language pattern  90 affect, affectivity  46–47, 52, 58–60, 84, 128 Althusser, Louis  102 Amman, Johann Konrad  18, 43 analysis  30, 72–73, 80–82 Andrén, Matts  6 animal, animality  20–21, 22, 32–33, 37, 45, 106–111, 129–130 anthropological difference  21, 106–111, 129 arbitrariness (linguistic)  13, 33, 79, 111, 114, 117, 127 Aristotle  20–21, 31, 40, 62, 67, 68 Armstrong, David  114, 136 Augustine, St.  16, 61–68, 86, 102, 104-105, 134, 146 autism  36, 51–52 B Baudiffier, Serge  91, 98 Bauman, H. Dirksen L.  57 Baynton, Douglas  3–4 Bébian, Roch-Ambroise Auguste  14, 15, 80, 115, 126, 127, 137–142, 150 Bellugi, Ursula  136 Benvenuto, Andrea  86, 98 Bickerton, Derek  118–119, 122–123 Bimbenet, Étienne  111 blind, blindness  21, 25, 27, 34, 45, 55–56, 85, 99 Bloom, Ralph  88 Bolton, Martha B.  27

Bonnaterre, Pierre Joseph  43 Brentari, Diane  6 Bruce, Scott G.  61 Buffon, George Louis  28 Butler, Judith  17 C Campbell, Gordon  104–105, 106, 112 Canguilhem, Georges  132 Capirci, Olga  105 Caselli, Maria C.  105 Cassirer, Ernst  12 Charrak, André  30 Cheselden, William  27 child, childhood  10, 25, 28, 58–60, 69, 103–105, 110, 116–120, 122, 131–135, 146–148 Chomsky, Noam  122, 135 Chottin, Marion  34 Christiansen, John B.  19 Christophe, Anne  134 Clark, Greame  59 cochlear implants  19, 59–60, 152 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de on human mind  30–32 on the deaf of Chartres  31–34 on the origin of language  50, 115–120 on wild children  38–39 influence on Itard  42, 48–53 on sensory perception  26–29 on Molyneux’s question  27 Condillac’s statue  26–29 convention (linguistic)  13, 50, 111, 113–115, 121, 124–125, 138 Copple, Mary M.  136 Coppola, Marie  120

Corballis, Michael  136 creolization  118–120 Curtiss, Susan  45 Cuxac, Christian  6, 71, 80, 92 D Danesi, Marcel  136 Darwin, Charles  87 Darwinism  3 Deaf-gain  57 deafness anthropological view of  11, 13, 68, 75, 79, 84, 98–99 as a cultural fact  4–6, 55–61, 78–82 as an epistemological problem  11, 31–34, 74–75, 94–96 congenital  40, 43, 126 medical view of  11, 19 deficiency paradigm  17–20, 39–41, 53, 59, 95–96, 152 deixis  63 Delaporte, Yves  5, 61–62 Demonet, Marie-Luce  108 deprivation  1, 26, 31, 38, 99 Derrida, Jacques  29 Descartes, René  34, 109 desire  52, 58, 60, 148 Desloges, Pierre  1, 8, 13, 77–82, 114, 139, 140, 141 Diderot, Denis on gesturing  83–93 on sign language  96–99 on sensory perception  94–96 on linguistic inversions  83–85 on the origin of language  84–85 on blindness  99 Douthwaite, Julia  26 drive  58–59, 147

164 Deafness, gesture and sign language in the 18th century French philosophy Du Laurens, Henri Joseph  26 Durand, Béatrice  52, 68 E Emmorey, Karen  6, 90 empiricism  13, 36, 68, 75, 149 L’Epée, Charles Michel de in deaf folklore  70–71 the educational approach of  71–73 Épinay, Madame de  52, 68 epistemology  11, 13, 73, 85, 93–94 ergative language pattern  90–91, 93 Esmail, Jennifer  109, 144 experiment of the pharaoh Psammetichus  40 the “doll house” experiment  57 with the “theoretical mute”  85–88 with music  94–96, 99 F Farnell, Brenda  144 finger alphabet  3, 74 first man  28 Fischer, Renate  77, 78, 82, 108 Foucault, Michel  25, 61, 151 Freud, Sigmund  58, 59 Friederici, Angela D.  134 G Geertz, Clifford  97 Genlis, Madame de  52, 68 Gérando, Marie Joseph de  126–127, 137 gesture compared to signing  2–7 indicative  110, 111 moral aspect of  61–62 quotable  114 unaccompanied by speech  85–93 as opposed to voice  124–125, 127–130 children’s gestures  103–105, 135 See also Sign Language, Home-Sign

Goldin-Meadow, Susan  6, 88–93, 117, 119 grammar  66, 71, 77, 83, 119, 133, 135, 145 H handshape  4, 74 Hedberg, Ulf  57 Hewes, Gordon W.  136 hieroglyphs  128 Hobbes, Thomas  8, 9, 16, 20–24, 31, 33, 34, 62, 67, 78, 102 Hockett, Charles F.  5 home-signing  7, 8, 33, 40–41, 53, 78, 89–90, 92, 119, 122 Humphries, Thomas  5, 57, 71 I iconicity  5, 81, 92, 147 ideas abstract  98, 139 complex  31–32 innate  10–11, 25, 33, 36, 44, 150 natural order of  13, 83, 89, 90–91, 93 idealism  30, 96 imaginary  17, 21, 35, 52, 66, 68, 82, 148, 151–152 imagination.  22, 30, 60, 80, 82, 116 imitation  33–34, 37, 40, 46, 65, 88, 128 interaction  12, 21, 33–35, 69, 149 instinct  45, 104, 106, 122, 129 interjections  81, 140–141 inversion (linguistic)  83, 85, 91 Itard, Jean-Marc on deafness  39–43 on language  47–50 on human nature  44 J joint attention  109–111, 117 Jones, Ernst  59 Josephs, Herbert  83–84, 87

K Karmiloff, Kyra  133, 135 Karmiloff-Smith, Annette  133, 135 Kegl, Judy  120 Kendon, Adam  4, 6, 61, 114, 136 Komesaroff, Linda  19 Kristeva, Julia  64 Kyle, Jim G.  143 L La Mettrie, Julien Offray de  45 Lacan, Jacques  45, 58 Ladd, Paddy  5, 152 Lane, Harlan on extrapolative error  17–18 on Abbé de l’Epée  73 on Victor and Itard  51–52 on Pereire  19 on the psychology of the deaf  152 language language of action  7, 50–51, 71, 101, 108, 114, 117, 127, 137, 140–141 acquisition of  47–50, 104–105, 109–111, 118–120, 133–135 natural language  43, 72, 127, 129, 138, 140–141 See also Sign language, Signs, Home-Signing Leigh, Irene W.  19 Lenneberg, Eric  51 Leroi-Gourhan, André  136 Liddell, Scott  6 Locke, John  10, 27, 44, 46, 134 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus)  14, 16, 102–113 M Macherey, Pierre  25 Maher, Jane  5 Mallery, Garrick  3, 74, 91, 128 Malson, Lucien  36 Mampe, Birgit  134 Mannoni, Octave  52–53 manual alphabet  70, 74 Marty, Eric  26

Index 165

materialism  102 Mauss, Marcel  61 McNeill, David  88 memory  22, 23, 26, 30, 33, 50 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  111, 136 metalanguage  74, 102, 113 metaphor  79–80, 97 Meynard, André on deficiency paradigm  18 on learning sign language  56 on cochlear implants  59–60 Mirzoeff, Nicolas  97, 98, 107 Molyneux’s question  27, 45 Montaigne, Michel de  106–108 Morford, Jill P.  117 Morgan, Michael J.  27 morphology  90 motherese  133 Mottez, Bernard  70 Murray, Joseph J.  57 music  75, 94–96 Musset, Alfred de  70 Mylander, Carolyn  119 N need  46, 48–50, 52, 104, 116, 128–130 Newport, Elissa L.  119 nomothetes (nomothetic theory of language origins)  111–113, 115 norm, normativity  3, 55–56, 132 O Ogilvie, Bertrand  45 Okrent, Arika  6 onomatopoeia  124 ontogenesis  14, 50, 102, 104–105, 114, 122, 124, 146–147 oralism  3, 18–19, 53, 73, 96, 113 P Padden, Carol  5, 57, 71 painting  79–80, 128 pantomime  4, 18, 63, 67, 84, 88, 128 passion  42, 128–131

perception auditory  17, 82, 128 sensory  10–11, 21, 25–31, 46–47, 94–96 visual  55–56, 90, 128–129 Philonenko, Alexis  131 phylogenesis  14, 50, 102, 104–105, 114, 122, 146–147 pidgin  98, 118–119 Pillard, Richard  36, 57 Pinel, Philippe  43, 51 Pizzuto, Elena  105 Plato  42, 109, 111–112 pleasure principle  58–59 Polich, Laura  120 privation  11, 18, 40, 42, 79 psychoanalysis  58, 147–149 Q Quartararo, Anne T.  70 Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius  137 R Rée, Jonathan  97, 107, 138 referential triangle  109, 117 reflection  32, 39, 81, 82, 116 Robins, Robert Henry  121 Rosenfeld, Sophia  13–14, 25, 70, 71, 73, 108, 142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques on the “first man”  28–29 on wild children  36–37 on deafness  73–75 on language origins  121–131 on education  131–135 S Sacks, Oliver  56–57 Saint-Loup, Aude de  61 Sallandre, Marie-Anne  92 savages  12, 25, 41, 87, 144–145, 147, 151 Schmitt, Jean-Claude  61 Sebeok, Jean U.  61 Sebeok, Thomas A.  61 Sebond, Raymond  106 Senghas, Ann  120 sensations  28, 30, 33, 39–40, 75 senses: sense of hearing  27, 31, 38, 42 sense of sight  27, 56, 74, 95

sense of smell  26, 45 sense of taste  27, 126 sense of touch  27–28, 45, 47, 74, 95 Sicard, Roch-Ambroise Cucurron  43, 50, 69–70 signs analytical signs  81 artificial signs  50, 72, 140 methodical signs  15, 71–73, 79, 138–139, 141, 145 natural signs  50, 71, 81, 116–117, 126, 138 ordinary signs  81 reflected signs  81 sign language alternate  61 American  119 French  59, 77, 138 monastic  61 Nicaraguan  119–120 of North American Indians  3 as a natural language  7, 43, 72, 79, 138–141 as an original language of mankind  3, 138–139, 141, 142 as a universal language  4, 13, 70, 80–81, 137, 141, 143, 145 as a transparent language  70, 81, 140–141 See also Gesture, HomeSign signed French  139 significator  122 signified  122 signifier  58, 60, 122 Singleton, Jenny L.  117, 119 Slobin, Dan  135 Socrates  42, 112 space  5, 27, 45, 57, 72, 80, 92 Spencer, Patricia  60 Stam, James H.  13, 115, 136 Starobinski, Jean  122–123 state of nature  36–37, 69–70, 121–126, 139 stereotype  18 Stokoe, William  4–5, 91, 109, 114–115, 136 subject, subjectivity isolated  37, 48

166 Deafness, gesture and sign language in the 18th century French philosophy and language  21–22, 58 and perception  10–11, 26–29 supplementation of the senses  11, 74, 93–94, 99 symbolic  17, 21, 87, 147 syntax  51, 91, 114, 145–146 T Taub, Sarah  81, 92 Thomas, Downing A.  113, 130 Thonnard, François-Joseph  62 Tomasello, Michael  110–111, 117 Tran Duc Thao  110 Tylor, Edward  15, 87, 91, 97, 109, 128, 142–147, 150

V Vargas, Yves  29, 131 Vermeerbergen, Myriam  6 Virole, Benoît  60, 73–75, 113, 117, 147–148 voice as opposed to gesture  115, 123–125, 127–131, 140–141 as opposed to speech  20, 40 vocal-gestural complex  15, 50, 114, 120, 137, 141 Volterra, Virginia  105 Vos, Connie de  5 W Wallon, Henri  146 Wells, Herbert George  55–57 Wermke, Kathleen  134 Wilcox, Sherman E.  114, 136

Wilson, Arthur M.  98 Winnicott, Donald  60 Woll, Bencie  143 word order  86–89, 146 wild child of Aveyron (Victor)  36, 38–39, 43–52, 59, 117, 149 of Burundi  36 Genie  45, 51; of Lithuania, 37, 38, 48, 116 raised by the pharaoh Psammetichus  40 writing  42, 144 Y Yau Shun-Chiu  128 z Zeshan, Ulrike  5

The book represents a historical overview of the way the topic of gesture and sign language has been treated in the 18th century French philosophy. The texts treated are grouped into several categories based on the view they present of deafness and gesture. While some of those texts obviously view deafness and sign language in negative terms, i.e. as deficiency, others present deafness essentially as difference, i.e. as a set of competences that might provide some insights into how spoken language works. One of the arguments of the book is that these two views of deafness and sign language still represent two dominant paradigms present in the current debates on the issue. The aim of the book, therefore, is not only to provide a historical overview but to trace what might be called a “history of the present”.

isbn 978 90 272 0503 2

John Benjamins Publishing Company