| This study charts a cultural history of the practices of manipulating language that underlie the Symbolist project and inform the Saussurean perspective. It examines the interconnected rise in nineteenth-century France, England, and Germany of popular cryptography, optical and electric telegraphy, and international language movements, phenomena which each involve an attention to manipulating language's material aspect. In so doing, it attempts to hew the line between two historiographic models: Michel Foucault's discourse analysis and Friedrich Kittler's media history. If Foucault's account of the "return of language" in The Order of Things powerfully characterizes the historical situation, it remains exclusively focused on discourse as an epistemological effect rather than a mediatic practice; Kittler's "discourse network of 1900," according to which discourse is produced by "random generators," highlights the importance of media, but tends to reduce discursive effects to epiphenomena of a medium's unitary function. In focusing on techniques glossed over by these accounts, I propose a Deleuzian rhizomatic structure of associations between practices, while insisting on the distinctive trajectories of mediatic and discursive systems, which interact only obliquely.;I begin with the telegraph's foregrounding of methods of signification, producing a new intensity of attention on the material of communication, as this is manifest in technical handbooks and popularizing accounts of the medium as well as invocations of telegraphy in literary texts. I next explore nineteenth-century cryptographic practice and its consequences, looking at contemporary cipher manuals and the reception of actual or spurious cryptograms in telegraphic correspondence, classified advertisements, and the work of literary authors. I read these pragmatic practices against analogous techniques invoked by contemporary Symbolist modes of producing and deciphering aesthetic language, with all their epistemological differences. Finally, I connect these procedures with the philosophical and literary tradition concerned with universal, absolute, or originary language, and its more modest incarnation in the international language movements of the late nineteenth century. Taken together, I argue, these developments seeking clarity and practicality in communication produced a shadow effect of technical esotericism, which has its analogue in the literary esotericism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. |
