In their anthropological study of a tribe of scientists, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar speak of the methodological problems involved with drawing conclusions from observation. A key component is the familiarity of the observer to the evidence being observed: “it is important that testing be carried out in isolation from the circumstances in which the observations were gathered,” they write. “On the other hand, it is argued that adequate descriptions can only result from an observer’s prolonged acquaintance with behavioral phenomena” (37). This is the essential difference between two schemes of validation, “favouring the deductive production of independently testable descriptions” (etic) versus “favouring the ‘emergence’ of phenomenologically informed descriptions of social behavior” (emic) (38). Ultimately they side with the emic, producing a document which describes the life of a laboratory in situ, but not without warning of the dangers of “going native,” that is, an “analysis of a tribe that is couched entirely in the concepts and language of the tribe” (38).

This seemed to me an essential concern not only for the observer-anthropologists, but for the scientists they are studying. Although Latour and Woolgar insist that they are describing social phenomenon, and thus producing something different than scientific facts, there is a definite tension about how and why to differentiate observer from participant. I began to wonder where the line between emic and etic began to break down, and the extent to which an observer has always-already “gone native” with respect to their observation. Since the emic/etic divide is essentially a question about description, one might look to how observations are produced by language. And since language is largely thought of as a social phenomenon (at least for literary scholars and anthropologists), the way it is observed by scientific analysis, that is, as a material effect produced by the brain and vocal organs, calls our validation schemes into question.

I thought it might be productive to use Latour and Woolgar to think about the emergence of thinking about language as a material and embodied process, as intimately connected to our brains and bodies as to culture and history. Interestingly enough, in the history of science, the moment at which the ‘fact’ of language begins to take hold is the moment it begins to break down. The identification of aphasia as a loss of ability to read or write, not caused by genetic deficit but by disease or wounding, challenged the notion that language was the seat of rationality or a direct extension of our cognitive abilities. Like Heidegger’s proverbial hammer: it is only when the hammer breaks, thus revealing a deficit, does it become apparent in its being. The shock of aphasic deficit displaces habitual models of perception, turning normative linguistic brain function into something strange. Medical inquiry usually begins with a realization of a negative capacity, and this is thoroughly present throughout the history of aphasia studies.

In 1783, Samuel Johnson suffered a mild stroke leaving him unable to speak for several weeks. During that time he provided an account of his condition in letters, detailing a paralysis in his ability for speech while his cognitive abilities remained intact. Being a religious man without a modern clinical vocabulary, Johnson attributes this loss of speech to spiritual intervention: “it hath pleased the almighty God this morning to deprive me of the powers of speech,” he writes to his doctor (Eagle 2).

Several decades later in 1866, Charles Baudelaire, living in exile in Brussels, falls into ill health and begins to experience aphasic symptoms that he struggles with until his death a year later. There are biographical records of confused patterns in Baudelaire’s speech, such as “asking his friends to open (rather than close) an already open window” and “saying ‘see you tonight’ (rather than ‘goodbye’) as they parted” (3). Baudelaire’s autopathographic description notably diverges from Johnson’s, as he writes in a letter to his mother that “you need to understand that writing my whole name now is a great task for my brain” (3).

Chris Eagle notes that what is interesting about these two letters is how they “illustrate a major paradigm shift which takes place in the decades between their strokes: from the traditional conception of language as a spiritual faculty to the modern view of language as a biological process rooted in the brain” (4). Between these two literary figures we see the historical implications of considering how the loss of proper speech functioning may be discontinuous with the faculty of language as a whole.

Of course, the progression that leads to Baudelaire’s self-diagnosis of his speech disorder is only the beginning of modern aphasiology; the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries are marked by the exploration and development of accounts of language that stem from materialist approaches to neurological functioning. In his study of the medical literature on aphasia in modernity, Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain, 1825 – 1926, L. S. Jacyna states that “It is possible to assign an inception date to the literature on aphasia: 1861” (3). Jacyna is referring here to the early work of Paul Broca, who famously attributes the faculty of articulate language to the left frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex.

The assignation of a specific inception date for aphasiology is significant not only because it confirms the paradigm shift between Johnson and Baudelaire, but because it emphasizes modernity’s obsession with novelty, the sense of the ‘now’ brought about by scientific discoveries that allow progression from a less developed past. Although the neurolinguistic findings on aphasia develop over time, we can see how within a modernist framework individual case studies can have immediate epistemological purchase on problems as fundamental as the relationship between mind and body. Here we can identify something of the the kind of social factors that determine the construction scientific facts that Latour and Woolgar are interested in.

While there was some debate on the adequacy of Broca’s account of aphasia, by the mid 1860s the discussion shifted from the question of whether language had a localized function in the brain to how this function could be conceptualized. In order to clarify this question, Broca hypothesized three levels of language function: The “general language faculty” which refers to the ability to establish a relationship between an idea and a sign encompassing all forms of signification, the “faculty of articulated language” which involves the conversion of ideas into speech through “emission or reception,” and the “voluntary organs” such as “the larynx, the tongue, the soft palate [voile du palais], the face, the upper limbs, etc.” (web).

Antonio Damasio writes “the true hallmark of Broca’s aphasia is agrammatism, a defect characterized by the inability to organize words in such a way that sentences follow grammatical rules and by the improper use of nonuse of grammatical morphemes” (532), for example, “utterances such as ‘Go I home tomorrow’ instead of ‘I will go home tomorrow’” (533).

Although more sophisticated accounts of neurolinguistic functioning build upon Broca’s formulation, I refer to his 1861 paper because it marks the emergence of thinking about the articulation of speech as a faculty apart from both physiological and cognitive conditions. Broca writes that “There are cases where the general language faculty persists unaltered, where the auditory apparatus is intact, where all the muscles, not even excepting those of the voice and those of articulation, obey the will, and yet where a cerebral lesion abolishes articulated language” (web), a special condition he terms aphemia.

It should be noted this famous presentation of aphemia wasn’t Broca’s primary objective at the time. It was part of a case study he presented at a symposium at the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris on the question of whether there was a causative relationship between the mass of an individual’s brain and their intelligence (for which he interestingly cites the autopsy of Lord Byron as evidence) (Jacyna 69). Broca then, can be evaluated not only as a significant historical figure, but also as a case study for the kind of reductive materialist impulse that posits an inherent and totalizing link between the faculties of personality, reason, and intellect to physical and localized neurological conditions.

Although Broca’s model was amended and updated, the view that a very specific, circumscribed area that functions as the seat of language remained dominant for multiple decades. In an 1889 survey of cerebral localization in aphasia, the American neurologist Dr. M. Allen Starr defines three “epochs” in the history of aphasiology. The first of these was Broca’s, and the second occurs with Carl Wernicke’s distinction between motor and sensory aphasia in 1874. Damasio describes patients with Wernicke’s aphasia a “[having] no difficulty producing individual sounds, but they often shift the order of individual sounds and sound clusters and can add or subtract them in a way that distorts the phonemic plan of an intended word; for example, they may say trable instead of table” (534).

In other words, observing a difficulty in word production that is unrelated to motor defects allows Wernicke to hypothesize these as separate functions. The third epoch is inaugurated in 1883 with Jean-Martin Charcot’s call for a more refined account of sensory memory in which both spoken and written language interact (330-1). Charcot’s model views the word as a “complexus” in which one can discover “four distinct elements; the auditory memory picture […], the visual memory picture […], and also two motor elements, the motor memory of articulation and the motor memory of writing; the first developed by the repetition of movements of the tongue and lips necessary to pronounce a word; the second by the practice of motions of the hand and fingers necessary for writing” (331). Although Charcot’s descriptive terms would certainly not be accepted by neuroscientists today, it is the first step toward a more integrative, embodied approach to cognition and memory in which the movement of the hand is intimately connected to the articulation of language.

In giving this account of the history of aphasia studies, I don’t mean to say that we should group language in with other bodily occurrences such as digestion. In fact, I’d like to combat forms of ‘bad materialism’ that reduce everything to physical processes. But if we are to state anything about language as a ‘fact,’ it must therefore be situated somewhere between social and embodied articulations. Also, as we see in the surprisingly late realization of language production as a faculty apart from comprehension, the production of scientific knowledge is inseparable from its social situation. I think Latour and Woolgar would agree.

Works Cited:

Broca, Paul. “Remarks on the Seat of the Faculty of Articulated Language,Following an Observation of Aphemia (Loss of Speech)” Bulletin de la Société Anatomique, 6, 330-357. 1861. Web.

Damasio. “Aphasia.” New England Journal of Medicine. 326.8 (1992).

Eagle, Chris. Dysfluencies: On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Jacyna, L. S. Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain 1825 – 1926. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000

Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve. Laboratory Life: the Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Malabou, Catherine. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

Salisbury, Laura. “Sounds of Silence: Aphasiology and the Subject of Modernity.” Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950. Ed. Salisbury, Laura and Shail, Andrew. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Starr, M. Allen. “Discussion of Cerebral Localization: Aphasia.” Transactions of American Physicians and Surgeons. New Haven: The Congress, 1889.