Shorn of their links to a mythology of race origins, the debates on Indo-European philology still persist in a rarefied and highly specialised form today; however, the academic limelight they once enjoyed has been usurped by a structuralist
socio-linguistics and its many posthumous variants, which, by employing the notion of a structured set of differences, appear to reject the idea of a philosophical ‘tracing back’ of diverse language elements to their common roots.
For the greater part of our century, the synchrony of structuralism has satisfied the radical modernist demand for a functionalist language model which could, like a functionalist aesthetics, act unencumbered by the ornaments of history and tradition. It was for this reason that Saussurean structural linguistics became intellectually popular in post-revolutionary Russia, via such figures as Sergei Karcevskij, who had worked with Ferdinand de Saussure in Switzerland, and who returned to Moscow in 1917 to take his part in the ‘Formalist’ school of Russian linguistics.105 However, many of the central tenets of Formalism were to be challenged by the publication in 1929 of Marxism and thePhilosophy of Language under the name of Vladimir Nikolaevich Volosinov.106 This text not only challenged Formalist theories (which it described as ‘abstract objectivism’) but dug deeper in positing a methodological link between Saussurean linguistics and Indo-European language theory. It is widely believed that this book was principally the work not of Volosinov but of Mikhail Bakhtin; I intend to concur with that view,107 and also with the opinion of Graham Pechey, for whom Bakhtin’s philosophy was ‘a post-structuralism co-inciding with the displacement that brought about structuralism itself’.108 Bakhtin’s critique of the ‘abstract objectivist’ and hypostasising tendency in both Saussurean and Indo-European linguistics, and of their mutual reliance on the technique of recognising an
‘artefact signal’109 can be seen to relate to the institution of the swastika by Schliemann and others as the visible mark (artefact) which could serve to reify (using the alliance of a ‘race’ with its ‘trace’) the concept of a structurally derived proto-Aryan language. For Mikhail Bakhtin, the methods of Indo-European comparative linguistics were the source of Saussure’s emphasis on a static structure preceding and governing the communicative act. Despite Saussure’s emphasis on synchronic values, his structures are still conceived as the precedents for any kind of dialogue. As Robert Stam has suggested in his conceptual summary of the Bakhtin school, the Russian saw in both Saussurean and Indo-European linguistics ‘a kind of linguistic necrophilia, a nostalgia for deceased languages’.110 Aryanism should also be included in this necrophiliac definition as an ancestor-worship conducted through the medium of the symbol.
I have suggested that the move from Indo-European language theory to an Aryan race is a temporal shift from a synchronic comparison across diverse languages to a diachronically conceived original set of native Aryan speakers, and in this sense, as Max Müller suggested, is as absurd as the notion of a
‘brachycephalic grammar’. However, Bakhtin did not allow either philology or structuralism to escape so lightly: he suggested that both must of methodological necessity work with material which is both ‘dead’ and ‘alien’ to the actual practice of speech utterances and human dialogue in a living language, and that such an emphasis revealed a hegemonic strategy on the part of a linguistic
‘caste’ to translate the meaning of ‘the word’ to the multitude: ‘the first linguists
and the first philologists were always and everywhere priests.’111 Once linguistic meaning is perceived as essentially alien to the accidents of dialogue and parole (‘externally changed and removed from the routine of life’), Bakhtin argued that the responsibility for language and for the generation of meaning is taken away from those who use it for the purpose of intra-personal communication, and placed outside their control. It is important to note that Bakhtin identifies this an essentially ‘colonial’ strategy:
The grandiose organising scheme of the alien word, which always either entered upon the scene with alien force of arms and organisation or was found on the scene by the young conqueror nation of an old and once mighty culture captivated, from its grave, so to speak, the ideological consciousness of the newcomer-nation—this role of the alien word led to its coalescence in the depths of the historical consciousness of nations with the idea of authority, the idea of power, the idea of holiness, the idea of truth, and dictated that notions about the word be pre-eminently orientated towards the alien word.112
It could be argued that to apply this critique to the ‘Aryanisation’ of the swastika would be to confuse Bakhtin’s linguistic ‘word’ with a material image. However, in the passage quoted above, we are already in the realm of the reified and alienated ‘artefact-signal’, the idea of the fixed, secret and monumental sign which represents the border and the limit of a commonly understandable and mutually communicative language. In Thomas Wilson’s book on the swastika, the anthropologist quoted a report on the reception of the Christian cross by native Americans: ‘this emblem was generally accepted by the savages as the only tangible feature of a new system of belief that was filled with subleties too profound for their comprehension.’113 In this instance, the symbol is a device heralding the unknown, the unphrasable and the incomprehensible. Aryanism both colonised the Oriental swastika and reconstructed it as an emblem which was later used by Nazism to colonise Occidental space, threatening an invasion of the West under the sign of the East.
Max Müller’s witty refutation of the Aryanists provided a much-needed deflation of the myth: yet Bahktin shows how the techniques of
Indo-European philology were already implicated in the myth-making process which was to result in the racist excesses of Michael Zmigrodski and Emil Burnouf. And in his emphasis on the deracination of language elements from the context of their utterance, Bahktin’s theories have direct bearing on Schliemann’s treatment of the swastika. Wrenched from its stratigraphic context, the swastika became the signal which could be compared with similar signals in a rough imitation of the more complex methods of philological comparison. In this light, Müller’s professional/philological censoring of the word ‘swastika’ simply allowed Schliemann to conduct amateur Indo-European comparisons using the image instead. Edward Said114 has referred to Müller as one of the philological
‘priests’: it may be that in this instance we are seeing not so much a concern for the Indian swastika per se as an example of the professional pride that wished to keep the brachycephalic brigade and the blundering amateurs out of Indo-European philology. Schliemann’s institution of the swastika as the Aryan sign par excellence was a caricature of analytical method, but it was a caricature whose material expression in archaeology delineated the essence of an approach in which the ‘philologist-linguist tears the monument out of that real domain and views it as if it were a self-sufficient, isolated entity’.115