Welcome, everyone. It's my great pleasure to be here to see that this has launched. I want to thank again, over and over again, first, our illustrious guests. Solovy for being here. Hello. The Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry. Of course, the SBS, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and all the others that you see thanked. It's been a great thing to come together this way. So thank you. It's also my pleasure now to introduce Michael Holquist. Professor Holquist is a professor of comparative literature and emeritus at Yale University. He received his doctorate from Yale, after which he was a member and often chair of Slavic departments at Yale, UT Austin, Indiana University, and then back to Yale, where he was for many years also chair of comparative literature. He is a past president, as most of us know with the MLA. His publications include articles on a wide variety of topics from utopian fiction, detective stories, Lewis Carroll's nonsense, and several Russian writers. His first book in 1977 and then a second edition in 1986 was on Dostoevsky and the novel. And after that, he devoted himself for a number of years to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, translating and editing four volumes of biography, Bakhtin, and dialogism, Bakhtin and his world, and many others. In addition to a number of articles on a wide range of subjects, Holquist has written, co-authored, and edited a total of eight books, including translations. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Stockholm and the Bernd-Sewell Prize for excellence in teaching at Yale College, clearly a very illustrious colleague of ours. He has allegedly retired in 2004. I think he's flunking retirement, as far as I can tell. He is currently working on two interesting projects, one near and dear to my personal heart, a book on modern German and Russian philology. And with his wife, Elise, the operation of a wine importing company to introduce Americans to the joys of the La Rine wine. So please help me welcome, and thank you for being here. Michael Holquist. Can everybody hear me? Good. David has asked that we perhaps publish some of the remarks that we're making in yet another activity that he and Chantel are sponsoring, a new journal. And when that happens, this talk will have two short epigraphs that I'd like to begin by reading. The first is the relationship simile dissimile is something quite different from the relationship simile simileia. And yet the relationship nonetheless goes elusively and profoundly to the heart of Valier. That's Saussure from the late Saussure. And even shorter from Sergei Kaczewski, one of my personal heroes, it is impossible to create a single word. I'd like, first of all, however, after that, to thank our hosts, David Grambling and Chantel Warner, for inviting us to what promises to be an exciting intellectual occasion. I feel more than the usual amount of gratitude to the organizers of this event, because it gives us all the opportunity to make ourselves publicly heard in Arizona on the issue of recent linguistic and cultural legislation that exposes the real world stakes in any discussion about the possibility of a single language. Our announced topic is multilingual, a term whose suggestion of number and diversity would appear to offer an alternative to ideologies based on the priority of any single language. And yet the adjective may be less innocent than it appears insofar as it does more than merely name a condition in which several languages are spoken. I raise the question because multilingual and its more common subset, bilingual, are both what grammarians call anaphoric adjectives. That is, their meaning depends on another prior word. In this case, they're Siamese twin monolingual. The nature of the problem, it seems to me, is already discernible in the fact that whatever else may be the case, both terms are incomplete in themselves and depend on the other to be meaningful, a first index that should make a suspicious of any claims to unity in the oneness presumed by monolingual. As an anaphoric concept, multilingual is specifically grounded in the opposition between many and one. And it sanctions, therefore, as its antonym the possibility that there might be such a thing as a single language. And it's, of course, true that at a very high level of generalization, we distinguish between people who do not understand common languages other than their own and those who do. This common sensical use of language may be useful in certain contexts, such as taking a census, if not further thought through, however, this way of conceiving language blinds us to its fractured nature when analyzed more thoroughly. A more accurate view, I will argue, is that the language of those who are said to speak only one language in this everyday sense of the term is already immersed in the ineluctable disunity and formal multiplicity that are the necessary condition of having any language at all. Failure to perceive the systemic multiplicity that is at the heart of any spoken language is a linguistically uninformed view that historically and politically has eventuated in what I will address today as linguistic monism. Monism is always a negative doctrine. It is in the business of saying no to ideas that challenge the claim of unity and that to which it ascribes the condition of being one. Linguistic monism is a positive belief system, conceives the world as consisting of geographically dispersed common languages, each of which has a unique separate identity of its own that is both stable and unitary. And its aspect is an ideology of denial. Monism thus opposes the reality of change. Each of the distinct common languages that it recognizes as a solid entity is, in fact, at an unstable point in its history as a system, of course. Further, even when such a separate language is conceived in its present moment as an immaculately integrated unity, it is, in fact, internally riddled with contending dialects. Languages are named for the people who speak them, and while a language, when used in this way, may, therefore, at some level of abstraction define a population, the speech of any community is merely a specific sector in an ocean of isoglosses that comprise its systemic limits. The other identifying features of linguistic monism are found not in what it denies, but rather in what it affirms. In its positive avatar as a belief system, monism holds, often unconsciously, that among the conjuries of self-identical tongues in the world, one language stands out as not common. Historically, the singularity has been thought to derive from a number of different sources, often from some primordial Urschwache given by the gods. According to Plato's Fidris, the Egyptian gods soothed the order into language through the introduction of literacy. Later, European scholars fought over the issue by debating what language Jehovah spoke to Adam. And in the 17th century, not only Hebrew, which made a certain amount of sense, but Swedish and Flemish were also put forward as candidates for such a pre-Babalian time. These attempts to uncover an endemic purity in natural language were made amidst a general ignorance about the nature of languages of phenomenon in its own right. And so such theories are really guilty of a certain historical naivete. The situation is quite different when we include attempts to identify a language that is not only unified, but whose singularity is so totally unsullied a body that it has powers of its own. Such a language enters the realm of magic, separated from other human tongues as the sacred is distinguished from the profane. My favorite example of this is the case of Fray Luis de Leon, an Augustinian monk and professor of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at the University of Salamanca, who in the 16th century translated the Song of Songs into Spanish. He was a very considerable poet, by the way. But he translated the Song of Songs into Spanish from the original Hebrew text. And for his labors, the church condemned him to five years in prison, not really because his target language was a vernacular Spanish, but also because in translating from the Hebrew, he had used a vernacular source language. As the inquisition charged, he had employed the corrupt original, as opposed to the Latin vulgate, the assortative translation of the Bible sanctioned by the church, and which therefore had ideological, if not historical, priority. Well, the most familiar examples of such a practice derive from religion, post-romantic nationalism, and to see nation states insist on the unique nature of language to bind its citizens together through the purity of its presumed wholeness. Of these, there is no end of examples. France, of course, has a long history of attempting to legislate the unity of a certain view of the French language, going back at least to François Premier, who sought to promote French culture linked to a specific version of the French language in his 1589 Ordinance de Villiers-Cotechais. How successful he was may be gathered from the fact that at the end of the 18th century, according to the official survey of the Assemblee Nationale, out of a population of 28 million, only 3 million French citizens spoke French well, and even fewer were able to write it. At least 6 million did not speak French at all. Napoleon then was thoroughly French for his time, and so far as he had learned the French language only at the age of 15, and spoke with a heavy Corsican accent all his life. After 1789, rapidly changing French governments sought to centralize their power and robbed the Catholic Church of its ability to proselytize and incredulous peasants in their own patois. So they formulated a French that even if spoken by less than half the population would be the only legal language in the new revolutionary state, banning the several other tongues then commonly spoken in France. In Germany, patriots such as Fichte made torturous arguments for the purity and superiority of the German language after Prussia's 1806 defeat by Napoleon. He was particularly pleased to point out that it was much better German than French, which had been diseased by Latin. For 19th century philologists such as Jacob Brim, who was also in that incidentally illegal historian, the native language had the capacity to find its speakers as uniquely German in the present because it contained the still living memory of the primordial Teutonic past. There are unhappily many other examples from the past and what is more scandalous from the present in which a particular language is secularized as a means unique in its power to unify the nation. I reference only in passing the activity of contemporary zealots such as John Tanton, the founder of pro-English, the organization founded to defend Arizona's 1994 English-only law and who is also predictably leader of the most radical anti-immigration organization in the country, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or for which the acronym is, of course, FAIR. Bilingual, although it names a separate set of problems, is like multilingual, also complicit in monolingual, monolingual since both have the antinemic capacity to enable the monism of monolingual. Many of us are uneasy with such complicity and the question then becomes how can we unleash the potential heteroglossia of multilingual by decoupling it from its dark monistic twin? Opposition to linguistic monism has historically taken several characteristic forms. There have been moral arguments based on appeals to fundamental human rights. There have been political arguments based on resistance to the overweening power of the state. But this afternoon, I will assume the justice of those arguments and turn to, rather, the recent history of linguistics, including Bakhtin's meta-linguistics, in an attempt to understand better the apparently counterintuitive truth that the condition of being in at least two languages appears to be the natural condition of having any language at all. Since the 19th century, when the academic study of language breaks away from classical philology, there have been scientific arguments against monism as linguists have sought to understand the intrinsic plurality of language in a number of different ways. Their activity that is most pertinent to our topic this afternoon is the attempt to theorize a connection between the polarity of the one and the many, the primitive in the philosophical sense, roots of mono and multi as they apply to language. Arguably, the first modern attempt to meditate the problem was that of Wilhelm von Humboldt in the modern period at any rate. He posits the binary opposition which haunts all subsequent attempts to define the nature of language. The static abstraction of extrapersonal laws which, drawing on Aristotle, he called anergia for activity and ergon, rules or work, which constituted the systemic aspect of language. Humboldt was seeking to understand the relation between the unspoken, closed, phonetic and syntactic rules that determine whether an utterance is meaningful or not in any given language and the unlimited possibilities for creativity each speaker of such a language has to shape meaning in particular situations in real life. Von Humboldt was a Kantian who was disturbed by the utter absence of the role of language in critical philosophy. He felt Kant's neglect of language was particularly egregious because language in von Humboldt's view was precisely the key to answering the most important questions left unresolved by Kant's epistemology. So he argued that as von Humboldt argued that language was not as had previously been assumed really the tool of thought, ergon, but was rather the activity of thinking itself, the activity anergia. A political liberal during a brief period of Prussian reform, he sought to justify liberty by arguing that freedom was inherent in the unlimited ability of humans to exploit the rules of language. I know it only in passing that it's no surprise then that he is the real hero of Tromsky's 1966 book on a history of modern linguistic thought. Von Humboldt's major work was published after he died and was prepared by his rather, his brother Alexander was a great explorer, but it didn't really understand what Wilhelm was trying to do. But that's something else. The point is that he anyway, his work was totally subsumed as soon as it was published by the emphasis on ergonistic language that now emerges in Germany. The unpredictable role of the individual speaker was an embarrassment to militants such as those that comprised the Jung Grammatica, the Neo-Gramarian school of Osthoff and Blugermann for instance. They emphasized the impersonal rule governed aspect of language because it permitted them to make claims that were more general and abstract similar to those of natural scientists who were attempting to understand the laws of physics. Earlier in the century when Laplace presented his celestial mechanics to Napoleon, the emperor sought to discomfort him by remarking the book contained no mention of God. Laplace famously replied that he had no need of that hypothesis. And in a like vein, the Neo-Gramarian, for the Neo-Gramarians, the existence of real-life speakers of a language was the hypothesis for which they had no need. It is therefore ironic that it was precisely Ferdinand de Sautier in his early Paris phase, one of the most brilliant representatives of the Neo-Gramarians, who theorized a return to the creative aspect of language. He did so after his return to Geneva in 1891 where during the last years of his life he obsessed the question of what it is that linguists study. He embarked on a magnum opus intended to redefine the nature of language, a project that was left uncompleted at his premature death in 1913. He had, however, been using portions of his manuscript for the last three courses that he taught before his death. And two of his students, Bayi and Sashayi, not particularly gifted students, by the way, published their notes from these courses in 1915 as the Côte Languistique Genaqau. It was this version of Sautier's theories that admirers and opponents revered and attacked in subsequent decades, including, among others, Bakhtin and his friends in Russia. They were among the first to condemn what appeared on the evidence of the Côte at any rate to be the necessary first condition of Sautier's attempt to define language. This distinction between Lang, the general rules, the governor-particular language, and Pachot, the speech of the speakers of that language. This fatal inter-duality, as Sautier calls it, is at the heart of the course's attempt to articulate a coherent definition of language as the discipline-defining subject of general linguistics. Only by neglecting the random anarchy of Pachot and concentrating on rule-ordered lang could the investigator, he says, provide a fulcrum that satisfies the mind. This stage of Sautier's thought can be summed up in his dictum from the course.  The dictum that says, or the quote that says, from the Côte, everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this. In languages, there are only differences. Now, I will return to this well-known facet of Sautierian theory when I later discuss the relevance of Bactine's meta-linguistics to our topic, but let me remark at this point that the standard view of Sautier, based on his student's notes, turns out to be based on a number of misconceptions. Misunderstandings have arisen because everyone assumed that the magnum opus Sautier was known to be working on had disappeared. History is full of tantalizing losses and it was assumed that, like the lost chapters from Aristotle's Poetics and the Definition of Comedy, that Sautier's manuscript on the nature of language had vanished. Then in 1996, as workmen were digging up the old Orhan Chari on the Sautierian estate, a trove of manuscripts and notebooks was discovered, including sketches of the major book that Sautier was working on at the time that he died. The manuscript, variously labeled by Sautier's Science de Longage or de la double sens de Longage, contains several elements that complicate the stereotypes based on the 1950 publication of his student's notes. It seems clear that Sautier was working his way towards an architect tonics that would ultimately be able to embrace the idiosyncrasy of Prohor. The key to doing so is found in a seminal essay by Sautier's student, the great Russian grammarian, Sergei Karsevsky, who, drawing on his association with the late Sautier, Karsevsky was not only a student of Sautier's, he taught at Genève for several years, until the 1950s. Karsevsky, drawing on his association with the late Sautier, with whom he had many, many close conversations, they drank together, writes, opposition, pure and simple, necessarily leads to chaos and cannot serve as the basis of a system. True differentiation presupposes a simultaneous resemblance and difference. Ultimately, the glue that would be proposed both to distinguish between and bind together the primordial role of difference in language would be sought in precisely the area that the earlier Sautier had abjured. The living speech used in human communities. Sautier, we can see from the Al-Shari manuscripts, was himself working towards this answer. He develops in a elaborate maritime metaphor. He was very poetic in these last essays. I mean, the writing is very, very different from the style of the earlier Sautier. It's full of wonderful drawings. It's kind of a mystic near the end. At any rate, among the metaphors that he develops in these late manuscripts is one that goes like this. I'm quoting now, a sign system must be part of a community. Indeed, any semiological system is not a ship in dry dock, but a ship in the open sea. Which is the real ship? One in a cupboard yard surrounded by engineers or a ship at sea. Quite clearly, only a ship at sea may yield information about the nature of a ship. The community environment changes everything. A sign system, excuse me, is destined for a community just as a ship is destined for the sea. But much as Moses did not live to enter the Promised Land, Sautier did not live to see the appearance of theories developed precisely to study the ship of language in the sea of community. Later examples of which, such as the linguistic turn in British philosophy represented by ordinary language thinkers such as Vile and Austen up to Christ and related to Wittgenstein's last phase. After the Searing Critique of Ernst Gelner's 1958 Words and Things, the School of Lawson's authority with the exception of Wittgenstein, just as the study of speech acts of which Mary Louise has provided the definitive account, I think, and the work of Irving Goffman, John Searle, and William LeBov began to have an impact in the 1960s. A flood of impressive work has now emerged as the study of everyday speech has evolved in the works of people like Michael Silverstein, John Gumpers, Deborah Tammann, Tannin, and many others. New disciplines have risen to study how language intersects with extra linguistic aspects of the cultures that speak them, such as discourse analysis, conversation analysis, CCA, pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics is coming to being to study the effect of society on language and the sociology of language is coming to being to study the impact of language on culture. But these later movements have all had a very securitist relation to hardcore linguistics which in the period after Sozier's death was dominated either by the structuralism of Jakobsen and Trubetskoye in Europe or the behaviorist version of structuralism advocated by Leonard Bloomfield in the United States. Each of these schools had a complicated, to say the least, relation to the early Sozier of the Coeur published by his students. Bloomfield does not even mention Sozier in his 1933 masterpiece, Language. Nevertheless, Sozier's early commitment to an abstract system is a guiding principle in both Bloomfield and Jakobsen. There was however an even more extreme version of structuralist linguistics that was about to enter the lists and clear all before it. A formal date for this new revolution might well be 1946, the manuscript date of Zellig Harris's methods in structural linguistics. Widely regarded as the first step in the ascendancy of transformative grammar as it unfolded under the leadership of Harris's student, Norm Chomsky. Harris was a protean theorist. Despite the formalist abstraction of much of his work, the anthropologically oriented linguist, Edward Sapir considered him to be his heir. In fact, he wanted him to be his son-in-law. Harris used to come up to Haven to see Harris, to see Sapir. At any rate, on the one hand, Harris strove to incorporate mathematics into his analyses. He has three books that try to prove that mathematics and language are essentially the same thing. He sought to demonstrate that Bertrand Russell's dictum that math equals language was wrong, that the opposite was in fact true, that language equals math. At the other end of the spectrum, he's generally considered one of the founders of discourse analysis. There was attempts to test the limits of phonemic recognition of aliphones in spoken speech. And he was deeply involved in the early attempts to get machine translation started. A lot of his work was funded, as we were saying, by the CIA and the military. As was a lot of Roman Jacobson's work during the same period. It was Harris's student, Noam Chomsky, however, who took the study of language to heights of speculative abstraction, not reached since the attempts of the 13th century, Woudistae, to define a universal grammar. There are many ways to chart the twists and turns in Chomsky's thinking over the years. Coming to them all, however, has been a much revised account of a duality between unconscious legislating principles that enable humans to communicate, but which themselves are never articulated on the one hand, and on the other, the language as humans actually speak in everyday life. At various times, Chomsky has named the two aspects of the dualism, I-language intentional, or I stands for intentional or internal, and E-language expressive level. In a later formulation, a major manifesto in the journal Science in 2002, is really a very important piece. He takes up the question under the rubric of the faculty of language. Instead of talking about language, he talks about the faculty of language, and he does that to distinguish between two levels of the faculty. He expresses the difference between the two faculty says FLB, the faculty of language broadly conceived, and the faculty of language in the narrow sense, FLN. I mean, forget the political overtones of FLN. His point was that while all animal species had to a greater or lesser degree faculty of language in the broad sense, only faculty of language in the narrow sense characterizes human beings. It is, in fact, the evolutionary element, he argues, that uniquely defines us as human beings. FLN is defined as an abstract internal computational system manifest in the benefits that it bestows, such as the capacity of human children, readily to master any human language into which they are born without instruction, the ability to translate from one language to another, and above all, the capacity to generate infinite sentences on the basis of finite rules. A speaker is capable of using and understanding sentences that have no physical similarity, no point-by-point relationship, to any sentence that he or she has ever heard before. My friend, Dick Oman, who is now happily on the Board of, the governing Board of the, Modern Language Association, used to conduct an interesting experiment with his students in the English department at Wesleyan that demonstrates the vastness of this capability. He showed 25 freshmen, a simple cartoon, and asked them to describe in one sentence what was going on in the picture. All 25 responses were different. Oman then had the results studied by a computer program designed to determine how many grammatically correct sentences could be generated from only the words used in these 25 sentences. The result was 19.8 billion different possibilities. Tromsky's 202 ceases has recently been in the news. In fact, it was in the news last week, again, because of its contestation by Dan Everett, expert on the Amazonian Pirrachah tribe, a group whose language defies most linguistic categorization. Pirrachah seems not only to lack tenses in numeracy, but this was the key. It lacks recursion. Recursion is a concept used in many disciplines, such as mathematics and computer programming. In fact, computer programming is impossible without it. But in linguistics, it refers, first of all, to the syntactical feature of embedding clauses within sentences, such as when we say, Jack suspected that Ellen knew that Jane was not telling the truth when she told Dick she had been present when Arnold fell off his bike. More generally, I've been working at Haskins Lab with some cognitive scientists on the problem, or the difference between reading complex texts and the kind of reading we do when we read very simple texts. And a way of dramatizing or making real complexity, try to define complexity in a way contested, by the way, that's a real problem. And what we did was to use very complicated examples of recursion, and it seemed to have worked.  But at any rate, it's a very important piece of Tromsky's argument for the peculiarly human ability to have broad linguistic capability. An example that might help us here, of how recursion works, because it sounds simple, but it's immensely rich. I'd iterate, something that might help us think about it is an advertisement for Droste, the Dutch chocolate that has the picture of a nurse serving a cup of cocoa on a tray that also holds a box of Droste chocolate with a picture of a nurse serving a cup of cocoa on a tray that also holds a box of Droste chocolate showing a nurse serving a cup of chocolate, you get the idea. It's the principle behind the idea of Misonov beam, and the Russian stacking doll known as Matryoshka. But why is recursion important, you will ask? And it is so because, as Tromsky argues, it is the algorithm that wells language to thought. It's what makes the way people think possible. Or to use terms from Humboldt, from which we began as foray, recursion is the name of the process that binds Ergon to Energia, a limited set of rules that permits us to make infinite combinations of words. Recursion is important to my argument, so let me give one more example. It is, remember, an activity, a process, an epistemological dialogue between abstract rules and concrete words that makes a real life dialogue possible. The most frequently used metaphor for explicating a recursion, for explicating recursion as a process is the relation of a cookbook to the actual preparation of a meal. Now I'm now going to skip over because I want to leave lots of time for discussion, so I'm gonna skip over some examples of that. But I go on to say that without denying the theoretical elegance or the originality of Tromsky's theory, it's nevertheless possible to see him wrestling with the great problem that has haunted all significant modern attempts to isolate what language is. How to find a single concept that could encompass all the systemic oppositions and existential contingencies that comprise language as a living phenomenon. Although he slights treatment of the subject of language as such, it is perhaps Kant who comes closest to a definitive account of the problem at any rate, a problem which he never attaches to language, of course. It was Kant's emphasis on synthesis, verbindung of a priori concept and the intuition from experienced life that was the fundamental activity of the human mind, the relation between Anshonk and Bekliff. And it was that which opened the way for whom both claim that language is thought, the groundwork of epistemology. In one way or another, then, all the figures I have mentioned so far have sought to specify this synthetic activity in one way or another. That's what they all have in common. The recursive process and the various schemes I have described is the activity of thinking the same problem, synthesis of opposites in different ways. If we could at least tentatively agree on so much, then the inclusion of Bakhtin in this series becomes obvious. Dialogue is his version of the synthesis that Linklis have grappled with since at least von Humboldt's opposition between Ergon and Anergia. They have all perceived a gap at the foundational heart of language. This recognition has forced them again and again to define language as a synthesis. You get i-language, e-language, FLB, FLN, signifiant, signifiant. I mean, the number of doublets goes on and on, all of which seek to bridge the gap. What Bakhtin brings to the problem is a different foundation for the inquiry. A classic definition of this foundation is found in a characteristically eccentric fashion. In a footnote, in his essay on the chronotope, where he writes, quote, we employ the Kantian evaluation of the importance of time, space, in the cognitive process, but as forms of the most immediate reality, not as transcendental. Well, he indicates the epistemological and indeed ontological claims of Kant as aspects of his scheme. He insists on treating these metaphysical elements from a different point of view. That point of view begins by assuming that everything is dialogical, everything is dialogical, because nothing is in itself. Like Socier, he sees the world as primordially relational. But he goes beyond even the Socier of the late notebooks in emphasizing the role of personal interaction as his base in the community. Returning from a moment to our opening remarks, we might say that for Bakhtin, not only are there anaphoric adjectives like hot, cold, multi-lingual, but that for Bakhtin, everything is anaphoric insofar as everything is interconnected, cannot mean without the other. This emphasis on the relation between community and language is what drives Bakhtin to concentrate on as the subject of his concern, what he calls utterance or viscosevania, the living word in exchange between unique individuals as the fundamental unit of language rather than sign or the sentence. Utterance is active, it is an event, a special category that Bakhtin always juxtaposes with existence itself, subudia, the event of co-being. Bakhtin's metalinguistics grows out of his conception of human beings as persons who share the task of being responsible for their own situatedness in a particular time and place. The language of each of whom, then, is part of an ongoing exchange with others who must also answer for the unique place that they occupy in existence. And so, shared in environment, there can be no first word and no single word. This is not the place to explore, especially at this point in my talk, this is no place to explore Bakhtin's ideas in any detail, but in conclusion, I hope enough has been said to suggest that there is a definition of the real of what can be known and the formulation of an ethic in dialogism. It follows from the complex nature of language as it has been defined by linguists as a phenomenon and by Bakhtin as a meta-linguistics as a core dynamic of human life. And it follows also that nothing so complex and shared as language can ever responsibly be treated as a sequestered unitary thing. Even the official form of a state mandated dialect is no less ribbon than the dialects it has excluded within the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies that are at work in language itself. Monolingualism is always a fiction and therefore a state policy is always suspect. Thank you. Thank you very much for a great talk and I think very inspiring and very informative for us all. Since you started out with some references to political conditions, I was hoping that you could help us understand a little bit more the deeply rooted fears of monolingual speakers. I mean, we're fighting with this on an everyday basis and you have beautifully elucidated really what it all means with language and thought and the binary opposition and so forth. It's all wonderful. This is academic talk and great. I really admire this. But it also I think would be great if you could add a little bit more sort of explications how we could get strength in our battle against precisely that population that holds power but seems to be afraid of the multilingual aspect. And it's the same both here, let's say in Europe where they're afraid against the off, let's say English coming in or Turkish coming in and here, Spanish coming in. So from a linguist, I would like to get some political argument if you don't mind. Well, Excuse me, I too want to thank you for a really rich and fruitful talk. I was thinking, no, no, no, no. No, no, really, I actually, the phrase though, it is language is a science system destined for community. Let me to think, is there a community destined for a science system? And I want to pick up more on what you're just saying to us because part of what you traced out for us was the way in which a number of linguists are operating in their descriptions of language but also showing us that you weren't explicitly relating that to a political backdrop against which they're making those descriptions. And I'm wondering, and I bet that you could address something more too, that would actually be something about the contemporary condition that we're facing. I'm not asking for an explicit. Yeah, yeah. But I do think it's interesting because in asking for that, just a little bit of a reflection on the difference than in the political vision of a socior, the political vision of a Chomsky, the political vision of a Bakhtin. I'm also wondering, in the end, one of the things that you seem to have come to is that there is ultimately something fascinatingly disruptive about language itself that will evade ultimately any of these attempts to contain it under a term of say, monolingual. I'm wondering if you could reflect on that. Well, it is certainly true that I believe language with a capital L is because it's so enriching and multiple in itself has somehow the power to disestablish claims to absolute truth, which is what really is at issue. It's something that is dead, something that is one, something that is... On the other hand, as somebody who studies literature, it's clear that fiction can be very powerful too. And I think that just as scientists have been trying to show that scientifically there is global warming going on, it's possible to create ideologies out of whole cloth. I mean, the lies that we see every day around us are astounding. And the facts don't seem in the moment to be having any effect. I believe that in the long run, the various ideologies that have based themselves on monolingual base. I mean, I think of the Nazi attempt to take over German, I mean, during the 30s, or the attempt before 1953 when Stalin wrote his famous two essays in his Vistia about language, the attempt of the party to control language, all come sooner or later crashing down. And so there is a historical process. I mean, great time in which I think any ideology that bases itself on lies, especially the lie of a magic language will fail. Unfortunately, most of us may not live that long. But it happens, it's a very slow historical process. But ultimately, as I said, the creative aspect of language, if I may say so, it's recursive. Possibilities are real. And the attempt to cut that knowledge out and claim that there is only one language is a fiction. And it won't last, it won't last. I mean, there are different versions of it that keeps bringing up, unfortunately, but sooner or later they all come apart. I want to go back to the ethical aspect that you mentioned at the end of your talk. I can see, and you were pretty persuasive in making the lineage between Bakhtin, Chomsky, Van Humboldt, et cetera, in theories of language that still believe in the individual faculty of language to operate all this. But from my corner of the woods, second language acquisition, who have pretty much the bulk of second language acquisition researchers who have discarded the Chomsky model to explain language acquisition, but have turned to more sociocultural, social views of language, and in particular, a neurological, like connectionism or complexity theory. How does the ethical come into that? And when you minimize the notion of human intention and you focus on patterns of use to explain the emergence of language, where does ethics come in there? Well, pretty quickly they come into play. I think at breakfast this morning, Mary-Louise and I were talking about an ex-president of Harvard University who publishes frequently in the New York Times, more than he does in the Wall Street Journal, by the way. At any rate, that man maintains that we should change education radically, but it's called what we need now in order to accommodate the lessons to be learned from information theory and from its use in decision theory by people like the Nobel Prize-winning statistician, Daniel Kahneman. His idea is that human, and I wish I'd brought it, I mean, because he describes human beings as essentially a mess. I mean, we have too many emotions, so we're too mucked up by feelings, essentially, and what we need to do is train our students to make decisions on the basis of statistics. And it's not by, it's not by, I mean, by the way, if you're an investor, that makes a lot of sense, right? I mean, that's one thing Kahneman makes very clear, but it's not necessarily the best thing if your wife is dying of cancer or if you are moved by a ballet or an opera or a great poem by the Suave Shimposhka, for instance. So it's not by chance. I mean, this is a roundabout way, Claire, to get back to your question about the ethics. What he also advocates in the same article is getting rid of foreign language departments because it's a waste of time to teach people foreign languages in a world that is increasingly becoming monolingual.  So I put these two things together. I mean, I think that the turn to the sacralization of statistics, the probability theory, on the one hand, with precisely the decline or the attitude that we should stop studying foreign languages. And that connection is what I think we are ethically impelled to resist. But these are very powerful forces that we're trying for. The person is immensely ignorant, I suppose, about languages that former president in immense ways. I'll talk about that Sunday, if you want more details. Oh, yeah, you don't have to give it to me, Bill. Well, I know that. I'm just, I just wanted to. I just wanted to, yeah. And the other thing about statistics in the stock market, that's, I don't agree with that either.  Well, on the other hand, I mean, kind of many. That's not a good question, but I just wanted to comment. Oh, I'm sorry. Bill, but you can talk about daddy kind of. So we've learned that the hard way. But how about Balkan's work, your former Yale colleague, cultural software, to follow on what the gentleman in the second row was talking about? That seems to be as good as any explanation I've come across to deal with some of the topics we've been talking about. How etiologies morph the memes over time. And some very bad things have long legs and long lives and they recede and come back.  And he goes into great detail to explain it. I think it's a pretty powerful argument, but I just raise that as one of the ways of thinking about social cognition, which is something Ben Teak talks about, that there are these memes out there that are attractive. He tries to use evolutionary sort of analogs to cultural beliefs like evolutionary aspects of morphology and function sort of have their lives. And sometimes they die, sometimes they don't. Often they stick around like bad viruses. Yeah, no, I'm an admirer of Martin's work. But I think that it's yet another attempt to use evolutionary theory historically. And I think that any attempt to use good old Darwinian evolutionary theory, which is absolutely non-teleological for historical explanation, even when it's an explanation that depends on a kind of non-pattern of the sort that he charts, is necessarily a highly challengeable way of going about doing history. And therefore it's a highly challengeable way to make arguments on the basis of the history that you write. I think, by the way, speaking of that, Chomsky's, you know, since 2002, has been deeply involved in evolutionary theory himself and has done a lot of publishing with biologists and evolutionary psychologists, whatever that is, to ground his idea about the distinctiveness of human recursion in evolutionary development. So once again, I mean, the criticism I make of Argon, I would make of the recent, I think that Chomsky is on to something, but I think that using Darwinism in the flat-footed way that he's now doing is a little worrying. But that's subject for another conversation. But it's very tempting always to use evolution when you're making a historical point. And it's something, I think, as we were saying before in connection with the question, very good question, about what is the relation between our knowledge of the nature of language and the ability to use that in any meaningful way to understand what is happening is the answer, I think, is that there is no systemic way to do that. I mean, that it is the case that bad ideologies based on lies are always with us. And the forces that destroy them in the end, I think, have a lot to do with the nature of language to be diverse, but beyond that, I don't think there's any, there's much you can say, certainly not evolutionarily. I just wanted to return briefly to the first question that we had from the audience, if you don't mind. It's because of the importance of von Humboldt in your talk. Is there for you any lesson to be learned from what happened to von Humboldt's efforts to build a social institution? I should never talk about von Humboldt if I'm a Germanist. Well, we know what happened at von Humboldt. But let me put it into context first. I mean, von Humboldt, for a year, was effectively depression minister of education. And he was the man who was chiefly responsible for the foundation of the new University of Berlin in 1810, which was a revolutionary change in the way universities were organized. And based on many principles, liberal principles, that von Humboldt had developed very early in his life. However, as soon as the Prussian king felt that he was able to assert control again, von Humboldt was effectively fired and was put into retirement, really, and spent the rest of his life translating from the Greek and studying Basque and other odd languages. And writing history or a description that was both historical and systemic of a Samatran language, the introduction to which is the manifesto for his theory of language as being a contest between system and creativity. But he did that in egg style effectively at his state in Berlin. And so, and his book was, except for a nutty student named Steintal, who went off in a really weird direction, he was without effect, is that what you were after? I mean, is it means to, I mean, in his own case, his own theory was less effective than it might be, both as an intellectual force and as something that worked in his own life. I don't think that that at all disestablishes the importance of the work that he did. Okay, well, but you know, it's a ask, right? No, it's a very sad story. I mean, the whole history of Prussian reform is a sad story, that's a particularly lugubrious chapter in it.