Nineteenth-century linguistics redefined words as inert marks of a representation, not living organisms

Evidence

Words were not a living organism but the parts of a representation. Placed together they formed an image of something, a coded message, a telegraph. They were made of marks that were meaningless in themselves; inspected closely, they dissolved into dots. In forming a representation, moreover, they presupposed a subject, who stands apart like the viewer of a painting or the visitor to an exhibition: ‘everything proceeds from him and addresses itself to him’. The purpose of linguistic representation was this communication between speaking subjects. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 444

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘representation’ theme Mitchell runs through earlier chapters (the world-as-exhibition, the observer standing apart) — this is the linguistic version of the same structure. — connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”