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IS A WORD A THING? It depends, of course, on what is meant by thing. If sensible properties constitute thingness, then a word is certainly a thing. It exists either as a sound to be heard or a mark to be seen. There is a long tradition, however, of denying words the status of things. In the short essay that follows, I will suggest that this tradition begins when words are required to represent things or matter. If words are to give a clear representation of things (empirical or notional), they must forego their own thingness.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Bacon draws a strong line between words and things. To emphasize the inferiority of words to things, he compares words to three forms of representation:1 a flourish on the initial letter of a patent or limned book; the statue Pygmalion fell in love with; a painting like Zeuxis's famous still life of grapes that looked so real a blackbird tried to peck them.2 This mistaking of the unreal for the real is what Bacon terms "Pygmalion's frenzy," a madness like idolatry that fixates on the image rather than the thing the image represents. In all three instances, the forbidden graven image is imagined as being itself immaterial. It offers up nothing of its own to read, to embrace, to eat. But, of course, all these forms of representation do have substance of their own, though it is not the same as that of the thing they represent. The flourish is made of ink on paper, the statue of stone, the painting of canvas and pigment. If these images were granted materiality, they would themselves become things worthy of the desire (to study, love, eat) that is the due of what they represent. Their pursuit then would be impelled not by a mad "frenzy" but by perfectly reasonable interest.
If words are to serve as transparent representations of things, their own thinglike or sensible properties must be overlooked. Or else remade in the image of what they represent. Thus Bacon hinted at an alternative system of notation that would work "without the help or intervention of words."3 Its characters, he speculated, would resemble the things they represented, either physically as pictographs or conceptually...