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Abstract
I use the one-hundred-year, transatlantic circulation of Le Corbusier's grain elevator photographs to tell the story of the short but vibrant life of a mechanized rhetoric. From 1913 to 1969, these photographs were understood in the context of a mechanized rhetoric, and they starred in the iconography of modernity. From 1971 to 2010, the same photographs were contextualized by a symbolic vision of rhetoric. So contextualized, the photographs lost their prestige and became conduits through which postmodernism was introduced into architectural theory—and from there into the American academy. As a case study of rhetoric's becoming-symbolic, then, this essay foregrounds the opportunity costs of symbolic definitions of rhetoric. It suggests that the twinned introduction of symbolism and postmodernism involved a misreading of rhetorical history.
He would like to thank Ned O'Gorman, Mitch Reyes, Kundai Chirindo, Erik Doxtader, Michael Bernard-Donals, and Michael Hyde for their comments on earlier versions of this article. He would also like to thank Barbara Biesecker and her anonymous reviewers for their patience and contributions.
He would like to thank Ned O'Gorman, Mitch Reyes, Kundai Chirindo, Erik Doxtader, Michael Bernard-Donals, and Michael Hyde for their comments on earlier versions of this article. He would also like to thank Barbara Biesecker and her anonymous reviewers for their patience and contributions.
Notes
[1] Le Corbusier-Saugnier, “Trois Rappels à MM. LES ARCHITECTS; premier rappel: le volume,” L'Esprit Nouveau 1, no. 1 (1920): 95. “Le Corbusier” was born with the publication of this article, the nom de plume appearing for the first time a scant two inches underneath the reprinted Bunge y Born. Until that point the future-Le Corbusier published under his given name Charles-Édouard Jeanneret. For more on the Jeanneret/Le Corbusier name change, see Paul Venable Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier: A Study of the Development of Le Corbusier's Thought, 1900–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 166–67.
[2] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 103.
[3] Although Le Corbusier did not acknowledge the origin of the grain elevator photographs he reprinted, he demanded that others acknowledge him. When Theo Van Doesburg reprinted grain elevators from L'Esprit Nouveau in the 1921 volume of De Stijl, Le Corbusier requested explicit recognition. See Daniel Naegele, “Misreading Walter Gropius,” History of Photography 19, no. 2 (1995): 176. On the origin of the grain elevator photographs published in Toward an Architecture (and the location of the elevators), see Jean-Louis Cohen, editor's and translator's notes in Toward an Architecture, 310–11.
[4] On the fact of the gouache, see Jean-Louis Cohen, introduction to Toward an Architecture, 8. On the composition of gouache, see Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 270.
[5] On the circulation of the photographs, Reyner Banham is the best. Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: US Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture 1900–1925 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). Also helpful are William J. Brown, “Walter Gropius and Grain Elevators: Misreading Photographs,” History of Photography 17, no. 3 (1993): 304–8; Naegele, “Misreading Walter Gropius”; and William J. Brown, American Colossus: The Grain Elevator, 1843–1943, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Colossal Books, 2010). For the De Stijl photographs, see “Pour Comprendre L'incompris,” De Stijl 4, no. 4 (1921): 62; and Aldo Camini, “Caminoscopie,” De Stijl 4, no. 6 (1921): 91.
[6] Le Corbusier's co-author on the original L'Esprit Nouveau essay, Amédée Ozenfant, claimed responsibility for the painting years before the gouache became scandalous. Cohen, introduction to Toward an Architecture, 8.
[7] Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 11; 173; 15.
[8] Vincent J. Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Praeger, 1969), 123.
[9] Even if Scully was referring to the grain elevator itself and not Le Corbusier's picture, the chronology still would not work. Montreal's Grain Elevator No. 2 was built in 1910. “Harbour Commissioners of Montreal Elevator No. 2,” Plans of Grain Elevators (Chicago: Grain Dealers Journal, 1913), 1.
[10] “Their last appearance without satire or historicizing commentary was, as far as one can tell, in Vincent Scully's American Architecture and Urbanism.” Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 15.
[11] Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier, n.p. The pictures are numbered 30 and 31 in the list that begins on page 260.
[12] To see the two versions of the Bunge y Born, see: http://spatialforces.tumblr.com/post/697625261/le-corbusier-silo-manipulated-photograph.
[13] Cohen, introduction to Towards an Architecture, 8.
[14] The tension between mechanics and symbolism in the context of modern architecture has been recognized in the pages of this journal by Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci Jr. Framing the St. Louis Gateway Arch as an example modern architecture, Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci noted its “mechanical” character. They stressed that modern architecture “jettisoned the symbolic.” Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, Jr., “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 3 (1991): 280, 266.
[15] Emphasizing the connections among architecture, rhetoric, and (post)modernism, I am following the lead of Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci, “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity, 263–88.
[16] Cohen, introduction to Toward an Architecture, 3.
[17] On the symbolism of rhetorical studies, see Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 17–25. On the symbolism of the humanities writ large, see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3; on the symbolism of human nature, see Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 3.
[18] So focused is our field on questions of symbolism that Barbara Biesecker refers to the “persuasive aspects of symbolic forms” as the “central preoccupation” of communication studies. Barbara Biesecker, Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1997), 4.
[19] Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989), 97–111.
[20] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 87, 151, 160, 266, and 299.
[21] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 151, 161. For the “traffic” citation, see Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells from the French 8th ed. (New York: Dover, 1987), 123 (emphasis removed). “Ewers” were small, decorative pitchers designed to hold water.
[22] In machines, Le Corbusier saw “a harmony whose elements proceed from a certain rigor, from a respect for and application of laws.” Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, “After Cubism,” trans. John Goodman, in L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925, Carol S. Eliel (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 142.
[23] Catherine de Smet, “‘Beware Printer!’: Photography and the Printed Page,” in Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography, ed. Nathalie Herschdorfer and Lada Umstatter (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 56.
[24] Gropius's illustrations are not reprinted in the English translation, cited below. For the illustrations, see Walter Gropius, “Die Entwicklung Moderner Inustriebaukunst,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes (1913): pictures precede page 17.
[25] Walter Gropius, “The Development of Modern Industrial Architecture,” in Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design, 1890–1939, ed. Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton, and Dennis Sharp (London: Crosby Lockwood Staples/Open University Press, 1975), 54–55.
[26] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 106 (emphases original).
[27] Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 6.
[28] “America” was “a term of comparison that finds Europe wanting.” Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 202.
[29] On the AEG turbine hall, see Walter Curt Behrendt, The Victory of the New Building Style, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), 111. On the Fagus shoe factory, see Walter Curt Behrendt, The Victory of the New Building Style, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), 122. On the Fiat factory, see Moisei Ginzburg, Style and Epoch, trans. Anatole Senkevitch Jr. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 114–15.
[30] For the mislabeled 1927 reprint, see Behrendt, The Victory of the New Building Style, 111. For the “official myth,” see Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 230.
[31] Walter Curt Behrendt, Modern Building: Its Nature, Problems, and Forms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 99. The [sic] follows William Brown, who inserted it because Behrendt most likely intended “North America.” Brown, American Colossus, 331.
[32] Reyner Banham notes that Le Corbusier was the “ultimate propagandist for American industrial buildings as the models for modern architecture.” Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 215.
[33] “Architecture is a plastic thing.” Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 87, 194. “Architecture, which is a thing of plastic emotion . . .” (“Architecture is a plastic thing.” Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 95).
[34] The OED lists this as a “special use” of the word “plastic”: “the art of shaping or modeling; an art or craft involving this, as pottery, sculpture, etc.; (also) any art form that represents three-dimensional forms, as painting, etc.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd ed., s.v. “plastic,” accessed November 13, 2013. Thus Le Corbusier uses “plastic arts” in conjunction with “contour modulation” because both involve the shaping of three-dimensional objects. “Contour modulation is a pure creation of the mind; it calls for the plastic artist.” Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 232.
[35] Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, “Sur la Plastique,” L'Esprit Nouveau 1, no. 1 (October 1920), 41.
[36] Plato, Philebus and Epinomis, trans. A. E. Taylor, ed. Raymond Klibansky (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1956), 51A, 51B, 51C.
[37] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 95 (emphasis altered).
[38] Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “Sur la Plastique,” 38.
[39] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 95–96 (emphasis original).
[40] On the two senses of touch, I follow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 17.
[41] This is consistent with much of affect theory. Drawing on Deleuze, Lundberg argues, affect “remedies a tendency in humanistic scholarship to interpret every interaction in relation to a subject who experiences and mediates it representationally by reading lines of force that are not exclusively mediated by a subject operating within a field of representations.” Christian O. Lundberg, “Enjoying God's Death: The Passion of the Christ and the Practices of an Evangelical Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 4 (2009): 400–1. Jenny Rice explains, “According to Massumi, affect is like a degree of intensity that is prior to an indexed or articulated referent. Affect describes an energetics that does not necessarily emerge at the level of signification.” Jenny Edbauer Rice, “The New ‘New:’ Making a Case for Critical Affect Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 2 (2008): 201. Lundberg's argument that affect is captured by the (Lacanian) Symbolic is not at odds with the claims advanced here, so long as the peculiarities of Lacanian terminology are considered. As Lundberg noted, the Symbolic is not the symbolic. Lundberg, Lacan in Public, 110, 20–21.
[42] Le Corbusier stressed that the mechanical power of the éléments primaires was irreducible to symbolism. Such forms, he explained, “reveal proportions that we sense as harmonious because at our core, beyond our senses, they give rise to a resonance, to a kind of sounding-board that is set vibrating.” Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 233 (emphasis mine).
[43] “Words are words: they designate.” Le Corbusier, Modulor I and II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 220.
[44] Although Massumi does not use the word “mechanics,” he is studying the impact (literally) of words on skin. Thus his memorable phrase: “the skin is faster than the word.” Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 25.
[45] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 24–26; 23.
[46] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 187.
[47] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 200.
[48] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 241 (emphasis mine).
[49] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 241.
[50] Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: John Rodker, 1931), 141.
[51] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 188 (emphasis mine).
[52] Toward an Architecture provides no reason to privilege grain elevators over any of the other machines that fill its pages. Within its pages, grain elevators are on par with automobiles, ocean liners, factories, and airplanes. However, the reception history of Toward an Architecture provides a strong reason to privilege the grain elevator photography. None of the other photographs can claim a post-Le Corbusier circulation even approaching that of the grain elevators.
[53] The photograph can be traced backwards from Le Corbusier in 1923, to the 1919 edition of Milo S. Ketchum's The Design of Wall, Bins and Grain Elevators, to the 1913 Gropius essay, to the 1913 edition of Plans of Grain Elevators, to the February 23, 1911 edition of Engineering News. Milo S. Ketchum, The Design of Walls, Bins, and Grain Elevators, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1919), 449; Walter Gropius, “Die Entwicklung Moderner Industriebaukunst,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbunes (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1913), picture precedes page 17; “Grand Trunk Pacific Elevator, Fort William, Ont.,” Plans of Grain Elevators (Chicago: Grain Dealer's Journal, 1913), 21; “The Grain Elevator of the Grand Trunk Pacific Ry. at Fort William (Ont.), Canada,” Engineering News 65, no. 8 (1911): 221.
[54] Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier, 81.
[55] Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “After Cubism,” 164.
[56] Le Corbusier on the slippage between universal and international: “If modern architecture is international today, it is so because it is universal and responds quite simply the needs, to the means, and to the aspirations of a mechanical civilization.” Le Corbusier, “Architecture and Urbanism,” Progressive Architecture 28, no. 2 (1947): 67 (emphasis original). Slippage between these categories was characteristic of modernity. See Haraway, Primate Visions, 198.
[57] Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 8.
[58] Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 54.
[59] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 95.
[60] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 101.
[61] Behrendt, Victory of the New Building Style, 137.
[62] Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Berlin: Rudolf Mosse, 1926; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), 37. Citation refers to the Da Capo reprint. The mistake is corrected in the English translation. Erich Mendelsohn, Erich Mendelsohn's “Amerika”: 82 Photographs, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1993), 45; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 23; Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, 123; Behrendt, Victory of the New Building Style, 111.
[63] Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 40.
[64] Charles Jencks, preface to Meaning in Architecture, ed. Charles Jencks and George Baird (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 7.
[65] I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; repr., New York: Routledge, 2001), vii. For “borrowed,” see Reuben Brower, Helen Vendler, and John Hollander, eds., I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 28.
[66] Brower, Vendler, and Hollander, I. A. Richards, 28.
[67] Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, ed. Charles Jencks and George Baird (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 9.
[68] David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 31.
[69] Geoffrey Broadbent, introduction to Signs, Symbols, and Architecture, ed. Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt, and Charles Jencks (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980), 1. This late-twentieth-century infusion of symbolism into architecture is better understood as a reassertion of symbolism. Vitruvius, after all, opened On Architecture (∼15 bce) with a discussion of “that which is signified and that which signifies it.” Vitruvius, On Architecture, trans. Richard Schofield (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009), 5.
[70] Jencks, preface to Meaning in Architecture, 7; Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 15.
[71] “Realism offers a fixity in which the signifier is treated as if it were identical with a pre-existent signified and in which the reader's role is purely that of consumer. It is this realist mode with which we are confronted when we look at the photograph as evidence. In realism, the process of production of a signified through the action of a signifying chain is not seen. It is the product that is stressed, and the production that is repressed.” John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 99.
[72] Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 18.
[73] Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 223; 223–24 (emphasis original).
[74] Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 228.
[75] Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 219.
[76] Brown, American Colossus, 317.
[77] By 1911, Andrzej Piotrowski writes, Le Corbusier's understanding of photography “had moved far beyond his earlier descriptive realism and reveal his new conceptual interest in the perception and understanding of a constructed reality.” Andrzej Piotrowski, “Le Corbusier and the Representational Function of Photography,” in Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture, and the Modern City, eds. Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray (New York: Ashgate, 2012), 38. On Le Corbusier's general skepticism regarding photography, see Le Corbusier, Creation is a Patient Search, trans. James Palmes (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1960), 37.
[78] Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow, 74 (emphasis original).
[79] Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow, 74.
[80] Charles A. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 20.
[81] Jencks, Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 70.
[82] Jencks, Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 15.
[83] Jencks, Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 12.
[84] Jencks, Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 30; 43.
[85] Jencks, Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 49.
[86] Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture, 54.
[87] Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture, 54.
[88] Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture, 51; 58.
[89] Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film, trans. Elizabeth Tucker (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), back cover; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 7th ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 113–15. On the importance of Learning From Las Vegas, see also Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 40.
[90] Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror, 15.
[91] Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed. (1966; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 18, 20, 43.
[92] Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror, 66.
[93] Denise Scott Brown, “Preface to the Revised Edition,” in Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), xv.
[94] Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 101.
[95] Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 7.
[96] Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 104 (emphasis mine).
[97] Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 135 (emphasis original).
[98] Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 137.
[99] Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci, “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity,” 267.
[100] Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801.
[101] Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
[102] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 209. The day “the Sophists were routed,” Foucault concluded, was “the day . . . truth moved over from the ritualised act . . . of enunciation to settle on what was enunciated itself: its meaning, its form, its object and its relation to what it referred to” (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 218).
[103] Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, eds., The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 214.
[104] Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 3.
[105] The phrase belongs to Dilip Gaonkar; it is critical. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 41.
[106] Kenneth Burke, “(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action,” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1978): 809.
[107] For a similar argument regarding Burke and symbolism, see Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 161–76.
[108] See Dave Tell, “Burke and Jameson: Reflections on Language, Ideology, and Criticism,” in Burke in the Archives: Using the Past to Transform the Future of Burkean Studies, ed. Dana Anderson and Jessica Enoch (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013).
[109] To see “Classic Landscape,” see http://historyproject.ucdavis.edu/ic/image_details.php?id=9848.
[110] Franklin Kelly, “Charles Sheeler, 1883–1965,” in Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection, ed. Bruce Robertson (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1999), 219–22. See also Susan Fillin Yeh, “The Rouge,” Arts Magazine 53, no. 3 (1978): 8
[111] “Oral History Interview with Charles Sheeler, 1958 Dec. 9,” interview by Bartlett Cowdrey, Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art, December 9, 1958, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-charles-sheeler-12883.
[112] Jameson, Postmodernism, 36, 37, 41.
[113] Jameson, Postmodernism, 39. This claim is directed specifically against the “masterworks and monuments of high modernism,” with which Sheeler's “grain elevators” were associated two pages earlier.
[114] Giorgio Agamben has recently suggested that language became symbolic only at a certain stage in its development, and it might someday cease to be so. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 55. For an overview of Agamben's argument, see Dave Tell, review of The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, by Giorgio Agamben, trans. Adam Kotsko, Philosophy & Rhetoric 45, no. 4 (2012): 452–59.