On “Katholikos” and the Grammar of Ownership: What Universality Does to Difference
Delivered to the Upper School of Oriole Collegiate, Ducson-Ponds, Spring Term, 2123
Genella deCanard, Mallard Laureate in Symbiotic Linguistics and Director of the Octavia Mallard Institute for Planetary Language, University of New Sydney
Good morning. I want to begin somewhere unexpected, which is with a duck.
Not a metaphorical duck, not a symbolic duck, but Professor Octavia Mallard herself, who spent forty-three years insisting that the most important thing a language could do was refuse to do what empire wanted it to do, and who did this from the Chair of Linguistics at the University of Sydney in a century that regarded a woman in that chair the way it regarded a duck in a cathedral: technically possible, probably temporary, and best not commented upon directly. She commented upon it directly. She commented upon everything directly. That is what we remember her for, when we bother to remember her at all, which is not often enough, and which is why this institute exists, and why I am here, and why we are about to spend the next hour thinking very carefully about a Greek word that has been causing trouble for approximately two thousand years.
The word is katholikos. You probably know it in its ecclesiastical dress: catholic, meaning universal, all-encompassing, without boundary or exclusion. Its etymology is straightforward and, I think, beautiful. Kata—according to, in keeping with. Holos—the whole. Together they say something generous: in accordance with the whole. A broad net. An open hand. The inclusive circle that Professor Mallard described in her third lecture series, Notes Toward a Century, when she wrote: “universality is, in principle, benign—the gathering-in, the open hand, the inclusive circle. But once harnessed to empire, universality becomes indistinguishable from control. ‘For all’ quickly translates as ‘over all.’”
Read that sentence again. I want you to carry it for the rest of this lecture, the way you carry a stone in a pocket—not heavy enough to slow you down, but present enough to remind you it is there. For all translating as over all. That is not a metaphor. That is a grammatical transformation with a political history, and Professor Mallard identified it in 1923, at a university that had not yet decided whether women could hold chairs without the chairs becoming embarrassing, and she identified it a full century before the discipline of symbiotic linguistics existed to give her a vocabulary for what she was observing. She built the vocabulary herself, from materials others had discarded. That is what we mean when we say she was in advance of her time: not that she predicted the future, but that she saw the present with a clarity the present could not yet afford to allow.
I want to trace what happens to a word when universality becomes control, because I think the trajectory is visible in katholikos with particular precision, and because I think understanding it matters more now than it has at any point since Professor Mallard’s era. We live—you live—in what Dr. Yemisi Adegoke-Firth, writing in the early years of this century, called “the age of the smoothed surface, when the ideal of universal access became the instrument of universal sameness.” Adegoke-Firth argued that the digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century performed, at the level of language and interface, exactly what the church performed at the level of doctrine in the fourth century: it made universality the condition of participation, and then made universality look like a gift rather than a demand. You can be here, the infrastructure said, so long as you are here in the way we have built here to be. The open hand turned out to have a grip.
Katholikos began as a descriptive term. It described the scope of something—a claim, a teaching, a gathering—that addressed itself to all people rather than to a particular tribe or city. There is nothing inherently coercive in this. The problem arrives when universality stops being the description of a reach and becomes the prescription of a standard. When “for everyone” shifts to “in the same way,” and “in the same way” shifts to “in our way,” and “our way” is never examined because the claim to universality has placed it beyond examination—has made it, by definition, not a local preference but a human universal—you have performed the central operation of empire without requiring a single soldier.
Professor Mallard wrote extensively about what she called “the theft dressed as discovery,” meaning the colonial habit of arriving somewhere, finding something that existed and had always existed, and naming it as though naming it were creating it. Language participates in this habit with particular enthusiasm, because language is the medium through which we establish what counts as real, what counts as known, what counts as having-been-said. When a concept is translated into the dominant language and assigned a place in the dominant taxonomy, the original concept does not simply gain a new name. It gains a new owner. The word symbiosis, which Professor Mallard reclaimed from biology and extended to what she called “planetary kinship”—the understanding of the earth not as a resource to be managed but as a community of relations to be inhabited—was not her invention. The word was there. The biological concept was there. The idea that it described something more than microbial cooperation was there, in multiple indigenous knowledge traditions, for centuries before any European named it. What she did was refuse to let the biological dictionary keep the word to itself. She stretched it, as she said language does, across time.
“Language is like a mind stretching itself across time.” She wrote this in The Lexicon of Polite Deception, which remains the most important work of linguistics published in the first half of the twentieth century and which most twentieth-century linguists did not read because she was a woman in Sydney rather than a man in Oxford, and the discipline of linguistics in that period was organised around the same principle as katholikos once it has become imperial: universal in theory, local in practice, ours in fact. The Mallard Institute exists in part to correct that record, and in part—this is the part I care about more—to ask what else she said that we have not yet caught up to.
I want to tell you what else she said about scarcity. She wrote, in Notes Toward a Century, that scarcity is not always material—that cultures can construct scarcity out of concepts, out of categories, out of words, exactly as they construct it out of land and grain. When a category is defined so as to exclude most people from it, and the excluded are then told they lack whatever the category names, you have performed a scarcity of the immaterial that is no less damaging for being linguistic rather than economic. She was writing about intelligence when she wrote this, and about femininity, and about reason, and about every concept that the dominant culture used as a gate—that it defined narrowly enough to keep most people on the wrong side of the definition, and then pointed at their exclusion as evidence of their deficiency. This is what katholikos does when empire gets hold of it: it defines the universal in terms that make most of humanity’s ways of being particular, and then describes those particular ways as falling short of the universal. The word that meant for everyone becomes the standard that most people fail.
Dr. Constance Arriaga-Voss, whose work on the deep grammar of inclusion I find indispensable and occasionally maddening, has proposed that “the most successful tools of colonial language are not the words that name the colonised as other, but the words that name the coloniser’s perspective as no-perspective at all—as simply the view from nowhere, the universal, the human.” This seems to me exactly right, and it seems to me that katholikos, in its imperial deployment, represents the purest example of precisely this operation. The church that called itself catholic did not say: we are one tradition among many, and we invite you to join us. It said: we are not a tradition. We are the whole. To be outside us is not to be in a different tradition; it is to be outside the whole. The word did not merely claim universality. It performed it, by making all alternatives into particularities and all particularities into deficiencies.
I think about this every time I hear the word transcendent applied to a mind someone wishes to praise. I think about the ladder of intensification that leads from smart to clever to intelligent to gifted to genius to transcendent—each rung climbing not toward greater precision but toward greater rhetorical altitude, until the final term reaches into theological vocabulary and borrows its authority from a tradition of the sacred without accepting any of the obligations of that tradition. Transcendent intelligence: intelligence that goes beyond ordinary limits, that surpasses categories. But whose limits? Which categories? The question is never asked, because the word transcendent performs the same operation as catholic: it presents a local standard as if it were the whole, and describes whatever exceeds that local standard as exceeding the whole. As approaching the divine.
Professor Mallard would have found this hilarious. She found most things hilarious that were also infuriating, which is a combination of responses I recommend to you as the appropriate one. She asked, in Notes Toward a Century, “to what end?”—a question she applied to every institution, every practice, every vocabulary that claimed universality. To what end does the word transcendent borrow the authority of the infinite? To what end does katholikos extend its net over the whole? The answer, in both cases, is the same answer: to the end of making a local preference look like a universal law, and making anyone outside it feel not merely different but deficient.
The work of symbiotic linguistics—the work this institute does, the work I am asking you to begin—is to ask that question persistently and without apology. Not “is this word accurate?” but “what does this word want?” Not “what does this category include?” but “what does it need to exclude in order to function?” Not “what is universal?” but “who decided?” Language is a mind stretching itself across time, as Professor Mallard said, and what stretches across time is not only meaning but power, not only knowledge but the organisation of knowledge, not only words but the arrangements of the world that words make possible and that words make seem inevitable. Nothing about the arrangements is inevitable. Everything about them was chosen. And everything that was chosen can, with sufficient attention and sufficient nerve, be chosen differently.
St. Oriole’s College, I am aware, was named for a seventh-century abbess who ran one of the great centres of learning in Anglo-Saxon England, and who held this position because the church that named itself katholikos had not yet decided, in her era, that women’s intellect was incompatible with its universal project. It later decided this. It spent a considerable number of centuries acting on the decision. You are here, in this room, in this century, in part because women like Professor Mallard spent their careers refusing to accept that decision as the inevitable expression of a universal law, and insisting instead that it was a choice—an interested, local, historically contingent choice—masquerading as the whole.
You should find this extraordinary. You should also find it, as Professor Mallard found it, hilarious and infuriating in equal measure, and you should go to work.
Thank you.
Note
Genella deCanard is Mallard Laureate in Symbiotic Linguistics and Director of the Octavia Mallard Institute for Planetary Language at the University of New Sydney. She holds honorary fellowships at the Collegium of St. Oriole, Cheltenham, and the Pan-Pacific Academy of Critical Languages. Her most recent monograph, “The Grammar of Kinship: Symbiosis, Universality, and the Language of the Whole,” was published by New Sydney University Press in 2121. She is the fourth holder of the Mallard Laureateship, established in 2089 following the centenary reassessment of Professor Octavia Mallard’s contribution to the field. She did not meet her great-aunt, Professor Mallard. She thinks about her every day.
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