Friday, 27 July 2018

Bourdieu on 'Linguistic utterances' vis-a-vis 'linguistic habitus'

Much has been written, and said, and discussed, and researched, on the language – power nexus on and off academia!

Thiong’o waxes eloquent on it in his Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature,

Gauri Viswanathan points out the pitpalls of the voluntary cultural assimilation perpetrated on the colonized under the guise of language, in her Masks of Conquest!

Ismail Talib, John McLeod, Elleke Boehmer among a host of other critics have explicated this nexus between language and power as connected with one’s history, politics, culture and thereby one’s identity itself.

In this regard, yet another impactful read that speaks to this unholy nexus between language and power happens to be from the legendary Pierre Bourdieu!

In this powerful read titled, Language and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu puts forth the proposition that, linguistic utterances or expressions can be understood as the product of the relation between a “linguistic market” and a “linguistic habitus.”  

Bourdieu critiques the linguistic theories of Saussure and Chomsky and the theory of speech-acts elaborated by Austin, and argues that, language should be viewed not only as a means of communication but also as a medium of power through which individuals pursue their own interests and display their practical competence.

Bourdieu’s critique of social institutions are very impactful, and they help us see through the various layers of power embedded in each aspect of our ‘culture’!

To Bourdieu, the major role of the education system is cultural reproduction. This is the reproduction of the culture of the dominant classes. These groups have the power to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate. They are able to define their own culture as worthy of being sought and possessed and to establish it as the basis for knowledge in the education system. However, there is no way of showing that they are any better or worse than other subcultures in society.

The wonderful introduction to the book by John B Thompson is a treat in itself. He has divided the book into three parts, devoting considerable attention to each; viz., Language in Linguistic Exchanges, Symbolic Power and Political Field!

The introduction is an invaluable source of guidance to research scholars who are working on language.

So im just giving a few excerpts gleamed from off the introduction for y’all –

Here goes -

As competent speakers we are aware of the many ways in which linguistic exchanges can express relations of power.

We are sensitive to the variations in accent, intonation and vocabulary which reflect different positions in the social hierarchy.

We are aware that individuals speak with differing degrees of authority, that words are loaded with unequal weights, depending on who utters them and how they are said, such that some words uttered in certain circumstances have a force and a conviction that they would not have elsewhere.

We are experts in the innumerable and subtle strategies by which words can be used as instruments of coercion and constraint, as tools of intimidation and abuse, as signs of politeness, condescension and contempt.

In short, we are aware that language is an integral part of social life, with all its ruses and iniquities, and that a good part of our social life consists of the routine exchange of linguistic expressions in the day-to-day flow of social interaction.

It is much easier, however, to observe in a general way that language and social life are inextricably linked than it is to develop this observation in a rigorous and compelling way. The contemporary intellectual disciplines which are particularly concerned with language have been illuminating in this regard, but they have also suffered from a number of shortcomings.

In some branches of linguistics, literary criticism and philosophy, for instance, there is a tendency to think of the social character of language in a rather abstract way, as if it amounted to little more than the fact that language is, as Saussure once put it, a collective 'treasure' shared by all members of a community.

What is missing from such perspectives is an account of the concrete. complicated ways in which linguistic practices and products are caught up in, and moulded by, the forms of power and inequality which are pervasive features of societies as they actually exist.

Sociologists and sociolinguists have been more concerned with the interplay between linguistic practices and concrete forms of social life; but in their work there is a tendency - though this is by no means without exception - to become preoccupied with the empirical details of variations in accent or usage , in a way that is largely divorced from broader theoretical and explanatory concerns. When social theorists have turned their attention to language they have not neglected these broader concerns, but all too often they have run roughshod over the specific properties of language and language use in the interests of developing some general theory of social action or the social world.  

One of the merits of the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is that it avoids to a large extent the shortcomings which characterize some of the sociological and social-theoretical writing on language, while at the same time offering an original sociological perspective on linguistic phenomena which has nothing to do with abstract conceptions of social life. In a series of articles originally published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bourdieu developed a trenchant critique of formal and structural linguistics, arguing that these disciplinary frameworks take for granted but fail to grasp the specific social and political conditions of language formation and use.

He also began the task of elaborating an original, innovative approach to linguistic phenomena, an approach that aims to be both theoretically informed and sensitive to empirical detail. The theory that informs Bourdieu's approach is a general theory of practice which he has worked out in the course of a long and prolific career, spanning more than thirty years and twenty volumes of research and reflection.

Armed with the key concepts of this theory, Bourdieu sheds fresh light on a range of issues concerned with language and language use. He portrays everyday linguistic exchanges as situated encounters between agents endowed with socially structured resources and competencies, in such a way that every linguistic interaction, however personal and insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce.

As Bourdieu shows, the members of the upper classes had everything to gain from the policy of linguistic unification which accompanied the French Revolution. This policy, which was part of Condillac's theory of the purification of thought through the purification of language, would give the upper classes a de facto monopoly of political power.

By promoting the official language to the status of the national language - that is, the official language of the emerging nation-state - the policy of linguistic unification would favour those who already possessed the official language as part of their linguistic competence, while those who knew only a local dialect would become part of a political and linguistic unit in which their traditional competence was subordinate and devalued.

The subsequent normalization and inculcation of the official language. and its legitimation as the official language of the nation-state, was not just a matter of political policy: it was a gradual process that depended on a vanity of other factors, such as the development of the educational system and the formation of a unified labour market.

The production of grammar books. dictionaries and a corpus of texts exemplifying correct usage is only the most obvious manifestation of this gradual process of normalization. Perhaps more importantly, with the establishment of a system of educational qualifications possessing a standardized value independent of regional variations, and with the unification of a labour market in which administrative positions depended on educational qualifications, the school came to be seen as a principal means of access to the labour market, especially in areas where industrialization was weak.

Thus, by the combined effect of various institutions and social processes, people speaking local dialects were induced, as Bourdieu puts it, 'to collaborate in the destruction of their instruments of expression'.

For more, do read it from the book. It's quite lovely a read!

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