Subjectivity, Language and the Postcolonial

Beyond Bourdieu in South Africa

Hannah Botsis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351972321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Subjectivity, Language and the Postcolonial, Hannah Botsis draws on theoretical work that exists at the intersection of critical social psychology, sociolinguistics and the political economy of language, to examine the relationships between language, subjectivity, materiality and political context.

The book foregrounds the ways in which the work of Bourdieu could be read in conjunction with 'poststructural' theorists such as Butler and Derrida to offer a critical understanding of subjectivity, language and power in postcolonial contexts. This critical engagement with theorists traditionally from outside of psychology allows for a situated approach to understanding the embodied and symbolic possibilities and constraints for the postcolonial subject. This exploration opens up how micro-politics of power are refracted through ideological categories such as language, race and class in post-apartheid South Africa.

Also drawing on the empirical findings of original research undertaken in the South African context on students' linguistic biographies, the book offers a unique perspective – critical social theory is brought to bear on the empirical linguistic biographies of postcolonial subjects, offering insight into how power is negotiated in the postcolonial symbolic economy.

Ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses including social psychology, sociolinguistics, sociology, politics, and education, this is an invaluable resource for students and researchers alike.

1
SUBJECTIVITY, IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE

Language is, and continues to be, a visceral site of identity construction, where people position themselves and others in relation to their particular beliefs, needs and politics of language. Often the common-sense response to colonialism and apartheid involves a rhetoric that implies that African languages should simply be brought into the mainstream as if this would lead to an appreciation in their value. This response is too simplistic and disregards the complex politics that now surrounds these languages. African languages were tainted by the politics of colonial rule (Painter & Dixon, 2013) and bear the scars of being devalued, and being a weapon of ethnic division. African languages were both the battleground and the weaponry.

The founding tenet of a poststructural orientation to language and identity is that language is constitutive of subjectivity and difference (Painter & Dixon, 2013). Given the power of language, it is of utmost importance that we understand how the cultural alienation and false superiority experienced under colonial and apartheid rule has left a lasting psychological impact on all who live in this context. Racialised and ethnicised thinking has proved tenacious, and its pernicious effects should not be underestimated (Hook, 2004; Painter & Dixon, 2013). In contemporary South Africa we can see that issues of language and dominance are not just between two individual speakers, but rather reference an entire history that has resulted in our skewed present (Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2002).

Language and languages

In order to make sense of the argument presented in the following chapters, I need to highlight the bivalent relationship between Language as an abstract category and languages as carriers of historical, social and political particularity. In the first instance Language refers to our capacity for speech and symbolic meaning-making that makes us human. In the second instance, specific cultural languages, as bounded units, are carriers of history, meaning and power, which contribute to our social positioning in the symbolic economy. The symbolic economy refers to the broad linguistic market where relations of symbolic power are expressions of the power relations between speakers or groups; as well as establish systems of value that attach to both languages and speakers of these languages (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 37). Not all speakers of every language are valued in the same way, but we all have to articulate our sense of belonging through Language. It is between the abstract structure of Language and the politics of particular languages that the subject’s linguistic repertoire is formed. I use the term linguistic repertoire descriptively to refer to the variety of languages, accents, dialects and registers subjects use to externalise their relationship to the world (for more on this see Busch, 2012, 2015). To speak of a repertoire is to highlight that languages are not bounded units, but elastic and capacious symbolic systems that people harness for means of communication and meaning-making.

We use language to articulate our sense of belonging in the world and for this reason we need to understand the relationship between language, identity and belonging. The ‘turn to language’ emphasised that one could not see past the language that was used to describe experience, and thus it was necessary to analyse language or discourse to understand the constitution of the subject. Parker (2002) argues that ‘you have to be sure not to let your eye slip from the text, not to be lured into looking right through it to where you imagine you are really seeing … the facts are storied in the text, and we then have to locate the text, culturally and historically’ (p. 9). For some discursive theorists there is nothing knowable outside of the text, outside of language. And it is through language that we construct knowledge about the social world. It is through this discursive orientation toward language, which I call Language with a big ‘L’, in which meaning is made and power is circulated (Weedon, 2004). All humans have the capacity for Language and it is a socially structuring force, and this can be understood as the ‘force of discourse’ (Price, 1999). But how does this relate to the politics of becoming a subject in a particular language?

The particularity of becoming a subject in a specific language is what could be called language with a little ‘l’, or natural or cultural languages. This includes both different languages, such as Zulu, English and German, and the variety of ways in which these are spoken (dialects, accents, registers). There is a fairly large body of work on language ideologies that critiques languages being referred to as fixed, bounded units, or reifying languages as if there might be a ‘pure’ language form (for example, see Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2002; Blommaert, 1999). While this critique is well established, it is the case that most people speak of languages, and their commonsense experience as language users, in a relatively fixed sense.

To be sure, there is an inextricable relationship between these two usages of the term. As Saussure has shown us: ‘the social nature of language is one of its internal characteristics’ (Butler, 1999, p. 121). The differences in the usage of Language and language that I have set up here are homologous to the distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. Langue refers to the abstract, rule-bound, signifying capacity of language, while parole refers to the particular ways individuals speak a language (Saussure, 1959). It was the distinction between these two levels that was foundational to the understanding of parole as a performative speech act (Austin, 1975).

What I mean to emphasise is that Language (as the abstract system of discursive power) has to find expression in particular languages. Languages are constitutive of discursive meaning, but spoken by individuals, in physical bodies, in particular material locations, with particular histories and particular affective, socio-cultural and economic effects. It is here where the discursive argument that there is nothing outside of Language might be critiqued, or at least attenuated. It is helpful to bear this distinction in mind going forward because, while the subject is formed in Language, the subject is embodied and uses particular languages in living relationships with others. Embodiment requires an understanding of Language as located in the fleshy reality of languages and their politics, and therefore requires attending to issues of affective-discursive meaning-making (Wetherell, 2012).

The homology referred to above (langue as Language and parole as language) also speaks to the distinction between subjectivity and identity. Subjectivity functions in the same way as the abstract category of Language, while identity is the fleshy content individuals give to the abstract category of the subject or subject position. In this sense, it is not that one should choose between identity or subjectivity for epistemological or even stylistic reasons, just that one ought to be clear on the analytical limits of either term, and it is to this that I now turn.

Identity and subjectivity

Who we feel ourselves to be, and how we articulate this – what has commonly been called identity – has been the focus of much psychological and social research. In this section I begin by reviewing some of the problems with the concept of ‘identity’ and how theorists have reworked or redefined this term so as to make it analytically productive (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). Central to such an attenuated understanding of identity is articulating the relationship between language, identity and affective dimensions of belonging. Often, within poststructural theory, the ‘turn to language’ and the ‘turn to affect’ are seen as at epistemological odds with each other. Yet, meaning-making (including meanings of emotions) is articulated through language, which indicates that there is ‘little point in trying to decompose affective activity into its bodily and discursive constituents’ (Wetherell, 2012, p. 53). As Wetherell suggests, we should rather take affective-discursive practices as ‘interwoven phenomena’ (2012, p. 53) in the process of identification/subjectification.

Building on such a view, I engage with the idea of identity as an articulation of momentary fixedness in a sea of change, that is, contextual and intersectional, as opposed to ‘authentic’. What one claims as an ‘identity’ becomes tied up with ethical questions about what rights and responsibilities accompany claiming a category of belonging. I argue this is especially so in the postcolonial context, where ethical and affective responses to questions of identity are indelibly bound up with one’s subject position. As such, in the final sections of this chapter I elaborate on Yuval-Davis’s (2006a) theorisation of belonging as productive in separating out the issues of 1) subject position in the social world, 2) affective attachment to an identity category, and 3) the ethical dimensions of identity politics. These three aspects of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006a) provide a helpful framework for understanding the relationship between language, identity and identification in the ‘post’-colony.

Identity

In recent times the concept of identity has been deployed so variously, across epistemological orientations, so as to have dramatically weakened its analytical capacity. As Brubaker and Cooper (2000) note, ‘conceptualizing all affinities and affiliations, all forms of belonging, all experiences of commonality, connectedness and cohesion, all self-understandings and self-identifications in the idiom of ‘identity’ saddles us with a blunt, flat, undifferentiated vocabulary’ (p. 2). While identity issues are pertinent to understanding how participants articulate their language experiences, analytically my focus is on subjectivity and subject positioning, a concept that is not inevitably captured by the broad term ‘identity’.

A helpful distinction that Brubaker and Cooper (2000) make in their formative paper on the conceptual messiness of ‘identity’ is that certain terms used in the interpretive social sciences can refer to ‘categories of social and political practice and categories of social and political analysis’ (p. 4, emphasis in the original). ‘Identity’ is just such a term. They go on to point out that just because a practice is salient to one’s area of study, it does not follow that the practice has to be used as a ‘category of analysis’ (p. 5). To use ‘identity’ in this way would be to reify identity itself as something fixed and stable, an assumption that has long been done away with in poststructural theory (Weedon, 1997, 2004; Hall, 2000; Hall, 1996). Paradoxically, ‘identity’ has been used as an analytical category in studies where the epistemological assumptions at play seem to undo the concept itself, i.e. the notion of a fluid identity. As Brubaker and Cooper argue, ‘It does not contribute to precision of analysis to use the same words for the extremes of reification and fluidity, and everything in between’ (2000, p. 36).

‘Subjectivity’ is a much more accurate concept for articulating how flows of power constitute different subject positions in the postcolonial context. It is important for me to highlight this because, inasmuch as I am interested in experience of language, which would seem to presume an ‘individual self’ who speaks (Parker, 2002, p. 135), my theoretical concern is in understanding how this ‘sense of selfhood’ is produced ‘in relation to others’ (Parker, 2002, p. 135). For this reason I use the word subjectivity, not ‘identity’ or ‘self’, which are often used interchangeably. In doing so, I aim to ‘account’ for the ‘process of reification’ in relation to identity and language (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000, p. 5), and ask how it is that symbolic categories come to shape material realities. Focusing on subjectivity and subject positioning allows me to attend to the ‘processes and mechanisms’ that produce a particular reality, without reinscribing this reality in normative and essentialist terms (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000, p. 5).

Hall’s (1996) seminal paper, ‘Who Needs ‘‘Identity’’?’ traces the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of various ways in which identity has been theorised in the post-Cartesian era. Hall (1996) notes that mind/body dualism is no longer a stable assumption of the subject. He traces discursive theories that argue for an understanding of the constitution of the subject through language thereby influencing our experience of our bodies. He notes how psychoanalytic theory has at times seen the internal world of the ‘drives’ as the ultimate determinant of who we are, while comparing this to Althusser’s theory of interpellation, which has been accused of economic determinism. It is much more likely that all three of these components (discursive, psychoanalytic and materialist) play a role in constituting who we feel ourselves to be and how we come to experience ourselves in the world in relation to others. As I will argue in the proceeding chapters, reading Bourdieu, Butler and Althusser together allows us to do just that.

However, without resolving these tensions here, I argue that in order to engage with the concept of identity it is useful to approach it as a concept ‘under erasure’ (Hall, 1996, p. 1). Following Derrida, Hall explains that terms used under erasure means that, ‘they are no longer serviceable – ‘‘good to think with’’ – in their originary and unreconstructed form. But since they have not been superseded dialectically, and there are no other, entirely different concepts with which to replace them, there is nothing to do but to continue to think with them’ (Hall, 1996, p. 1). Thus, Derrida uses the term erasure to emphasise our dependence on terms that are ‘useful, necessary and wrong’ (Sampson, 1989, p. 7, my emphasis). A term under erasure is written down and then crossed out to indicate that we need the term for the point being made to be intelligible, while simultaneously emphasising that this is the incorrect term, or does not capture the fullness of what might be meant.

Identity then, is not used to index a fixed position in the world, or a stable sense of belonging, or even an authentic sense of self, but rather is the ‘thing’ that feels contested whenever we speak about our social location, our feeling of belonging and a set of parameters being set on who we ‘really’ are. Thus, in line with Bauman’s (1996) suggestion to see identity as a verb, it might be more appropriate to speak of the identification of the subject with social categories of difference and feelings of attachment. In Hall’s words, identification is ‘a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption’ (2000, p. 3). Hall’s metaphor of the suture is particularly effective in describing something that feels natural, but bears the scars of being held together. The suture leaves a scar on the body, so one always knows that area of the skin was sewn together, but once the tissue has healed, the scar becomes a part of our bodies in a way that makes us unique and feels natural. The suture has also been referred to as an ‘intersection’ (Heath, 1981, p. 106), a term now ubiquitous in social sciences and humanities research, introduced in Crenshaw’s legal scholarship (1993). Intersectionality refers to that particular set of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Subjectivity, identity and language
• 2 The symbolic economy
• 3 The paradox of subjection
• 4 Subjectivity in the postcolonial symbolic economy
• 5 Subjectivity, language and the south african symbolic economy
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Index