<<TRANSMATHOME

BETWEEN THE SEEN AND THE SAID Deleuze-Guattari's Pragmatics of the Order-Word Bruce McClure

Contents Abstract Abbreviations

7. Linguistic and Metalinguistic Practices

 

7.0 Concepts of language

 

The fundamental groundwork of language — the development of a clear-cut phonetic system, the specific association of speech elements with concepts, and the delicate provision for the formal expression of all manner of relations — all this meets us rigidly perfected and systematised in every language known to us. [1]

 

The work of linguists like Edward Sapir played a great role in emphasising the sophistication of languages, those previously thought (as had been their speakers) to be primitive or infantile in comparison to those of Europe. By explaining through vast ranges of examples how what at first glance might appear to be unintelligible can in fact be translated/understood, if due attention is paid to differences both internal and external to language, Sapir helped undermine the West’s assumptions about its inherent superiority. This valuable insight has nonetheless contributed to two approaches in the study of language which, I will argue, both fail to present an adequate picture of how language works. The first I raised back in Chapter 3 under the name of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the notion that each different language forms a hermetically-sealed bubble encoding the flux of reality in a unique way. The second, the nativist account of language as a biological property of all humans, an innate capacity of the brain, argues that behind all the diversity of the world’s languages lie the mechanics of an inbuilt Universal Grammar.

 

These two standpoints each come in many different forms, but there are however connections between them: they both reify language, in the sense that they raise it up as a founding principle of culture — whether this is seen as the single culture of all humanity (the differences between localities merely accidental) or the mutually equivalent (yet mutually incomprehensible) cultures of the world. The way they do this is by presenting it (meaning Language-singular for the nativists, or any individual language for the relativists) as a totality, a living organism in its own right, that is somehow distinct from and independent of the set of all actual utterances and inscriptions. [2]

 

Instead of this I propose the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘this complicated form of life’, characterised not by an innate grammar or universals of communication, nor by a benign, Ruthrofian ‘significatory matrix’, but by the structure of normativity, Judith Butler’s ‘highly rigid regulatory frame’ (to which we will return below). [3] While this will differ from culture to culture in its specificities, it will everywhere demonstrates the interplay between majoritarian tendencies of control, regularity and habit, and minoritarian tendencies of experimentation, rupture and change. These two aspects are intertwined and mark a relative difference, a difference in point of view rather than of nature:

 

Constant is not opposed to variable; it is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other kind of treatment, or continuous variation. So-called obligatory rules correspond to the first kind of treatment, whereas optional rules concern the construction of a continuum of variation (TP 103).

 

We seek an approach to language that takes this interplay as basic, rather than the ‘quest for constants’ that grounds such traditional oppositions as language/speech, synchrony/diachrony, competence/ performance.

 

7.1 A Science of Language

The most monumental contribution to nativist linguistics is almost certainly that of Noam Chomsky, and his immensely thoughtful approach needs to be considered in order to establish more precisely the areas of the debate with which we are engaging, and those that are outside the remit of the present investigation. For Deleuze-Guattari, Chomsky is clearly damned from the outset for several reasons: his transformative grammar is intrinsically arbourescent and hierarchical; his Universal Grammar would seem to be the archetype of language considered as an abstract machine in its own right (seemingly isolating linguistics from sociopolitical concerns of any kind); his approach demands the abstraction of constants from the continuous variation of language use; he seems to regard the idealised ‘competence’ of the individual speaker as the focus of linguistics rather than any notion of collective assemblages (with the corresponding point that the other, machinic aspect of the assemblage is also utterly irrelevant to his approach); his goal is to scientifically investigate the human ‘faculty of language’ imagined as an innate capacity or mechanism, the description of which is already and for all time a matter of what is necessarily true of all humans — a theoretical stance which would appear to be utterly at odds with a philosophy based on difference in itself.

 

Can these charges amount to substantiated criticisms of Chomsky’s position, or do they simply miss the point of his enterprise?  In the process of answering this question, I will examine some criticisms of nativist approaches to linguistics, as well as asking whether there are any possible points of connection between the project of generative grammar and our present concern with order-words. Along the way, we will make clearer exactly the aspects of language study and understanding to which the pragmatics of the order-word relates, and how, if at all, such an approach can communicate with that of Chomsky, or whether (as seems likely at the outset of this episode of our investigation) the differences in starting point, preferred descriptions and intended aims, are just too far apart to be of any use to one another.

 

7.1.1 Chomsky on Skinner

Noam Chomsky made his name with his ‘Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour’, in which he not only demonstrated the many flaws of Skinner’s attempts to draw analogies between the responses to conditioning of various animals in the laboratory to the language use of humans, but also laid the groundwork for a brand new type of linguistics — generative grammar. [4] In his review, Chomsky shows Skinner’s attempts to explain language acquisition and use in terms of conditioning alone (through the mechanism of stimulus and response), rather than through a combination of conditioning and internal structure, to be woefully inadequate to explain such phenomena as the successful acquisition of language in deprived circumstances, and the capacity to master the rules of sentence generation without being taught them explicitly.

 

The first problem with transposing Skinner’s conceptual apparatus of stimulus and response from labrats to humans is the definition of the terms. Is everything that impinges on the organism a stimulus, or only that which provokes a response?  Is every behaviour of the organism a response, or only that which is related to a particular stimulus in a lawlike manner?  This may not pose a particular problem when you are concerned with whether a rat learns to press a lever for food, but when you are trying to explain (for example) a person’s response to a painting, you either have to explain whatever her response is (assuming she has complied with your request and her response is in some way connected to the painting), by a particular property of the painting considered as stimulus, or else you have to abandon the schema.

 

Could it be suggested that Chomsky’s critique of Skinner could be turned on Deleuze-Guattari’s notion of the order-word? From a Chomskian perspective, they too would seem to propose an account of language based on externalised stimulus-response mechanisms rather than paying any attention to the innate structures of the mind upon which these mechanisms surely depend. In actual fact, I would suggest that in isolating the ‘faculty of order-words’ Deleuze-Guattari are from a certain point of view closer to Chomsky than Skinner, in that this faculty is seen to be a property of human societies (at least since the age of the Despot, the emergence of signification and subjectification, and the conjoining of voice and graphism, as we saw in Chapter 5). The profound difference, however, is that this faculty is social, collective, rather than individual; it is ontologically prior to the notion of the isolated human subject. Its relation to postulated ‘modules’ of the brain is an issue we must leave open in this account — except to say that it is indeed dependent on the structure of the bodymind, but it is equally dependent on the structure of human society (‘this complicated form of life’) and its ‘rigid regulatory frame’ of normativity. Hence, Chomsky’s dismissal of Skinner is largely justified, but his notions (which we will now explore in more detail) about what for him is the only conceivable way of understanding language or examining it are much more questionable.

 

7.1.2 Competence

In his Linguistic Theory in America, Frederick Newmeyer states that the key contribution of the approach to linguistics that Chomsky inaugurated, despite many differences in method and focus, is the notion of competence. [5] Mitsou Ronat, in conversation with Chomsky, defines this as

 

that knowledge internalized by a speaker of a language, which, once learned and possessed, unconsciously permits him to understand and produce an infinite number of new sentences. Generative Grammar is the explicit theory proposed to account for that competence. [6]

 

Chomsky argues that psychology (of which linguistics is necessarily a subset [7] ) must start by ‘identifying a cognitive domain [vision, memory, language, etc] [...] which can be considered as a system, or a mental organ, that is more or less integrated’ (LR 49). This is because it is only on the basis of such a system that progress can be made in analysing the more traditional focus of psychology — namely, behaviour or performance. In subordinating performance to competence, Chomsky regards himself as laying out a truly rational science of psychology. Without this preliminary theoretical understanding of the system no understanding of the process — beyond the level of mere observation — is possible. Indeed, psychology necessarily has some implicit notion of competence, whether it is aware of it or not, even if it is simply the notion that ‘language is a system of words’ (LR 50). What Chomsky offers is the possibility of the ‘better psychology’ that would result from a ‘better model of competence’ (ibid).

 

 

 

7.1.3 I-Language and E-Language (part 1)

In a more recent work, Chomsky has reinscribed the competence/performance distinction as that between internal- or I-language and external- or E-language. [8] In presenting this distinction, he first brackets off ‘the commonsense notion of language’ as defined by its sociopolitical status (Chinese, English, etc), and mentions the common refrain that ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy (attributed to Max Weinrich)’ (KL 15) — a notion Deleuze-Guattari phrase as ‘There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity’ (TP 7). For Chomsky, this attitude cannot hope to furnish linguistics with any workable basis from which to examine language: ‘all scientific approaches have simply abandoned these elements of what is called “language” in common usage’ (KL 15). Also of no interest is the ‘normative-teleological’ side of the commonsense view, from which it makes sense to talk about a foreigner or child’s ‘“partial knowledge of English”’ (KL 16) — this too must be ruled out of the scientific approach, and replaced by an all-or-nothing ‘idealized “speech community” that is consistent in its linguistic practice’ (ibid.). In what he labels a ‘theory-internal’ point (KL 17), Chomsky then remarks that it would be impossible for this community to speak a mixture of languages, such as French and Russian, even if they do so uniformly, because

 

The language of such a speech community would not be “pure” in the relevant sense, because it would not represent a single set of choices among the options permitted by UG [Universal Grammar] but rather would include “contradictory” choices for certain of these options (KL 17)

 

Given that Chomsky just stressed the irrelevance of the sociopolitical boundaries between languages, there is something peculiar about this appeal to “purity”, scare-quoted or not. The sympathetic reader has no choice but to assume that this kind of “pure” French (for example) is of a different order from, for example, the kind of “pure” French jealously guarded by the Académie Française. It surely also signposts a problem for the notion of a single UG (to which we will return below)!

 

7.1.4 Science and Idealisations

Chomsky confronts the question of the legitimacy of these idealisations, and gives the impression of arguing strenuously for their necessity, particularly that of ‘property of mind P’ (KL 17). His ‘argument’ for the existence of his idealisations runs as follows:

 

Surely there is some property of mind P that would enable a person to acquire a language under conditions of pure and uniform experience [9] , and surely P (characterized by UG) is put to use under the real conditions of language acquisition. To deny these assumptions would be bizarre indeed: It would be to claim either that language can be learned only under conditions of diversity and conflicting evidence, which is absurd, or that the property P exists — there exists a capacity to learn language in the pure and uniform case — but the actual learning of language does not involve this capacity. In the latter case, we would ask why P exists; is it a “vestigial organ” of some sort?  The natural approach, and one that I think is tacitly adopted even by those who deny the fact, is to attempt to determine the real property of mind P, and then ask how P functions under the more complex conditions of actual linguistic diversity. It seems clear that any reasonable study of the nature, acquisition, and use of language in real life circumstances must accept these assumptions and then proceed on the basis of some tentative characterization of the property of mind P. In short, the idealizations made explicit in more careful work are hardly controversial: they isolate for examination a property of the language faculty the existence of which is hardly in doubt, and which is surely a crucial element in actual language acquisition (KL 17-18).

 

In other words, P must exist; P can only be examined on the basis of purified idealisations of language, even if normal conditions are those of ‘diversity and conflicting evidence’. This P is, in all likelihood, species-specific (i.e. proper to all humans) (KL 18-19) and ‘it is difficult to imagine how [studies which do not make these assumptions] might fruitfully progress’ (KL 19).

 

The trouble with the above ‘argument’ is that it starts with a foregone conclusion (‘Surely there is some property of mind P...’), the only argument for which is the dismissal of its rejection as ‘absurd’. One could conceivably accept the theoretical possibility that language could be acquired under conditions of purity, uniformity and nonconflicting evidence, without either allowing that it ever actually is, or that there is therefore such a thing as Universal Grammar. In fact, the first assumption is not that easy to accept. Supposing a group of adults modified their speech in rigid accordance with some theory or other of Universal Grammar, and brought up their children in the resulting atmosphere of a truly homogeneous speech community. This is not to suggest that Chomsky himself conceives of UG as in any way prescriptive, or that there is a veiled prescriptive agenda behind the notion, but rather to emphasise how odd such a community would be. It is far from obvious that the children of such a community would make fewer grammatical mistakes in their early years, or become more articulate or imaginative speakers, or be less prone to idiosyncratic constructions. What is striking, however, is the distasteful nature of such a notion — the amount of training these adults would have to undergo to strip them of every ungrammatical usage; the sense of artificiality of the resulting environment. Why, if the idea of a homogeneous speech community is supposed to be indispensable to any serious study of language, does the thought of it actually instantiated seem so contrary to the actual diversity of everyday language use?  This does not amount to an argument that ‘language can be learned only under conditions of diversity and conflicting evidence’; it does, however, cast doubt on Chomsky’s insistence that such diversity must be considered the exception rather than the rule.

 

The second point about property of mind P ‘common to all humans’ (KL 19), is that it is one thing to insist (as Chomsky does) that (1) idealisations are ‘the sole means of proceeding rationally [...] You study ideal systems, then afterwards you can ask yourself in what manner these ideal systems are represented and interact with real individuals’ (LR 54). It is quite another to go on to insist that (2) the relevant ‘ideal system’ in the study of language is a ‘property of mind P’ rather than, say, a property of material systems or (more specifically) a property of sociopolitical assemblages, and (3) that this P is therefore ‘common to all humans’. In actual fact Chomsky takes all three assumptions as read, when in fact all are debatable to say the least. As Bolinger writes,

 

There is no question that human infants come into the world with vastly more preformed capacity for language than used to be thought possible. [...] But whether or not the genetic design contains elements that are explicitly linguistic hinges on the overall question of explicitness. There is so much interdependence in the unfolding of our capacities that we cannot be sure that the linguistic ones do not start as nonlinguistic, only to be made linguistic by features of the environment (AL 284).

 

7.1.5 I-Language and E-Language (part 2)

To return to the distinction between E-language and I-language: the shift in focus from former to latter that Generative Grammar enacts (provided we accept Chomsky’s claims about idealisation and property P) is a move in the direction both of realism, and of greater congruence between the commonsense notion of language and its linguistic counterpart. E-language encompasses most or all traditional approaches to linguistics — all those, whether structural, behavioural or what-have-you, which ignore the role of the mind/brain, or at least, do not hinge on the existence of property P. Whether conceived of as ‘the totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community’ (Bloomfield, quoted by Chomsky, KL19), [10] a system of sounds associated with a system of concepts (Saussure’s langue), or indeed Deleuze-Guattari’s ‘the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts current in a language at a given moment’ (TP 79), [11] languages in the sense of E-language are mere ‘artefacts’ (KL 26), ‘epiphenomenon[al] at best’ (KL 25), and ‘artificial, somewhat arbitrary, and perhaps not very interesting constructs’ (KL 26) with ‘no corresponding real-world objects’ (KL 27). In contrast, I-languages, conceived of as the ‘“notion of structure” in the mind of the speaker’ (KL 23), are precise, real systems to which the test of truth or falsity can apply, and hence are in line with the objects of study of any natural science.

 

It is the role of Universal Grammar in the respective approaches that makes this distinction possible. For E-language, it is the corresponding grammar which is the semi-arbitrary construct, in that any number of grammars could be enumerated that could account for the same utterances from the same speaker. If, however, you start from the notion of UG, characterised as the initial state (S₀), the starting point of every human by virtue of its genetic endowment, you can then move to particular grammars defined as ‘theories of various I-languages’ (KL 25), and more broadly, to the steady state S_s of knowledge of a language. The differences between I-languages in spite of their common basis in UG is due to the differences in experiences of speakers of different languages (though Chomsky hesitates to call this ‘learning’ (KL 26)), but it is the notion of UG that promises rich rewards to the linguist who compares, say, English and Japanese, with a view to constructing the UG necessarily common to both (and all other human languages).

 

These, then, are the guiding principles of the investigation: that the focus is I-language (the “notion of structure” in the head of the individual speaker — or in Chomsky’s earlier term, his or her ‘competence’), which consists of innate component (UG) and ‘learned’ component; that all speakers of all languages (excepting the pathological) share UG and hence that different I-languages have this shared basis that puts them, potentially, in relations of mutual illumination. A more dramatic result of this shift is that the things generally referred to as languages (i.e. E-languages) are of no interest to linguistics. In comparing the I-languages of an English speaker and a Japanese speaker the convergences must be conceived of as relating to UG and these individuals’ I-language, not to any real-world object called English or Japanese, for there is no such thing. The notion, therefore, of a power takeover by a dominant language (or ‘mother tongue’), with or without an army or navy, is nigh-on meaningless for this approach.

 

This shift serves to protect Chomsky from many criticisms of earlier versions of his approach, since when people complain that different notions of UG fail to capture what languages are actually like (their dependence on context, intonation, gesture and other ‘paralinguistic’ factors) or the differences between them, he can argue that his opponents are still thinking about E-languages, the relevance of which can only be an eventual outcome of an investigation into I-languages, to which any account of E-languages is entirely subordinate.

 

Chomsky dismisses the notion that there is anything problematic about basing linguistic study on an idealised notion of a homogenous linguistic community; indeed he argues that idealisation is necessary for any science to proceed, and further, that only idealised systems (such as competence, or I-language) ‘have interesting properties’ (LR 56). To the charge that this idealisation in some way removes linguistics from social reality, Chomsky states

 

Opposition to idealization is simply objection to rationality; it amounts to nothing more than an insistence that we shall not have meaningful intellectual work. Phenomena that are complicated enough to be worth studying generally involve the interaction of several systems. Therefore you must abstract some object of study, you must eliminate those factors which are not pertinent. At least if you want to conduct an investigation which is not trivial (LR 57).

 

Linguists such as Labov, who pursue the continuous variation of language and are not concerned with extracting idealisations, are therefore condemned by Chomsky to be mere natural historians, like the collectors and cataloguers of rocks or butterflies, as opposed to the natural scientists who seek the principles of generative grammar. However, in a pithy but crucial footnote, Deleuze-Guattari cite Labov as pinpointing the paradox of much linguistics:

 

William Labov has clearly shown the contradiction, or at least paradox, created by the distinction between language and speech: language is defined as the “social part” of language, and speech is consigned to individual variations; but since the social part is self-enclosed, it necessarily follows that a single individual would be enough to illustrate the principles of language, without reference to any outside data, whereas speech could only be studied in a social context. The same paradox recurs from Saussure to Chomsky:  “The social aspect of language is studied by observing any one individual, but the individual aspect only by observing language in its social context” (TP 524, note 7) [12]

 

As we saw above, Chomsky’s later I-language/E-language distinction does not mesh with that of language/speech, and since he is uninterested in the social aspect of language, he would seem to be released from the apparent paradox Labov notes. Nevertheless, from our perspective, the project of generative grammar is dramatically limited in its pursuit of the deep truths about language, precisely because it neglects language’s intrinsically social nature, and because it takes as given this common property of all individual humans, rather than an unevenly distributed property of human society, intimately connected with normativity — society’s relations of command and control.

 

7.2 Shibboleth [13]

What I will be examining in this section is the issue of prescriptivism in language, the notion of correct usage, and the way linguistics seems to distance itself from this arena, leaving it to popular discussions of language. An excellent example of this stance can be found in Steven Pinker’s best-selling The Language Instinct, [14] where he devotes a chapter to ‘The Language Mavens’, those self-appointed arbiters of word-use in popular media. [15] Pinker’s project is to show that language is ‘as instinctive as spinning a web [is for a spider]’, that ‘every three-year-old is a grammatical genius’, and that ‘the design of syntax is coded in our DNA and wired into our brains’ (371). Hence, the kind of thing the mavens call correctness is an irrelevant arena of pedantic hobbyism, of no interest to the scientific study of language. Pinker takes pains to show how non-standard uses conform to his scientific notion of grammar just as much as standard uses, and it is only prejudice to regard the former as inferior to the latter when it comes to utility in self-expression. He further shows that the bases on which the mavens criticise things like split infinitives, double negatives and other no-nos, themselves betray a lack of understanding of how language works. In the case of the former example, based on standard English grammar modelled on Latin, the rule that infinitives should not be split misses the point that because of the nature of Latin itself (where ‘the infinitive is a single word like facere or dicere’), ‘Julius Caesar couldn’t have split an infinitive if he had wanted to’. On the other hand, in English, ‘an “isolating” language, building sentences around many simple words instead of a few complicated ones’, it makes perfect sense (LI 374). In the case of the latter, he points out that no one ever thought Mick Jagger actually meant that he could in fact get satisfaction, since only under the strictures of Standard English is there anything problematic about emphasising a negative with another negative just as it is commonplace in French’s Je ne sais pas, or in English sentences like I didn’t buy any lottery tickets, where the any cannot be used in the opposite sentence, *I bought any lottery tickets because it works only to agree with the negated verb (LI 376). [16]

 

However, by the end of the chapter, Pinker seems to have changed his mind, arguing that the written word always benefits from being carefully revised in accordance with principles of style. Is there a contradiction here?  Sociolinguist John Honey certainly thinks so, and strenuously takes issue with Pinker’s willingness to reassert what Honey calls the ‘linguistic equality’ thesis, despite the seemingly indisputable fact that everyone has notions of good and bad language use, clear and unclear expression. [17] For Honey, the ‘linguistic equality’ thesis is the assumption taken for granted by the majority of linguists, that every language, or dialect of a language, is as good as every other — that there can be no grounds for suggesting that one is morally superior, more advanced or more ‘highly evolved’ than another. There are several contributing factors to the success of this doctrine, which Honey sees as having dominated linguistics throughout the 20^th Century. The first factor is linguistics’ pretensions to scientific objectivity, and its attempts to distance itself from pejorative and discriminatory attitudes both to non-European languages and to supposedly deficient dialects of European ones. Both Honey and another sociolinguist Deborah Cameron argue that linguistics has gone too far in the quest for disinterested objectivity, and as a result has neglected the irreducible role of normativity in language, in the academic study of language, and in everyday discussions about language in all walks of life. [18]

 

For Honey, this has resulted in an unwillingness to talk about the relative merits of different languages, or more importantly for his purposes, of different dialects of the same language. Honey’s book is an apologetic for Standard English (SE), and the notion of standardised language generally, as something that needs to be taught in the schools even if this is at the expense of people’s pride or fluency in their regional dialect.

 

His arguments in favour of actively enforcing SE, in brief, are:

1. People naturally associate well-spokenness and literacy with education, higher social status and power. In this sense people who speak in regional dialects will be discriminated against, as assumptions will be made about their intelligence. By the same token, enforcing of Standard English is necessary to combat discrimination against it from within communities of nonstandard English speakers.

2. Fluency in SE, being the language of government, law, scientific research and the great works of literature, is a prerequisite for involvement in these spheres. For schools not to give everyone the opportunity to speak SE is to emasculate them socially, politically and artistically.

3. The maintenance of SE (best done, for Honey, in accordance with the judgements of a cross-section of educated speakers) is invaluable for communication, wherever English is spoken. Non-standard forms, with their less-clearly defined grammar, higher incidence of slang and esoteric phrases, are limited by geography, but SE (in both British and American versions) is spoken the world over. Without its active promotion, English risks dissolving into a vast range of mutually unintelligible dialects, whereas with global promotion and support, a consensually formulated (and regularly updated) SE could truly be a world language.

 

Honey argues that belief in the dogma of linguistic equality has resulted in an erosion of English teaching in the UK, with teachers less willing to correct non-standard phrases and spellings. This is combined with changing attitudes to how grammar should be taught, or whether it should be taught at all, and the net result is (supposedly) appallingly high levels of illiteracy — especially in deprived areas — and the resultant perpetuation of cycles of poverty, rising crime figures and the other familiar riffs of the ‘hell in a handbasket’ deterioration school of social commentary. There are two aspects of Honey’s stance I would like to focus on: his critique of supporters of non-standard English on the basis of their role in perpetuating social decline, and his tendency to take as inevitable the prevailing attitudes mentioned in point 1 above. The latter I will examine in the discussion of verbal hygiene below. The former question is particularly relevant to Deleuze-Guattari’s advocacy of ‘becoming-minor’ in language, ‘making language stutter’, and ‘becoming a foreigner in your own tongue’.

 

7.3 What is Wrong with Communication?

The most cursory glance at Deleuze-Guattari’s ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ indicates that their stance will be fundamentally opposed to Honey’s assumptions regarding the superiority of Major or Standardised language, which they clearly associate with social control through the transmission of order-words. I have dealt above with their equation of grammar with the imposition of the ‘semiotic coordinates’ by which we are expected to navigate our courses through life, a strict schooling in the language of the State being intertwined with the normalising of behaviour through social obligation. However, are they perhaps a little quick off the mark in their condescension towards official grammar and standardised language?  This is one aspect of a greater worry Deleuze-Guattari often engender, that their valorisation of change and creation over stability is at best naïve, and at worst, dangerously destructive. Supposing English teaching (for example) were to be carried out on the basis of a rejection of the strictures of grammar, the fostering of password-creation over order word reinforcement, and encouragement of free innovation for its own sake?  If we take at face value their claims that language is not primarily about conveying information, then perhaps a situation where conveying information becomes virtually impossible is the situation we should strive for?  How else are we to take Deleuze’s call for the creation of ‘vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control’ (N 174)?

 

In short, a Honeyesque critique of Deleuze-Guattari’s stance on language would place them as two well-educated intellectuals devaluing everyone else’s right to join the club of standard language users (an argument he uses against critics of SE, Raymond Williams and Roy Harris [19] ) by arguing that standardised, State-sanctioned language is the vehicle of oppression (rather than, as Honey argues with some force, of liberation). While of course Deleuze-Guattari were not setting out to contribute directly to debates about education policy, there is nonetheless a worry here that their views — if they are supposed to be taken to have any practical applications whatsoever, which I assume they are — smack of armchair anarchism. [20]   What use is minor literature if you have never learned to read?

 

The rather distasteful conclusion from this could be that Deleuze-Guattari’s position is something like ‘Of course people have to be taught to read and write in accordance with the major language. If they cannot give and receive order-words, they can’t free up the passwords within; if they can’t talk like a native in the first place, they cannot learn to talk like a “foreigner in their own tongue”. We only said ‘vacuoles’ of noncommunication — we didn’t mean whole housing estates!’  In other words, to the extent that Deleuze-Guattari are critical of the Strata they are also complicit, and their criticisms only carry weight insofar as they assume the continued existence of the Strata regardless. Rather than the anarchic revolutionaries that are perhaps suggested by the radical educational policy I fancifully extrapolated from them above, they are actually interested in ‘becoming-minor’ in language as a literary or artistic exercise, an exercise that is only interesting against the backdrop of the continued dominance of the Major language of representation.

 

This reading of Deleuze-Guattari suggests that affirming passwords over order-words amounts to little more than a lifestyle choice, open only to those privileged enough to be able to discern the difference, with absolutely nothing to say about the problems caused by high levels of illiteracy the world over. For example, Goodchild’s Deleuze and Guattari appears to present their politics in this fashion, where the point is to explore your own private becomings and leave politics in the capable hands of the social democrats. [21]   I hope now to show that their account runs much deeper than this in its dissection of the social functioning of language, and rather than proposing an aesthetic judgement of password over order-word, they do in actual fact have a substantial contribution to make to issues of language teaching that surpasses the Honey stance.

 

In ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ they argue that major and minor are not opposing categories of language, but the same language from two different points of view: that of the institutional grammarian (in the prescriptive sense), extracting pseudo-universals from the flows of language on the one hand, and on the other, an experimental approach focusing on the continuous variation of language, its dependence in any given instance on the specifics of the social context in which it arises. As far as the teaching of language goes, this could take the form of a shift of emphasis (one that has already taken place) from a focus on supposedly immutable rules, to a sensitivity to the importance of paralinguistic aspects — intonation, the interplay of formal and informal registers, body language, and perhaps most importantly, the indexes of relative power in social interaction. The last thing such an approach would be is blind to the kind of prejudices Honey talks about against non-standard forms. Rather than seeing standard uses as something of value for their own sake, language teaching on a pragmatic basis would equip the student with an understanding of the embeddedness of speech and writing in a variety of different situations, and that discourses about language are (like discourses about anything else) only comprehensible in relation to the power relationships of which they are an expression.

 

In any case, communication has never been as simple as the model of ‘telementation’, or the transfer of thoughts from one head to another, suggested. As I have tried to show in this thesis, language is not a fixed code, and its flexibility also entails what could be seen as its greatest weakness — indeterminacy. Exact transfer of ideas from mind to mind is a hopeless idealisation, that makes inexplicable the enduring appeal of ‘non-standard’ literature from Tristram Shandy to Dr Seuss, and reduces language to a transparent medium of communication. [22] As Deborah Cameron puts it,

 

Non-standard and unconventional uses of language can only be seen as a threat to communication if communication itself is conceived in a way that negates our whole experience of it (VH 25).

 

In the following discussion of ‘verbal hygiene’, I will explore the possibilities of a fundamentally political, pragmatic understanding of how language works, in order to show that these ideas are a much more appealing basis for investigating and teaching languages than Honey’s commitment to standardisation as means, and maximised communication as goal.

 

7.4 Metalinguistic Practices

 

[H]umans do not just use language, they comment on the language they use (VH 1).

 

In her book Verbal Hygiene, Deborah Cameron, like Honey, argues against the supposed objectivity of linguistics — though she is keen not to dismiss its insights and innovations. The problem with it is its failure to take adequate account of metalinguistic practices, both institutional, subcultural and individual. These practices or movements in the modification of speech and writing, she argues, are as old as language itself, predating modern linguistics by millennia. Her point, as we will see, is very close to that of Deleuze-Guattarian pragmatics — namely that there is no zone of language use that is free of investments in social and political concerns; language is never simply about information or communication, but always arises in particular social contexts, in particular relationships of power: the abstract entity ‘Language’ does not exist beyond its concrete instantiations in particular social contexts.

 

It is important for linguists to acknowledge that there is more to people’s beliefs than the ignorance and prejudice that meet the eye; for in order to displace the most powerful ideology there is, namely common sense, it is necessary to grasp its hidden principles and to understand the reasons for its enduring popular appeal (VH xiii). [23]

 

In explaining her choice of the term ‘verbal hygiene’ to designate the practices she is investigating, Cameron contrasts it with the traditional distinction in linguistics between the descriptive and the prescriptive, arguing that the discipline has tended to distance itself from any investment in the latter area. As Steven Pinker was cited as arguing above, prescribing ‘correct’ language use is an activity for people who do not know any better — people who have not recognised that everyone (barring such exceptions as the mentally subnormal) automatically and necessarily has the means to express themselves fully, as language necessarily arrives as a totality, differences between idiolects notwithstanding. Linguistics is concerned with examining this natural phenomenon, in charting its changes and differences through history, across continents and through the economic strata of society. Notions of ‘correctness’ are alien to linguistics, since while it recognises that certain uses may be privileged by certain groups over others, these are simply data to be recorded and interpreted in the manner befitting a true science. [24]

 

Cameron argues that while the study of language in accordance with scientific practice is clearly possible and productive, such an approach cannot escape the fact that language operates on the basis of norms. Language is not a phenomenon like gravity or the speed of light; it is neither an artefact of culture, nor a living thing in its own right — ‘any more than swimming, or birdsong, is a living thing’ [25]   (cf. Pinker’s suggestion that ‘language is like the song of the humpback whale’ (LI 370)). The rules linguistics ‘discovers’ no doubt capture actual regularities in speakers’ behaviour, but to say therefore that such rules exist ‘in the speaker’ or indeed ‘in the language’ conceals the social apparatus giving force to such rules and maintaining such regularities, a process in which linguistics is itself thoroughly implicated.

 

Cameron refuses to allow by unchallenged, any appeals to how (a) language or grammar simply ‘is’. Such appeals, while more innocuous and perhaps unavoidable in the natural sciences, are in linguistics mystifications, in that they take for granted the authority of some set of facts of past or present usage, to arbitrate in disagreements over new formulations. The point is not so much that you cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, but (firstly) that the facts (or ‘ises’) brought to bear in such disputes will always be overdetermined by some already operational set of ‘oughts’ left outside the realm of argument, and (secondly) that when it comes to language use, there are no mere ‘ises’, just the ‘oughts’ that successfully took root and became entrenched. [26]  

 

For example, in English the masculine third person pronoun has found itself on the receiving end of verbal hygienists, on the fairly obvious basis that it excludes half of humanity. Traditionalists argued that ‘he’ actually meant ‘he or she’ all along, or at least that it does now, and that in any case it is vastly preferable to such ugly constructions as ‘he or she’, or worse still, the shudder-inducing ‘they’-singular. People of this view to this day can be heard grudgingly correct themselves (‘...sorry, he or she...’) making it clear what a terrible imposition this concession is. Nevertheless, when I hear ‘he’ when what is clearly meant is ‘he or she’, it jars. Expressing the same sentiment slightly differently (and using the technique of ‘experiencer deletion’ as listed among Bolinger’s list of techniques of ‘non-neutrality in grammar’ [27] ), it is no longer acceptable to say ‘he’ when you mean ‘he or she’. Needless to say, if I had been brought up to believe that ‘he’ could be said to apply to both sexes, rather than its use being due to the subordination of women, it is likely I would strenuously argue that it is both acceptable and correct, and that anyone who says otherwise is either a fool or a dangerous extremist. In partial concession to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if the way we were taught language doesn’t actually affect how we think about things in general, it certainly affects how we respond to challenges to our verbal hygiene!

 

This distinction (fool or extremist) Cameron brings out as evidence of the contradictory stance taken by opponents of language change. In such an example as the above, they are inclined to say on the one hand that these changes are offences against the way language actually is, and on the other that it doesn’t matter anyway — why do these campaigners think that such superficial changes are anything to do with any real plight women and racial minorities might actually be in?  This translates into two equally contradictory responses to changes that have become established (e.g. Black (or, if appropriate, African-American) replacing Negro, disabled or dysabled replacing handicapped, as well as the more obviously pejorative forms nigger and cripple). Either such changes are simply seen to be due to geological shifts in language caused by impersonal social currents rather than the result of individuals campaigning, or they are cosmetic shifts of little consequence that will probably change again tomorrow as fashion dictates. Both responses depoliticise language, and negate the efforts of the campaigners involved.

 

Cameron argues that linguistics cannot keep its hands clean in issues of verbal hygiene, because the distinction between what it does and what popular (and unpopular) verbal hygienists do is very difficult to maintain:

 

both prescriptivism and anti-prescriptivism invoke certain norms and circulate particular notions about how language ought to work [...] ‘description’ and ‘prescription’ turn out to be aspects of a single (and normative) activity: a struggle to control language by defining its nature’ (VH 8).

 

Linguistics may purport to merely observe, but the often-unquestioned authority of science and the underdetermination of theories by empirical data mean that its objectivity should not be taken for granted. [28]   Instead, a linguistics that takes the normativity of language as fundamental will be better placed to understand its own political roles.

 

Verbal hygiene practices [29] in all their diversity point to two key notions. The first is that people constantly talk about talk, and modify the way they and each other speak and write. In other words, rather than being something we just do, the way we do it is as important (if not more so) than whatever it is we are speaking or writing about — and we are constantly making (more or less conscious) decisions about this just as we are about every other activity. In contrast to this, the disinterested stance of the linguist seems ludicrously alien: surely language-use of all things has to be investigated with rigorous attention, if not necessarily to the inner world of the individual, then at least to the actual situation she is acting in (and her effect on it). In Deleuze-Guattari’s terms, utterances can only be understood in relation to particular collective assemblages — this last phrase marking a distinction both with the speech of the individual and the language of the society, and instead focusing on the particular milieu on which the utterance occurs. [30]   Indeed, collective assemblages, the boundaries of which are far from self-evident in A Thousand Plateaus, can be carved out on the basis of the verbal hygiene practices (along with other order-words) in circulation at a given moment. You comprise a collective assemblage with the rest of your Plain English pressure group, or with your fellow speakers of rural Doric, Jamaican patois or poststructuralist philosophy jargon.

 

What becomes of the individual in the collective assemblage?  Cameron’s arguments against those approaches which negate the roles of individuals in language change could conceivably be turned against the notion of the collective assemblage — is this not simply the return of the notion that impersonal geological shifts in society facilitate change rather than, perhaps, actively campaigning individuals (be they feminists, the Académie Française, or whoever)?  This point raises the issue of the nature of the individual and the acts that can be attributed to it. Arguing with Deleuze-Guattari, all utterances are collective, and (as Cameron would presumably concede) it is the collective nature of such verbal hygiene movements that result in change, rather than their happening to consist in groups of particularly influential individuals. The individual is constructed from the collective assemblages, rather than the other way round, particularly with relation to politics and the politicisation of language. We will shortly examine Cameron’s account of the construction of the individual.

 

The second point — why verbal hygiene practices are as relevant as any other socio-political campaigns or movements — is that they are never simply about language. As I have just suggested they can be defining characteristics of particular groups (most obviously in the case of those formed with explicitly linguistic aims) and in such cases, what might lie behind the ostensive activities is investment in a group of like minds, united in their alienation from prevailing attitudes. But more significantly, as Cameron points out, verbal hygiene debates are generally the symbolic expression of ‘“deeper” social conflicts’ — or rather the two levels are in ‘complex interaction’ to the extent that neither can be understood without reference to the other (VH 12). In Deleuze-Guattarian terms, the two are in reciprocal presupposition — the collective assemblage defined by its utterances (where what is said is not separable from the way it is said: medium = message [31] ) and the machinic assemblage defined by bodies, their actions and passions. On both sides, it is a matter of the enforcement or rejection of traditional norms and the creation and maintenance of new norms, behaviours and social obligations linked through the switching point of the order-word.

 

7.5 Subjectification

Cameron proposes three zones — authority, identity and agency — in which this interaction is played out. Each of these draw their significance from the uses of language, and show why disputes over the uses of language go ‘all the way down’ as regards the structuring of the social. Crucially, she argues that

 

Linguistic conventions are quite possibly the last repository of unquestioned authority for educated people in secular society. Tell such people that they must dress in a certain way to be admitted to a public building and some at least will demand to know why; they may even reject the purported explanation as absurd and campaign for a change in the rules. Tell them, on the other hand, that the comma goes outside the quotation marks rather than inside (or for that matter vice versa as is conventional in North America) and they will meekly obey, though the rule is patently as arbitrary as any dress code (VH 12).

 

The point is that while the rule itself may be arbitrary, its social function is not. As Honey argued, failing to comply with standard usages marks you out as legitimately discriminatable-against, where almost nothing else would — as Cameron puts it, ‘linguistic bigotry is among the last publicly expressible prejudices left to members of the western intelligentsia. Intellectuals who would find it unthinkable to sneer at a beggar or someone in a wheelchair will sneer without compunction at linguistic “solecisms”’ (VH 12). For Cameron, this is prejudice (though she freely admits experiencing the ‘jarring’ effect of bad spelling and grammar herself [32] ); for Honey it is natural and legitimate, since he is already convinced of the superiority and importance of standard forms. Both agree that ‘correctness’ is neither arbitrary or trivial, and that to perpetuate or challenge the authority of grammar is to take a stand on far more than just language (and hence, will often be an utterly futile and counterproductive gesture). For Cameron, this is an indication that verbal hygienists of every stripe disingenuously or deliberately confuse the issues by failing to see the underlying social processes that are at stake.

 

The inexorability of grammar runs as deep as all other social behaviours — we are as likely or unlikely to want to speak or spell incorrectly as we are to want to draw attention to ourselves, act aggressively or obscenely, or otherwise contravene our internalised codes of acceptable behaviour. Take the following excerpt from a conversation about correct and nonsensical sentence constructions cited by Bolinger, between a mother and her seven-year-old daughter:

 

M: What’s the difference how you say things as long as people understand you?

D: It’s a difference because people would stare at you (titter) [...] I don’t want somebody coming around and saying — correcting me. [33]

 

For Cameron, a major failing of sociolinguistics has been its taking for granted of ‘people’s demonstrable sensitivity to linguistic norms, their fine-tuned awareness of prestige and stigma’, without paying any attention to the actual mechanics of how this sensitivity and awareness comes about (VH 14-15). Her suggestion is to examine the construction of identity (or in terms of the present investigation, subjectification), turning on its head the sociolinguistic assumption that linguistic behaviour can be explained in reference to a pre-existing identity, and looking instead at how social positions and relationships are constructed through linguistic and other behaviours. Drawing on Judith Butler’s performative account of identity-construction, Cameron asks ‘If identity pre-exists language, if it is given, fixed and taken for granted, then why do language-users have to mark it so assiduously and repetitively?’ (VH 17). This continual, performative marking of identity is necessary because ‘identity does not exist outside of the acts that constitute it’, each of which are in interaction with the ‘highly rigid regulatory frame’ [34] of social norms.

 

This frame defines what acts are required to produce an intelligible, acceptable or normal identity; its definitions cannot simply be ignored, but they can be negotiated, resisted and in some circumstances deliberately modified [...] Debates on verbal hygiene are of particular interest: conflict renders visible the processes of norm-making and norm-breaking, bringing into the open the arguments that surround rules. Verbal hygiene practices that are not the subject of debate are also illuminating: examined closely, they show how norms become naturalized and how unquestioned (‘conventional’) ways of behaving are implicitly understood by social actors. Overall, then, the investigation of normative practices, whether contested or taken for granted, has the potential to cast light on the relations between language, society and identity (VH 17).

 

The third zone of agency brings together problems of authority and identity, in the question of agency — that of the extent to which we speak language, or, to paraphrase Heidegger, it speaks us. For linguistics, as we have seen, language is a natural phenomenon or a living organism with its own pattern of evolution and change; for verbal hygienists, it might either be something whose decline needs to be prevented, or whose outmoded forms need to be brought in line with changing attitudes. It is under the banner of agency that Cameron presents her middle path between the notions either that language use (as natural process) cannot be made artificially to square with so-called passing whims of the age (such as political correctness) — and that attempts to make it do so are misguided prescriptivism, or that if changes are seen to take root they are merely the gradual evolution of language due to the effects of social change. In either case agency is denied and the ‘naturalness’ of language is strategically appealed to — in the first case, because the fact that changes can be argued for successfully and can take root as a result is denied, and in the second, because linguistic changes are seen as mere epiphenomena of social change.

 

A high level of conformity need not mean everyone assents to the relevant norms; it could mean rather that they live within social relations that make deviance and resistance particularly difficult (VH 238n4).

 

Because science itself has authority in modern society, while at the same time the discourse of value remains a highly salient one for everyday talk about language, the absolute distinction between observing norms and enforcing them cannot be maintained in practice (VH 8).

 

Cameron cites right wing commentator John Marenbon, who argued that the linguists who argue for description over prescription have missed the point: [35]

 

‘grammar prescribes by describing’. The point of doing a ‘descriptive’ grammatical analysis is precisely to establish what the norms of grammar are, so they can be prescribed with confidence to users of the language (VH 10).

 

But though Cameron agrees with this point, she disagrees with his assumption that we are therefore obliged to follow one set of prescriptions over another. By accepting that normativity is inescapable in language use, you open the very question of which normative strategies to follow at any given point — a question that bares directly on the social and political investments of each.

 

I would argue that there is not the radical distinction Cameron proposes between the normative practices of verbal hygiene and normativity in other social arenas, in that the latter are often so ingrained as to be largely invisible much of the time. Examples of this could be the behaviours which mark someone as weird or insane-looking. Making this comparison brings up the corresponding argument one might make, to the effect that people who break social norms, whether by running around naked or by machine-gunning their workmates probably are insane, just as the illiterate or inveterately ungrammatical are deficient. Just because these norms are in one sense socially constructed, they are nonetheless real forces on people’s behaviour, and there are real consequences for failing to conform to them.

 

The analogy can be taken further. Should there be any proponents of ‘grammatical atheism’, or the idea that grammar, or the regime of signification/subjectification in its entirety, is a set of shackles to be thrown off, or radically refigured, they would bear comparison with the radical antipsychiatry of someone like Thomas Szasz. [36] While the present approach is happy to suggest that psychiatry and linguistics alike have had roles to play in ordering and controlling society in a rather less disinterested way than that in which they like to be presented, it is another thing altogether to suggest that either psychiatry (with its not infrequent successes in preventing people commit suicide or helping them get through difficult and dangerous periods of their lives) or the various sciences and proto-sciences of language should be declared our enemies. The point is not to criticise the very idea of norms, or to suggest that we could do without them, but rather to explore the possibilities of modifying or replacing those norms. Having realised that they are there and that they are to some extent open to debate, it will not do to appeal to them as natural principles, as a covert way of maintaining their power. Above, we saw how John Honey appealed to people’s ill-dispositions towards non-standard forms of English, such as Black English, as justification for the active promotion of SE in schools. ‘There is,’ retorts Cameron, ‘a lot of colour prejudice in Britain, but that fact is never invoked to suggest that black children [...] should be taught the proper use of skin lightening cosmetics’ (VH 98).

 

7.6 Conclusion

To sum up the findings of this chapter: in contrast to the stance of nativist linguistics, grammar is unlikely to be an innate faculty, one essentially devoted to the production and reception of sentences. What we have argued for instead, is the faculty of order-words, which is not a biological property of human neuroanatomy, but rather, is a contingent social property of human societies (at least, all those that have been encountered so far). In other words, the behaviours we understand as language use, at least on present data, are everywhere accompanied by custom, regulation and control — social obligation — though this may take radically different forms at different times and places. The implication for linguistics is that language can only be separated off from a pragmatic examination of its particular context, at the risk of detaching it from life — in spite of Chomsky’s claim that it is the cataloguers of linguistic variation who are the ‘butterfly collectors’ as opposed to those true scientists of language in the schools of generative grammar (LR 57). Our discussion of verbal hygiene emphasised that linguistic and metalinguistic practices are intertwined with social, political and economic struggles, and that there are no mere matters of language: that is, for all the time spent dealing about the ‘merely linguistic’, one is prevented or distracted from talking about the ‘bigger picture’. Discussions of verbal hygiene, alongside debates about social practices, are vivid examples of the distribution of the visible and the articulable being contested and reasserted.