Why use new words?

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Jan Blommaert 

I sometimes get asked why I insist on using new and arcane terms such as “superdiversity” and “chronotope” in fields for which we (appear to) have an established and consensual vocabulary. My answer is usually: sometimes we need new words for no other reason than to examine the validity of the old ones. A form of quality control of analytical vocabulary, if you wish.

The history of science is replete with reformulations of the same, or very similar, realities, and authors such as Michel Foucault were extraordinarily productive in the creation of an entirely new terminology to describe processes already described in, e.g., Weber and Marx. The quest was, almost invariably, a quest for enhanced precision and accuracy – rendering visible and analytically identifiable (often small but relevant) distinctions that had been left aside as relatively insignificant details, side-effects or mere aspects of another phenomenon; or to identify a phenomenon previously treated only in part or in a much to generalizing way. Think of Foucault’s use of “biopower” or “governmentality” as instances, Scott’s “hidden transcripts” or Bourdieu’s “habitus”. Such terms do not replace an earlier vocabulary, they complement it with tools that allow and enable a different approach to the same field or object, focusing on different aspects and characteristics of it.

In that sense, they are no one’s enemy. The more since, as C. Wright Mills reminded us, the debate should not be about the words, but about the ideas they capture and for which the words are merely facilitators.

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TINA undressed 2: History without agency

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Jan Blommaert 

This morning, ING Bank announced a worldwide restructuration in which 7,000 jobs will be cut, about half of which in its Belgian branch. The restructuration did not come as a surprise to many employees and observers, in spite of ING having done not too badly at all – the last decade saw a net profit of around 11 billion Euro, with over 7 billion in dividend, and a 30% increase in the CEO’s remuneration last year. So it is not that the bank is on the brink of collapse or that its shares are nosediving. Thus, why this range of deep-cutting measures?

ING communicated its decision in a statement called “Accelerating Think Forward“. The restructuration is part of a strategy implemented since 2014 (“Think Forward”), which now demands acceleration, more specifically “a number of initiatives to further improve the customer experience, further grow primary customers and lending, and increase efficiency”. The bank has done quite well, as we have seen. However, says CEO Ralph Hamers, “[w]e also promised to keep getting better and that is exactly what today’s steps are aimed at. Our recent successes allow us to do so from a position of strength.”

The past is, thus, just the take-off for the future. This future is by definition not known. But nevertheless, ING reads the signs:

“Customers are increasingly digital and bank with us more and more through mobile devices. Their needs and expectations are the same, all over the world, and they expect us to adopt new technology as fast as companies in other sectors. In order to continue to lead in digital banking, we need to offer a better customer experience, that’s instant, personal, frictionless and relevant. At the same time, banks are confronted with continuous regulatory burden and a prolonged period of ultra-low interest rates. These factors put pressure on the returns which are necessary to fund growth and investments, and cover our cost of capital.”

Observe how ING suggests that the prime mover behind this plan is the customer, whose preferences, demands and expectations have shifted into a direction that demands “a better customer experience, that’s instant, personal, frictionless and relevant”. Money only appears at the very end of the statement:

“In line with our strategy, we will be introducing ING Group financial targets for 2020. We will maintain our ING Group CET1 ratio above the prevailing fully-loaded requirement, currently 12.5%, with a leverage ratio above 4%. Our target for the cost/income ratio is 50-52%. In light of the continuing regulatory uncertainty, we are not updating our RoE target (currently 10-13% of ING Bank IFRS-EU equity), but we reiterate our intention to pay a progressive dividend over time.”

Given that we are talking about a bank operating in a competitive global banking universe and owned by shareholders demanding specific levels of return on investment, it is relatively safe to suspect that the real prime mover is profit, and that the new customer experience is a means to that end.

The reversal of those two elements brings us to the TINA (There is no alternative) frame. In an earlier piece I discussed how a particular discursive use of identity forms part of the TINA frame; here we see similar things happening with history. And to summarize the point, we see how in the ING statement, a particular distinction is made between

  • history with agency, and
  • history without agency

The history-with-agency is the strategy presented by the bank. Its plan “Thinking Forward” already incorporates a clear agentive frame – it’s the bankers who think – and “accelerating” that plan is obviously also something decided more or les sovereignly by the bank’s executives. The strategy, in short, articulates how the bank intends to control a future through specific measures designed to benefit from…. a history over which they have no agency. And this history-without-agency is described in the paragraph in which the developments in customer expectations and market circumstances are given.

From a purely factual viewpoint, the bank has co-shaped all the conditions presented in that paragraph. ING customers have, for years, been pushed towards more digital and less branch-based banking activities through measures implemented by no one else but the bank (and often contested by the customers themselves). The same goes for the “regulatory context” referred to, including the “ultra-low interest rates”, which occured often both in response to existing banking problems, as well as at the request of banking lobbies. None of these forces, thus, can structly be depicted as alien, outside forces over which the bank has no control. The same counts a fortiori for the elephant in the room: profitability target setting. The shareholders are the bank, and as we have seen in the fragment above, they have received 10-13% percent “Return on Equity” – a quite extraordinary level of profit, reflecting, one could say, quite unrealistic levels of expected profit growth. And these target settings are not forced upon the bank by outside forces.

The paradox, however, is that ING presents the entire operation as a rational response – their agency – to forces of history that they can only follow, by trying to remain ahead of them. In other words: they are suggesting that they respond to historical forces by shaping them. “Sorry, but there is no other way to respond to future challenges than to create them ourselves.” This paradox is nicely woven into the delicate discourse of cause-and-effect in the statement, and this particular discursive move feeds into the TINA frame: things are what they are, there is no alternative for history than a future shaped by us. We can see this nicely in this final fragment:

“While not all plans we present today are finalized, the intended initiatives are expected to result in a reduction of ING´s workforce in Belgium by around 3,500 FTEs and by around 2,300 FTEs in the Netherlands for the years 2016-2021. These numbers include the intended move to an integrated banking platform, with the remainder of functions affected spread over intended programmes in IT, operations, Wholesale Banking and various business support functions. At the same time, we will add colleagues in parts of our business where we expect to accelerate growth given our plans to continue to attract new customers and increase lending to support the economies we are active in.”

It’s all about agency here, and incidentally the agency articulated here touches precisely those causal forces previously described as beyond the grasp of the bank – the objective directions of history in the banking world.

At the heart of TINA, there is a lie – we all know that. The lie revolves around the suggestion of non-agency, of absolute and uncontrollable actors shaping fields of action in which those using the TINA frame claim to have just minimal, responsive, and therefore rational agency. While in fact, they are the actors. In other words: they pretend to be the victims of a future they themselves are engineering. And this future is, of course, an absolute and undisputable given, to which they can only adjust their course of action.

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TINA undressed 1: Identity politics as identity without politics

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Jan Blommaert 

On a hot day in July 2016, four policemen walked onto a beach in Nice, France, ordered a Muslim woman to take off part of her hijab dress, in full view of dozens of other tourists, and fined her for violations of the local decency regulations. The incident was captured by a photographer (which makes the public undressing even more disconcerting) and the images went viral. They triggered a fierce international debate on the why and how of such interventions, in which Muslim female dress is seen as a direct index of a deeper threat – that of jihadism.

How could these four policemen see their intervention as “normal”? After all, one can question, on grounds of common sense, quite a few aspects of a situation in which four armed men order a woman to publicly undress, and sanction her “over-dressedness” on a beach as an act of indecency. The answer can be found elsewhere, in a feature of public debate which has become pervasive whenever Islam and its (real or imagined) characteristics are the theme. There is a highly peculiar use of identity in such arguments, and I shall attempt to sketch it in what follows.

As I said, the incident triggered a massive debate in mass and social media, in which broadly two camps could be discerned. One camp saw the police action as normal and argued that hijab does not belong in our society, since it is an emblem of Islamic backwardness regarding male-female equality. The other camp saw it as a transgression of civil liberties – the freedom of religion – and as an illustration of the absurdities to which the War on Terror (read: the West versus Islam) had led. Both camps overlap to some extent (but certainly not in absolute terms, as we shall see) with the traditional Right-Left distinctions in the political field.

In Belgium, too, this debate raged, and the Belgian-Flemish Social-democrats took a position which largely sided with the first camp. For this, evidently, they were attacked by fractions of the Left. And on 15 August, a member of the Social Democratic party posted the following update on Facebook (Dutch original, my translation).

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There is, in se, nothing remarkable about the text, other than that it combines several arguments found in hundreds of other interventions in these discussion. I summarize them as follows:

  1. The text makes a neat distinction between “us and them”, and both parties are treated in a fundamentally different way.
  2. The “us” party is characterized by epistemic superiority: we know how wrong “they” are, and we know what “they” should do in response to that.
  3. The “they” party is described as a situated entity in the “here-and-now” chronotope. Their actual and concrete behavior is the focus of discussion.
  4. The “we” party, in contrast, is described as absolute and timeless, in a “here-always” chronotope, by invoking “our” history (Enlightenment) and “our” values.
  5. “Their” behavior is political: concrete forms of behavior are seen as an immediate and distinct threat to “democracy”. Our reaction to this, in contrast, is explicitly depoliticized and presented as a simple factual, rational, observation.

This neat (and recurrent) separation of different universes for “us” and “them” enables the author to conclude that the Social-Democratic emphasis on law and order has nothing to do with traditional political Left-Right distinctions. It is a matter of rational reasoning – a simple statement of “problems” – which refers not to specific really-existing political directions, but to our fundamental identity. Thus, it wasn’t President Hollande’s socialism that motivated the four policemen’s action, it was the values of Enlightenment.

We see here how identity is used as a very powerful argument, suggested to transcend everyday politics and to be played out at an existential and timeless level of essential identity. Small features of “their” behavior can now be seen as absolute challenges to who we are, and as in need of responses that protect that fundamental identity. Such responses can – or must – be given by political actors of all shades and colors: actual political positions (and traditions) do not matter here, for our very essence is at stake. And just like in economic matters, addressing the threat of Islam is captured in the TINA frame – there is only one way to respond to it, and that is to defend the absolute status of “our way” and accept no compromise, let alone an alternative strategy, in that battle. Since there is just one way, this way must be “rational”.

Decades ago, scholars such as Manuel Castells, Immanuel Wallerstein and Eric Hobsbawm warned us that identity would become the battlefield of the globalized political world. They were right, and we begin to see how this battlefield is organized: by a politics of identity which denies its political – contestable and debatable – nature, and instead offers itself as an absolute feature.

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Who owns my ideas?

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Jan Blommaert

I recently received an email from the academic sharing platform ResearchGate, where I maintain a profile.

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So here we are. I am the originator of knowledge, but I can only share it with others under conditions specified by a commercial enterprise, who holds the license to it. In the philosophical literature, this situation is know as heteronomy, the opposite of autonomy.

There is a long tradition in which knowledge was seen as an exceptional kind of commodity: as opposed to e.g. an apple or a bottle of Coke,  consumption of knowledge doesn’t deprive its producer of it. On the contrary, it is supposed to make everyone better, to contribute to the common good. We are now in a situation where (a) this principle of knowledge as a commons is entirely rejected; (b) the producer is deprived of the autonomy to communicate it.

The contribution of a publisher to an academic article is nothing more than a reference. To the title and author, it adds something such as “Journal of Applied Linguistics 34/3: 111-131”. That’s it.  This reference, of course, is the stuff of careers. The article can be insignificant or outright useless, but the reference turns it into an academic achievement, a really-existent result and product of labor that can be turned into a line in someone’s CV and thence into an argument for appointment, tenure or promotion. It’s alchemy: a stone has been turned into gold. Or at least, that’s what we believe has happened.

The price to be paid for this bit of alchemy is colossal. I can make ideas, convert them into knowledge and write them into texts; but I have to ask permission for communicating them to others, for I don’t have the right to do so myself. I can, thus, violate the copyrights to my own thoughts, words and phrases. I can be punished for doing so. So what is the next thing? Perhaps a close monitoring by publishers of conference contributions? – imagine that I would read a paper published by them to an audience who haven’t paid for it? Surely that would be a crime.

Forgive me if I find all of that quite weird.

Copyright Jan Blommaert, 2016

 

Academic publishing and money

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Jan Blommaert 

In what follows, I intend to place some footnotes to an earlier text, in which I addressed at length various highly contentious issues characterizing the field of academic publishing nowadays. That earlier text, roughly summarized, (a) described the present economic model of academic publishing as outspokenly exploitative; (b) included the current models of Open Access as equally absurd when viewed from the perspective of ownership, and (c) suggested that publishers become increasingly redundant as actors in the field of knowledge circulation. We can independently do almost everything currently done by publishers, and do it better.

The text became the topic of one of the first discussion sessions on Academia.edu and was widely picked up and redistributed (illustrating, thus, the exact point it was making). To the extent that the arguments in the text still require clarification and further elaboration, I wish to offer one point in what follows – about money.

As an element of background, it is good to recall that academic publishing is an extraordinarily lucrative business – in fact, one of the most lucrative businesses around. In 2013, Elsevier-Reed (one of the giants in the field) reported a net profit rate of 39% – a margin which for most other domains of industry belongs to the realm of dreams. Part of this is due to the escalation of subscription costs for academic journals, which has risen at a level three times higher than other average commodity costs since 1986. Academic publishing is, if one wishes, a robber economy. Open Access negotiations, especially those in which so-called “Gold Open Access” is the target, involve the payment of several thousands of Euro’s for a single article to be made Open Access. I refer the reader to the earlier text for details.

Grasping the nature of the transactions involved in all of this can be helped by the following illustration. Here is part of a copyright agreement I recently concluded with a prominent academic publisher.

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There is nothing special about the text of the agreement; in fact, it is quite common in our field. We notice that I transfer all copyrights to the publisher, and that I do not get a reward for it. In fact, what I get in return is a reference to an electronically published version of my text, and some heavily limited rights in using this published version myself. People who wish to read my article and have no access to an institutional subscription to the journal have to pay the price of a book – between 30€ and 50€ per article. And if I (or my university) want to turn the article into something that can be read at no cost by anyone, a couple of thousands of Euros must be paid to the publisher.

It’s all about money, surely, but only parts of the money involved in this are shown so far. An aspect never mentioned in these transactions is the production cost of the article. Articles don’t grow on trees, they are manufactured by someone, and this process involves material and immaterial resources, and labor costs.

Now let us do a little simulation here, and a merciful one. Imagine that the production cost of an average article involves 100 hours of academic labor (from getting the idea, over the research, to reading, writing, editing and so forth, and including the material costs). And imagine that such labor costs about 20€ per hour (as I said, I am being merciful here). The production cost of the article is 2000€, and by signing the copyright agreement this is donated to the publisher, who, in turn, charges everyone (including the author) for reading the article. It’s a form of “enclosure” – you spent a season working hard growing apples, but if you wish to eat one you need to buy it from a grocer who happens to have licensed the apples.

Imagine now that I write a book. The book has seven chapters, and to keep things simple I use the calculation above – each chapter being the equivalent of an article. We then get 7 times 2000€, or 14.000 Euros’ worth of labor donated to the publisher. It is because these production costs are eliminated in the transactions we (have to) enter into with publishers, that academic publishing is so extraordinarily lucrative a business. Publishers, simply put, do not bear any cost in the production of their primary material – the papers and books we submit to them for publication. When they speak about “costs”, consequently, they only address the end of the line production costs – some editing and lay outing, and marketing, sales and distribution of things that consumed tremendous amounts of labor to produce and represent, consequently, tremendous value – all of which is made invisible now. Note, in passing, that these end-of-the-line costs are usually pressented as prohibitive and are also rolled off onto the author, as in the following illustration, a fragment from another copyright agreement:

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Now, whose money is involved here? In my case, the money appropriated by publishers is that of my employer, a public university; through the system of subsidies in education, the money is ultimately put up by the taxpayer. Who, if s/he now wants to read the product they subsidized, need to pay 30€ for a single pdf download.

From the publishers’ viewpoint, this is an excellent business model (credentialed, I assume, by their profit margins). From the viewpoint of the producer, it’s a net, huge loss, and an economic  model that is profoundly unsustainable. I can therefore simply repeat the conclusion of the earlier text on this topic: let’s do the publishing ourselves. We can do it better, cheaper, more efficiently, and more democratically.

 

POSTSCRIPT April 2019

In yet another transition in the system described here, Elsevier now considers the copyright transfer agreement between author and publisher an “order”: by transferring all the rights to his/her text, the author places an order with Elsevier for publishing etc. services. Needless to say that there is no more room for negotiation (let alone disagreement) about the conditions of this order: if you do not click the right buttons, your text will not be submitted to the publisher – period. And One of the buttons one can click is the Gold Open Access one – which involves a payment (by the author) of 1500Euro.

There is no limit to the exploitation model in academic publishing…

Elsevier

(Some of the arguments here are inspired by the essays in Charlotte Hess & Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a commons: From theory to practice; MIT Press 2011)

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“Us versus them” argumentation: a simple example

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Jan Blommaert 

What follows is a sketchy analysis – do try this at home – of a genre that has become extraordinarily widespread in social media debates: antagonistic argumentation revolving around a simple us-versus-them scheme. The example I shall use is that of a Facebook update posted on 15 August 2016. The update was part of a social media storm, erupted after an incident on the beach in Nice, France, where a Muslim woman wearing a so-called “burkini” (in fact, a hijab) was forced by four police men to take her tunic off, and fined 38€ for violation of decency regulations.

This incident triggered massive public and political debate in Belgium, and for days it was the topic on Facebook, both in the narrow sense (“away with the burkini!!”) and in the usual ripple-effect in which any theme related to Islam could lead to statements on every other Islam-related theme. Belgian politicians spoke out on the topic, and the Belgian-Flemish social democrats took a rather repressive position in the discussion. Evidently, this sent a (or better: one more) shock wave through Facebook, and social-democrats were quickly and generously showered by allegations of right-wing anti-immigrant politicking.

On 15 August, a sympathizer of the social-democratis posted this relatively long (and not always quite coherent) update. The original was in Dutch, I translated it.

Suddenly, some think that identifying radicalization is a right-wing thing. Hello! Moment please! Being social doesn’t mean being naïve. One can also naively walk into the lion’s den and believe the animal can be stroked like a pussycat. There is effectively a problem with some [Muslims] in Belgium and their interpretation of Islam. They not just put (soft or hard) pressure on their wives, family, friends; they effectively dictate rules that cannot be reconciled with our laws and human rights, such as fraternity, freedom and equality. Protecting these right is ALSO being social. No matter how sensitive the topic. And the discrimination that unfortunately occurs, the call for respect for Muslims, is no license to dictate the norms and values of Islam, or more precisely, their interpretation thereof. Let alone that non-Muslims would be prohibited from calling into question certain practices, like some in that same community that oppresses women and the social pressure not to just have contact or to marry a Muslim, to make her subordinate, to refuse her to seek a job or to force her to wear a veil. All of this cannot be reconciled with our society, which has known the Enlightenment, something the Middle East urgently needs to understand that a secular state isn’t such a bad idea given the diversity of views, also within one faith, and the negative consequences. It is not because exclamation marks and question marks are put around radicalization and the intolerant attitudes of a group of Muslims in Belgium, that this become a right-wing policy by definition. I have been able to experience myself over the past month how I was prevented by a second-generation Muslim of Belgian nationality, who clearly displayed radicalized traits, from having a conversation with a woman wearing a veil, while the latter had initiated the conversation with me! Such people do not respect our freedoms and democracy, and one must be able to say this and take action regarding this. This has nothing to do with left or right wing, but [a lot] with education and human rights. Being oversensitive now because one points to a problem, and claim that this would be a right-wing reaction, is too crazy for words. It’s not because one is socialist that one has to accept that our norms and values would suddenly be dictated from another corner, and that we once again experience religion like in the 1920, this time not from the Catholic church but by the few who have a very narrow view of Islam. The Muslim community has got a lot of work to do in the way of social control, and the Imam, in particular, should point towards the fact that Islam, too, teaches reconciliation, respect for the fellow human being. That there is no place in the real Islam for violence (including domestic violence), oppression and denying the respect for other people by a lack of respect for their human rights. And most certainly [there is no place for that] in the heart of God and his people.

The general direction of the text is apologetic, of course: the author’s main argument is that there is nothing “right-wing” to being critical of aspects of Islam which he deems in violation of fundamental “norms and values” regulating “our” societies. While developing his apology, however, a consistent us-them scheme is developed. We can, in fact, rewrite the entire text in two colums, one specifying characteristics and actions of “they”, the Muslims, another describing those of “we”, social-democratic Flemish Belgians. Consider the result:

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I have done this simple two-column excercise for many years with beginning discourse analysis students, and one can see how productive it is. In the “us” column, we can see

  • Expressions of epistemic authority: meta-qualifications expressing a superior, rational and delicate understanding of things (including, at the end, “true” Islam), and references to personal experience.
  • A reiteration of “our norms and values“, of which the reality in everyday and institutional life is presented as unquestionable: fraternity, freedom, equality, our laws, human rights, education, the secular state
  • A reference to “our” history, which has known “Enlightenment”, a thing badly needed and long overdue in the Middle East.
  • Depoliticizations: outspoken in this example but quite consistent, “stating problems” is not seen as a political-ideological action, it is mere realism and rationality.

The left-hand column, by contrast, contains

  • Generalizations: statements about a “minority” whose interpretation of Islam is wrong; the responsibility for this group, however, rests with the entire Muslim community – especially “the Imam” has some serious work to do.
  • Exaggerations: this minority of “radicalized” Muslims “effectively dictate rules” that clash with our laws, norms and values; they also prohibit “us” from pointing towards their shortcomings and from taking action in their regard. To whom such rules are effectively dictated, and who would effectively be prohibited from stating such problems is puzzling given the many thousands of posts in which such problems are stated with extreme clarity and without any shade of inhibition.
  • Scale jumps: anecdotal and exceptional incidents are lifted instantly to levels where absolute principles are at stake – rejections of “our freedoms and democracy”. Racist discrimination, in contrast, is usually presented as anecdotal (and not as a denial of these fundamental principles).
  • Absence of depoliticization: their behavior has extreme political significance; our resistance against it is, as we have seen, not political but a matter of common sense.

Note some terms around which I put scare quotes here: terms such as “our” (as in “our society”, “our norms and values” etc.) and “radicalized”. The first one is, technically speaking, a shifter, something the actual meaning of which shifts according to context; the second is a degree term expressing a particular level of intensity (compare: “my painting is innovative” – “my painting is very innovative” – “my painting is radically innovative”). None of the terms, thus, are neutral descriptors, if you wish – and thus they are begging the evident question what exactly do you mean by this? The broad lines of a more indepth analysis are now in place.

And so we see an argument which many (certainly its authors) would perceive as making sense, even “correct”, but which is in actual fact quite easy to dislodge. It is a kind of “rationality” that deserves to, and must, be critically addressed at all times. So do try this at home.

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What Pokémon Go teaches us about society

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Jan Blommaert 

The summer of 2016 was full of sports. There was the European football championship, almost instantly followed by an epic Tour de France and then spilling over into the Olympic Games. All of these were global competitive events. But the competition that wove itself through all of this, and was equally global, was entirely different. It consisted of millions of people all over the world going out in the streets with their smartphones ready, hunting for Pokémon cartoon creatures. Thé mega-event of the summer of 2016 was Pokémon Go.

Pokémon started as a game in 1995 and became very popular when it became a manga-style children’s TV series around the turn of the century. In my house, you will still find dozens of Pokémon merchandising items from that era, as my then-small children were greatly knowledgeable about nearly every aspect of the strange world of creatures, trainers and battles. Now in their early twenties, they took to the streets this summer to hunt and collect the same creatures. A comatose fantasy world had been brought back to life; Nintendo shares went crazy on the stock market.

The thing was considered weird by many. Flocks of people, staring at their smartphone screens, would walk and congregate, apparently aimlessly, in streets, parks, shopping malls, pubs, museums and private backyards; when overheard, they produced a cryptic jargon that could trigger smiles, jealous faces, and shrieks of amazement from others; at times they would stop, point their device in some direction – where I didn’t see a thing – and subsequently groaned “yessss!”. The news brought reports of traffic accidents caused by Pokémon enthusiasts, and YouTube showed clips (“epic fail” style) of people crashing into obstacles while concentrating on the events on their smartphone screens. Mayors and Police chiefs contacted Nintendo and called for restrictions on the placing of Pokémons in certain zones, and Brussels Airport politely requested the company to disable Pokémons on the airport tarmac and in the security screening area. The hype was seen by many as disruptive, silly, pointless and irritating. Like any hype, one supposes.

Pokémon go was disruptive. This new-generation, “enhanced” version of the two decades old video- and card game broke down the boundaries of the space within which so many contemporary forms of hi-tech popular culture are being practiced and within which they are contained. This space is that of the “virtual” world – more concretely, a screen. People engage with such forms of culture while sitting behind a screen in long uninterrupted bursts of activity, quietly and often invisible for all others who do not participate in it. Such forms of culture are, thus, spatiotemporally quite effectively niched. Parents would complain that their children spend long hours doing “something” behind that screen, while the nature of the practices their children are involved in is poorly understood, or indeed greatly unknown to them.

What the little smartphone app enabling Pokémon Go did, was to take such practices out of their usual spatiotemporal niches and bring them elsewhere, into the “real”, offline world, the public spaces where participants now mingle with nonparticipants – members of one culture encountering members of another culture, in a terrain now claimed by both. Going offline does not mean that the game is now shared by all; the boundary crossed is just that of the spatiotemporal seclusion typical of such forms of culture. But as I said, participants point their smartphones to something which remains invisible for nonparticipants, and get very excited by the presence of creatures that do not exist in the world of those who did not download the Pokémon Go app.

So here is the sociological and anthropological significance of Pokémon Go: it makes visible – a rare occasion – and offers a glimpse of a cultural world that coexists with other cultural worlds, and which usually remains out of the gaze of the unengaged bystander. This cultural world, I said it, is often called “virtual”. I consider that an epic misnomer, and Pokémon Go demonstrates it:  there is nothing “virtual” about millions of people all over the world performing cultural practices by means of a small hi-tech item, in public spaces not designed for such practices. It is a lesson in the complex cultural arrangements that characterize our world. Those who preferred to remain in denial – those who call it “virtual” – received an in-your-face warning that our society contains numerous communities, some small, some very large, of people engaging in practices not “normally” part of the cultural-canonical repertoire. We know these people, but we didn’t know the cultural registers they practiced. Or we believed they were not really, really real.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, Pikachu and Bulbasaur are really really, real. So if you meet them, have some courtesy.

 

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Ahistorical? Yes, right…

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Jan Blommaert

Nelson Flores, in a recent article, adds to the cottage industry of uninformed and shallow criticism of sociolinguistic superdiversity. my colleagues and I are (once more) accused of:

three limitations of the super-diversity literature: (a) its ahistorical outlook; (b) its lack of attention to neoliberalism; and (c) its inadvertent reification of normative assumptions about language

Most of the arguments developed in some earlier texts are entirely applicable here, so no new elaborate argument is required. Just speaking for myself, I invite the reader to apply Flores’ critique to the following works.

  • Discourse: A Critical Introduction (2005) revolves around a theory of inequality based on mobile, historically loaded and configured communicative resources I call voice (following Hymes);
  • Grassroots Literacy (2008) describes in great detail how and why two recent handwritten texts from Central Africa remained entirely unnoticed and unappreciated by their Western addressees. Literacy inequalities in a globalized world, thus, for reasons that have their roots in different histories of literacy in different places.
  • The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (2010) addresses exactly the same phenomena: globalization expanding old inequalities while creating new ones due to a reshuffling of historically emergent linguistic markets, combined with a renewed emphasis on reified normativity by nation-state and other authorities.

In each of these books, the practical question guiding the theoretical effort, and significant amounts of data, deal with the systematic discrimination of large immigrant and refugee populations in Western countries such as mine, on grounds of sociolinguistic inequalities. Ahistorical? Neoliberal? Reified normative assumptions about language?

This is n’importe quoi criticism in which the actual writings of the targets of criticism, strangely, appear to be of no material importance. And in which critics, consequently, repeat exactly what I said in my work, and then claim that I said the opposite. Or come up, finger in the air, with insights others and I developed, published and defended in the 1990s.

One word about the “ahistorical” point in Flores’ criticism (and that of others). He equates “historical” with “diachronic”, a very widespread fallacy often seen as – yes, indeed – the core of an ahistorical perspective. “Historical” has to be “old”, in short, and whoever works on old stuff does historical work, while those who work on contemporary stuff are not historical in their approach. Since I work on issues in the here-and-now, I am “ahistorical”. Please read some Bloch, Ginzburg, Foucault or Braudel, ladies and gentlemen. Or some Bourdieu and Hymes, and even Gumperz and Silverstein: “historical” means that every human action, past and present, is seen and analyzed as an outcome of historical – social, cultural and political – paths of development, and derives much of its function and effect from that historical trajectory. Which is what I emphasize systematically while working in the present. And find a lot of work on old stuff entirely ahistorical.

Further commentary in defense of viewpoints I myself categorically reject is a waste of time. Discussion of profoundly uninformed opinions is also something for which I have very little patience.

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Commentary: Mobility, contexts, and the chronotope

kpopheart

Jan Blommaert

(Commentary to a special issue of Language in Society on “Metapragmatics of Mobility”, eds. Adrienne Lo & Joseph Park)

I must emphatically thank Adrienne Lo and Joseph Park for inviting me to comment on the exceptionally insightful collection of essays presented in this volume. The essays, I believe, mark and instantiate the increasing maturity of what has become a sociolinguistics of globalization in which the various, highly complex challenges caused by mobility are being productively addressed.

Of these challenges, perhaps that to our established notions of “context” might be one of the most pressing ones. Rigorous and disciplined attention to context is what separates social and cultural approaches to language from formal linguistics; it is the thing that defines disciplines such as sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics and discourse analysis. And an increasing awareness of mobility as a crucial ontological feature of “language” – or more broadly, meaning making – in today’s world goes hand in hand with an awareness that something is wrong with our well-weathered mainstream conceptualizations of “context”: they are too simple and fail to do justice to the complexities we observe. All papers in this volume can be read as illustrations and expressions of that unease. I propose to explore Bakhtin’s concept of “chronotope” as a possibly fertile and certainly more precise tool for addressing these challenges (cf. Blommaert 2015a).

Let me first define the scope of the issue; two preliminary remarks may be useful for what follows.

  • One: in a sociolinguistic approach to meaning making, context cannot ontologically be separated from language (or other semiotic modalities), for it is a fundamental part of the meanings constructed in language; context is what turns language in a “social fact” (to quote Durkheim).
  • Two: notions of context are built on, and invoke, imaginations of the social world and of the place of social actors and activities therein. So context is always more than just an operational-analytical category: it involves an ideological a priori (which, as we shall see, is always a moral a priori).

From that perspective, two things can be observed – and I regret that space restrictions prevent me from entering into detail here. One, context remains quite poorly integrated in several branches of the social and cultural study of language (Silverstein 1992; see for a review Blommaert 2005, chapter 3). And two, the social imagination underlying many forms of usage of context appears to be “sedentary”: context is local, stable, static and given. Obviously, a notion of context adjusted to mobility needs to transcend this and stress its continuously evolving, multiscalar and dynamic aspects, as well as the intrinsic unity of context and action.

There are several available building blocks. John Gumperz (1982) never stopped reminding us that context is always contextualization, and Aaron Cicourel (1967; 1992) insisted that context was always multifiliar, overlapping and scaled. In addition, the union between context and action,we now realize, is metapragmatics: language-ideologically ordered indexicals are at the core of the dialectics of contextualized meaning making (Silverstein 2003; Agha 2007; also Blommaert 2005). The papers in this volume have all drawn extensively on these sources. The complication offered by mobility as a given has been well phrased by Lo and Park in their introduction (this volume): in an era of physical and technological mobility, people need to navigate multiple worlds. They cannot any longer be viewed as sedentary members of a (single) closed, integrated and stable Parsonian community and are subject to the normative judgments in vigor in very different places among very different people – simultaneously.

This is where the chronotope might come in handy. Recall that Bakhtin (1981) defined the chronotope as a timespace configuration – an “objective” bit of context, one could say – which was characterized, and joined, by ideological, “subjective” features. Specific times and places placed conditions on who could act, how such actions would be normatively structured, and how they would be normatively perceived by others. A knight in a medieval legend, for example, is expected to be chivalric and inspired by the noblest of motives, and his concrete actions would be expected to emanate such characteristics; if not, he’s not a “real” knight. Bakhtin, thus, offered us a heuristic unit in which timespace configurations are simultaneously orders of indexicalities, and in which the multiplicity of such units is a given of the dialogical and heteroglossic reality of social life. Chronotope, thus, is a “mobile” context enabling not just precise ethnographic description but explanatory potential as well.

We begin to see, for instance, how physical and social mobility operate synergetically – moving across timespace configurations involves a reshuffling of the social and cultural capital required for identity construction, prestige and power, through what Hymes called “functional relativity” (1996: 44-45). It explains, thus, why forms of speech indexically anchored in one timespace configuration – that of the colonial past, for instance – can be re-entextualized into another, in ways that involve entirely different indexical valuations. We can observe this in the essays by Vigouroux and Collins, where the indexical valuations of the speech forms deemed emblematic of the colonial (racialized) past dance up and down once they are moved into different timespace configurations. A descriptive stance – observing a particular accent in students’ speech (Collins), or a grammatical pattern perceived as “substandard” (Vigouroux) – is turned into a racialized-historical stereotype in ways described by Agha (2007) whenever such an accent is produced “elsewhere”. Mobility, we can see, involves indexical re-ordering, or to be more precise, indexical restratification.

Observe that such restratifications have an outspokenly moral character. The ideological load attributed to specific forms of social action turns them into moralized behavioral scripts normatively attached to specific timespace configurations. The essays in this volume are replete with examples in which judgments of speech are formulated in terms of locally articulated claims to legitimacy, i.e. in terms of a projection of behavioral features onto “the right to do X, Y or Z here and now”. Chun’s analysis of perceived mispronunciations of Korean names by “foreign” fans illustrates this: such fans are “not from here”, and their actions are therefore subject to normative judgments “from here”. Being “(not) from here” becomes an absolute normative benchmark: a non-negotiable one that offers no bail. Ideologies of correctness and standardization, we can see, are chronotopically organized (cf. Silverstein 1996). They require a distinction between “from here” and “not from here” that can be activated as a chronotope of normalcy: here-and-now, “normal” behavior is X, Y and Z, and this is an absolute, “ideal” benchmark. And Park’s excellent essay shows how people who are by definition “not from here” – expatriate executives – negotiate and renegotiate the issues caused by mobility itself, shaping a separate chronotope of normalcy among themselves (transnational business, after all, is a distinct “world” in Lo and Park’s terms).

Obviously, such distinctions are identity distinctions – indexical order is always a template for identity, and identities are chronotopically grounded, by extension (Blommaert & De Fina 2016). Park’s managers construct themselves in their elaborate metapragmatic discourses of mobility; Chun’s Korean fans ascribe identities to the mispronouncing transnational ones; Collins’ teachers construct their pupils in similar ways, and the discursive pathways analyzed by Vigouroux lead to a projected stereotypical identity of Sub-Saharan Africans drawn across timespace from the colonial imagination. Note that in each of these cases, moral judgments constitute the moment of identity-shaping. The “corrections” offered by Chun’s Korean fans come, as said earlier, with judgments of legitimacy, and legitimacy extends from minute features of language into categorical identity diacritics. Moralized behavioral scripts are the on-the-ground realities of indexicality, and thus of identity-making. Typically, those who are “not from here”can achieve “approximations” of the normative “standard” order (Vigouroux); they can therefore also only approximate the “standard”identities. “Standard” and “correctness” are inevitably evaluative judgments, and they fit into a package of profoundly moral-evaluative notions such as “true”, “authentic”, “real” and so forth. Language-ideological literature is replete with such terms, and in public debates on such topics one continually trips over collocations between terms such as “correct” and “true”, and “(not) from here”. Collins’ delicate analysis of racialized enregisterment in South-African schools can serve as a textbook example of this.

Lo and Choi’s case study of an internet debate on the “truth” in the story of the Korean rapper Tablo brings together several of the points mentioned here, and lends profile to another one. The critics who doubt rapper Tablo’s educational credentials (using, unsurprisingly, details of his English “accent” as evidence) draw on a chronotope of normalcy: normally, one can’t finish degree work at a US institution at the rhythm claimed by Tablo; normally, his English should be immaculate of he’s taken a degree in the US, normally he shouldn’t sound like “us” after his US-based education, and so forth. They base themselves on a “normal” behavioral script, adherence and deviance of which are profoundly moralized. The data are bursting with moral-evaluative statements that are simultaneously statements of identity ascription, and driven by the “from here-not from here” diacritic that defines globalized mobility.

But there is more, and Lo & Choi’s paper shows it in full glory. The general chronotope of normalcy, we observe, can be broken down into an infinite number of micro-chronotopes specifying the indexical order of specific bits of behavior (Tablo’s performance in a talkshow, his translation of a poetry book, and so forth). So we see a fractal connection across differently scaled chronotopes, in which the order of indexicality from the highest scale (the chronotope of normalcy) is carried over into microscopic and infinitely detailed lower-scale ones. We see, if you wish, chronotopes nested within chronotopes, with specific points and general ones interacting nonstop. Goffman’s “frames within frames” (1974) are never far away here, of course, but it is good to remind ourselves that “frames” are, in themselves, chronotopically organized.

All the essays in this volume thematize such cross-scalar connections, and call them, for instance, “discursive pathways” (Vigouroux), “re-entextualizations” (Lo & Choi), or “interdiscursivity” (Park). Such terms remain useful, and understanding them as descriptors of cross-chronotope processes of uneven (scaled) quality can deepen their analytical force and make them far more precise than the “cross-contextual” label we now stick onto them. Such connections – the “polycentricity” of communicative environments, in short (Blommaert, Collins & Slembrouck 2005) – are inevitable in the sociolinguistics of mobility, and we have to be able to get a more precise grasp of them. This leads me to a final, brief, remark.

In the essays by Chun and by Lo & Choi, the internet, or (to use an epic misnomer) the “virtual world” is the context of the data offered. The analyses are outstanding; but we should not overlook the fact that the online context is the least well understood one in our fields of study, and that a careful investigation of how this context shapes and determines online social action remains to be undertaken. We know that it has exceptional scalar qualities (think of virality), and that, as a chronotope, it stands in complex polycentric relationships to “offline” ones (see Blommaert 2015b; Varis & Blommaert 2015). But the exact characteristics of these phenomena await profound focused study. Note that all the subjects discussed in the essays in this volume live in the internet age, and that, consequently, we can assume that all have been influenced by the circulation of cultural material enabled by such technologies. Precise how this influence plays out in their actual day-to-day discourses, how it modifies them and grants them yet another dimension of metapragmatic mobility, raising new issues of polycentric normativity, looks like a worthwhile topic for a follow-up volume. It is to the credit of the present volume that such fundamental questions emerge, and I repeat my sincere thanks to the editors for affording me the chance to engage with them.

References

Agha, Asif (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Blommaert, Jan (2005) Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Austin TX: University of Texas Press.

Blommaert, Jan (2015a) Chronotopes, scales and complexity in the study of language and society. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 105-116.

Blommaert, Jan (2015b) Meaning as a nolinear effect: The birth of cool. AILA Review 28: 7-27.

Blommaert, Jan & Anna De Fina (2016) Chronotopic identities: On the timespace organization of who we are. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, paper 153. Tilburg: Babylon.

Blommaert, Jan, Jim Collins & Stef Slembrouck (2005) Polycentricity and interactional regimes in ‘global neighborhoods’. Ethnography 6/2: 205-235.

Cicourel, Aaron (1967) The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice. New York: Wiley.

Cicourel, Aaron (1992) The interpenetration of communicative contexts: Examples from medical encounters. In Alessandro Duranti & Charles Goodwin (eds.) Rethinking Context: 291-310. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goffman, Erving (10974) Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New Tork: Harper & Row.

Gumperz, John (1982) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hylmes, Dell (1996) Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor & Francis.

Silverstein, Michael (1992) The indeterminacy of contextualization: when is enough enough? in Peter Auer & Aldo DiLuzio (eds.) The Contextualization of Language: 55-76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Silverstein, Michael (1996) Monoglot “standard” in America: Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In Donald Brenneis & Ronald Macaulay (eds.) The Matrix of Language: 284-306. Boulder Co: Westview Press.

Silverstein, Michael (2003) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23: 193-229.

Varis, Piia & Jan Blommaert (2015) Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes, and new social structures. Multilingual Margins 2/1: 31-45.

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