A Week of Manifestos

*Note: Sorry about the length. But there's a comic at the end. 

Villanueva’l s question from “Rhetoric is Politics”: “How do nice people abide by and maintain not nice things, like a system in which certain groups are consistently relegated to the bottom of the structure in disproportionate numbers?” (Powell 2)

There are two things that jumped out at me from this week’s readings. First, they all provide responses to oppressive language practices. Baca takes our minds back to the early stages of European colonialism and the brutal, violent takeover of a civilization which began with the gatekeeping device of the Reqeurimento. Life or death. Speak well enough to convert or death. “This legacy is partially why the Eurocentric myth linking the Western Roman alphabet – and eventually, English alphabetic literacy – to agency, and democracy can potentially mean little, and when it does, it brings with it baggage of global proportions” (230-31). Powell’s nation-based focus on the oppression of Native Indians implicates those of us who stand idly by Academic imperialism. Horner, Lu, Royster, and ol’ Joe Trimbur take issue with perceived norms of SAE or EAE, arguing that this fallacy allows for the marginalization of languages and students as either deficient, incorrect, or inferior to the “norm” and ignores the actual conditions in which language operates. These norms are historically contingent and constantly changing, and adherence to SAE or EAE does not ensure effective communication – especially in a country (and a globalized economy) where various languages and Englishes proliferate and non-norm versions are preferred among certain groups.

Each promotes a rhetorical response. Baca argues that new technologies use pictographic manuscripts that have the potential to “resume historical trajectories independent of Western global expansion” (whatever page 5 is in the pdf). Powell argues academics should adopt trickster rhetoric that works within and outside the system, ironically pulling at and cutting across the narratives that string together our rhetorically created reality. It should inhabit the “wild space over and between sounds, words, sentences, and narratives.” Horner, et. al. argue for a shifted perspective of translingualism that values linguistic difference as a classroom resource rather than a problem to be corrected. Each of these seems a bit sketchy to me.

Baca’s belief that we can resume historical trajectories independent of history seems… well… ridiculous. You can’t erase the past 500 years of colonialism and start from scratch. That’s like Marxists who dream up utopias of what could be without engaging the current material conditions of the situation. Perhaps a more generous reading of Baca is that he believes technology has allowed people to puncture the monolithic dominance of Western alphabetic and literacy by returning images to a central place in communication, and that has opened space for making his topic an area of study. He is engaging in what Powell described as the two responses to a lack of American Indians: a collective effort to re-create those voices, and as an effort to penetrate and thereby legitimate the counter stories, seeing them as explicable objects of study.” I am sympathetic to the desire to escape the idea that entering the public sphere with sufficient literacy leads to power. It’s like a classic critique of Habermas. There really isn’t a space in which you can leave behind social signifiers that influence how those in power hear your message. No matter how fluent you are. You’re always marked as not those in power in some way. But I’m skeptical that technology is a fix (which I’m not sure he’s arguing, but I get the feeling he’s more gung-ho about it than I). Technology seems to me to have emerged as another part of the public sphere, but one just as politically, economically, and socially connected to the Western history of colonialism as alphabetic literacy was originally. Who gets it? Who sets its dominant conventions that make certain websites seem gross? Where is this power centralized? Is it possible to use the internet to create a counterpublic to this dominant group… yeah… sure… but you could make the same claim about the practice of literacy, alphabetic or no. It was possible to create counterpublics that continued to use pictographic language. But in both cases the sustainability seems questionable and the material risk to one’s life seem obvious.  Powell and Horner et. al. both work within the national frame. Both argue for a specific language practice and interpretive schema that will (hopefully [though for Powell, questionably]) affect change that will lead to less… bad things happening… But both seem to put their hope once again into a rhetoric that they doubt. Powell seems accepting of the likely possibility that her words will not move us at the end. Horner et. al. notes that “dominant ideology is always indifferent to the invalidity of its claims.” While Horner et. al. say that we need not accept its sway, one cannot help but ask how do we fight it? Relying on rhetoric to persuade academics or policy makers by engaging in the public sphere seems to run into the same conflicts that the use of pictographic writing gets on the internet. Both can’� t erase the social signifiers that mark them as marginalized perspectives, and thus engage in public dialogue from a weakened position for changing behaviors and policies. Hence, the indifference. It’s as if each approach, Baca’s pictographic writing, Powell’s trickster rhetoric, and Horner et. al.’s translingualism each argue that a letter to the editor will change things, but differ on what the letter should say and how it should say it.

Another qualm I have with Horner et. al. is their adherence to the nation-state framework. Baca at least notes that we must also interrogate why and where for a new geography of reason and invention, a geography that cannot be divorced from economy and the material realities of living experience which are undoubtedly legitimate components of rational thought.” Implementing translingualism seems like a good idea. But I worry about companies viewing translingualism as a costly endeavor. Potential miscommunications internally and externally. Increased use of materials (paper, etc.) because of language uses, clarifications, etc. The additional time spent during these semiotic negotiations. The expense of adjusting policies, providing training about language policies, etc.  Global capitalism is so incredibly fast and flexible geographically with how it rearranges to reduce costs that it seems unless translingualism as a policy was globally implemented, companies would literally change locations. The US, as one of the largest economies, may (and I’m not sure to what extent) be protected from this corporate flight, but even within states and regions, companies shift to cut costs. I guess I’m not being clear right now, but I wonder to what degree using the nation-framework as the starting place weakens the effectiveness of the solution argued for by Horner et. al.

Finally and relatedly, the second thing I noticed is that, despite all of their references to war, violence and death, the material consequences of English-only policies on immigration, education and economics, and bodies, bodies, bodies, bleeding bodies that are unseen and unheard, there are little to no references to bodies in their solutions.  When there (in Powell), they are justifications for the approach, not part of the solution. If rhetorical approaches to change language practices and language policy is limited because of the concerns I have about the public sphere, how can material bodies make this visible? (Read: protests). This is of course complicated by my qualms about the geography of global capitalism, but how might we reimagine locations of protest to deal with the new forms of capitalist production that are emerging. If we can’t rely on the factory as a location of protest because it is too easily closed and moved (it is cheaper to close and move a factory that is protesting than to break the protest), how should we imagine organizing protests? Who should protest and where? Food is produced across multiple states, in multiple places, and moved through multiple modes of transportation, could we organize along chains of production? The logistical costs of shifting that many different operations would be crazy hard to swallow.