Prendergast vs Trimbur?

So I've been reading the beginning of Manuel Castell's Communication Power, and I think I'm starting to understand exactly what about the division Gallagher was drawing between Trimbur and Prendergast that was starting to bother me.

Gallagher set up a transition narrative for how we talk about and understand language use with three stages. (1) We used to search for an underlying universal grammar (which linguists still search for). (2) We stopped looking for pure language and began treating language in terms of discourse communities (Burkean Parlor). Here, it wasn’t that language was a specific way universally and structurally, but that it had certain conventions for proper use that allowed you to get access to a community’s conversation. These conventions were contextually determined, but there were centers or clusters of conventions (see Trimbur’s issue with Kachru on p. 110; replace nation with community and you have it). (3) This second approach to language excludes many uses of English that don’t fit the norm of whatever community we are looking at: “The establishment of a new variety of PCE, in other words, requires working out a relationship of mutuality between a variety of language and its host population that, as Pennycook puts it in his critique of the very idea of national varieties, ‘leaves out all those other Englishes which do not fit the paradigm of an emergent national standard’” (118).  The shift to networked understanding of language recognizes the splintered and disconnected spread of capitalism and language, acknowledging the disconnections as well as the connections through the idea of the splintered metropolis. By thinking about the use of language through “styling” rather than a type of language as we tend to when we talk of “varieties” or “flows,” we can more effectively represent the circulation and enactment of English in not only South Africa but “the splintered metropolis of globalized capitalism” (119).

We thought about Prendergast in terms of the second category of how we’ve approached language, and Trimbur in terms of the third. When we were talking about how Prendergast and Trimbur approached language, our conversation centered on language like "spread" and "distributed."  When we talk about language as spreading, we use a metaphor of territory - though, perhaps because I'm hungry, I'm now thinking of spreading butter over bread. Language starts in a central space and moves to other places, filling in the gaps and crevices of a society slowly. This way of talking about and conceptualizing language solidifies language as a concept separate from practice and encourages us to assign agency to language (maybe). And this issue is compounded when we analyze, use, or believe the myth of a standardized English. SAE moves and spreads, and it forces people to adopt the language. So the consequences of this approach to language can be thought of in terms of the following: 

1.     It solidifies a language as something that can exist separate from practice by social actors in a specific context. 

2.     It gives agency to language over people.

3.     When coupled with the idea of a standard or native English, it encourages assumptions about correctness and deficiency, and those deficiencies can be assigned to people, to language practices, and to social markers like geographic origin, nationality, race, gender, etc. 

4.     In neoliberalism, deficiencies are most commonly discussed in terms of effective tools for accomplishing something. The modernization project. So language spread throughout time (a la Baca) can be thought about in terms of periods: Christianizing, Civilizing, or Modernizing. But each of these hinges on superlatives and comparatives - better or best. 

5.     These superlatives and comparatives do much of the work in establishing center/periphery relations by metaphorically territorializing language and assigning values to different locations. Even without our realizing it.

6.     Because of this valorization and territorialization, English’s spread is considered inevitable.

7.     With this way of discussing language, consequences number 3-6 become the focus of scholarship and conversation - either disproving myths or focusing on the relevance of the myth in everyday life.

8.     As a result of the emphasis on a language removed from practice, we forget to look at innovative ways in which language is being used now and opportunities for gaining agency (cue Trimbur).

I think this division Gallagher created was exaggerated (I don't think he necessarily believes that Prendergast thinks of language as having agency and people not in quite so stark of terms as depicted here) in part to bring up a point about approach to language. But, as I think Brandon's comment about agency being limited points out, not all agencies are created the same. The question for me is why - what is limiting. 

If agency is one’s capacity to act to bring one’s will, interests, and/or values to fruition, agency is at its core about relationships and power. Agency is about one’s relation to social structures (or, to put it another way, one’s position within competing institutions, organizations, networks, social actors, etc) and to what extent this relation affects your ability to influence other social actors/structures. Castell defines power in a similar way: “power is the relational capacity that enables a social actor to influence asymmetrically the decisions of other social actor(s) in ways that favor the empowered actor’s will, interests, and values” (10).

Two things I appreciate about Castell’s approach to power relations at the beginning of his book are (1) his focus on human actors rather than disembodied powers like an apparatus or institution and (2) his emphasis that one’s “relational capacity of power is conditioned, but not determined, by the structural capacity of domination” (10, my emphasis). As Castell explores exactly what he means by a social actor, he points out that social actors can be individual or collective, organizations or states, etc, but he argues that “ultimately[…] all organizations, institutions, and networks express the action of human actors, even if this action has been institutionalized or organized by processes in the past” (10-11). Institutions, states, organizations, and networks are in a sense the partially crystallized power relations of human actors in some capacity – even if the originating human actors are long dead.

Castell’s emphasis on “conditioned, but not determined” leaves room for resistance to domination. Domination is a power relationship supported by two main mechanisms of power – violence (or the threat of) and discourse. Violence can be understood fairly easily in terms of force and coercion. Discourse can be understood in the drive of institutions to “construct meaning” in service of specific interests and values. Think Foucault. This is where we get the compliance and acceptance of those who are dominated.

When I take this and think back to the issue we discussed about Prendergast vs. Trimbur, I have issue with how our conversation seemed to say that there is no use in studying language the second way. While I do appreciate the third approach to language’s innovation and perhaps more accurate representation of language usage and its critiques of the ideas of varieties of English (poor ol’ bastardized versions Darwinian metaphors) and flows (mistaken assumptions about the homogenization of space), I worry that tossing the second approach to the side entirely would lose something incredibly important. A standard language might not exist. A central discourse might not exist. But their discourses structure and construct how people understand and interact with the world. While it would be logical then to argue that we should critique the discourses and change them (which we should), it is not as if they are simply discourses. Types of English (that may not exist as a living English, but still exist in codified form like classical and ecclesiastic Latin does) are spread through institutions that actively promote a specific understanding of English. Publishing companies that produce grammar and style books, for instance.  Educational non-profit organizations.

It is right to critique how the way we talk about language can lead to assumptions of inevitability and universality. It is right to critique how our scholarly approaches can create communities that exclude in the process of including and legitmating Englishes (Trimbur’s response to Kachru). But that doesn’t mean there isn’t space for the kind of analysis that challenges these institutions and discourses that do materially exist (even if in a globe-hopping way).