Aesthetics and Embodiment in Bangladeshi Language Ideologies in the
Mirror of Madness:
Attunement and Its Discontents
by Jim Wilce
Northern Arizona University
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"What troubles me with [those] analyses which prioritize ideology is that there
is always presupposed a human subject on the lines of the model provided by classical
philosophy, endowed with a consciousness which power is then thought to seize on."
(Foucault 1980)
"Ideology is most effective when it remains interred in habit" (Comaroff 1985: 5)
"The most successful ideological efforts are those which have no need of words…" Bourdieu 1977b: 188)
1. Immersion in the Data: Olna and her Family
· 1.1 Telling Olna to "speak beautifully": Sundering speech or speaking sundar?
· What are the ideals and typifications of speech underlying the metadiscursive commands which Olna's family issues?
· Shapla's use of the descriptor sundar, beautiful, as a particular aesthetic, a metapragmatic sensibility constructing intersubjectivity as object of desire
· Olna herself seems to enjoy the act of speaking as a device not for signification but for pleasure.
"[This heterogeneity of the speaking subject, which originates in children's first echolalias,] is also detectable when reactivated as the rhythms, intonations, and glossolalias of psychotic speech, where it serves as the last prop of the speaking subject threatened with the complete collapse of the signifying function. … it produces so-called musical effects. But it also produces non-sensical effects, which destroy not only accepted beliefs and meanings but even, in more radical experiences, syntax itself… Heterogeneity is the proper term… [I]t is not the modality of meaning or signification" (Kristeva 1993: 156).
1.2 From Bangladesh to Boston: Schizophrenic discourse as aesthetic
· Olna's aesthetic as Peircean Firstness
· Compare the semiotic-aesthetic sensibilities in a Boston shelter for the homeless mentally ill (Desjarlais 1997)
· Residents play "ragtime" with language
· Shelter staff seeks to impose transparent referentiality and incite the desire for intersubjectivity
2. Aesthetics, Embodiment, and Language Ideologies
2.1 The challenge to the "language ideologies" rubric presented by Olna's
family
Shapla's metapragmatic sensibility, and her order to "speak beautifully," challenges a reconsideration of linguistic ideologies in their on-the-ground deployment.
2.2 Definitions and connotations of "linguistic ideologies"
· Rumsey: shared bodies of commonsense notions of the nature of language in the world."
· Linguistic ideologies
· 1) embody diverse situated perspectives,
· 2) reflect the positioned interests of those invoking them,
· 3) are expressed at varying levels of awareness (dominant ideologies are the most implicit and assumed),
· 4) play a role in identity formation-- in the effacing of differences of power and status and in the imagining of solidarities, and
· 5) filter perceptions of communicative and social practice
· The disembodied ideational bias in ideology's connotations
… despite Althusser's invocation of Pascal's dictum-- "Kneel down and move your lips and you will believe"-- as a perspective on ideology.
· Rethinking linguistic ideologies as embodied metapragmatic sensibilities
3. Postlude: The Natives Prefer Croce to Gramsci
· Croce (1992): Language as social aesthetic
· Sapir (1949): The unconscious patterning of linguistic behavior is aesthetically organized
· Mashima's perception of a breakdown in intersubjectivity and her action to bridge the gap are both rooted in her body, as are Shapla's.
· Olna's family, in other words, prefers both the aesthetic linguistics of Croce-Sapir and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1963) to the sometimes Machiavellian, sometimes rarefied, but rarely embodied connotations of the term ideology.
4. REFERENCES
Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin & Philosophy and other Essays. Ben Brewster, trans. New York, London: Monthly Review Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre.1977a. The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information 16: 645-668.
-----. 1977b (1972). Outline of a theory of practice . Tr. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Comaroff, Jean.1985. Body of power, spirit of resistance. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Croce, Benedetto. 1992. [1902] The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the LInguistic in General. Tr. Colin Lyas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Desjarlais, Robert R. 1997. Shelter Blues: Homelessness and Sanity in a Boston Shelter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Colin Gordon, ed. New York: Pantheon.
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Hanks, William F. 1996 Language and communicative practices (Critical Essays in Anthropology No. 1). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Laderman, Carol. 1987. The ambiguity of symbols in the structure of healing. Social Science and Medicine 24/4: 293-301
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. The Structure of Behavior. Alden L. Fisher, tr. Boston: Beacon.
Rumsey, Alan. 1990. Word, meaning, and linguistic ideology. American Anthropologist 92/2: 346- 61.
Sapir, Edward. 1949 (1927). The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society. In The Unconscious: A Symposium, Charles M. Child and Ethel S. Drummer, eds. Pp. 114-142. NY: Knopf. Reprinted In Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality, David G. Mandelbaum, ed. Pp. 544-559. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California.
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