Introduction
The notion of fetishism, in the most general interpretation of the term, is one in which an object is afforded extra-natural properties, or is animated and brought to life as an agentive âthingâ. In this sense, the notion of language as a fetish (Simpson & OâRegan, 2018; Simpson, 2018) imagines languages such as English as bearing all kinds of extra-linguistic properties: As a product or service (Singh & Han, 2008), as a commodity or resource which speakers exchange (Heller, 2016), as a mythical âthingâ which does this or that to people (Pennycook, 2007), and even as a cause of social suffering (Piller & Cho, 2013; Piller, Takahashi, & Watanabe, 2010). What we offer in this chapter is a critical engagement with the notion of fetishism as it relates to a larger body of work on language, language policy, and political economy, in respect of language alienated and fetishised in standard forms; the recasting of language not as a social product, but as a form of legal property, owned and traded by individuals; and the necessity of fetishised forms of language in the functioning of the âfreeâ market. We conclude by underscoring the notion of fetishism as consisting in illusions which exist not in theory, but in practice, and with a call for future research to examine the fetishism of languages in the practice of the market. We therefore argue that calls for policy to develop critical reflexive awareness in speakers, while certainly important, are not in themselves sufficient for moving beyond fetishistic notions of language.
Fetishism
For ĆœiĆŸek (2008, 2012b, 2012a, 2019), drawing on Hegel, Marx, and figures from psycho-analysis such as Freud and Lacan, fetishism consists in structural effects being misrecognised as properties inherent to individual elements of structures in-themselves. He illustrates this with the Hegelian example of the relation between a King and his subjects involving:
a certain misrecognition which concerns the relation between a structured network and one of its elements: what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elements, as if the property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements. [âŠ] Being a âkingâ is an effect of the network of social relations between a âkingâ and his âsubjectsâ; but â and here is the fetishistic misrecognition â to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in an inverse form: they think that they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king; as if the determination of âbeing a kingâ were a ânaturalâ property of the person of a king.
(ĆœiĆŸek, 2012a: 308â309, emphasis added)
However, what Marxâs notion of fetishism, illustrated most famously in his notion of the fetishism of the commodity (Marx, 1990), adds to such an analysis is the additional question of how fetishistic beliefs exist not only in the ideational realm of thought and belief, but are also necessarily reproduced through practice â necessary in the sense that they are a functioning part of how a system itself works and reproduces itself. To turn to the example of the commodity, rather than the value of a commodity understood as the result of a complex social organisation of production, commodities seem to embody value in and of themselves â they appear to us mysteriously as being tautologically worth what they are worth. Their prices seem to fluctuate up and down independent of the actions and desires of their human creators â in other words outside of social relations, and they do so even as we are well aware that they are the products of human, and not divine, work. Capital similarly seems imbued with a mystical quality, appearing to us as it does, as value which magically breeds more value. The point of fetishism which Marx emphasises however, is that such fetishism is not simply a distortion or illusory belief which can be rent asunder through critical introspection, or with a better or âcorrectâ understanding of how things âreally areâ. Rather, it is about the beliefs or illusions which we follow, even as we know better, as it were. As ĆœiĆŸek puts it: â[W]e are fetishists in practice, not in theoryâ (2012a: 315). Just as recognising that money, in the form of paper, plastic, or digital numbers on a screen, is a token and does not itself hold any value in some sort of animistic sense, this does not prevent one from buying or selling in the market, or making a fetish out of money. It is not necessary for people to believe this or that about markets, commodities, or money, rather âthe things themselves believe for themâ (ibid.: 317, emphasis in original). Fetishism in this sense works. For example, though we do not believe in an inherent mystical property of money (whether metal, paper, or digitised representations thereof) to grow as if it were alive, the money in our savings accounts really does âgrowâ. It is fetishism in this sense of an illusion or erroneous belief that is spontaneously reproduced in practice but which simultaneously works nevertheless, that we wish to use in order to extend upon work which has dealt with the commodification of language and its implications for language policy.
The fetishism of language in standard forms
For Park and Wee, in their critique of English as a global language, English has undergone a certain reifying mystification, whereby âwe come to see English as an entity, a thing with a boundary and fixed content that is identifiable and definable in a regular fashionâ (J. S. Y. Park & Wee, 2012: 103). In tracing the emergence of ideologised âstandardâ English accents such as Received Pronunciation, and later Estuary English, their analysis explores how various forms of codification and prescriptive policymaking abstract away from language as a constantly shifting and emergent process, and lead to a construction of language as a finite and static object or âthingâ. At points, their discussion runs along very similar lines to Marxâs notion of fetishism, in for example their concern to penetrate through a âmystification that leads us to believe in the autonomous nature of languageâ (ibid.: 104). Here, language as an âautonomousâ fetish is
no longer seen as part of the speakerâs practice but a thing that has its own internal rules and structure, which in turn is imbued with values such as âcorrectnessâ, [and where] the speaker is in a sense alienated from her own language.
(ibid.: 109)
Similarly, Ricento describes the notion of a fixed standard as a âmythâ, which has led to the paradox whereby âstudents must go to school to âlearnâ their native languageâ (2006, p. 20). In the terms of fetishism outlined above then, language as a structural effect â the composite social product of ongoing human activity â comes to exist outside of the social relations which produce it, as an alienated thing-in-itself, with its own âKing-likeâ qualities (of normative grammar or correctness, for example) appearing not as man-made, but as natural and inherent to language as a thing-in-itself.
Fetishism and language ownership
This notion of language as a fetishised thing-in-itself alienated away from its speakers is taken up in much work on language commodification, as Da Silva, McLaughlin, and Richards summarise: â[L]anguage, as a commodity, is no longer an inherent quality of certain individuals or something that individuals own, but something that is separate and external to their personhoodâ (2007: 185). What is of note here, in relation to processes of standardisation, are two distinct yet overlapping senses of alienated fetishised forms of language. First, there are the efforts of nation-states to standardise languages as a means of instituting gatekeeping controls upon rights of citizenship â efforts which have often been directed at masking or appearing to resolve contradictions within liberal nation states between democratic egalitarian ideals and unequal social realities (Heller & McElhinny, 2017). Second, there is language commodification as a process which is seen as âemblematicâ of the new economy (Boutet, 2012), where the extension and intensification of the processes of capitalism more historically (i.e. enclosure of the commons, accumulation, commodification, etc.) has taken place, not within an entirely ânewâ historical political-economic period, but rather as part of capitalismâs latest evolving variegated form (Block, 2018). This is often referred to as neoliberalism or late capitalism.
There is, however, a key distinction we wish to make between, on the one hand, the abstraction of language away from speakers into a standard form which they must then attain for the stateâs purposes of establishing a citizenry and nation, and the notion of fetishising language as an alienable thing or âcommodityâ to be traded on the market, in terms of ownership. On the one hand, the learning of language as a means of maintaining nation states â of creating a citizenry which speaks an idealised form of language â presupposes language as a shared or communal âthingâ which, though alienated away from its speakers, nevertheless, at least on the face of it, belongs to the nation, and to the constituted citizenry itself. This is even when it serves to obscure wider social inequality, as when class elites consolidate their own privileged position by promoting their own variety of language as the basis for the standard form. On the other hand, language in its âcommodifiedâ form comes to be seen in terms which harmonise with the notion of individual liberal property rights, that is, as a âthingâ over which the possessor, as a juridical individual, has the rights of ownership, and the right to sell or exchange as she sees fit. Here, the notion of language as a skill â i.e. as part of the composite bundle of skills (Urciuoli, 2008) which commodified labour in the market trades for wages â comes to the fore. Indeed, some have described in detail the manner in which shifts from, and contradictions between, notions of language as a form of collective ethno-national identity on the one hand, and language as a thing individuals trade in the expectation of various forms of âprofitâ in the market on the other, occur (DuchĂȘne & Heller, 2012). As Ricento has pointed out in reference to language and language policy more broadly, there is a fundamental mismatch between the notion of âlanguage as a social phenomenon, spoken and written by communities of people, and the core of liberal political philosophy [âŠ] the essentialness of individual liberty and rights to satisfy the supposedly unquenchable acquisitive desires of individual human beingsâ (2015: 34), a notion which has become turbocharged under neoliberal regimes which view human development through the lens of individual competition within the market (Foucault, 2008).
So far as the notion of language as a skill is concerned, there is an alienation of language into a fetishised form in a double sense. First, in the abstraction of language outside of the social relations of humans themselves as an autonomous thing-in-itself. And second, once such forms of language have been learnt, language takes on a second fetishised form, often in the guise of a credentialed qualification over which an individual can then claim a right of ownership, and fetishistically trade in the market as a commodified skill. Here, like money and its fetish value, the credential itself is treated as if it were the skill. It embodies the language which has been alienated away from speakers as a standard âthingâ, so making it possible to âownâ language as a competence and trade it on the market. However, while it is certainly possible for communally âownedâ language to function in a wholly non-commodified manner (i.e. when understood as a property in common, rather than as something an individual may own and exchange with another), the forms of ownership discussed above â communal and individual â seldom exist as either/or categories, but rather co-exist. Proficiency in a standard linguistic code or ânational languageâ often serves as a means of sorting and disaggregating individual speakers through what Bourdieu refers to as the profit of distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). This is the distinction accorded to those who can utilise the standard linguistic code proficiently, which distinguishes them from those who cannot. In the same vein, notions of global English as a supposedly neutral competence which is capable of acting as a great democratic leveller are deeply problematic (Bruthiaux, 2008; OâRegan, 2021; J. S. Y. Park & Wee, 2012; Pennycook, 2007, 2017), since âglobal Englishâ is in practice widely utilised as a normative competence (Ives, 2010) which is the preserve of transnational cosmopolitan elites in the capitalist world-economy, against which any sense of âownershipâ in common is amongst the more grotesque of fetish illusions, since most people in the world, if they have any competence in English, do not utilise it in a âproficientâ normative form, but very often in highly situated and localised ways. In addition, the greater part of this imagined community does not âpossessâ either the alienated competen...
