1 Introduction
In this book we argue that the issue of linguistic diversity within Europe should proceed from an understanding of how language objects are stabilised and destabilised in relation to the political order. The EU mantra of ‘unity in diversity’ could be a contradiction within a modernity that stresses the homogenisation of populations as the basis of unity within the nation state—the claim that unity can be achieved across diversity. How is this achieved where there is an increasing shift towards diversity and hybridity? We focus on the processes whereby the nation state has forged a commonality that transcends language and the social, asking how the relationship between language, place and identity is changing within a shifting normativity.
Within the EU discourse the nation state remains central, and diversity pertains more to the transnational than to the internal configurations of the nation state. It is a unity that also transcends the nation state, involving the EU as a political entity. ‘Unity in diversity’ places language at the heart of a new political order that challenges the centrality of the nation state, at a time when globalisation and the neo-liberal discourse are transforming the relationship between language and the state. We ask, what other changes in the social configuration must occur so that change in the political order takes place? The prevailing logic suggests that modifying the institutional arrangements that support language may well involve administrative changes. However, the institutional structures whereby language production and reproduction,1 and identity formation are framed should be retained. Heller and Duchene (2012:19) argue that we are ‘nearing the limits of linguistic nationalism (or national linguistic) regimes to organize our lives'. It is this process we explore in this book.
Within Kantian universalism, while proclaiming its own individuality each European state also subscribes to a universalism inscribed in democracy. The EU now seeks to subscribe to universal principles while promoting linguistic diversity. How does a new image of a people that incorporates membership of historical communities (ethnos), square with citizenship as a continuous process involving collective action and the acquisition of fundamental rights and equal dignity (demos) (Williams and Williams 2012)?
The influence of power on the differentiation and categorisation of languages changes. Prompted by neo-liberal discourse, liberal democracy has involved a transition from government to governance, replete with new structures of engagement that allow the deepening of the integration of the autonomous individual and civil society in the political process at all levels. This opens the way for a new politics, while institutions are now obliged to subscribe to the public will in a new way. Digital technologies have brought about a transformation, or a structural shift, of economic activity across national borders, mediated by language. They have also extended the range of political debate, limiting the influence of more orthodox forms of media. This has implications for how language is operationalised.
Language is not pre-social. Post-structuralism argues that the linguistic categories which derive from the formalism of linguistics can relate to aspects of social organisation. This does not involve creating a gap between linguistic analysis and the culturally informed social, or even the semantic. The abstract formal features are modified in accordance with their operational context, but this does not mean that language objects do not have stable structures that transcend history and culture. They can be understood as discursive formations which constitute vast discursive unities that display a regularity. They constitute a diverse discourse with a spatial form, a matrix of meaning to which is linked words, statements and actions. The relative homogeneity is based on a division of equally stable social and analogous practices. It is possible to discover their historical and cultural appearance and how they have been stabilised in terms of the social practices on which they rely. However, these practices are socially structured.
Our focus is on language objects, how they are constructed and constituted, asking what are the institutional involvements and how are they changing? The notion of hegemony—understood as a dynamic system that constrains while also allowing rather than as an ideological order—is central to our thesis. It involves the processes that link state institutions with the elements of neo-liberalism. Given the articulation between the EU and member states, it is relevant to consider how the relationship between language, hegemony and institutional orders is restructured in a way that is manifestly different from what had existed in industrial society.
The EU has a narrative on language and on its own role as a political institution, the goal of promoting European unity while encompassing linguistic diversity. It links notions of cultural diversity with the notion of political pluralism. Yet it is caught within a globalisation process driven by a specific discourse that it can only partly strive to influence. Our goal is to explore the interface between the mantra of ‘unity in diversity’ and the processes of globalisation to understand how the goal can be achieved. EU operations have intensified since Mann (1993b) suggesting that globalisation did not diminish the structural role of the nation state. We look at different sub-systems that consolidate the hegemonic process—economy, law, education and government—and how they operate within a framework that is exposed to neo-liberalism in forging a new political system. If the changing language hegemony involves little threat to state languages, it leaves the notion of unity to be accounted for. Unity focuses less on the construction and constitution of language objects than on how identities are formulated. The effects of the relevant discourses condition the responses of subjects within these sub-systems; their practices are constrained by the effects of discourse, while also being provided with new conditions for action. There will be counter discourses that involve subject positions wherein individuals object to on-going developments, a clash of narrative and a heterogeneity of discourses. The power of who has the right to speak influences the status of statements. The stabilisation of discourse is only relative, and we are caught in a moment where even a limited degree of discursive stability is constantly challenged.
We proceed in this opening chapter by considering the engagement between sociolinguistics and sociology. This allows us to highlight how our own approach diverges from the emphases uncovered. We also outline the main dimensions of recent change by focusing on globalisation and the role of neo-liberal discourse.
2 Locating the Sociological in Sociolinguistics
The limited engagement of early sociolinguistics with sociology has given way to an essential awareness of the work of those sociologists who have had most to say about language, especially Giddens and Bourdieu. Yet, a clear understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of sociology remains missing. Consequently, we find epistemological projects that attempt to link the work of Bourdieu, who was influenced by the phenomenology of Merlau-Ponty,2 his teacher, with a post-structuralism that strives to escape determinate judgement (Martin Jones and Gardner 2012); or the functional liberalism of Hymes with the positivism of Marx (Blommaert 2003).
Discourse analysis has been informed by developments in sociology since the 1960s. The emphasis on signification involves linguistics, while its indeterminate side can involve sociological theory and a focus on the social dimension of meaning (Achard 1993). It did not emerge in the 1980s as Fairclough (2006:9) implies, but from the work of Michel Pecheux and his team dating from the 1960s until 1984 (Pecheux 1982; Williams 1999).3 It built on the structuralist interrogation of the place of language in social processes that was incorporated in Foucault’s ‘order of discourse’, on the linguistics of Benveniste and Culioli, the sociology of Althusserian Marxism and the work of Gramsci. It overlapped with Laclau’s radical post-structuralism (Laclau 2000b).
The initial Marxist thrust of discourse analysis has been replaced by a distinct liberalism, largely through the influence of the work of Giddens (Blommaert 2005:7). His work reintroduces the centrality of the notion of individual subjectivity and social practice in the social world, something that links well with the sociolinguist’s focus on the social actor. He drew on linguistics (Giddens 1984), and specifically on the work of Saussure, in formulating his concepts, arguing that society, like language, should be understood as a ‘virtual system’ with ‘recursive properties’ (Archer 1982:478, 1990). Language is a tool with which to view society, rather than being the constitution of society, an approach that derives from Simmel’s (1978) neo-Kantianism with its emphasis on contingency, and specifically, how in the notion of Vergellschaftung Simmel claimed that given principles permeated throughout society, thereby providing it with a structured form. It is this activism that is engaged in the notion of reflexivity. It is a hermeneutics that is resolutely anti-positivist. Yet Simmel also insisted that nothing in social life could be explained in terms of determinate judgement.
Because, Giddens claims, the epistemological draws attention away from ontology, his focus is on the ontological rather than the epistemological, on what is rather than on how to explain it. His focus is denotative, or realist in the sense that it is not simply a model but that it makes reference to things in the real world and to real properties of human actors and institutionalised social arrangements. As a result he is accused of focusing on individual behaviour and rational action to the extent that he is unable to accommodate the formation of the subject, or the effects that other subjects bring to bear on the constitution of the individual as the subject (Willmott 2007). He plays down the epistemology and methodology in thinking of structure as an actual constituent, as a property, of society, rather than being linked in any way to a methodology that can analyse either strategic conduct or institutions. This is consistent with his understanding of structure, first as a flow of social practices involving social actors, and second, as the rules and resources made available by signification, domination and legitimation.
Modern analytic epistemology has become somewhat esoteric and artificial in the face of its failure to provide a successful account of knowledge, to the extent that some philosophers no longer seek to define the conditions of knowledge, stressing instead its contextual aspects. Even as meta-narratives, sociological theories play a role in establishing the nature of the knowledge involved in interpreting the social world, but they speak from specific places that condition the meaning of that which they construct. Social class or ethnicity provide the subject places a priori, but it is the transformation of the individual as the subject of discourse that is involved in filling those places. Should theory be involved in locating these places? If identities are forms of articulated collective wills there can be little value in referring to these identities through labels that are merely points of temporary stability. It is more important to comprehend the logics of their constitution and the formal determination of the spaces within which they inter-relate (Laclau 2000b:53).4
Giddens claims that ontological questions are unavoidable, and must have primacy over the epistemological. A social ontology that tells us what kind of things exist in the world tells us little about how society works, beyond arguing that social phenomena involve events that are always contingent and open ended. Prioritising the ontological means that reflexivity is only possible when the object becomes the ground for the singular subject’s reflexivity, becoming a tool for epistemology, entailing an engagement with instrumental reason (Lash 1999:219–220). For Giddens and Beck, reflexivity becomes a critique of determinate reason in the sense of its understanding as a freedom from social structures. Escaping a dependence on social structure involves a situated inter-subjectivity and praxis wherein the subject invests itself in the very object that opens out onto ontology. A ‘freedom’, thus grounded, involves discursive mediation becoming primary and constitutive.
Giddens’ ontological focus is replicated in Fairclough’s (2006) focus on critical realism, in which socially constructed objects and social relations have a materiality that does not depend on a human knowledge of them. Epistemologically he rejects positivist accounts that do not include reference to their social and discursive construction, and approaches that fail to acknowledge that the socially constructive effects of discourse are subject to certain non-discursive conditions. Giddens’ understanding of the structure/agency relationship as dialectic involves language products standing in a dialectical relationship to social structure, and linguistic-communicative events relating to social processes and structures. Since the structure/a...