Welsh in the Twenty-First Century

Delyth Morris, Delyth Morris

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783164110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Analyzes the state of the Welsh language at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This title aims to update our understanding of Welsh as a living language; how its use, learning, understanding teaching, evolution and promulgation are developing in the world of the 21st century where Welsh is spreading to the internet and encyclopaedias.

Language, Meaning and the Knowledge Economy

Glyn Williams

Centre for European Research

Introduction

We are at the cusp of change, from one variety of capitalism to another. It involves new roles for the state, new relations of production and new forces of production. It reverberates in how the various social science disciplines change, and how new forms of the understanding of language appear.

The reference point for the change is that which is referred to as immaterial labour, which is defined as the activity of the manipulation of symbols. Immaterial labour involves two different components. The informational content of the commodity refers directly to how skills increasingly involve computer use and both horizontal and vertical communication, while the activity that generates the cultural content of the commodity involves activities not usually recognized as ‘work’ – the definition and fixing of cultural standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and public opinion.

A major architect of the more recent developments was Robert Reich, secretary of labour in the USA under President Clinton. Reich argued that in the long run immaterial labour would be crucial for all economies. It involves scientific and technological research, training of the labour force, development of management, communication and electronic financial networks. Those jobs operating intellectual labour included researchers, engineers, computer scientists, lawyers, creative accountants, financial advisers, publicists, editors and journalists and university academic staff. The growth of such activities would run parallel to a decline in Tayloristic activities since such repetitive and executive activities could be easily reproduced in states with low labour costs. He further argued that globalization had removed the link between the state and the ownership of capital and the means of production. Rather, what is important is efficiency and the productivity of communication, with capital being owned by multinational corporations. What is lost through the denationalization of the ownership of capital is compensated for by the ownership of immaterial labour, of the control of knowledge production. Knowledge becomes nationalized and its organization is managed nationally. Thus the state should invest strategically in value-creating activities, the immaterial activities that characterize the knowledge economy. Income generated by this sector would be deployed to deal with the unemployment of the unskilled and low-skilled labour, partly in order to reduce the disparity between the incomes of skilled workers and those of the working poor.

It is partly because of these features of action that there has been an increasing search for creative workers. It involves yet another shift in productive orientations. Whereas in industrial economies labour went in search of work, we now find that work increasingly goes in search of labour. Florida (2002) has claimed that what he refers to as the ‘creative class’, perhaps better conceptualized as a status group, is an important driver of economic growth. According to Follath and Sporl (2007) this ‘class’ ‘is a diverse and colorful group, exemplified by the ability to create ideas that can flow into companies – that will in turn attract return-hungry investors with plenty of start-up capital’. They claim that it is divisible into three groups: ‘rational innovators’ including engineers, scientists and computer experts; a ‘creative middle’ such as businessmen, advertising people and designers; and then the ‘artists’, including musicians, actors and painters. The so-called class is held together less by relations to the means of production or income similarities than by the sharing of a common culture.

Certainly there appears to be broad agreement that the three essential ingredients of a successful knowledge economy are technology, skills and a highly educated labour force (Powell and Snellman, 2004). Increasing human capital is key for innovation and growth. The creative class is claimed to be attracted to locations with open, diverse communities which champion diversity and make cultural creativity accessible. There is general agreement that creativity is increasingly becoming an important part of the economy. Consequently the market value of creative people has risen, and large industries have sought to adapt to how idea-creation assumes ever more importance.

The second determinitive issue is that of globalization. Production in the knowledge economy increasingly targets a global market. This is a consequence of how the regulatory practices of states have declined. Many argue that, as a consequence, the power of the state has also declined. Its interests lie increasingly with global issues and less with the internal socio-economic agenda. The voluntarist and statist discourse gives way to neo-liberalism. It involves a different representation of society and its relationship to the state, while retaining the division between the state, the economic and political power on the one hand, and the frames of social and collective action on the other, with the action of institutions and the individual and collective action lying between them.

When the state dominates the economy, it dominates the public through its imposition of the circumstances in which the individual enters the labour market – language, qualifications, location etc. When this is relaxed and the state involves itself in a globalization of the economy such that economic choice involves more than political decisions, there is a separation of the state from its society. It is argued that the state is there to ensure the welfare of the people, as a benevolent guardian rather than as a leader (Touraine, 2007:45). It is evident in how the EU has moved from its earlier ambitions and moves towards the incorporation of different states, cultures, languages and nations. It is obliged to support a multilingualism and cultural diversity.

It obliges an analysis of systems and an analysis of actors or those who can be considered as subjects. Within industrial society the actor and the system constituted the two faces of the same coin. In the new context, the categories that define the system are totally dissociated from those that define the actor. This means that the form of nationalism that creates a new state as the mirror of the former state no longer applies – it makes collective action redundant. A focus on the state means that social facts are thought of only in terms of the political, and this leads to a sociology without actors and without subjects. It leads to seeing solutions simply in terms of the state and of power (more powers to the Assembly etc.), paying little attention to the people as social actors. Yet the knowledge economy, placing an enhanced importance on human capital, pulls in the opposite direction.

In this paper I would like to explore these developments while asking the question of their implications for language. I will argue that language plays a central role in the knowledge economy and that multilingual working practices can lead to substantial productivity gains for the individual company. This in turn suggests how we need to rethink the nature and value of our own languages. I begin with a consideration of how the social sciences have taken similar realignments in recent years and how this, in turn, accommodates the new understanding of language.

The Social Sciences

All of the social sciences have been subject to considerable ontological reorientation during the past twenty-five years. The two main driving forces of this change have been the strength of post-structuralism and the related awareness of the tacit nature of knowledge. These are aligned with the evident disconnection between theory and empirical research. This leads to substantial changes as the founda-tional assumptions of Cartesianism are brought into question. This is a concern for disciplines that have tended to have the rationality of the centred human subject at the heart of their theoretical problematics. It results in substantial shifts. In sociology there is a shift away from structure and function, or structure and agency, to a concern with social practice. In economics, the linear, equilibrium models of neo-classical arguments yield to different perspectives, including evolutionary economics and other approaches that focus on the centrality of human capital, and the relationship between social and cultural capital. In Linguistics there is a shift away from a focus on syntax to semantics, and from language to action and discourse. Concepts such as that of ‘communication strategies’ now involve cultural rather than rational determination, and are increasingly related to how learning by doing insists on a dynamic conception. Psychology is subject to similar refinement, particularly as a consequence of Lacanian and other influences. Thinking is no longer understood as a mechanical process conducted according to procedural programmes, rules or instructions, but involves considerable emphasis on flexibility. Such notions as identity, attitudes or motivation are no longer understood as the effects of determinants of the centred, rational human subject, but as part of the transformation of the individual into the subject of discourse (Williams, 1999). In a sense language and the objects of the social sciences converge.

The social sciences emerged at the same time as the modern state and were very much a product of Cartesian thinking. Furthermore, there is a direct relationship between the state and the concepts of the social sciences. Thus, each state had a single society, a single economy and a single state language and culture. The relationship between language and culture and the state was one in which education was to foster a coherent and unified culture, expressed through a single language in order to foment a unified citizenry. Similarly, the state regulated its economy in order to control the labour market and, in so far as was possible, to ensure full employment and the welfare of the citizenry. This interpretation makes it difficult to avoid thinking of the social sciences and their concepts as the ideological edifice of the state. On the other hand they can be conceived as the elaboration of the concept that make the analysis of the state, its economy and its society possible. What is perhaps more relevant is that when the role of the state declines through globalization and the development of supra-state political-economic institutions, it throws the relationship between key concepts and the framework for these concepts into disarray. Does the society pertain to the state or the European Union? Is the normative system whereby ethnicity is defined by deviation from the normative order a European or a state dimension? Such questions are in abundance and represent a real crisis for the social sciences.

1 Sociology

Where the main criticism of sociology has fallen is on the kind of work that strives to elaborate substantive theories that develop new theories and validate them through empirical observation. It is argued that the elaboration of conceptual tools and the ignoring of the voluntaristic forms of social life has led to a reified, positivistic and often teleological account of social behaviour.

Developments in sociology during the 1980s and 1990s are directly associated with this critique of structure and agency. The rejection of the equilibrium model of social change feeds directly into the conception of structure as a constantly changing entity, so that it is not possible to claim that there can be any direct relationship between structure and agency. Stability only exists as traces of prior discourse, thereby becoming institutions. Furthermore, a static understanding of society such as that which is implicit in the language shift/maintenance dualism becomes totally untenable. Secondly, the individual influences structure in the sense that he or she feeds into the constant changing nature of social structure.

The change in emphasis from patterned human behaviour to social practice, that is, from structure to practice, is central to these developments. While there may well be a structure to behaviour in the sense that it is patterned, this does not help in understanding the relationship between the individual, the subject and behaviour, partly because of the tendency to relate individual behaviour to the structure of which it is part. Social practice relates more to the notion of patterned behaviour as normative. That is, it relates to an understanding of society as consisting of patterns of behaviour that are constantly changing or shifting, but which do so within the context of the capacity to persist as normative for that particular society. We shift from an awareness of structure as something that exists and persists, to one in which it is dynamic, constantly changing and yet persisting as a structure. It is from the issues of social structure and normativity that the notion of social order derives.

Social practice is no longer understood as the product of rationalism, nor as the correlate of a relatively static social structure (Giddens, 1994). The actions of social actors are understood as a continuous flow of conduct which, to the extent that they acquire a certain regularity, takes the form of a social practice. Thus in interaction, while the absence of a subject may well be understood, it does not insist on resorting to models that rely on language, culture, social roles or power as the determining factors. Rather, the pervasive normativity of social life operates by reference to unconscious parameters. Communication always arises in specific contexts and is tied to everyday social practice.

There are at least two fundamental approaches to such issues. On the one hand we have the post-structuralist argument that refutes any role for the centred, rational, human subject. On the other hand sociologists such as Giddens (1984), Bhaskar (1989) and Bourdieu (1987) retain some faith in agency and structure, retaining an ontological view of the individual as a knowledgeable, autonomous agent who is active in formulating his/her action. This is achieved without denying the tacit nature of knowledge. Giddens’s theory of structuration shifts the focus from a concern with how structure determines action, to how action is structured as everyday life, and how structured action or social practice is reproduced.

Post-structuralism represents an alternative to Enlightenment materialism, with its focus upon the centred, rational human subject as the source of all meaning (Williams, 1999). It rejects either the subject or reason as the starting-point for social, cultural or political analysis, arguing that both are constructed in and through the discursive process. Furthermore, post-structuralism places stress on the instability and contingency of the structural context of social interaction. This has particular significance for the relationship between the signifier and the signified, in that the notion of a fixed relationship between them is broken. The sign lacks unity, with the infinite play of meaning breaking that unity, and underlining the essential ambiguity of language and meaning.

2 Linguistics

The preoccupation of linguistics has been with form rather than meaning, with syntax rather than semantics. Since Saussure’s demarcation of the boundaries of la langue, linguists have operated on a pre-constructed object in elaborating their theories of language. That is, the ‘language’ which they refer to is an object that has been worked on by the state in its various operations of standardization as a form of language planning. As such it sanctions the legitimation of a specific form and, to this extent, syntax is political. This standardization applied not simply to the standard form of a state language, but also to the relationship between different languages within the same state, albeit that the vindication was even more explicit and fierce. It involved the ideal language of grammar and linguistics. It should be evident that all formalist linguistics revolves around a paradigm of analysis that is of little value to the kinds of processes and analyses referred to above.

General grammar focused on what was common to all languages, leading to the science of the laws of language to which all languages are submitted. This defence of universality and the assertion that some categories exist identically in all languages are far removed from a concern with the use of the language and its relationship to the construction of meaning. The object of comparative linguistics was to establish links between specific languages, leading to an emphasis on the kinship analogy of Indo-Europeanism with its particular form of Eurocentrism and even racism. Linguistics sought to distance itself from the explicit political concern of the comparativists and neo-grammarians by claiming a concern with the elements of language and a focus on syntax. It was firmly tied to Cartesian rationalism. Thus Chomsky’s logico-formalism relies on the competence of the rational human subject as speaker who selects what reflects a norm or sustains a particular model of competence from among a series of possibilities.

This contributed to an awareness that the process leading to describing and using a language is based on the technologies that are the basis of metalinguistic knowledge – the grammar and the dictionary (Auroux,1994). It is never based on the totality of language but on selected representation. It has ...