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"Here we are together," says the group photograph (Fig. 1). But the solidarity that the photograph seems to represent is more a function of the representational practice of photography, which generally functions as an integrative mode of representation, than it is an expression of the intellectual solidarity among participants at our conference. Indeed, the idea of the "political' audaciously evoked in the title of our gathering, "The Politics of Language Purisrn ... ," probably created more discomfort among participants than it did intellectual motivation. As a result, the photograph is ideological inasmuch as it encourages a misreading of our proceedings. Much of the discussion involved a struggle between those who would politicize Ianguage purism movements, treating thern within a political problematic, and those who would depoliticize thern, treating thern within :1 technical and/or adrninistrative problema tic, But while the photograph is ideological, conveying a false image of solidarity, it is a useful mode of expression for our purposes because it has a kinship with language purification. Group portraits and language purification can both be vicwed as part of a broac1er anc1very basic play of forces in a societyl, those that produce identityf arnong persons and those that create differences. In general, when we ascenc1 to this level of abstraction, dealing with the interplay of identity and difference, it becornes possible to see connections arnong sccmingly disparate phenomena. For example, Levi-Strauss (1966: 32) creates a frarnework within which games and con tests can be interpreted within the frame of this basic social process. Games ... appear to have a disiunctive cffect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual players or tcams where originally there was no indication of incquality. Ancl at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers. Ritual, on the other hand, is the cxact inverse ; it conjoins, for it brings about a union ... or in any case an organic rc1ation between two initially separa te groups .... In the case of garnes the symmetry

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A political approach (9 language purism

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... is preordained and it is a structural kind since it foIlows from the principIe that the TUles are the same for both sides. Asyrnmetry is engendered; it follows inevitably from the contingent nature of events, themselves due to intervention, chance or talent. The reverse is true of ritual. There is an asymrnetry which is postulated in advance between profane and sacred, faithful and officia ting, dead and living, initiated and uninitiated, etc .. and the 'game' consists in making all the participants pass to the winning side by rneans of events, the nature and ordering of which is genuinely structuraJ. What Levi-Strauss's analysis hcre demonstrates, at a mnimum, is the intelligibility we enjoy when we introduce a level of abstraction; we are able to "read" two seerningly disparate social processes within the same linguistic/conceptual currency. If we take this episternological insight and add it to Levis-Strauss's substantive focus on garnes and rituals, we have an entree to an initial political problema tic we can lend to language purisrn movernents. Recognizinr that we must interpret language purisrn movernents as events by contextualizing them within a broader, on-going social process, we ask about their constituting motivations. These are motivations understood not as individual/causal or psychological phenomena but as social level phenomena, for such a movernent has a collective significance; it has the effect of identifying certain mernbers of the community within an inherited linguistic social caste while placing others outside of this membership. It thus involves both identification and differentia tion. Language purification movernents also have a marked, ideational mpetus which relates, a mong other things, to the tcrrn "purification." lf we look at the history of the terrnjpurification and view it from the point of view of its metaphoricity, "purification" loses its innocence, for its most powerful historical role has been its use as a representation for overcoming sin. Inasmuch as sin has been represented or figured as a kind of "stain," which Ricoeur (1967:46) had identified as "the first 'scherna' of evl," it is clea. that purification has Iunctioned i part as a moral ter m appliecl to actions aimed at overcoming eviJ. When a tenn with a pointedly moral valence is put into play i social processes, it cannot wholly lose that valence, even when effor are made to neutralizo its moral forcc! Every society is involved to some dcgree with iclentity politics, with scparating people into groups with identities which form a hierarchy of worthiness, and one's language group membership is an impoi tant part of many of these identity politics processes. Clearly, then, attempts to "purify" a languag

implicitly promotes those who can most c\osely identify themselve as belonging to the language base toward which the change is aimed to a position of moral superiority. And because purification implies getting rid of stain and thus evil, purification movernents imply at some level that the impure language elernents belong to impure persons. his impurity ascription makes it then possible to put people who cannot c\aim affiliation with the priviJeged language in a lesser moral space. In the first instance, then, we can develop a political perspective on language purification movernents by both placing the movement as a whole within the power and authority-related process of the interplay of identity and difference, which creates solidarity within cer+ain groups and differences between those groups and others, and by noting the symbolic charge placed on such movements when the explicit activity is "purification" of a language. The next instance involved in developing a political understanding of language purification requires us to adopt a particular approach to language, one which rejects the traditional idea that language is a neutral mdium of communication and treats language as "discourse." In the more familiar approaches lo political phenomena, language is treated as a transparent tool; it is to serve as an unobtrusive conduit between thoughts or concepts and things. A discourse approach, on the contrary, treats language as opaque. As a result, it encourages an inspection of both linguistic practices wit hin which various phenomena political, economic, social, biological, etc. - are embedded (in fact, from a discourse point of view various disciplines are linguistic practices) and also enables us to raise questions about the poltica implications of discursive practices'The inspection of those practices can be either a temporal, emphasizing the grarnma tical, rhetorical, and narrative mechanisms responsible for recognition of those phenomena treated as the referents of statements in various disciplines, or historical, emphasizing the process by which various phenomena find their way into language. In either case, it can be shown that discursive economies, whieh privilege various linguistic operators are associated with the circulation of persons in connection with relations of power, authority and control. In short, once the transparency metaphor for language is exchanged for the opacity rnetaphor, analysis becornes linguistically reflcctive. What this implies can be dernonstrated if we take a simple example, the phenomenon of the, "a ttitude,1 which has found its way into the

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Michael J. Shapiro

A political approach to language purism

25

speech/writing practices and analyses of the political science profession (indeed, it is one of the most highly funded "objects" of attention in the discipline). father than asking the question about why it is that this or that person holds this or that attitude, the typical 'quistion posed by analysts, one can ask about what dimensions of power and authority are implicated in the attitude's ernergence in the OOtguage of the social sciencesr Undoubtedly the attitude's emergence as an attribute of ~ersons has coincided with the development of the use of mass mcdia to sell public policy7and those who perpetra te it. When legitimation processes were more indirect, in that they involved the control over the individual through the control over group and occupational or religious mernbership, there was no question of inOuencing anything as unmediatcd as an individual, mental orientation (e.g., Spain sold a docile self-consciousness in the Philippines by laundering it through Christianity. lt was the institution of the Church that mediated the Filipino's relationship to Spanish authority) (cf. Rafael 1984).1 In addition, important political events, e.g., the rise to power of Hitler, motivated studies of the phenomenon of obedience to rigid systems of authority. Accordingly, a land mark study (Adorno el al. 1950) of the attitude was explicitly directed toward the cognitive dimension of the acceptance of fascist appeals, and even thc less overtly anxius studies (e.g. Campbell el al. 19FO) that helped to Iound the phenomenon known as the political a ttitude of ex trcme positions. In many ways, the discursively orlentcd question is more politicaJly acute than the empirically orientecl Cine becausc it recognizes a domain of political rclationships that is [ugitive within the transparency unclerstanding of the language of inqlliry{The volubility of r~lationships immanent in speech practices is silencecl in the non-discursive approaches. What, then, is discoursej' There is l familiar version that contains a misleading bias. Traditionally there is a strong bond between the idea of discourse anel the concept of communication. Within this . tradition, discourse emerges from thc clistinction between viewing language as a system of signs and as an instrument of communication. For example, Emile Benveniste nou-d that once we leavc the individual sign or word and (Ira l with the sentcnce. we are concerning ourselves with discourse, for discourse involves ernpioying language in order to comrnunicate. But Bcnvcniste privileged only one dimensin of discoursc, for the comrnunicatio n fuiction assurncs a speaker and listener whose presence and intentional consciousness governs the

meanings of the discourse. There is, however, a dimension of meaning that is not generated in the interlocutory relationship. This is the meaning that is already resident in the linguistc practices to which individual speakers resort in making their utterances and listeners resort in their interpretations (cf. Easthope 1983 :40-42). Thus an utterance such as "we now know more about sexual perversions than ever before," operates on at least two levels. As cornmunication, it is c\ear what is conveyed, namely those already constituted phenomena, which have come to be regarded as sexual perversions are now more firrnly connected to ruedes of knowing, e.g., there are probably more "case histories" of persons who have been recruited into the role of the sexually perverse. But what remains silent and thus unthought within such a communicative perspective are the processes wherein "sexual perversions" are constituted and incorporated into a form of authority and control. To take such a view, we have to overcome the disabling view of discourse as transparent cornmunication between subjects about things, a view within which the value of the staternents of a discourse is wholly absorbed in a statement's truth value. Michel Foucault who stresses the silcnt and unthought dimensions of discursive practices, suggested (1972: 120) a politicized alternative to the traditional preoccupation with the truth value of individual statements and discursive formations as a whole: To analyze a discursive formation is to weigh the "value" of sta tements, a value that is not defined by their truth, that is not gauged by a secret con ten t but which characterizes their place, their capacity for circulation and exchange, their possibility of transformation, not only in the economy of discourse, but more generally in the administration of scarce resources. This view of discourse alerts us to the political content sequestered in the subjects (kinds of persons), objects and relationships about which we speak. It shows that staternents can be evaluated as political resources, for discourse is, in Foucauit's terms, an "asset. ,. For example, the creation of the phenomenon of the "sexual perver=ion" is understood, within Foucaults perspective, as a "perverse implantation," representing a step in the processes whereby medicine took charge of explaining the increasing number of kinds of sexual abnonnalities that were constituted and adrninistct cd by a society increasingly interested in rcndering conduct 1110repredictablc (Foucault 1978:48). From a Foucauldian perspc ctive on discourse, thc invention

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Michael J. Shapiro

A political approach to language purism

. 27

and medicalization of sexual perversions represents the creation of a kind of medicalized subject whose sexual modes of conduct are penetrated by a discipline engaging in a Iorm of surveillance supporting prevailing modes of power and authority. For exarnple, as Foucault points out, in the oleler coeles, soelomy was a forbidden act. After medicine's penetration into the fielel of such acts a wholly new, more complex sexual actor/subject was contrived. "The nineteenth-century homosexual becarne a personage, a past, a case history, ami a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life Iorrn, a rnorphology, with an indiscrete anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology (Foucault 1978:43). Foucault thus demonstrates how the "homosexual" was constituted. To the extent that we merely communicate about such things we engage in a discourse that simply reproduces an existing structure of power and authority. This alternative approach to discourse, one that stresses its constitutive rather than its communicative dimensin alerts us to the process wherein things come into speech and the mechanisms or elements of a discourse in which thcy reside, For this purpose, one needs a focus lhat is almost wholly unfamiliar to conternporary political science, which predicates its approaches to inquiry on the view that language is transparent and thus on the apprehension of phenomena that have already made their way into speech. Within the traditional language conceits of political scicnce, language purism movements have political significance only to the ex tent that those with recognized "political" posit ions get involved. Bu t if one Iocusses on the politics of discourse, the political dimensin of language purism inheres in the privileging of various phenomena which are allowed to come into language. Much of this discursive approach to languaze is based on a particular conception of language and meaninu, that mtroduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, which predicates meaning not on the relationship between a word and object but on the relational structure of signifiers. For those influenced by the Saussurean linguistic traelition, in which meaning is predicated on the structure of difference among signifiers rather than the word-objcct relationship, the signiier precedes the signifieel. This implies that those phenornena (signifieds) about which we have understandings arise as a result of our signifying practices. Christian Metz has represen ted this preceelence of the signifier with a rernark on how the love experienced by sorne men is pr-dicated 011 a mental projection about its enelurance. He savs (\ 982: 11), " ... far from the

strength of their love guaranteeing it a real future, the psychical representation of that future is the prior condition for the full arnorous potency in the present." Whatever credence one might give to this particular view - that it is the network of signifiers in which love and an imagined future participa te that produces the phenomenon we :dentify as "love" the epistemological implication is clear; an understanding of the phenomena about which we speak is to be gained not by formulating precise, technical rules to translate ideas into observations or to translate observations into the conscious intentions of an actor. What is to be recovered, rather, is a non-conscious set of linguistic practices, which are constitutive of the things one is conscious of. Moreover, insofar as we recognize how things are constituted, we are in a position to regard the "things" in the world: the unities, equivalences, and coherences represented by prevailing speech practices, not as natural or transcenelental but as things contrived and produced by human practices. We are then licensed to move in a different direction from mainstrearn political understanding. Rather than privileging scientific communication with its cornn ilment to clarity and precision about things poltical, we can question the authority of the certainties that operate within consensual speech about the political world and about the world that is thought of as being other than politica\. There is yet another aspect of language that lends itself to a politicizing of languaze purification movernents. This is the perspective offered by Bakhtin, who spoke of the degree of pluralism or, in his terms, heteroglossia within a society. In speaking about the way language functions in various genres of writing, Bakhtin (198 1:271) sets up a tension between centripedal forces, those "forces that serve to unify and centralize the verbal-ideological world," anel the centrifugal forces which operate against this unifying tendency. There is, in any society, what Bakhtin (1981 :271-272) ea lis "heteroglossia" (rna ny voices): At any given moment of its evolution, lahguage is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word ... but also ... into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth. Bakhtin identifies the novel as that fonn of writing which exemplifies the intemal stratification of language (hctercglossia), which manages to be maintained in the rnidst of the unifying, centripedal tendcncies

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Michoel J. Shapiro

A poltica! approach to language purism

29

of a society. He points genres of writing,

out (1981 :272-273)

that while various poetic

Note
l. Rafael's analysis is an exemplar of a discourse oriented approach. He shows, among other things, how the meaning of Christian encounters, e.g., lh,. confessional, were affected when refracled through a translation from the Spanish into the Tagalog Janguage.

developed under the influence of unifying, centraliz ing, centripedal forces of verbal-ideological life, thc novel - and those artistic-prose genres that gravita te toward it - was being shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal Iorces. While Bakhtin 's ernphasis here is 011 the novel as a genre which counters various centralizing tendencies within a society's verbal-ideological system, the insight can be transf'erred usefully to the problem of language purismo A purification movernent is representative of a centripedal tendency. Diversity is under attack, and the discursive econornies that result can only enhance a centralizing tendency within the society's systern of power and authority. In general, then, a political understanding of language purification movements is possible evcn when that movernent is encoded within depoliticizing - e.g .. Iechr ically oriented - discourses, What is required, at a general level, is an appreciation that language is a resource. The locations it creates for kinds of person/spcakers partakes of the more general econorny of place and sta tus within a society, and its grarnrnatical, rhetorical, a nd narrative strucrures deploy responsibiJities and authoritative Iorrns of control. And policy aimed at unifying a society's language sys cm is itse lf a political gesture inasmuch as it denies and delegitimatcs varior. lorms of diffcrence or otherness. At rnany levels, a society's approach to the Othr-r is constitutive of the breadth of meaning and valuc :t i~ prepared to tolerate. Language purism is a move in the direction 01' narrowing lcgitimate forms of meaning and thereby declaring out-of-bounds certain dimensions of otherness. It is not as drama tic and easily politicized as the extermination of an ethnic minority or evcn so casily made contentious as the proscription of various forms of social deviance, But the Other is located rnost fundarnentally in languagc, the mediurn for representing selves and other. Therefore, any move that alters language by centralizing and pruning or clecentralizing and diversifying alters the ecology of Self-Other relations ami thereby the identities that contain and anmate relations of power ami authority,

References Adorno, TW., E. Frenkel-Brunswick, DJ. Lcvinson, and R.N. Sanford 1950 T7e Authoritarian Personality . New York: Harper & Row. Bakhtin, M.M. 1981 T71e Dialogic Imagination, (Caryl Emerson and Michacl Holquist, trans.). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Carnpbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes ) 960 The Americal1 Voter. New York: Wey. Easthope, Anthony 1983 Poetry as Discourse . New York: Methuen. Foucault, Michel 1972 T71e Archeology of Knowledge. (A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans.). New York: Pantheon. 1978 The History of Sexuality (Robert Hurley , trans.). Ncw York: Pantheon. Levi-Strauss, Claude 1966 T71eSavage Mind. Chicago: Unversity of Chicago Press. Metz, Christian 1982 Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti, trans.). London: MacMillan Prcss. Rafael, Vicente L. 1984 Contracting Christianity: Convcrsions and Translations in Early Tagalog Colonial Society. Ph.D. Dissertation . Cornell Univcsity. Ricoeur, Paul 1967 771e Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Bcacon Press.