the inquiry blog: an obituary

IB, the constant companion, relentless taskmaster, and on-call therapist of ENGL7395, passed away today due to internal complications stemming from starvation for intellectual material, severely depleted in these difficult times of Final Paper drought. IB was approximately 13 weeks old.

He wasn't always easy to live with; his refusal to define his own genre and his inability to commit to convention earned him the reputation of “sneaky bastard” (Daly 1). An unreliable confidant, he had an obnoxious way of sharing your secrets with everyone and anyone who so much as asked to see them. But in his defense, he did so out of the best of intentions. His ability to instigate stimulating conversation was legendary, and he was the very best of all listeners, a patient sounding board through thick and thin. Those who may have grumbled about him in life most certainly miss him in death; may the spirit of inquiry live on in his absence. It is a remarkable legacy indeed.

tonight on the t

"Excuse me, can I trouble you for a pen?"

He had long hair and glasses, and a copy of _Fight Club_ (the book) on his lap.

"Of course," I replied, and reached into my bag.

He reached across the aisle for the pen and turned to the man in the stocking cap next to him.

"What's your number, man?" Long Hair asked. I tried to tune out as Stocking Cap answered--eavesdropping is a habit I'm looking to break. I spent the next few stops focusing instead on the ring of black dirt around each one of Long Hair's fingernails, the cover of the book, and the geometric shapes on each man's parka. The pen was returned to me with a smile and I watched Long Hair hand _Fight Club_ to Stocking Cap, who was getting up to exit the train at Tufts. They shook hands and the train stopped. As the doors opened, Stocking Cap turned back around, looked at me, and said, very softly,

"Excuse me, but you're beautiful."

Astonished, I smiled, and remembered to say Thank You right right as the doors were closing.

A few more stops ticked by in silence as I toyed with my phone. Long Hair had produced another book from one of his many plastic bags.

Then, out of the blue, I heard, "I wanna thank you."

I stared at Long Hair.

"For the use of your pen, you know. I wanna thank you. I just met that guy [stocking cap] tonight, just now, and he's just getting out of a psych ward, you know. I think he needs to read books. No one fuckin reads anymore, you know? That really frustrates me. I wish I had something better than Palahniuk to give 'im. At least Palahniuk beats Grisham, you know? But still. I wish I had something better. But I'll call him in three days. It takes people on average nine hours to read _Fight Club_. So I'll call him in three days."

Not really knowing what to say, I asked, "Will he be ok?"

"Him? Oh yeah, I think so. He seems to be in good spirits."

Silence.

"Do you read?" Long Hair wanted to know.

"...A little?" I ventured, a lame substitute for the yeah-tons-but-not-cool-stuff answer that immediately sprang to mind.

I don't really remember the next few minutes in any reproducible detail, honestly--he told me about his mom, an Orthodox Jewish theologian who introduced him to Sartre and Camus when he was younger, and monologued for a bit on his interest in French existentialism and the Western Occult tradition.

Then, out of nowhere: "I've been thinking a lot about miscommunication across dialects, you know?"

I couldn't believe my ears.

"I'm talking about accurate communication, you know? That doesn't happen very often."

Well aware that my time with him was limited, I mentally raced through the million questions I wanted to ask him about this. I settled on: "Do you think accurate communication is possible?"

He rubbed his forehead. "Mmm...Yeah. I mean, only through the use of different modes, you know? Like music. Or painting. I paint. Mostly I paint portraits. Especially of jazz artists. I feel like I communicate best through painting, you know? Most accurately."

His stop was nearing and he was gathering the plastic bags. I bit my tongue--I wanted him to keep talking. Instead: "Are you on Facebook?"

"No."

Silence.

"Well, do you communicate electronically? I could send you some images. You could see what I mean."

He wasn't asking for a phone number, so what the hell? I jotted down my email quickly and handed it to him.

"Thanks. I'm Soren. It was nice to meet you."

And with an awkward sidelong handshake, he was gone, and I was left thinking about "accurate communication", painting, multimodal expressions of self, Maria, "the artist who doesn't speak English is no artist", Soren's implicit belief in the merits of post-psych-ward exercises in literacy, his valuing of Palahniuk over Grisham, the bequeathing of _Fight Club_, miscommunication across dialects, and, by extension, translingualism. What, according to Soren, does painting do that language can't? In what ways might multi-modalism be useful to translingualism? Is translingualism even about accuracy, though? Or is accuracy one of those words (like authenticity...ha, ha...) that just drive everyone crazy?

Anyways.

Nothing groundbreaking, obviously--just one of those strange T interactions (made all the more weighty by the fact that I was on my way home from our class) that I don't want to forget, so I am logging it here.

is it too late for me?

It occurred to me as I was reading Kells that, yes, we should encourage “Students [to] bring not only their language(s) and discourses but the cultural ecologies of their own experience to their writing” (207)...but have I ever done this myself? When I read these articles, I think about them from the point of view of the teacher wanting to know what to do in her classroom. But I don't know why it's taken me this long to realize that I am the student, right now: in all of the writing that I do for all of the classes that I take, do I ever make a conscious effort to employ MY language, or does everything I write come out sounding like washed-out pseudo- (or, more graciously, apprentice-) academese that fits like ugly old shirts I've kept since high school (cuz they're stretched out in all the right places) and wear with a resigned shrug whenever I don't know what else is appropriate? Would I ever stick my neck out on a final paper, for instance, and write something that sounds like Chloe, rather than something that sounds like Chloe-sounding-as-much-like-everyone-else-as-she-can-get? The obnoxious truth is, probably not. Not even on a paper about linguistic diversity, which is the cruelest of ironies...I would probably write that linguistic diversity paper in the exact same linguistically un-diverse voice I've used for every other paper I've ever written, just like I've spent all semester blogging about trans/multi[lingualism/culturalism] in the same damn clinical mono-everything voice that has come to feel safe and legitimating, somehow.

The even-more-obnoxious truth is, I don't actually know what Chloe (minus academese) sounds like on paper. Kells asks, “Where and how do our students claim citizenship? How do they enact what they know and who they are?” (207), and I'm haunted by that because * I am the student! * and I'm afraid that the way that I enact who I am on paper is a very constructed, inauthentic (that just sent shivers down everyone’s spine, including mine—sorry—) process that is the result of years and years in The Academy.

(Note: I'm not interested in playing the blame game. I'm not making claims that I've been brainwashed by anyone or anything. I take full responsibility for the performative attitude I adopt whenever I try to write like a background-less perfect-English machine. And I'll also note that standardization of academic language is certainly not only the US's problem. I have vivid memories of my third grade teacher in France holding up my notebook in front of the whole class and condescendingly asking everyone, “Qui peut montrer a Chloe comment ecrire un sept?” (Who can show Chloe how we write our sevens?) because I hadn't put the little strike-through bar on the diagonal part. A standardized seven! In third grade! I'd gotten the math answer right, I just hadn't written the number the way everyone else did, and I got called out publicly for it. It was a traumatizing experience for a shy little bookworm whose American education had entirely failed her on the European way of writing numbers (now I'm blaming a little). Obviously, that experience was the tip of the Chloe-meets-standardized-French iceberg...)

Point is: can a girl who, right now, as a student, can't really remember her “own” language ever really help her future students write in theirs? How do I encourage a practice that I myself don't practice?

guanxi

I’m struck by the similarities between the linguistic dynamics of the internet-based guanxi described by Hawisher and Selfe in “Globalization, Guanxi, and Agency” (in which “cross-cultural guanxi represent, we believe, a potent form of accumulating and deploying social capital in an increasingly globalized world” (63) and about which “it is a mistake to think that the global landscape of the Internet necessarily leads to a monologic global culture or language like English” (71)), and Trimbur’s discussion in “Linguistic Memory and the Uneasy Settlement of U.S. English” of the transatlantic networks created by the slave trade (an early – if inherently reprehensible – type of globalization?) in which cross-cultural relationships were also matter of capital (albeit bodily and economic), and “Languages other than English were recognized as important for commerce, diplomacy, and knowledge” (24).

A less convoluted way of verbalizing that might be simply to say that (surprise, surprise) here I am, thinking about linking again. Guanxi is a concept to add to my limited vocabulary of linking. It is a term that, I think, is more focused on the person-to-person aspect of linking than the term “link” itself (to my mind a rather sterile, impersonal signifier – albeit with personal implications – of textual motion through cyberspace) tends to evoke for me. Similarly, the slave ship is a surprising context in which to think about the physical linking of people and places in a linguistically productive way.

So not only does linking affect the written text itself and its processes of meaning-making (a la Queen), it also affects the linguistic contexts in which texts are written and produced and thought about in the first place (a la Hawisher and Selfe); and not only does linking affect the ways that meaning is derived from what we read and where we read it (again, Queen), but it also can impact (always in an act of subversion, I wonder? Not sure…) the power dynamics inherent in language—that is, linking people together results in the re-negotiation of the ways in which language can be used to “justify”, reinforce, and exert one person’s dominance over another.

That is what Trimbur is saying happened, right, when he asserts that
“although English was the lexifier or language of power, the linguistic motive, nonetheless, was not so much to acquire English wholesale as to pidginize it by eliminating features of English that were unusual or difficult for relevant language groups to learn and by interjecting into English ways of forming words and sentences that came from African languages.” (29)

…?

Mostly, this is all background rumination for what *really* interests me: the evolution of pidgin and creole languages, the role of the guanxi in the creation of them, and, broadly, the weird things that happen, power-wise, when the “standard” is messed with on such a broad scale. Like Lu, “I am particularly interested in scholarship that approaches the transrelations of nations, cultures, peoples, and language(s) in terms of transactions that transform, transfuse, translate, transport, transverse, transubstantiate, transvalue, transpose, and transplant established ways of doing things and in terms of multidirectional transactions—not merely top-down but also bottom-up and sideways” (49).

standardization

And I thought that the topic of standardization of English within the US was a loaded rhetorical nightmare: “The team wanted an exam that would be recognized by the international community, but not at the expense of losing the sense of what English would mean to Slovaks entering the global economy” (Prendergast 113). If I understand this correctly, the objective is to create an exam that tests fluency in a respectable (for lack of a better word), internationally-understood, yet culturally situated English tailored to fit Slovakian needs. Standardized-but-customizable. International-but-Slovakian. No matter how I try to rephrase or simplify the tall order laid out here, I can’t seem to bring blurry concepts like “international community” and “what English would mean to Slovaks entering the global economy” into focus—where is this international community, exactly, and is it really speaking a coherent lingua franca with enough consistency to establish itself as a unified authority on the standardization of anything?

As we brought up in class last week, it’s hard to get a sense of what “Slovakian” means from this book (not a critique—just a function of Prendergast’s approach to ethnography); therefore, it’s difficult for me to get a cohesive picture not only of what “Slovaks entering the global community” look like, but also what they need English to do for them. I suspect that I would have these same questions even if Prendergast had undertaken a more holistic, deep-anthropological type of ethnography: at the risk of sounding obnoxiously grad-school-y (forgive me!), is “Slovakian” a viable essentialization? Is there such thing as the quintessence of Slovakianism, and what are the dangers of conceiving of a group of individuals in such a broad way?

Nor is the concept of “English” quite clear. For starters, Prendergast has clearly mapped the bifurcation of American English vs. British English in Slovakian consciousness, showing how each is (de)valued altogether differently depending on the historical moment and individuals’ purposes in learning English in the first place. The team itself is bipartisan on this issue: “When a task created by half the reform team for the purpose of modeling the speaking exam was handed out for everyone’s perusal, it was edited to comply specifically with British English… ‘On the weekend,’ for example, was corrected to ‘at the weekend’” (Prendergast 115). Consensus has not quite been reached on what kind of English is being tested here.

Further, I’m a little bit amazed that “The team did not, for example, consider it critical to assess pronunciation” (114). What?! Is this not a conversation-based language exam? A student spoke too quietly, and all hell broke loose. How is pronunciation not important? Isn’t comprehensibility a goal? I don’t understand this at all.

To recap so far: there is a team of scholars seeking to create a standard for English (which may be American English, or might be British, but either way, pronunciation won’t matter…even though the idea is to garner international respect and facilitate communication…hmm…) so that Slovaks (who are they?) can have their linguistic needs (what are they?) met as they go forth into the international community (which, I suspect, does not exist).

I suppose standardization of anything relies on the kind of blurry language that is large and vague enough to encompass what- and whom-ever needs to be encompassed, regardless of where reform is happening.

PS: Oh yeah, and um…standardization of course makes me think of Professor Gallagher’s Radical Departures. I wonder whether he ever radically departs from (standardized?) class norm to allow students to go to his house on presentation week?

the artist who doesn’t speak english is no artist

I have no idea where this is going to wind up, but here goes.

I found Maria’s starving-artist narrative particularly poignant, for a lot of reasons. The most inane one first: I was struck by Prendergast’s attentive rendering of her, which, it seems to me, rather lovingly seeks to capture as much of Maria’s complexity as possible. For example: “Another evocative phrase…was ‘because I love America’; [Maria] used it several times: to explain, for example, why she had chosen to study English in high school…Each time, however, she signaled sarcasm, by either a forced smile followed by a cascading laugh or mock fervor in her voice and eyes” (Prendergast 63). Maria comes across as an expressive, intuitive, idealistic-if-increasingly-disillusioned cultural commentator.

Secondly, it’s curious to think about English as the lingua franca of art, which is something entirely other than finance or composition or research articles. My first thought when reading Maria’s assertion that “The artist who doesn’t speak English is no artist” was, “Really? DaVinci? Rubens? Cezanne? There are entire generations of artists whose work participates in American cultural consciousness who not only did not speak English, but are also all dead—they aren’t speaking anything at all. And their work still matters.” Isn’t that art’s “thing”? Isn’t art supposed to transcend all this petty business of talking and writing in favor of a more visceral (purer?) mode of communication? But that’s a naïve reaction—art, like music, was embroiled in linguistic politics long before English ever mattered (the vestiges of which are visible in the fact that art majors are tested on their knowledge of Italian terminology to this day). So the question isn’t my initial “does art really have a lingua franca too?”, but rather, “when, how, and why did English usurp (that’s a judgmental word) the Romance languages’ rotating roles as ‘the language to know’ for artists in this day and age?” …and, perhaps, “Has the periphery changed?” (Maria locates the divide between the center and periphery of the art world along linguistic lines—has this always been the case?)

Thirdly, and least-well-thought-out, there’s a whole part about translation on pp. 60-61: “…the act of translation between language and experience…[and] one final act of translation—that between viewer and work” (Prendergast). Postmodernity has made the notion of image-as-text a rather common one. It’s not new to think of “reading” an image in terms of its compositional elements, recognizing it as created, situated, etc., which I think is one kind of translation. But video is even more complex: “Maria translated the audio of the video into English subtitles so the work would be legible to the largest portion of the international audience they aspired to attract…The introduction of English, an idiom with which she was not completely comfortable, created exactly the kind of distance it was the point of her art to collapse” (Prendergast 61). Hmm…

point of curiosity: is this the right maria?

I realize that there are doubtless many Slovakian artists named Maria who spent time in the US (Boston, specifically, wasn't it?) on a grant (Prendergast never mentions whether it was the Fulbright...) in the early 2000s. But maybe this is the right one?

[UPDATE: it is the right one! I have gotten in touch with her. Hooray!]