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!]

links

I’m thinking a lot about the inherent meaningfulness of links. Dingo’s theorization of the network model (which draws “linkages between national and international texts and policies” (502)) and Queen’s assertion that “The link acts as the mode of circulation by which…already mediated texts are further transformed as they enter different rhetorical fields” (484), while they are dealing with different kinds of links (Dingo’s comparative/theoretical and Queen’s digital), nevertheless seem to be very much to one another’s point: the very placement of texts in various forms of connection with one another – the creation of links – and their movement through time and digital, literary, or political space is a [transformative/productive/meaningful] activity. It’s like stepping away from the actual stuff of meaning (its content, I guess, if that can be imagined for a second,) and looking instead at its structure or context (“…cultural climate, witnessing, and location, for example” (Dingo 502),) in order to…what? Better understand the content?

That’s not really it. My premise is flawed, because the point is that content and context can’t be separated, and should, in fact, be interrogated simultaneously. Is this true? Where a text comes from, where it goes, what it looks like, and what’s next to it matters just as much (100% as much? 82% as much? 51% as much?) as what it’s saying. But again, it’s not a question of determining how much that surrounding stuff matters so much as it is about recognizing that what a text is saying is always inevitably mediated by where, how, and to whom it is saying it. I think.

Queen shows how the literal “movement” of a text in cyberspace can result in misunderstanding and misappropriation (which, I suppose, is one kind of meaning-making). The internet itself – as a mode that deals in links – bears investigation: “How does Internet technology not simply reflect, but also create representations that a/effect particular relations of power among feminist activists across borders?” (Queen 485). The internet is active: the ways in which texts circulate and overlap and link is itself a creative process.

For Dingo, it’s all somehow bound up in the notion of the transnational: “understanding the interarticulations between U.S. welfare and World Bank gender-mainstreaming policies requires studying transnational rhetorics as a multitude of dynamics” (502). This may be too simplistic an essentialization, but it seems that if Queen is telling us to pay attention to (and beware of) the ways in which the texts we find online have already been and continue to be mediated by the internet, then maybe Dingo is advocating that rhetorically active citizens be conscientious linkers, intentionally looking for interarticulations even between seemingly disparate texts: “As my interrogation of World Bank and U.S. welfare policy shows, transnational situations that may seem radically different and disconnected are actually bound by transnational networks of power, neoliberal logics, and similar rhetorical practices that function to define and contain women’s agency in the global market place” (Dingo 502). These interarticulations will presumably be endless in an age of globalization.

It’s not like English majors aren’t used to putting texts in conversation with one another (which is a kind of linking, I think). But Queen and Dingo seem to be using a much bigger scale, at minimum, and perhaps a different paradigm altogether. How does network theory and linking complicate our pre-existing inclination to put texts in conversation with one another?

Parenthetically, the temptation for me is to think of internet links as kind of organic—disembodied, certainly, and somehow “naturally” (do I mean accidentally?) occurring in this odd, vast, impersonal digital space…  

lovelife billboard campaign (in case other readers of royster were curious)