Structured Visions

This week I turn to the concept of individual that’s produced by the legal system: the ‘rational person’. The rational person is a disembodied individual, who is stripped away of all uniqueness, embodiment, emotion and desire. It turns out that a justice system, like the modern one, based upon the idea of ‘fairness’ requires us to think of other people as rational, with exactly the same needs and entitlements as every other ‘rational person’.

What would a legal system look like if not based upon the idea of ‘fairness’? In the classical period, it was the idea of ‘natural order’. In the medieval period, it was the idea of a hierarchy with an authoritative God at the top.

Fairness sounds obvious, because it’s what we’re used to. But the implications are troublesome: in order to treat people fairly, we have to treat them as if they were all the same. Worse, we have to pretend they don’t have bodies, emotions and desires.

I share some anecdotes about people who are silenced when they’re expressing their unique desires. Four-year-old Amy is told she has to use her ‘happy voice’ – meaning, she has to sound neutral and emotionless if she wants to be listened to. Twenty-year-old Nemo is told to shut up by her peers when she acts out what it’s like to sexually desire another person. Read my book, Language, Sex and Social Structure, for more on the discursive erasure of sexual desire.

Read Costas Douzinas’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ‘Law and justice in postmodernity’ for more on justice, fairness and the legal subject.

Download It’s Not Fair! The Rational, Disembodied Person.

In the past two episodes, I’ve been talking about how society needs to be structured in order for particular types of individuality to exist. In this episode I discuss two types of social structure: the system of traffic laws and culturally specific politeness norms. My interest in traffic laws comes from spending lots of time as a young girl annoying my parents while they were driving. My interest in politeness comes from having lived in a few different cultures and getting things very very wrong (like slamming my jaw into the cheekbones of complete strangers).

Legal systems in most societies are based upon the principle of rationality: laws dictate what is the most rational choice so that people are compelled to make that choice or face unpleasant consequences. When someone breaks the law, they are usually held to a standard of rationality: they are judged according to what a rational person would do.

If people were rational – and only rational – would we need politeness norms? Politeness norms are based upon the principle that other people might be offended by our behaviours. But why would rational people be offended? In their seminal work on linguistic politeness theory, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson argue that politeness behaviour is not irrational. They based their theory on the idea that people are rational, but that they also have something called face. Face is the thing that keeps people from stating what they want in a straightforward way. Rather than ‘You there. Wrap this plaster around my finger so the nail stays in place’, they might say something like, ‘I’m so terribly sorry, I know this is very cheeky, but can I ask a big favour of you? Would you be willing to help me out? I know you’re in a rush….’ etc. To use a politeness strategy that attends to negative face, acknowledge that the person they’re talking to would rather be left alone, as in the example above. To attend to positive face, make the person you need help from feel like they’re just like you – part of a select group of people, as in ‘Help a fellow Goth?’

Whereas the legal system relies upon the notion of the rational or the reasonable person, the politeness system (at least as described by Brown and Levinson) relies upon the notion of the ‘Model Person’ – someone who has both rationality and face.

I bring these notions up here because I want to explore the idea that these two types of system create a notion of a particular type of individual – an individual whose uniqueness has been stripped away and who is strangely disembodied. Next week I’ll discuss how difficult it is for some social systems to theorise in terms of individuals with bodies.

For more on Linguistic Politeness, check out the Linguistic Politeness Research Group.

Download The Model Person: Traffic, Politeness, French Kissing and Fingernails.

With each new story is a different – but familiar – way of understanding how different types of social structure produce different types of individual. Mary’s story, in last week’s episode, illustrated the notion of the individual as a token of a particular, recognisable type: ‘I was one of those…’ This week we hear from Christina, who tells a story in two parts. The first part is about the economic downturn of her hometown, Awayville. The second part is about how she got out of there. In fact, she got out as soon as it was possible for her to leave:

I graduated from high school and moved out that night. I was packed before I went to graduation, and I graduated, and went to party and left. Like, that night.

Later she constructs a group of people, using the existential process there is and the definite determiner the, which signals that the listener will be able to figure out which group of people she’s talking about:

There’s always like the people who you just figure are gonna stay there forever.

With a new story – Christina’s story about getting out of Awayville – we have a new image of how the individual relates to the community. In Christina’s vision of the social world, the community is a group of nameless, indistinct people who will stay in Awayville forever. The individual is the one who separates herself from those people and that place.

The image of the individual here is the isolated individual, who has to rely upon her own resources to move away from a difficult economic situation. This story, from my point of view, is very similar to what has often been called ‘the American dream’: the idea that all Americans have the chance to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’. The idea, that Christina reflects here is something like:

It’s up to me to change my own life.

The questions Christina’s story raises for me, though, are these:

Who’s changing the social structure that made your life so difficult in the first place?

How can we both be an individual and be contributing to the reshaping of the community or the social structure so that it isn’t quite so oppressive and so difficult?

How can I be both an individual who is reliant upon my resources but is also fully supported by my community?

I also speak about different notions of the individual in so-called ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ cultures, and speak a bit about the difference between using kinship terms and given names when referring to family members. If you’re interested, there are some illustrations of kinship terms in Korean in Alan Hyun-Oak Kim’s chapter, ‘Politeness in Korea’ in Politeness in East Asia, edited by Dániel Z. Kádár and Sara Mills.

Download ‘I Left, Like, That Night’: The Isolated Individual.

I tell more stories about my experiences in Strasbourg and American students doing their best to fit in. Often fitting in to aspects of French culture, and learning French, was made difficult because of how much they enjoyed being in the company of other English-language speakers. Thinking about them as a ‘community of practice’ – a term coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation – helps us to understand that better. Lave and Wenger say that you learn particular skills by being part of a community committed to a particular activity, like baking or playing basketball. The students joined together to engage in the practice of learning French and learning about French culture. If they’d come to France to learn to be bakers, it might have been easier to learn French, because learning French would have been just one aspect of a bigger picture: being part of the community of bakers.

‘Communities of practice’ explains a lot, and it has been used in quite a lot of sociolinguistic research (including the work by Penelope Eckert and Mary Bucholtz I discussed last week). The idea is that identity has more to do with doing particular things than with being a particular way. Some things it might not explain, though, such as what it felt like for Cheryl Harris’s grandmother when she was passing as White in order to get a job that would support her family. It might not explain what I call

the wounding that happens when you feel like you’re denying some aspect of yourself.

So I’ve decided to start exploring not just the models of community that scholars develop, but also the models of community that people come up with in their day to day conversations, even when they don’t realise it. Take this conversation between Mary and Rachel:

Mary: I was like one of those like, I’m not gonna go outside because I’m gonna get my shoes dirty, y’know? ((laughs))

Rachel: You’re still like that. ((laughs))

Mary: I am. ((laughs)) Ha ha ha, Rachel. Just cos I don’t like trampling through the mud.

By using the demonstrative ‘those’, Mary is signalling that there is a category of people that she belongs to. Rather than telling us what qualities these people have, she acts them out for us by performing a little monologue about what they might say. She’s describing herself as unique from the other people in her Strasbourg community. That is, she’s different from them, but still recognisable, because she belongs to a category that others can understand. This act of dividing people into categories turns out to be a way of making it possible for Mary to be a unique individual in her community.

This raises some issues/questions for me. Some quotes from the episode:

There’s a strange tension between being part of a group and being unique, that has to do with dividing people up and co-creating community.

This has started me thinking about the relationship between the individual and the group and the individual and the community and the way that communities construct the notion of the individual.

Do we have to divide everybody up in order to recognise them as individuals?

What types of community can we construct such that it is safe to be an individual?

More next week on co-creating community through conversation, and the relationship between the individual and the community.

Download ‘I Was One of Those’ – Uniqueness and Community.

Last week I said I hated social structure? I need an attitude adjustment. When is thinking about social structure fun for me? When we’re imagining new ones: flower worlds, sock worlds, bubble words, underground worlds, for instance.

I discuss the work of two sociolinguists, Penelope Eckert and Mary Bucholtz, who did ethnographic work in the alien world of the American high school. Eckert’s book, Language Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High analyses the links between class, gender and language in a high school in the Detroit area. Eckert describes a divide between ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’ and shows how the kids create meaningful categories according to the things they do, not just what social class they come from.

Bucholtz’s article, ‘“Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls’ describes a group of self-proclaimed ‘nerds’ in another American high school. These girls, she explains, are constructing their own social category that subverts ‘cool’ identities.

I ask: how easy it is to subvert established social categories in a given social structure?

I ask: why are social categories – even subversive ones – based on acceptance/rejection? Can we imagine a social world where there’s nothing but acceptance?

I decide to move from being an objective anthropologist to a regular person, with subjective experiences. I time travel back to being a kid at school myself, sitting in the school lunchroom staring down my shyness, my peers and … my peas. Eureka! I discover the value of creating a new story.

Download Kill Your Peas and Other Stories from Alien Worlds.

Linguistic description gets messy. The scientific description of language starts from the idea that no one variety is intrinsically better than any other variety, then why do linguists always only use the Standard to describe other varieties? Well, not every linguist. In her book, Talking that Talk, Geneva Smitherman upsets the apple cart by using African American Vernacular English (AAVE) forms in academic contexts.

I get called out of my scientific linguist mode when someone tells me I use the word ‘like’ a lot when I talk. Like, what? It turns out that the use of ‘like’ as a quotative has a particular function when you study it in relation to the structure of spoken narrative.

Grammatical structure, narrative structure – just the kind of structures I love. But the use of ‘like’ is often also studied in terms of its relation to aspects of social structure: which types of people are most likely to use it, and how it’s likely to be judged.

When I start thinking about the links between grammatical structure and social structure, I’m no longer thrilled about being objective and descriptive. I start to ask myself a few questions:

Can I study social structure objectively? Can I simply describe social structure? Can I treat social structure as if it were beautiful, the way I understand linguistic structure to be? And the answer was no, actually. Social structure really pisses me off. I hate the way society is structured. I don’t like the fact that society is structured according to a class system, or according to a race system or according to gender inequities. I don’t want to simply describe that. I really wanna judge that!

And I also want to find alternatives. More on that next week.

Download I’m Like, Social Structure Really Pisses Me Off!