Colores de los módulos

7 . 1 C H A N G E W I T H I N C H A N G E

The narrative of this book has been a movement away from one way of looking at linguistic variation towards another – in fact from one very particular, consolidated, disciplined and productive perspective to a much more open, critical but speculative perspective. As I said near the beginning of the book, the first conception of style in a socio- linguistic context was a variationist one, defining style as a simple plane of linear variation within the speech of a single person. As the book has progressed, reflecting changes over time in the sociolinguis- tic analysis of style, it has become less and less satisfactory to work with any simple definition of style. In relation to general and literary stylistics, Jean Jacques Weber summarises these priorities as follows: meaning and stylistic effect are not fixed and stable, and cannot be dug out of the text as in an archaeological approach, but they have to be seen as a potential which is actualized in a (real) reader’s mind, the product of a dialogic interaction between author, the author’s context of production, the text, the reader and the readers’ context of reception – where context includes all sorts of sociohistorical, cultural and intertextual factors (Weber1996b: 3).

If we substitute a more complex notion of ‘participants’ for ‘reader’ in the above quote, including speakers, listeners and analysts as parties engaged with and impacted by stylistic meaning, then Weber’s sen- tence stands as a useful summary of what a sociolinguistic stylistics, as I have argued for it in the book, can aspire to be and do.

Sociolinguistic style has outgrown its conceptual origins. If we con- tinue to use the term, it has to encompass the whole field of making social meaning through deploying and recontextualising linguistic resources. And in that formulation, social meaning is itself a complex phenomenon, not merely referring to simple indexical relation- ships between language forms and membership of social groups. This 177

makes style seem like the whole of discourse, apart from the fact that, in my own treatment here, I have generally remained within the conventional bounds of accent/dialect resources and meanings made around them. Even then, it has been important to stress the artificial- ity of dislocating anything we might think of as ‘dialect’ from dis- course, because social meanings made through dialect are thoroughly embedded in more general discursive and semiotic processes.

This book’s narrative relates intimately to other narratives. The gen- eral narrative of sociolinguistics as a discipline over the last fifty years, much more widely than in respect of style alone, shows the same movement away from reliance on a confident structural sociology to a more tentative social theory of practice. Approaching styling as social practice has allowed us to see a much wider range of social meanings, designs and consequences than a structural stylistics could. But these gains have been traded against the security – undoubtedly a false secur- ity – of simple explanatory models of style-shifting and of social organ- isation. The interpretive world of social practice is messy, complex and contingent. It doesn’t allow us to be satisfied with a generalised account of ‘what most people stylistically do’, and that ceases to be a compelling issue. The main rationale for a practice view is, however, that it has a better chance of articulating the lived social world of meaning-making through language. When the focus is on variable forms of speech, a practice perspective can show how variation is made meaningful in, and embedded in, social interaction, rather than just being an attribute of speakers or a group tendency. It can help us address the old socio- linguistic question of why variation exists. The most inclusive answer is that it exists to make social meaning in discourse.

But sociolinguistics, and the study of linguistic variation within it, doesn’t just ‘happen’ to be living out this particular change narrative. Intellectual fashions, like most other domains of fashion, can cer- tainly be self-sustaining, but the move towards a constructionist and critical sociolinguistics is not just fashion. It has been a case of struc- turalist models only taking us so far in their ability to explain data at hand. A high level of abstraction in the definition of social groups and

contexts and in the quantitative analysis of speech (see Chapters2and

3) has protected variationist sociolinguistics from confronting its

explanatory limitations. In the study of what was called ‘stylistic variation’ across contexts, as we saw in earlier chapters, context simply could not be adequately handled via a determinist structural taxonomy. Styling achieves more than the demarcation of pre-defined situations or gross sorts of relational stance. John Gumperz makes this same point about taxonomies of speech events and genres:

Anthropologists and folklorists concentrating on performance discovered that more often than not events were not clearly bounded. Rather, the participants’ definition of what the relevant context is ‘emerged’ in and through the performance itself . . . The analytic issue therefore shifts from language choice or style as traditionally conceived within sociolinguistics, to the question of how and by what signalling devices language functions to evoke context (Gumperz

1996: 365).

The narrative is therefore also a narrative of problems in the applica- tion of tightly specified theoretical and methodological principles to discourse data, and a progressive need to achieve better accountability to those data. This in turn relates to what the aims of sociolinguistic inquiry are taken to be. For understanding linguistic change, where a language is viewed top-down as a system of variation, there are more specific and narrow criteria for what is an adequate account of speech variation data. Those criteria are far too narrow when the aim is to understand social identity work through variation, for example.

But another narrative is the historical narrative of social life itself in the social environments that sociolinguistics is trying to understand. I have touched on this theme at a couple of points in the book (see

section1.6, in particular), and it is the main issue in this short final

chapter. The movement away from a structural account of language in society is a reflection of how society itself has begun to move beyond what we have understood by social structure. This is the argument that language – and language variation, as this book’s concern – have come to do rather different work in contemporary social life, by comparison with their function in the seemingly more ordered world that Labovian sociolinguistics encountered and modelled. Intellectual paradigms, like people, are products of their times. Two main issues are worth revisiting.

The first is the idea of authenticity and its relation to language and sociolinguistic performance. At least implicitly, sociolinguistics has made strong assumptions about authentic speech and about the authentic status of (some) speakers. Sociolinguistics has often assumed it is dealing with ‘real language’. (There has even been a sociolinguistics book series called the Real Language Series, where the title stakes a claim for the importance of non-idealised speech and language as data.) But ‘real language’ is an increasingly uncertain notion. In late-modern social arrangements and in performance frames for talk, do we have to give up on authenticity? How does style play with, and play out, authenticity? The second issue is media- tion. An idea of this sort is at the heart of stylistic performance and

reflexivity. It is the idea that there is, we might say, some reflexive chamber within which social meanings are made and inferred. Late- modernity is an era strongly associated with semiotic mediation, although it is usually the mass media that are in question. How does the mediation of language affect the quality of our social experience?

7 . 2 T H E A U T H E N T I C S P E A K E R

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no-one has as yet discovered. (Wilde1894/1970: 433; Coupland

2003: 417)

Oscar Wilde’s epigram grabs our attention, firstly, because it asserts something counter-intuitive. Most of us value truthfulness, consist- ency, coherence, integrity and so on, and we judge other people and ourselves partly against criteria like these. At the same time, the epigram hints at a widespread position in contemporary social science (post-dating Wilde by many decades) that is radically sceptical about the feasibility of authentic experience. Language and discourse are often given as a reason for this scepticism, in the broad sweep of argument about the social construction of reality (Berger and

Luckmann 1971). The fact that language mediates our approach to

the world is often taken to be the reason why there can be no directly

authentic experience (Belsey 2005; Bendix 1997). The epigram also

makes us think of Oscar Wilde’s own rationale for favouring personal artificiality. As a gay man in the public eye in an intolerant world, he found that displaying his ‘authentic self’ did him no favours. We begin to sense the politics around authenticity. But what is authenticity and what might we mean by ‘an authentic speaker’? There have been interesting debates about authenticity and sincerity, including Paddy

Scannell’s (1996) theorising of ‘sincere’ television representations,

Joanna Thornborrow and Theo van Leeuwen’s (2001) collection of

papers on authenticity in the mass media and Lionel Trilling’s (1972)

literary theory of sincerity. Although there is little overall consensus in these sources, let me suggest that there are five main qualities of authenticity.

The first is ontology, meaning that things we consider authentic have a real existence, as opposed to a spurious or derived existence. The second is historicity. Because they are not ‘made to order’, authentic things generally have longevity; they have survived. Many things we consider authentic are durable and even timeless. Martin Montgomery

(2001: 398) explains that the earliest systematic uses of the word ‘authenticity’ were in relation to written documents and quests to establish what was and what was not an original written documentary source. A third quality of authentic things is their systemic coherence. Authentic things are ‘properly’ constituted in significant contexts. In the example of written documents, an authentic text is not just an old one. It is likely to be ‘historic’ as well as ‘historical’. It fits into some significant institution or system. For example, if a text is an important religious or literary text, it has a particular place in the meaning-system of religion. Fourthly, there needs to be a degree of consensus in judging something to be authentic. So authenticity relates to the process of authorisation and to a particular source of authority. The significance of declaring something to be an authentic object, such as a painting, is to put its identity beyond challenge based on some expert assessment. Fifthly and most obviously, an authentic object has value. Because authentic things are ratified in a culture, they have definite cultural value. They are anchoring points – things one can hold on to.

Using this elaboration of the idea of authenticity, perhaps we can see more clearly how social styles, including linguistic styles, have been considered to be either more or less authentic, from different points of view. I have used the term ‘vernacular speech’ throughout the book to refer to something like ‘the ordinary speech of ordinary people’, with- out intending the concept to carry any specific ideological implications. But it’s clear that variationist sociolinguistics has taken an ideological stance in favour of vernaculars, and that it has assumed that vernac- ulars are authentic speech products. Vernacular authenticity is based in beliefs about ontology – how language ‘really is’, on the ground; how we find it to be when we seek it out ‘in the community’, and when we observe it empirically without influencing it (recall the observer’s para- dox). Vernaculars also have historicity. They are the product of natural (inherent but also socially motivated) linguistic change in community speech-norms over time. The idea of systemic coherence is there too – the orderliness of the ‘speech community’ has been a recurrent theme in variationism. So is consensus – in-group norms for speech being recycled in dense networks, and community members conspiring to generate sociolinguistic structure. Vernacular speech clearly has value for sociolinguists. Not only is vernacular speech thought to be an anchor for solidarity and local affiliation, but we study vernaculars because we think they are worthy cultural objects.

In contrast, variationist sociolinguistics has (at least implicitly) dis- credited ‘standard’ or establishment ways of speaking, partly because it has constructed them to be inauthentic. William Labov treats

‘standard’ speech as imposed variety and as a deviation from real, natural, orderly vernaculars. So, as Rusty Barrett pointed out (see

Chapter6), black speakers in the USA who do not use the ‘full’ AAVE

sociolinguistic system have at times been considered ‘lames’ or mar- ginal people, culturally speaking. There has been the assumption that style-shifting in general is a movement away from the true vernacular system, where the orderliness and coherence of the vernacular breaks down. It is very likely that the low level of attention paid to style in variationist sociolinguistics reflects the feeling that style is where sociolinguistic authenticity starts to crumble, which might make it a less worthy topic for investigation. I hope to have resisted this assump- tion in this book.

In passing we can note that the elite establishment has in fact defended ‘standard’ ways of speaking using pretty much the same criteria that sociolinguistics have appealed to in the defence of ver- naculars. It has constructed ‘standard’ varieties to be more ontologic- ally real, historic, coherent, consensual and valuable – in short, as more authentic. I am not suggesting that the establishment ideology is correct or even equally correct – it is hygienist, exclusionary and illib- eral. I am just pointing out that phrases like ‘real language’ and ‘the authentic speaker’ resonate just as strongly for the establishment as they do for sociolinguists, and that each ‘side’ has invested heavily in the ideology of authenticity, feeling that they ‘have authenticity on their side’. This is why sociolinguists’ attempts to engage politically on behalf of ‘non-standard’ speech have not been as successful as they have deserved to be. The potential for point-of-view clashes and for discourse without shared assumptions is striking.

But the main point is that, when we start to unpack the ideological politics of linguistic authenticity, we can’t avoid seeing authenticity, in this field at least, as a discursive construction (Bucholtz and Hall

2004). Authenticity’s trick is to convince us that it is an absolute quality of things and people in our social world, and we do seem to have to believe this. But to attribute authenticity to ways of speaking is to fail to

see the process of iconisation at work (section1.4). ‘Standard’ speech

(which I have been resolutely quote-marking throughout the book) and vernacular speech (which I haven’t) can each be constructed to be authentic, and by implication, we can accept neither as truly authentic. The analysis of style, particularly when we interpret styling in terms of performance and stylisation, is where we see behind the mask of authentic speakerhood. Speakers invoke voices that have had historic, consensual meanings and values, but, in performance, they break the semiotic chains that are the basis of their supposed authenticity.

This gives us a useful way to interpret the high performance styl-

isations we saw in Chapter6. The various speakers we analysed there

were engaged in ‘not being themselves’ and using stylistic resources both to index social identities and at the same time to mark the fact that these were not identities that they authentically owned or inhabited. John and Roy, for example, were performing the genre of ‘Welsh gossip through English’ in the curious context of a discourse about historical facts. They were reflexively ‘mentioning’ this genre practice more than ‘using’ it. They were deauthenticating themselves as speakers and deauthenticating the practice they were alluding to and stylising. As

I suggested in section6.2, stylisation is precisely a means of compli-

cating ownership of voice. We can make the same claim about the pantomime Dame and the African American glam queens. In the case of stylistic ‘junking’, the interpretive problem is to decide whether it is the normative users of a linguistic variety (e.g. Mexican Spanish speakers) that are being deauthenticated (through parody), or whether the speakers are, also or instead, deauthenticating themselves (through metaparody).

Some extreme forms of self-deauthentication through speech styl- ing have been reported. John Maher describes the idea of metroethnicity

in Japan (Maher2005). He describes metroethnicity as a form of indi-

vidualistic self-assertion that reinterprets ethnically or socially-linked ways of speaking. It does not buy into the ideology of ‘language loyalty’. It is adoptive and fundamentally anti-essentialist. Speakers adopt or value ways of speaking for their ephemeral meaning of ‘cool’ and not at all as an endorsement of historical cultural associa- tions. Metroethnicity, Maher says, is sceptical of ‘heroic ethnicity’. It is a deliberately shallow form of ethnic identification and treats ethnic or social allegiance as a fashion accessory. So Irishness can be consid- ered cool in Japan. The German language may be uncool, but German- accented English can be very cool, and so on. This is an extension of the media-based transformation and commodification of traditional

meanings and values for varieties that we discussed in Chapter 6.

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about ‘speech genres’ being ‘the drive-belts

from the history of society to the history of language’ (Bakhtin1986:

65). But late-modern life seems able to break those ‘drive-belts’ on occasions and establish quite different values for varieties. This is

where stylistic practice becomes most like bricolage (Hebdige1979;

Eckert2005). We find appropriated semiotic resources being recom-

bined into new meaningful relations.

Stylistic operations are not, however, restricted to this ‘deconstruc- tive’ work. Authenticity is not fully ‘in crisis’ in late-modernity even

though it is harder to find. Styling can also work to (re)authenticate

identities. In Chapter6I argued that the distancing effect of stylisation

opens up new opportunities for rethinking how a community of practice orients to its indexical linguistic forms and varieties. The result is not a simple ‘new authenticity’ but a new footing for reassess- ing value, historicity, coherence and so on – the various qualities of authentic experience. So we can think of ‘authenticity in perform- ance’, or the construction of second-level authenticities. Performers often ‘earn’ degrees of authenticity precisely through their disavowal of first-order authenticities. Indeed it is an interesting speculation that, in late-modernity, authenticity needs to be earned discursively rather than automatically credited.

7 . 3 T H E M E D I A ( T I S A ) T I O N O F S T Y L E

Variationist sociolinguists have been consistently hostile to the idea that mass media are a regular or important factor in triggering lin- guistic change. In his substantial volume on social factors in linguistic change, William Labov says that ‘all of the evidence generated in this volume and elsewhere points to the conclusion that language is not systematically affected by the mass media, and is influenced primarily