Porcentaje respecto al valor teórico:

Audiences of Catalonian public television (Televisió de Catalunya) are regularly exposed to an astonishing abundance of messages with intercul-tural content. Television shows and promotional campaigns revolve around immigrant cultures and languages, foreign residents, mixed marriages, Catalans of ‘exotic’ extraction, international cuisine, Catalans traveling or residing abroad, and a multitude of programs and advertisements that showcase and promote the use of the Catalan language among locals and foreigners.

It is this last category that I propose to examine here more closely in view of the import generally attributed to linguistic distinctiveness as a vehicle of national identity. The subsequent analysis of two examples of this genre reveals how seemingly similar messages can contain radically opposed ide-ologies. Both of the televised campaigns are overtly designed to encourage performance of Catalan national identity through the use of the Catalan language among locals and foreigners: The fi rst is part of a promotional multimedia campaign entitled Ajuda’m, parla’m en català (Help Me, Speak to Me in Catalan), and the second campaign consists of a series of televised miniepisodes entitled Tenim paraula (We Have the Word), in which nonna-tives display their command of the Catalan language.

Catalonia is an autonomous province in the northeast of Spain; it lost its self-government following the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and did not regain its regional autonomy until the death of the dictator Francisco Franco and reinstatement of democracy in 1975. During the thirty-six years of the Franco regime, a traditionalist authoritarian nationalism was enforced that actively sought to suppress any linguistic and cultural manifestations of national identities that were not Castilian, a policy which predominantly affected Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. For Catalonians, this meant that the Catalan language was banned from all public, educational, religious, and cultural domains.

Owing to a vigorous oral culture and quotidian acts of civil resis-tance during Franco’s totalitarian regime, the Catalan language endured and made an astonishingly quick recovery after the caudillo’s death and Spain’s transition to a constitutional monarchy. In the ensuing years, the

Catalonian government implemented a proactive policy that reinstated the Catalan language in education, the media, politics, and commerce. Since then, Catalan nationalists have been engaged in a continuous, nonviolent struggle with the Spanish central government in Madrid for cultural, lin-guistic, economic, and political emancipation. At the same time, Catalonia, a wealthy region with one of the fastest-growing immigrant communities in Europe, has also turned into a gathering and meeting place of diverse cultures and peoples.

Thus, in March 2003, Catalonian television audiences and press read-erships found themselves directly spoken to by a government-sponsored campaign entitled Ajuda’m, parla’m en català (Help Me, Speak to Me in Catalan), which carried the slogan “Tu ets mestre” (You are a teacher).¹ The press and radio campaigns were devised essentially to enhance the commu-nication of the TV ad, which opens with a tracking shot of its three Catalan protagonists and portrays each against the backdrop of their respective environments: a chef at the entrance of his restaurant, an elderly female shopper outside a market hall, and a teenage skateboarder in front of a graffi ti-covered wall. Then, in rapid succession, the camera captures the restaurant owner working with a black cook in the kitchen of the restau-rant, the shopper being served by a young Asian saleswoman at a butcher’s stall in a market, and a “conversation” between the Catalonian youth and his fellow skateboarder, Hassan, at a public square in Barcelona.² A male voice-over informs the audience that “[e]ach year, in Catalonia, more than 65,000 people who come from outside learn Catalan. But in order for them to speak it, you are the best teacher [sic].”³ The ad closes with a shot of the immigrant cook addressing the audience with the words “Help me, speak to me in Catalan!” In alternative versions of the ad, the closing plea is made by the skateboarder or the saleswoman.

“In all three cases,” according to the offi cial government press release,

“a Catalonian addresses an immigrant in Catalan.” The three immigrants represent some of the more visible ethnic groups that have immigrated to Catalonia in recent years: an adult black African man, a young Asian woman, and a teenage boy from a North African country. Similarly, they represent the typical professional, business, and leisure-time contexts in which fi rst-generation immigrants might be expected to interact with the host community.

The Catalan government (la Generalitat), or more specifi cally, the Con-sortium for Linguistic Normalization (Consorci per a la Normalització Lingüística, CPNL), commissioned this campaign to encourage Cata-lonians to use Catalan when addressing non-CataCata-lonians, implicitly dis-suading native Catalonians from the widespread practice of using Castilian (Spanish) with foreign-looking and foreign-sounding people.⁴ According to the CPNL, this tendency may already have resulted in a general disinclina-tion on the part of immigrants and foreign residents to study Catalan. As a consequence, they are failing to integrate into the regional Catalonian

cultural and linguistic environment, choosing instead as their reference the wider, national context of Spain. This is particularly signifi cant in the con-text of the ongoing geopolitical and historical debate over Catalonia as a

‘nation without a state,’ said to be suffering linguistic, cultural, economic, and political discrimination at the hands of the central Spanish government.

As a result, many Catalonians advocate political resistance to the Spanish hegemony and strive to construct and promote an image of Catalonia as a nation with its back to Spain and its arms open to Europe.

The Consortium for Linguistic Normalization deserves praise for its intentions and the initiative; for its efforts to promote cultural integra-tion, social harmony, language preservation; and for raising self-awareness among Catalonian natives rather than scapegoating the immigrants. How-ever, this study is not so much concerned with the linguistic aspects and policies of the campaign as with the media portrayal of ‘self’ and ‘other’

and the representation of cultures in contact in the regional media. Analyz-ing the various modes of representation serves to shed light on the identity politics practiced in the media, which Catalonians encounter with remark-able frequency when they watch television, listen to local radio stations, read the press, or browse Web pages in Catalan.

The principal methodology of this study hinges on Louis Althusser’s cri-tique of the practice of subject interpellation. In Althusser’s theory of ideol-ogy, interpellation is the mechanism through which subjects are made to acknowledge their existence as participants in the dominant ideology of the particular society to which they belong.⁵ I submit that Althusser’s theory of ideology, although dating from the 1970s, continues to speak to the nation-alist state’s practice of hailing its subject. I argue that those media messages that are concerned with immigration and cultures in contact confront their audiences with deliberate constructions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ and thus make them scrutinize, rethink, and remake their idea of a Catalonian identity in the face of a growing multicultural reality.

Along these lines, the Help Me campaign is an ideal stepping stone for examining the politics of subject interpellation in the Catalonian media.

Following the description of the campaign’s TV ad provided earlier, the subsequent text analysis is indebted to the Barthesian practice of show-ing how the denotative message of a text (here the audiovisual text of the ad) is likely to betray connotations that may be decoded within the larger system of the society that produces and consumes them.⁶ Thus, the initial expository sequence of the ad introduces the three protagonists of the story while the denotative signifi cant, or the ‘linguistic’ anchor, of the message appears superimposed in a rectangular yellow frame on the lower half of the screen: “You are a teacher.” After having seen the entire ad with its optimistic bid for acculturation, we see that the most plausible, connota-tive message of this sequence would be a declaration of encouragement and goodwill to Catalan society, something along the lines of the following:

‘You are a valuable part of the Catalonian community—represented here

by three tolerant, open-minded individuals, a business owner, a shopper, and a teenager—which enthusiastically takes in all those coming from out-side Catalonia as long as they are willing to integrate linguistically (and by extension, culturally). For that to happen, you must take a proactive, asser-tive attitude toward this integration process. You can make a difference.’

To visualize this message, the fi rst performance of an intercultural encounter is set in the kitchen of a restaurant. A Catalonian man, whom we are supposed to take for the owner, and a black cook are busy with pots, pans, and ingredients. Then, the Catalonian, while stirring the con-tents of a saucepan, turns to his coworker and asks him: “Shall I reduce the sauce?” (Redueixo la salsa?). Here, the surprise effect of the denota-tive message takes the implicit appeal for hospitality and accommodation one step further. In the elliptical shorthand typical of advertising language, the ad sketches out a narrative revolving around the theme of immigra-tion. In this context, the viewer takes for granted that the power structure places the Catalan at the top. However, the Catalonian’s question shows that the audience was mistaken and that the black man is the supervisor, or may even be the owner. Moreover, the scene seems to entail the promise of empowerment and upward mobility of a traditionally subordinate group (a moot promise as the subordinate group is not part of the target audience).

The second encounter between outsider and native takes place at a butcher’s stall at the market. The elderly lady asks the young Asian girl behind the counter: “Let me have two cuts of beef, love” (Posi’m dues mit-janes de vedella, maca.). The use of the verb vosté in its formal address, the engaging smile, and the typically endearing use of maca (‘love’ or ‘darling’), signal an overall disposition to go out of one’s way to be friendly and to treat the interlocutor as an equal.

The last example of intercultural contact takes place at one of the many open areas in the inner city of Barcelona that are frequented by skateboard-ers. “Hassan, did you skateboard in your country, too?” (Hassan, al teu país també feies skate?) the local boy asks his friend, and we are supposed to surmise that the possibilities for intercultural relationships can go beyond the professional rapport of the workplace or the superfi cial (albeit cordial) acquaintance between a salesperson and a customer. In fact, friendship can be forged across the cultural divide, and curiosity about the ways of life in the other’s country cuts both ways; indeed, it is one of the staples in inter-cultural communication.

And yet—in the face of the overwhelming presence of favorable mes-sages identifi able in the ad—if we enter other variables into the equation, a slightly different reading emerges that reveals a decidedly uneasy relation-ship between the denotative signs (captions, voice-over, and dialogue) and the unspoken messages produced by the elliptical style of the advertising narrative. Indeed, the process of subject interpellation in the ads can hardly be adequately decoded without scrutinizing the nonverbal communication of both characters who have speaking parts—namely the Catalonians—and

those who have nonspeaking parts, i.e., the immigrants. Additional visual variables that need to be factored in are cinematographic aspects such as the mise-en-scène and the camera language.

Thus, upon watching the initial tracking shot once more while concen-trating on the characters’ relationships with the camera, we observe that the ‘autochthonous’ protagonists are clearly aware of being captured on fi lm and follow the lens with their gaze as it tracks them, thus acting out a relationship of complicity with the very device that controls the visual and narrative authority in the ad. This rapport is predictably absent in the rela-tionship between the camera and the three immigrant characters. The res-taurant episode, for instance, portrays two characters busy in the kitchen, and the camera opens with a close-up of a hand that is tossing food in a pan over the stove. The camera pulls back from the hand to a medium shot of the immigrant, showing his profi le in the foreground and the Catalonian man in the background. The focal point of the deep-focus photography is the person speaking in the background, which results in a fuzzy foreground and blurs the black cook’s face. If one plays the footage in slow motion, one can actually observe how the cook turns and moves his lips, presumably in reply to the other man’s question, but both his words and his image dissolve and smoothly merge into the next scene.

The sequence calls for closer scrutiny. As is characteristic of the narra-tive style of commercials, the portrayal of the relationship between the two characters relies on stereotypes and remains as fuzzy as the cook’s face.

Clearly, though, the purported owner or manager is asking his employee’s advice on how to prepare a certain dish, thus acknowledging the immi-grant’s greater expertise. However, the surprise maneuver of empowering the immigrant character only works if the expected, ordinary situation is the exact opposite, thereby overtly confi rming the customary power struc-ture inherent in the binary opposition between the empowered mainstream and subordinate immigrant. What is more, the black cook is oblivious to the camera and, as with the other two immigrants, the recording devices pay no heed to what he might have to say—and, disappointingly, in which language he might say it.

A variation of this pattern is repeated in the market episode. As the image fades up from the previous scene to focus on the face of the young Asian woman, the camera lens is gazing over the shoulder of the customer who is placing her order. Again, the deep-focus shot blurs the foreground and brings into sharp focus the face of the young Asian woman. Her face is serene and distant; she blinks and breaks into a friendly smile as she pas-sively awaits the customer’s request. Then the camera abruptly reverses its perspective to assume the immigrant’s point of view. The editing, though, is strangely discontinuous, and both the mise-en-scène and the visual perspec-tive of the butcher are not congruent with the previous shot. Now observ-ing the customer from the direction of the butcher’s stall, the camera (and the butcher) towers over the customer, gazing at the elderly woman from

an exaggerated angle that does not match with the previous frame in which both characters appeared to be roughly at the same height.

With the immigrant thus elevated by the camera from a subordinate to an empowered position, the ‘reduced’ customer assumes a distinctly obse-quious body posture, breaks into a saccharine smile, and places her order.

We’ll never know the butcher’s side of the exchange. Like her counterpart in the kitchen, she is not given a voice and seems oblivious to the camera.

While the two women proceed to conduct their business, the male voice-over, in typical advertising fashion, cuts in commandingly and drowns out any further conversation that might have taken place.

Whereas the woman’s polite request seems to transmit an appeal for collaboration and gentle coercion toward acculturation in an atmosphere of respect and even affection, an examination of the visual presentation reveals a subtext that belies the explicit message of the audiovisual pre-sentation. The ostentatious effect of raising the immigrant up from her customarily subordinate position, which is procured through a dramatic change of the camera angle representing her gaze, substantiates the fact that this is not the conventional point of view. What is more, the physical elevation of the Asian woman in this mise-en-scène jars with her dissionate, detached facial expression and her complete and utter silence, pas-sivity, obedience, meekness—to mention only a few of the attributes her attitude calls to mind.

This is where the seemingly smooth, cohesive surface of the audiovisual text breaks open to reveal beneath it a palimpsest inscribed with the noto-rious rhetoric of ‘us/them,’ ‘self/other,’ or ‘dominant/subordinate,’ i.e., an essentialist concept of identity that in this video footage unmasks itself as a carefully staged composition with an ideological agenda. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Althusser formulates the thesis that

“[i]deology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”⁷ Here, the ideological agenda strives to fos-ter and enhance an illusion by prompting the principal actors to ‘perform’

a representation of social harmony and integration between immigrated individuals and representatives of the host community, seeking to gloss over (but not quite succeeding) the distressing reality of a community that has made the transition from out-migration to in-migration over the brief period of two decades.

Questions of motivation and justifi cation notwithstanding, the close reading of the audiovisual text reveals some of the pitfalls of using the strategies of the advertising narrative in a political and ideological context:

Once it has been acknowledged that the coherence of the text is achieved to a great deal through the spectators’ very own desire for the conclusive and the constructive and, ultimately, for order, the text begins to show its fault lines and basically deconstructs itself. Upon freeze-framing through the skateboard episode, we notice the same fractured, contradictory message that underlies the previous episodes. Again, the camera renders Hassan the

teenage skateboarder voiceless, nondescript, even unresponsive—simply placed in the scene as an excuse for presenting a mere semblance of inter-cultural communication.

This pattern is brought to its climax in the closing sequence, which returns to the restaurant kitchen setting. The focal point is the black chef, who is now center stage. At last facing the camera, he has been given a speaking part only to parrot the catchphrase of the ad. Clearly reminiscent of storefront advertising icons such as the cigar-store Indian or the blacka-moor, he wields his cooking ladle, fl ashes a broad smile, and pleads: “Help me, speak to me in Catalan!”⁸

In this ad, each instance of directly addressing the TV viewer is an exam-ple of subject interpellation with the objective of getting the viewer to real-ize that he or she is being addressed. Once the viewer has ‘turned around,’

that is to say, has responded to the call, he or she immediately becomes a subject within the logic of the ad’s ideological structure. The subject (small s) becomes Subject (capital S). The individual agent is subjected to the ide-ology, i.e., he or she responds to the appeal to act out the possibility of subjecthood. Thus, the media, which proliferate the message and carry out

that is to say, has responded to the call, he or she immediately becomes a subject within the logic of the ad’s ideological structure. The subject (small s) becomes Subject (capital S). The individual agent is subjected to the ide-ology, i.e., he or she responds to the appeal to act out the possibility of subjecthood. Thus, the media, which proliferate the message and carry out