Kathryn Woolard
Textes sous copyright dans le dossier 'Woolard' de notre bibliothèque numérique privée.
La perspicacité de Kathryn Woolard, éminente anthropologue linguiste de l'Université de Californie à San Diego, lui a permis de repérer, dans des publications désormais classiques, deux ou trois processus fondamentaux à l'œuvre sur la scène langagière dans la société contemporaine et dans le bilinguisme et la diglossie qui caractérisent toute scène langagière. L'un de ces processus est la valorisation des langues dominantes sous la forme d'une voix désincarnée (disembodied), d'une voix dépassionnée (disinterested), d'une voix venant de nulle part, voix anonyme, voix off.
L'Anonymité de la voix est donc une question d'anthropologie linguistique.
1 / Le public comme voix off
La voix des classes dominantes est une voix de nulle part, et sa qualité de voix off est valorisée.
gal_woolard_publics.pdf — Susan Gal and Kathryn A. Woolard, “Constructing Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority.” In Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority, eds. S. Gal and K.A. Woolard. Encounters Series, Vol. 2. Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen, series eds. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Press, pp. 1—12.
We are interested in the category of the public as a language-based form of political legitimation. Discussion of publics has been reinvigorated in American social theory by the translation and republication of Habermas' early work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ([1962] 1989).
Publics derive their authority from being in a sense anonymous. They supposedly or potentially include everyone but abstract from each person's interest-bearing and privately defined characteristics. By this reasoning, publics can represent everyone because they are no-one-in-particular. This disinterested, disembodied public, a form of aperspectival objectivity, was constructed against the personified and embodied legitimacy of the absolutist monarch, whose authority was often enacted exactly through spectacle and self-display.
woolard_authority.pdf — Kathryn A. Woolard, “Language and Identity Choice in Catalonia: The Interplay of Contrasting Ideologies of Linguistic Authority.” In Kirsten Süselbeck, Ulrike Mühlschlegel, Peter Masson, eds. Lengua, nación e identidad. La regulación del plurilingüismo en España y América Latina. Berlin: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut P.K. (In press, forthcoming 2008).
(3—4) In contrast to minoritized languages, hegemonic languages in modern society often rest their authority on a conception of anonymity. Anonymity is an ideological foundation of the political authority of the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere (Habermas 1989). This modern “public” supposedly includes everyone, but it abstracts away from each person's private and interested individual characteristics to distill a common or general voice (Gal/Woolard 2001: 6). The social roots of the public in any specific speaking position are ideologically represented as transcended, if not entirely absent. The disembodied, disinterested public, freed through rational discourse from the constraints of a socially specific perspective, supposedly achieves a superior “aperspectival objectivity” that has been called “a view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986). From this viewpoint, the tenets of dominant ideologies in the modern public sphere appear not to belong to any identifiable individuals but rather seem to be socially neutral, universally available, natural and objective truths. In a sense then, they are anonymous.
2 / Que représente la voix off et anonyme sinon l'establishment?
Tant que le Castillan est dominant, sa qualité de voix off le dessert aux yeux des catalans. Lorsque le Catalan devient la langue dominante et la langue des élites, son anonymité — sa qualité de voix de nulle part — commence à jouer contre elle.
(15) In my now admittedly outdated ethnographic research in the late 1980s and early 1990s, those who actually used the new Catalan public voice were all children of the middle classes or higher. They were the ones who felt most at home in the public domains that have become Catalan-speaking through official policies. Working class children did not. Young working class speakers often feel themselves to be marginal to public institutions like the school, at the same time as they are all the more attached to the popular cultural domains where Castilian still dominates (Woolard 2003).
__________________________
Renvoi à l'article de 2003 qui montre que les locuteurs les plus convaincus du Catalan étaient les enfants des classes les plus aisées.
woolard_marginalized.pdf — Woolard, K.A. 2003. “’We Don’t Speak Catalan Because We Are Marginalized’; Ethnic and Class Connotations of Language in Barcelona.” In R.K. Blot, ed., Language and Social Identity. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, pp. 85-103.
Middling and high-achieving students used Catalan; low achievers and reluctant students did not. Alienated from school, poor students were further alienated from the Catalan language they associated with school. In a number of ways, then, middle-class students are better positioned than working-class students to appropriate Catalan as a social resource.
_____________________________
To the degree that Catalan became a necessity for success in formal institutions such as the school, it also became a social resource acquired and used by middle class children of Castilian-speaking origins. The interests of this class are often more identified with such institutions. The connotations of social class that Catalan had before autonomy were further consolidated through the mechanism of institutional acquisition. In Barcelona as in the U.S., the public voice of formal institutions was not heard by socially marginal young people as a voice from nowhere [le fait pour le Catalan d'être une voix off n'était donc pas un atout], but as one that was not their own. Catalan was in this way in danger of being a victim of its own institutional success.
3 / Postmodernisme: Transgresser l'anonymat, rapatrier la voix off
(17—18) Postmodernism has challenged the two dominant bases of linguistic authority of the modern period, the twin monoliths of ideological anonymity in the liberal public sphere on the one hand, and the authenticity of ethnic and nationalist movements on the other. In response, defenders of languages in some settings have begun to search for new discursive ground (see, e.g. Heller 1999).
Se réapproprier la langue par la plaisanterie; rapatrier la voix off et la sortir de l'anonymat.
In the new Catalanization campaign introduced by the Generalitat in January 2005, “Dóna corda al català” (‘Wind up Catalan’), we may have a first glimpse of a developing shift in the rhetorical grounding of the defense of Catalan. The move is away from both authenticity and anonymity, and toward playfulness and irony, the master trope of postmodernity.
The absurd mascot of the campaign is la Queta (short for la Boqueta, the little mouth) a windup set of chattering plastic teeth. Thousands of such plastic toys were distributed with the launching of the campaign. La Queta sings the campaign theme song – “Speak without shame, speak with freedom, and for a start, speak Catalan” – over and over in childish and notably non-native Catalan. Authenticity, purity, tradition, seriousness and certainly suffering are all repudiated quite manifestly in this choice of mascots; what could be less authentic than a set of plastic dentures?
One of the first speech acts that la Queta comically models on the campaign’s website is how to insult people in Catalan. The ridiculous toy evokes language choice as expressive and playful rather than painful. The presentation of the campaign reported on the website in fact characterizes it as attempt to make the language seem appealing (engrescadora), particularly to those who are not fluent by reassuring them that it doesn’t matter (no passa res) if they make mistakes. Its explicit goal is to make Catalan a “natural, everyday”, “modern” language, associated with leisure. Not a language that is imposed but rather one that “makes things easy” (facilita les coses). The campaign is targeted particularly at adolescents, and encourages them to perceive Catalan as a “transgressive language”, one that erases labels (esbora etiquetes).
