Happy New Year from Structured Visions! Today I discuss a grammar meme that my brother pointed out to me – an illustration of a stern old man saying:
When you say ‘I seen,’ I assume you won’t finish that sentence with ‘the inside of a book.’
I draw once more upon Pierre Bourdieu’s work, this time his book, Language and Symbolic Power. Bourdieu’s image of social structure is one in which individual agents negotiate their worlds by drawing upon different types of capital – economic, cultural, social and symbolic. The variety of any language that comes to be understood as the ‘Standard’ form is a form of symbolic capital. With his unkind comments, the man in the illustration is engaging in a form of ‘symbolic violence’ – attacking another’s use of a non-Standard variety of English by mocking it and deeming it worthless.
When discussing the notion of ‘symbolic violence’ with university students who hope to one day be teachers, I was told that kids have to learn to speak properly or they won’t get anywhere in life. In other words, they have to learn to value what the educational institution values or they’ll be in trouble later in life. But hold on, I responded, doesn’t that mean these kids have to submit to symbolic violence? Doesn’t it mean they have to devalue their own sense of self? Is it worth it?
As I’ve mentioned before, there are at least two ways of looking at grammar. Prescriptive approaches view grammar as something that is either right or wrong – it’s something to be policed by schoolteachers or by social media memes. Descriptive grammars explore the patterns and structures of any variety of language without making claims about which varieties are better or worse.
I have a perspective on grammar that is different from these two approaches. For me, grammar is the medium by which social structure becomes aware of itself.
When people use language, they produce spoken or written texts, and grammatical analysis reveals how social worlds and selves are constructed. Fascinating things happen when I explore the various selves that are grammatically constructed in texts – and often these fascinating things coincide with embodiment. The comments on the grammar meme revealed a good deal of embodiment in response to ‘I seen’: people cringed, they shuddered, their ears hurt, their ears folded up. These various forms of embodied disgusts remind me of a conversation I once had with an American student, Jeremy, who was learning French in Strasbourg:
(from Clark 2002)
In Jeremy’s account of his classmate’s poor French several different selves are produced: the first person singular (it just makes me, like my skin crawl), the generic third-person plural (they, like, make up a word) and the non-personal third-person singular (It’s like, what?). The they is the generic group of people speaking French badly. The it is the observing, objective, disembodied authority figure who has the power to evaluate others as incompetent. In Jeremy’s account, the first-person (me) shows up only briefly, as a singular embodied self having a negative experience in response to the negatively evaluated performance of others.
The idea that it is the embodied self who takes the hit in authoritative, draconian social structures shows up in one of the comments to the ‘I seen’ grammar meme.
Every time I hear it I get shivers and a headache. I don’t correct because I don’t want anyone to feel bad.
This commenter shows an awareness that to correct someone’s grammar is to engage in symbolic violence. The self constructed here is one that doesn’t want to impose that kind of violence. But violence happens, nevertheless: the text produces an embodied self that suffers – from shivers and a headache – in the face of an authoritative social structure.
If grammar is the medium by which social structure becomes aware of itself, then the social structure here is committing acts of symbolic violence on… itself.
Is that the kind of social structure we want to imagine as we move into 2016? Can we imagine other types of social structure in which such symbolic violence isn’t required?
Structured Visions 