The Readers’ Corner:

From Fred Lonidier :
                  I want to contact artists who are connected to the labor movement with their art (my limited impression is that "art & politics" is not a very French thing anymore; I'm not aware of any contemporary French left-modernist art which is comparable to Anglo, German or "third world" work in the last two decades, except documentary film).
The sociological studies of Christian de Montlibert, however, sound very interesting, and I look forward to meeting with him in Grenoble, in January.

From Yuri Stulov :
                 At Minsk State Linguistics University and the American Studies Center at the European Humanities university, which are more than a geographical distance away from the Grenoble Research Center, the CIESIMSA web site has already served to provide students and faculty with  information, original commentary and analysis on the impact of American corporations. Both the French Department and the American Studies Department here in Minsk have found the Center useful.

                                                                            ******
 

Recently in one of my American history discussion groups at Grenoble I indulged myself in an heuristic exercise by announcing at the beginning of  the class, "You girls have read this document, but you probably didn’t understand it." After a brief silence, I asked: "What did I just say?" Most students replied that I just told them that the document I had chosen to discuss was probably too advanced for students to understand, but a few insisted that I had just expressed a prejudice against women. Very soon, however, this minority interpretation developed into a majority opinion --even when I tried to ingratiate myself with the words:
"But, I like you girls...!"
 

In the 1970s, while teaching American history in Paris, I had the good fortune of meeting David Cooper, who had just completed another book on anti-psychiatry, which he called The Language of Madness. He was teaching in the streets and cafés of Paris the same year that I was sharing a house with an actor and a nurse near Place d’Italie. Occasionally Cooper would come to our home for a respite. The actor with whom I was living had recently participated in some street theater, directed by Michel Foucauld, in which the troop stood across the street opposite the barred windows of a prison. Periodically, some of the actors and actresses would run across the street, and, throwing themselves up against the wall, yell out their lines from the play into the windows above, before dashing back across the street. The purpose of this project was to break into the closed linguistic field inside the prison and introduce new words and concepts through the orifices of the institution --words which were intended to help the occupants inside the institution better understand their own alienation and the violence of their institutionalized lives.
 

 I suspect that somewhere buried in our collective minds in the early 1970s was the idea that American militarism represented the reincarnation of the Roman Empire, and Paris was somehow the "New Athens," where philosophers educated the general population. The boulevards of Paris were fairly buzzing with would-be Socrates, Aristotles, and Platos. (The Sophists, I was later told, began to take control of the Paris salons only after my departure to California, at the end of that decade.) In the early 1970s, many of us were influenced by the words of The Young Marx: "The philosophers have interpreted the world, but the point is to change it!" It was in this milieu of applied philosophy that I first learned about linguistic domains in society. Like fish swimming through currents --hot-then-cold-- we struck out across the City, moving through one linguistic field after another.... R.D. Laing, in London, had already declared his revolutionary intentions to his impressive following: "If I could drive you out of your wretched mind, I would!" And David Cooper was now in the streets of Paris insinuating himself into closed linguistic fields with new concepts imbedded in carefully selected words, which he imagined as a sort of progressive virus that once planted would proliferate and eventually liberate the host from the received ideas which enslaved him. [See, also, Félix Guattari’s influential works, Psychanalyse et transversalité (1972) and La Révolution moléculaire (1977).]
 

 The discipline of social-linguistics had begun to interest me after discovering the works of William Labov and Richard Bernstein. Before completing my Ph.D. thesis in social history at Wisconsin I was already preparing to do a community study of the neighborhood near Pigalle where I had lived for several years. I was borrowing research methods developed by Labov, in his two recent books, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular and Sociolinguistic Patterns (both by University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970). (I brought copies of these books back from Madison, Wisconsin, where I had spent the summer of 1974 conducting interviews for an oral history project at the Wisconsin State Historical Society Archives, which was documenting the social history of a prolonged teachers’ strike in northern Wisconsin.) Another book I thought would be useful for my community study in the Paris neighborhood was Ray Birdwhistell’s Kinesics and context; essays on body motion communication, which was also being used as a textbook in the Communications Department at U.W.-Madison. I intended to develop these theories and methods in my project at Pigalle. But a different bibliography awaited me in Paris and my community study was postponed. [See, Feeley, "Les Loisirs à Pigalle," Esprit, mars 1979.]

 In America, it was widely held at this time that culture was transmitted verbally, and that there existed essentially two categories of speech: (a) that which arises from a very local situation in which speakers all have access to the same fundamental assumptions. (In this category, every utterance is a restricted code and serves to affirm the social order.) and (b) that which is employed in social situations where speakers do not accept or necessarily know one another’s fundamental assumptions. (This second category, representing elaborated codes, has the function of making explicit unique individual perceptions, and bridging initial assumptions.) [See Richard Bernstein’s influential work on applied linguistics, The Restructuring of Social and Political Thought, 1976.]

 When an individual speaks in a restricted code, Bernstein argued, he is performing a linguistic ritual, which acts to renew common sentiments and reinforce his or her social identity and, per force, that of the group. By contrast, the elaborated codes provide a larger lexical pool and a wider range of more complex syntactical alternatives.

The link between language and social solidarity, then, can be expressed in two simple propositions:

        Proposition 1:  The greater the group’s level of solidarity or corporateness, the more
                             restricted the linguistic code.
        Proposition 2: The lower the group’s level of solidarity or corporateness, the more
                             elaborated the linguistic code.

Thus, linguistic codes would be expected to shift between being more elaborated and restricted depending upon the overall solidarity or corporateness of the group in which they are produced.

This theory seemed to offer researchers the possibility of decoding the communications inside communities or business enterprises, and analyzing ritual linguistic behaviors, to determine categories of thought which serve to reaffirm the group’s identity, an activity which is very often independent of individual desires or intentions.

        Hypothesis A: Private corporations impose an esprit du corps, which is not necessarily
                               solicited by individual employees.

        Hypothesis B: A carefully cultivated esprit du corps among employees in a private
                               corporation can give way to the development of social-class consciousness,
                               under specific conditions.
 

Decoding utterances was a political skill widely developed in the 1970s. In Paris, however, logocentrism was rapidly falling into disfavor. By privileging spoken language over written, and rationality over the unconscious, argued Jacques Derrida, the real foundations of certainty, identity, and truth cannot be understood. For him, the critique of concepts and hierarchies is essential to any traditional criteria of identity, but this practice involves repressing and forgetting other elements which thus become the un-thought, and sometimes the unthinkable. The first step of deconstruction, according to Derrida, is to undermine the text from within, by tracing the contradiction that shadows the text’s coherence and "expresses the force of a desire," usually with the effect of subverting a privileged term, like national security, already contaminated by military-and-police brutality[For a recent exposé of the cold-blooded murder of women and children, performed by a group of elite U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, see atelier n°10, article n°7]; free market economy, by job dislocations; consumerism, by environmental pollution; high profits, by low wages, etc., etc.... [See Jacques Derrida, Positions : entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta (1972).]
 

Thus, recent linguistic and literary theory, it appeares, might offer researchers useful tools in developing new methods for analyzing the causes and the effects of internal and external communications at privately owned corporations. A recent example of the raw material available for research is the memo written by the founder and CEO of Cerner Corps., Neal Patterson, who sent a controversial e-mail communication to 400 of his 3,100 world-wide employees, warning them that they must work harder. The communicaton was sent on March 13, and almost immediately it was forwarded to internet chat rooms, where the athoritarianism of the workplace was discussed "around the world". This indiscretion quickly caused the value of the 1.5 million-dollar company to fall by 22 % within three days.

                                    I was trying to start a fire, [Mr. Patterson said.]
                                    I lit a match, and I started a firestorm.

[Readers are invited to visit atelier no.4, article no.10, for a description of "The E-Mail Read 'Round the World: An Executive's Cautionary Tale," by Edward Wong.]
 

An American idealist school of scholars, including Joan Scott (professor at Princeton and author of Gender and the Politics of History, 1988), have traditionally divided linguistic studies into two parts: logic and rhetoric. According to Michel Foucault, whom Scott cites frequently, the dominant ideology of a society is transmitted linguistically to the general population either through rational thought or through passionate discourse (i.e., propaganda). Either way, it is by the repetition of words, phrases, and ideas that members of society learn to conform to a specific world view, and this consensus is largely derived from the will of the ruling elite. In the preface to her more recent book, Only Paradoxes to Offer (1996), Scott argues that historically laws and regulations have substituted for truth, when science was found inadequate to resolve a given problem or answer a question. As a consequence, she argues, the influence of law (i.e., ideas) on perceptions of nature was obscured. [See, also, Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 1966.]

French dialectical materialists, however, such as linguist, Michel Pêcheux, argue that all ideas are derived from real relationships; that ideologies are passed on by means of non-verbal encounters with the materials of society, which is to say that the totality of interrelationships within institutions, and not just ideas, determine consciousness. Some critics of logocentrism go so far as to say that consciousness floats in a sea of the unconscious, and that the practical primacy of the unconscious means simply that one must put up with what comes to be thought and eventually, according to Pêcheux, dare to think for oneself in the non-verbal material context. [See, also, the very influential books by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatari: Anti-Oedipe, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1 (1973) and Mille plateaux, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (1980).]

Pêcheux goes on to argue that language is derived from dialectical material forces and an essential non-symmetry exists in the relationship between the real and thought. "The real," he writes,

                               exists necessarily independently of thought and outside it,
                               but thought necessarily depends on the real, i.e., it does
                               not exist outside the real.

Elsewhere, Pêcheux differentiates himself from humanists and idealists, whom he believes are guilty of mystifying the processes of indoctrination:

                               If it is true that ideology ‘recruits’ subjects from amongst
                               individuals [in the way soldiers are recruited from amongst
                               civilians] and that it recruits them all, we need to know how
                               ‘volunteers’ are designated in this recruitment, i.e., in what
                               concerns us, how all individuals accept as evident the meaning
                               of what they hear and say, read and write (of what they intend
                               to say and of what it is intended be said to them) as ‘speaking
                               subjects’…. [See Michel Pêcheux, Les Vérités de La Palice :
                                       linguistique, sémantique, philosophie, 1975.]
 

In the newspapers this week, we have read a number of accounts of employee disloyalty in the corporate world. Reed Abelson reports in an IHT article on April 30, "Job-Linked Web Venting Turns Ugly," that:

                                  Thousands of message boards for individual companies have
                                   emerged over the past few years, creating a window on what
                                   some employees feel but never say publicly. Often the view
                                   through this window is rather ugly.

                                   On message boards for particular companies on third-party Web
                                   sites like Yahoo and Vault, some employees are anonymously
                                   expressing thoughts they would not dare say out loud. They are
                                   freely showing their prejudices or denouncing other employees by
                                   name, sometimes accusing them of incompetence or misconduct or
                                   recounting salacious rumors about their sex lives. [Seeatelier no.4,
                                           article no.14.]

The media reports on these public displays as exceptional indiscretions rather than daily events inside the corporate world, where the linguistic domain is severely restricted. Managers are routinely compelled to threaten employees if they don’t work harder, and employees often air their grievances, but only in private so the social equilibrium necessary for production is maintained.

However, going public on these matters of authoritarianism and discipline represents a visible break with the more subtle esprit du corps, and it comes dangerously close to encouraging the development of a social-class consciousness. From the experience of shared memories of abuse, it is only one small step to developing collective strategies to correct these injustices, through participation in social movements. [For additional discussions of injustices inside the corporate work place and the social movements they are spawning, readers are invited to visit atelier no.8, article no.2 ("Executive Decisions")  and atelier no.19, article no.24, ("Democracy when you least expect it").]
 

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