Transcript
This book is part of a series published by The Open University. Thethree books in this series are:
Creativity in Language: From Everyday Style to Verbal Art (editedby Zsófia Demjén and Philip Seargeant)ISBN 978-1-4730-0372-9
Narrative, Language and Creativity: Contemporary Approaches(edited by Janet Maybin)ISBN 978-1-4730-0373-6
The Politics of Language and Creativity in a Globalised World(edited by David Hann and Theresa Lillis)ISBN 978-1-4730-0374-3
www.open.ac.uk
This publication forms part of the Open University module E302: Language and Creativity. Details of thisand other Open University modules can be obtained from Student Recruitment, The Open University, POBox 197, Milton Keynes MK7 6BJ, United Kingdom (tel. +44 (0)300 303 5303; email general-enquiries@open.ac.uk).
Alternatively, you may visit the Open University website at www.open.ac.uk where you can learn more aboutthe wide range of modules and packs offered at all levels by The Open University.
The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
First published 2016
Copyright © 2016 The Open University
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Edited and designed by The Open University.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow.
ISBN 978 1 4730 0374 3
1.1
Contents
Series preface 9
Biographical information 11
Book introduction 13
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate
relationship 171.1 Introduction 17
1.2 The political dimension of language use 19
1.3 Rhetoric: the art of persuasion 23
1.4 Literature’s status in political discourse 27
1.5 The influence of cultural value on beliefs about creativity 29
1.6 Creativity and originality: purloining resources for political
ends 34
1.7 The power and wisdom of the crowd: a new creative
landscape 39
1.8 Conclusion 45
References 46
Reading A: Convergence culture 50
Reading B: Social media in the sixteenth century: how Luther
went viral 56
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse 652.1 Introduction 65
2.2 Analysing creativity in political discourse 71
2.3 Political speeches 73
2.4 Grass-roots political activity 78
2.5 Copying, remixing, irony and play 85
2.6 The value of creativity for political discourse 88
2.7 Conclusion 92
References 93
Reading A: On Obama’s victory style 97
Reading B: Creating a counter-space: Tahrir Square as a
platform for linguistic creativity and political dissent 103
Reading C: The redress of poetry 113
Chapter 3 Creativity on sale 1193.1 Introduction 119
3.2 Literary stylistics and the ‘poetic function’ 121
3.3 Linguistic creativity in an advertisement and a poem 123
3.4 Linguistic creativity and purpose 132
3.5 Multiple voices 135
3.6 Multimodality, literature and advertising 140
3.7 The political dimension of the global reach of advertising 142
3.8 Conclusion 147
References 147
Reading A: The discourse of Western marketing 149
Reading B: Language choice in advertising to bilinguals 161
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of
value 1714.1 Introduction 171
4.2 The politics of value 173
4.3 Language and value 174
4.4 Creativity in language: definitions and disputes 178
4.5 Conflicting values: creativity, authority and tradition 180
4.6 Innovation and the judgement of value 184
4.7 Mixing it up: ‘high’ culture, ‘low’ culture and the politics of
understanding 188
4.8 Creativity, elitism and the language of literature 192
4.9 Conclusion 197
References 198
Reading A: Texting 201
Reading B: The modern politics of ‘not real’ words 207
Reading C: Londonstani: Why the lingo? 213
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world:
creativity curbed or unleashed? 2175.1 Introduction 217
5.2 Globalisation, localisation and glocalisation 220
5.3 Hip hop: creativity unleashed? 226
5.4 Call centres: creativity curbed? 233
5.5 Conclusion 240
References 241
Reading A: Circles of flow 244
Reading B: ‘Subterranean worksick blues’: humour as
subversion in two call centres 255
Reading C: Is there a global ‘call centre’ speech style? 269
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production 2716.1 Introduction 271
6.2 Regulating creativity 272
6.3 Regulating content and distribution: censorship and
surveillance 278
6.4 Digital curation and distribution 288
6.5 Creative Commons and alternative models of authorship
and ownership 294
6.6 Conclusion 299
References 300
Reading A: Fan fiction and copyright 303
Reading B: Obscene modernism 310
Reading C: Spreadable media 315
Chapter 7 Looking back, leaping forwards: a personal–
political review with critical–creative prospects 3237.1 Introduction 323
7.2 Challenging dichotomies, and key terms recast 325
7.3 Extended texts, extending practices 335
7.4 Conclusion 353
References 356
Acknowledgements 359
Index 365
Series preface
The books in this series provide an introduction to the study of
creativity in the English language. They look at what linguistic
creativity is, how it is used and the range of issues that it raises, both
in everyday contexts, and in literature and ‘high’ culture. They are core
texts for the Open University module E302 Language and creativity.
The series aims to provide students with:
. an understanding of the nature of creativity in English, and the
ways it is used to fulfil a range of social, cultural, artistic and
political functions
. knowledge of different theories and debates concerning creative
language practices
. the skills required to analyse and evaluate linguistic and semiotic
creativity
. an appreciation of how different modes (such as image, movement
and music) are used and combined to creative effect
. an understanding of how and why narrative plays such a central
role in people’s lives, and how narrative practices are changing in
the era of digital media
. an appreciation of how creative acts are shaped and constrained by
a combination of political, social and economic forces, and how
linguistic creativity can be used as a resource for political activity
. an appreciation of how the global status of English is altering both
the nature of linguistic practices and what is evaluated as creative
around the world.
The books include:
. activities designed to assist with the understanding and analysis of
the material
. key terms, which are emboldened in the text at the point where
they are explained (and in the index so that they are easy to find)
. readings at the end of each chapter, which offer further in-depth
discussion of key points. These involve relevant examples of
linguistic creativity from diverse contexts around the world, and
Series preface
9
represent an additional viewpoint on core discussions from the
chapter.
The other books in this series are:
Demjén, Z. and Seargeant, P. (eds) Creativity in Language: From
Everyday Style to Verbal Art, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Maybin, J. (ed.) Narrative, Language and Creativity: Contemporary
Approaches, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Philip Seargeant
Series Editor
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
10
Biographical information
Deborah Cameron
Deborah Cameron is Professor of Language and Communication at the
University of Oxford. She researches and writes about the way social
divisions and power relations shape language users’ attitudes, beliefs
and behaviour, and has a particular interest in the subject of language,
gender and sexuality. Her books include Language and Sexuality (with
Don Kulick, 2003), The Myth of Mars and Venus (2007) and Verbal
Hygiene (2012). She has also published articles in journals such as the
Journal of Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics and Discourse & Society.
Guy Cook
Guy Cook is Professor of Language in Education at King’s College,
London. He was co-editor of the journal Applied Linguistics (2004–
2009), and Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics
(2009–2012). This century, his books have included Translation in
Language Teaching (2010) (winner of the Kenneth W. Mildenberger
Prize), Genetically Modified Language (2004), Applied Linguistics (2003),
The Discourse of Advertising (2001), and Language Play, Language
Learning (2000) (winner of the Ben Warren Prize). He is currently
principal investigator on the project The Discursive Representation of
Animals (http://animaldiscourse.wordpress.com).
David Hann
David Hann is a lecturer in English Language Studies and Applied
Linguistics at The Open University. He has a background in teaching
English for business and communication skills. His main research area
is English as a Lingua Franca, with a particular focus on humorous
language play among non-native speakers of the language.
Kristina Hultgren
Anna Kristina Hultgren is a lecturer in English Language and Applied
Linguistics at The Open University. Her research interests include
language and globalisation, call-centre discourse, and English as a
medium of instruction in non-English dominant contexts. She is co-
Biographical information
11
editor of English-Medium Instruction in European Higher Education: English
in Europe (with Slobodanka Dimova and Christian Jensen, 2015) and of
English in Nordic Universities: Ideologies and Practices (with Frans Gregersen
and Jacob Thøgersen, 2014). She has published in the International
Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Sociolinguistics and Multilingua.
Theresa Lillis
Theresa Lillis is Professor of English Language and Applied Linguistics
at The Open University. She has taught English at primary, secondary,
adult and higher education levels as well as undergraduate and
postgraduate courses in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and literacy
studies. She has authored and co-authored a number of books on the
subject of writing, her main research area, including The Sociolinguistics
of Writing (2013), Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics
and Practices of Publishing in English (with Mary Jane Curry, 2010) and
Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire (2001).
Colleen McKenna
Colleen McKenna works in the area of academic practice at the
London School of Economics and Political Science. Before this, she
was a lecturer in academic literacies at University College London,
where she developed and led the Academic Communication
Programme. Her research interests include literacies, dialogism, the
sociology of texts, academic identity construction and contemporary
Irish poetry. She has also published in the areas of digital education
and online, multimodal communication.
Rob Pope
Rob Pope is Emeritus Professor of English at Oxford Brookes
University and a National Teaching Fellow. He has taught English at
universities in New Zealand, Wales and Russia, been a visiting
professor in Australia and Japan, and presented widely for the British
Council. His books include Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative
Strategies for Literary Studies (1995), Creativity: Theory, History, Practice
(2005), Creativity in Language and Literature: The State of the Art (co-
edited with Joan Swann and Ronald Carter, 2011) and Studying English
Language and Literature: an Introduction and Companion (2012).
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
12
Book introduction
Why focus on the politics of language and
creativity?
This book explores the many ways in which linguistic creativity is a
resource for political activity, and the politics surrounding the
production, ownership and evaluation of different kinds of creative
activity in contemporary society. At the heart of this book is a
recognition of the recent explosion of ‘production’ activity across texts,
modes, media and technologies which, in turn, is forcing us to ask
questions about what gets counted and valued as ‘creative’ linguistic
and semiotic practice, and why.
‘Creativity’ is treated throughout as a highly contested term, but one
which has enduring appeal as a way of capturing a phenomenon that is
fundamental to individual and social survival, development and
transformation. In exploring the nature and significance of linguistic
and semiotic creativity across different social domains, we approach
creativity in three broad ways:
. Creativity as an everyday phenomenon, referring to making, creating,
producing as a fundamental human activity. Exactly how people
engage in creative activity and what they create varies significantly,
as is discussed across the chapters in this book.
. Creative/ity as an evaluative notion – mainly positive – to refer to
particular kinds and types of linguistic and semiotic activity.
Historically, certain kinds of creative activity (and creative products)
have been more highly valued than others but, as illustrated in the
chapters in this book, there is considerable debate about what is
and should be valued.
. Creativity as a resource for individual and social transformation. While
meanings attached to the terms creative/ity continue to be hotly
debated, creativity is predominantly viewed as a resource for
enhancing and transforming human experience. Chapters in this
book seek to explore the particular significance of linguistic and
semiotic creativity across a range of social contexts.
The book explores a number of key questions: In what ways is
linguistic and semiotic ‘creativity’ a political phenomenon? How are
Book introduction
13
creative acts shaped and constrained by political, social, economic and
technological factors? How is linguistic and semiotic creativity currently
being used as a resource for political activity, and why? How is the
global status and use of English reconfiguring the nature of linguistic
and semiotic practices, and what gets evaluated as ‘creative’?
The seven chapters in this book use authentic examples from across
the spectrum of creative text-making practices – including
advertisements, political speeches, social media posts, plays, hip hop,
poetry, pop songs, memes and digital fiction – to illustrate and debate
the nature, value and significance of creative activity across different
social domains. They draw on a range of approaches and analytical
frameworks including stylistics, social semiotics, multimodality,
aesthetics, discourse studies and rhetoric, each of which is introduced
and defined in relevant chapters.
How the book is structured
The book begins with David Hann opening up key debates about the
politics of language and creativity, which are then pursued throughout
the book. It includes definitions of ‘politics’ and ‘ideology’, and locates
differing contemporary perspectives about ‘creative value’ in long-
standing debates around ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. While acknowledging
the unprecedented scale and nature of contemporary production
activity, the chapter also seeks to draw parallels with significant
historical developments.
The theme of political discourse is further developed in the second
chapter, where Theresa Lillis draws on critical discourse analysis,
sociolinguistics, rhetoric and semiotics to illustrate the different ways in
which language and other semiotic resources are used creatively in a
wide range of political activity. The chapter includes examples from
pre-scripted political performances as well as more spontaneous
grassroots political activity, both on- and offline, involving different
modes and media. It considers the argument that specific creative
forms, such as poetry, have a particular value in transforming political
consciousness.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on a theme which is central to debates about
creativity, that of value and evaluation, with authors adopting
contrastive perspectives. Drawing on approaches from stylistics,
multimodality and performance studies, Guy Cook explores the stylistic
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
14
and semiotic similarities and differences between literary texts and
marketing, PR, and advertising texts. Cook argues that although there
is a superficial similarity between the kinds of creativity to be found in
these texts, their social value and effects are of a different order:
advertising’s overriding purpose to sell products closes it off from the
transformative effects, experiences and interpretations that literary texts
encourage.
Deborah Cameron adopts a different approach to value and evaluation
in Chapter 4. Rather than argue that a particular type of creativity or
creative product is of more fundamental value than another, or has
specific effects, Cameron discusses the notion of hierarchies of value
and taste. Drawing on sociolinguistics and stylistics, the chapter
explores creativity as a value in itself, as well as an evaluation practice
in relation to a wide range of creative texts, including everyday, popular
and high-status literary texts. In so doing, Cameron interrogates the
particular value attached to the flouting of established rules and
conventions in different contexts, and the extent to which these are
framed as ‘creative’.
The theme of globalisation, which is evident across all chapters,
becomes the central concern of Chapter 5. Anna Kristina Hultgren
explores how key globalising influences are impacting on the range of
linguistic and semiotic practices in which people engage. Drawing on
sociolinguistics and globalisation theories, the chapter foregrounds the
contrast between ‘routinisation’ and ‘creativity’ in linguistic and
semiotic activity, focusing on two global phenomena: hip hop and call
centres.
Chapter 6 turns to the question of the politics surrounding the
ownership of creative products, an issue given particular pertinence in
an era of rapid technological change. Colleen McKenna explores the
regulation of creativity and language in both formal and informal
contexts, including questions around authorship, ownership, copyright
and corporate interests. She investigates freedom of speech and
censorship (both explicit and implicit), intellectual property rights, and
how these are developed in different parts of the world, as well as the
opening up and closing down of internet tools by state agencies. This
chapter also explores the changes to the rights and ownership of
artefacts produced via digital media such as YouTube.
The book closes with a chapter that encourages readers to engage
reflexively with the key themes of the book by re-reading and re-
Book introduction
15
writing their understandings about what constitutes creativity in the
contemporary world. Rob Pope problematises the simple dichotomies
that tend to populate discussion about creativity – literary–non literary,
personal–political, private–public, creative–critical, rational–emotional,
serious–play, reality–art – and highlights the fact that all dimensions are
implicated in processes of production, reception and evaluation.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
16
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and
language: an intimate relationship
David Hann
1.1 Introduction
The two events referred to below made the newspaper headlines at the
time they occurred. On the face of it, they seem to have nothing in
common:
Two men in suits walk into a hairdresser’s in Ealing, west
London. They do not, however, visit the establishment for a
haircut. In fact, they ask the proprietor to remove a poster which
is displayed in his window. He politely but firmly refuses.
(Based on Withnall, 2014)
A hostile exchange occurs between two countries over the release
of a film which is a comedic account of the assassination of a
political dictator. The government of the country where the film
is set warns that its release would constitute a ‘wanton act of
terror’ which would trigger a ‘merciless response’.
(Based on The Telegraph, 2014)
In fact, the hairdresser’s poster featured Kim Jong-un, the leader of
North Korea. Below his smiling face and distinctive haircut were
printed the words ‘BAD HAIR DAY?’ The two men who paid the
establishment a visit were from the North Korean embassy. The
diplomatic row was between the United States and North Korea over
the release of the American film The Interview, a comedic and fictional
account of the assassination of the very same leader.
North Korea’s reaction to the poster and film may not have been
surprising, but it indicates that even a government with a reputation as
one of the world’s most despotic cannot afford to be indifferent to the
ways in which creative output can influence public opinion, whether at
home or abroad. This is especially true in a digitised age in which
linguistic and visual content can be sent across time and space in
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
17
previously unimagined ways. For example, the ‘Bad hair day?’ poster
would soon have been forgotten in pre-internet times, but has been
amplified and perpetuated by news websites and individuals, so that a
quick web search produces tens, if not hundreds, of replications and
mutations of the original image and slogan. There has been a shift in
the balance of receptive and productive activity as traditional media –
which provide for both one-to-one communication (e.g. the telephone)
and one-to-many communication (such as the television) – have been
supplemented by the many-to-many platform (Peterson, 2012) that the
internet provides.
Of course, the hairdresser’s poster would probably not have caught the
world’s attention if it hadn’t been amusing to many people. That the
poster caused amusement reveals something of its creative quality. One
of the foci of this and other chapters in this book is the creative
dimension of political expression, one in which humour often has a
role. Furthermore, what comes to be regarded as creative is itself not a
politically neutral process and this chapter examines differing
conceptualisations of the term, which can be traced back, in large part,
to discussions in the late nineteenth century about what constitutes
‘culture’.
In the course of this chapter, you will be introduced to some of the
frameworks and tools that can be useful in analysing the creative
nature of spoken, written and multimodal texts. You will consider the
ideological dimension of everyday language use and look at the special
status of literature when considering the creativity and political impact
of texts. You will also assess the ways in which the recycling and
repurposing of language and images have been used for subversive and
often humorous political ends, a process facilitated by new
technologies. More generally, the implications of the blurring of the
divide between producers and consumers are examined. At the same
time, a historical perspective is provided by looking at the parallels
between the creative dissemination of information and discussion at
the time of the Arab Spring in 2011 and that which occurred during
the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe.
Given that the title of this chapter and the book as a whole feature the
words ‘politics’, ‘creativity’ and ‘language’, the various meanings and
associations attached to each will be discussed, revealing their close
relationship. First, the nature of language itself is examined in relation
to its context of use.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
18
1.2 The political dimension of language use
Language is never neutral, even when we might want it to be. There is
significance not only in what we say and write, but in how we say and
write it. The first activity explores this dimension of the nature of
language use.
Activity 1.1
Allow about 30 minutes
Below are three texts, one from a television drama, another from a text
message and the final one from a newspaper headline. All feature ‘non-
standard’ forms of English. Beyond the meaning content, what social
significance do you think the language used has in each case?
Text A
Street scene: two boys are walking past a group of young men. One of
the young men calls to the boys …
Dushane: Yo! Wha gwan, blood!
Ra’Nell: Wha gwan.
Dushane: You know who I am, innit?
Ra’Nell: Everyone knows you, Dushane.
Dushane: Come here (Ra’Nell approaches) … I want to ask you
somethin’. Ain’t it time you started rollin’ with us?
(Top Boy, 2011)
Text B
Hi, how u? R u getting ther? I’m in bank quein up-payin in
stuf4alice-who I Wrk4. We’l av2go out4drink soon-let me no if
u wan2 ova nxt few days-not thur. Sux
(Tagg, 2013, p. 275)
Text C
I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language
(Humphrys, 2007)
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
19
Discussion
Depending on your knowledge of different varieties of English, you might
have been able to identify Text A’s features as belonging to speakers
who are young, urban, working class and probably of Afro-Caribbean
origin, although some of the younger white characters in the drama from
which the extract is taken also use similar language. This is a clear
example of how language is rooted in its sociocultural context. As such,
its features are not mere linguistic curiosities but bound up with the
identities of the people who speak it. The real-life equivalents of
Dushane and Ra’Nell use their language with varying degrees of
consciousness to project who they are. (The added complication of an
exchange like this being taken from a television drama rather than ‘real
life’ is explored later in this chapter.)
The language in Text B is clearly recognisable as belonging to a
particular genre. Constraints of time and space in the use of text
messages have clearly helped shape the forms of the language here,
with non-essential elements such as verb auxiliaries and articles being
dispensed with, and individual letters and numbers standing for particular
syllables. However, these features are not just pragmatic responses to
technological constraints, but also, as with Text A, carry a certain social
significance. For example, it seems unlikely that the writer is over 40.
Even a brief message such as this signals the author’s identity to some
degree.
The newspaper headline’s use of ‘textspeak’ in Text C can be seen as a
parody of and challenge to the use of texting language, thus reinforcing
the sentiment in the headline. The article is written by the broadcaster,
John Humphrys, who is well known for criticising what he regards as the
widespread ‘misuse’ of the English language (see, for example,
Humphrys, 2004).
The social significance of variations in language has long been
recognised, as evidenced in the words of the Russian literary
philosopher and semiotician, Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in the early part
of the twentieth century:
In any given historical moment of verbal-ideological life, each
generation at each social level has its own language; moreover,
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
20
every age group has as a matter of fact its own language, its own
vocabulary, its own particular accentual system …
(Bakhtin, 1981 [1935], p. 290)
In considering the political dimension of language use, it is significant
that Bakhtin uses the term ‘ideological’ to discuss linguistic variation.
For him, language is the site and resource of an ideological
battleground. As he sees it, any speaker at a particular moment has to
attempt to negotiate their own meaning in a language which, by its
nature, is full of previous speakers’ meanings and intentions. This
makes language inherently dynamic. The word ‘ideological’ carries a
clear political dimension in English, often linking it to a set of beliefs
about how to govern. However, while there has been much debate
about Bakhtin’s own ideological position (e.g. Hirschkop and
Shepherd, 2001), his use of the term ‘ideology’ is often interpreted as
having a broader meaning. Pam Morris writes:
The Russian ‘ideologiya’ is less politically coloured than the
English word ‘ideology’. In other words, it is not necessarily a
consciously held political belief system; rather it can refer in a
more general sense to the way in which members of a given social
group view the world.
(Morris, 1994, p. 249, cited in Warshauer Freedman and Ball, 2004, p. 4)
This meaning, pertaining to the beliefs of a social group, is, in turn,
important for an understanding of how the word ‘political’ is used and
understood here and in other chapters of this book. ‘Politics’ and
‘political’ derive from the word polis, meaning ‘city-state’ in Ancient
Greek (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2015). This clearly relates to the
meaning of ‘politics’ which most readily comes to many people’s minds
– activities associated with the state. However, polis also encompassed
the notion of ‘citizenship’:
Ideally, the polis was a corporation of citizens who all participated
in its government, religious cults, defense, and economic welfare,
and who obeyed its sacred and customary laws.
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2015)
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
21
This notion goes beyond the idea of politics as the business of the
state to encompass a community’s shared beliefs and the duties
associated with defending those beliefs (Hansen and Raaflaub, 1995).
In short, you can find these key terms being used in the following
ways in this and other chapters:
. ideology: the world view or beliefs of a social group
. politics (narrow definition): ‘the art and science of government;
public life and affairs as involving authority and government’
(Allen, 1990)
. politics (broad definition): activities pertaining to the struggle by
different social groups and institutions to communicate their views
and beliefs.
Bakhtin posits that language, as a site of ideological struggle, is in
constant tension between two forces: the centripetal, which pulls
towards the standardisation of language, and the centrifugal, which
pushes towards diversification and change (Bakhtin, 1981 [1935],
pp. 270–2). These forces are very much implicated in the political
dynamic of society, the centripetal being associated with the established
order, while the centrifugal pushes against that order: for example, by
subverting language’s standard forms and meanings. The language used
by Dushane and Ra’Nell in Text A (Activity 1.1) represents the
centrifugal within the broader societal context (although it could be
argued that it is centripetal within the confines of the speakers’ own
social circle). Similarly, the forms of the language in Text B could also
be viewed as part of the centrifugal force pushing against standardising
pressures. However, the texting language featured is becoming part of
its own genre’s norms. In other words, it is in the process of becoming
standardised, demonstrating that what is centripetal or centrifugal
depends on how language is socioculturally situated at any given
moment. The overall sentiment in the newspaper headline in Text C is
indicative of the voices that are raised against non-standard uses of
English and can be regarded as the embodiment of centripetal
pressures at work. Indeed, the terms ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ each
carry implicit value judgements, despite the fact that, in linguistic
terms, a ‘standard language’ is simply one of a number of varieties of a
language which has become codified and promoted in dictionaries and
grammar books, as opposed to ‘non-standard’ varieties, which have not
(Trudgill, 2003). However, in public debate, anxieties over falling
education standards and other perceived societal problems often
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
22
coalesce around language use, especially that of the young. Language,
then, is not only the means but also the subject of an ongoing
ideological struggle. It is a debate which is often couched in terms of
value and even morality. This phenomenon is explored further by
Deborah Cameron in Chapter 4.
Bakhtin’s framework for understanding language use suggests that
anything we say or write inevitably carries social and ideological
significance in that it either resists or reinforces societal norms and, in
that sense, is inherently political. Important though this insight is in
exploring the political dimension of language use, it does not provide
an answer as to why language use can be political. Furthermore, what
of the third concept this chapter is concerned with: creativity? What is
its relationship to politics and language use? These questions are
examined in the following sections.
1.3 Rhetoric: the art of persuasion
Language’s role in the pursuance and exercise of power, and the
particular ways in which its features can be creatively manipulated
towards such ends, have long been recognised. The Ancient Greeks
were aware of the importance of the art of persuasion in public life
and, although study of its nature predates Aristotle, his treatise Rhetoric
(Aristotle (2004 [350 BCE]), written in the fourth century BC, has
probably had a greater influence on thinking in this field than any
other. Aristotle regarded rhetoric – the art of persuasion – as being at
the heart of life in the community and, as such, he frames it as
political in the broad sense described earlier.
Aristotle saw rhetoric as comprising three persuasive strands:
. logos: the appeal to reason
. pathos: the appeal to emotion
. ethos: the appeal to the good reputation of the speaker.
According to Aristotle, the speaker can draw on a number of
rhetorical devices which can enhance the appeal of their message.
These include the use of figurative language, such as metaphors and
similes, and the manipulation of rhythm by various means, including
repetition.
In order to examine rhetorical devices in action, two speeches will be
analysed, one of which is from the literary genre of drama.
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
23
Figure 1.1 Aung San Suu Kyi during her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance
speech
Activity 1.2
Allow about 45 minutes
Read the two texts below and answer the following questions:
. Would you regard these texts as political in nature and, if so, what
makes them so?
. Would you say one is more political than the other? If so, why?
. Which rhetorical devices can you identify? What are their effects?
Text D
This is part of the acceptance speech given by the well-known Burmese
politician and symbol of resistance to political dictatorship, Aung San
Suu Kyi, for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on 16 June 2012, 21 years
after she had originally been awarded the prize while under house
arrest:
Often during my days of house arrest it felt as though I were
no longer a part of the real world. There was the house which
was my world, there was the world of others who also were
not free but who were together in prison as a community, and
there was the world of the free; each was a different planet
pursuing its own separate course in an indifferent universe.
What the Nobel Peace Prize did was to draw me once again
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
24
into the world of other human beings outside the isolated area
in which I lived, to restore a sense of reality to me.
(Aung San Suu Kyi, 2012)
Text E
This is part of a famous speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II. In this
scene, John of Gaunt, uncle of the king, is dying. He rails against the
state of the realm, which he feels is deteriorating under Richard II’s rule,
as the king presides over a court where favouritism is rife and corruption
endemic. In this extract, he recalls when the nation was great:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
…
(From Richard II, 2.1, cited in Greenblatt et al., 1997, p. 967)
Discussion
Both texts are clearly political in the narrow sense as they revolve
around affairs of government or state. The first is given by a high-profile
political figure, while the second describes the perceived glories of a
nation. It could be argued that the first is more obviously political in that
it refers to the real world: Aung San Suu Kyi is talking about events that
occurred rather than ones conjured up by the mind of a playwright (this
idea, however, is challengeable and discussed below).
Looking at the rhetorical devices used, Aung San Suu Kyi repeats a
particular structure (‘There was the …’). This parallel use of a structure
helps to bring out the links and contrasts in the ideas that they contain.
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
25
The first of these is itself metaphorical – ‘There was the house which
was my world’. The second picks up this concept of the world and
contrasts the Burmese community’s togetherness with her own isolation.
At the same time, both worlds are prisons. These two worlds themselves
are differentiated from ‘the world of the free’.
There is clear pathos here as the repetition sets up a rhythm which
appeals to the heart rather than the head. This rhythm is enhanced by
the fact that the parallel structure is used three times, a common feature
of rhetorical discourse. For reasons which are not well understood, such
three-part lists seem to be particularly effective at eliciting an emotional
response from an audience. It could also be argued that the final
sentence of the three evokes a famous phrase (‘the land of the free’)
from the American national anthem. This phenomenon of language
echoing previous utterances and texts is discussed later in this chapter.
Finally, the metaphor of three separate planets seems to be an appeal to
ethos, as it implicitly recognises the speaker’s political significance,
linking Aung San Suu Kyi to both Burma and the world beyond.
John of Gaunt’s speech makes clear grammatical parallelism in the
repeated use of the structure ‘this’ plus an accompanying noun phrase.
Figurative language is also to the fore, likening England to, among other
things, a moat, a precious stone and a fortress. Perhaps the most
striking and unusual feature is the conversion of the noun ‘sceptre’ into
an adjective to describe the island, the sceptre being a symbol of
authority and even divinity.
Aristotle adopted an explicitly moral stance towards political rhetoric,
arguing that logos, pathos and ethos should be in balance for rhetoric
not only to be effective but also to serve the needs and interests of the
community (Aristotle (2004 [350 BCE]). It could be argued that a
preponderance of one element over another is dangerous: for example,
an overuse of pathos could lead to overtly propagandist texts, where
appeals to the rational are overridden by those to the heart. This may
be one reason why political rhetoric has long been regarded with
suspicion: Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, was particularly wary of its
seductive power (Hamilton and Cairns, 1961). Indeed, echoes of Plato’s
scepticism and suspicion can be found in the ways in which some
academic analysts seek to lay bare the creative manipulation of
language for political ends (see the discussion of critical discourse
analysis in Chapter 2).
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
26
1.4 Literature’s status in political discourse
To interrogate further the political aspects of the two texts in
Activity 1.2, it is useful to consider their genres. One is from that
prototypically most creative of genres, literature, and the other is not.
This makes their relative truth claims rather different in nature. Unlike
the target audience for Aung San Suu Kyi’s words in Text D, the
audience for John of Gaunt’s speech in Text E is not being encouraged
to respond or take action. After all, the theatre-going public are not
expected to rise from their seats and influence the action on stage,
whereas Aung San Suu Kyi’s words are designed to galvanise her
audience, however indirectly, into helping her secure her country’s
democratic future. In the literary text, there is what Ronald Carter calls
‘displaced interaction’ (1997, p. 135) between text and audience, a
characteristic he identifies as being indicative of literariness. He sees
interaction as being displaced when ‘the reader is asked to perform no
particular action except that of a kind of mental accompaniment to the
text in the course of which he or she interprets or negotiates what the
message means’ (Carter, 1997, p. 135). Nothing is asked or expected of
the people in the auditorium except this act of interpretation.
However, a line of argument that the non-literary text is more political
than the literary because its interaction with the world is direct is
challengeable. Widdowson (2006) differentiates non-literary from
literary texts by regarding the former as referential and the latter as
representational. Non-literary texts ‘indexically refer, and this means
that they should effectively refer readers to some context of situation
that they can recognise in their world’ (Widdowson, 2006, p. 33). On
the other hand, ‘if you read something as literature, you recognise that
it does not have any direct referential connection with your concerns.
… It represents an alternative reality in parallel’ (Widdowson, 2006,
p. 35). Shakespeare’s drama then, like literary texts in general, can be
regarded as representational, but this does not mean it carries no
significance outside its own constructed text world. An episode in the
history of the production of Richard II illustrates this point tellingly.
In early February 1601, supporters of the Earl of Essex (an ex-
favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, who was planning a rebellion against
her) commissioned the Lord Chamberlain’s men (Shakespeare’s theatre
company) to put on Richard II at the Globe. The conspirators were
clearly hoping that people would see a parallel between the despotic
and corrupt rule of Shakespeare’s Richard and that of the Queen. As it
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
27
turned out, Essex’s rebellion was quickly put down. An interesting
postscript to this episode is that Elizabeth ordered the same company
of players to put on the play on the eve of Essex’s execution. Through
this act, she seemed to be sending out the message that not only had
she defeated Essex, but she was confident enough in her own standing
that the public would not (dare to) interpret Richard II as reflecting the
nature of her own reign.
These events may be a footnote in history but they illustrate an
important point about literary texts: they can be seen to resonate
beyond the world in which they are set because of their potential to
represent something beyond their own created context. The leeway for
interpretation that lies at their heart can make them potent vehicles for
political messages. After all, political significance, like beauty and,
indeed, creativity, resides, in part, in the ‘eye’ of the beholder. (The
notion that a defining characteristic of literary texts is their openness
to interpretation is emphasised by Guy Cook in Chapter 3.) It is one
of the reasons why creativity is often viewed with suspicion by those in
power, especially if they have dictatorial impulses. Artists are always
vulnerable at times of political upheaval because their work, even when
it does not make explicit reference to power structures in the real
world, may be seen to be passing comment on them. Richard II is only
one such example. History is littered with others, such as Stalin’s
banning of Eisenstein’s milestone in early cinema Ivan the Terrible Part
II (1958) after the parallels between the Soviet leader’s reign of terror
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
28
Figure 1.2 Elizabeth and Essex in happier times
and Ivan’s proved too uncomfortable for the dictator to tolerate
(Neuberger, 2003).
In terms of the texts’ creativity, the textual features identified within a
rhetorical framework are much the same as those that would be seen
as ‘literary’ in the influential Russian Formalist tradition dating from
the early twentieth century. The Formalists saw literary language as
being defamiliarising in nature (Mukařovský, 1964 [1958]), standing out
from the ordinary because of either unexpected textual regularity or
irregularity (Jeffries and McIntyre, 2010). The notion of
defamiliarisation was not totally new: Aristotle himself (2004 [350
BCE]) discussed how stylistic devices can have this effect on an
audience. The quality of being unexpected, novel and innovative is
associated with creativity. Indeed, novelty is still regarded as one of
creativity’s defining features. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity
(Kaufman and Sternberg, 2010), for example, conceives of creativity as
being of high quality, appropriate to its communicative purpose and
novel. However, as will be seen later in this chapter, the idea that
creative language has necessarily to be novel (itself a contestable term)
is open to challenge.
Are textual features alone enough to ascertain a text’s creative merits?
A consideration of the relative qualities of Texts D and E suggests
otherwise: the fact that one was written by someone widely thought of
as a literary genius and cultural icon doubtless has some influence on
the regard in which it is held. The question of status, especially in
relation to literary texts, is explored further in the next section.
1.5 The influence of cultural value on beliefs about
creativity
The adjective ‘creative’ itself is often associated with the arts and with
works of people of exceptional talent such as Shakespeare. The very
fact that Text E was written by a figure thought of as one of English
literature’s ‘greats’ inevitably colours an audience’s judgement of its
value. In this regard, it is worth taking a historical perspective, which
reveals (at least) two distinctive approaches to understanding creativity.
These approaches can be traced back to a debate about a closely
associated concept: culture.
In 1869, a highly influential work by Matthew Arnold was published in
Britain called Culture and Anarchy, based on a series of university
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
29
lectures the author had given. For him, culture was a civilising
influence and a means of providing people with a moral framework.
He saw the education of the nation’s people, and especially its children,
as vital to their spiritual well-being. This was to be achieved by
exposure to culture which, for him, was ‘the best that has been
thought and said in the world’ (Arnold, 1869, p. viii). This is a rather
broad and vague definition but, in practice, Arnold saw culture in
somewhat restricted terms as primarily the literary and philosophical
output of the English and classical greats such as Shakespeare and
Homer. His ideas have been interpreted in an overtly political way by
some to mean that literature is a useful instrument for asserting
stability and control over society. Indeed, the title of Arnold’s volume
invites such an interpretation. For example, George Gordon, a
Professor of English at Oxford in the early years of the twentieth
century, proclaimed that ‘England is sick, … and English literature
must save it. […] English literature has now a triple function: still, I
suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our
souls and heal the State’ (cited in Eagleton, 1983, p. 23).
At about the same time as Arnold was promoting his particular idea of
high culture, another conceptualisation of the term began to emerge.
The British anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor (1871) saw culture as
a complex mix of society’s beliefs, laws, morals and customs. His ideas
were built on, extended and modified by other anthropologists
throughout the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The
differing perspectives of Arnold and Tylor about what constitutes
culture can still be found in current uses of the term. They are evident
in the words of Raymond Williams, the influential cultural critic and
academic, ‘We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a
whole way of life – the common meanings; to mean the arts and
learning – the special processes of discovery and creative effort’
(Williams, 1958, cited in McGuigan, 2014, p. 3). Interestingly, although
Williams sees the word ‘culture’ as encompassing both the arts and
learning (a concept akin to Arnold’s) and ‘a whole way of life’ (one
nearer to an anthropological definition), in this quotation at least, he
attaches ‘creative’ to the former. Arnold’s and Tylor’s contrasting
conceptualisations of culture (albeit implicitly) seem to underpin
current debates about what constitutes creativity. For instance, the
recent academic interest in the creative nature of everyday interaction
and the ways in which the seeds of literary language can be found in
seemingly mundane exchanges (e.g. Carter, 2004; Maybin and
Swann, 2006) – ‘the common meanings’ in Williams’s quotation –
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
30
might be viewed, in part, as a challenge to the idea of creativity lying
only in ‘high culture’. The focus on everyday creativity therefore
responds to and continues the debate started by Arnold and Tylor a
century and a half ago about what constitutes cultural significance and
value (something which is returned to in Chapter 4 of this book).
These contrasting notions of culture are also evident in the political
discussions which take place around the type of literature which is to
be taught in schools. For instance, in 2014, the UK government’s
Department for Education (DfE) produced a document outlining the
aims of the newly reformed GCSE English Literature qualification.
These included an opportunity for students ‘to develop culturally and
acquire knowledge of the best that has been thought and written’
(DfE, 2014, p. 3). The words, although not attributed to any particular
source, may sound familiar. As you come across the term ‘creativity’ in
the chapters that follow, it is a good idea to reflect on whether the
author’s use of the term relates more closely to the kind of output
which could be regarded as cultural in Arnold’s sense, in Tylor’s sense
or a combination of the two.
‘High culture’ and ‘popular culture’
Shakespeare, of course, was seen by Arnold as an original and unique
voice who is an integral part of the nation’s cultural heritage and so
part of ‘the best that has been thought and said’ – although it is worth
noting that, in his own day, Shakespeare would not have been seen in
quite such elevated terms. His status is such that he pervades today’s
cultural landscape, and the influence of his works can be seen in some
unlikely places.
Activity 1.3
Allow about 30 minutes
Look at the images in Figure 1.3, which use various parts of John of
Gaunt’s speech in Richard II, and answer the following questions:
. What do the images tell us about the relationship between ‘high
culture’ and ‘popular culture’?
. What do they tell us about the place of the speech in ongoing
representations of Englishness?
. What meanings do you think each of the creators of these posters
and covers was hoping to generate by using elements of John of
Gaunt’s speech?
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
31
Discussion
The fact that parts of John of Gaunt’s speech are (re)used in these
various ways suggests that they are widely recognised. However, this
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
32
Figure 1.3 Clockwise from top left: a DVD cover (2010); a magazine cover
(2014); a film poster (2006); and a DVD cover using an original film poster
(1944)
does not necessarily mean that either the creators or the potential
audience for these posters and covers would necessarily know the
provenance of the words used.
These images illustrate how tokens of ‘high culture’ are purloined by
‘popular culture’ for its own ends. It is also worth bearing in mind that
what we now regard as high culture was often the popular culture of its
day, Shakespeare being a prime example. The boundary, then, between
‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture is shifting and permeable.
In the first and second examples, it seems fairly clear that the words
carry associations to do with pride in country and, in the first case at
least, a certain nostalgia. These are reinforced by the accompanying
images. In the first, there are photographs that not only portray the
attractions the country has to offer, but also point to its previous
industrial might (the steam locomotive). The second contains a beautiful
image of the English countryside and, significantly, also carries the
words ‘For all who love our green and pleasant land’. These words are
inspired by Sir Hubert Parry’s anthem Jerusalem, itself based on William
Blake’s preface to his poem Milton (Maclagan and Russell, 1907, p. 2).
What is interesting to note is that the language, in being drawn on in this
way, begins to lose the nuances of meaning that it had in Shakespeare’s
play. John of Gaunt is an ambiguous figure in Richard II, so his words
may not necessarily be understood at their face value. In addition, the
context in which Gaunt utters them is often forgotten. Some 20 lines
after this famous extract, he complains ‘That England that was wont to
conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself’ (from Richard
II, 2.1, cited in Greenblatt et al., 1997, p. 968).
The DVD cover for David Lean’s film (using an original poster), like the
two preceding examples, uses the words from the speech seemingly in
order to stir up feelings of national pride. This sense of national pride is
enhanced by the time and place of its production. England in 1944 was
at war and this is emphasised by the fact that the character in the top
left-hand corner is wearing a Navy uniform. The message seems to be
that this ‘happy breed’ is resolutely upbeat despite the adversities it
faces.
Finally, the 2006 film poster differs from the others in a number of
significant ways. The reference to John of Gaunt’s speech is less
obvious in that the title is not faithful to the original. However, the use of
colour makes the red ‘This’ and blue ‘England’ stand out in relation to
the white ‘is’, so evoking the famous speech. That the colours
themselves are those of the British flag is also significant. At the time the
film was set, in the early 1980s, the British Union Jack (red, white and
blue) was more associated with England than the red and white English
flag of St George. Another difference is that the poster strikes a
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
33
discordant note compared to the preceding images. In fact, the picture of
disaffected youth seems to set itself up in opposition to the others: this
England is neither green nor pleasant. As such, it appears to respond,
not so much to the words of Shakespeare, but to those who have
appropriated those words for nationalistic and nostalgic ends.
The way in which language draws on previous usages and intentions is
something which is emphasised by Bakhtin (1981 [1935]). He maintains
that the nature of language means that speakers inevitably draw on
previous speakers’ meanings. He sees language as heteroglossic –
many voiced – in nature, its meanings forged and altered by usage, so
that words carry within them the intentions, connotations and
contextual flavours of previous speakers and usages. He also regards
every utterance and piece of writing as dialogical – responding to
what has been uttered and written before while at the same time
anticipating its own response.
1.6 Creativity and originality: purloining resources
for political ends
For Bakhtin, heteroglossia and dialogicality are properties of language
itself. We cannot help but use words which have been in the mouths
of others and which carry previous speakers’ meanings and intentions.
This raises important questions about what counts as creativity,
especially in relation to its ‘novelty’ (Kaufman and Sternberg, 2010).
However, the conscious redeployment of linguistic resources, such as
that evident in the uses of John of Gaunt’s speech in the examples
above, seems to be of a different order from our inevitable recycling
of words that others have deployed for their own intentions. In order
to capture this conscious redeployment, the further concepts of
entextualisation and recontextualisation are useful.
. Entextualisation: the encoding of some aspect of human
experience and the cultural marking of this representation as a text
(spoken, written, multimodal) (Maybin, forthcoming)
. Recontextualisation: the movement of a piece of text (spoken,
written, multimodal) from one context with which it is closely
associated, to another.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
34
In order to bring these into play, another pair of texts that set out to
subvert the meanings of the sources on which they draw will be
examined.
Activity 1.4
Allow about 20 minutes
Look at the texts below and answer the following questions:
. How could each of these texts be regarded as political?
. In what ways do they each draw on existing ideas and texts?
Text F
A poster of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after he
imposed a ban on Twitter in Turkey (March 2014).
Text G
A tweet showing the Brazilian footballer Neymar pictured with his son,
inspired by fellow professional Dani Alves, who ate a banana thrown at
him as a racial insult during a game (April 2014).
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
35
Figure 1.4 A poster of Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdoğan
Figure 1.5 A tweet showing a photograph posted by Brazilian footballer
Neymar on Instagram
Discussion
Text F is clearly part of a political discourse as it is attacking a policy of
the Turkish prime minister. From the poster alone, it cannot be
ascertained whether it has been produced by a recognised source, such
as an opposition party, or has simply been created by a citizen angered
by the ban. Given the technological tools now widely available, it is of
course possible not only to stick the poster on a wall, but also to publish
it worldwide. It is this very power which Erdoğan seems to be attempting
to combat in his ban on the use of Twitter. Manifestations of grass-roots
political activism, facilitated by digital technology, feature centrally in the
next chapter.
Text G, like Text F, attempts to combat and defuse the power of the act
that it comments on. Its focus is not as narrowly political as Text F’s as it
is not targeting a political figure or party. Rather, it confronts an ideology,
a particular world view which regards some ethnicities as inferior to
others. It is, nevertheless, political in the broad sense that it relates to
people’s beliefs and principles which themselves could form the basis of
a political system. A notorious example from history was the Nazis’ use
of a racist ideology as a core organising principle in their political goals.
Both clearly draw on previous texts and ideas. Text F echoes the famous
‘yes we can’ slogan employed by Barack Obama during his first
presidential campaign in 2008 and has the added advantage of rhyming
with the Turkish Prime Minister’s name. The Neymar tweet uses and
undermines the racist slur relating black people to monkeys through the
indexical sign of the banana.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
36
The words on the Erdoğan poster are transformed, not only by the
changing of one letter in the original slogan, but also by the movement
of the phrase from one context with which it is associated to another.
Of course, for it to be identified as coming from Obama’s presidential
campaign, the original slogan needed to stand out from all the other
words that were harnessed for the purpose of securing his place in the
White House. This it did, primarily, through its repetition in
advertisements and, above all, through its liberal use by the candidate
himself in the many speeches that he gave around the country. The
effect of this repetition is like that of the poetic features discussed in
the previous speeches you looked at. It foregrounds the phrase,
decoupling it from a specific time and place and making it reusable in
different contexts. Of course, all language is reusable but it is how a
meaning derived from its association with a particular time, place and
speaker is transformed through this process which is important here.
In this regard, the notion of entextualisation, originating in the field of
linguistic anthropology, is useful. Any text (a word, a phrase, an image)
– and its associated contextual meanings – can be decoupled from its
original setting and reused in another context. For example, in this
section, we have seen how the unusual and memorable use of a noun
as an adjective – ‘this sceptred isle’ – entextualised by Shakespeare, has
been recontextualised.
The effectiveness of both Texts F and G derives from the contrast
between their meaning and intent, and that of the original contexts on
which they draw. In the case of the Erdoğan poster, the
recontextualisation of Obama’s slogan provides a contrast between the
high-mindedness and upbeat idealism associated with it (although time
and experience have probably loosened that association in the minds of
some) and what might be regarded as Erdoğan’s small-minded and
dictatorial action in banning Twitter. The bringing together of these
two concepts produces an incongruity which is both telling and
humorous.
Incongruity has long been recognised as an important characteristic of
humour. In the early nineteenth century, William Hazlitt observed that
‘Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only
animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and
what they ought to be’ (cited in Morreall, 1987, p. 65). In the Erdoğan
poster, the what-things-are is encapsulated in the Prime Minister’s
banning of Twitter, and the what-things-ought-to-be in Obama’s
slogan. Of course, the what-things-are is another way of referring to
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
37
the status quo, and the status quo is a state which those in power, by
definition, have an interest in upholding. Perhaps, then, it is not
surprising that humour is a weapon often used by those without power
to undermine those with it. Poking fun at a prime minister with
dictatorial tendencies or at a racist slur robs them of their menace.
This relates to another notion of Mikhail Bakhtin’s, that of the carnival
where ‘The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the
structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended’
(Bakhtin, 1984, p. 122). By poking fun at the established order, that
order can be subverted, at least on a temporary basis. With regard to
humour’s relationship with power, it is also worth noting that humour
has a get-out clause: ‘I was only joking’. Perhaps this is why it is a
useful means of pushing at the boundaries of what is socially and
politically acceptable. In this sense, it has parallels with the status of
literary output which could claim that ‘it is only make-believe’. This
ambiguity can be a potent political tool, as will be discussed in
Chapter 2.
The Neymar tweet has much in common with the Erdoğan poster. It
too uses recontextualisation, taking the banana and radically changing
its meaning by strikingly contrasting the ugly racist and viciously
exclusive motivation behind throwing the fruit with the innocence
represented by the image of Neymar’s son, and the inclusive nature of
the tag ‘weareallmonkeys’. Furthermore, peeling the banana as if ready
to eat it, much like Dani Alves’ action in eating the banana thrown at
him, is a way of robbing the fruit of its original figurative significance
by reducing it to its literal function – a nutritive resource.
The recycling and repurposing that is present in both these texts
provides a useful perspective on the commonly held view that
creativity must necessarily be novel and original. Carter makes a
pertinent point about this relationship between creativity and
originality:
the creative act is always seen, at least in many modern
industrialised cultures, in terms of making something novel,
i.e. new or innovative. The meaning of original here is of
something new and unexpected (e.g. He’s such an original thinker.
That’s a really original idea). However, the word original also has
the meaning of ‘origins’, or original sources (as in ‘the original
walls of the city’ or ‘the original inhabitants of the town’). The
word derives from Latin origo, meaning a rise or beginning or
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
38
source, and this meaning links it with the sense of a basic source
from which everything organically grows.
(Carter, 2004, p. 26)
It will be seen throughout this book that texts often draw on a widely
recognised source and that their creativity and effectiveness lie as much
in their use of an original source as in their original exploitation of it.
This potential for recontextualisation is, of course, multiplied by the
affordances which modern technology allows. In fact, both the
featured texts can be regarded as ‘memes’, a term coined by Richard
Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, in his influential book The Selfish
Gene (1976). It is itself a play on the word ‘gene’. Dawkins contends
that there are units of behaviour, beliefs or practices which can be
replicated as they are transmitted from one person to another through
language, music, rituals, and so on. Like the gene, through replication,
they can be modified and changed. Technological tools allow this
replication to spread both widely and rapidly, meaning that texts can
traverse national boundaries and enter a global arena of discourse. It is
significant that the word ‘meme’ has become closely associated with
the internet. For example, definitions of the term include ‘an image,
video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied
and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations’
(Oxford Dictionaries, 2015). The Erdoğan poster is a good example of
a meme: it is a variation on a well-known slogan and can be found on
various web pages. It is noteworthy that the original text that inspired
it is American and that the Erdoğan poster is itself written in English,
suggesting that it is meant not only for domestic Turkish consumption.
The globalised nature of social media, the role of the English language
in that communicative environment and the stretch of shared
intertextual reference points are recurring themes throughout the
chapters in this book.
1.7 The power and wisdom of the crowd: a new
creative landscape
In order to examine the significance of the new digitised and globalised
environment which many people now inhabit, you will now revisit the
Neymar tweet that featured in Activity 1.4.
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
39
Activity 1.5
Allow about 45 minutes
Neymar’s tweet appeared in a BBC news item reproduced in Figure 1.6.
Read the article and answer the following questions:
. Would you say that Neymar’s original tweet is more or less effective
at communicating its message than, say, an interview on a television
channel?
. What does the article tell us about the relationship between the ‘old’
and the ‘new’ media?
Discussion
The effectiveness of the tweet is bound up with its creative potential. A
television interview may not have given Neymar the same opportunity to
manipulate the resources available to him. The medium allows him to be
his own one-man production team, unfettered by the potentially different
agenda that a television broadcaster might have. As discussed earlier,
he undermines and defuses a racist slur through his able deployment of
the resources at his disposal – image, and language in the hashtag.
Furthermore, as previously mentioned, the speed and spread of
Neymar’s tweet is an important factor in assessing its effectiveness. The
nature of his audience should also be taken into account. It can be
safely assumed that his millions of ‘followers’ would be more interested
in his concerns than a television watcher who happened across the item
on the news. On the other hand, it could be argued that the message in
his tweet would be less likely to reach members of a general audience
than it might via television.
Another significant factor in assessing the effectiveness of the message
is the ability of the people who read the tweet to resend it, or take up the
meme and reconfigure it in some way before broadcasting their version
of it to the world. This is not the one-to-many model of communication
that a television channel provides, but a many-to-many paradigm which
allows for a proliferation of the tweet and varieties of it. It needs to be
borne in mind, of course, that the tweet might also be repurposed for
different intentions beyond its original author’s control.
The reach of the message is, of course, potentially global, though the
same might be said for many television channels. Neymar’s awareness
of its global reach means that he has shaped his message accordingly,
writing his hashtag in various languages, including English. This
adapting of the message for a global audience and the role of English in
that process is a theme taken up in the next chapter.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
40
‘We are all monkeys’By BBC TrendingWhat’s popular and why
28 April 2014
If you can’t beat racism, eat it. That’s whatthousands of people on social media are doing,inspired by footballer Dani Alves eating thebanana hurled at him on the pitch.
Tens of thousands of people around the world aregoing "bananas" over a tweet by Brazilian footballerNeymar. On Sunday, the Brazil international andBarcelona forward posted an image of himself onInstagram with a cheeky smile and a banana, sideby side with his toddler son. Under the picture wasthe hashtag #weareallmonkeys, in English, as wellas in Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan.
Neymar’s picture was inspired by fellow Barca player and Brazil international,Dani Alves - who had a banana thrown at him on the pitch in a match againstVillareal. Alves kept his cool, picked up the banana, peeled it and ate it, prior totaking the kick. Neymar’s tweet seemed like a deliberate attempt to turn eating abanana into an anti-racism meme - he has over 10 million followers on Twitterand 4.6 million on Instagram.
Inspired by Neymar, over 100,000people have used the hashtags -with celebrities and ordinary peoplealike striking humorous poses withbanana in hand. The majority havecome from Brazil, where celebritiessuch as singers Gaby Amarantosand Michel Teló have expressedtheir support. But the trend is global- for example Cesar Barros, aBoston DJ, posted a selfie in whichhe displays a large smile while holding a peeled banana. "What Dani Alves didwas so amazing," he told BBC Trending. "He didn’t stoop to that racist idiot’slevel and instead he made a joke out of the situation. The racist plan backfired ina major way and now the idiot created a worldwide movement against racism."
Monkey noises and throwing bananas are used the world over as a racistgesture at football matches, with mixed race Dani Alves himself previouslyvictimised. By turning the banana from a symbol of racism to a symbol ofdefiance, will the current trend make a difference? Tom Conn, a Spanish footballfan, echoed many others on social media when he tweeted that "in one singleaction, Dani Alves did more to fight racism than any UEFA/FIFA ‘Say No toRacism’ has ever done".
Reporting by Bruno Garcez
Figure 1.6 An article about Neymar’s tweet from BBC News (Source:
Garcez, 2014)
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
41
In terms of what it tells us about the relationship between old and new
media, the article sheds light on the way in which long-established
media organisations such as the BBC are adapting to and adopting new
media tools. BBC Trending, from which this article is taken, gives its
audience ‘a hand-picked selection of stories on social media around the
world’ (BBC, 2015). As such, it is monitoring what’s happening and, in
selected cases, rebroadcasting it. This is significant as it shows how the
news agenda is no longer the preserve of the traditional broadcasters.
People are becoming increasingly aware of their potential, as ordinary
citizens, to influence the news agenda through their own creative
output. Similarly, in other areas of their lives, they too can be a critic,
an author, a publisher or a consumer watchdog. This shift from
consumption to production that the digital technologies allow has been
noted by cultural commentators such as Gunther Kress (2010). It is
one which was predicted by Alvin Toffler (1980) before the advent of
the World Wide Web in which he envisaged the rise of the ‘prosumer’
who, as the name suggests, not only consumes but produces.
The shift from consumption to production has profound implications
for the power dynamic in the new media landscape. After all, control
of the media has long been recognised as a vital tool in the exercise of
societal power. This is a central concern of media scholar, Henry
Jenkins, in his book, Convergence Culture (2006). He later describes how
he originally conceptualised convergence culture as a place where:
no matter how we imagine the future, it was [going to] involve
different kinds of media, different channels of communication
coming together in some way to shape the way we process the
world around us. …
As everyone was learning how to become a more active
participant in the media environment, as more and more people
were producing and circulating media themselves, they became
part of a larger media landscape.
(Jenkins, cited in The Open University, 2016)
Thus, for Jenkins, convergence culture is both a technological and a
cultural phenomenon.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
42
Activity 1.6
Allow about 1 hour and 30 minutes
Turn to Reading A, ‘Convergence culture’ by Henry Jenkins, at the end
of this chapter. Jenkins declares himself an optimist with regard to the
future of the media environment which we inhabit, a place where new
technology can allow for increasing participation rather than mere
consumption.
. In what ways does he think media pessimists have got their
assessment of the media landscape wrong?
. What grounds does Jenkins have for optimism?
. How convinced are you by his arguments and what evidence would
you draw on to support or question his view?
Discussion
Jenkins sees the media pessimists as exaggerating the power of the
established media organisations and disempowering ordinary people by
turning them into mere victims. He regards such a view as ignoring
people’s complex relationship with popular culture and overlooking the
participatory activities emerging that allow grass-roots groups to speak
back to the established media. However, in order to be successful in
combating a concentration of media power, he argues that people need
to collaborate, using their collective bargaining power to form
consumption communities. He sees the potential for new social power to
be exercised through adhocracy – a non-hierarchical coming together on
an ad hoc basis for the sake of the common good.
One example he cites of adhocracy in action is Wikipedia. Through
collaboration and communal effort, Wikipedia has established its own
working norms and produced a databank of knowledge which
endeavours to allow its readership intellectual independence. The
communal nature of much creative production and the forces that resist
it are explored in more detail in Chapter 6.
How you react to Jenkins’s argument may depend in part on how much
power you think the established media multinationals have in shaping
and controlling our media landscape and whether you think people
coming together in virtual space can do so without creating their own
hierarchies, as they tend to do in physical space. It might be argued that
the ad hoc and fluid nature of such communities reduces the risk of this
happening.
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
43
Looking at the current commercial media landscape, there are
undoubted concentrations of power in the virtual marketplace, such as
that wielded by organisations, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and
Amazon. These may well be regarded by some as unhealthy in terms
of the democratisation of the media landscape. At the same time, in
the political arena, platforms such as Twitter allow the dissemination of
ideas and events that might otherwise go unreported. Indeed, it could
be argued that the use of such channels can itself shape events, the
Arab Spring of 2011 being a well-documented example and one which
features in the discussion of grass-roots political activity in Chapter 2.
At the same time, political establishments attempt to control the flow
of such traffic, with greater or lesser degrees of success: the Turkish
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for example, eventually lifted
his ban on Twitter because so many people had found ways to
circumvent it.
A historical perspective on the media landscape
Those with power – political, social, artistic and commercial – will
always try to manage the production of media output, while others will
challenge that control. As will be seen in this section, it is a mistake to
see such a struggle as a modern phenomenon.
Activity 1.7
Allow about 1 hour and 40 minutes
Turn to Reading B, ‘Social media in the sixteenth century: how Luther
went viral’ by Tom Standage, at the end of this chapter. Read
Standage’s account of the importance of social media during the
Protestant Reformation in Europe, some 500 years ago. As you read,
make a note of the following points:
. What parallels can be seen between the creative use of resources
discussed so far in the chapter and those that Standage points to in
the actions of Luther and his supporters?
. What other parallels does Standage draw between the media
landscape of that period and that of today? Do you find these
parallels convincing?
Discussion
An interesting parallel can be drawn between Luther’s decision to use
standard German to spread his message, and the use of English in
Texts F and G that you examined earlier. In all these cases, the
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
44
motivation is to spread a particular message to as wide an audience as
possible. It is also why English in the contemporary world is used
alongside local languages by protesters around the world to ensure that
their messages are heard both locally and globally. Another relevant
commonality can be found in the exploitation of different modes and
media. In Luther’s day, ballads and woodcuts helped spread the
message through all levels of society, just as a simple tweeted image
such as Neymar’s can communicate a message with telling effect.
Interestingly, parody was as much a political weapon during the
Reformation as it is today, and similarities can be seen between the way
in which traditional songs were humorously repurposed for the
Protestants’ own ends and the hijacking of Obama’s slogan in order to
attack the Turkish Prime Minister some 500 hundred years later (Text F).
The other parallels that Standage mentions are numerous. He points to
a ‘networked public’ that used a decentralised and relatively cheap
system of distribution. Furthermore, because pamphleteers could
respond to each other quickly, the public was able to read about and
take part in an ongoing debate. Standage also mentions the difficulties
the authorities had in controlling and shutting down media outlets that
were not to their liking, allowing a sort of momentum which acted as
what he calls a ‘collective signalling mechanism’, letting people see that
others thought like they did.
Overall, I find his argument persuasive. The similarities he finds between
Luther’s media world and our own are thought-provoking and show that
the ‘digital revolution’ is not something that has emerged from nowhere,
but has clear historical precedents.
It is illuminating to take other significant moments of technological
change in our media from history – the telegram, the postcard, the
telephone, the television – and reflect on the similarities and
differences in the effects that they had on people’s social and political
lives compared to the technological innovations of today.
1.8 Conclusion
You have seen in this chapter how language, by its nature, is never
neutral and can be both the subject and the medium of ideological
struggle. As a subject, the ways in which it is viewed and valued reflect
wider societal conflicts. As a medium, the influence it can exert
through the creative manipulation of textual features has been
recognised since Aristotle’s time. Furthermore, literature and other art
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
45
forms are particularly potent means of political expression because of
their openness to symbolic interpretation. At the same time, this makes
them a potential target for suppression. However, the chapter has
demonstrated that creative political output is not the preserve of
literature and ‘high art’. People have always creatively used the
communicative resources available to them both to disseminate their
own views and to undermine the views of others. The digital age has
accelerated both the frequency and the breadth of this process.
Through the recontextualisation of memorable language and other
resources, contrasts ‘between what things are, and what they ought to
be” (Hazlitt, cited in Morreall, 1987, p. 65) are often highlighted,
making such contrasts highly political in nature. Humour invariably lies
at the heart of such political discourse as it is an effective tool in
robbing the powerful of their potency. Humour, like literature, often
operates in the hinterland of meaning where it is open to
interpretation.
In the next chapter, among other things, you will look in more detail at
the use of semiotic resources in the modern world’s political struggles,
and, more particularly, at how grass-roots activism exploits the global
reach of such resources both online and on the street.
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Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
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Reading A: Convergence culture
Henry Jenkins
Source: Edited version from Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: WhereOld and New Media Collide, New York and London, New York UniversityPress, pp. 258–66.
Critical pessimists, such as media critics Mark Crispin Miller
[2005], Noam Chomsky [Herman & Chomsky 2002], and Robert
McChesney [1999], focus primarily on the obstacles to achieving a
more democratic society. In the process, they often exaggerate the
power of big media in order to frighten readers into taking action.
I don’t disagree with their concerns about media concentration,
but the way they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it
disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them. Far
too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse
about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation,
“propaganda machines” and “weapons of mass deception”. Again
and again, this version of the media reform movement has
ignored the complexity of the public’s relationship to popular
culture and sided with those opposed to a more diverse and
participatory culture. The politics of critical utopianism is founded
on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on
a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing
with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with
previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining
momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more
empowered, not when they are at their weakest.
Media concentration is a very real problem […]. Concentration is
bad because it stifles competition and places media industries
above the demands of its consumers. Concentration is bad
because it lowers diversity – important in terms of popular
culture, essential in terms of news. Concentration is bad because
it lowers the incentives for companies to negotiate with their
consumers and raises the barriers to their participation. Big
concentrated media can ignore their audience (at least up to a
point); smaller niche media must accommodate us.
That said, the fight over media concentration is only one struggle
that should concern media reformers. The potentials of a more
participatory media culture are also worth fighting for. Right now,
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
50
convergence culture is throwing media into flux, expanding the
opportunities for grassroots groups to speak back to the mass
media. Put all of our efforts into battling the conglomerates and
this window of opportunity will have passed. That is why it is so
important to fight against the corporate copyright regime, to
argue against censorship and moral panic that would pathologize
these emerging forms of participation, to publicize the best
practices of these online communities, to expand access and
participation to groups that are otherwise being left behind, and
to promote forms of media literacy education that help all
children to develop the skills needed to become full participants
in their culture.
[…] [My] most controversial claim […] [is] that increasing
participation in popular culture is a good thing. Too many critical
pessimists are still locked into the old politics of culture jamming.
Resistance becomes an end in and of itself rather than a tool to
ensure cultural diversity and corporate responsibility. The debate
keeps getting framed as if the only true alternative was to opt out
of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and
lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by
small alternative presses. But what would it mean to tap media
power for our own purposes? Is ideological and aesthetic purity
really more valuable than transforming our culture?
A politics of participation starts from the assumption that we may
have greater collective bargaining power if we form consumption
communities. Consider the example of the Sequential Tarts.
Started in 1997, www.sequentialtart.com serves as an advocacy
group for female consumers frustrated by their historical neglect
or patronizing treatment by the comics industry. Marcia Allas, the
current editor of Sequential Tart, explained: “In the early days we
wanted to change the apparent perception of the female reader of
comics … We wanted to show what we already knew – that the
female audience for comics, while probably smaller than the male
audience, is both diverse and has a collectively large disposable
income” [Allas 2003]. In her study of Sequential Tart, scholar and
sometime contributor Kimberly M. De Vries argues that the
group self-consciously rejects the negative stereotypes about
female comics readers constructed by men in and around the
comics industry but also the well-meaning but equally constraining
stereotypes constructed by the first generation of feminist critics
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
51
of comics [De Vries 2002]. The Sequential Tarts defend the
pleasures women take in comics even as they critique negative
representations of women. The Web zine combines interviews
with comics creators, retailers, and industry leaders, reviews of
current publications, and critical essays about gender and comics.
It showcases industry practices that attract or repel women,
spotlights the work of smaller presses that often fell through the
cracks, and promotes books that reflect their readers’ tastes and
interests. The Sequential Tarts are increasingly courted by
publishers or individual artists who feel they have content that
female readers might embrace and have helped to make the
mainstream publishers more attentive to this often underserved
market.
The Sequential Tarts represent a new kind of consumer advocacy
group – one that seeks to diversify content and make mass media
more responsive to its consumers. This is not to say that
commercial media will ever truly operate according to democratic
principles. Media companies don’t need to share our ideals in
order to change their practices. What will motivate the media
companies is their own economic interests. […]
We still do not have any models for what a mature, fully realized
knowledge culture would look like. But popular culture may
provide us with prototypes. A case in point is Warren Ellis’s
[2002–2004] comic book series, Global Frequency. Set in the near
future, Global Frequency depicts a multiracial, multinational
organization of ordinary people who contribute their services on
an ad hoc basis. As Ellis explains, “You could be sitting there
watching the news and suddenly hear an unusual cell phone tone,
and within moments you might see your neighbor leaving the
house in a hurry, wearing a jacket or a shirt with the distinctive
Global Frequency symbol … or, hell, your girlfriend might answer
the phone … and promise to explain later. … Anyone could be
on the Global Frequency, and you’d never know until they got the
call” [Ellis 2004]. Ellis rejects the mighty demigods and elite
groups of the superhero tradition and instead depicts the twenty-
first-century equivalent of a volunteer fire department. Ellis
conceived of the story in the wake of September 11 as an
alternative to calls for increased state power and paternalistic
constraints on communications: Global Frequency doesn’t imagine
the government saving its citizens from whatever Big Bad is out
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
52
there. Rather, as Ellis (2004) explains, “Global Frequency is about us
saving ourselves.” Each issue focuses on a different set of
characters in a different location, examining what it means for
Global Frequency members personally and professionally to
contribute their labor to a cause larger than themselves. The only
recurring characters are those at the communications hub who
contact the volunteers. Once Frequency participants are called into
action, most of the key decisions get made on site as the
volunteers are allowed to act on their localized knowledge. Most
of the challenges come, appropriately enough, from the debris left
behind by the collapse of the military-industrial complex and the
end of the cold war – “The bad mad things in the dark that the
public never found out about” [Ellis 2004]. In other words,
citizen soldiers use distributed knowledge to overcome the
dangers of government secrecy.
Ellis’s Global Frequency Network closely mirrors what journalist
and digital activist Howard Rheingold [2003: xii] has to say about
smart mobs: “Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act
in concert even if they don’t know each other. The people who
make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible
because they carry devices that possess both communication and
computing capabilities. … Groups of people using these tools will
gain new forms of social power.” In Manila and in Madrid,
activists, using cell phones, were able to rally massive numbers of
supporters in opposition to governments who might otherwise
have controlled discourse on the mass media; these efforts
resulted in transformations of power. In Boston, we are seeing
home schoolers use these same technologies to organize field trips
on the fly that deliver dozens of kids and their parents to a
museum or historic site in a matter of a few hours.
Other writers, such as science fiction writer Cory Doctorow
[2003], describe such groups as “adhocracies.” The polar opposite
of a bureaucracy, an adhocracy is an organization characterized by
lack of hierarchy. […]
[…]
[…] If one wants to see a real-world example of something like
the Global Frequency Network, take a look at Wikipedia – a
grassroots, multinational effort to build a free encyclopedia on the
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
53
Internet written collaboratively from an army of volunteers,
working in roughly two hundred different languages. […]
Perhaps the most interesting and controversial aspect of the
Wikipedia project has been the ways it shifts what counts as
knowledge (from the kinds of topics sanctioned by traditional
encyclopedias to a much broader range of topics relevant to
specialized interest groups and subcultures) and the ways it shifts
what counts as expertise (from recognized academic authorities to
something close to Lévy’s concept of collective intelligence). Some
worry that the encyclopedia will contain much inaccurate
information, but the Wikipedia community, at its best, functions
as a self-correcting adhocracy. Any knowledge that gets posted
can and most likely will be revised and corrected by other readers.
For the process to work, all involved must try for inclusiveness
and respect diversity. The Wikipedia project has found it
necessary to develop both a politics and an ethics – a set of
community norms – about knowledge sharing:
Probably, as we grow, nearly every view on every subject will
(eventually) be found among our authors and readership. …
But since Wikipedia is a community-built, international
resource, we surely cannot expect our collaborators to agree
in all cases, or even in many cases, on what constitutes
human knowledge in a strict sense. … We must make an
effort to present these conflicting theories fairly, without
advocating any one of them. … When it is clear to readers
that we do not expect them to adopt any particular opinion,
this is conducive to our readers’ feeling free to make up
their own minds for themselves, and thus to encourage in
them intellectual independence. So totalitarian governments
and dogmatic institutions everywhere have reasons to be
opposed to Wikipedia. … We, the creators of Wikipedia,
trust readers’ competence to form their own opinions
themselves. Texts that present the merits of multiple
viewpoints fairly, without demanding that the reader accept
any one of them, are liberating. [Wikipedia 2001]
You probably won’t believe in the Wikipedia unless you try it, but
the process works. The process works because more and more
people are taking seriously their obligations as participants to the
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
54
community as a whole: not everyone does so yet; we can see
various flame wars as people with very different politics and
ethics interact within the same knowledge communities. Such
disputes often foreground those conflicting assumptions, forcing
people to reflect more deeply on their choices. What was once
taken for granted must now be articulated. What emerges might
be called a moral economy of information: that is, a sense of the
mutual obligations and shared expectations about what constitutes
good citizenship within a knowledge community.
References for this reading
Marcia Allas, e-mail interview with [Henry Jenkins],
[Autumn] 2003.
Kimberly M. De Vries, “A Tart Point of View: Building a
Community of Resistance Online,” presented at Media in
Transition 2: Globalization and Convergence, MIT, Cambridge,
Mass., May 10–12, 2002.
Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (New York:
Tor, 2003).
Warren Ellis [2004], “Global Frequency: An introduction,” http://
www.warrenellis.com/gf.html.
[Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N. (2002) Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York, Pantheon
Books.]
[McChesney, R. (1999) Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication
Politics in Dubious Times, Champaign, University of Illinois Press.]
[Miller, M. C. (2005) Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral
Reform, New York, Basic Books.]
Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New
York: Basic Books, 2003).
“Neutral point of view,” Wikipedia [2001], http://www.
infowrangler.com/phpwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:
Neutral_point-of/view.
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
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Reading B: Social media in the sixteenth century:
how Luther went viral
Tom Standage
Source: Standage, T. (2011) ‘Social media in the 16th century: how Lutherwent viral’, The Economist, 17 December [Online]. Available at www.economist.com/node/21541719 (Accessed 24 April 2014).
Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social
media helped bring about the Reformation
IT IS a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering
discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an
authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their
solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message
spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to
suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for
revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology
and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous
efforts had failed.
That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened
during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther
and his allies took the new media of their day – pamphlets,
ballads and woodcuts – and circulated them through social
networks to promote their message of religious reform.
Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed
media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support
for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of
printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of
this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms
of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the
role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating
public opinion in the Reformation.
Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running
debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing
press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the
wider system of media sharing along social networks – what is
called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries,
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
56
grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very
quickly, and saw how it could spread his message.
New post from Martin Luther
The start of the Reformation is usually dated to Luther’s nailing
of his “95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” to
the church door in Wittenberg on October 31st 1517. The “95
Theses” were propositions written in Latin that he wished to
discuss, in the academic custom of the day, in an open debate at
the university. Luther, then an obscure theologian and minister,
was outraged by the behaviour of Johann Tetzel, a Dominican
friar who was selling indulgences to raise money to fund the pet
project of his boss, Pope Leo X: the reconstruction of St Peter’s
Basilica in Rome. Hand over your money, went Tetzel’s sales
pitch, and you can ensure that your dead relatives are not stuck in
purgatory. This crude commercialisation of the doctrine of
indulgences, encapsulated in Tetzel’s slogan – “As soon as the
coin in the coffer rings, so the soul from purgatory springs” –
was, to Luther, “the pious defrauding of the faithful” and a
glaring symptom of the need for broad reform. Pinning a list of
propositions to the church door, which doubled as the university
notice board, was a standard way to announce a public debate.
Although they were written in Latin, the “95 Theses” caused an
immediate stir, first within academic circles in Wittenberg and
then farther afield. In December 1517 printed editions of the
theses, in the form of pamphlets and broadsheets, appeared
simultaneously in Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel, paid for by
Luther’s friends to whom he had sent copies. German
translations, which could be read by a wider public than Latin-
speaking academics and clergy, soon followed and quickly spread
throughout the German-speaking lands. Luther’s friend Friedrich
Myconius later wrote that “hardly 14 days had passed when these
propositions were known throughout Germany and within four
weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar with them.”
The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted
Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to
another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed
and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in
March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
57
German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin
and then translating it into German was not the best way to
address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have
spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was
going to happen.” For the publication later that month of his
“Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, he switched to German,
avoiding regional vocabulary to ensure that his words were
intelligible from the Rhineland to Saxony. The pamphlet, an
instant hit, is regarded by many as the true starting point of the
Reformation.
The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept
at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem
of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a
decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution,
deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing
and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to
participants in such systems as a “networked public”, rather than
an “audience”, since they do more than just consume
information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a
friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to
ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany.
Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a
pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial
edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
58
Mubarak and Leo X, the anciens régimes
spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther’s
sympathisers recommended it to their friends. Booksellers
promoted it and itinerant colporteurs hawked it. Travelling
merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other
towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would
quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in
the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would
thus spread quickly without its author’s involvement.
As with “Likes” and retweets today, the number of reprints serves
as an indicator of a given item’s popularity. Luther’s pamphlets
were the most sought after; a contemporary remarked that they
“were not so much sold as seized”. His first pamphlet written in
German, the “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, was reprinted
14 times in 1518 alone, in print runs of at least 1,000 copies each
time. Of the 6,000 different pamphlets that were published in
German-speaking lands between 1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were
editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In all, some 6m–7m
pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the Reformation,
more than a quarter of them Luther’s.
Although Luther was the most prolific and popular author, there
were many others on both sides of the debate. Tetzel, the
indulgence-seller, was one of the first to respond to him in print,
firing back with his own collection of theses. Others embraced
the new pamphlet format to weigh in on the merits of Luther’s
arguments, both for and against, like argumentative bloggers.
Sylvester Mazzolini defended the pope against Luther in his
“Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Theses of Martin Luther”.
He called Luther “a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of
iron” and dismissed his arguments on the basis of papal
infallibility. Luther, who refused to let any challenge go
unanswered, took a mere two days to produce his own pamphlet
in response, giving as good as he got. “I am sorry now that I
despised Tetzel,” he wrote. “Ridiculous as he was, he was more
acute than you. You cite no scripture. You give no reasons.”
Being able to follow and discuss such back-and-forth exchanges
of views, in which each author quoted his opponent’s words in
order to dispute them, gave people a thrilling and unprecedented
sense of participation in a vast, distributed debate. Arguments in
their own social circles about the merits of Luther’s views could
be seen as part of a far wider discourse, both spoken and printed.
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
59
Many pamphlets called upon the reader to discuss their contents
with others and read them aloud to the illiterate. People read and
discussed pamphlets at home with their families, in groups with
their friends, and in inns and taverns. Luther’s pamphlets were
read out at spinning bees in Saxony and in bakeries in Tyrol. In
some cases entire guilds of weavers or leather-workers in
particular towns declared themselves supporters of the
Reformation, indicating that Luther’s ideas were being propagated
in the workplace. One observer remarked in 1523 that better
sermons could be heard in the inns of Ulm than in its churches,
and in Basel in 1524 there were complaints about people
preaching from books and pamphlets in the town’s taverns.
Contributors to the debate ranged from the English king Henry
VIII, whose treatise attacking Luther (co-written with Thomas
More) earned him the title “Defender of the Faith” from the
pope, to Hans Sachs, a shoemaker from Nuremberg who wrote a
series of hugely popular songs in support of Luther.
A multimedia campaign
It was not just words that travelled along the social networks of
the Reformation era, but music and images too. The news ballad,
like the pamphlet, was a relatively new form of media. It set a
poetic and often exaggerated description of contemporary events
to a familiar tune so that it could be easily learned, sung and
taught to others. News ballads were often “contrafacta” that
deliberately mashed up a pious melody with secular or even
profane lyrics. They were distributed in the form of printed lyric
sheets, with a note to indicate which tune they should be sung to.
Once learned they could spread even among the illiterate through
the practice of communal singing.
Both reformers and Catholics used this new form to spread
information and attack their enemies. “We are Starting to Sing a
New Song”, Luther’s first venture into the news-ballad genre, told
the story of two monks who had been executed in Brussels in
1523 after refusing to recant their Lutheran beliefs. Luther’s
enemies denounced him as the Antichrist in song, while his
supporters did the same for the pope and insulted Catholic
theologians (“Goat, desist with your bleating”, one of them was
admonished). Luther himself is thought to have been the author
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
60
of “Now We Drive Out the Pope”, a parody of a folk song called
“Now We Drive Out Winter”, whose tune it borrowed:
Now we drive out the pope
from Christ’s church and God’s house.
Therein he has reigned in a deadly fashion
and has seduced uncountably many souls.
Now move along , you damned son,
you Whore of Babylon. You are the abomination and the
Antichrist,
full of lies, death and cunning.
Woodcuts were another form of propaganda. The combination of
bold graphics with a smattering of text, printed as a broadsheet,
could convey messages to the illiterate or semi-literate and serve
as a visual aid for preachers. Luther remarked that “without
images we can neither think nor understand anything.” Some
religious woodcuts were elaborate, with complex allusions and
layers of meaning that would only have been apparent to the well-
educated. “Passional Christi und Antichristi”, for example, was a
series of images contrasting the piety of Christ with the
decadence and corruption of the pope. Some were astonishingly
crude and graphic, such as “The Origin of the Monks” (see
picture), showing three devils excreting a pile of monks. The best
of them were produced by Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach.
Luther’s opponents responded with woodcuts of their own:
“Luther’s Game of Heresy” … depicts him boiling up a stew with
the help of three devils, producing fumes from the pot labelled
falsehood, pride, envy, heresy and so forth.
Amid the barrage of pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts, public
opinion was clearly moving in Luther’s favour. “Idle chatter and
inappropriate books” were corrupting the people, fretted one
bishop. “Daily there is a veritable downpour of Lutheran tracts in
German and Latin…nothing is sold here except the tracts of
Luther,” lamented Aleander, Leo X’s envoy to Germany, in 1521.
Most of the 60 or so clerics who rallied to the pope’s defence did
so in academic and impenetrable Latin, the traditional language of
theology, rather than in German. Where Luther’s works spread
like wildfire, their pamphlets fizzled. Attempts at censorship
failed, too. Printers in Leipzig were banned from publishing or
selling anything by Luther or his allies, but material printed
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
61
elsewhere still flowed into the city. The city council complained to
the Duke of Saxony that printers faced losing “house, home, and
all their livelihood” because “that which one would gladly sell,
and for which there is demand, they are not allowed to have or
sell.” What they had was lots of Catholic pamphlets, “but what
they have in over-abundance is desired by no one and cannot
even be given away.”
Luther’s enemies likened the spread of his ideas to a sickness. The
papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication in 1520 said
its aim was “to cut off the advance of this plague and cancerous
disease so it will not spread any further”. The Edict of Worms in
1521 warned that the spread of Luther’s message had to be
prevented, otherwise “the whole German nation, and later all
other nations, will be infected by this same disorder.” But it was
too late – the infection had taken hold in Germany and beyond.
To use the modern idiom, Luther’s message had gone viral.
From Wittenberg to Facebook
In the early years of the Reformation expressing support for
Luther’s views, through preaching, recommending a pamphlet or
singing a news ballad directed at the pope, was dangerous. By
stamping out isolated outbreaks of opposition swiftly, autocratic
regimes discourage their opponents from speaking out and linking
up. A collective-action problem thus arises when people are
dissatisfied, but are unsure how widely their dissatisfaction is
shared, as Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of
North Carolina, has observed in connection with the Arab spring.
The dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, she argues, survived for
as long as they did because although many people deeply disliked
those regimes, they could not be sure others felt the same way.
Amid the outbreaks of unrest in early 2011, however, social-media
websites enabled lots of people to signal their preferences en
masse to their peers very quickly, in an “informational cascade”
that created momentum for further action.
The same thing happened in the Reformation. The surge in the
popularity of pamphlets in 1523–24, the vast majority of them in
favour of reform, served as a collective signalling mechanism. As
Andrew Pettegree, an expert on the Reformation at St Andrew’s
University, puts it in “Reformation and the Culture of
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
62
Persuasion”, “It was the superabundance, the cascade of titles,
that created the impression of an overwhelming tide, an
unstoppable movement of opinion…Pamphlets and their
purchasers had together created the impression of irresistible
force.” Although Luther had been declared a heretic in 1521, and
owning or reading his works was banned by the church, the
extent of local political and popular support for Luther meant he
escaped execution and the Reformation became established in
much of Germany.
Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than
previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of
superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under
the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who
has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary
France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in
the present have produced a false consciousness about the past –
even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing
of importance to consider before the days of television and the
internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the
continuation of a long tradition. Modern digital networks may be
able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of
media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution.
Chapter 1 Politics, creativity and language: an intimate relationship
63
Where monks came from, in the Lutherans’ view
Today’s social-media systems do not just connect us to each
other: they also link us to the past.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
64
Chapter 2 Creativity in political
discourse
Theresa Lillis
2.1 Introduction
This chapter will explore the different kinds of linguistic and semiotic
creativity that are used in political discourse. Of course, this
immediately raises the questions: What do we mean by ‘linguistic and
semiotic creativity’? and, What do we consider to be ‘political’
discourse? Further questions explored across the chapter are: Why are
particular kinds of linguistic and semiotic creativity used in political
discourse? What effects do they have? On whom? With what
consequences?
Activity 2.1
Allow about 30 minutes
In order to begin to think about these questions, look at the five
examples below and consider the following:
. In what ways might each of these be considered examples of political
discourse?
. In what ways would you consider the examples to be creative?
. How might you go about analysing these examples: for example,
what type of analytic tools could usefully be applied to each?
Example 1
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a
place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the
dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions
the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
(Cited in Crystal, 2008)
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
65
Example 2
Example 3
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
66
Figure 2.1 No dash for gas
Figure 2.2 Demonstration, Banco de Espaňa
Example 4
Figure 2.3 ‘Trickle down’ meme
Example 5
Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping soundWhen the spade sinks into gravelly ground:My father, digging. I look down.
(Heaney, 1990 [1966], p. 1 )
Discussion
Examples 1, 2, 3 and 4 are identifiable as political discourse in that they
each reflect an engagement with social concerns and offer a particular
position on these. Examples 2, 3 and 4 are more oppositional,
challenging established positions, whereas Example 1 seeks rather to
reinforce an existing position. Example 1 is an example of the more
traditional political discourse, probably easily recognisable as an extract
from a prepared political speech because of its particular verbal style – a
long propositional utterance (45 words), the three-part structure to the
embedded questions and the rhetorical strategy of opening up the
possibility of negation or doubt (rhetorical question) only to end by
indicating that what is to follow will challenge such doubt. It is an extract
from the celebration speech made by Barack Obama after being elected
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
67
as US president in 2008. This opening extract is an emotional appeal,
more strongly evident in the performance of the speech than in the
written verbal extract here. The comments made in the opening speech
are premised on several presuppositions: that democracy is a good thing
and that those talking and listening have a shared sense of history.
There is also a familiar narrative at work here about America as a place
where dreams can come true – a place where all things are possible.
Example 2 is an example from an online newspaper, showing an image
of a demonstrator and her campaigning placard, as well as the
reproduction of the slogan of the campaign against ‘shale gas’ or
fracking: ‘No dash for gas’. In contrast to Example 4, and in a tradition
we might recognise as objective news reporting, the article is not
seeking to explicitly subvert the image or slogan. However, the reporting
of any event always involves positionality or stance, and it is evident
here in a number of ways. The photographic image is full of contrasts
that include, but go beyond, a simple recording of the encounter
between campaigners and the police. Contrasts that stand out to me
include: female/male; sitting/standing; full body/torso and legs; bare
arms/fully clothed; white/black; light/dark. The image might be the result
of a practical decision: perhaps it was only possible, for a range of
reasons, to get this shot. Or perhaps the image was the result of
aesthetic considerations, where the photographer chose to create an
image with multiple aesthetic contrasts, with perhaps the main thematic
one being a contrast between human agency – through, literally, the face
of the campaigner – in contrast to a faceless constraining institution.
Example 3 is a photograph showing a participant in a demonstration in
Madrid, Spain, the location identifiable from the metro sign shown. The
protestor is wearing a T-shirt with the wording Una Vez Yo Tuve
Derechos sociales y laborales (‘Once I had social and workplace rights’).
This T-shirt illustrates an example of copying-with-modification – or
remixing. Here the commercial ‘English’ YouTube brand is reversioned
as Yo Tuve, playing with the similarity in sound (phonemes) and look
(graphemes/orthography/colour/shape) between the ‘English’ brand and
the Spanish words. This is a commercially produced T-shirt, by one of
the major Spanish unions, Comisiones Obreras (CCOO): a designer
working for CCOO clearly decided to play with this brand logo,
presumably not only to enhance the propositional meaning of the
political commentary, but also simply for fun. It’s interesting to note here
what this image suggests about the relationship between participation,
observation and (re)representation in contemporary society: the image
shows the person in the foreground and another in the background
participating in an event while also simultaneously recording the event,
taking photos or videos, some of which are likely to have been
distributed via different media. The question of participation and
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
68
production is a key theme across this book, already discussed in
Chapter 1, and one I return to later with regard to ‘grass-roots’ political
activity and public space.
Example 4 is an instance of the phenomenon often currently referred to
as ‘memes’, where content of some kind – a text, a film, an image, a
sound – is widely circulated (currently via the internet but this is part of
longer traditions of (re)distribution) with the intended meaning of a text,
or part of a text, disrupted, challenged or played with in some way (I
consider critical comments on the use of the term ‘meme’ below). This
can happen, for example, by modifying an existing visual image, adding
a verbal caption or gloss to an image – as in the example here – or
changing the content of the verbal interaction in a film. All these
transformations can be repeated. The meaning of the original image in
Example 4, showing a group of middle-aged men in suits laughing
(perhaps recognisable to some audiences as senior US politicians),
takes on a critical edge through the verbal gloss which offers a particular
interpretation of what they are laughing about – the well-worn metaphor
of ‘trickle down’ for signalling a process of political and social change;
and who they are laughing at – ‘them’. Here, again, contrasts are played
with ‘us’ and ‘them’: as a reader I infer that the ‘them’ being laughed at
here includes me as part of the general public for believing such a
notion (see Fairclough and Fairclough, 2013, p. 184, for newspaper
readers’ posts criticising the discourse of ‘trickle down’ economics).
Perhaps Example 5 is the least ‘political’ in the sense we have been
using so far, in that it is not concerning itself with commentary on social
issues or adopting a position on issues of obvious public concern (see
definitions of ‘political’ in Chapter 1). It is an extract from a poem, most
obviously recognised as such through the layout, the use of rhyme and
simile, and the surprising juxtaposition (an example of linguistic
‘deviation’, see Chapter 3, Section 3.2) of ‘snug’ and ‘gun’. However, this
poem, written by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, can be seen as political
in the broadest sense of the term – in the choice of subject and the
orientation towards the subject. I would argue that by choosing to make
digging the focus of a poem, the poet is making a particular social
comment, most obviously signalling the cultural valuing of physical
labour. The full version reflects the poet’s aesthetic appreciation of such
labour.
In this chapter you will explore and analyse different kinds of linguistic
and semiotic resources that are used for political purposes, and
consider the extent and ways in which they are used ‘creatively’. As is
discussed throughout this book, ‘creativity’ is a value-laden term often
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
69
reserved for particularly socially prestigious texts, objects and
performances and strongly critiqued for this reason (see Carter, 2004;
Pope, 2005; Swann et al., 2011) on the grounds that creativity is far
more pervasive in everyday life than this restricted use implies.
‘Creative/-ity’ as a notion is increasingly being used in sociolinguistics
and studies of communication to characterise a wide range of everyday
linguistic practice, the considerable productive activity taking place
using new technologies and the mixing and meshing of languages and
modes.
This chapter focuses on exploring creativity in political discourse in
three ways:
1 At the level of creation or production. To consider the array of
semiotic and linguistic resources that are used to create or produce
political discourse, paying particular attention to those features
which have an aesthetic dimension or appeal; that is, they are
intended as, or are taken up as, beautiful, pleasing, fun(ny),
interesting, unusual, surprising, shocking. I would consider all the
examples discussed in Activity 2.1 to be creative in this sense.
2 At the level of purpose. To consider why particular kinds of creativity
are used in political discourse or for political purposes. Of course,
it is not possible to know producers’ purposes by looking at their
products alone, but they all involve an aspect of persuasion,
wanting to convince the audience of particular views and
perspectives. However, they do so in different ways, through style,
humour, language and image. They may also have a moral or ethical
purpose and, indeed, some theorists emphasise the moral purpose
of all aesthetic production (for an overview, see Schellekens, 2008).
3 At the level of value and impact. To consider whether different kinds
and instances of creativity in political discourse have different value
for political engagement. That is, to consider the extent to which
and ways in which they enable, facilitate, affect, influence and shape
people’s involvement and engagement in social and public life and
governance. Throughout the chapter you will consider the value of
different kinds of linguistic and semiotic activity in and for political
discourse.
Before turning to further examples of political discourse, first you will
be introduced briefly to some of the tools and approaches that are
available to us for analysing creativity in political discourse and
illustrated in this chapter. Developing an adequate set of tools for
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
70
description and analysis is a key challenge we face when seeking to
understand any linguistic and semiotic phenomenon.
2.2 Analysing creativity in political discourse
How do we describe and analyse the type of phenomena we have just
considered in Activity 2.1? In the descriptions of the examples so far,
you will have noticed the use of terms and categories drawn from a
number of interrelated fields of language study. The text that follows
outlines several key approaches that are evident in the discussion above
and which will be used throughout this chapter.
Discourse is an overarching term to refer to specific instances of
language use in their social and historical context. The use of
‘discourse’ to describe language reflects the view that language is always
historically situated and represents particular ways of being in the
world, or particular ways of representing knowledge. As stated above, it
is useful to conceptualise all the examples or instances of political texts
in Activity 2.1 as ‘discourse’. Given the use of a range of semiotic
resources or modes in most instances of communication, it is also
important to conceptualise discourse as a potentially multimodal
phenomenon (rather than purely linguistic). Later in the chapter, you
will consider an example of critical discourse analysis (CDA), which
involves paying particular attention to uncovering hidden or ideological
intention in texts. An example of this is Example 1 in Activity 2.1
where I commented on what the extract presupposed rather than what
was stated. Intertextuality is an important notion here (Bakhtin, 1981
[1935]; Kristeva, 1986), referring to the ways in which all language use
is connected to existing and prior language use, and presupposition is
one important aspect of intertextuality.
Social semiotics is the study of signs in society and how they are
used in and for communication. In this chapter this includes attention
to language but also to other signs or modes. So, for example, you will
have noticed that in commenting on Example 4, I implicitly suggested
a link between middle-aged men in suits and power – precisely because
signs, such as suits, may often index power in certain socio-historical
contexts. This particular sign, like all signs, is both referential – that
is, referring to a specific object or phenomenon, here they are wearing
suits – and indexical – that is, pointing to a particular social meaning
associated with a particular object, here the wearing of suits signals
formality and (again depending on the specific context) power,
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
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authority. You may be able to think of the ways in which other signs in
the examples index particular social meanings: for instance, what does
the image of the sitting demonstrator index? What does the verbal
reference to ‘dream’ index?
Multimodality is an approach to communication which draws on
social semiotics to foreground the range of modes in any act of
communication. Whereas linguists have tended to focus only on the
verbal dimension, researchers in multimodality point to the multimodal
nature of communication, paying attention to images, colour, shape
and material. Mode is used to refer to different aspects of the material
nature of communication, such as spoken, written, visual and aural.
The significance of the different modal elements has been
foregrounded above, as in Example 2 where I commented on not only
the juxtaposition of verbal language and image, but also the particular
contrasts set up in the image.
Rhetoric is concerned with the study of how texts persuade and, in
many ways, underpins much contemporary analytic work on political
discourse. This chapter draws on some of the more obvious classical
rhetorical categories of different kinds of ‘appeal’ or persuasion: logos
(using reasoned argument), pathos (using emotional appeal) and ethos
(appealing to the good reputation of the speaker), of which the latter
two are evident in Example 1 (and the first is evident in the speech as
a whole) and are discussed below (see also Chapter 1).
Stylistics provides an array of categories for describing and analysing
verbal language in written texts. While many of these were developed
in relation to literary texts, they are increasingly used when analysing a
whole range of texts and language uses. In the examples here we can,
for example, identify the following stylistic features: metaphor
(e.g. ‘trickle down’), simile (e.g. ‘snug as a gun’), rhyme (‘sound’/
‘ground’), assonance (‘No dash for gas’) and multilingual phonemic and
graphemic play (Yo Tuve).
Aesthetics refers to the study of beauty, but also includes the study of
‘taste’ – what people like, dislike, recognise as beautiful, artful, etc. –
with a recognition that ‘taste’ is very much a social phenomenon and
that particular tastes may reflect and enact particular moral or ethical
values. As you read this chapter it will be important to reflect on your
own ‘tastes’, why your tastes are as they are and whether you think
that particular aesthetic practices have particular ethical, moral or
political significance.
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While analysts often draw on one particular analytic approach, there is
a wealth of tools for us to use in analysing creativity in political
discourse. The rest of this chapter continues to draw on the range of
approaches summarised here, starting in the next section with the use
of specific tools for analysing political speeches.
2.3 Political speeches
Formal speeches have played a key role in political activity, and the
study of the artful design and take-up of such speeches (or particular
aspects of them) has a long history, with (as discussed in Chapter 1)
Aristotle’s Rhetoric (2004 [350 BCE]) commonly cited as a highly
influential early text. The different types of rhetorical discourse
categorised and deployed in classical rhetoric are still used and
recognised in political speeches today, and the study of political speech
has continued to attract significant academic attention. This section will
illustrate how categories from stylistics, rhetoric and critical discourse
analysis are used to analyse political speeches.
Activity 2.2
Allow about 1 hour
Turn to Reading A, ‘On Obama’s victory style’ by David Crystal, at the
end of this chapter. Read the extracts from David Crystal’s blog on
Barack Obama’s celebration speech, given in November 2008. You have
already read the opening of this speech in the previous activity
(Example 1). As you read, consider which particular analytic tools
Crystal uses to analyse the speech. What other analytic tools do you
think could have been used?
Discussion
Crystal draws on stylistics and rhetoric to analyse the speech. Pointing
to specific features – utterances in groups of three, structural parallelism,
‘pairs’ structures, following the ‘rule of seven’, similar lengths of
utterances in each paragraph, moving from the general to the particular,
invoking a well-repeated response from the audience, making a powerful
intertextual reference – Crystal makes visible the stylistic mechanisms
which made the speech successful. Of course here he is focusing
explicitly on the verbal dimension, although he signals that other
semiotic and modal dimensions were important, through his mention, for
example, of Obama’s performance: ‘You have to put it across right, of
course, with an appropriate prosodic climax. Obama is brilliant at that
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
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too.’ Considerable attention has been paid to Obama’s speech making
and performance, and much commentary has focused on how he as a
handsome, young black man, the first black president of the USA, has
negotiated prevailing stereotypes of black masculinity (see, for example,
Hoston, 2014).
What’s striking to me about Crystal’s blog – and of course this is a more
personal and informal genre than, for example, an academic article – is
his obvious enjoyment of the speech. As a reader you get a sense of his
personal experience of the speech, his concern that Obama might not
pull it off and his own pleasure that he does (‘it blew me away’, ‘it was
real daring’).
What also strikes me about Crystal’s analysis is that he seems happy to
identify the features which he explicitly notes are pre-scripted and
therefore consciously designed (‘the speech-writers had a trick up their
sleeve’) without expressing concern about whether the use of such
features amounted to manipulation of any kind. This is presumably
because he considers Obama to be a ‘good’ man: thus, the stylistic
features that Crystal identifies as contributing to the persuasive force of
the speech – logos (reasoned proof) and pathos (emotional appeal) –
are successful (from the perspective of Crystal and many millions of
others) because of the third persuasive force, ethos (appeal to the good
reputation of the speaker).
Crystal’s positive appraisal of Obama’s speech contrasts with
widespread scepticism about the conscious use of language and
rhetorical devices by politicians to persuade, manipulate or deceive.
There has long since been mistrust – from Socrates to modern-day
publics – of the words and intentions of politicians, evident currently
in terms such as ‘spin’ and ‘spin doctors’ and indeed the pejorative
meaning attached to the term ‘propaganda’ (see Jowett and
O’Donnell, 2006). Concern about how language is used to represent
reality in order to persuade or manipulate an audience is central to
CDA. Within this approach, a key concern is not only to identify the
stylistic–rhetorical features of discourse, but also to make visible the
ideological intent or effect of such features.
Activity 2.3
Allow about 25 minutes
Read the extract below, from a speech given by Tony Blair, UK Prime
Minister from 1997 to 2007, and an analysis of the extract by Norman
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
74
Fairclough. This is part of Fairclough’s larger analysis of the discourse of
‘New Labour’, a political programme claiming to transform traditional
Labour party politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As you
read, consider the following questions:
. Which stylistic and linguistic features does Fairclough identify?
. How might the analysis of this specific speech contribute to making
visible the ideological orientation of a particular political party at a
specific historical moment?
Extract from a speech by Tony Blair
I believe in this country, in its people and our capacity to renew
Britain for the age in which we live.
We all know this is a world of dramatic change. In technology; in
trade; in media and communications; in the new global economy
refashioning our industries and capital markets. In society; in family
structure; in communities; in life styles.
Add to this change that sweeps the world, the changes that Britain
itself has seen in the 20th century – the end of Empire, the toil of
two world wars, the reshaping of our business and employment
with the decline of traditional industries – and it is easy to see why
national renewal is so important. Talk of a modern Britain is not
about disowning our past. We are proud of our history. This is
simply a recognition of the challenge the modern world poses.
The choice is: to let change overwhelm us, to resist it or equip
ourselves to survive and prosper in it. The first leads to a
fragmented society. The second is pointless and futile, trying to
keep the clock from turning. The only way is surely to analyse the
challenge of change and to meet it. When I talk of a third way –
between the old-style intervention of the old left and the laissez-
faire of the new right – I do not mean a soggy compromise in the
middle. I mean avowing there is a role for government, for
teamwork and partnership. But it must be a role for today’s world.
Not about picking winners, state subsidies, heavy regulation; but
about education, infrastructure, promoting investment, helping small
business and entrepreneurs and fairness. To make Britain more
competitive, better at generating wealth, but do it on a basis that
serves the needs of the whole nation – one nation. This is a policy
that is unashamedly long-termist. Competing on quality can’t be
done by Government alone. The whole nation must put its shoulder
to the wheel.
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
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[Extract from analysis by Norman Fairclough]
There are various processes and social actors represented here,
[…] but I focus first on processes involving agents of a more
abstract and impersonal character in the global economy: ‘the new
global economy refashioning our industries’, ‘change that sweeps
the world’, ‘to let change overwhelm us, to resist it or to equip
ourselves to survive and prosper in it’, ‘the challenge the modern
world poses’. Notice the metaphorical character of these processes:
‘change’ is successively metaphorised as something like a tidal
wave (‘change that sweeps the world’, ‘let change overwhelm us’),
implying inevitability; as a person or group to ‘resist’; and as a
place we can ‘survive’ and ‘prosper’ in. And the ‘modern world’ is
personalised as someone who ‘poses challenges’. The inevitability
of change is also implicit in the representation of resistance as
‘trying to keep the clock from turning’ – ‘change’ is as inevitable as
the passage of time.
Although change is most obviously seen as a complex set of
processes, it is not represented here as a process but rather as a
causal entity in other processes. It is ‘nominalised’, the word
‘change’ is used not as a verb but as a noun. Nominalisation
involves abstraction from the diversity of processes going on, no
specification of who or what is changing, a backgrounding of the
processes of change themselves, and a foregrounding of their
effect. In backgrounding the processes themselves, nominalisation
also backgrounds questions of agency and causality, of who or
what causes change. Yet many of the changes listed have been
substantively contributed to by decisions on the part of business …
and governments to act in one way rather than another, for
instance in negotiating multilateral agreements on trade and the
movement of capital. The absence of responsible agents further
contributes to constructing change as inevitable. And one effect of
the lists of changes in the third and fourth sentences (beginning ‘In
technology …’) is to iron out important distinctions in this regard –
changes in ‘family structure’ are more adequately represented as
changes without responsible agents than changes in ‘trade’.
(Fairclough, 2000, pp. 25–7)
Discussion
Fairclough points to a range of linguistic and stylistic features which he
argues serve to create a particular world view. These include transitivity
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
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and grammatical metaphor, or ‘nominalisation’ (see Fairclough, 2000, for
full analysis). Fairclough argues that these features serve to background
the agents behind the changes mentioned, making the specific changes
mentioned seem inevitable and therefore unstoppable. The ways in
which key social changes are marked as inevitable is, Fairclough
argues, a key feature of the discourse of ‘New Labour’, standing in
contrast to an older Labour party discourse which foregrounded cause
and effect and thus opened up spaces for people to challenge
(Fairclough, 2000).
It is useful at this point to consider one of the questions raised at the
beginning of this chapter: why are particular kinds of creativity used in
political discourse? The answer in part depends on the different
positions and interests of analysts. The stylistic analysis of a political
speech by Crystal is perhaps similar to Formalist approaches to texts
conventionally acknowledged as ‘creative’ (literary works) in that his
goal seems to be to identify the formal features that make the text
‘work’ (for a definition of Formalist approaches, see Swann et al., 2004,
p. 115). Likewise, Fairclough and CDA analysts focus on the formal
features of texts, including categories which are commonly considered
to be creative, such as metaphor. However, in CDA the purpose of
identifying such features is not to celebrate artfulness, but to show
how such artfulness might be being used to offer particular
representations of reality, and indeed to manipulate truth in order to
sustain particular ideologies and political activity. Analysing the range
of features is important to the goal of identifying what version of
political reality is being represented and, thus, the type of political
understandings or action these may constrain or enable.
It is also important to note that in CDA, ‘creativity’ is valued but is
used in a specific way. Creativity is rarely used as a positively loaded
notion to categorise features of text or to praise the skills of an
author/performer. It is used to signal possibilities for discursive
change: that is, the ways in which people seek to use discourse to
transform dominant ideologies and practices:
The immediate origins and motivations of change in the
discursive event lie in the problematization of conventions for
producers or interpreters, which can happen in a variety of ways.
For example, the problematization of conventions for interaction
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
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between women and men is a widespread experience in various
institutions and domains. Such problematizations have their bases
in contradictions – contradictions in this case between traditional
gendered subject positions into which many of us were socialized,
and new gender relations. … When problematizations arise,
people are faced with what Billig et al. (1988) call ‘dilemmas’.
They often try to resolve these dilemmas by being innovative and
creative, by adapting existing conventions in new ways, and so
contributing to discursive change. The inherent intertextuality and
therefore historicity of text production and interpretation …
builds creativity in as an option. Change involves forms of
transgression, crossing boundaries, such as putting together
existing conventions in new combinations, or drawing upon
conventions in situations which usually preclude them.
(Fairclough, 1992, p. 96, emphasis added)
The last sentence in the quotation above signals that creativity consists
of using conventions in unusual or transgressive ways, and to this
extent Fairclough’s use of ‘creative/-ity’ seems to mirror common
definitions of creativity which foreground ‘novelty’ (see Chapter 1).
However, ‘novelty’ is valued to the extent that it enables discursive and
therefore political change. The aesthetic value of creative or
transgressive practices is usually backgrounded in CDA of political
discourse. Yet, as illustrated in the following section, the aesthetic
dimension to discursive and political change clearly has a strong value
for participants, and is increasingly evident in many types of popular
political activity.
2.4 Grass-roots political activity
In the previous section you considered some examples of pre-scripted
speeches by major politicians, and the semiotic resources that are used.
This section focuses on what is often referred to as ‘grass-roots’
political discourse: that is, discourse from popular campaigns
challenging mainstream dominant political programmes or ideologies.
In recent years, such public demonstrations have taken the form of
‘occupations’, literally occupying key locations in cities around the
world, often large squares where people can congregate and express
dissent. In terms of focus, participation and production, these public
demonstrations are both local and global, with people participating in
local events often seeing themselves as part of globalised movements,
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
78
notably the Occupy movement. The explicit goal of Occupy is to
transform society:
since we can no longer trust our elected officials to represent
anyone other than their wealthiest donors, we need real people to
create real change from the bottom up.
(#OCCUPYTOGETHER, 2013)
Occupy involve people from around the world in their demonstrations
and concerns, with estimated calculations of the number of cities
involved in Occupy-related protests standing at between 750 and 950
in late 2011 (Rogers, 2011).
Such demonstrations involve a wide range of linguistic and semiotic
practices: in the immediate physical context where occupations take
place such practices include the circulation of informational or
propositional content – maps, health and safety information, schedules
– and the organisation of opportunities for debate through public
assemblies, for example, discussing both immediate actions and also
larger political issues. But what is also striking about these public
demonstrations is the strong creative–aesthetic dimension: this is
evident in the design and play of public signage in the form of
handheld banners, decorations of the self or public buildings,
performance (such as theatre and dancing), the use of classical poetry
and popular music. The examples below show just some from the
range of ways in which people play with linguistic and semiotic
resources for grass-roots political purposes, and in which explicit – or
‘manifest’ (Fairclough, 1992, p. 117) – intertextuality is central. The
image in Figure 2.4 is taken from many examples provided by Liesbeth
Zack (2012) on humour in the Egyptian demonstrations of 2011,
referred to as the ‘laughing revolution’ because of the considerable
propensity for humour even in the most violent of circumstances.
Samia Mehrez, for example, reports that after hundreds of
demonstrators were deliberately shot in the face by the Central Security
Forces in January 2011, and again the following November, social
media groups circulated a joke that the digital smiley sign ‘:)’ would
now be changed to ‘.)’ to signal the loss or damage to eyes (Mehrez,
2012, p. 18).
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
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Figure 2.4 Expiry date (Source: Zack, 2012, p. 725)
Figure 2.5 is an image taken from occupations in Madrid in the square
Puerta de Sol, where the name of the square, Sol (sun), is used as a
metaphor for hope and change and, in this example, is built into the
wording Sol-ucion to the economic and political crisis. It is also used
alongside Arabic script which indexes at least two levels of meaning:
(1) participation of local Arab migrants in Spanish protests; and (2)
popular global revolution indexed by the use of Arabic script.
Figure 2.6 shows how covering buildings and advertising hoardings are
used in another context to resignify a main square – as belonging to
the public rather than the central government or authority. Figure 2.7
shows the body as a resource for and site of public signage.
Figure 2.5 Sol-revolution (Source: Martín-Rojo, 2014, p. 643)
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
80
Figure 2.6 Large banners covering buildings
Figure 2.7 ‘I beg you leave’ (Source: Gribbon and Hawas, 2012, p. 129)
Researchers focusing on public protests signal the relationship between
space, creative practice and political participation – how reconfiguring the
public space opens up different ways of meaning making or
semiotising such space. Some of these mark the space in very obvious
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
81
ways, as in Figure 2.5. Martín-Rojo (2014), writing about the Indignados
movement in Spain (for further details see Hesserl, 2011), and the
occupations of major Spanish cities such as Madrid, explains the
political significance of such occupation:
Squares are the nerve centres of many cities, their physical and
symbolic core, as well as the centre of power, where we find
churches, town halls, the head offices of banks, clocks that
identify the city, etc. In capitalist cities, the squares are also the
centre of commerce and of the political institutions
(Lefebvre 1968). In fact, siting the protest camps in the nerve
centres of the city contributes to the significance of the messages
of protest, while these in turn transform the urban space and the
experience of its inhabitants. Otherwise we could not grasp the
meaning, in this context, of some of the repeated slogans whose
whole point is to draw attention to their positioning, in front of
or surrounding these vital centres of government and commerce.
This is epitomised in the slogan displayed in Syntagma Square,
Athens: “We are here” (είμαστε εδώ), where here is in the square
in front of the parliament building. The slogan alternates with
“We are in the streets/squares” and “We are everywhere”
(είμαστε παντού) …
(Martin-Rojo, 2014, p. 627)
Activity 2.4
Allow about 1 hour and 45 minutes
Turn to Reading B, ‘Creating a counter-space: Tahrir Square as a
platform for linguistic creativity and political dissent’ by Mariam Aboelezz,
at the end of this chapter.
As you read, consider the following questions:
. What kinds of creative/aesthetic activity are described as taking place
in the occupation of Tahrir Square?
. What does the reading suggest about why people engage in this kind
of creative activity?
. In what ways do you think that the creative discourses contribute to
building the Square as a political ‘counter-space’?
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
82
Discussion
Aboelezz describes a range of creative activity on the Square: poetry,
jokes, banners, chanting, singing, dancing, graffiti and multilingual play.
Modally, the signs tend to be ‘verbal heavy’ (Lillis, 2013, p. 42): that is,
involving substantial amounts of verbal language in several scripts. But
the inscripted verbal signs are at the same time clearly multimodal –
using a range of scripts, colour, shape, size; and are used alongside or
nested within other modes involving different kinds of materials – the
body, buildings, statues, tanks – and as part of different forms of
production, including spontaneous performance as well as the holding,
carrying and wearing of signs.
Aboelezz draws on Lefebvre (1991) to argue that creativity is essential
to create (or recreate) public spaces and to build ‘counter-spaces’ which
serve to challenge the existing political and social order. The view of
creativity here echoes that of Fairclough, discussed above, whereby
discursive creativity as transgression of existing practices is both a
reflection of, and a resource for, social and political change. Aboelezz
points to a number of examples of such transgression: the linguistic
order is challenged by using Egyptian Arabic alongside Standard Arabic;
the political authority is challenged through a range of creative activity, in
particular humour, through parody of political leaders and their actions;
and of course the physical space itself is transgressed and reconfigured,
as it becomes a counter-space that people inhabit, or occupy, rather
than pass through, in order to communicate their dissent to each other,
political leaders and the wider world.
Several languages are mentioned in the paper. Standard Arabic,
Egyptian Arabic, English and Chinese each seem to have different
purposes and effects: Egyptian Arabic is used alongside Standard Arabic
to communicate views, to play with ideas and to perform. Aboelezz
argues elsewhere (2014) that Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic have
different specific purposes. Poetry in standard Arabic serves as a
unifying force for people in the Arab world, transcending dialectal and
geographical difference, and, thus, to unify not only those physically
present in the Square but also more distant people, via social media and
platforms such as YouTube (as discussed below). Egyptian Arabic, in
contrast, seems to have been used to draw in commentary from popular
culture, such as proverbial sayings and lines from songs and films.
The use of English is evident in the examples, usually alongside Arabic,
both to ensure that the nature of the political dissent is communicated
globally (‘Go to Hell Mubarak’) and as part of the playful semiotic
activities on the Square (consider the hard copy reconstruction of a
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
83
Facebook wall and phrases such as ‘GAME OVER’). Chinese is also
used in one example in the reading, as are hieroglyphics, both of which
Aboelezz refers to as ‘language play’. The Chinese sign is language play
because the protesters are not expecting the Chinese sign to be
understood for its propositional content (the Arabic translation does that)
but for what it indexes – an ‘exotic’ language that is also difficult to
understand – paralleling (and playing with) Mubarak’s apparent inability
to understand the Arabic signs. Hieroglyphics are used to index Mubarak
as a ‘pharaoh’ figure.
What stands out for me is the importance attached to aesthetic activity
by many participants in popular political demonstrations, evidenced by
the recreating of space, the decorating/dressing of the body and the
creative use of humour, languages and scripts. The importance of play
(including humour) in, and as a resource for, grass-roots protests
seems to be an instance of the ‘carnivalesque’, the historical tradition
of which has been explored by Bakhtin:
The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian;
they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and
always contain an element of fear and of intimidation. These
elements prevailed in the Middle Ages. Laughter, on the contrary,
overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its
idiom is never used by violence and authority.
(Bakhtin, 1968 [1965], p. 90)
In some epochs, and still today in many places in the world, there are
moments in the calendar where the official is played with and
challenged (an obvious example is the way carnival takes place in the
Christian calendar before Lent in many parts of the world, where strict
religious practices are challenged through excessive eating, drinking and
public displays of sexuality, and where authorities are mocked and
satirised). And some of the activities in grass-roots political movements
seem to echo these. The conscious or orchestrated nature of such
activity for political purposes is reflected in the term ‘tactical frivolity’,
used initially by a group of women activists demonstrating against the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings in
Prague in 2000. Dressed in silver and pink in the flamboyant style of
Rio de Janeiro carnival, their goal was to challenge through explicitly
frivolous or playful behaviour (Chesters and Welsh, 2004).
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84
Of course, a key feature of contemporary society is that new
technologies mean that the carnival does not necessarily stay local but
spills out across the world, so that whatever happens locally can be
connected in important ways to many other people and places. The
affordances of technologies – and specific platforms, such as YouTube
– for not only reproducing but glossing and manipulating content in
some way mean that demonstrations can be meaningfully circulated
globally. A common example is the use of songs as soundtracks to
videos of demonstrations; a specific example is an English-medium
introduction and translated text of a 1930s poem set to music at the
time of the demonstrations in Egypt 2011 (Arab Freedom
Anthem, 2011). Taking part in grass-roots political activity can thus
include participating both in immediate events and from a distance by
producing or watching content that becomes part of what we can
describe (following Bakhtin) as a virtual carnival.
2.5 Copying, remixing, irony and play
Copying and re(en)contextualising is a feature of all human
communication (see Chapter 1) and is particularly powerful when used
for ironic or parodic purposes in political discourse. We have
considered many types of reuse across the chapter and there is of
course a long tradition of such reuse across all genres. Consider the
title of one the most famous anti-war poems in English, ‘Dulce et
Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen, which is completed in the last line of
the poem pro patria mori. This statement (‘It is sweet and honourable
to die for one’s country’) is an ironic reuse of an extract from an ode
by Horace, an irony picked up in many anti-war films of the twentieth
century (Winkler, 2000).
The reuse and recombining of existing semiotic products across all
genres has grown considerably with the use of the internet. Consider
the reuse and remixing of a pop song in Figure 2.8. Extracts from the
lyrics are provided in Table 2.1.
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
85
Table 2.1 Comparison of song lyrics
‘Party in the USA’, Miley Cyrus ‘Party in the CIA’, Weird Al
Yankovic
I hopped off the plane at L.A.X. with
a dream and my cardigan
Welcome to the land of fame,
excess, whoa! am I gonna fit in?
Jumped in the cab, here I am for
the first time
Look to my right, and I see the
Hollywood sign
This is all so crazy, everybody
seems so famous
My tummy’s turnin’ and I’m feelin’
kinda homesick
Too much pressure and I’m nervous
That’s when the taxi man turned on
the radio
And the Jay-Z song was on
And the Jay-Z song was on
And the Jay-Z song was on
(Source: MetroLyrics, 2016a)
I moved out to Langley recently
With a plain and simple dream
Wanna infiltrate some third-world
place
And topple their regime
Those men in black with their
matching suitcases
Where everything’s on a need-to-
know basis
Agents got that swagger
Everyone so cloak and dagger
I’m feelin’ nervous but I’m really
kinda wishing
For an undercover mission
That’s when the red alert came on
the radio
And I put my earpiece on
Got my dark sunglasses on
And I had my weapon drawn
(Source: MetroLyrics, 2016b)
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
86
“Weird Al” - Party In The CIA (Parody of “Party In The U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus)“Weird Al” - Party In The CIA (Parody of “Party In The U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus)Miley Cyrus - Party in The U.S.A - YouTube - Windows Internet ExplorerMiley Cyrus - Party in The U.S.A - YouTube - Windows Internet Explorer
Figure 2.8 Remixing pop songs as political discourse
The internet has become a key resource not just for generating content
(including political content), but also for sharing with vast numbers of
people, which leads to further remixing and reusing. One specific and
common example of a form which rapidly proliferates are ‘memes’ (see
Example 4 in Activity 2.1), whereby content of any kind – images,
parts of films, cartoons, etc. – are reversioned in some way and
recirculated via the internet. Of course, while many are circulated as
spontaneous acts of fun, as with any semiotic resource, these can be
more consciously designed, reproduced and spread for specific political
purposes. And here it is important to remind ourselves that while it
may sometimes be difficult to track down or trace the origins of
particular memes, they are not ‘autonomous’. Jenkins et al. (2013) are
critical of the widespread use of terms such as ‘meme’ – attributed to
Dawkins (1976) as the cultural parallel of ‘gene’, as noted in Chapter 1
– and ‘viral’ because of the way these tend to obscure human agency:
While Dawkins stresses that memes (like genes) aren’t wholly
independent agents, many accounts of memes and viral media
describe media texts as “self-replicating.” This concept of “self-
replicating” culture is oxymoronic, though, as culture is a human
product and replicates through human agency.
(Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 19)
Jenkins et al. (2013), drawing on work by Phillips (2009) to provide a
political example, trace the circulation by the right-wing US ‘Tea Party’
of Barack Obama as the Joker from the film Batman to ‘4chan’ as the
creators of this particular meme. 4chan are described as ‘an online
community that actively encourages behaviour which is often described
as “antisocial” or “troll-like”’ (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 28). Similarly,
Penney (2010) charts the way in which the iconic red-and-blue Obama
‘HOPE’ image of 2008 (designed by graffiti artist and street fashion
entrepreneur Shepard Fairey) was copied and reversioned by
conservatives challenging Obama and his policies.
Activity 2.5
Allow about 45 minutes
Find an example of a remix of a text or performance that you consider
has a political goal or angle. It could be a remix of a political speech as
a meme, a political comment as a comedic performance, or a song
which takes on a political stance. Analyse the key features of the remix
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
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using some of the approaches and categories illustrated in this chapter.
How would you evaluate its creative or aesthetic value and its political
effect?
Discussion
At the time of writing, I particularly enjoyed the memes made to
challenge a Turkish politician’s statement that it was improper for women
to laugh out loud in public. This gave rise to much sharing across social
media of photographs of women laughing aloud in a range of public
contexts. I also thought that a meme generated by Chinese
environmentalists to campaign against the killing of elephants for ivory
was playful and clever: it involved the re-presentation of an elephant
using the colours of a panda, an animal considered a national treasure.
What interests me here is the impact of such reuse on our political
understandings in the world. When I laugh at a meme, how is it
shaping my understandings? And this takes us back to the questions at
the beginning of the chapter: Why are particular kinds of linguistic and
semiotic creativity used in political discourse? What effect do they
have? On whom? When? With what consequences? The next section
will conclude this chapter by considering these questions in relation to
a culturally prestigious creative genre – poetry.
2.6 The value of creativity for political discourse
What seems clear from the discussion so far in this chapter is that
creativity, play and attention to the aesthetic aspects of communication
are strongly evident in political discourse. The propositional content
(what is said) of political discourse is important to producers and
receivers, but so too are the creative and aesthetic dimensions (how it
is said). Also, while persuasion of ideas might be considered to be the
longer-term goal, attention is also paid to what might be considered
the more immediate goals of having fun, and enjoying and playing with
a wide range of semiotic resources. Creative practices clearly have value
in the production of, and participation in, political discourse.
Just as political discourse uses a range of features typically defined as
creative or literary, there is a long-standing tradition of creative
discourse or works marked as ‘literary’ being produced and used both
explicitly and implicitly for political purposes. In this section you will
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
88
explore why and how one literary genre, poetry, is used to express
political concerns, and consider a poet’s perspectives on the value of
this particular genre for making political commentary and effecting
social change. Does poetry have a different kind of value for political
commentary from, for example, a pop song, a meme, a banner? And, if
so, what is its particular value? Here you will focus briefly on some of
the works and ideas of one poet, Seamus Heaney (1939–2013), the
Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet who explored the tensions surrounding
the poet’s creative commitments and political responsibilities through
both his poetry and his essays. You have already seen an extract from
one of his earliest published poems ‘Digging’ in Activity 2.1. Let’s
consider a full version of another of his more obviously political
poems.
Activity 2.6
Allow about 20 minutes
Now read one of Heaney’s poems, ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, which
generated considerable debate and controversy. In what ways would you
describe the poem as political? What stylistic features does the poet
use?
Requiem for the Croppies
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people, hardly marching – on the hike –
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
The retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.
(Heaney, 1990 [1966], p. 12)
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
89
Discussion
The poem’s theme is the rebellion of Catholics against the British
in 1798. The ‘croppies’ were the Irish Catholic rebels of 1798 who wore
their hair cut close to the head as a token of sympathy with the French
Revolution. The poem is written in the first person with the poet-narrator
adopting the persona of a croppy. There is parallelism in the first and
last lines of poem: reference to barley which began in their pockets and
ends growing from their graves, a contrast between those living and
working the soil and those dying and buried beneath it. The poem is a
narrative involving the description of a specific place and an account of
events leading to a particular outcome. The metaphor – ‘The hillside
blushed’ – signals both the blood of the battle and shame. Although of
course the ‘voice’ of the poet-narrator cannot be assumed to be the
voice of the poet Heaney, the political orientation to this particular event
seems clear: by choosing it as a topic for poetry, Heaney is making a
statement about the importance of remembering this event. By writing in
the first person ‘we’, he aligns himself with the croppies and foregrounds
the unequal resources for the rebellion, juxtaposing the rural peasantry
and their weapons (pike, cattle, scythes) against the military machinery
of the conquerors (cannon, infantry).
Heaney’s vast work includes poems which are overtly political in the
sense of aligning himself with a particular group and voice (as in this
example here), as well as many more works which can be considered
political in a much broader sense of his choice of focus, often on
ordinary people, Irish traditions and histories (as in Example 5 in
Activity 2.1). Making Irish history (which included ‘Irishness’ in all its
many forms) visible was something that was a lifelong interest to
Heaney. This does not mean that he didn’t identify with aspects of a
particular social group – the specific positioning of Irish Catholics in
Northern Ireland during the 1960s – during which period he
considered it important ‘to let Irish nationalist or republican feeling
breathe in this atmosphere’ (Archive on 4, 2015).
But Heaney defines himself as a political writer in the broadest sense
of everyone being immersed in a specific historical context and
moment. This cannot be avoided:
You’re in the polis as a writer – ‘political’ comes from the word
polis in Greek, the community, the city, state whatever and if there
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
90
was anything close to a city state intimacy in our life in Ireland, in
Britain wherever, Northern Ireland is a cockpit. I don’t know how
big Athens was but I mean Derry and Belfast put together are a
kind of Athenian situation. So I think responses to that and
holding that either in focus, at bay or taking it in necessarily
makes you a political writer.
(Archive on 4, 2015, emphasis added)
The writer is always political, therefore, in Heaney’s eyes. However, he
also makes it clear that he wasn’t interested in building a specific
party/partisan political position. When his poem ‘Requiem for the
Croppies’ was taken up by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) as an
expression of their ideology, Heaney stopped performing the poem in
public. And reflecting on this specific poem and its take-up, he makes
an important distinction regarding how he views the political position
of the poet: ‘I think it was perfectly in order to have a disposition, but
not a propagandist position’ (Seamus Heaney Talks to Kirsty
Wark, 2012).
Activity 2.7
Allow about 1 hour and 15 minutes
Turn to Reading C, ‘The redress of poetry’ by Seamus Heaney, at the
end of this chapter. As you read, consider the following questions:
. What does he mean by the ‘redress’ of poetry?
. What does he see as the value of poetry?
. What does he see as the role of the poet in society?
Discussion
As already discussed, Heaney argues that poetry (as language, form
and ideas) cannot fail but to be located socio-historically, and is
therefore always engaged in a response to social and political contexts.
In Reading C he points to the pressure that poets can be under to take
up one particular side in any conflict. However, what he also makes clear
is that poetry is not and should not be political in the sense of
advocating one set of views, one response. Rather, it should be used to
work ‘against the grain of the usual’, to open up new ways of
understanding and envisioning the world. Heaney points to what he
refers to as Auden’s ‘trinity of poetic faculties’ which are ‘making,
judging, and knowing’. Heaney argues that ‘making’ (which in this
chapter and book we have been calling ‘creating’) offers something
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
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above and beyond ‘judging and knowing’ – that is, rational and critical
orientations to understanding, knowledge and truth – without being
totally separate from it. The relationship between the ‘creative’ and the
‘critical’ is the focus of the final chapter in this book.
In this making or creative space, Heaney argues that poets work within
and against not just the grain of existence but the grain of canonical
literature and canonical views of language. Here, language and form are
key resources: what poetry is cannot be restricted by conventions but
must draw on existing forms and be open to new ones. Of course, using
language as the material for the expression of such high ideals is not
straightforward. Even so, he argues that poetry is a special resource,
offering new horizons and imaginations.
Heaney clearly has a view of poetry as something special, as art as
compared with life (even if it is born in life), and as having a particular
political value in developing and harnessing human consciousness to
worlds that might be imagined and created. But in offering reflective
commentaries on the nature and purpose of poetry, he argues that it is
not linked to immediate action – which of course does not mean that
it cannot or will not be. Rather, Heaney is offering a longer view of
poetry, across time and space, as a resource for political action and
imagination. In this way his position is that the creativity of poetry has
a particular social value.
2.7 Conclusion
This chapter started by asking what we mean by linguistic and semiotic
creativity, and why particular kinds of linguistic and semiotic creativity
are used for political purposes. At the level of creation or production,
there is considerable creative activity across all types of political
discourse: we have seen how people make use of an array of linguistic
and semiotic resources to create political discourse which is pleasing,
funny, inspiring, shocking and playful. At the level of purpose, what
seems clear is that the creative-aesthetic contributes to the political
messages being produced, but has a purpose that goes beyond or is
additional to the propositional content. Why is this creative-aesthetic
dimension so common? It seems to me that there are three possible
reasons. First, creativity is a fundamental aspect of human life;
therefore, it is not surprising that it is also evident in political
discourse. Second, creativity, as understood in Bakhtinian terms as a
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
92
carnivalesque activity, often involves transgression of conventional
social, cultural and political norms which can be mobilised for more
planned political purposes, such as challenges to established authorities
and the status quo. Third, in the twenty-first century, for a range of
reasons, not least the increased access to the material means of cultural
production through the use of the internet, there seems to be what
Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999, p. 95) call a ‘heightened reflexivity’:
this refers to the fact that people are paying increasingly explicit
attention to discourse, both in the production of discourse for
particular purposes (buying, selling, persuading, etc.) and in the
production of the self (how we talk, dress, move, etc.).
As to the question of the value of different kinds of creativity in
political discourse, this chapter raises a key question: ‘Are some forms/
genres of more profound value in raising human consciousness and
imagining new political practices and ways of reorganising social lives,
as Heaney suggests?’ My personal conclusion would have to be ‘yes
and no’. The importance and potential impact on individuals and large
numbers of people of creating and sharing a banner or meme which
laughs at dictators cannot be underestimated. At the same time, the
impact, and value, of a poem which stirs a sense of vague unease or
articulates a feeling of hope or despair cannot be measured. Exactly
what value these different forms have may depend on when and how
they are experienced, and by whom.
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Reading A: On Obama’s victory style
David Crystal
Source: Edited version from Crystal, D. (2008) ‘On Obama’s victory style’,DCBlog [Online]. Available at http://david-crystal.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/on-obamas-victory-style.html (Accessed 25 May 2016).
Speaking as a stylistician – as opposed to a human being (if you’ll
allow me the distinction), as excited as anyone about this event –
it blew me away. As the speech started, I turned to my wife and
said, ‘He’ll never do it!’ What was I noticing? It was the opening
if-clause, a 41-word cliff-hanger with three who-clause embeddings.
Starting a major speech with a subordinate clause? And one of
such length and syntactic complexity? I thought he would be
lucky if he was able to round it off neatly after the first comma.
Try it for yourself: get a sense of the strain on your memory by
starting a sentence with a 19-word if-clause, and see what it feels
like. But he didn’t stop at 19 words. The first who-clause is
followed by a second. Then a third. It was real daring. It’s difficult
for listeners to hold all that in mind. But it worked. And then the
short 4-word punch-clause. And deserved applause.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a
place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream
of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power
of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
How did it work? How can you get people to process 41 words
easily? By following some basic rules of rhetoric. One is to
structure your utterance, where possible, into groups of three.
who still doubts that America is a place where all things are
possible,
who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our
time,
who still questions the power of our democracy
The other is to make sure that none of these chunks exceed what
is easy to process in working memory. Psycholinguists once
worked out a ‘magic rule of seven, plus or minus two’ – that
Chapter 2 Creativity in political discourse
97
most people find seven ‘bits’ of information the most they can
handle at a time. […]
People start sensing a difficulty when the sequence reaches five.
Some can’t get beyond this. Most of us get into trouble if we try
to remember more than seven, though some people can handle
up to nine without a problem. […]
Here are those three who-clauses with the main information-
carrying words in bold and tallied:
who still doubts that America is a place where all things
are possible, 7
who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in
our time, 6
who still questions the power of our democracy 4
As the sentence progresses, note how the demands on our
memory get shorter. In fact the demands are even less than the
numbers suggest because of the structural parallelism: who still
doubts… still wonders… still questions…. With still set up as part
of the pattern, we do not need to devote any processing energy
to it, and can concentrate on the following verb.
The rhetorical ‘rule of three’ is an important feature of the
speech. It’s something that all famous speech-makers use.
Churchill was brilliant at it. But all public speakers know that they
can get a round of applause if they use a triptych with structural
parallelism:
I was with you yesterday
I am with you today
And I shall be with you tomorrow!
You have to put it across right, of course, with an appropriate
prosodic climax. Obama is brilliant at that too.
What you mustn’t do is overdo it. For Obama to follow this first
paragraph immediately with another triptych wouldn’t work. A
different stylistic technique is needed to provide variety and
maintain pace. He switches to a ‘pairs’ structure – and pairs
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98
within pairs. The ‘lines’ vs ‘people’ contrast is itself a pair – but it
contains paired noun phrases:
lines that stretched around schools and churches…
people who waited three hours and four hours…
Note how, strictly speaking, the pairing is unnecessary. He could
have said simply:
lines that stretched around buildings…
people who waited hours…
but the pairing is more effective. A triptych is unwise here, for
the underlying meaning is banale, and to keep it going would be
to produce a sense of padding:
people who waited three hours and four hours and five hours…
He rounds the paragraph off with another pairing:
they believed
that this time must be dif ferent,
that their voices could be that dif ference.
And then he produces what, to my mind, is stylistically the most
daring piece in the whole text: a list entirely consisting of pairs.
From a content point of view, lists are dangerous, as they prompt
people to notice who might have been left out. But that evening,
I don’t think anyone was counting. Yet it’s worth noting that he
respects the ‘rule of seven’ – there are just seven groups
mentioned (or six, if you put the ethnic groups together):
young and old
rich and poor
Democrat and Republican
black, white,
Hispanic, Asian, Native American
gay, straight
disabled and not disabled
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Why omit the ands in the middle group? Precisely because the
omission of and reduces the force of the contrast and allows the
suggestion that the list can be extended. Unlike ‘young and old’
and the others, the list of ethnic groups is open-ended. Maybe the
same open-endedness applies also to ‘gay, straight’ – I'm not sure.
This first section of the speech ends with more pairs within pairs:
we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection
of red states and blue states
We are, and always will be, the United States of America.
Having devoted so much rhetorical energy to pairs, it’s not
surprising to see him round off this first section with more
triples:
cynical and fearful and doubtful…
on this date, in this election, at this defining moment…
And we should also notice that the whole of this first section is
structured as a triptych. Each of the paragraphs after the first
begins in the same way:
It’s the answer told…
It’s the answer spoken…
It’s the answer that led…
And the paragraph lengths are almost the same: 52 words, 53
words, 48 words. So we have threes within balanced threes.
Elegant.
[…]
When he reached the end of his ‘challenges’ section, I thought the
speech was about to end. It used two time-honoured ending
motifs. First there is a sequence of four rather than three:
the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity
and unyielding hope.
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And then an appeal to the future:
What we’ve already achieved gives us hope for what we can and
must achieve tomorrow.
He could have stopped there. But then there was an electrifying
change, as he moved from the general (‘America can change’) to
the particular (‘Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old’).
It was a risky strategy. The end of the speech was not far off. He
had just produced several hundred words of highly crafted
rhetoric, with many vivid and climactic images – ‘from
parliaments and palaces’, ‘America’s beacon still burns as bright’,
‘the true genius of America’. The audience is being brought to the
boil. To tell a quiet, intimate story now could have produced an
anticlimax. But it didn’t. Why?
Because the speech-writers had a trick up their sleeve. The
Cooper story starts quietly:
She was born just a generation past slavery…
but within a few words she is part of a new rhetorical build-up,
first with a pair:
…a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the
sky…
and then a stunning triptych, with each element containing a pair:
I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in
America –
the heartache and the hope;
the struggle and the progress;
the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed
on with that American creed: Yes we can.
There’s the trick that gets the speech out of any possible trouble.
The audience has already shouted ‘Yes we can’, three times, at an
earlier point. It has become a catch-phrase, used throughout the
campaign. The real climax of the speech is going to build on that.
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But an audience has to be taught what to do, by way of reaction.
People won’t intervene en masse in the middle of a story. They
have to be invited. And Obama uses the rule of three to teach
them.
…with that American creed. Yes we can. [no noticeable
response]
…and reach for the ballot. Yes we can. [no noticeable
response]
…a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can. [audience: Yes
we can.]
From then on, he’s home and dry. Every ‘Yes we can’ trigger is
going to get a response. The triptych rhetoric continues to flow:
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in
Birmingham, a bridge in Selma…
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin,
a world was connected…
to put our people back to work… to restore prosperity… to
reclaim the American dream…
And there, with ‘dream’, he ends as he began. ‘Dream’ is a
powerful word in American political rhetoric, thanks to Martin
Luther King. King is not mentioned in the speech, but he is there
in spirit, from the beginning to the end. Obama’s opening words
link dreams to questions. His closing words link dreams to
answers. The speech is a Martin Luther King sandwich, and it
went down very very well indeed.
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Reading B: Creating a counter-space: Tahrir
Square as a platform for linguistic creativity and
political dissent
Mariam Aboelezz
[Please note: this reading contains language that may be considered
offensive.]
Prior to January 25th, 2011, the name Tahrir Square would have
meant very little to people outside Egypt. The name of this
location in downtown Cairo has now become synonymous with
the 2011 revolution in Egypt and has come to symbolise people
power for anti-government demonstrators across the world. Tahrir
Square is therefore no longer a simple place name, but space has
come to represent many layers of meaning. A useful frame within
which the role of Tahrir Square in the 2011 revolution can be
meaningfully studied is that of the counter-space (cf.
Lefebvre, 1991). In this essay I discuss how Tahrir Square was
constructed as a counter-space, drawing on a qualitative analysis
of approximately 2000 protest messages drawn from images
captured in Tahrir Square between 25 January and 11
February 2011 (see Aboelezz, 2014 for full details of study).
What do I mean by ‘counter-space’? According to Lefebvre
(1991), a counter-space is a type of social space which is forged in
resistance to spaces which embody the power of the established
order, and in so doing presents “an initially Utopian alternative to
actually existing ‘real’ space” (p. 349). Hence, a counter-space is a
space which has “escaped the control of the established order”,
and – crucially – includes “deviant or diverted spaces” which
“show distinct evidence of a true productive capacity” (p. 383).
Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the counter-space is particularly
relevant here, not least because it associates creativity with dissent.
Tahrir Square has a long history of representing a space for
political dissent and has served as a rendezvous point for many
political protests in the past (Nassar, 2011), but never on the scale
seen during and since the 2011 revolution. The political
significance of Tahrir Square was clear from the first day: it was
the middle ground where protesters marching from various parts
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of Greater Cairo would meet on the evening of January 25th, only
to be forcefully evicted later that night. Protestors battled to
regain the square over the next two days. They succeeded on
January 28th and maintained it as their stronghold until the
revolution climaxed in Mubarak’s resignation. This battle for
control over Tahrir Square was significant at a symbolic level
“displaying the extent to which political dissent became the
politics of settlement. Being present day and night became itself a
form of political expression” (Tawil-Souri, 2012: 90).
One of the most iconic chants of the Jan25 revolution – seen
printed on a banner hanging over Tahrir Square in Image 1 – was
al-šaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām (the people want to topple the
regime). The chant was inspired by the recent Tunisian revolution
and it reverberated in Tahrir Square on the evening of
January 25th before protestors were expelled from the square later
that night. The Arabic word niẓām also translates into order, and
it could be argued that it was not just the political order which
was challenged in Tahrir Square during the following eighteen
days, but also social and linguistic order.
Despite the seriousness of the protesters’ demands and the
sombre affair of the fallen protesters, a festive, creative
atmosphere prevailed over the Square. There was singing and
dancing, there was poetry-reciting and stand-up comedy, there was
graffiti-spraying and mural-painting, and of course, there was a
multitude of witty, creatively displayed protest messages.
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IMAGE 1. “THE PEOPLE WANT TO TOPPLE THE REGIME”. [TAKEN 08/02/11 © ISLAM EL
SHAZLY]
Underground bands which had hitherto appealed to a small niche
audience thrived in this atmosphere, and so did graffiti artists.
Graffiti (sprayed and painted) covered the ground and walls of
Tahrir Square, various monuments in the square, and even the
army tanks stationed along its perimeter from the evening of
January 28th (Image 2).
The square became a thriving environment for transgressive
discourses which violated the “sensibilities and laws of
emplacement” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003: 166). Graffiti is only one
example which “by its very nature (the use of non-legitimated
surfaces for writing) is beyond the control of the usual
authorities” (Sebba, 2003: 155), making it a particularly marked
act of transgression or rebellion against the established order.
Other examples of transgressive discourses which could be found
in Tahrir Square included protestors using various everyday props,
sometimes their own bodies, as surfaces for displaying protest
messages (Image 3). In another clear example of defiance to the
‘laws of emplacement’, a characteristic monument in Tahrir
Square, the statue of Omar Makram (1750–1822) – a historical
figure of popular Egyptian resistance – is seen in Image 4 made
to hold protest signs against Mubarak’s regime.
The celebratory spirit which marked (particularly the final week
of) the protests has caused some to refer to the protests in Tahrir
Square as a mūlid [festival] (Keraitim & Mehrez, 2012). The
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IMAGE 2. ANTI-REGIME MESSAGES ON AN ARMY TANK STATIONED IN TAHRIR SQUARE.
[TAKEN 06/02/11 © R. ELEISH] (These are the translations of some of the
messages on the tank: “Allah is great… Egypt’s revolution shall not fall”; “No
to tyranny, no to corruption”; “No to Egypt’s tyrant, Mubarak the oppressor”;
“This tank has witnessed Egypt’s liberation from Mubarak’s era, 25/1/2011”.)
playfulness and mirth of this mūlid was perhaps most apparent in
the humorous character which hallmarked the protests. In a
Foreign Policy article published immediately preceding the Egyptian
revolution, El Amrani (2011) states matter-of-factly that Egyptians
are “notorious for their subversive political humour”. Similarly,
Zack (2012) alludes to the same stereotype stating that “for
decades, making jokes about their circumstances had been a way
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IMAGE 3. PROTESTORS USING THEIR BODIES AS SURFACES FOR PROTEST MESSAGES
(THE ARABIC WORD IN RED TRANSLATES TO ‘LEAVE’). [TAKEN 10/02/11 © YASMIN MOLL]
IMAGE 4. ANTI-REGIME MESSAGES HANGING FROM THE ʿOMAR MAKRAM STATUE IN
TAHRIR SQUARE. [TAKEN 01/02/11 © ROWAN EL SHIMI]
for Egyptians to vent their frustrations at a time when saying
what one really felt was not always possible” (Zack, 2012: 712).
Examples of these political jokes could be seen on protest signs
such as the one pictured in Image 5. The joke translates to:
Question: There is much talk that your sons have looted the
country?
Mubarak: These are mere rumours. [All there is that] Gamal
opened a kiosk in Aswan [South of Egypt] and Alaa opened a
kiosk in Alexandria [North of Egypt] and their businesses
expanded a little so they connected the two kiosks to each other.
Such political jokes which were previously whispered in private
gatherings were now boldly displayed for the world to see.
Indeed, there were no boundaries of societal expectations of
politeness which the protestors’ messages did not cross. Mubarak
was called everything from a cow and a donkey to testicles. Taboo
language in protest messages was not uncommon. One protestor
was pictured holding an Arabic sign with the message “Leave
already, you …” followed by a drawing of a pile of eggs (a
derogatory way of referring to testicles; a form of insult). Another
Arabic message sprayed across an army tank read in Arabic
“Down with the tyrant son of a whore”. Swear words could also be
seen in English messages: one message read “Bollocks to you
Mubarak”, another said “America fuck your aid”.
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IMAGE 5. POLITICAL JOKE ON A PROTEST SIGN IN TAHRIR SQUARE. [TAKEN 09/02/11 ©
MAGED HELAL]
On a linguistic and stylistic level, Tahrir Square was an unregulated
space which escaped the policing of the language authorities (cf.
Sebba, 2003). The language situation in Egypt is a textbook
example of classical diglossia (Ferguson, 1959), where Standard
Arabic is the predominantly written variety of formal use, while
Egyptian Arabic is the predominantly spoken variety of everyday
interaction. Tahrir Square clearly escaped the written hegemony of
Standard Arabic, with Egyptian Arabic being as common a sight
as Standard Arabic on protest messages. It was also common to
see messages in other languages, particularly English, with many
instances of creative language play, often for comic effect. An
example of this language play is seen in Image 6, where the
placard reads “if you do not understand Arabic [in Arabic] leave
Mubarak [in Chinese]”. In Egypt, Chinese is seen as an exotic
language spoken by people who live very far away. Hence, if you
are saying something which is difficult to understand, people will
say that ‘you might as well be speaking Chinese’. Another example
of rhetorical language use could be seen in messages directed to
Mubarak in hieroglyphics, implying that Mubarak is a ‘Pharaoh’
(see Aboelezz, 2012 for a detailed discussion of language play in
the protestors’ messages).
One linguistic tool which was frequently employed in the protest
messages was intertextuality, broadly defined as the reproduction
of a text or its structure in a different context for a range of
purposes, e.g. irony, parody, humour, reverence, etc. Intertextuality
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IMAGE 6. A MESSAGE TO MUBARAK IN CHINESE. [TAKEN 01/02/11 © ESSAM SHARAF]
of the sort found in protest signs may be divided into three types:
material intertextuality, structural intertextuality and constitutive
intertextuality. Material intertextuality, “the establishment of an
intertextual relation is dependent on the existence of concrete
texts” (Duszak, 2009: 45), occurred the most frequently and was
the easiest to detect. These usually involved direct quotes from
scripture, poems or public figures. Structural and constitutive
intertextuality on the other hand involved a greater degree of
creativity.
Structural intertextuality refers to cases where a “kinship between
texts is conceived of in terms of style, textual format, ideologies
or writing conventions” (Duszak, 2009: 45). Here, “our general
ability to reason, conceptualize abstractions or establish analogies”
is central to identifying the intertextual link (ibid.). I use this term
to refer to instances where the original message (though still
detectable) is reworked in some way in what effectively becomes a
parody of the original message, and in so doing produces a comic
effect. Examples of this in the protest messages included
reworked references to traditional sayings, verses of poetry, and
lines from popular movies, TV series or songs. For example, an
iconic verse from a poem by the late Tunisian poet, Abul Qassim
Al Shabi (1909–1934), which originally translates to “If the people
one day will to live, then destiny must respond”, was reworked into
“If the people one day will to live, then the cows must respond, where
the Arabic words for destiny and cows rhyme. Another example is
the reworking of the proverbial saying “honour the dead by burying
them” into “honour the regime by burying it”. Again the integrity
of the original structure is maintained and this contributes to the
comic effect.
I distinguish between structural intertextuality and constitutive
intertextuality which Fairclough (1992) refers to as
interdiscursivity. The constitutive intertextuality of a text,
Fairclough (1992: 104) explains, “is the configuration of discourse
conventions that go into its production”. It may be said that
constitutive intertextuality occurs when a text adopts or borrows
from the discourse conventions of a certain genre, style or
register. I use this term for cases where the intertextual link
cannot be traced to a particular message but rather to the
conventions of a certain discourse field. In some cases, these links
may have to do partly or entirely with the visual presentation of
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the message rather than with linguistic aspects of it. An example
of this is a protest sign fashioned after a birth certificate
chronicling the birth of ‘Egypt’ on the 25th of January 2011.
Another represented a pink slip relieving Mubarak from
presidential duties. One carried the image of a pack of an
Egyptian brand of cigarettes with the message “Caution: Mubarak
harms the health and can lead to death” printed on it. Other examples
included automobile license plates with the word “leave” in
Arabic inscribed on them, a Mubarak expiration bar code, and
several messages with a technological theme, such as the snapshot
of Mubarak’s (imaginary) Facebook wall seen in Image 7.
While only one of various linguistic tools employed by the
protestors, intertextuality exemplifies the creativity of the
protestors and the mocking tone, the satire, the parody and at
times dark humour that permeated many of the protest messages.
Humour, creativity and dissent were all intertwined in a collective
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IMAGE 7. SNAPSHOT OF MUBARAK’S ‘FACEBOOK WALL’. [TAKEN 08/02/11 © MAGED
HELAL] (The Arabic in the status translates to “I will not leave it (Egypt) until
it is in ruins”. The Arabic wall posts roughly translate to (from top to bottom):
“leave already, dude; have some feelings”; “scram already, I’m fed up with
you”; “The letters in Mubarak’s name stand for = imposter; ridiculous; must
leave; Mummy’s boy; corruption”; “Murtada Mansour (director of Zamalek
football club): leave already, we can hardly believe that Zamalek is about to
win the league”.)
statement against the status quo. Every aspect of the protest
messages – what they said, how they said it and the way they
were displayed – spelled defiance to the regime and reinforced the
status of Tahrir Square as a counter-space which challenged the
established political, social and linguistic orders.
References for this reading
Aboelezz, M. (2012). ‘Out!’ in Any Language. The Linguist, 51(3),
14–15.
Aboelezz, M. (2014). The Geosemiotics of Tahrir Square: A study
of the relationship between discourse and space. Journal of
Language and Politics, 13(4).
Duszak, A. (2009). Discourses “off course”. In J. Renkema (Ed.),
Discourse, of Course (pp. 37–51): John Benjamins.
El Amrani, I. (2011). Three Decades of a Joke That Just Won’t
Die: Egyptian humor goes where its politics cannot. Foreign
Policy, Jan/Feb 2011.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and Social Change: Polity Press.
Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15, 325–340.
Keraitim, S., & Mehrez, S. (2012). Mulid al-Tahrir: semiotics of a
revolution. In S. Mehrez (Ed.), Translating Egypt’s Revolution: the
language of Tahrir (pp. 25–67). Cairo: The American University in
Cairo Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith,
Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Nassar, A. (2011). Ramziyyat Maydān al-Taḥrīr [The Semiotics
of Tahrir Square]. Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies 21-
04-2011. Retrieved 27-07-2012, from http://www.dohainstitute.
org/release/c4cb65cb-77c8-409e-99c7-3faf0fe1b92a
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. B. K. (2003). Discourses in Place:
Language in the material world. London: Routledge.
Sebba, M. (2003). Spelling Rebellion. In J. Androutsopoulos & A.
Georgakopoulou (Eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities
(pp. 151–172). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Tawil-Souri, H. (2012). It’s Still About the Power of Place. Middle
East Journal of Culture and Communication, 5(1), 86–95.
Zack, L. (2012). “Leave, I want to have a shower!” The Use of
Humour on the Signs and Banners Seen During the
Demonstrations in Tahrir Square. In R. Genis, E. de Haard, J.
Kalsbeek, E. Keizer & J. Stelleman (Eds.), Between West and East.
Festschrift for Wim Honselaar (pp. 711–729). Amsterdam:
Uitgeverij Pegasus.
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Reading C: The redress of poetry
Seamus Heaney
Source: Edited version from Heaney, S. (1990) The Redress of Poetry, NewYork, Oxford University Press, pp. 3–11.
Politically speaking, … the redress of poetry does not reside in its
placing of a symbolic truth in the balance against an historical
situation. That is all very well as an aesthetic project, but it will
not satisfy either party in the actual vehemence of a conflict. For
them, the redress of poetry would consist rather in poetry’s
renunciation of complexity and self-division and its embrace of
one or other side of the question, without ambivalence. Its
redress would be in the simple act of adding leverage to one or
other arm of the scale.
So: if you are an English poet at the Western Front, the political
pressure is to contribute to the war effort, preferably by
dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in
the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the
tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at
the height of the Vietnam War, the official expectation will be for
you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the
German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the English
government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-
East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these
things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a
simplification.
Still, although such actions frustrate the common expectation of
solidarity, they do have political force, all the more so because
they are directed against the grain of the usual. Their exacerbation
is the very guarantee of their effectiveness. …
…
If we take W. H. Auden’s famous trinity of poetic faculties,
namely, making, judging, and knowing – a triad which he defined
with casual genius in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry
twenty-three years ago – then we can say that the making faculty
seems to have a kind of free pass and can range beyond the
jurisdiction of the other two. And yet, limber and absolved as
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linguistic inventiveness may seem in poetry, it is not disjunct from
or ever entirely manumitted by the critical intelligence. …
… The redress of poetry, however interpreted, continues to be a
topic of urgent concern. Whether one understands redress in the
sense that I have been admitting up to now, namely poetry’s
instrumentality in adjusting and correcting the world’s imbalances,
or whether one goes for another meaning of the word and
understands ‘redress’ as the setting-upright of poetry, its erection
into a distinct eminence as itself – either way, the subject remains
a central preoccupation and dilemma for contemporary
practitioners.
Think, for example, of the conflicting awarenesses in the work of
a contemporary white Australian poet like Les A. Murray,
sensitive to the historical desecration of aboriginal culture in his
country; or think of black Caribbean poets like Edward Kamu
Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, who would retrieve an Afro-
consciousness through an Anglo-idiom; or consider an American
feminist poet like Adrienne Rich; or contemporary rap and rasta
poets like Benjamin Zephaniah; or even centrally placed English
poets like Tony Harrison or Ted Hughes who might well think of
their original selves as tributaries rising very far away from the
main English stream. All of these experience a pressure to refuse
the exclusive civilities of established canonical English literature,
to alter if not deform the modes and decorums of poetry as they
are understood by the education system and the influential
cultural media.
The pressure comes from an accumulation of experiences long
unspoken or unacknowledged, the need to give voice and
retaliatory presence to suppressed life, be it ethnic, sexual, social,
or political. The pressure expresses itself, of course, in terms of
argument and theme, but also more subtly and necessarily in
terms of language itself, at the intimate level of rhythm and
diction and echo and allusion. Yet when it comes to that intimate
level of their art, all of these poets, however divergent from or
irreconcilable to the established poetic modes, all of them are
involved at some previous formative level with these very modes,
since poetry makes itself heard and begins to know itself only
within the context of all existing poetry. Their original ‘ear’ may
offend them because they have come to think of it as acquired or
imposed; yet if they deafen or deaden it on behalf of some
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political or cultural programme, they are going to feel that they
are committing an offence against their auditory imagination. A
sin against the ear is the poetic equivalent of the sin against the
Holy Spirit. Somehow their sensibility, formed in a sort of ancien
régime of poetic taste, must develop to accommodate their
revolutionary intent, for unless the redress of poetry is effected
primarily by work that sets itself upright by virtue of free,
uncensored impulse, its other aspiration to correct the world’s
imbalances will be seriously debilitated.
To say this, however, is not to deny the propriety of a poetry that
deliberately seeks to effect cultural and political change. The
history of Irish poetry alone over the last hundred and fifty years
is sufficient demonstration that a motive for poetry can be
grounded to a greater or lesser degree in an overall movement of
national self-recovery. Obviously, patriotic or propagandist intent
cannot of itself be a guarantee of artistic success, but in emergent
cultures the authentic struggle of an individual consciousness
towards affirmation and distinctness can be analogous if not
coterminous with the common straining towards self-definition;
there is a mutual susceptibility between the formation of a new
tradition and the self-fashioning of an individual talent. …
… [A]s an Irish writer whose education was undergone in
Northern Ireland, on the crest of the 1947 Education Act (a
definite British benefit) and in the wake of the Irish Literary
Revival, I am sensitive to the claims and counter-claims exerted
by the terms ‘English Literature’ and ‘Irish’ or ‘Anglo-Irish
Literature’. And I am well aware of the complications which
English-language poetries must encounter as they attempt fission
from the central English canon and seek redefinition within a new
historical, geographical, and political framework. Writers, after all,
are among the most sensitive of readers, and they will certainly
have internalized the form of the dominant literature. Whether
they are feminists in reaction against the patriarchy of language or
nativists in full cry with the local accents of their vernacular,
whether they write Anglo-Irish or Afro-English or Lallans, all
writers of what has been called ‘nation language’ are caught on
the forked stick of their love of the English language itself.
Helplessly, they kiss the rod of the consciousness which
subjugated them. No matter that the black poet from Trinidad or
Lagos, or the working-class writer from Newcastle, can cry out
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that their education in Shakespeare or Keats was an exercise in
alienating them from their authentic experience, devalorizing their
vernacular and destabilizing their instinctual at-homeness in their
own non-textual worlds: this may be a demonstrable fact of life,
but its truth should not obliterate other truths about language and
self-valorization ….
Certainly in any culture moving towards self-determination or its
own demarginalization, it will be imperative to question the
normative place of the colonizer’s literature or of the dominant
literature, which in our case comprises the English poetic
tradition. At a special moment in the Irish Literary Revival, this
was precisely the course adopted by Thomas MacDonogh,
Professor of English at the Royal University in Dublin, whose
book on Irish Literature in English was published in the year of
his execution for being one of the signatories of the 1916
proclamation of an Irish Republic. At a more seismic level of
effect, it was also the course adopted by James Joyce. But
MacDonogh knew the intricacies and delicacies of the English
lyric inheritance which he was calling into question, to the extent
of having written a book on the metrics of Thomas Campion.
And even from looking through Finnegans Wake darkly, it would
appear that Joyce knew everything. Neither of them, evidently,
considered it necessary to proscribe within his own reader’s
memory the riches of the imperial culture whose imprint they
were, in their different ways, intent on displacing within the
general consciousness. Neither of them curtailed his susceptibility
to the truth of poetry in order to prove the purity of his truth to
a cause. Which is why both of them are instructive when we
come to consider the scope and function of poetry in the world.
They remind us that poetry’s integrity is not to be impugned by
its status as symptom of some particular cultural moment or
political system.
Clearly then, nothing is simple; and the deconstructionist critics,
with their unmaskings and destabilizings, are prolonging by other
means the political and intellectual wars that have marked modern
times, most especially the war between the shorers-up and the
tearers-down. Yet the poetic intelligence is not absolved of its old
responsibility to find bearings just because it wakens in a
quandary, in a quagmire where it can touch no solid linguistic
ground. Even in these conditions, it is still possible to conceive of
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the poem travelling the troubled element of consciousness with all
the volition and integrity of a shock wave travelling through
water. Not so much a momentary stay as a reactive heave against
confusion. Indeed I am still enough of a humanist to believe that
poetry arises from the same source as that ideal future which
Derek Mahon, in his poem ‘The Sea in Winter’, envisages as
follows:
The ideal future
Shines out of our better nature
…
Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political
dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a model
of active consciousness. It has to be able to withstand as well as
to envisage, and in order to do so it must contain within itself the
co-ordinates of the reality which surrounds it and out of which it
is generated. When it does contain these co-ordinates, it becomes
a power to which we can have recourse; it functions as the rim of
the silence out of which consciousness arrives and into which it
must descend. For a moment, we can remember ourselves as fully
empowered beings.
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Chapter 3 Creativity on sale
Guy Cook
3.1 Introduction
Creativity is often associated with the arts and therefore, where
language is concerned, with literature. Definitions of creativity often
refer to it as the bringing into existence of something new and
valuable, a process by which original and imaginative ideas are
instantiated in the production of an artefact of some kind. In the case
of literary creativity, this artefact is a play, poem, novel or short story.
Yet the term ‘creativity’ is also used in the world of commerce, and in
particular in the advertising, marketing and promotion of goods and
services. But to what extent, where linguistic creativity is concerned,
are these two uses of the term ‘creativity’ in literature and commerce
actually manifestations of the same process, and to what extent are
they similar achievements? Is it just a question of the same creative
force and process finding a different outlet, or is there some more
fundamental difference?
The purpose of this chapter is to explore these difficult questions but,
as will become evident, I have a clear position: I argue that, although
texts found in both literature and advertising can be innovative, many-
voiced and invested with meanings, their respective effects are of a
different order. The overriding purpose of advertising to make a profit
closes it off from the multiple interpretations that literary texts – with
their more open-ended purposes and motivations – encourage. As you
read through this chapter, reflect on the extent to which you agree
with the argument I develop and whether you are persuaded by the
evidence I draw on.
I shall begin at the textual level with consideration of the kind of
language associated with creativity, before moving on from there to
consider how this language achieves meaning in particular contexts,
and also how it interacts with other modes of communication, such as
the visual.
As well as interrogating the commonalities and contrasts in the
creativity to be found in advertising and literature, I shall also consider
the political dimension to advertising, by looking at the ideological
assumptions of the industry as revealed through the language its
Chapter 3 Creativity on sale
119
practitioners use between themselves, and by exploring the factors at
work in its contribution to the global spread of English.
Activity 3.1
Allow about 15 minutes
Before you read on, take a look at the product descriptions on food and
drink packaging that you have at home. Do you find the wording of these
descriptions poetic in any way? Items which are marketed as ‘treats’
may provide particularly good material. Dove® ‘Almond’ chocolates, for
example, are described as ‘silky smooth promises’. Brookside Chocolate
Bowl ‘Dark Chocolate Pomegranate’ (see Figure 3.1) is described as:
‘Masterfully prepared sweetened real fruit juice pieces, made from a
blend of pomegranate and other select concentrated fruit juices, are
dipped in our extra creamy pure dark chocolate to create this decadent
taste sensation.’
Discussion
If you have found any product description which you consider poetic, try
to pinpoint what exactly it is in the choice of words which prompted that
judgement. Is it rhythm or other sound effects, the choice of words,
unusual grammar, elaborate structures, appeals to the senses, fanciful
metaphors, or something else? It may help to list both the features you
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Figure 3.1 Brookside Chocolate Bowl ‘Dark Chocolate Pomegranate’
consider poetic and the factors you feel may undermine that impression.
You will notice that the product description only works as part of a whole
label, in conjunction with the product, and with pictures and packaging
too. There is also a lot on any label which is decidedly not poetic:
ingredients, nutrition information, net weight, barcode, etc.
The activity you have just undertaken presupposes an intimate
relationship between the poetic and the creative. This relationship is
explored in more depth in the next section.
3.2 Literary stylistics and the ‘poetic function’
The study of literary stylistics, which seeks to investigate the links
between literary language and its effect, was founded on the
assumption that it is the patterning of formal elements, together with
deviations from ‘normal’ language use, which is the bedrock of literary
creativity, meaning and power. Early literary stylistics took its cue from
a theory of language functions advanced by Russian linguist Roman
Jakobson at a conference in 1958 and published in 1960. Jakobson
proposed a taxonomy of the many things that language can do. Thus,
language can express emotion, influence others, convey information
and ideas, effect social relations, check that the channel of
communication is working, and talk about itself. In addition, Jakobson
suggested, language has a ‘poetic function’ when words are chosen not
only for their meaning but for the formal relationships they enter into
with the words around them.
We can see this in a line of poetry such as ‘The sky is blinding mind-
unwinding blue’. Here words are chosen as much for the sound
patterns that they create as they are for their meanings: the repeated
vowel sound /aɪ/, the alliteration of ‘blind’ and ‘blue’, and the
alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. The fundamental idea
behind this kind of stylistics approach is that the idiosyncrasies,
patternings and deviations of literary language create a parallel meaning
which amplifies and extends the literal.
Yet before we get carried away with such descriptions as an
explanation of literary creativity, or even as a definition of literature
which distinguishes it from other types of discourse, we need to
address a troubling problem. There are many other types of discourse
which share some or all of the linguistic features associated with
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literature, making us wonder whether the poetic function is, after all,
an aspect common to much language use.
Advertising is a prominent example. For, although advertising language
may at times seem poetic, its purpose, and the way we relate to it, is
different. An advertisement is seldom actively sought. Most people do
not go online, read a magazine, watch a television programme or go to
the cinema in order to see advertisements, but for some other purpose.
The successful advertiser must rather come to us, capture our
attention, hold it, however briefly, and leave us with something we will
remember and which will influence our behaviour. Typically, this must
be done within a very short time or a very small space. It must be
achieved in the minute or less of a television advertisement, the single
page of a magazine or the corner of the computer screen. Some
advertisements do this in very brash and inartistic ways – by just being
big or loud, by pulsing irritatingly in a section of the screen, by
arousing sexual interest through the image of a conventionally
attractive young woman or man, or by forcing themselves on us, like
the advertisements that precede some YouTube videos or those that
are part of the ‘full programme’ in a cinema. Yet many also do it by
using techniques of compressed and powerful expression similar to
those used in poetry. Squeezed in space and time, vulnerable to being
flicked past, zipped or zapped by the remote control, or just closed
down with a click of the computer, they aim to use a few very well-
chosen words to maximum effect. It is these clever, verbally skilful
advertisements with which I am concerned in this chapter.
IF YOU’RE
NOT FAST
YOU’RE FOOD
(Timberland)
THE MOMENT
LASTS A SECOND.
THE LEGEND
LASTS FOREVER
(Nike)
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Slogans such as these deploy rhythm, alliteration and parallel structures
to make their points elegantly, concisely and memorably. Indeed,
Jakobson himself, when advancing his theory of the poetic function,
chose a snappy slogan rather than a poem as an example (thus
demonstrating, incidentally, that his notion was not intended to be
confined to, or to define, poetry). Writing shortly after the US
presidential election of 1956, he pointed to the three-syllable slogan
adopted by the campaign to re-elect General Dwight Eisenhower,
whose nickname was ‘Ike’. The words on the balloons, buttons and
placards in the Eisenhower camp were not ‘I support Eisenhower’, but
the much more potent and memorable ‘I like Ike’. Here there is a
threefold repetition of the same vowel sound /aɪ/ and the rhyme of
‘like’ and ‘Ike’. The poetic function of language, in other words,
extends beyond poetry.
3.3 Linguistic creativity in an advertisement and a
poem
In order to delve further into the issue of whether the creativity
associated with high art and literature is fundamentally different from
that in advertising, we need to look at examples from each genre,
asking to what extent they are similar in nature.
Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion
The 1980 advertisement for the perfume Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion,
shown in Figure 3.2, contains just 12 words, with the lines aligned
centrally to form a distinctive shape.
It manifests intense patterning and creativity: phonologically,
grammatically and visually. Phonologically, if we annotate the stressed
syllables by emboldening them as follows we can see that there is a
pattern: unstressed syllable + stressed syllable + unstressed syllable:
Be touched by the fra grance that touch es the wom an
It divides, in other words, into four regular rhythmic units or ‘feet’:
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dee dum dee| dee dum dee | dee dum dee | dee dum dee
Be touched by | the fra grance | that touch es | the wom an
This particular kind of foot is called an amphibrach. The name
‘Elizabeth Taylor’ has the same rhythmic pattern:
E li za | beth Tay lor
dee dum dee | dee dum dee
Grammatically, the 12-word copy is a single imperative sentence: ‘Be
touched by the fragrance that touches the woman.’ It uses a very
unusual construction: a passive imperative, ‘Be touched’. (There are
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Figure 3.2 Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion
one or two set phrases in English, such as ‘be seated’, but these are the
exception rather than the norm. ‘Be touched’ is markedly odd.) The
subject of this sentence is you, but in this case, as is usual in
imperatives, this subject is ellipted – that is, understood without being
said: ‘(You) be touched’. The phrase ‘the fragrance’ is modified by a
relative clause (‘that touches the woman’) in which the relative pronoun
(‘that’) stands for the fragrance. In other words, if we fill out
everything, the sentence could be represented as illustrated in
Figure 3.3, which shows that the relative clause is a mirror image of
the main clause.
Visually, the layout of the wording mimics the shape of the bottle
which in turn (as the publicity claimed) is in the shape of a heart. So
this short advertisement contains a very concentrated and intensive
patterning of language.
The Clod and the Pebble
Let us now examine the patterning of language in a short poem:
William Blake’s ‘The Clod and the Pebble’ from Songs of Innocence and
of Experience (Blake, 1970 [1794], p. 32).
The Clod and the Pebble
“Love seeketh not itself to please,Nor for itself hath any care,But for another gives its ease,And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”
So sung a little Clod of ClayTrodden with the cattle’s feet,
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the fragrance … that touches … the woman
You the woman … Be touched … by the fragrance
Figure 3.3 Patterns revealed
But a Pebble of the brookWarbled out these metres meet:
“Love seeketh only self to please,To bind another to its delight,Joys in another’s loss of ease,And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”
The language seems straightforward and accessible with an apparently
childlike simplicity. Even the archaisms – ‘seeketh’ for ‘seeks’, and
‘metres meet’ (meaning something like ‘appropriate lines’) – cannot
obscure the clarity of the description. Yet even in its simplicity, it has
many of the rhetorical and linguistic features which typically distinguish
literary from non-literary communication. It personifies abstract ideas
and dramatises the contrast between them, bringing into existence a
fantastic reality: non-selfish love becomes a lump of clay and selfish
love a small stone who sing to each other in a stream. The choice of
these two characters is appropriate and powerful. A clod is soft and
easily damaged, perhaps unattractive too, evoking standard metaphors
such as ‘soft-hearted’ and ‘downtrodden’. Depressingly, given its use
here to symbolise goodness, the word ‘clod’ is also used to denote a
foolish person. The pebble, on the other hand, is hard and shiny and
not easily damaged, evoking parallel standard metaphors such as ‘hard-
hearted’ or ‘heart of stone’.
The poem also has rhythm. Each line is an iambic octameter. That is
to say that it can be divided into eight two-syllable units (eight ‘iambs’),
the first syllable unstressed and the second syllable stressed:
dee dum | dee dum | dee dum | dee dum
so sung | a li | ttle clod | of clay.
The poem also rhymes (ABAB CDED AFAF) and has other sound
effects as well, such as the alliterations of ‘Clod of Clay’, ‘Heaven in
Hell’, ‘metres meet’, and the assonance (repeated vowel sounds) of
‘seeketh … metres … meet … please’. It is also markedly full of
parallels, reversals and contrasts. The third stanza almost repeats the
first, except that, by means of very slight changes, it expresses
completely the opposite meaning: suggesting perhaps that the
difference or transition between selfish and unselfish love is very slight
and volatile. The chillingly contrasted opening and closing stanzas are
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balanced on the fulcrum of the central stanza, whose first two lines
refer back, and whose last two lines refer forward. The poem thus
divides into two exactly balanced halves. It is as though when the
clod’s song is finished, it is answered and mocked by the retort of the
pebble.
Linguistic creativity, meaning and significance
Both the advertisement and poem you have just looked at are intensely
crafted, full of language choices and patterns which, even when they
appear to be simple, are on close inspection dense and intricate. Both
convey a great deal in very few words, not only by the conventional
signification of the words (what they refer to in the real or a fictional
world), but also by the formal relations between them, such as rhyme,
rhythm and structural parallelism. Both create a symmetric reversal of
structure so that the second half seems significantly to mirror the first.
But does this patterning enhance their meaning, or achieve significance
in comparable ways?
In the advertisement, the linguistic and visual devices generate a
number of potential meanings. As already mentioned, ‘Be touched’ is a
marked construction which is subsequently echoed in the active verb
‘touches’, thus foregrounding its polysemy – it has meanings which are
sexual (physical contact) and affective (emotional arousal). These
meanings are reinforced by the heart-shaped bottle – the heart, of
course, is conventionally seen as the seat of the emotions, most
notably that of love. Finally, in this regard, the name of the perfume
itself – Passion – emphasises this link between the product and the
needs and yearnings it represents. So, the advertisement does not
merely sell the product as a perfume with a nice aroma, but invests it
with the potential buyer’s desires. Its aim is to persuade a woman to
choose this particular perfume (or perhaps someone to choose it for
her) and the language and design work together to suggest an
equivalence between the purchaser and Elizabeth Taylor – ‘the woman’
in the picture and the woman looking at it. Interestingly, potential
buyers know this to be an advertisement and the advertiser knows they
know. Yet the latter counts on the audience’s desires, as triggered by
the meanings the advertisement generates, to override this knowledge
that the text is designed to manipulate them.
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It is noteworthy that some advertisements, especially in today’s
knowing age, deliberately seem to eschew an appeal to people’s
aspirations and vulnerabilities. A good example of this is the series of
advertisements for DIY products by Ronseal® with the well-known tag
line in the UK, ‘Ronseal: Does exactly what it says on the tin’.
However, even in these cases, I would argue that the advertisements
are not merely selling a product but also attempting, through it, to
reinforce the potential purchasers’ positive image of themselves as
shrewd, honest and down-to-earth.
So, advertisements do not merely try to sell products but, through
sometimes implicit and multiple meanings, make appeals to consumers’
positive or aspirational self-images. Nevertheless, the aim at the heart
of such texts remains a commercial one – to sell, even though what is
being sold may be more than the goods themselves.
Blake’s poem also uses language in a compressed and skilful way, but
in addition it deals with something more important than a purchase.
Although written in English in eighteenth-century London, it
dramatises a contrast of universal relevance, between selfish and
unselfish love. This is expressed through images which are
comprehensible across differing languages and cultures – clods,
pebbles, cattle, running water. Even contemporary urban societies have
an agricultural memory instantiated in standard symbolisms, metaphors
and sayings (‘greedy pig’, ‘dog in a manger’, and so forth). Similarly,
the reference to Heaven and Hell, although drawn from a Christian
cosmology by Blake, has echoes in the cosmologies of other religions
too. The poem thus creates a miniature but very accessible fictional
world, in which clods and pebbles sing rival songs like people, and in
doing so brings vividly and powerfully to life a banal but important
idea: that love can be egocentric or altruistic. Tellingly, the meaning of
the poem has been the subject of much discussion and disagreement
(Willmott, 2011), suggesting another difference between literary and
advertising texts: that the former are more resistant to a single
interpretation than the latter.
Activity 3.2
Allow about 30 minutes
William Blake was an engraver as well as a poet, and many of his poetic
works were published with his own illustrations. In the case of Songs of
Innocence and of Experience these illustrations are not merely alongside
the text, as they are with some of his longer poems. Rather, text and
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128
illustration are integrated. Consider the following two pages from Songs
of Innocence and of Experience illustrating respectively the poems ‘The
Clod and the Pebble’ (Figure 3.4) and ‘The Tyger’ (Figure 3.5). In your
view, is the effect of the poems changed in any way when taken together
with the illustration? If so, is the effect enhancing or detrimental? Is the
combination of the two modes in any way analogous to the integration of
image and words in advertisements?
Choose an advertisement which integrates image and text (i.e. almost
any advertisement!) and compare the effect with that in Blake’s
illustrated poems.
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Figure 3.4 ‘The Clod and the Pebble’
Figure 3.5 ‘The Tyger’
Discussion
Anyone familiar with Blake’s illustrations will recognise his inimitable
style in these two pages. His images have an other-worldly look to them,
in part because of the distinctive methods by which he produced his
etchings, giving them an unfinished and ethereal quality. I would say that
the illustrations enhance the mystical dimension of Blake’s works,
inviting a spiritual interpretation of his words.
One obvious difference between advertisements and poetry which has
not been discussed above is that images (and other modes such as
music) are often central to the effect of advertisements, whereas poems
and novels generally rely on words alone. (Drama is a more complex
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case, as although a play can be read as a text, it is intended to be
realised on stage.) In the advertisement for Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion
the picture is very important, and related to the words – the bottle is a
similar shape to the copy; its sparkle is echoed in Elizabeth Taylor’s
eyes and jewellery. Blake’s illustrated poems are unusual in that, like
advertisements, they present words and images together. You may feel,
however, as I do, that the words of the poem are effective without the
image in a way which is not the case with an advertisement.
The Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion advertisement is remarkably short,
including just 12 words. ‘The Clod and the Pebble’ (though short for a
poem at 73 words) is much longer. So perhaps it is unfair to point out
that the poem has ‘more to say’. Yet in advertising and marketing it is
not only brief slogans that have elements of the poetic, but longer
advertising copy too.
The two stanzas below are the first of eight in an advertisement in the
McDonald’s ‘Favourites’ campaign. The words seem eligible to be
considered as not just poetic, but a poem.
Now the labourers and cablers
and council motion tablers
were just passing by.
And the Gothy types
and scoffy types
and like-their-coffee-frothy types
were just passing by.
Let us look at these opening stanzas of the advertisement from a
purely technical perspective and the ways in which they manipulate the
forms of the language that they use. It certainly has both rhythm and
rhyme, which it uses in an intense and sophisticated way to reflect and
amplify both its mood and its meaning. The rhythm of the first two
lines of each stanza is fast and pulsing, while that of the repeated final
line of each stanza abruptly slows the pace. This is achieved by using a
kind of stress-timed verse in which the stressed syllables fall on a
regular beat, and the unstressed syllables must be squeezed in between.
This means that where unstressed syllables are many, the rhythm
speeds up; where they are few, the rhythm slows down.
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In the McDonald’s advertisement, the major stresses fall as follows:
Now the labourers and cablers
and council motion tablers
were just passing by.
And the gothy types
and scoffy types
and like-their-coffee-frothy types
were just passing by.
Thus, the long sequences of syllables on which there is no major
stress, such as ‘and like-their-coffee’ accelerate the pace, while the two
adjacent stresses in the last line slow it down markedly – capturing
perhaps, as the accompanying film does, the feeling of relieved
relaxation as the characters described leave behind their hectic lives to
relax in the dependable atmosphere of McDonald’s (the refrain). In this
way, as in the best poetry, ‘poetic’ patterning does not exist merely for
its own sake, but amplifies and adds to meaning and effect. In addition
to this use of rhythm, there are internal rhymes – ‘labourers …
cablers’, ‘Gothy … scoffy … coffee’ – as well as lexical and
grammatical innovation. ‘Gothy’ and ‘scoffy’ are neologisms, while the
words ‘like-their-coffee-frothy’ (which have the grammatical structure
of a predicate comprising verb phrase + direct object + complement)
are used here hyphenated as a premodifier to the noun ‘types’. In
short, the use of language in these opening two stanzas is as clever,
skilful and dense as anything one might find in a conventional
canonical poem. In the actual advertisement, however, which is a short
film with the words recited over footage of people arriving at a
McDonald’s, it is immediately clear from the setting that it is an
advertisement, even though there is no explicit reference to
McDonald’s until the third stanza (not given here), which mentions
‘McNuggets’.
3.4 Linguistic creativity and purpose
So the questions persist. Can a text such as the one featured in the
McDonald’s advertisement be both a poem and an advertisement? Or
are they, for some reason, mutually exclusive categories? Does the
purpose of this poetic ingenuity – to promote a product – somehow
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132
override its poetic credentials and achievement? Does the fact that
‘The Clod and the Pebble’ is not selling anything, but apparently has
the sole purpose of reflecting and representing an idea for its own
sake, somehow underwrite its integrity as art? Does the elusive quality
of literariness reside at this macro level of intention and effect and
subject matter, as suggested above, rather than at the micro level of
verbal ingenuity and technique (i.e. rhymes, rhythms, and so forth),
which the McDonald’s advertisement amply displays in a highly skilled
and effective manner?
The thrust of my argument up to this point suggests that advertising
texts, despite the fact that they can be invested with meanings beyond
the products they are trying to sell, nevertheless remain limited by their
purposes. However, before rushing to any conclusions it will be
salutary to consider other ‘poetic’ uses of language, in the Jakobsonian
sense, which have ulterior motives and effects.
Activity 3.3
Allow about 20 minutes
Look at Figure 3.6 and Figure 3.7, which are from a campaign website.
Comment on how the images, the poem, and the campaign as a whole
draw on poetry and poetic effects.
Figure 3.6 Saving Tigers
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Figure 3.7 ‘Tiger Burning’
Discussion
The website uses poems (with varying degrees of success) that are
clearly based on William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’. The one in Figure 3.7
attempts to imitate the rhythm, rhyme and alliterative patterns of the
original. It might also be argued that the juxtaposing of the two images in
Figure 3.6 is poetic in effect, bringing out the contrast between the
magnificent living beast (on the right) and the skins to which it and its
kind can be reduced by poachers (in the picture on the left).
So far I have been talking about advertisements as ‘selling things’ and
suggesting that this profit motive bars them from achieving the nobler
purposes and more universal relevance of literature. Yet, as you may
have already reflected, not all advertisements sell things. Some
advertisements promote health campaigns (Wear a condom, Stop
smoking), charities (Save the Children, Save the Tigers) or a political
party (Vote Scottish Nationalist). Advertisements can therefore have
purposes other than the commercial. However, they still seek to change
or influence their audience’s behaviour in some way, to get us to do
something. So, even in advertisements that feature literary texts such as
poems, the referential function narrows the potential interpretations that
can be made of such texts.
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The overriding referential function in advertising is evident in one of
its key characteristics: its predominantly ‘monologic’ rather than
‘heteroglossic’ nature. This characteristic is considered in the following
section.
3.5 Multiple voices
Beyond a multiplicity of potential interpretations, another discursive
quality sometimes presented as characteristic of literature is the
unresolved multiplicity of voices. Structuralist critic and philosopher
Roland Barthes commented on this in his essay ‘The death of the
author’ (2008 [1968]) with reference to Sarrasine, a novella by Honoré
de Balzac (2013 [1826]), in which the eponymous main character falls
in love with Zambinella, a castrato male singer, under the false belief
that Zambinella is a woman. At one point the narrator of the story
writes of Zambinella that:
This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational
whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her
fussings, and her delicious sensibility.
(Quoted in Barthes, 2008 [1968], p. 313)
However, as he is telling the story retrospectively, in full knowledge of
Zambinella’s identity, this narrator already knows that this was not a
woman. Barthes comments:
Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on
remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is
it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with
a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing
‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic
psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that
writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our
subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting
with the very identity of the body writing.
(Barthes, 2008 [1968], p. 313)
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The voice of this narrative, in other words, is unresolvably multiple.
There is an author and a narrator who is also a character in the story;
then within the narrative there are the voices of other characters,
expressed in indirect speech (‘She said that x’) or direct speech (She
said, ‘x’) with multifarious degrees of commentary and colouring by the
author as well as the voices of whole sections in society (Leech and
Short, 2007, pp. 255–74). Indeed, many of the most popular and highly
successful novels are characterised by an extreme ambiguity and
multiplicity of voices.
The famous opening lines of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are a
case in point:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be
on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in
the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the
rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
(Austen, 1985 [1813], p. 51)
Here a contradiction between the two opening sentences creates an
intriguing puzzle. For while the assertion in the first sentence seems
absolute and unequivocal, it is immediately undermined by the caveat
and qualification in the second. The categorical ‘It is’, ‘universally
acknowledged’ and ‘must be’ give way to the reservation of ‘however’
and the tentative ‘may be’ in the first half of the second sentence, so
that the initial ‘truth’, far from being universal, shrinks to being a
belief ‘fixed in minds of the surrounding families’, suggesting that it is
by no means either universal or correct – indeed, how can it be if the
feelings of the man in question are neither known nor certain? One
might take this further and suppose that these ‘surrounding families’,
by assuming their own views to be shared by everyone, are in fact
rather blinkered and parochial in their outlook. The overall effect is to
create a complex interplay of voices vying with each other so that what
initially appeared to be a clear and decisive opening declaration by the
author or narrator is immediately refuted and becomes the opinion of
some of the characters only. The voice in the first sentence, which
seemed to be the author’s, now becomes that of someone else, and the
author herself, like Balzac above, is no longer there.
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The Russian literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1984
[1929]), writing about the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, described such
characteristic multi-voicing in novelistic discourse as heteroglossic
(literally ‘variously voiced’), contrasting it with monologic (one-voiced)
discourse. Drawing on Bakhtin’s discourse approach, we might say that
the extracts from Balzac and Austen are heteroglossic: the genre of
story is juxtaposed with that of gossip, or one sub-genre of the novel –
a straightforward confident third-person narrative – is juxtaposed with
another kind of less authoritative storytelling in which there is no
magisterial omnipotent narrative viewpoint, but a jostling of first-
person narratives, in which characters vie with each other to tell their
version of events.
Activity 3.4
Allow about 15 minutes
Look at Figure 3.8. Consider this 2009 advertisement for Dixons (now
part of Currys, a major electrical retailer across the UK) and the multiple
voices and different genres it evokes. To what extent are they realised
through language and to what extent through visual effect? Note down
some examples of each.
Discussion
This advertisement works by juxtaposing, in a humorous way, at least
two voices. One is Dickensian, evoking in particular A Christmas Carol,
the other the contemporary world of shopping and online purchase. The
contrast is effected at many levels: the typeface, appearance of the page
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Figure 3.8 Dixons’ Christmas advertisement (2009)
and layout imitate an antique book; the language and name of the
character are also reminiscent of Dickensian times. However, this
impression is gradually disrupted by the anachronistic intrusion of
contemporary realia: the 94 bus, the 700,000 watts of Christmas lighting
and particularly the concluding reference to the Dixons website. In sum,
there are multiple voices in this text, suggesting that advertising texts
can, like literary texts, be heteroglossic in nature. Indeed, a line such as
‘Dixons … The last place you want to go’ seems to run contrary to what
is usually supposed to be the main purpose of such texts – to promote a
product and its producer. This question of the degree to which
advertising texts are truly heteroglossic is one which is explored further
in the next section.
A key question is whether, or to what degree, the heteroglossia to be
found in some advertising and marketing has monofunctional or
multifunctional goals, and whether its ultimate purpose means that one
voice dominates. It could be argued that some advertisements are
monofunctional, bound always to promote one monologic viewpoint:
the company is wonderful, the product is the best, and that is all.
While this may indeed have been the case in early advertising and
public relations – such as can be seen in the 1910 Chivers’ carpet soap
advertisement in Figure 3.9 – it is very much not the case with some
of the most successful contemporary brands which need to promote
themselves in a more knowing, even sceptical age. One might even
observe a parallel with successful novels – popularity goes hand in
hand with heteroglossia.
Take, for example, the following ‘history’ of Ben&Jerry’s ice cream – a
highly successful upmarket brand dedicated to producing ice cream –
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Figure 3.9 An early twentieth-century advertisement
which states: ‘Our Social Mission compels us to use our Company in
innovative ways to make the world a better place’ (Ben&Jerry’s, 2016).
History
Back in ’66, in a school gym class, Ben Cohen and Jerry
Greenfield were brought together by a special bond... they both
hated running but loved food. Years later in ’78, Ben had been
fired from a series of McJobs while Jerry had failed for the
second time to get into medical school. So, armed with a $5
correspondence course in ice cream making, they opened their
very first scoop shop in a dilapidated gas station in downtown
Burlington, Vermont.
They soon became popular in the local community for the finest
ice cream. Ben had no sense of taste so he relied on what he
called ‘mouth feel’, so big chunks of chocolate, fruit and nut
became their signature. While they disagreed at times over the
chunk size, they did agree that they wanted to enjoy themselves –
as Jerry put it ‘if it’s not fun, why do it?’
(Unilever, 2015)
Humour here is created by the conflict of discourses and genres. The
honest opening voice of middle America, ‘Back in ’66’, is soon
subverted. The standard tale of rags to riches, hard work, loyal
friendship and commitment is evoked and then immediately
undermined through facetious detail. Far from being the self-
disciplined young men one might expect to encounter in promotional
biographies for entrepreneurial success, the two boys turn out to be
self-indulgent and unfit. In the terms of the genre being parodied, their
sybaritic approach to the sensual pleasures of ice cream consumption
might well be described as positively decadent. The two voices clash
linguistically in the second sentence. The phrase ‘were brought together
by a special bond’ comes straight from the genre being ridiculed. For
this bond is not strength of character or adherence to the American
Dream, but (the ellipsis says it all!) ‘they both hated running but loved
food’. A key to the clash of values which gives the edge to this parody
can also be found in the dates. The two boys met in 1966, the heyday
of the hippy movement, and went into business in 1978. The phrasing
of the company tag line on their website ‘spreading peace, love and
ice-cream’ evokes this very explicitly, an allusion presumably aimed to
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appeal to a major market, the now ageing but prosperous ex-hippy
consumers who eat expensive but environmentally friendly ice cream.
Activity 3.5
Allow about 30 minutes
Go to the Ben&Jerry’s website (www.benjerry.com) and have a look
around. Then think of some other highly successful brands for services
or products. Try to choose a variety of different types: both luxuries and
essentials, both cheap and expensive, for both children and adults, and
so forth. Go online and explore the web pages. Do you find the same
kind of multi-voicing as that in the marketing of Ben&Jerry’s?
Discussion
As with formal linguistic patterning, it seems that while there is great
ingenuity and wit in multi-voicing in advertisements, it is also constrained
by purpose. However many voices may be present, the injunction to buy
the product must in some way shine through and be the ascendant or
dominant voice. Indeed, advertisements often seem to rely on our very
own knowingness to come to an interpretation which suits their
purposes. For example, in attempting to interpret the line in the
advertisement you saw earlier, ‘Dixons … The last place you want to go’,
the fact that we know the advertisement must be pushing us to buy the
goods on offer makes us search for a positive meaning – that the
company is the ultimate, reliable port of call for Christmas shopping.
I would argue that a key difference between literary and advertising
texts is that literary texts are more fundamentally heteroglossic and that
the reader of literary multi-voicing is not pushed towards one
particular interpretation or response.
3.6 Multimodality, literature and advertising
The theories of literary creativity on which we have drawn so far – a
Jakobsonian stylistics and a Bakhtinian discourse analysis – have in
common a view of creativity and complexity as a property of the text.
The former approach dwells on the manipulation and patterning of
linguistic forms – the phonology, grammar and lexis. The latter, though
it sees the act of communication as always contextualised and subject
to infinitely various interpretation, is nevertheless, in application, also
very much concerned with text and the ways in which different voices
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
140
are written into the text through devices, nuances and intertextual
echoes. (The Austen opening resonates with the voice of gossip; the
Ben&Jerry history evokes sentimental success stories and hippy
manifestos.)
Yet literary discourse, like any other discourse, cannot achieve meaning
through text alone. In order to be realised as communication it needs
in some sense to be performed, to take on life in a particular place, for
particular people, who interpret in specific and various ways. Post-
Jakobsonian stylistics has moved very much in this direction, adding to
the Jakobsonian perspective a concern with the process of
understanding, and the ways in which literariness is as much a product
of reception as text (Jeffries and McIntyre, 2010). Marketing too is
necessarily obsessed with both predicting and monitoring actual
audience response.
When a work of literature is realised in physical performance – the
production of a play, the recitation of a poem – the written language
becomes inseparably associated with other modes of communication.
Performance is, in other words, multimodal. When a play is produced
and performed, the words of the text are firmly linked to particular
sights and sounds – the costumes, gestures, props and movements of
the characters. It matters whether it happens inside or in the open air,
in a packed theatre with an excited audience, or in some cold, empty
hall with sparse and indifferent auditors. A performance is, in other
words, a conjunction of semiotically laden elements – sight, sound,
clothing, layout, movement, temperature and even smell are all part of
(and can all play a part in) effect and interpretation. Again, this is as
true of non-literary performances as it is of literary ones. Think of the
conjunction of robes, incense, light, chanting and stained glass involved
in some ritualistic religious observance.
And yet there are degrees of importance and salience among the
different modes involved. There is a sense in which, in the
performance of literary texts, while the realisation of a written text
through other modes is inevitable and important, the text (the
linguistic resource on which the performance is based) takes
precedence over the other modes which accompany its realisation. It is
the text which is the starting point. There may be an infinity of
possible Hamlets and Hamlets (i.e. interpretations of the character and
productions of the play), but they all draw on the same resource, and it
is this resource which gives them significance, interest and value, and
remains at the core of what we are watching. A play encountered in a
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particular production, or a poem known only through performance, is
inevitably interpreted and performed – but there is also a printed text
against which to interpret that interpretation. Conversely, even a novel
– at least when encountered ‘cold’ without the guiding hand of a
literature teacher or literary critic – still needs to be realised by a
particular reader in a particular place, to be ‘performed’ by the reader
to themselves (albeit if this use of ‘performance’ is partly
metaphorical).
In advertising and marketing this hierarchical relationship between the
modes is usually different. Words and other modes are indissolubly
linked and have come into being together: an interdependence which is
arguably becoming stronger as communication technology develops
and options for visual effects become greater. There are no alternative
possible performances of an advertisement or a campaign as there are
for a play or poem. Thus, while it is possible to isolate the text of an
advertisement or a campaign, as we have above, this has a quite
different feel from the act of going back to the text of a play or poem
after seeing it performed, in order to interpret the interpretation. In
advertising and marketing, texts and visual effects are inseparable. The
words of the McDonald’s advertisement, for example, have no available
separate textual existence (other than in academic analyses, such as this
one, or suggestions for their pedagogic use). The Ben&Jerry marketing
texts are – when looked at online – realised through a choice of fonts,
colours, layout, pictures and hyperlinks, all of which contribute to their
light-hearted appeal, just as much as, or even more than, the words.
The discussion so far has moved outwards from the formal features of
text towards consideration of the communicative effects of these
features, and to their interaction with other modes of communication,
such as visual images. The underlying assumption has been that the
phenomenon of creativity, whether in literature, advertising or other
discourse, cannot be understood or assessed without consideration of
its full communicative context. This includes the political dimension of
the communicative context, a theme explored in the following section.
3.7 The political dimension of the global reach of
advertising
The nature of advertising is not politically neutral, its very existence
being predicated on some form of capitalist system. Although
capitalism in its various realisations is the dominant and thus, perhaps
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
142
for many people, natural political system of the twenty-first century, it
is not so long ago that an alternative, Communist ideology held sway
in large parts of the world. It is therefore illuminating to look back to
the time of the collapse of the centrally planned economies of Eastern
Europe in the 1990s to examine what the advertising industry itself
was saying about these new potential markets, and how the words used
reveal an underlying ideological world view.
Activity 3.6
Allow about 2 hours
Turn to Reading A, ‘The discourse of Western marketing’ by Helen Kelly-
Holmes at the end of this chapter. This reading provides an interesting
perspective on the spread of Western marketing discourse into Eastern
Europe at a politically significant period of history. Kelly-Holmes takes a
CDA approach to identifying the underlying ideology to be found in the
descriptions of this new market by the advertising industry.
As you read, consider the following questions:
. What underlying ideological assumptions are revealed in the
language of the marketing and advertising industry that Kelly-Holmes
analyses?
. What sort of textual evidence does Kelly-Holmes draw on?
. How creative or poetic would you regard the language which is
highlighted in the reading?
Discussion
Kelly-Holmes argues that there are assumptions in the language of the
advertising and marketing world which are revealed through close
analysis. She identifies the ways in which capitalism is equated to
democracy and how the Western political model is seen as normal while
the previous Communist system is described in terms of its aberrance.
Kelly-Holmes uses the ‘Textline’ database which comprises a range of
text types, such as interviews, reports and speeches. By searching key
words such as ‘advertising’ and ‘Eastern Europe’, she sought to identify
texts which were explicitly discussing advertising at a particular moment
in ‘Eastern European’ history.
Some of the language highlighted by Kelly-Holmes is clearly poetic. As
shown earlier in this chapter, figurative language can be striking. For
instance, the images of the Wild West that are identified by Kelly-Holmes
add colour while reinforcing their ideological message. However, as the
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author herself points out, much of the language used is probably done
so subconsciously. This lays bare interesting questions with regard to
intention and its role in both creative and political texts: to what extent
should intention be seen as a prerequisite to creativity? Is political
ideology all the more powerful when it is unconscious and taken for
granted?
It is unsurprising that advertising is a ubiquitous feature of people’s
lives in countries which operate in political systems that are essentially
capitalist. After all, it is an important tool in facilitating the buying and
selling of goods. However, it can be argued that it has had an
ideological impact beyond its promotion of a capitalist political system.
It is also seen as an important channel for the global spread of
English, a language regarded by some as a threat to the world’s
linguistic and cultural diversity and as a means of inculcating an Anglo-
Saxon viewpoint and imposing it on others. For a long time English
has been widely used in advertising to markets where it is not the first
language. In The Future of English, David Graddol (1997) makes
frequent references to the role of advertising in the growth of English
as the pre-eminent international language, placing ‘Advertising for
global brands’ high in a table of ‘Major international domains of
English’ (Graddol, 1997, p. 8).
There is, however, a tension in international marketing between
motives for ‘localisation’ – the tailoring of campaigns to specific
markets and thus to a greater use of ‘local’ languages – and an impetus
for globalisation – in which the same campaign is used across different
locations, effectively ignoring, or at least downplaying, these local
languages (for discussion of localisation, see Chapter 5). And in some
quarters ‘localisation’ seems to be gaining strength. In a later
publication on a related topic, Graddol (2006) has much less to say
about the role of advertising in the spread of English and reports
instead an opposite tendency:
In response to the spread of English and increased
multilingualism arising from immigration, many countries have
introduced language laws in the last decade. In some, the use of
languages other than the national language is banned in public
spaces such as advertising.
(Graddol, 2006, p. 116)
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144
However, it is very easy to oversimplify the picture when discussing
the spread of English globally and see it simply in terms of two
opposing forces: the globalising, homogenising effect of the spread of
English and the resistant localising forces that insist on the use of
‘local’ languages. To illustrate this point, Reading B provides an insight
into the potential elements at play in deciding which language is most
effective when advertising products in an Indian setting.
Activity 3.7
Allow about 1 hour and 30 minutes
Turn to Reading B, ‘Language choice in advertising to bilinguals’ by
Aradhna Krishna and Rohini Ahluwalia, at the end of this chapter. As you
read consider the following question:
Which factors, according to the authors, should a company selling in
India take into account when choosing a language to advertise in?
Discussion
Krishna and Ahluwalia’s findings indicate that, unsurprisingly, a company
needs to bear consumers’ preconceptions in mind. These relate to the
symbolic significance given to different languages – in this case, English
and Hindi. Although both are positively evaluated by the research
informants, they have contrasting associations: English being seen as
sophisticated and modern, while Hindi carries a sense of national pride
and of community. As a result, for example, English seems to ‘fit’ the
advertising slogan for a luxury product more easily than it does for a
product seen as a necessity. However, consumers’ attitudes are even
further complicated by other considerations beyond the product and its
slogan. It seems that whether a company is local or multinational also
influences the degree to which potential consumers consider its choice
of language or languages appropriate or not. The findings suggest that
multinational companies are allowed less leeway in this regard than local
ones are. Krishna and Ahluwalia’s article points to the complexity that
often operates in multilingual environments in advertising and other
communicative fields.
The symbolic significance of different languages is clearly an important
factor in deciding which language to advertise in. Even in
advertisements for English-speaking consumers in English-speaking
countries, other languages are used to give certain flavours to certain
products, by drawing on national stereotypes. Thus, French may occur
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untranslated in perfume names and copy to connote elegance, high
fashion and sophistication. The perfume Ma Griffe, for example,
maintains its French name when sold in the UK, presumably to lend it
the kudos of Frenchness, rather than because many English-speaking
purchasers appreciate the pun (une griffe can mean both ‘a designer
label’ and ‘a claw mark’.) The German phrase Vorsprung durch Technik
(roughly translated as ‘advancement through technology’) is used by
the German car manufacturer Audi, presumably to evoke stereotypical
associations of German manufacture with efficiency and reliability.
Italian may be used in food advertisements for English-speaking
markets to connote excellent traditional home cooking.
The use of English in advertisements across the world may be partly
motivated by similar considerations, but is also more complex, driven
additionally by the ascendancy of English as the main international
language. English is used not only for aesthetic or entertainment
reasons, but because it is a major communicative resource in the
delivery of services to an international clientele.
Literature too may appear to be implicated in the spread and
ascendancy of English and arguably in a corresponding detrimental
effect on the languages it eats into or replaces. Among postcolonial
writers there has been a parallel earlier debate to that between
‘localisers’ and ‘globalisers’ in marketing. Some, such as the late
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (e.g. 1999 [1976]) have argued for the
virtues of writing in English because of its global reach, while others,
such as Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (e.g. 1986), insist on writing
only in their own ‘local’ language. Yet there are key differences
between this debate about the use of English in literature and that
about its use in advertising. For while the effects of the global use of
English in commerce may be perceived as being generally
homogenising, spreading particular ideologies and perspectives
associated with the UK and the USA, the effects of postcolonial
literature in English (at least in intention) is quite the contrary, as these
words of Chinua Achebe make clear:
[M]y answer to the question Can an African ever learn English well
enough to be able to use it ef fectively in creative writing? is certainly
yes. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it as a
native speaker? I should say, I hope not. It is neither necessary nor
desirable for him to be able to do so. The price a world language
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
146
must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of
use.
(Achebe, 1999 [1976], p. 212)
3.8 Conclusion
The superficial similarity but fundamental dissimilarity between literary
and commercial uses of English may serve as a cue for us to reflect in
conclusion on all the aspects of creativity in the two spheres that have
been examined in this chapter. You have looked at formal linguistic
characteristics of literary creativity, their functions and purposes, their
integration with other modes of communication and, lastly, their
relation to the continuing growth of English in the world. From all
these perspectives it is very hard to establish any decisive unequivocal
boundary between linguistic creativity in literary and commercial
discourse. The borders of literary language have been, and will
continue to be, a vexed problem for scholars. In my view, there
remains some deeper distinction, which stylistic analysis – whether at a
micro or a macro level – cannot quite reach. The problems of
distinguishing literary from commercial creativity linguistically may
serve to point us elsewhere and to conclude that while surface features
are important to both, it is in effects and values that a more
fundamental difference resides.
A good poem can move us to tears, illuminate our deepest human
experiences and will bear thousands of repetitions. A good novel
creates an alternative world, whose characters become important
figures in our lives. Literary creativity can create new ways of seeing,
aid our understanding of the most important aspects of life (love,
sexuality, friendship, family, ageing, death, suffering, failure), widen our
cultural and social perspectives and imbue us with a sense of beauty
and profundity. The use of superficially similar creativity in advertising,
while it may achieve incidental heights of wit and ingenuity, remains
fatally constrained by its limited overriding purpose – to make a profit.
References
Achebe, C. (1999 [1976]) ‘Morning yet on creation day’, in Ogbaa, K.Understanding Things Fall Apart: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, andHistorical Documents, Westport, CT, The Greenwood Press, pp. 216–22.
Austen, J. (1985 [1813]) Pride and Prejudice, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
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Bakhtin, M. M. (1984 [1929]) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (trans. C.Emerson), Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Balzac, H. de (2013 [1826]) Sarrasine, Project Gutenberg ebook [Online].Available at www.gutenberg.org/files/1826/1826-h/1826-h.htm (Accessed 12February 2016).
Barthes, R. (2008) [1968]) ‘The death of the author’, in Lodge, D. and Wood,N. (eds) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn, Harlow, PearsonEducation, pp. 313–16.
Ben&Jerry’s (2016) ‘Our values’, Ben&Jerrry’s [Online]. Available at www.benjerry.co.uk/values (Accessed 12 February 2016).
Blake, W. (1970 [1794]) Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the TwoContrary States of the Human Soul, London, Oxford University Press.
Graddol, D. (1997) ‘The future of English: a guide to forecasting thepopularity of the English language in the 21st century’, Bournemouth University[Online]. Available at https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/business-postgraduate/files/2014/09/CIGBE-The-Future-of-English.pdf (Accessed 26May 2016).
Graddol, D. (2006) ‘English next: why global English may mean the end of“English as a foreign language”’, The British Council [Online]. Available athttp://englishagenda.britishcouncil.org/sites/ec/files/books-english-next.pdf(Accessed 26 May 2016).
Jakobson, R. (1960) ‘Concluding statement: linguistics and poetics’, in Sebeok,T. A. (ed.) Style in Language, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 350–77.
Jeffries, L. and McIntyre, D. (2010) Stylistics, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press.
Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007) Style in Fiction, 2nd edn, London, Longman.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) Decolonising the Mind, London, James Currey.
Unilever (2015) Ben&Jerry’s: History [Online]. Available at www.unilever.ca/our-brands/detail/ben-and-jerrys/396352/ (Accessed 29 April 2015).
Willmott, R. (ed.) (2011) William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience,Oxford, Oxford University Press.
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Reading A: The discourse of Western marketing
Helen Kelly-Holmes
Source: Edited version from Kelly-Holmes, H. (1998) ‘The discourse ofWestern marketing professionals in central and eastern Europe: their role inthe creation of a context for marketing and advertising messages’, Discourseand Society, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 339–62.
INTRODUCTION
One of the inevitable consequences of the collapse of the planned
economies of central and eastern Europe has been the banishing
of a rival, alternative discourse to the sidelines in many spheres of
economic, cultural and political thought. In its place, the
dominant or dominating discourse has indeed proclaimed the
triumph and legitimacy of the market. It seemed that a turning
point, a fundamental break with the past dichotomy of Left and
Right had been reached in the discourse of the market; for some
– most prominent among these Fukuyama (1992) – it was more
of a dead-end, the end of a search for alternative forms of socio-
economic order and the accompanying grand narrative. The
ideology of consumption and self-actualization through lifestyle
purchase seemed to have been vindicated, and consumers and the
producers of market discourses could now be comforted by the
fact that the alternative had been disproven in what was now seen
as a brief and ultimately flawed exercise. As Jameson states,
Everyone is now willing to mumble, as though it were an
inconsequential concession in passing to public opinion and
current received wisdom (or shared communicational
presuppositions) that no society can function efficiently
without the market. (Jameson, 1991: 263)
The rush to fill the vacuum left behind by ‘socialism’ and
‘communism’ has been led by marketers and entrepreneurs, and,
as Cook (1992: 16) predicted, advertising and other ‘capitalist’
discourses have become more widespread in the countries of the
former ‘Soviet Bloc’.
[…]
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Advertising is always carefully planned in minute detail with an
above-average awareness of the extra-lingual task. But advertisers
and markerters operating in East Germany were not only very
aware of the micro strategy, in terms of a particular campaign, but
also of the macro task, in terms of restructuring the economy as a
whole and implementing the process of consumerization. As one
West German banking executive put it, ‘Our task is to turn those
brought up under communism into fully-functioning capitalists’
(Waller, 1992). […]
SOCIALIZATION, CONSUMERISATION,
INTERTEXTUALITY AND CONTEXT
In the market society, the social conditions for the production
and consumption (Fairclough, 1989) of marketing and advertising
texts are present due to the existence of the institutions of the
market and its discourses which not only assume but also
reinforce the status quo of the consumer society. As Fairclough
states, ‘discourse and practice in general … are both the products
of structures and the producers of structures’ (1989: 39).
The notion of ‘market discourse’ is particularly complex and
multi-layered. It relies for its success on not only highly
sophisticated intertextuality, but also on a multi-dimensional and
reflexive relationship between texts, commodities, individuals and
societies. The whole relationship and the constituent parts are all
market discourses. If we confine our objects of study to obvious
genres such as advertising and public relations, we miss out on
much of today’s market discourses and their functioning. Thus,
not just advertising and public relations, but also shop fronts and
windows, packaging and labelling, information leaflets and
mailshots, direct mail and telesales communicate their message by
intentionally and unintentionally appealing to a variety of both
practical and obscure culture-based needs and by relying on
consumer familiarity with the discourse of marketing and
knowledge of the market system. […]
For the producer of market discourses in the existing market
society, the social conditions of production and consumption are
taken for granted; they are part of the framework of that society
and therefore much of this socialization is actually undertaken
unintentionally. For most members of the consumer society who
now participate in the market, there is no sense of
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
150
consumerization, of the deliberate construction or imposition of a
consumer identity or discourse. Since their earliest memories,
market discourses – i.e. discourses which not only originate from
but also assume the market society – have permeated all aspects
of their lives. They are, therefore, socialized consumers, and
producers of market discourses thus focus on the micro
advertising task in terms of presenting a new product, lifestyle,
service etc.; their preoccupation is with the ‘new’ (Halliday, 1985)
or ‘entropic’ (Shannon and Weaver, 1949) component of the
advertising text, taking consumer understanding of the framework
of the market, its vocabulary, its rituals, its truths and common-
sense assumptions, as ‘given’ (Halliday, 1985) or ‘redundant’
(Shannon and Weaver, 1949). Market discourses are read within
the ‘pattern of “preferred” meanings’ (Hall, 1993: 207), supported
by the frameworks of knowledge, relations of production and the
technical infrastructure (Hall, 1993: 207) of the consumer society.
In the former planned economies of central and eastern Europe,
the case is reversed. Here, the process of consumerisation could
be observed. Rather than simply communicating with the
socialized consumer, advertising, marketing and media agencies
were faced with ‘unconsumerised’ citizens. As Ferguson (1990)
states, public discourse in today’s society constitutes and is
constituted by processes of informational and cultural exchange
‘which are shared, widely available and communal in character’
(1990: ix). This was clearly not the case when western advertisers
and marketers brought their discourses East. […]
THE STUDY
Fifty texts were selected for study through the ‘Textline’ database
(published by Reuters), using the key words ‘advertising’ and
‘eastern Europe’. The selection contains a variety of text types,
principally interviews, reports and speeches. The database
comprises a very comprehensive source of texts dealing with
economics, marketing, advertising and finance from the British,
European, American and international business press and also
specialist journals for marketing and advertising professionals. On
the surface, the discourse community appears relatively
homogeneous in terms of occupation and education and also in
terms of assumptions about the market, since the texts are being
produced and consumed within the context of the international
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business community. The members of the discourse community
could be said to operate within a ‘professional code’ (Hall, 1993:
209). However, the cultural diversity in the ethos, interpretation
and operation of market systems would lead to caution in
assigning producers and users to a uniform category – with one
exception: these are all people talking about the formerly planned
economies of central and eastern Europe to others who are
interested in these economies for a variety of reasons, many in
terms of marketing objectives. The discourse objects – the
citizens of these countries – are thus not generally part of the
discourse community.
The objective of the study was not a detailed analysis of the
discourse of these marketers, an in-depth study of the ‘how’ of
what they are saying; instead the emphasis was on the ‘what’ –
specifically what they are saying about the necessity for an
ideologically compatible context and intertextual sphere within
which their texts can be received; what their discourse tells us
implicitly and what they themselves tell us explicitly about the
operation of a dominating, hegemonic discourse on an everyday
basis.
The selected texts were examined with the objective of answering
the following questions:
. What intertextual relations exist? Can we hear echoes of the
triumphal incantation of capitalism? Are the status quo of the
market economy and the consumer society and the common-
sense assumptions and truths of consumerism given and
uncontested? To what extent does the discourse of marketers
and advertisers feed on the narratives and myths of triumph
and conquer?
. Does the discourse display an awareness of the macro
function, the need to construct an ideologically compatible
context and intertextual sphere? How do the producers of
these texts see their role in the process?
. Do marketing and advertising professionals construct
themselves triumphalistically in relation to the pre-existing
context? Do the agents construct themselves as economically,
educationally, culturally superior? How do they refer to the
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
152
objects of the discourse? What role do the citizens of these
countries play in the discourse?
INTERTEXTUAL RELATIONS – ECHOES OF THE
TRIUMPHAL INCANTATION OF CAPITALISM
‘Capitalism’ = democracy
The assumption underlying many of the textual features of the
discourse is the common-sense truth among economists and
politicians of the Right and centre that the ‘free’ market equals
democracy and that the market has brought democracy and
freedom. The market is presented as a fundamental part of the
democratic process and so are its discourses. […]
[…]
The texts of international organizations with explicit ideological
aims form an (unconscious) intertextual sphere for advertisers and
marketers in central and eastern Europe and their texts are
echoed in the discourse of these individuals. For example, this
perceived equation of the market with freedom is especially
pronounced in the media, where advocates express the conviction
that ‘only free markets can guarantee diversity of expression’
(Murdock, 1992: 21). Thus, private media are assumed to be
democratic and incorruptible, unlike their state-owned
counterparts. Murdock’s use of the limitor ‘only’ and the modality
of ‘can’ are indicative of this widespread belief in private media as
guarantors of democracy and incorruptibility, unlike their state-
owned counterparts:
Boguslaw Chrabota, programming director of Poland’s
national commercial channel Polsat, cited recent national
elections in the country as proof that private stations were
less subject to political pressures than their public
counterparts. (TEXT 46)
An ad firm executive who declined to be named said foreign
agencies are often kept out of bidding for governmental
advertising contracts. One thing that is likely to help the
growth of advertising is the end of the state monopoly over
airwaves which has allowed the establishment of private
television stations. (TEXT 46)
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[…]
Westernizing = Normalizing
The triumphalism of the pro-market commentators and the self-
satisfaction of western ‘capitalism’ echo Fukuyama’s contention
that we have now reached the end of History in terms of the end
of a search for the ideal economy and society (Fukuyama, 1992).
Such intellectual discourse forms part of the intertextual sphere
within which the texts of the advertising and marketing agencies
[sic] – not in a direct, explicit way, but rather in a subconscious
way through the infiltration of the discourse into all aspects of
public life in western economies and societies. As Barthes (1981)
puts it, they are ‘unconscious or automatic quotations, given
without the quotation marks’ (p. 39).
Excluded from their considerations is any counter discourse, no
alternative is heard, although, as Keegan points out, ‘Communism
has failed, but capitalism has not succeeded’ (1992: vii).
[…]
Thus, underlying the discourse of marketing and advertising
agencies are the texts of the western market society and the
intertextual relationships and assumptions upon which they are
based. The period of ‘actually existing socialism’ or ‘communism’
in its varieties is seen as something transient – a temporary
deviation from the norm, as illustrated by the following extract:
Shell had its first links with Eastern Europe last century,
links which were interrupted by the arrival of
Communism, but which gradually resumed during the 50s.
It was not until the last few years that trade has blossomed
again. (TEXT 28)
Here, too, we see the penetration of positive, growth metaphors
in the discourse and their association with trade, the market and
‘capitalism’. The process of economic reform and the
introduction of the consumer society is viewed by media and
advertising professionals as something normalizing, stabilizing; the
economy and society are being returned – with the aid of these
new market discourses – to an assumed norm of ‘capitalism’, the
ideal of the market which allows things to ‘blossom’. In these
texts, the problems – economic and otherwise – being
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
154
experienced by these countries are presented as being inherently
linked to the system of the planned economy. The market system,
on the other hand, is presented as providing the solution:
… when will Western investment penetrate other parts of
Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent
States, where advertising conditions are chaotic and
problems of political instability and geographical barriers
to distribution recall Gogol. (TEXT 23)
There is still a great deal of disorganisation on some of the
channels and advertising practices have a long way to
develop. (TEXT 23)
Conditions are ‘chaotic’ because they do not conform to the
western model; western investment in the media is presented as
the great white hope, the civilizing, stabilizing and normalizing
influence, as evidenced by the use of the rhetorical question,
which gives the question experiential value.
[…]
Go East to the Wild West – Dominant myths and narratives
A key characteristic of the discourse of marketing, advertising and
media professionals in the sample selected is the use of symbolic
language which invokes the imagery of the Wild West and
colonization – two grand narratives of triumph and conquer in
western culture. The economies and societies of central and
eastern Europe are presented as wild and lawless frontiers, the
advertisers and media professionals as the civilizing, pioneering
spirits. They are invariably ‘pushing forward’, settling ‘new
territories’. Investigating the use of metaphor in the discourse is
particularly revealing, since ‘different metaphors imply different
ways of dealing with things’ (Fairclough, 1989: 120) and evidence
‘different ideological attachments’ (p. 119).
Central and Eastern European commercial television
pioneer, Central European Media. (TEXT 41)
I really enjoyed the pioneering spirit of the place. (TEXT
24 – young advertising executive talking about his work in
Budapest)
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Hungary offered us the chance to go where no ad men
had gone before. (TEXT 24)
Sony Broadcast and Professional Europe has furthered its
push into Eastern Europe by opening a branch in Warsaw,
Poland. (TEXT 19)
The countries themselves are referred to in terms of frontier
imagery:
[The former Soviet Bloc] is probably the last
underdeveloped market. (TEXT 29)
Over the next couple of years, I see a tremendous amount
of new territory. (TEXT 13)
Others … have already established a strong foothold in
other East and Central European territories. (TEXT 18)
In fact, much of the language used is reminiscent of the colonial
discourse of the last century:
Poland is perceived as the jewel in the crown. (TEXT 18)
An image of lawlessness, implicitly linked to the Wild West
mentality, also pervades the discourse. The cowboy tactics which
advertising agencies get away with tend to be blamed on the
perceived lawlessness of these states:
‘The rules change so fast, and often nobody takes notice of
new rules: it’s like the Wild West,’ said Bernd Ahlbrecht,
Hamburg-based marketing manager for Central and Eastern
Europe at German cigarette marketer H.F. and Ph.F.
Reemtsma. ‘We have to do whatever we can.’ As a result,
cigarette marketers ignore the law and advertise everywhere
except broadcast media (TEXT 15)
The speaker’s choice of the pronoun ‘we’ not only refers to the
actions of his agency; ‘we’ is extended to encompass all ‘right-
minded’ people. The pious intention contained in the statement
‘We have to do whatever we can’, is reminiscent of the discourse
of aid workers in reports brought back from the sight of a human
tragedy.
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156
It is ironic that this lawlessness in the area of advertising
regulations is linked inherently with the legacy of the centrally
planned economy, rather than being blamed on unfettered
‘capitalism’ – the ‘pure market’ or the ‘extreme free market’
(Keegan, 1992: 99) – which exists in many of these countries and
regions.
[…]
CONCLUSION
Examining the discourse of western marketing and advertising
professionals in former centrally planned economies of central
and eastern Europe not only provides key insights into how these
‘reconstituted’ societies are evolving and being directed to evolve,
it also shows how the triumphal discourse of capitalism both
feeds and is fed by the texts and context-building activities of
these individuals. There is a fundamental textual interrelationship
between them – both are the expression of the other, both rely
on each other for legitimacy. The hegemonic discourse can too
easily be seen as something unattached, something different which
hovers and provides a nebulous framework, but does not exist or
operate on a micro, everyday basis. As Jameson states ‘the
ideology of the market is unfortunately not some supplementary
ideational or representational luxury or embellishment that can be
removed from the economic problem … it is somehow generated
by the thing itself, as its objectively necessary afterimage’ (1991:
260).
[…]
The discourse of consumerization in central and eastern Europe
also highlights the key role which the producers of market
discourses often unwittingly play in socialization. Again, they are
usually highly aware of the immediate micro educational/
socialization task of the particular market discourse; however, the
role they play in constructing and reaffirming the status quo of
the market and imparting its rituals and discourses to socialized
consumers takes place at a far more ‘passive’ level – passive being
understood here as non-deliberate or not conscious rather than
non-active or non-participatory. On the part of consumers, the
socialization is also far more ‘passive’ than, for instance, deliberate
socialization through pedagogy or religious instruction. By
observing the awareness among advertising and marketing
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professionals operating in central and eastern Europe of this
pedagogical/socialization function and its more direct, less subtle
manifestation in these countries, we also gain an insight into how
much of socialization in the market society takes place at a non-
deliberate, non-conscious level through media and market
discourses.
[…]
[…] There is no formal ideology to which these marketers and
advertisers adhere; they would not consider themselves to be
ideologues and in fact the term ‘ideology’ does not occur in their
discourse, except, significantly, in reference to the former Soviet
bloc. They do not see themselves as part of some grand
conspiracy, but rather as doing their job. This is, perhaps, the true
triumph of market ideology and its discourses: its assumed
normalcy, its status as the given way of life from which there may
be minor deviations but not serious alternatives. It is at the
ordinary, everyday level that the discourse has truly come to
dominate and that its triumphal incantation – by virtue of its very
mundanity – is most audible.
References for this reading
Barthes, R. (1981) ‘Theory of the Text’, in R. Young (ed.) Untying
the Text – a Post-Structuralist Reader. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Cook, G. (1992) The Discourse of Advertising. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power. Harlow: Longman.
Ferguson, M. (1990) Public Communication: The New Imperatives.
London: Sage.
Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man.
London: Hamish Hamilton.
Hall, S. (1993) ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in D. Graddol and O. Boyd-
Barrett (eds) Media Texts: Authors and Readers, pp. 200–11.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1985) An Introduction to Functional Grammar.
London: Edward Arnold.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
158
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. London: Verso.
Keegan, W. (1992) The Spectre of Capitalism. London: Radius.
Murdock, G. (1992) ‘Citizens, Consumers and Public Culture’, in
M. Skovmand and K.C. Schroder (eds) Media Cultures –
Reappraising Transnational Media, pp. 17–41. London: Routledge.
Shannon, C. and W. Weaver (1949) The Mathematical Theory of
Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Waller, D. (1992) ‘Germany: European Finance and Investment,
Germany 2 – Spearheading the Transition’, Financial Times (1
July): 2.
Texts from Textline corpus used in this reading
Text 15: EASTERN EUROPE: Mussey, Dagmar and Kariel, Ken
(1993) ‘Reemtsma Takes West Cigarettes East’, Advertising Age
(Apr.).
Text 18: EASTERN EUROPE: Bateman, Louise (1995) ‘Rising in
the East’, Broadcast (7 Apr.).
Text 19: POLAND: Sony Eastern Push. Broadcast (11 Nov. 1994):
11.
Text 23: EASTERN EUROPE: Syfret, Toby (1992) ‘Advertising
Budgets are Growing at a Rate of 700 Per Cent a Year and Selling
Out Fast’, Broadcast (9 Apr. 1992): 42.
Text 24: HUNGARY: Marshall, Caroline (1995) ‘Postcard from
Budapest’, Campaign (9 June): 28.
Text 28: EASTERN EUROPE: ‘Campaign Report on
International Advertising – Shell and OGILVY and MATHER
Tread with Care’, Campaign (25 Sep.): 34.
Text 29: EASTERN EUROPE: ‘Campaign Report on
International Advertising – Soho meets Warsaw’, Campaign (25
Sep. 1992): 31.
Text 41: SLOVAKIA: ‘CME Losses Rise. BIPCIT’, CBSEXP
(May 1996): 16.
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Text 46: UKRAINE: ‘Polish Media Focus’, CBSEXP (Apr. 1996):
16.
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160
Reading B: Language choice in advertising to
bilinguals
Aradhna Krishna and Rohini Ahluwalia
Source: Edited version from Krishna, A. and Ahluwalia, R. (2008) ‘Languagechoice in advertising to bilinguals: asymmetric effects for multinationalsversus local firms’, Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 35, December,pp. 692–705.
Several countries in Southeast Asia (e.g., Singapore, Japan, and
India), Europe (e.g., Holland, Belgium, and many Western
European nations), North America (e.g., United States), and
North Africa (e.g., Morocco, Algeria, Chad, and Tunisia) have
bilingual populations. Many of these populations are fairly fluent
in a “foreign” language (typically English or French) as well as at
least one local or native language. Advertising to these
populations includes an additional layer of complexity, that is, the
choice of language for advertising. A number of options exist: the
ads could be in either one of the primary languages or could have
a bilingual format containing a mixture of the two languages
(e.g., Spanglish, Hinglish, or Singlish, which combine English with
Spanish, Hindi, and Malay/Cantonese, respectively). This issue is
becoming increasingly crucial for multinational corporations
(MNCs) that need to weigh the advantages of single language use
(e.g., English) across markets versus the complexities of
communicating their message in the local language or a mixed
language ad. One option may be to follow the lead of local
companies in making advertising language choices. Our research
sheds some light on the feasibility of this decision rule.
Even as MNCs make inroads into bilingual markets, there is a
paucity of research that specifically addresses the increasingly
consequential issue of advertising language. Although a significant
body of research in consumer behavior has examined the
cognitive structures, memory, and organization of information by
bilinguals (e.g., Tavassoli and Han 2001; Zhang and
Schmitt 2004), few researchers have focused on the role of
language in the persuasion process for consumers (see Koslow,
Shamdasani, and Touchstone [1994] and Luna and Peracchio
[2005a, 2005b] for exceptions). Importantly, the extant persuasion
research examining bilinguals has been conducted within contexts
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(e.g., Hispanics, French, and Singaporeans) in which one language
(majority language or the language spoken by the group that holds
power and prestige, e.g., English or French) has positive
associations for the audience, while the other (minority language
or the language spoken by those low in power and prestige,
e.g., Spanish) has negative associations, such as inferiority
(e.g., Koslow et al. 1994; Luna and Peracchio 2005a, 2005b; Platt
and Weber 1984). Notably, in addition to favorability-related
associations, bilinguals are also likely to have other language-
specific perceptions (e.g., global, sophisticated, friendly, and sense
of belonging) in their language schemas (e.g., Myers-Scotton
1999, 2002). However, it is difficult to cleanly separate out the
effects of language favorability from language perceptions in the
context of majority-minority languages since favorability is often
confounded with language perceptions. Our research, therefore,
uses a bilingual context in which both languages are viewed
positively (urban India) and focuses on language perceptions
rather than on language favorability.
Prior research has also focused on mixed languages (e.g., Luna
and Peracchio 2001, 2005a). This is not surprising given the
increasing popularity of mixed languages like Spanglish in the
American marketplace. Our research investigates both mixed as
well as single language messages.
Using the existing literature in this area (e.g., Luna and Peracchio
2001, 2005a) as a starting point, we attempt to build a conceptual
framework for examining the broader issue of language choice in
persuasion of bilinguals. Two important moderators of the impact
of language choice on persuasion are identified and integrated in a
model of language effects: the country of origin of the company
and the product category of the brand. Specifically, given the
global context of this decision, our research attempts to
understand the extent to which MNCs can replicate the strategies
being used by local companies regarding language usage.
Additionally, we study language choice for MNCs versus local
firms as it pertains to different product categories (luxuries vs.
necessities).
…
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162
PILOT STUDY: ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CONTEXT
The Indian Context
In middle and upper class urban India, children typically learn
Hindi (or their regional language, e.g., Tamil) first and learn
English later when they start going to school. In most schools,
either the language of primary instruction is English or English is
taught as a second language from the kindergarten year onward.
Both Hindi and English are spoken in informal social settings.
Bollywood movies (which are in Hindi) and Hindi language music
are popular throughout the country. Popular television serials are
in Hindi, but several from the United States (e.g., The Bold and the
Beautiful and Desperate Housewives) are also very popular. Among
the younger generation, Cartoon Network and MTV are as well
liked as Bollywood music, local music videos, and local television
channels (which are primarily in Hindi). Thus, people in India are
exposed to both English and Hindi all the time.
One thing to note is that in urban India, even when the ad
language is Hindi or mixed (Hindi and English), the written script
is typically roman for both languages, especially when the ad
appears in an English language magazine. Examples of Hindi and
mixed ads using the roman script are given in figure 1.
A review of the literature suggests some generalizable language-
related associations in bilingual cultures that use English as the
second language. Use of English in ads has come to suggest a
social stereotype – a symbol of modernity, progress,
sophistication, and a cosmopolitan identity (e.g., in Japan, Korea,
Germany, and India; Bhatia 2000; Piller 2003; Takashi 1990a,
1990b). However, the primary (or first) language is likely to have
high levels of belongingness associations, which connote a
stronger sense of closeness and in-group associations (e.g., Myers-
Scotton 1999, 2002). For instance, Koslow et al. (1994) found that
the use of Spanish was associated with respect for, sensitivity
toward, and association with the Hispanic community. In other
words, there may be a higher level of belongingness associated
with Hindi, while English may symbolize sophistication and
modernity in India.
Further, unlike the negative connotations of inferiority and lower
socioeconomic status associated with Spanish for Hispanics in the
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United States (e.g., Luna and Peracchio 2005a), in India, the Hindi
language tends to have several positive associations, such as
solidarity, pride, nationalism, family, and belongingness, and is not
necessarily associated with lower social status (Bhatia 2000). We,
therefore, expect associations for both languages to be primarily
positive. …
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164
FIGURE 1 EXAMPLES OF HINDI AND MIXED LANGUAGE MAGAZINE
ADVERTISEMENTS IN INDIA
[Summary of] Methodology
[Detailed descriptions of the methodology and findings as
presented in the original paper are omitted here. Instead, a
summary of the nature of the studies undertaken and an outline
of the conceptual framework used are given.
The authors undertook a pilot study in which bilingual
undergraduate students from Delhi University were given
questionnaires to investigate their attitudes towards using and
encountering English and Hindi in various contexts. As expected,
the findings showed that both languages were viewed favourably
but rather differently. English was associated with notions such as
‘globalness’, prestige and professionalism, while Hindi was linked
to a sense of family, closeness and belonging.
The findings from the pilot study were used as the basis for a
conceptual framework for looking at language use in advertising
to bilingual customers. This framework posits that when a
language is expected to be used in a particular context (i.e. it is
‘unmarked’), then the language is processed straightforwardly,
while if the language use is unexpected (i.e. ‘marked’), this triggers
the conscious common associations with that language.
Furthermore, the authors’ framework hypothesises that consumers
expect multinational companies (MNCs) to use English while, for
local companies, the local language or an informal mixture of that
language and English would be expected. The authors also point
to research which suggests that, when purchasing necessities,
consumers are drawn to product brands with which they feel
familiar and at home, while, with luxuries, they tend to value
sophistication and exclusivity over familiarity.
Two main studies were undertaken with a cohort of bilingual
undergraduates in which they were asked to evaluate the
effectiveness of ad slogans for detergent (a necessity) and
chocolate (a luxury). In Study 1, the slogans for each of the
products were either in English or in Hindi. In addition, the
students were given background information about the imagined
companies making the products which the students were told
were either multinational or locally based. In Study 2, the research
participants were exposed to slogans in English, in Hindi or in a
mixture of the two. Furthermore, they were asked to elaborate on
the different associations and thoughts which the slogans brought
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to mind. The findings from the studies are included in the
discussion below.]
GENERAL DISCUSSION
…
It is important to note that although these data were collected in
India and are helpful in establishing the validity of the research
context, they reveal a set of associations that appear to be globally
generalizable. Past research conducted in several countries (Japan,
Korea, Germany, and Singapore) has revealed similar types of
associations with the local language (strong sense of closeness and
belongingness; e.g., Myers-Scotton 1999, 2002) versus English
(modern, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan; e.g., Piller 2003;
Takashi 1990a, 1990b), suggesting generalizability of the chosen
context and the underlying language perceptions.
Study 1 tests the role of company (local vs. MNC) in advertising
language choice, using single language ads. Consistent with our
conceptual framework, the findings reveal that language choice is
likely to matter to a significantly greater extent to MNCs than to
local companies. As such, across the two product categories tested
in our research (detergent for necessities and chocolate for
luxuries), language did not influence ad evaluations for the local
company. However, English emerged as a more effective choice
for luxury goods, and Hindi led to more favorable evaluations of
necessities, when the company was an MNC. Results of this
experiment suggest that MNCs need to be more cognizant about
language choices in global bilingual markets, and it would be ill
advised for them to simply follow the choices that appear to be
working for the local corporations. Thus, the choice of advertising
can be extremely important for MNCs, especially for positioning
the product.
Study 2, consequently, was designed to provide deeper insights
into the role of language for MNCs. It attempted to (a) zero in
on the processes underlying language effects on ad evaluations
and (b) extend the scope of research from single language slogans
to mixed language advertising. The results revealed that
consumers tend to use the perceptual associations of languages
that are most relevant for evaluating the product category
(sophistication for luxuries and belongingness for necessities … ).
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
166
Our research provides several novel and interesting insights about
language use for MNCs – relating to both single language as well
as mixed language ads. It identifies an important caveat relating to
the use of local language by an MNC. As study 2 reveals, the
unexpectedness of Hindi language choice by an MNC focuses a
lot of attention (more than even the mixed languages) on the
language of the ad (largest number of language-related cognitive
responses), heightening the perceiver’s skepticism, as reflected in
the increased counterargumentation, thereby, reducing the ad’s
persuasiveness. This outcome appears to be more likely as the
level of slogan elaboration increases (e.g., study 2 vs. study 1). As
such, the belongingness advantage that is implied by the use of
Hindi for necessities might be wiped out for consumers who
elaborate extensively on the slogan. These data appear to suggest
that MNCs should observe caution in the use of local language,
even in the domain of necessities (our findings suggest that use of
local language is clearly expected to backfire in the domain of
luxuries). In other words, localization of the ad language may be a
good strategy for necessities (for which belongingness is
important), but MNCs need to be cautious about going
completely local and might be better off using mixed language ads
for bilinguals.
In this regard, our findings highlight an important advantage of
mixed language messages for MNCs – they are able to capitalize
on the favorable associations of both languages without drawing
excessive attention to the language choice and, therefore, present
the “safe bet” option for advertising products that fall in the
category of necessities, in global bilingual markets. Mixed language
ads, in addition, might be the most feasible (and low risk) option,
if a product does not clearly fall in the luxury/necessity
distinction, since they are likely to elicit relevant and favorable
associations for both languages. They are also likely to be
relatively effective in the domain of luxuries, as study 2
demonstrates. It is important to note that the two mixed language
forms did not differ from each other in terms of their perceptual
associations (sophistication and belongingness) as well as overall
persuasiveness (slogan evaluation) for the two product categories
tested in this research.
An interesting finding from our studies is that local firms do not
necessarily have to use English to market luxuries in India. While
Chapter 3 Creativity on sale
167
this seems to be the prevailing practice in India, our results show
that language choice, even for luxuries, has little impact for local
firms.
It is, however, important to note that the effects obtained in this
research (especially those related to the mixed language ads) may
only generalize to contexts in which the salient associations for
both languages are primarily positive. Thus, if the two languages
fall in the majority-minority category, one being perceived as
favorable and the other having predominantly unfavorable
associations, the language of the code-switched term is likely to
play a more important role (e.g., see Luna and Peracchio 2005a,
2005b). A useful avenue for future research may be to examine
the role of different language formats, when both favorability and
language-specific associations vary, by taking the joint influences
of both into account.
A possible limitation of our study is that the hypotheses were
tested in the context of a single product category of luxuries
(chocolates) and one category of necessities (detergent). Future
research could attempt to replicate our results using other product
categories of luxuries and necessities. However, selecting these
categories will require several critical considerations to rule out
potential confounds, such as the cost differential in the products,
country-of-origin effects in the category, whether it is a packaged
good or not, and the prevalence of branded items in the category.
We have examined belongingness and sophistication associations
of language. Future research could also look at these associations
for products by using a sophisticated product and a belongingness
product.
Another limitation of our research is that consumers in the
studies were well-educated individuals for whom both English and
Hindi may be regarded as favorable and for whom sophistication
might be a desirable brand attribute. Given our relatively
homogeneous sample, these findings should be generalized with
caution to other segments of the Indian population, for example,
rural India where education levels tend to be significantly lower.
Additional research should examine the generalizability of these
findings across different types of media. One interesting finding
of our pilot study was that the Indian participants were more
likely to read and write in English (vs. Hindi) but were more likely
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
168
to engage in conversations as well as seek entertainment
(e.g., movies) in Hindi (vs. English). Therefore, it is possible that
language-based effects may vary with the media of communication
(e.g., print v. broadcast).
References for this reading
Bhatia, Tej K. (2000), Advertising in Rural India: Language,
Marketing Communication, and Consumerism, Tokyo: Tokyo Press.
Koslow, Scott, Prem Shamdasani, and Ellen Touchstone (1994),
“Exploring Language Effects in Ethnic Advertising: A
Sociolinguistic Perspective,” Journal of Consumer Research, 20
(March), 575–85.
Luna, David and Laura A. Peracchio (2001), “Moderators of
Language Effects in Advertising to Bilinguals: A Psycholinguistic
Approach,” Journal of Consumer Research, 28 (September), 284–95.
——— (2005a), “Advertising to Bilingual Consumers: The Impact
of Code-Switching or Persuasion,” Journal of Consumer Research,
31 (4), 760–65.
——— (2005b), “Sociolinguistic Effects on Code-Switched Ads
Targeting Bilingual Consumers,” Journal of Advertising, 24 (2), 43–
56.
Myers-Scotton, Carol (1999), “Explaining the Role of Norms and
Rationality in Codeswitching,” Journal of Pragmatics, 32 (9), 1259–
71.
——— (2002), Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and
Grammatical Outcomes, New York: Oxford University Press.
Piller, Ingrid (2003), “Advertising as a Site of Language Contact,”
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23, 170–83.
Platt, John and Heidi Weber (1984), “Speech Convergence
Miscarried: An Investigation into Inappropriate Accommodation
Strategies,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 46
(1), 131–46.
Takashi, K. (1990a) “English Elements in Japanese Advertising,”
English Today, 6, 45–46.
——— (1990b) “A Sociolinguistic Analysis of English Borrowings
in Japanese Advertising Texts,” World Englishes, 9, 327–41.
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Tavassoli, Nader T. and Jin K. Han (2001), “Scripted Thought:
Processing Korean Hancha and Hangul in a Multimedia Context,”
Journal of Consumer Research, 28 (December), 482–92.
Zhang, Shi and Bernd H. Schmitt (2004), “Activating Sound and
Meaning: The Role of Language Proficiency in Bilingual
Consumer Environments,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31
(June), 220–28.
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170
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the
politics of value
Deborah Cameron
4.1 Introduction
When English-speakers call someone or something ‘creative’, it is not
just a descriptive statement, it is typically also a judgement of value. In
this chapter you will consider some questions about the way in which
creativity in language is judged. What counts as using language
‘creatively’, and who has the authority to decide? Are all creative uses
of language valued equally, or are some considered ‘better’ than others?
How are judgements on linguistic creativity affected by social, cultural
and political considerations?
Activity 4.1
Allow about 20 minutes
This activity invites you to reflect on the relationship between creativity
and value by considering how the word ‘creative’ is used in present-day
English. Start by consulting your own intuitions: what kinds of people or
activity would you be likely to describe as ‘creative’? Would you be
making a value judgement? If so, would it be positive or negative?
Now compare your intuitions with some evidence drawn from the usage
of a larger population. Below are some examples from the British
National Corpus (BNC). The BNC is a ‘reference corpus’ for British
English – a balanced, 100 million-word sample of authentic language
use stored in computer-readable form, which can be accessed online
(www.corpus.byu.edu/bnc/). The word ‘creative’ occurs around 2500
times. Do the following examples match your intuitions? What do they
tell us about creativity and value?
1 EXPERIENCED versatile creative musician, guitar,
fiddle, mandolin, seeks accomplished musician into
country roots for gigs, mainly duo, Gloucestershire.
2 From being among the dullest of Japan’s
manufacturers, Nissan has blossomed into one of its
most creative and capable.
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
171
3 Within a year he had moved to a more creative agency
and four years later was working at the then most
creative agency in London.
4 Possession of an academic qualification is evidence of
intellectual ability, of assiduous and successful study,
and of readiness to assume a creative and responsible
role in society.
5 Great ingenuity was expended in creative accounting
to get round overall spending limits or capital
allocations.
6 Geraldene Holt, whose books on cooking with herbs
have been well received, has written Creative Herb
Gardening.
7 Further, according to this more sophisticated
inductivism, creative acts, the most novel and
significant of which require genius and involving as they
do the psychology of individual scientists, defy logical
analysis.
8 We must programme our minds to be expansive and
creative and eliminate the words ‘I can’t’ from our
vocabulary.(Source: adapted from British National Corpus, 2016)
Discussion
We must be cautious about generalising from such limited evidence, but
the examples offer some support for the conclusion that ‘creative’ is
typically a positive value judgement. It frequently appears in close
proximity to other words denoting positive qualities (e.g. ‘versatile’,
‘capable’, ‘ingenuity’, ‘genius’), and in one example it is explicitly
contrasted with an adjective denoting a negative quality (Nissan is said
to have been one of Japan’s ‘dullest’ companies before it ‘blossomed’
into one of the ‘most creative’). Sometimes adding positive value (as
opposed to semantic content) seems to be its main function: this is true
for the book title in (6), for example, where it is hard to see what the
difference might be between creative herb gardening and plain old herb
gardening.
In these examples there are no unambiguous cases of ‘creative’ being
used to make a negative judgement. The example that comes closest is
(5), which refers to ‘creative accounting’, a stock phrase denoting
unorthodox financial practices which is sometimes used to imply
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
172
dishonesty or deception. Your intuitions may have told you that ‘creative’
can have that implication in non-financial contexts too: a teacher might
describe the excuse given by a student who is late handing in their work
as ‘creative’ and mean that the teacher thinks it is a lie. However, these
negative usages are euphemisms, meant to soften the judgement by
avoiding blunt terms like ‘fraud’ and ‘lying’. In that sense they trade on
English-speakers’ understanding that the ‘normal’ meaning of ‘creative’
is positive.
4.2 The politics of value
The title of this chapter refers to ‘the politics of value’ – but what
does politics have to do with judgements of creativity? Clearly, those
judgements are not ‘political’ in the most common sense of the word,
relating to institutions and processes of government. The meaning of
‘politics’ that is relevant here is a more abstract one, referring to power
structures and relationships of all kinds (a familiar example of this
usage is the phrase ‘office politics’, meaning power struggles within a
workplace). In the more abstract sense, all judgements of value can be
said to have a political dimension. Evaluating someone or something is
a way of exercising power, and power is one of the factors that
determines who may evaluate whom, in what ways and with what
consequences.
The relationship between power and evaluation is especially clear in
hierarchical institutions like schools and workplaces, where it is
typically higher-ranking individuals who have both the right and the
obligation to make judgements on those below them. Classroom
teachers assess their pupils, and are themselves assessed by head
teachers. Managers evaluate the employees they manage, and are
evaluated in turn by their own bosses. These judgements are local,
made by specific individuals in particular institutions, but they are also
shaped by the workings of power on a larger scale. When a teacher
assesses a student’s work, for example, they will often be using
standards imposed from outside, such as the specifications of a
national school curriculum or the criteria used to mark public
examinations. Even when the teacher’s assessments are not tied to any
particular set of external criteria, they will be informed by the values
the teacher internalised during their own education and professional
training. What gives the teacher’s judgements authority is not only the
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
173
teacher’s ‘local’ status in their own classroom, but also the more
‘global’ currency of the values their judgements are based on.
It has often been pointed out that values are not socially neutral. One
of the functions of education is to equip people with what the social
theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1986) called cultural capital, meaning
knowledge of the tastes and habits of behaviour which are valued by
the people with most power and influence in society. For those who
do not start out as members of this elite group, cultural capital
acquired through education (and certified through the award of
recognised educational qualifications) is potentially a route to upward
social mobility.
In most societies there is no absolute consensus on questions of value;
rather, there is argument and debate. But arguments about value are
also political in the broader sense of the term (see Chapter 1): often
they can be seen as symbolic enactments of deeper ideological and
social conflicts. Consider, for instance, debates about the value of
graffiti and rap music: should these be acknowledged as creative art
forms, or are they just (respectively) mindless vandalism and foul-
mouthed ranting? The arguments may be couched in ‘artistic’ terms,
but the judgements being made are also social, reflecting different
attitudes towards the groups most closely associated with a particular
form of expression. This is not a one-way street: a rap artist might
denounce classical music as boring and irrelevant, and that could also
be a social judgement on the culture it is part of. However, it is
typically the judgements of the powerful and privileged which are
accorded most legitimacy. The value of classical music is generally
acknowledged, even by people who dislike it, in a way the value of rap
is not.
The topic of this chapter is how the politics of value affect judgements
on creativity in language, but that will turn out to be a complicated
question. Not only are there competing definitions of linguistic
creativity, and differing opinions on its value, but there is also some
dispute about whether it is legitimate to make value judgements on
language at all.
4.3 Language and value
One of the first things a linguistics student learns is that value
judgements have no place in the ‘scientific’ study of language. The
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linguist’s job is not to tell people how they ought to speak or write,
but to explain how language works and describe how it is actually
used. Linguists maintain that all languages and ways of using language
have equal linguistic value. The idea that some are ‘better’ than others
is dismissed as merely prejudiced, and of no scientific interest (see
Pinker, 1994, for a clear summary of this position).
Most students beginning their study of linguistics find it hard to adopt
this non-judgemental stance, which runs counter to ingrained habits of
thought and talk. Everyday metalanguage (language used about
language) is strongly evaluative, and the habit of making judgements is
one we become familiar with at an early stage of life. Children are
constantly judged for the way they speak: adults evaluate their
vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar and style of speech, and are quick
to let them know when they have got something wrong, or said
something inappropriate or rude. As they grow up they also absorb the
judgements that are habitually made on different ways of using
language in the culture they belong to. British English-speakers learn,
for example, that some people are described approvingly as ‘well
spoken’ while others’ speech is disparaged as ‘common’; that some
foreign accents are comical, others sexy or sinister; that spelling errors
are ‘careless’, non-standard grammar is ‘illogical’, and jargon or slang
words are ‘gobbledegook’ and ‘gibberish’.
Activity 4.2
Allow about 15 minutes
What kinds of judgement do you remember adults (e.g. parents, other
family members, teachers) making on your use of language when you
were growing up? Do you think they have had any lasting effect on how
you speak and write? Do they affect how you regard the language you
see and hear around you? (If you are a parent, for instance, do you
make the same judgements on your own children’s speech?)
Discussion
Evaluating language was certainly an everyday activity in my family and
most of the judgements made were negative. For instance, I remember
my parents criticising me for using ‘unladylike’ language (a category that
covered a multitude of sins from shouting to using ‘rude’ words to
speaking in a broad local accent). I also recall, in my first few weeks at
secondary school, an English teacher giving out a list of ‘banned’ words
(including ‘get/got’ and ‘nice’) which we were not allowed to use in
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
175
essays because they were ‘ugly’ and ‘bad style’. I now think these
prohibitions were just arbitrary prejudices, but in practice some of them
have stayed with me. I still avoid the word ‘nice’, for instance, even
though I don’t believe there is any good reason to do so.
The evaluation of children’s language by adults is an aspect of what
linguistic anthropologists call language socialisation (Ochs and
Schieffelin, 2011), the process of becoming a culturally and
linguistically competent communicator. This requires, among other
things, an understanding of the values your community uses to judge
communication. Ideas about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ language – a subcategory
of language ideologies (Woolard, 1998): the beliefs and theories
through which people make sense of linguistic phenomena – are
variable across cultures and over time: my experiences as a girl growing
up in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s will differ from the experiences
of people who grew up in a different place and time. However, there
are some kinds of judgement which are likely to be part of most
people’s experience, since they are based on beliefs about language and
value which are very widely held in modern literate societies.
Probably the most important of these is a belief in the value of
‘correctness’, meaning conformity to the rules of a standardised
language variety. ‘Incorrect’ usage routinely attracts negative comment,
and the terms in which it is talked about are often strikingly moralistic,
implying a judgement not only on the language, but also on the
character of its user. Deviations from what is taken to be correct
pronunciation are condemned as ‘lazy’ or ‘sloppy’, and non-standard
morphology and syntax (e.g. ‘I ain’t done nothing’) are labelled ‘bad
grammar’, while words used in a non-standard sense (e.g. ‘literally’ in
statements like ‘my head literally exploded’) are said to be ‘misused’.
Another criterion on which language use is often judged is its
appropriateness for a particular purpose, context and audience.
Language which is not necessarily ‘incorrect’ may nevertheless be
criticised as ‘inappropriate’ if it is impolite, obscene, blasphemous or
prejudiced (e.g. racist, sexist or homophobic); insufficiently formal for
the setting (e.g. slang or non-standard grammar in a job interview);
unsuited to the purpose for which it is being used (e.g. text-message
spelling in an essay); or unacceptable coming from a certain type of
language user (e.g. my parents’ insistence that ‘ladies’ don’t shout).
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Some judgements on language are based on aesthetic values, reflecting
cultural beliefs about what is more or less beautiful. The idea that
some forms of language are more aesthetically pleasing than others is
commonly invoked to criticise certain accents, slang words and even
‘ordinary’ words like ‘get’, which my teachers considered ‘bad style’ not
because it was ‘incorrect’, but because it was an ‘ugly word’. Such
aesthetic preferences are matters of taste, and consequently judgements
on good and bad style have a particular tendency to vary historically
and cross-culturally. Some societies and historical periods have
accorded most value to ‘eloquence’ (a ‘fancy’ style characterised by
unusual words, complex syntax and elaborate figures of speech), while
in others there has been a preference for plainness. In contemporary
English-writing handbooks and style guides it is plainness that tends to
be emphasised: these texts stress the importance of brevity and clarity,
while warning against long-windedness, obscure jargon and the kind of
ornate language that is disparagingly labelled ‘flowery’ or ‘purple prose’.
The preference for plainness has also been justified on moral grounds,
using the argument that ‘eloquent’ rhetoric allows unscrupulous people
(like advertisers and politicians) to confuse, manipulate or deceive their
audience. George Orwell (2013 [1946]) championed the virtues of plain
English for exactly these reasons in his classic essay ‘Politics and the
English language’.
Where does creativity fit into this picture? I said earlier that it was a
complicated case, and this discussion has identified one of the
complicating factors. Though the value attached to creativity is
generally positive, in the sphere of language it competes – and may
conflict – with other positive values such as correctness,
appropriateness and clarity. That conflict is the source of many
arguments about value. What one person praises as a creative use of
language – ingenious, novel and original – another may condemn as
obscure, pretentious and full of deviations from ‘correct English’. Later
we will consider the case of Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani
(2006), which divided opinion in exactly this way. One reviewer
described the book’s language, a mixture of standard English, non-
standard English, Panjabi, teenage street-slang and texting, as ‘Artful,
thought-provoking and strikingly inventive’, while another called it ‘an
almost impenetrable gibberish’ (Malkani, 2016). First, though, let us
examine some more general questions – beginning with the question of
what is meant by ‘creativity’ in the context of language use.
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
177
4.4 Creativity in language: definitions and disputes
Most people probably think of linguistic creativity as a special kind of
inventiveness and skill with words, the exception rather than the rule.
But that is not how it is conceptualised in linguistics. For linguists in
the tradition of Noam Chomsky (1965), linguistic creativity is part of
the innate human capacity for language: it is simply the ability which
all language users have to produce novel utterances from pre-existing
linguistic resources. (The last sentence is an example: there is nothing
exceptional about it, but it is probably original in the sense that no one
may have ever put exactly those words in exactly that order before.)
Using this definition, everyone is being creative with language every
time they speak or write.
Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists take a position somewhere
in between the everyday and the Chomskyan view. They point out that
in most cultures there are linguistic genres and practices which make a
special feature of creativity: they are not just creative in the way all
language use is creative, but are designed for the specific purpose of
displaying participants’ creative verbal skills. Some practices of this
kind are explicitly competitive: an example is the African-American
verbal duelling tradition known as ‘playing the dozens’ (a ritualised
exchange of insults whose rules are explained in Labov, 1972). More
recently, various forms of creative language play have been invented by
online communities: examples include ‘Leetspeak’, a way of writing
which replaces letters with other symbols (e.g. the word leet (‘elite’) can
be rendered ‘1337’ (Cameron and Panović, 2014, p. 54), and
‘LOLspeak’, the grammatically and orthographically ‘deviant’ language
of LOLcats, which say things like ‘I can has cheezburger’ (Gawne and
Vaughan, 2012, p. 99).
The study of these phenomena has its own ‘politics of value’. On the
one hand, the belief that ‘all language varieties are equal’ prompts
linguistic researchers to defend the value of practices which are often
dismissed as worthless by drawing attention to the creativity they
involve. On the other hand, the same principle of equality makes
linguists reluctant to suggest that some uses and users of language are
‘better’ than others. To avoid that implication, they tend to gloss over
the question of individual creativity, putting more emphasis on the
‘rule-governed creativity’ of the practice itself, which is presented as
one more application of the innate human ability to adapt language for
new purposes and contexts.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
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Activity 4.3
Allow about 1 hour and 30 minutes
Turn to Reading A, ‘Texting’ by David Crystal, at the end of this chapter.
Crystal analyses two examples of text poetry composed by Norman
Silver. Begin by reading the poems themselves: as you do so (and
before you turn to Crystal’s commentary), make notes on what (if
anything) you think is ‘creative’ about Silver’s use of language. Then
read Crystal’s comments, paying attention to the way he deals with the
question of creativity (and, in particular, the question of its value). How
do his observations about the poems compare with the observations you
made before you read his comments? Do you find his analysis
convincing?
Discussion
Crystal’s analysis is a good example of the approach to creativity which I
described earlier: for him, Textspeak is ‘the latest manifestation of the
human ability … to be linguistically creative’. He does not really consider,
however, whether the examples he discusses, text poems, might display
a different kind or degree of creativity from ‘ordinary’ text messages. He
does acknowledge that they come from ‘a literary genre, not a real text
situation’, but in most of his analysis they are treated simply as source
material for a general description of the language used in texting.
In your own reading of the poems you may have noticed, and perhaps
judged as ‘creative’, features which are not common in everyday texting,
but are more typical of literary or poetic language. For instance, the
poem ‘txt commndmnts’ is not only written in Textspeak, but is an
extended metalinguistic comment on Textspeak. It is also an extended
allusion to another text, the Bible (if you don’t recognise this intertextual
reference you won’t get the joke, or the point). Silver also makes use of
formal poetic devices such as line division, rhyme and syntactic
parallelism; his use of upper-case type in ‘u shall nt shout with capitls
XEPT IN DIRE EMERGNCY’ is a variation on the poetic practice of
using the sound of words to mimic their meaning. But although Crystal
comments on some of the features that make Silver’s usage distinctive,
he does not judge the poems as more creative, or more valuable, than
other uses of Textspeak.
Many commentators disagree with Crystal’s assessment of Textspeak as
a creative use of language. The literary critic John Sutherland, for
instance, described it as ‘thin and … unimaginative … mask[ing]
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
179
dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness’ (Sutherland, 2002). One of
Crystal’s aims is to demonstrate that these judgements are misguided,
by showing, for instance, that text spelling is a rule-governed system
rather than a random collection of errors. But however painstakingly
he supports that argument with linguistic evidence, it is unlikely to
convince critics like Sutherland, because their objections to Textspeak
are not just linguistic: they are, as described earlier, symbolic
enactments of deeper social conflicts. Criticising Textspeak is a
symbolic way of expressing negative attitudes towards the social
phenomenon it is part of – the rise of new digital technology; and the
social group who are seen as its prototypical users – young people.
The linguistic creativity of young people is a perennial focus for two
(often interrelated) kinds of conflict: conflict between generations and
conflict about social change. These conflicts have both private and
public manifestations; sometimes, as in the case we will look at next,
they can become overtly political issues.
4.5 Conflicting values: creativity, authority and
tradition
In the UK, for several decades there has been a highly politicised
debate about how to teach the English language to schoolchildren. It
revolves around a supposed contrast between ‘traditional’ approaches,
which focus on ‘the basics’ of grammar, spelling and punctuation, and
‘progressive’ approaches, in which language skills are developed
through ‘creative’ activities like writing stories and poems. I call this a
‘supposed’ contrast because in reality it would be hard to find a school
that does not use some combination of the two approaches. But
rhetorically they are presented as opposite and incompatible:
traditionalists warn that by encouraging creativity the progressives are
condoning illiteracy, and progressives retort that by harping on about
‘the basics’, the traditionalists are stifling children’s natural creativity.
Concerns about standards of literacy among schoolchildren have a long
history, but the roots of this particular debate lie in the 1970s, when
‘progressive’ ideas developed during the previous decade began to
influence mainstream institutions, including schools. This provoked a
backlash from traditionalists who warned that it would lead to a
decline in standards. The terms of the debate were already well
established when, in 1982, The Observer newspaper published a column
written by John Rae, the conservative headmaster of a fee-paying
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school, under the title ‘The decline and fall of English grammar’. Rae
began by making the familiar claim that schools since the 1960s had
abandoned traditional grammar teaching and replaced it with creative
writing, to the detriment of linguistic standards. But then he took the
argument a step further:
The overthrow of grammar coincided with the acceptance of the
equivalent of creative writing in social behaviour. As nice points
of grammar were mockingly dismissed as pedantic and irrelevant,
so was punctiliousness in such matters as honesty, responsibility,
property, gratitude, apology and so on.
(Rae, 1982, quoted in Cameron, 2012, p. 94)
Here, Rae asserts that the ‘overthrow of grammar’ has caused a decline
not only in linguistic standards but also in behavioural and moral
standards. But the logic of that argument is obscure: how would an
appreciation for ‘nice points of grammar’ make people more honest
and more respectful of others’ property, and why would creative
writing have the opposite effect?
Rae’s argument only makes sense if we assume he is using the
opposition between ‘grammar’ and ‘creative writing’ to symbolise some
deeper conflict. To see what that conflict might be, it is useful to recall
the earlier discussion of conflicting linguistic values. Grammar teaching
and creative writing are practices based on different ideas about which
values are most important. In grammar teaching the emphasis falls on
correctness, conformity to the rules, whereas in creative writing what is
valued is individual self-expression, which may involve non-conformity
or rule breaking. The deeper conflict which is played out symbolically
in debates on grammar and creative writing is a conflict about the
importance of rules in the education of children. This symbolism
supplies the ‘missing link’ between linguistic and behavioural or moral
standards: Rae fears that if children are not taught to obey the rules of
language, they will have no respect for rules in any sphere of life, and
the end result will be anarchy. Interestingly, these connections are not
made only on one side of the argument. Opponents of traditional
grammar teaching in the 1980s also associated grammar with strict
discipline and obedience to rules. For them, however, those were
negative rather than positive associations. They agreed with Rae about
the meaning of grammar, but disagreed with him about its value (for a
detailed discussion of the debate, see Cameron, 2012).
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
181
This argument did not end in the 1980s. A new controversy was
sparked in 2013 when the Conservative Education Secretary, Michael
Gove, announced plans to modify the primary school curriculum. One
of his proposals was that the teaching of English to children aged 5–11
years old should put more emphasis on grammar, spelling and
punctuation. Predictably, this attracted both enthusiastic support and
strong opposition. The following activity explores the arguments made
by some of its opponents.
Activity 4.4
Allow about 25 minutes
The quotation below is a shortened version of an open letter criticising
Michael Gove’s proposals; it was signed by 100 academics and
published in two national newspapers (the Independent and The
Telegraph) on 20 March 2013. What are the writers’ objections to the
proposals? Based on what you can tell from the above account, has
anything about this debate changed since 1982?
We are writing to warn of the dangers posed by Michael
Gove’s new National Curriculum which could severely erode
educational standards. The proposed curriculum consists of
endless lists of spellings, facts and rules. This mountain of
data will not develop children’s ability to think, including
problem-solving, critical understanding and creativity.
…
The new curriculum is extremely narrow. … Speaking and
listening, drama and modern media have almost disappeared
from English.
…
… Schools in high-achieving Finland, Massachusetts and
Alberta emphasise cognitive development, critical
understanding and creativity, not rote learning.
(Independent, 2013)
Discussion
There is evidence in this extract of both continuity and change. One
thing that has remained the same is the construction of rules and
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
182
creativity as incompatible opposites: we see this in the first paragraph,
where ‘spellings, facts and rules’ are contrasted with ‘problem-solving,
critical understanding and creativity’. Another point of continuity with the
past is the complaint that the new English curriculum will marginalise
areas of the subject that emphasise self-expression, such as speaking
and drama.
But the writers’ argument also draws on ideas that were not part of the
debate in the 1980s. In the past in UK education policy debates,
creativity was most strongly associated with the ‘progressive’, liberal
values of self-expression and personal freedom; while it has not entirely
lost those associations, it has evidently acquired some new ones, which
might be called ‘neo-liberal’, because the value of creativity is
understood in economic terms. Along with critical thinking and problem
solving, creativity is one of the skills and dispositions needed for success
in a globalised, technology-driven and (in the West) post-industrial
economy. This conception of creativity as a valuable economic asset, for
nations as well as individuals, is what lies behind the reference to ‘high-
achieving Finland, Massachusetts and Alberta’ – all places that have
recently been found to rank above the UK in international comparisons
of educational attainment. The writers are suggesting that Mr Gove’s
‘back to basics’ approach will cause Britain to fall further behind its
competitors in a world that needs creative thinkers, innovators and
problem-solvers, not mechanical rote learners and rule-followers.
The writers of the open letter present traditionalist approaches to the
teaching of English as backward-looking and out of touch with new
economic realities. In arguments about language, however, looking back
to the past is often a good political strategy. Although the idea of a
past ‘golden age’ when everyone spoke and wrote correctly is a myth
(see Milroy and Milroy, 2012), it is one that appeals to large numbers
of people. The sociolinguist William Labov once remarked that in 40
years of interviewing people from all walks of life, he had never heard
anyone say: ‘It’s wonderful the way young people talk today. It’s so
much better than the way we talked when I was a kid’ (Labov, 2001,
p. 6). His older interviewees often spoke approvingly of the advances
they had seen during their lifetimes in medicine, science, technology
and living standards, but in the case of language they were firmly of
the opinion that things were better in the past.
This attachment to tradition and the past is another linguistic value
that is potentially in conflict with creativity, since using language
‘creatively’ will often mean using it in a way that is novel or unfamiliar.
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
183
However, attitudes to linguistic innovation are complicated: though
people may express a generalised conservatism when talking to
researchers like Labov, their responses to specific innovations are more
variable. Novelty is not always seen as a bad thing, and even when it is,
that is not usually just because of a simple prejudice against anything
new.
4.6 Innovation and the judgement of value
The ways in which different kinds of linguistic innovation are valued
clearly varies and it is important to consider why.
Activity 4.5
Allow about 20 minutes
Make a list of five things you have noticed as ‘new’ in language during
the past few years. They might be words, phrases, meanings, spellings,
grammatical features or vocal patterns (e.g. of intonation or voice
quality). Do this quickly, writing down the first five that come to mind
rather than pondering your choices at length. Now go through your list
and answer the questions below.
. Who do you think of as a typical user of this innovation?
. What would be a typical context for it to be used in?
. Do you use it yourself?
. Do you like it, dislike it or not have an opinion about it?
. If you have an opinion, what do you like or dislike about it?
Is there a pattern in your responses?
Discussion
Our opinions about innovations in language are often related to our
perceptions of the contexts and people we associate them with –
whether we feel any identification with those people, what social status
we accord them and whether we view them positively or negatively. (You
can accord someone high status and still view them negatively: not
everyone has positive attitudes to royalty, for instance.)
One of my favourite recent innovations is the use of the word ‘slash’ (like
the symbol /, but pronounced or written out) as a conjunction with
several possible functions (see Curzan, 2013): for instance, ‘I went to
class slash caught up on Game of Thrones’ means ‘I was supposed to
go to class but instead I watched Game of Thrones’. This innovation
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184
originated in digital communication and has spread to conversational
speech; its core users are young people. I spend a lot of time with young
people (my students) and I have generally positive attitudes to the
innovations they come up with (boosted in my case by the usual
linguist’s sympathy for ‘underdog’ groups whose language is constantly
criticised).
By contrast, I dislike the expression ‘I’m loving/liking X’ (where the
innovation is the use of the progressive -ing form). This may also have
originated in youth culture, but it was popularised when McDonald’s
adopted ‘i’m lovin it’ as an advertising slogan, and that’s really why I
dislike it. I see it as an example of the way corporations constantly try to
influence everyday speech and behaviour, and it annoys me that people
are susceptible to that. Outside the McDonald’s advertisements, I
associate the use of ‘loving X’ with people commenting on new trends or
the latest exploits of celebrities (‘we’re loving Beyoncé’s new hairstyle!’)
and I imagine those people as shallow and unintelligent. I may be a
linguist, but it is evident that my likes and dislikes are based on social
stereotypes and prejudices more than sound linguistic judgements.
You might be thinking: ‘couldn’t it be the case that people who dislike
a linguistic innovation are genuinely responding to qualities of the
language?’ It could be, but one reason for thinking that in many
instances it has more to do with social attitudes is that the same
linguistic features are evaluated differently in different contexts. Take,
for instance, the complaint that Textspeak-users don’t bother with
capital letters (XEPT 4 SHOUTNG). The same could be said of the
twentieth-century poet e.e. cummings, who didn’t even bother with
them in his own name. But in his case that was not attributed to
illiteracy or ‘mental laziness’. When cummings left out the capitals, it
was Art.
In modern societies, artists have a special license to innovate – at least
when they are operating in an artistic context (the official who issued
cummings’ passport may have been less tolerant). The capacity for
linguistic innovation is sometimes used as a measure of a literary
writer’s status: one commonly cited proof of Shakespeare’s genius is
the number of new words he contributed to the English language.
Conversely, a recurrent criticism of poor or mediocre writing is that it
is clichéd and derivative, or in other words not innovative enough. And
this too is an area where social stereotypes come into play.
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
185
For much of the twentieth century, linguistic innovation was
represented as the province of men, while women’s language was
disparaged as conservative, conventional and unoriginal. The linguist
Otto Jespersen (1998 [1922]) argued that women’s role throughout
history had been to civilise language by setting standards of politeness
and decorum, while men were responsible for renovating language,
using their capacity for innovation to ensure it did not lose its vitality
and vigour. While Jespersen thought that women’s natural conservatism
was needed to keep men’s wilder impulses in check, he warned that
‘there is a danger of the language becoming languid and insipid if we
are always to content ourselves with women’s expressions’ (Jespersen,
1998 [1922], p. 234). Needless to say, he did not have a high opinion
of women’s literary output – though he did suggest that foreign
language-learners should seek out the work of female novelists as a
good source of simple and commonplace vocabulary.
More than 50 years later, observations not unlike Jespersen’s were
made by the feminist scholar Mary Hiatt in her book The Way Women
Write (1977). Hiatt analysed a hundred passages taken from published
fiction and non-fiction texts, comparing the male and female authors’
use of various linguistic features. Among the differences she reported
was a tendency for women’s style to be less individual and more
‘conformist’ than men’s. Whereas Jespersen had implied that women’s
conservatism was ‘natural’, Hiatt attributed it to insecurity and lack of
confidence caused by women’s subordinate status in society. But she
still believed that women were less capable than men of the kind of
creativity that makes writers like Shakespeare ‘great’.
Linguists today do not believe that women are linguistically
conservative, whether by nature or for social reasons. On the contrary,
research suggests that they are consistently at the forefront of linguistic
innovation (Labov, 2001). Young women, in particular, are trendsetters:
they are responsible for many of the innovations which eventually
become mainstream. The use of ‘like’ as a conversational filler is one
example; another is ‘uptalk’, the high rising terminal intonation pattern
that makes statements sound like questions (Liberman, 2008). These
innovations were (and still are) disparaged, precisely because they were
associated with teenage girls; nevertheless, they have now spread to
every social group (Liberman’s discussion includes a sound-clip of
George W. Bush using uptalk). If the folk-belief has persisted that it is
men who push the linguistic boundaries, that only goes to show how
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
186
strongly our judgements of language are influenced by stereotypes and
prejudices about its users.
Activity 4.6
Allow about 1 hour
Now turn to Reading B, ‘The modern politics of “not real” words’ by Anne
Curzan, at the end of this chapter. A language historian, Curzan
discusses the critical reception of neologisms (new or unfamiliar words)
used by US political figures from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama.
How does her discussion relate to the idea that judgements on linguistic
innovations tend to mirror attitudes to the innovator(s)?
Discussion
The negative reception of neologisms used by presidents and other
high-ranking politicians might seem to challenge the principle that
innovations are judged according to the status of the innovator. Arguably,
however, what it really shows is that we need to distinguish between
different kinds of status. Political power is not the same thing as cultural
authority, and in matters of language it is the latter rather than the former
which educated people defer to. As Curzan points out, too, the
disrespectful judgements made on politicians’ neologisms do, in a way,
mirror attitudes to the politicians themselves. Furthermore, in
democracies politics is adversarial: drawing attention to politicians’
linguistic lapses is a way for their political adversaries to cast doubt on
their competence, intelligence and fitness for office.
Who has the cultural authority to make judgements on language?
Curzan mentions one source that is generally regarded as authoritative:
the dictionary. But while dictionaries can tell you whether something is
a ‘real word’ (i.e. is in common use), they make no judgement on
whether something is a ‘good word’ (if it is useful, beautiful,
memorable, elegant, witty, and so on). For that kind of judgement, we
are more likely to refer to the values and standards set by literary
authorities: writers, scholars and critics (see discussion in Chapter 1,
Section 1.2). As mentioned earlier, literary language is expected to be
creative and innovative; this is one sphere in which there is no dispute
about the value of creativity as such. But that does not mean there are
no arguments about it at all. Judgements of creativity in literary
language are also shaped by the politics of value.
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
187
4.7 Mixing it up: ‘high’ culture, ‘low’ culture and
the politics of understanding
In 2012, the Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz was asked by an
interviewer if he thought some readers might be alienated by the
mixing of English and Spanish that is a characteristic feature of his
work. He expressed his irritation by tweeting:
[Mother****ers] will read a book that’s 1/3 elvish, but put two
sentences in Spanish and White people think we’re taking over.
(Díaz, 2012)
This comment is most obviously a criticism of the anti-Hispanic
prejudice Díaz detects in the interviewer’s question. But by contrasting
readers’ resistance to Spanish with their willingness to read ‘a book
that’s 1/3 elvish’, Díaz is also, it could be argued, making a more
obliquely negative comment on his critics’ literary tastes.
‘Elvish’ is the name of a group of invented languages featured in the
fantasy novels of J. R. R. Tolkien. Since Tolkien’s time (roughly the
mid-twentieth century) many more ‘conlangs’, as they are now known
to their aficionados (the term is short for ‘constructed languages’),
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
188
Figure 4.1 Junot Díaz
have been created for use in works of fantasy and science fiction,
including films, television series and computer games as well as novels.
(Well-known recent conlangs include Klingon [Star Trek], Na’vi [Avatar]
and Dothraki [Game of Thrones] – see Okrent, 2009, for a cultural
history of language invention.) They can be very complex systems, with
sizeable vocabularies, full sets of phonological and grammatical rules,
and in some cases their own written scripts. Yet the creativity that is
displayed in their construction receives little critical applause outside
the conlangers’ own subculture. Most conlangs appear in texts that are
defined as ‘genre fiction’ rather than ‘literature’, and the genres they
belong to are often perceived as the province of obsessive geeks.
Díaz exploits that perception: as well as presenting those who dislike
his language mixing as racists (‘put two sentences in Spanish and White
people think we’re taking over’), his reference to Elvish casts them as
undiscerning readers, people who prefer stories about elves to more
challenging fare, and whose opinions on literature can therefore be
disregarded. What Díaz is doing is shifting the emphasis from one
hierarchy of value, based on ethnic/social status, to another, based on
literary prestige. In the first hierarchy his membership of a minority
ethnic group positions him as inferior to his critics, but in the second
they are inferior to him.
The mixing of English with foreign or invented languages is not found
only in the work of minority ethnic writers and producers of popular
genre fiction, but also in the writing of ‘mainstream’ literary authors. In
their work, however, it gets a different response. For instance, some
critically acclaimed works of twentieth-century fiction make use of an
invented variety of English that diverges markedly from the forms
readers are familiar with, so that an active effort is required to
understand it. Examples include Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange (1962), written in a fictional Anglo-Russian teenage slang called
‘Nadsat’, and Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker (1980), written in a
language representing what Hoban imagines present-day English might
become if its history were interrupted by a nuclear catastrophe. An
extreme case is James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (2012 [1939]), which is
written in a form of English so idiosyncratic that many readers have
admitted to finding it largely incomprehensible. Yet these literary
writers are not disparaged as geeks, or accused of alienating readers;
rather they are applauded for the originality of their inventions.
T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land (Eliot, 2009), widely regarded
as one of the most important literary works of the early twentieth
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
189
century, uses foreign languages quite extensively: there are passages in
French, German, Italian and Sanskrit, as well as an epigraph in Latin
and ancient Greek. Eliot was not a native speaker of any of these
languages (in the case of the classical ones, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit,
he obviously could not have been), and perhaps that is one reason why
his use of them is judged differently from Junot Díaz’s language
mixing. Whereas Díaz’s bilingualism was naturally acquired, Eliot’s
multilingualism was the result of academic study, and as such an
impressive display of cultural capital. Whereas Díaz is perceived as
excluding non-Hispanic readers by using the mother tongue of an
ethnic group to which he belongs, but they do not, Eliot’s assumption
that his educated audience would share his knowledge of foreign
languages can be seen as an inclusive gesture, one more likely to flatter
than alienate the reader.
Another difference between Eliot and Díaz is that Eliot’s foreign
language interpolations were drawn from ‘high’ literary sources, such as
the poetry of Baudelaire and Dante, whereas Díaz’s source material is
the vernacular Spanish and ‘Spanglish’ (a mixture of Spanish and
English) spoken on the streets of New York City. In fact, street
vernacular – though in English rather than a foreign language – is used
in The Waste Land too: the mixing of ‘low’ and ‘high’ cultural
references is a feature of the kind of literary modernism whose
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
190
Figure 4.2 T. S. Eliot
exponents included both Eliot and Joyce. More generally, it has always
been permissible for elite authors to represent the voices of the
‘common people’ in literature. Vernacular or non-standard writing has
been more controversial when produced by working-class or minority
ethnic authors like Díaz. Not only are they accused of excluding
readers who do not share their identity, but their use of a language
variety which is part of their own or their community’s repertoire may
also be seen as less creative, because it is assumed that what they are
doing is just a form of transcription (taking the spoken vernacular that
surrounds them and transferring it directly on to the page).
This is a naive assumption: writing in a non-standard vernacular always
involves creativity, if only because writers have to make their own
decisions about spelling (whereas in a standardised variety the rules are
fixed). But vernacular writing can also be creative in other ways. The
activity below focuses on the choices made by the writer Gautam
Malkani, whose novel Londonstani (2006), written in a mixture of
standard English, London English, Panjabi, slang and Textspeak,
explores contemporary issues of ethnic, generational, gender and class
identity through the exploits (some of them violent and/or criminal) of
a group of young, mainly British Asian men living in the west London
suburb of Hounslow.
Activity 4.7
Allow about 1 hour
Turn to Reading C, ‘Londonstani: Why the lingo?’ by Gautam Malkani, at
the end of this chapter. The text comes from a part of Malkani’s website
where he answers readers’ questions about the language of
Londonstani. As you read this material, consider how far Malkani’s
decisions were motivated by the desire to produce a faithful
representation of vernacular speech, and what other motivations seem to
have been important to him.
Discussion
Malkani makes clear that the language of Londonstani is a self-
conscious literary construct rather than an attempt to represent reality
faithfully: he dismisses what I referred to earlier as ‘transcription’, writing
down exactly what you hear, as ‘dumbass-ingly pointless’. He notes that
many of his choices do not exactly mimic the speech of real young
British Asians in west London: for instance, he avoids the most obscure
or ephemeral slang terms, he uses SMS conventions in what is
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
191
presented as spoken narrative/dialogue, and he uses small linguistic
variations in the representation of different characters’ speech
(e.g. whether they use ‘ain’t’ or ‘in’t’) as a code for different degrees of
‘hardness’ or resistance to authority. On the other hand, he clearly cares
about making the language ‘recognisable’, pointing out, for instance, that
in reality slang has rules and if these are completely ignored the result
will lack credibility. His creativity is demonstrated through the balance he
strikes between approximating the ‘real’ rules and inventing his own.
It was mentioned earlier that Londonstani’s language attracted some
negative judgements, with one reviewer calling it ‘almost impenetrable
gibberish’. This, however, was a minority view. In recent decades, the
creativity of authors who write in their own vernacular, or one to
which they have a direct cultural connection, has gained increasing
critical recognition. The Saint Lucian writer Derek Walcott received the
1992 Nobel Prize in Literature; Junot Díaz is one of a number of
bilingual Latino/a writers in the USA whose work has won awards;
other highly regarded works of American literature have been written
wholly or partly in African-American English (e.g. the highly popular
1982 novel by Alice Walker, The Color Purple). In the UK there is a
flourishing literature in vernacular Scots, one example of which –
James Kelman’s novel How Late It Was, How Late (1994) – won the
prestigious Booker prize. It is noticeable, though, that the most
critically respected vernacular writers are often those who display their
‘high culture’ credentials in other ways. Walcott’s Omeros (1990), for
instance, is a reworking of the Homeric poems The Iliad and The
Odyssey, long considered foundational in the Western literary tradition.
Kelman’s novels make use of literary techniques, such as the kind of
interior monologue known as ‘stream of consciousness’, which are
associated with modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
It is not their use of an unfamiliar language variety alone that makes
Walcott’s or Kelman’s texts ‘difficult’; and their difficulty seems to be
one of the criteria on which they are judged to be valuable works of
art.
4.8 Creativity, elitism and the language of
literature
The literary modernists mentioned in the last section – Eliot, Joyce and
Woolf – had a particular predilection for novel, unconventional and
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
192
‘difficult’ language, which reflected their commitment to modernist
ideas about what art should be and do. One of the modernist
movement’s slogans was ‘make it new’: in literature the quest for
newness prompted radical experiments with both literary and linguistic
form. This approach to literary language raises questions which have
been debated since the early twentieth century. Does the value of a
work of literature depend on the author’s willingness to experiment
with language, or can writers be linguistically creative while remaining
within the bounds of what is ‘normal’ and intelligible?
A related question is more explicitly political: is the modernist
celebration of novelty and difficulty a form of elitism, which effectively
defines the ‘best’ literary works as those which only a small minority of
readers can appreciate? The critic John Carey (1992) has argued that
modernist writers like Eliot, Woolf and Ezra Pound were unashamedly
elitist: despising the lower classes and the mass culture that catered to
popular tastes, they did not want their work to be accessible to all, but
only to a select group who shared their ideas and values. Carey’s view
of the modernists is disputed among scholars, but some of the writers
who followed them had a similarly negative attitude, especially to their
language.
In the 1950s, a loose grouping of English poets and novelists emerged
whose members explicitly sought to break away from the legacy of
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
193
Figure 4.3 Derek Walcott
modernism. Usually referred to as ‘The Movement’, these writers –
Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Thom
Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain – came from
lower-middle-class or working-class families; education had equipped
them with the cultural capital needed to move up the social ladder, but
their class origins made them critical of what they saw as the
modernists’ elitism. They were particularly critical of experimentalism:
the way writers like Joyce and Pound played with the conventions of
language and poetic form in an effort to ‘make it new’. Philip Larkin
described Pound’s poetry, along with Picasso’s painting and the jazz
music of Charlie Parker, as embodying ‘the two principal themes of
modernism, mystification and outrage’ (Larkin, 1970, p. 23).
The Movement writers rejected what Larkin called ‘mystification’.
Kingsley Amis summarised his aims as ‘trying to tell interesting,
believable stories about understandable characters in a reasonably
straightforward style: no tricks, no experimental foolery’ (quoted in
Vinson, 1972, p. 46). He also said, of The Movement writers as a
group: ‘all we really have in common is a desire to write sensibly … to
write poems that are intelligible in the sense that they can be
paraphrased’ (quoted in Leader, 2000, p. 525). Amis wrote frequently
on the subject of language, and from these writings (see Cameron,
2009, for more detail) it is clear that the linguistic values he considered
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
194
Figure 4.4 Virginia Woolf
most important were correctness and clarity of meaning, which for him
meant not only intelligibility but also the avoidance of pretentiousness
and affectation.
Opinions differ on whether The Movement produced work of high
literary value. Some critics have dismissed them as minor writers, partly
on the grounds that their deliberately un-experimental language is flat
and banal. They have also been criticised as provincial ‘little
Englanders’, lacking the cosmopolitan outlook that led modernists like
Eliot to mix languages and cultural references. Other critics defend
them, but often by arguing that their language is less straightforward
than it looks, and that it actually exhibits some of the modernist
qualities they claimed to despise (for more discussion of critical views
about the Movement, see Leader, 2009).
Although they have not gone unchallenged, the modernist criteria of
innovation, experimentation and difficulty still shape ideas about
creativity and value in literary language. Those criteria are invoked
frequently in arguments about what counts as ‘literature’ and what
differentiates ‘good’ from ‘bad’ writing in imaginative fiction more
generally.
Activity 4.8
Allow about 25 minutes
The passage below is an extract from a review of E. L. James’s
bestselling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), which tells the story
of a sadomasochistic relationship between the dominant and worldly
Christian Grey and his inexperienced submissive partner Anastasia
Steele. This is not the assessment of a professional critic, but comes
from one of the many amateur book blogs where anyone can post a
review. Amateur reviewers can sometimes challenge the cultural
consensus represented by more mainstream sources, but in this case
the reviewer echoes mainstream critics’ judgements on Fifty Shades,
most of which were negative.
As you read through the passage, consider how the criticisms made in it
relate to the ideas you have examined in this section about language,
creativity and value.
Last but not least, let’s talk about the writing.
Guess what? It’s bad. Shocking, I know. Insultingly simple in
both style and form, and filled to the brim with details being
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
195
told instead of shown. James also apparently thinks that
throwing in the occasional dictionary-necessitating word is
enough to give her “tale” a classy and sophisticated air. Well,
it isn’t, and the attempt comes across as silly and contrived
because of this. The end result is a work that seems more like
an unusually well-written fanfiction than a genuine piece of
literature. …
James also likes to reuse the same phrases and scenarios
every chance she can get. Let’s take a look at some of her
favorites:
…
4. Anastasia compares her orgasms to the feeling of
shattering into pieces. (Sounds painful.)
5. Anastasia describes Christian’s jeans as hanging on his
hips “in that way.” (Wonderfully descriptive, James. Good job.)
…
7. Anastasia says “oh my” or some more colorful variation of
the phrase during sex.
The last object on this list is undoubtedly the most annoying.
It’s used every other page, and it drove me absolutely insane.
(Beimers, 2013)
Discussion
The author of this review is evidently familiar with ‘elite’ discourses on
literary language and value. The book is criticised for lacking the formal
and stylistic complexity we would expect in a ‘genuine piece of
literature’; the reviewer suggests that James has tried and failed to make
her style more literary by ‘throwing in the occasional dictionary-
necessitating word’. He then castigates her for not being creative
enough to vary her phraseology: the offence of using the same formulas
repeatedly is compounded by the banal or inappropriate nature of the
formulas themselves.
The attention given by reviewers of Fifty Shades to ‘bad writing’ is
interesting in itself, since erotic fiction is not usually read for its
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
196
stylistic qualities. Perhaps focusing on James’s style allows critics to
judge the book negatively without having to take a position on issues
such as its explicit depiction of sadomasochistic sex and its
stereotypical treatment of gender. Whereas objecting to those things
might make the reviewer appear prudish or ‘politically correct’,
complaints about the clichéd and wooden prose display cultural capital
in a way that is less controversial.
4.9 Conclusion
In this chapter you have looked at the value accorded to creativity in
language, and at the ways in which judgements of it may be thought of
as ‘political’. It has been noted that both the nature and the value of
linguistic creativity are matters of dispute. Linguists’ definitions and
judgements conflict with those of ordinary language users; among the
latter there are conflicting views on the importance of creativity. For
many people, using language ‘creatively’ is less important than using it
‘correctly’, ‘appropriately’ or ‘intelligibly’. In addition, judgements on
specific examples of linguistic creativity are affected by the context and
the status of the creator. Neologisms produced by literary writers are
evaluated differently from those produced by politicians; language
mixing is more acceptable in ‘high art’ than in street vernacular;
Chapter 4 Language, creativity and the politics of value
197
Figure 4.5 E. L. James
deviations from the normal conventions of spelling and punctuation
may be viewed as creative in experimental poetry, but when they
appear in text messages they are more likely to be interpreted as
evidence of ‘illiteracy’.
Linguists argue that all human language use involves creativity, and
their work has illuminated the diversity of the practices in which
creativity is displayed. But in the real world, all forms of creative
language use are not considered to be equal. Judgements on creativity
are not based primarily on linguistic criteria, but on values which are
ultimately social, cultural and political.
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Reading A: Texting
David Crystal
Source: Edited version from Crystal, D. (2008) ‘Texting’, ELT Journal,vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 77–83.
[Two text poems by Norman Silver]
txt commndmnts
1 u shall luv ur mobil fone with all ur hart
2 u & ur fone shall neva b apart
3 u shall nt lust aftr ur neibrs fone nor thiev
4 u shall b prepard @ all times 2 tXt & 2 recv
5 u shall use LOL & othr acronyms in conversatns
6 u shall be zappy with ur ast*r*sks & exc!matns!!
7 u shall abbrevi8 & rite words like theyr sed
8 u shall nt speak 2 sum1 face2face if u cn msg em insted
9 u shall nt shout with capitls XEPT IN DIRE EMERGNCY+
10 u shall nt consult a ninglish dictnry
Norman Silver: Laugh Out Loud :-D txt café. 2006.
langwij
langwijis hi-ly infectious
childrenthe world ovacatch itfrom parenceby word of mouth
the yungr specially vulnerableso careshud b taken how langwijis spread
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symptoms include acutegoo-goo& the equally serious ga-ga
if NE childis infected with langwijgive em3 Tspoons of txtb4 bedtime& ½ a tablet of verseafter every meal
Norman Silver: Age, Sex, Location txt café. 2006.
[…]
Commentary
A new medium for language doesn’t turn up very often, which is
why the linguistic effects of electronic communications
technology have attracted so much attention. And with mobile
phones, where the small-screen technology is so constraining, the
effects have generated one of the most idiosyncratic varieties in
the history of language. I call it Textspeak.
Textspeak is characterized by its distinctive graphology. Its chief
feature is rebus abbreviation. Words are formed in which letters
represent syllables, as seen in ‘b’, ‘b4’, ‘NE’, ‘r’, ‘Tspoons’, ‘u’,
‘ur’, ‘xcept’. Use is made of logograms, such as numerals and
symbols, as seen in ‘&’, ‘@’, ‘2’, ‘abbrevi8’, ‘b4’, ‘face2face’, and
‘sum1’. Punctuation marks and letters are adapted to express
attitudes (the so-called smileys, or emoticons), as seen in the ‘:-D’
after the title Laugh Out Loud – you have to read the symbols
sideways to see the point.
Such forms are by no means restricted to Textspeak; they turn up
in other electronic domains, such as emails, chatgroups, and blogs.
Indeed, rebuses have a much longer linguistic history. The
Victorians played games with them, and children’s Christmas
annuals have long contained puzzles using them. The only type of
traditional rebus that does not appear in Textspeak is the use of
pictures – such as a bee representing the word ‘be’. But in
Textspeak something more radical has taken place.
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The nature of telephony, plus the on-screen limitation to 160
characters, has motivated a much more wide-ranging and
innovative set of conventions. Textspeak has its own range of
direct-address items, such as ‘F2T’ (‘free to talk?’), ‘PCM’ (‘please
call me’), ‘MMYT’ (‘Mail me your thoughts’), and ‘RUOK’ (‘are
you OK?’). Multi-word sentences and response sequences can be
used, reduced to a sequence of initial letters. ‘LOL’ is used in the
poem, and is explained in the title of the book in which it
appears; other examples are ‘SWDYT’ (‘So what do you think?’),
‘BTDT’ (‘Been there, done that’), and ‘YYSSWW’ (‘Yeah, yeah,
sure, sure, whatever’). Even more ingenious coded abbreviations
have been devised, especially among those for whom argot is a
desirable safeguard against unwelcome surveillance.
Texters seem to be aware of the high information value of
consonants as opposed to vowels. It is fairly unusual to lose
consonants, unless the words are likely to be easily recognized, as
in the case of ‘hi-ly’ and ‘rite’. But there are lots of instances
where one vowel is dropped (‘aftr’, ‘capitls’, ‘cn’, ‘emergncy’,
‘hart’, ‘insted’, ‘mobil’, ‘nt’, ‘othr’, ‘prepard’, ‘theyr’, ‘thiev’, ‘txt’,
‘yung’), or two (‘conversatns’), or three (‘dictnry’), or four (‘recv’).
‘Neibrs’ is an interesting example, losing two consonants and two
vowels (only one in American English, of course). ‘Msg’ loses
three vowels and one consonant. ‘Equllay’ seems to be doing
something different – making a word look strange for its own
sake (the standard spelling contains the same letters, ‘equally’). ‘A
ninglish’ is also different: by moving the position of the word-
break, the spelling suggests a non-standard pronunciation –
though in fact running the ‘n’ into the ‘e’ of English is a perfectly
standard practice.
Texters also seem to be well aware of the low information value
of punctuation marks. There is no sentence punctuation at all in
the poems, with the exception of the double exclamation-mark in
the sixth commandment, and apostrophes are dropped in ‘neibrs’
and ‘theyr’. On the other hand, certain punctuation marks are
given new functions, being used ludically in ‘ast*r*sks’ and ‘exc!
matns’, and there is a contrastive use of space (in the second
commandment), type-size (in the fifth and seventh), and colour
(‘hart’ in the first and ‘XEPT IN DIRE EMERGNCY +’ in the
ninth are printed in red [use of colour in original]). Hyphens are
sometimes respected (three uses in the ‘langwij’ poem). Capital
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letters are conspicuous by their absence at the beginning of
sentences, but are often used for effect – in the ninth
commandment, for example, and also in some of the acronyms
(such as ‘LOL’).
Why abbreviate? There is ergonomic value in abbreviation, given
that the number of key-strokes saved bears a direct relationship to
time and energy – and formerly (depending on your service-
provider) even the eventual size of your telephone bill. In a
creation such as ‘ru2cnmel8r’ (‘Are you two seeing me later?’), the
full form uses over twice as many key-strokes.
In 2004 I published A Glossary of Textspeak and Netspeak, and –
ignoring the difference between upper-case and lower-case usage
– collected about 500 Textspeak abbreviations. However, only a
small number of these actually turn out to be in regular use. The
vast majority are there just to be ‘clever’, illustrating the
possibilities of language play. ‘ROTFL’ (‘rolling on the floor
laughing’) may have had some use at the outset, but its later
developments (such as ‘ROTFLMAO’ and
‘ROTFLMAOWTIME’—‘rolling on the floor laughing my ass off
… with tears in my eyes’) illustrate idiosyncratic communicative
one-upmanship rather than genuine community usage. And I
doubt whether many texters actually use such creations as
‘LSHMBB’ (‘laughing so hard my belly is bouncing’).
The method isn’t without its difficulties. Leaving out letters always
runs the risk of ambiguity. From the receiver’s point of view, a
single sequence can have more than one meaning: ‘BN’ – ‘been’
or ‘being’, ‘CID’ – ‘consider it done’ or ‘crying in disgrace’, ‘CYA’
– ‘see you’ or ‘cover your ass’, ‘N’ – ‘and’ or ‘no’, ‘Y’ – ‘why’ or
‘yes’. If a message of transmitted love gets the reply ‘LOL’, it is
up to you to decide whether it means ‘laughing out loud’ or ‘lots
of love’. It could make a big difference to an emerging
relationship. And you have to know your recipient before you
decode ‘GBH’, which can be either a ‘great big hug’ or ‘grievous
bodily harm’. There are similar ambiguities in the Textspeak of
other languages.
From the sender’s point of view, there are also choices to be
made. ‘Good to see you’ can be ‘GTCY’, ‘GTSY’, ‘G2CY’, or
‘G2SY’; ‘I love you’ can be ‘ILU’, ‘ILUVY’, or ‘ILY’; ‘thanks’ can
be ‘THNX’, ‘THX’, ‘TX’, or ‘TNX’. I found a remarkable eight
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variants for ‘talk to you later’: ‘TTUL’, ‘TTUL8R’, ‘TTYL’,
‘TTYL8R’, ‘T2UL’, ‘T2UL8R’, ‘T2YL’, and ‘T2YL8R’, and there
are probably others. Even more exist for ‘what’s up?’ – depending
on how many U’s you bother to send: ‘WASSUP’, ‘SUP?’, ‘WU?’,
‘WSU?’, ‘WSUU?’, ‘WSUUU?’, etc. Doubtless text-messaging
dialects are already evolving.
No texter is entirely consistent, and no two texters use identical
conventions. While a few abbreviations are widely (possibly
universally) used, such as ‘txt’and ‘msg’, others are not. I have
seen texters write ‘shl’ or ‘shll’ for shall’, but Silver doesn’t. Some
would write ‘consult’ as ‘cnsult’ or ‘cnslt’. The seventh
commandment is only partly respected, in these poems: ‘em’,
‘fone’, ‘langwij’, ‘luv’, ‘parence’, ‘sed’, and ‘shud’ are indeed quasi-
phonetic representations of the way these words are pronounced,
presumably in Silver’s accent. (That the spelling reflects a
particular accent is clear from such words as ‘neva’ and ‘ova’,
where there is no ‘r’. A West-Country speaker would presumably
not want to leave the ‘r’ out – nor, for that matter, would most
Americans.) But other words are not given a phonetic form. The
full standard English spelling given to ‘infectious’, ‘children’,
‘vulnerable’, ‘symptoms’, ‘serious’, and so on indicates that we are
dealing here with a literary genre, not a real text situation at all.
To my mind, this is one of the most interesting things about the
way texting has evolved. It is a new genre. It began to be used in
poetry very early on, in The Guardian’s text-messaging poetry
competitions. It was only a matter of time before a texting poet
arrived on the scene, and a website (www.txtcafe.com) where
doubtless the genre will be fully exploited and explored as time
goes by. Text-message stories – even novels – are also already
being circulated.
The Silver poems illustrate the strengths of texting, and also its
limitations. The more unusual the word, the more it needs to be
spelt out in full. There must be a serious limit to the amount of
information which can be conveyed using abbreviation, and a real
risk of ambiguity as soon as people try to go beyond a stock set
of social phrases. The set of possible messages is really very small,
and only a few abbreviations – such as ‘C’ (‘see’), ‘B’ (‘be’), ‘2’
(‘to, too, two’), ‘4’ (‘for, four, -fore’), and ‘U’ (‘you’) – can be used
in lots of sentences.
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Will Textspeak have an effect on the language as a whole? This is
unlikely. The whole point of the style is to suit a particular
technology where space is at a premium; and when that constraint
is dropped, abbreviated language no longer has any purpose. Its
‘cool’ associations amongst young (or at least, young-minded)
people will allow some of its idiosyncrasy to achieve a use
elsewhere, and there are occasional reports of Textspeak creeping
into other forms of writing, such as school essays. But these are
minor trends, part of the novelty of the medium. They can be
controlled as part of the task of developing in children a sense of
linguistic appropriateness – in the UK, one of the basic principles
behind the National Curriculum in English. The genre could gain
strength from its literary applications, but it is too soon to say
whether these have a long-term future.
Some people object to Textspeak. Some are bemused by it. I am
fascinated by it, for it is the latest manifestation of the human
ability – and young human ability, at that – to be linguistically
creative and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse
settings. In Textspeak, we are seeing, in a small way, language in
evolution.
References for this reading
Crystal, D. 2004. A Glossary of Textspeak and Netspeak.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Silver, N. 2006. Laugh Out Loud :-D. Age, Sex, Location, both
published by txt café, 57 Priory Street, Colchester, CO1 2QE.
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Reading B: The modern politics of ‘not real’ words
Anne Curzan
Source: Edited version from Curzan, A. (2014) Fixing English: Prescriptivismand Language History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 106–13.
The word misunderestimate, which George W. Bush famously used
in November 2000 after the presidential election (“they
misunderestimated me”), made headlines as “a Bushism” – a word
already in the OED in reference to an idiom or peculiarity of
speech associated with George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush.
The word, along with others seen to be of its ilk, was used as
fodder for critiquing Bush’s intelligence and competence – on
both sides of the Atlantic. Take, for example, this line from the
Leicester Mercury (“Read Dubya’s Unwise Words,”
December 16, 2000): “For a hair-raising peek into the cob-webby
mind of the most powerful man on earth take a look at The
Complete Bushisms [the online magazine Slate’s running list of
Bushisms]. It’s full of garbled utterings from the man who told
America that his detractors had ‘misunderestimated me.’”
In a significant number of the mocking discussions of this blend
of misunderstand and underestimate, commentators harkened back
to earlier presidential neologisms, perhaps the most famous of
which is normalcy. Some twenty-first century commentators
mistakenly credit Woodrow Wilson with normalcy, but in fact, it
was President Harding, before he became president. And the
controversy over normalcy showcases some of what is at stake in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for presidents who
neologize (whether intentionally or not). Neologisms can prove
slogan-worthy as well as demeaning to their author, as the word’s
legitimacy stands in for the speaker’s legitimacy; and in both cases
the neologisms can be distracting to the press and the public,
stealing part of the spotlight from the issues to which they refer.
On May 14, 1920, Warren G. Harding supposedly misread the
word normality in a draft of a campaign speech, saying normalcy
instead. So what he said is as follows:
America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not
nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not
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agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the
dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but
equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but
sustainment in triumphant nationality.
The word normalcy quickly attracted attention, and Harding
harnessed that publicity and incorporated the word into a
campaign slogan: “Return to Normalcy.” This kept the word
normalcy in the limelight, and over the next year, the New York
Times addressed the legitimacy of the word normalcy multiple
times, including in letters to the editor from concerned readers
(on both sides of the issue). In other words, not only the word
but also the conversation about the word were considered
newsworthy. […]
[…]
Just [under a year] later on April 29, 1921, the New York Times
brought in the British to join in the critique of Harding’s language
(“Says Harding’s Style Jolts King’s English: London Newspaper
Thinks World Might Have Done Very Well Without Some of His
Phrases”). While the piece starts with other linguistic outrages
(according to the Brits), it returns to the word normalcy:
London, April 28. – The Daily Chronicle, in criticism of the
English used by President Harding in his first message to
Congress as disclosed on the full text which has reached
here in American newspapers says:
“The message contains several passages that could cause a
shudder in academic circles. He describes America as ‘illy
prepared for war’s aftermath.’ He says she is ‘ready to co-
operate with other nations to approximate dis-armament.’ He
refers to the overlapping of functions ‘which fritters
energies’ and talks of ‘protesting outlay’ when what he
means is protesting against outlay.
“Mr. Harding is accustomed to take desperate ventures in
the coinage of new words. In his election addresses he
invented the hideous ‘normalcy.’ This message gives us
‘hospitalization’ which the English speaking world might
surely have done very well without.”
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As often happens, some of the linguistic “atrocities” blamed on
Harding have much longer histories: illy is cited in the OED back
as far as 1546 (although the Microsoft spellchecker underlines the
word in red); and hospitalization was already in Webster’s New
International Dictionary of the English Language by 1909. But in
the end, the language is an excuse for a critique of the President,
as some readers pointed out.
[…]
George W. Bush’s word creations, as mentioned above, were
similarly scrutinized publicly by the press, taken as in some way
indicative of his intelligence and qualifications for leadership. On
his heels came Sarah Palin, the Vice Presidential candidate in
2008, whose language – especially her choice of idioms and some
of her grammatical constructions – was regularly ridiculed by the
press during the presidential campaign. Then she created a word.
Or at least many thought she did. On January 27, 2010, Sarah
Palin responded to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union
address on Fox News and said the following:
Ever since about August…Americans have paid more
attention to what is in this health care bill, and more and
more Americans are becoming more concerned about what
we see in there, so it hasn’t been a matter of he not being
able to explain his policy, with government takeover and
mandation of health care.
The Twittersphere and blogosphere went atwitter about this “new
word”: mandation. And it wasn’t celebratory buzz. Much of it was
along the lines of “Is mandation even a word?” […]
[…]
Now, of course, almost all viewers of Palin’s interview understood
exactly what Palin meant by “mandation of health care”:
mandation is a straightforward derivation of the verb mandate,
using the nominal suffix -ion (e.g., legislate > legislation). The sport
was to see if it was a “real word” – not a meaningful word
derived from rule-governed processes in the language but rather a
word recognized by dictionary editors in standard dictionaries. It
was not (it is in the OED but as obsolete with the meaning ‘the
act of committing a speech to memory’), which gave
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commentators fodder for critique. Never mind that Palin was far
from the first person to use the word, and others had even used
it in print (e.g., some commentators quickly located a 1989 article
in the Compensation and Benefits Review titled “Healthcare for the
Uninsured: Is Mandation the Answer?”).
A few months later, Palin made headlines again, this time for her
innovative blend refudiate. As with mandation, this word formation
was not entirely innovative – the blend of refute and repudiate had
popped up before, but Palin made it famous. She used it first on
July 14, 2010, in an interview on Fox News, again with Sean
Hannity, and commentators in the blogosphere poked fun at the
word. Then on July 18, she tweeted: “Ground Zero Mosque
supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours
throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.” The
tweet was quickly removed, after almost instant ridicule, and later
in the day, Palin posted a tweet that cited refudiate,
misunderestimate, and wee wee’d up (an expression President Obama
used in 2009) as evidence of English as a living language. She
then added: “Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to
celebrate it!” The comparison to Shakespeare once again lit up the
Twittersphere. The word refudiate got so much buzz over the next
few months that the New Oxford American Dictionary named it
their word of the year for 2010, although the announcement on
the Oxford University Press blog added the caveat that the Press
and its lexicographers had “no definite plans to include ‘refudiate’
in the NOAD, the OED, or any of our other dictionaries.” Several
critics of this decision argued that refudiate was a speech error,
not a coinage (and not new to Palin).
Zimmer (2013) raises the question of why presidents no longer
lead in creating or popularizing new words. Thomas Jefferson is
credited in the OED for neologize (1813), as well as belittle (1785)
and Anglophobia (1793). Of course, Jefferson was carrying out his
neologizing before Webster’s dictionary had been published in the
US. Zimmer concludes:
Presidential language, while still closely watched, no longer
exerts the impact it once did. In part, that is because modern
presidents are exceedingly careful about what they say, which
puts a damper on linguistic innovation. But we are also
swamped with so many forms of creative public discourse,
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online and in the mass media, that “words from the White
House” don’t stand out as much.
It is certainly true that we are swamped with creative public
discourse, and it’s important that part of that discourse focuses on
presidential neologizing, usually as illegitimate. Consider the
ridicule that George W. Bush endured for his use of the word
embetterment, formed through regular morphological processes
from the verb embetter, which the OED lists as obsolete, but
would still be transparent for English speakers through analogy
with a verb such as embitter. Embetterment as a neologism is
arguably no more radical than Jefferson’s creation of belittle. Yet
while belittle appears in the OED with Jefferson as the first
citation, embetterment appears in Urban Dictionary with this
definition: “A non-existent word that George W. Bush frequently
uses in speeches and at press conferences.”
Jefferson wrote: “Necessity obliges us to neologize.” What counts
as “necessity” is open to debate. And Jefferson was not living in
the age of blogs and tweets and 24/7 news cycles, which raise the
political stakes of neologizing. It is no wonder that modern
presidents are exceedingly careful about what they say – not only
in terms of the content but also in terms of the perceived
legitimacy of the words. As Ben Jonson wrote centuries ago in
Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter (1640): “A man coins not a
new word without some peril and less fruit; for if it happen to be
received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is
assured.”
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the new words
created by famous people are regularly debated publicly online
and in the press. For politicians, the question of a word’s
legitimacy can be a way to debate the person’s legitimacy.
References for this reading
Jonson, Ben. 1640 [1892]. Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter.
Edited, with introduction and notes, by Felix E.Schelling. Boston:
Ginn & Company.
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Zimmer, Ben. 2013. All the president’s words: whatever happened
to our neologizers-in-chief ? Boston Globe (January 20). http://
bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/01/20/all-president-words/
hmyLFIS4TfHx7ctH67bMEI/story.html?camp
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Reading C: Londonstani: Why the lingo?
Gautam Malkani
Source: Edited version from Malkani, G. (2014) ‘About Londonstani’, GautamMalkani [Online]. Available at www.gautammalkani.com/about_londonstani.htm (Accessed 6 January 2016).
[…] I wanted to write [the book, Londonstani] in a way that
people who know this scene would find engaging and so I
basically had to write it in the language people use and
understand. Whenever I tried switching to “proper English”
(whatever that’s supposed to mean), it sounded stupid and just
didn’t work.
But I’m not going to waste cyberspace here defending the
language against accusations that it’s too crude or base, because to
even dignify that with debate means ignoring how the English
language has always evolved through corruption.
Having said all of that, the language of Londonstani is clearly
important in its own right. Firstly, the young men in the book are
supposed to be wannabe bad-boys rather than the real thing and
are therefore pretty much all talk. It seemed like the best way to
spell this out was to just have them talk.
Secondly, speech patterns are the characters’ main measure of
manliness and virility. Mobile phones and tongues become the
book’s two phallic symbols […] But that’s not to say these things
are simply substitute sports cars. Speech and phones are the tools
the characters use to get away from their mothers, yet they’re also
the same things their mothers try to regulate them with. So
they’re a bit like weapons.
Also, “proper English” is a symbol of the dominant culture and
system that the main characters are trying to disrespect. So while
the young men express their disrespect for mainstream society by
carefully pulping the English language, the Panjabi dialogue in the
book (spelt the local way rather than the British “Punjabi”) had to
observe strict grammatical rules and silent letters, etc. Alongside
“proper English”, the book’s other symbols for dominant,
mainstream society include the education system; public transport;
public institutions and the taxation system that funds them; and
the BBC – although the four young men soon learn to love the
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latter because the broadcaster embraces and celebrates their own
version of Britishness. In fact, by the end of the book Jas even
learns to love public transport, while ripping off the taxman stops
looking like such a good idea when he’s confronted with the
mother of all tax evasions… but all this is a digression from the
question about language…
Because “proper English” represents the culture and system the
young men are trying to disregard, I couldn’t resist using the
mobile phone generation’s disregard for grammar and spelling.
But mobile phone SMS/text speak is only used heavily by two
characters – Hardjit and Davinder – because they’re the most
aggressive. The bulk of the book’s language is basically a mash-up
of London street slang; popular Americanisms (such as “feds” or
“bucks”); Panjabi slang and hip-hop slang.
What I didn’t want to do was capture an exact picture of the way
people talk by writing it just as I was hearing it. That would’ve
been dumbass-ingly pointless because slang changes all the time
and words and phrases would’ve been out of date by the time the
book was published (if indeed it ever got published). So instead, I
tried to create a timeless version of the slang so that more people
could recognise and relate to it regardless of what year they
finished school.
Creating a kind of futureproof, timeless slang – instead of taking
a snapshot at any particular moment in time – basically meant
taking popular words from different years that have already stood
the test of time and then stitching them together. So I took words
from when I was at school in Hounslow in the late 1980s and
early 1990s that people still use today. Then I took words that
have stood the test of time from the interviews I did for my
university dissertation in the mid-late 1990s (which luckily I’d
captured on dictaphone cassette as well as notebooks). And then I
combined all of that with words being used today that I think will
probably survive. So from each stage of the research I was trying
to bin words that might not survive (even if they were more
interesting and trendy at the time) and replace them either with
other, more enduring slang words or just plain English. The
result, I hoped, would be a version of the slang that everyone
would recognise but that nobody ever really used (at least in its
entirety anyway).
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214
Words that I rejected included things like murk, ends, sick, bare,
blazing and arms. For example, instead of “arms” (meaning
hostility) I used the word the older slang word “beef ” because
people still recognise and use it – it’s more likely to stand the test
of time, even if it’s not as popular today as “arms”. Of course,
not all these calls might turn out to be correct, but the idea was
to be recognisable, not definitive.
One potential downside of writing in slang (apart from short-
circuiting my word processor’s spellchecker) is that it restricted
what I could do with Jas’s narration. He can’t get too
sophisticated, not just because he’s always trying to suppress his
intelligence, but also because the language doesn’t really allow for
it. But that’s kind of the point: as Mr Ashwood says in the book,
you can’t really understand stuff properly if you can’t articulate it
properly. So the slang eventually helps Jas in his mission to be
less intelligent.
I adapted the slang for different characters depending on how
hardcore they were. So Jas has his own linguistic rules, Amit and
Ravi share another set of rules while Hardjit and Davinder have
their own version (the rest of the characters speak “proper
English”). For example, Jas always says “in’t” instead of “ain’t” –
which hopefully shows how Jas tries too hard to be a bad-boy
while Hardjit is comfortable and secure using the British
mainstream slang “ain’t”.
This all caused a nightmare for my publisher because I insisted on
going through the manuscript again and again to make sure all the
correct linguistic rules were being followed by the correct
characters – and I’m not even sure I totally managed it. All this
rule-making and future-proofing might seem ridiculous given the
fluid nature of slang, but slang often does have rules and I
wanted to use rules and subtle distinctions to highlight
fundamental differences between characters who, on a superficial
level, are always trying to look and sound like each other. The
point is, the slang isn’t random. There are rules and codes with all
slang – otherwise slang wouldn’t create boundaries and barriers to
entry. And in the case of this particular slang, it creates both a
racial boundary and a generational boundary. So, just like every
other aspect of the characters’ identities, their seemingly random
slang is actually carefully constructed and contrived.
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Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the
globalised world: creativity curbed or
unleashed?
Anna Kristina Hultgren
5.1 Introduction
This chapter explores creativity and language in the context of
globalisation through two examples: hip hop and call centres. While
these examples may immediately strike us as having little in common,
both hip hop and call centres have been hailed as epitomising
globalisation. Hip hop has been defined as ‘a youth arts mass cultural
movement that evolved in New York City during the 1970s’ (Keyes,
2008, p. 87). It is a conglomerate term for four types of popular
culture, including rap music, DJ’ing, street dance and graffiti
(Schloss, 2009). Hip hoppers practising one or more of these four
types of art form share a purpose of creating ‘spaces of resistance to
oppression, racism, and poverty’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 188). Hip hop has
been said to be exemplary of globalisation because its constitutive
practices are being exported across the world through global media
such as MTV, YouTube and magazines. The global interconnectedness
is evident in that hip hoppers in countries as diverse as China, Canada,
Senegal, Cuba, France, Japan, Sweden, Brazil and the UK may see
themselves as belonging to the same community. Indeed, the term
‘Global Hip Hop Nation’ (Alim, 2009, p. 105) has been coined to
capture its transnational and translingual dynamics.
Likewise, call centres are also seen as a phenomenon of globalisation.
The number of call centres globally has shot up exponentially as a
result of political and economically motivated decisions in the 1980s to
remove barriers to international trade and outsourcing. They are now a
widely favoured and cost-effective way for organisations to manage
their contact with customers. Improved infrastructure worldwide means
that it is possible to outsource call centres to parts of the world where
labour costs are much cheaper, thereby in turn reinforcing globalisation
and global interconnectedness.
While both hip hop and call centres are viewed as global phenomena,
when it comes to creativity, scholars have taken very different views.
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
217
Academics studying hip hop have been keen to highlight what they
regard as its inherently creative and innovative aspects. Hip hoppers,
whether graffiti artists, dancers, DJs or rappers, often get recognition,
at least among some cultural commentators and academics, for
breaking with established norms. As such, hip-hop practices seem to
satisfy at least one of the three criteria of creativity proposed by
Kaufman and Sternberg (2010, p. xiii): that is, they are ‘different, new,
or innovative’.
In academic studies of call centres, in contrast, creativity is not a
concept to which attention is readily drawn. On the contrary, call-
centre work is often described as highly routinised, partly or wholly
pre-scripted and sometimes as downright tedious. As one call-centre
manager puts it:
once an Adviser sits down and logs on her computer, puts on her
headset, the calls are force fed to her, she is script driven. Once
that call is finished another one pops into her head. There is no
let-up, no break, unless they have an official break.
(Cited in Mulholland, 2004, p. 714)
Because hip hop and call centres seem to be at the opposite points on
a spectrum of creativity, they seem potentially illuminating in terms of
exploring and articulating what creativity is and what it is not.
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218
Figure 5.1 Connecting the world: call centres and hip hop
A key concept of this chapter, in addition to that of creativity, is that
of agency, a ‘[t]erm used by sociologists to refer to the human
capacity to act (see Giddens, 1979); used to contrast the individual with
wider social and political structures’ (Swann et al., 2004, p. 7). Many
sociologists argue that people are not free to act just in any way they
may want to because they are constrained by social structures (such as
social class), which shape their upbringing, their lived experiences and
their values. Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of ‘habitus’ captures this idea by
recognising that individuals are habituated, through upbringing and
value schemes, to act in certain ways relating to social class, gender and
ethnicity. For researchers of language, the question of agency in
language (Duranti, 2005) concerns the extent to which speakers are
able or free to use language in any way they like, or the extent to
which their choices are constrained.
This chapter will raise questions about the relationship between agency
and creativity. For, just as with creativity, hip hop and call centres are
practices which have been explicitly or implicitly assumed to represent
opposite ends of the spectrum with regard to agency. Representations
of hip hop as creative and artful appear to foreground linguistic
agency: that is, the idea that hip-hop artists are free to use language in
any way they like with little regard for – or indeed as a deliberate
challenge to – established social and artistic conventions. Indeed, hip
hop, like many other art forms, is often construed as an outlet to
express one’s discontent with social and political issues, such as urban
hardship and racism, as well as being an important means to express
one’s identity (Morrison, 2003; Keyes, 2008). Conversely, in call centres,
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
219
Figure 5.2 Creativity unleashed? Graffiti artistry: one of four components of
hip hop
if linguistic agency is an issue, it has been approached from the
perspective of questioning the degree to which it exists: for example,
whether call-centre workers have any sort of freedom to act in a
regime of intense management control in which every task of the
working day, from time on the phone to taking a break, is
electronically registered and scrutinised (see Figure 5.3). It is not
without reason that call centres have often been labelled ‘new
sweatshops’ or ‘electronic panopticon[s]’ (cited in Bain and Taylor,
2000, p. 2) and ‘communication factories’ (Cameron, 2000, p. 93).
Therefore, a key question in this chapter is the extent to which
creativity is contingent on agency. Certainly, it does seem to be
assumed, in many accounts of creativity, that someone needs to be able
to act – or do something – in order for the resulting output to be called
creative. But how far do one’s acts need to go and – a key theme
across many discussions of creativity – to what extent do they need to
break with conventions and established structures to constitute
‘creative’ or ‘innovative’ behaviour? Put differently, how far is creativity
possible when one’s agency is curbed?
5.2 Globalisation, localisation and glocalisation
In this section you will look at three concepts which are of key
importance to understanding globalisation. For the purposes of this
chapter, they will be referred to as globalisation, localisation and
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01/07/15 9:05:50 1:31:37 15:17 00:00 02:44 1:02:52 10:42 00:02 00:00 00:00 00:0002/07/15 9:02:57 3:33:39 19:18 00:00 18:54 1:00:07 28.34 13:32 00:00 15:53 57:2105/07/15 7:30:08 45:07 07:03 00:00 00:00 28:09 00:00 00:00 00:00 00:00 09:5506/07/15 9:05:22 2:02:26 20:58 00:00 00:00 1:00:54 00:00 00:00 00:00 00:00 40:3407/07/15 9:04:42 1:43:58 09:44 00:00 10:23 59:27 15:36 08:48 00:00 00:00 00:0008/07/15 9:01:51 2:07:21 24:11 00:00 00:00 58:24 00:00 11:05 00:00 00:00 33:4112/07/15 7:17:20 41:40 11:49 00:00 00:00 29:49 00:00 00:02 00:00 00:00 00:0015/07/15 7:05:16 35:18 24:51 00:00 00:00 00:00 00:00 10:27 00:00 00:00 00:0021/07/15 9:08:55 1:29:04 21:09 00:00 00:00 58:48 00:00 09:07 00:00 00:00 00:0022/07/15 9:06:46 1:35:48 29:28 00:00 00:00 56:44 00:00 09:36 00:00 00:00 00:0026/07/15 7:36:22 1:18:36 18:58 00:00 00:00 28:30 00:00 00:00 00:00 00:00 31:0827/07/15 9:06:40 1:30:06 19:07 00:00 00:00 1:00:14 00:00 10:45 00:00 00:00 00:0028/07/15 9:07:57 1:26:44 15:41 00:00 00:00 59:34 00:00 11:29 00:00 00:00 00:0029/07/15 0:06:06 1:26:54 17:55 00:00 00:00 59:34 00:00 09:25 00:00 00:00 00:0030/07/15 9:04:48 1:33:35 23:22 00:00 00:00 59:27 00:00 10:46 00:00 00:00 00:00
Date StaffedTime
CustomerService
Idle PerformanceAssessment
Admin Lunch Meeting Break Training Emergency SystemProblems
Monitor SheetAgent: Simpson Joy Printed: 02/08/15
Figure 5.3 Creativity curbed? Monitor sheet from a call centre (adapted from author’s data, see
Hultgren, 2008)
glocalisation (see ‘Globalisation – key concepts’ box). In later sections
you will look at these concepts in relation to hip hop and call centres,
but here they will be illustrated using an emblematic example of
globalisation, McDonald’s fast food chain. Like hip hop and call
centres, McDonald’s, with outlets in more than 100 countries, is often
held out as an iconic example of globalisation. Indeed, it ‘has often
been taken to represent the apogée (or nadir) of globalized
commercialism’ (Kelly-Holmes, 2010, p. 478). It should serve well,
then, to illustrate some key dimensions of globalisation and how they
relate to creativity and agency.
Globalisation – key concepts
Globalisation: refers to ‘a phenomenon which emphasises
interconnectedness across the globe and which encompasses a
number of significant economic, technological and cultural aspects’
(Swann et al., 2004, p. 125).
Localisation: refers to ‘the maintenance and development of local
practices and identity’ (Swann et al., 2004, p. 126) within the
context of globalisation.
Glocalisation: refers to ‘the simultaneity – the co-presence – of
both universalizing and particularizing tendencies’ (Robertson,
1997, p. 4).
The principles and processes on which McDonald’s is based are the
same all over the world: there are specific and globally applicable
guidelines for how to wrap the burgers and how many minutes to fry
the fries and keep the poured-out milkshakes on the shelf before they
are binned. As a customer, you are also conditioned to behave in
standardised ways in outlets across the world: you choose from the
same structure of menu consisting of sandwich/burger, fries and soft
drink, you order and pay for your food at the counter and you clear
your own table. This exemplifies globalisation and particularly that
aspect of it that highlights increased global similarity, or
homogenisation, in contrast to global variety and difference, or
heterogeneity.
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Activity 5.1
Allow about 15 minutes
Look at the cartoon below and consider how it generates its humour.
Discussion
This cartoon alludes to a prevailing view of globalisation: that it causes
cultural homogenisation. More specifically, it exploits the common
complaint by tourists travelling in today’s globalised world that individual
countries are losing their unique character. Indeed, if you travel, you
yourself may bemoan how hard it has become to go anywhere in the
world without being met by the recognisable logos of McDonald’s, Coca-
Cola and Starbucks. Such increased similarity across the world has
often been hailed as a key marker of globalisation, and particularly the
type of globalisation that is associated with the politically and
economically powerful influencing and encroaching on the less powerful.
Globalisation is often held up against the other two concepts
introduced in the box above: localisation and glocalisation, but these
can also be regarded as dimensions of globalisation. Taking McDonald’s
as an example, localisation is manifested in the adaptation of its
products to the likes and dislikes and cultural and religious mores of
specific countries and regions. McDonald’s in India, for example, has
introduced a mutton-based Maharaja Mac to cater for both Hindus
who do not eat beef and Muslims who do not eat pork. In the Middle
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
222
Figure 5.4 Don’t give up hope, Lenny
East and Pakistan, the McArabia, a chicken grilled sandwich served on
a pitta bread, accommodates a widespread regional preference for that
type of bread. German outlets serve beer. This local adaptation, or
localisation, can be understood in terms of a global product that is
adapted to local particularities.
Glocalisation (Robertson, 1995) is supposed to capture phenomena
which cannot easily be understood in terms of either globalisation or
localisation. This process is often said to involve creativity as well as
agency in that the individual strategically picks, chooses and combines
elements from a pool of existing resources, possibly without much
regard for pre-existing constraints or conventions. The direction of
influence in the case of glocalisation is thus assumed to be much more
dynamic and unpredictable in that it does not necessarily involve a less
powerful actor adopting or adapting the resources of the more
powerful. Instead, the flow of influence is one of multidirectionality
whereby semiotic resources from a potentially infinite range of
different cultures and languages are mixed into novel and hybrid forms.
The next activity is designed to help you explore your understanding
of these concepts and relationships, staying for the moment within the
example of McDonald’s.
Activity 5.2
Allow about 20 minutes
The three photographs shown in Figures 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7 come from a
blog on the internet called ‘McDonald’s Around the World’ (www.
travellingmcds.com). Here bloggers can post pictures and review
McDonald’s food items that they have eaten in various locations across
the world. Look at the three photographs and their captions, which
reveal where they were taken, and reflect on whether they represent
globalisation, localisation or glocalisation.
Discussion
If you have looked at the pictures in combination with their captions, one
possible interpretation is that these meal items represent aspects of
glocalisation: for example, they contain a mix of cultural resources. The
double wasabi burger was bought in Hong Kong, though you may well
have been surprised by the use of wasabi, Japanese horseradish, which
at least to Westerners is more readily associated with Japan and grows
naturally there. Similarly, while Aloo Tikki is a North-Indian snack made
from boiled potatoes and various spices, the McAloo Tikki burger,
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purchased in Singapore, is presumably marketed to suit the taste buds
of the large Indian population residing there. Finally, the Texan burger,
purchased by a blogger travelling to South Africa, was only on the menu
for a month as part of the restaurant’s Tastes of the World promotion,
which in fact can be seen as a strategic instance of glocalisation. This
mixing of resources from different food cultures might be seen as
creative and innovative, at least if creativity is understood as combining
existing resources into something new.
Figure 5.5 A Double Wasabi of Flavor purchased by a blogger in Hong
Kong
Figure 5.6 A McAloo Tikki Burger bought in Singapore
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Figure 5.7 The Texan Burger, bought in Johannesburg, South Africa
While the above interpretation emphasises glocalisation, innovation,
creativity and agency, it is, however, also possible to make a case for
these images representing instances of globalisation and localisation,
depending on where the emphasis is placed. The mere fact that
McDonald’s reproduces its key practices across the world may seem to
point to some degree of homogenisation. Further evidence of
homogenisation may be seen in the McDonald’s logo and brand-
compliant typography, which is either imprinted on the packaging or clear
from the product name in the ‘Mc’ prefix. If you make a case for
localisation, you might argue that these products have been adapted to
suit the local market; you would be unlikely to find the first two examples
in a US outlet. In both globalisation and localisation, we might expect
agency and creativity to be less foregrounded, as the outcome involves
making do with the resources that are already there, through adoption or
adaptation.
A key question for you to consider in this chapter is the extent to
which globalisation always entails powerful actors influencing those
that are less powerful. Certainly, a widespread understanding of
globalisation seems to be that politically and economically powerful
actors in the world (whether these are nation-states, global media
enterprises or multinational corporations) come to dominate and
influence the less powerful, essentially leading to different parts of the
world becoming increasingly similar. This process may be understood
as a one-directional flow of influence from the powerful to the less
powerful. Alternative interpretations might be that less powerful actors
choose to adopt the resources and practices associated with the
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
225
powerful (as opposed to having them thrust upon them) or that the
influence is of a more multidirectional nature, where there is a flurry of
exchanges involving cultural and linguistic resources. And what do the
different patterns of flow – one-directional or multidirectional – mean
for opportunities in creativity and innovation?
5.3 Hip hop: creativity unleashed?
This section explores the extent to which creativity and agency feature
in the language of hip hop. As mentioned in the introduction, hip hop
is an example of globalisation which has often been celebrated for
innovatively – and, arguably, creatively – mixing semiotic resources
from different languages and cultures. As the sociolinguist Alastair
Pennycook (2010, p. 600) writes in regard to the hip hoppers he
focuses on, they ‘artfully integrat[e] the flows of English and Korean
rap styles in a bilingual performance’.
Academics studying hip-hop practices have certainly highlighted its
many creative and innovative aspects, focusing, for instance, on the
way in which hip hoppers mix linguistic and other semiotic resources
normally associated with different ethnicities. Scholars have often
described such hybrid practices in celebratory terms, sometimes
explicitly denoting them as ‘creative’ and/or ‘innovative’ (e.g. Mitchell,
2001; Pennycook, 2010).
Hip-hop scholars have been quick to take on board glocalisation as a
useful concept to understand that, contrary to what may perhaps be
the prevailing, common-sense understanding, globalisation need not
always entail a one-directional linear trajectory from the powerful to
the less powerful, but can take place in more circular flows. This
means that instead of a widespread perception of globalisation leading
to the world becoming increasingly homogeneous, it is actually
becoming much more of a potpourri or melting pot of different
cultural and linguistic resources.
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Activity 5.3
Allow about 2 hours
Turn to Reading A, ‘Circles of flow’ by Alastair Pennycook, at the end of
this chapter. Read the extract to explore the extent to which a melting
pot of cultural resources is manifested in the lyrics and language choice
of hip hop.
As you read, reflect on the following:
. What evidence does Pennycook cite to support his point that
globalisation does not always entail a flow of influence from the
powerful to the less powerful?
. To what extent do agency and creativity feature in Pennycook’s
argument that hip hop practices are glocalising?
Discussion
Pennycook cites examples from many places across the global hip-hop
community (Australia, Hawaii, French Polynesia) which influence one
another rather than, or in addition to, simply adopting elements from the
US hip-hop scene. For instance, the Maori hip-hop group Upper Hutt
Posse combine ‘the use of Maori traditional instruments, militant patere
and karanga (raps and calls to ancestors) and invocations of the spirits
of the forest (Tane Mohuta) and the guardian of the sea (Tangaroa), and
the rhetoric borrowed from the Nation of Islam (Mitchell, 2003a, p. 13)’.
These influences from different cultural contexts come in a variety of
forms, languages, themes, traditions, instruments, melodies and
rhythms. Pennycook, drawing on the work of Akindes (2001) on
Hawaiian hip hop, emphasises the counter-hegemonic nature of hip hop
and points to the explicitly political messages in the lyrics.
While Pennycook does not actually use the term ‘creative’ to describe
the glocalising practices of hip hoppers, their norm-deviating and
surprising nature could be said to fit Kaufman and Sternberg’s (2010)
definitions of creativity as being ‘innovative’. There is also a sense in
which producers’ agency is assumed, whether or not this is explicitly
recognised. Thus, Pennycook’s argument could be said to hinge on the
idea that hip hoppers strategically and deliberately adopt semiotic
resources from different cultures to create novel, challenging, surprising
(and creative?) effects which break with established ways of using
language and cultural norms. The idea of glocalisation, then, does
appear to foreground agency to a higher degree than either globalisation
or localisation.
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To sum up, hip-hop scholars tend to use examples of language mixing
and other engagements with cultural hybridity to draw attention to
circular flows of influence in the globalised world. Elements from
different languages and cultures are strategically picked up and remixed
to form what may, by some, be described as creative outcomes.
Assumed or explicitly foregrounded in such practices is agency, as hip
hoppers are understood to strategically combine elements from
different languages and cultures to form new linguistic forms which
depart from conventionalised ways of using language.
Activity 5.4
Allow about 25 minutes
Staying with hip hop for a little longer, to consider what it tells us about
the nature of ‘transcultural flows’, read the following lyrics performed by
the Tanzanian hip-hop artist or rapper King Crazy GK, featuring the
seven-person hip-hop group East Coast Team. As you read, consider the
particular social meanings that the lyrics index (see Chapter 2).
Figure 5.8 King Crazy GK, a rapper from Tanzania
The original lyrics, which are in Swahili, are on the left and the English
translation is on the right.
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228
Table 5.1 ‘Ama Zao ama Zangu’ (‘Theirs or mine’)
Amiri Jeshi Mkuu sasa naitangaza vita As an Army commander now,
I order a war,
sio ile kuu ya tatu
bali hii ni ya kivietnam yanni mtaa
not the third world war
rather, this is like Vietnam,
meaning, street
kwa mtaa
mmoja mmoja nawakamateni afu
by street
one by one, I capture (fans)
and then
nazaa nanyi
utaponiona ita polisi 911
breed more
when you see me, call the
police at 9-1-1,
la sivyo otherwise
jua umekwisha realize that it’s over
watoto wa mama siku hizi children of today,
mnachonga sana you all think too much of
yourselves
yaani nyimbo moja in other words, if you get one
song
hewani on the air,
mkisifiwa mnajiona wakina P-Diddy you are praised as if you were
P-Diddy
(Source: Alim et al., 2009)
Figure 5.9 East Coast Team
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Discussion
The decision to perform in Swahili, the official language of Tanzania
alongside English, suggests a wish for the group to claim affiliation with
their local Tanzanian hip-hop community. This choice may not be
insignificant since a long-standing debate in Tanzania has revolved
around whether to adopt Swahili or English as the national language.
Swahili is seen as indexing (or as being associated with) traditional
Tanzanian, pan-African, often socialist values, whereas English primarily
indexes economic prosperity and growth. By choosing to perform in
Swahili, the artists can therefore be said both to perform a local,
Tanzanian identity and to draw on the political potential of hip hop by
taking sides in a language-related debate. So the local identity is
claimed primarily through the choice of performing in Swahili.
Conversely, the claim to membership of the global hip-hop community is
evidenced in the lyrics by a number of references to that community. As
the original researcher, Christina Higgins (2009), observes, the name
‘King Crazy GK’ signals an alliance with the African-American rap artist,
Krazy, who is well known on the global hip-hop scene; the reference to
P-Diddy likewise signals an alliance with the global hip-hop community.
However, an alternative analysis might want to question the celebratory
view of hip hop as being a melting pot of multiple cultural resources.
There is reference to the Vietnam war, a salient concept in US culture,
as well as to calling 911. As Higgins (2009) points out, dialling 911 in
Tanzania will not put you through to the police, but it will do so in the
USA. Possibly, too, 911 could be an even further-reaching US cultural
reference to the 1990 political song ‘911 is a joke’ (performed by the
American rap group Public Enemy about the lack of response by the
police in Black neighbourhoods in the USA). Additionally, P-Diddy (later
known as just ‘Diddy’), while being a prominent figure in the global hip-
hop community, is actually an American rapper. Similarly, on a more
subtle level, Higgins suggests that the name of the featured group, East
Coast Team, so named because Tanzania is on the east coast of Africa,
creates a ‘globalized indexical tie’ (Higgins, 2009, p. 108) to the US hip-
hop community and the tensions that exist between the East and West
Coast hip-hop scene there. In choosing to call themselves ‘East Coast
Team’, then, the group may be said to affiliate themselves with the East
Coast hip-hop scene in the USA, which is considered by some to be
more authentic than hip hop emanating from the West Coast of the USA.
All in all, then, this might be taken as evidence that the flow of influence
does seem to go mainly from the powerful (here the USA) to the less
powerful.
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230
It seems, then, that although some of the resources which are drawn
on to claim membership of the global hip-hop community may be seen
as global, in many cases, it is possible to pinpoint their possible origins
to a specific, locally recognised culture. This brings into question the
extent to which the flow of influence is indeed multidirectional or
whether it is skewed in favour of the less powerful more often
adopting the resources of the more powerful.
Pennycook is certainly keen to point out that ‘Although certain hubs of
cultural production remain highly influential – the metropolitan centers
of France and the USA, for example – the flows of popular culture are
not simply from center to periphery’ (Pennycook, 2010, p. 593). He
argues that there is a mixing and remixing of languages, ideas, concepts
and lyrics going on that ‘brings about new relations among languages
and cultures’ (Pennycook, 2010, p. 593). Pennay (2001, p. 128), on the
other hand, laments that ‘[r]egrettably, the flow of new ideas and
stylistic innovations in popular music is nearly always from the
English-speaking market, and not to it’.
As an argument against Pennycook’s over-celebratory view, Allington
observes that the emerging new relations are massively asymmetric,
with creative industries based in the USA and the UK enjoying
virtually unchallenged global dominance and, within those countries,
audiences for cultural goods produced outside largely remaining
‘limited to members of linguistic minorities’ (Allington, 2012, p. 243).
This situation appears not to be undermined by new technologies such
as the SoundCloud website, which enables creators based anywhere in
the world to publish and disseminate music (especially hip hop and
dance music) on a global level. In their large-scale analysis of
relationships on this site, Allington et al. (2015) propose that
SoundCloud users in London, New York and Los Angeles can readily
find large numbers of followers both among each other and
throughout the rest of the world, while users elsewhere struggle to
reach a more than local audience. This suggests that, even in an
apparently anarchic online environment, the flows of popular culture
overwhelmingly are from centre to periphery.
Figure 5.10 shows the following relationships between SoundCloud
users in 134 different cities (those with very low numbers of users
were left out). The ten cities where SoundCloud users had the most
followers from elsewhere have been labelled, and so have the ten with
the least. The ten with the most followers are in western Europe or
North America and are mainly English-speaking countries. The ten
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231
with the least followers are in eastern Europe, Latin America, and
south and south-east Asia. Some of the latter ten cities are very
important: for example, Tbilisi and Dhaka are national capitals, while
the Hyderabad Metropolitan Area has around 10 million inhabitants.
But the study found that SoundCloud users based in the small British
city of Brighton were followed more than twice as often as people
based in all ten of those places put together.
In this section you have considered the example of hip hop and how
analysts have used it to show the way in which globalisation is not
simply about the less powerful copying or being forced to adopt the
practices of the more powerful. Rather, it has been suggested that
there are bi- or multidirectional circles of influence which involve a
strategic mixing of semiotic resources from the local and the global,
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
232
Figure 5.10 Who’s following whom? (Adapted from Allington et al., 2015,
p. 218)
which can be described as creative. In this mixing and remixing, the
agency of artists is recognised and emphasised by some scholars;
however, the extent to which such agency disrupts globalised patterns
of production is problematised by other scholars (e.g. Allington
et al., 2015) who argue that flows of popular culture are
overwhelmingly from the centre to the periphery.
5.4 Call centres: creativity curbed?
In this section you will consider an example of globalisation that would
seem to illustrate the antithesis of discursive and cultural creativity: the
modern-day call centre. If you are a citizen in contemporary Western
society, you are likely to have fairly frequent contact with call centres.
Whether your car breaks down, your credit card gets stolen or you are
feeling poorly, you will be put through to a call centre when you dial,
respectively, your rescue service, your bank and, in the UK at least,
your health care provider out of hours.
Call centres serve as a useful contrast to what might seem at times to
be an overemphasis on linguistic creativity and agency in the age of
globalisation. Their raison d’être of increasing speed of service and
reducing costs inevitably leads to standardisation, routinisation and
control; all concepts, it would seem, that are potentially antithetical to
linguistic agency and creativity. A key feature of call-centre practice and
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Figure 5.11 Inside a typical call centre
a key example of routinisation is the call-centre scorecard. A scorecard
is a document used by managers to assess the extent to which a call-
centre worker has complied with a set of management-imposed
interactional moves and phrases in a randomly selected sample of calls
they have taken or made. In most call centres, calls are routinely
recorded (which customers will often be informed about prior to
interaction) to serve as the basis for regular performance reviews. In
some call centres, such reviews may be consequential for salary
bonuses and career progression, so incentives to comply are often
high. They serve two overall purposes, which are fundamentally
contradictory: on the one hand, to make sure that the operator takes
control of the call in order not to waste time on irrelevancies and, on
the other, to create rapport with the customer as a way of
compensating for what might otherwise feel to the customer to be an
impersonal and routinised service.
Activity 5.5
Allow about 20 minutes
Now look at a transcript of a highly routinised interaction (in the form of
a directory enquiry) and a call-centre scorecard. (They have been taken
from different call centres and are not related to one another.) What
evidence is there that the call handler has little scope for agency?
Agent: XYZ Directories, which name please?
Caller: Jones
Agent: Jones, thank you.
Which town please?
Caller: Cardiff
Agent: Cardiff, thank you.
Which address please?
Caller: Number 28, Acacia Avenue
Agent: Number 28, Acacia Avenue, thank you.
Just searching for you. (pause)
Sorry to keep you waiting.
Thank you. Your number is 0123 456789
Caller: Thank you.
Agent: You’re welcome.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
234
Caller: Goodbye.
Agent: Goodbye.
(Cameron, 2001, p. 104)
Discussion
It could be argued that both the scorecard and the directory enquiry
exchange provide evidence that the talk that goes on in call centres is at
least to a certain extent out of the control of the call-centre worker. The
scorecard steers the call-centre worker towards certain interactional
moves, named as ‘Greeting the Customer’, ‘Managing the Request’ and
‘Response to Customer’. Each of these, in turn, is subdivided into more
fine-grained instructions or suggestions for the way to behave, such as
‘Waits to speak until the call is presented and greets promptly using
standard greeting’, ‘Listens with full attention, focuses on the issue
presented’ and ‘Asks for (and uses) customer’s name’.
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
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Figure 5.12 Example of scorecard used in a call centre
The directory enquiry exchange, in turn, is similarly unlikely to deviate
from a standard format. While this format may or may not be explicitly
prescribed by a scorecard, it is dictated by a combination of routine and
technology which require certain pieces of information to be input in a
specific order. In other words, the questions ‘Which name please?’,
‘Which town please?’, ‘Which address please?’ are best asked in that
order to enable the operator to process the call efficiently. Also worth
noting are the attempts made by the operator to create rapport with the
customer: for example, by reassuring the caller that they are ‘Just
searching for you’ and by apologising with ‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’
Such instances of creating rapport and compensating for the routinised
and/or scripted nature of the interaction are also detectable in the
scorecard, which encourages operators to use their own name and the
caller’s name and to adopt a ‘pleasant demeanour’ through their tone
and word choices. Even though such rapport-building moves may
immediately seem to contrast with the routinised and scripted nature of
the interaction, they have been referred to as ‘synthetic
personalisation’: that is, ‘a compensatory tendency to give the
impression of treating each of the people “handled” en masse as an
individual’ (Fairclough, 1989, p. 62). In sum, then, both scorecards and
actual call-centre interactions (at least the very routinised type examined
here) have led academics to argue that agency in call centres is
significantly reduced.
Activity 5.5 serves to make the point that call-centre workers’ linguistic
agency has often been claimed to be diminished. However, it needs to
be borne in mind that there is considerable variation between call
centres in terms of how script-reliant and routinised the interaction is.
Short and very predictable interactions, such as directory enquiry
exchanges, are likely to be among the most routinised ones.
Notwithstanding this, the linguistic prescriptions and practices in call
centres constitute a stark contrast to the example of hip hop in which
scholars appear to have assumed a much greater degree of agency,
often with creative outcomes, whether or not explicitly labelled as
such. To what extent is it possible to deduce from this that agency is a
prerequisite for being creative? Put differently, is it possible to be
creative when one’s agency is reduced?
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
236
Activity 5.6
Allow about 2 hours and 15 minutes
Turn to Reading B, ‘“Subterranean worksick blues”: humour as
subversion in two call centres’, by Phil Taylor and Peter Bain, at the end
of this chapter. Taylor and Bain are sociologists who have contributed
extensively to the literature on call centres. As you read, consider the
following questions:
. What evidence do the authors provide for what they call ‘creative and
subversive humour’?
. What purposes does humour in the call centres seem to serve?
. To what extent do the observed subversive practices imply agency
and what does this suggest about the relationship between creativity
and agency?
Discussion
The authors of this paper position themselves in an ongoing academic
debate about the extent to which workers in call centres are able to
actively resist or challenge the regime of control to which they are
subjected, or whether they are passive victims of it. In this reading,
Taylor and Bain argue for the former, emphasising the subversive
character of humour in the workplace.
The authors draw on their ethnographic research involving observations,
interviews and transcripts of meetings to point to a range of examples of
humorous activity – these include verbal satire, jokes about customer
interaction and the call-centre scripts governing interaction, and leaflets
of different kinds which seek to ridicule or undermine the authority of
individual supervisors, management in general or valued practices, such
as ‘the office meeting’. The purposes of such humour vary from the
warding-off of boredom to challenging the organisational regimes and
values of the call centres. With regard to humour having an explicitly
political purpose, Taylor and Bain foreground the significance of humour
being an individualist subversion technique existing alongside more
traditional and collective forms of resistance, such as trade union
membership. They argue that the individual and collectives are
interlinked, so that humour is used as a way to enlist co-workers in
union membership. This type of behaviour was especially clear in one of
the two call centres they studied (Excell). Of course, it is worth pointing
out that humour and trade union membership are not the only two forms
of subversive behaviour that call-centre workers have been found to
engage in. Other types of behaviour include absenteeism, logging that a
sale has been made when actually having got hold of an answering
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237
machine, and simply quitting one’s job (Mulholland, 2004). The latter, of
course, is not necessarily an effective form of rebellion as employees
can be easily replaced.
The authors explicitly refer to the humorous practices as ‘creative’,
although they do not elucidate further: one explanation for this may be
their disciplinary affiliation with industrial sociology, within which
creativity may not be a particularly salient concept. But by signalling the
creative nature of the humorous practices in the workplace, their
approach reflects the idea that creativity, rather than being assumed to
be the preserve of the few, is an everyday phenomenon (Carter, 2004;
Maybin and Swann, 2006). Perhaps more significantly, they are clearly
signalling the agency of call-centre workers to challenge routinised
practices and to resist the control imposed on them and act in various
ways – including using humour – to subvert it. These practices appear to
provide relief from routine and boredom and are, in a sense, then, not
incompatible with the rigidly controlled environment, but a direct
consequence of it. It could be argued that control and routinisation might
not only curtail but in fact breed agency and, depending on one’s
viewpoint, creativity.
So far, you have examined both anti-creative (routinised) and creative
practices in call centres, as well as the role of agency within them. But
what about globalisation? Are the linguistic practices in call centres
best described in terms of globalisation, localisation or glocalisation?
Some would probably argue that call centres are an example of the
world becoming increasingly homogeneous and that there is a one-
directional flow of influence from the powerful to the less powerful.
The first call centre was reportedly set up in the 1960s in the USA
(Bagnara and Marti, 2001) and, as an operational prototype, the call
centre has since spread rapidly to numerous countries around the
world. It is well known that in many offshore call centres (where
operators communicate with customers in another country, often in a
language which is not their first) there is pressure to conform with
anglophone norms of politeness and pronunciation. For instance,
Indian and Philippine call-centre workers receive ‘culture’ training by
being shown British or US soaps (depending on where their customers
are based), by being given English-sounding pseudonyms, by
deliberately not revealing their location and by receiving training to
neutralise their accents.
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238
However, it is also possible to argue that call centres, and specifically
the management-prescribed speech style that workers are expected to
use, are better described as an instance of localisation: that is, an
adaptation of global resources to local conditions. To consider this
alternative viewpoint, you will now be asked to read a popularised
version of an academic article based on work I have done in call
centres in four countries: the Philippines, Hong Kong, Denmark and
Scotland.
Activity 5.7
Allow about 30 minutes
Turn to Reading C, ‘Is there a global “call centre” speech style?’ by Sue
Fox, at the end of this chapter. This is a brief article based on my
research into call centres (Hultgren, 2011). As you read, consider the
following questions:
. What does the article say about language varieties and speech styles
used in call centres in four distinct national contexts?
. Which do you think best captures what goes on: globalisation,
localisation or glocalisation?
Discussion
Fox refers to my argument that, in these four locations, the speech style
that operators were asked to use with their customers was very similar
(although there was some evidence of ‘localized adaptations’) – this
suggests that a process of globalisation is at work. However, despite the
use of a similar style, the language in which the service interaction was
conducted was different (English in the Scottish and Philippine call
centres, Danish in the Danish one, and Cantonese, Mandarin and
English in the Hong Kong call centre). This observation is used to argue
that, in relation to language varieties used, what goes on is a case of
localisation – with the exception of the Philippine call centre, the call
handlers in each national context continued to speak in their local
language(s). In other words, then, they localised the global.
It seems to me, however, that it would be hard to interpret the use of
local languages as a case of glocalisation, as operators do not appear to
strategically mix semiotic resources from different cultures and
languages, as in the case of hip hop. Instead, they operate within the
constraints imposed on them – while they are, for the most part, able to
speak in their own national language, they comply with certain (globally
valid) linguistic prescriptions.
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Probably what is becoming clear is that the relationship between
creativity, agency and globalisation is far from straightforward.
Activity 5.8
Allow about 15 minutes
Now is a good time to reflect on whether and how your understanding of
creativity, globalisation and agency has changed by reading this chapter.
Can you think of other examples of creative or anti-creative practices
resulting from globalisation?
Discussion
Many examples of creativity in the context of globalisation are made
possible – and circulated – by the internet. An obvious example is the
‘meme’ where existing content of some kind – image, words, sound – is
modified in some way and recirculated in the modified format (see
Chapter 2). At the same time, some might consider the production of
memes as an example of an anti-creative practice if they are produced
entirely from existing ‘stock’ material from ‘meme generators’.
The concepts of globalisation, localisation and glocalisation are useful, I
think, in helping us to: (1) recognise that there are globalising tendencies
in communication; and (2) consider and identify the different ways in
which global communicative patterns and styles interact. A key
challenge, however, is how to decide whether a specific communicative
activity is an instance of localisation (which is often used to imply a local
adjustment to a global practice) or glocalisation (which, in contrast, is
used to signal a deliberate, agentive mixing of semiotic resources) as
any such definition in part must depend on the perspective of those
engaging in the activity. Further work is needed to explore such
perspectives.
5.5 Conclusion
Through analysing linguistic practices in hip hop and call centres, it has
become clear that some globalised practices are recognised as creative
(even if the term is not used), and others are not. The emphasis in
describing hip hop is often on making visible the range of semiotic
resources used and the mixing, borrowing and shifting that is involved.
In contrast, the emphasis in analysis of call-centre discursive practice
has, to date, been on scripts, prescription, repetition and routinisation.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
240
Yet, as the discussion of humour in call centres shows, creativity
cannot be completely curbed even in highly prescripted domains of
workplace practice. People find ways to step outside of routinised or
homogenising practices, as a way of humanising the work domain and
sometimes as a way of challenging existing practices.
This is where the relationship between creativity and agency seems to
be underlined, with both the examples in this chapter seeming to
suggest that creativity to some extent hinges on agency, the freedom to
choose to act in particular ways. But individuals cannot endlessly act
creatively. In fact, evidence from the call centre suggests that creativity
may in fact be bred by rules and indeed only be observable when
positioned against rules that are broken. In the same way, hip hop may
be seen as having been born out of subverting existing social, linguistic
and artistic conventions.
As far as globalisation is concerned, creativity is linked, albeit often
implicitly, to glocalisation, where globally available phenomena are
remade in the context of local practices, needs and interests. In
contrast, localisation signals the enactment of global practices in local
spaces and, while variety is evident, the outcome is homogeneity with a
lack of opportunity for creative or innovative practice.
All in all, each of the concepts of creativity, agency and globalisation
explored in this chapter are highly contested notions. You will no
doubt continue to revise your understanding of some or all of them as
you read on in this book.
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Reading A: Circles of flow
Alastair Pennycook
Source: Edited version from Pennycook, A. (2007) ‘Language flows, languagemixes’, in Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, Abingdon, Routledge,pp. 116–39.
While it may be true that the effect of global rap on the US is
limited, the issue is also not one of unidirectional flow. There are
many flows in many directions, and thus we can start to think of
alternative frames of analysis by analogy with the black Atlantic,
from the hip-hop Pacific to the black Mediterranean or ‘Chopstick
hip-hop’. As Tony Mitchell (2001) suggests, if Sydney rappers of
Fijian and Tongan background, such as Trey and Posse Koolism,
combine with King Kapisi’s ‘Samoan hip-hop to the world’, and if
Hawaiian band Sudden Rush’s Ku’e (Resist) has been influenced
by Aotearoa-New Zealand Upper Hutt Posse’s E tu (Be Strong),
then what we are witnessing is a ‘Pacific Island hip-hop diaspora’
and a ‘pan-Pacific hip-hop network that has bypassed the borders
and restrictions of the popular music distribution industry’ (p. 31).
These circles of hip-hop flow are at times overlapping: Hawaii,
for example, links the Pacific to the US, while French-influenced
parts of the Pacific, such as French Polynesia (Tahiti) and New
Caledonia link the Pacific to the French circuit. […]
[F]urthermore, the Pacific has always been a place of multiple
criss-crossing movements, and the ways different transcultural
forms link across the region produces an intricacy of interactive
influences.
In her discussion of Na Mele Paleoleo (Hawaiian rap) developed
by Sudden Rush, Fay Akindes (2001) argues that by bridging
elements of political self-determination with popular culture, this
Hawaiian hip-hop has become ‘a liberatory discourse for
Hawaiians seeking economic self-determination in the form of
sovereignty. Sudden Rush … have borrowed hip hop as a
counter-hegemonic transcript that challenges tourism and Western
imperialism’ (p. 95). Sudden Rush draw on a mixture of
indigenous traditions, including kaona – a particular Hawaiian
style of using metaphor in order to express hidden meanings (a
development in part in reaction to Calvinist missionary
proscription of sexual reference, and thus seen as an anti-colonial
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
244
subversion) – as well as direct political messages. As Akindes
describes the title track of Ku’e (which means to oppose or
resist), ‘the main message is a call to reclaim Hawaiian lands and,
therefore, economic self-sufficiency and self-determination. The
rap is fresh and unfamiliar: it is ne mele paleoleo, Hawaiian hip
hop, a cut ’n’ mix of African and Jamaican reggae rhythms,
Hawaiian chanting, and subversive rapping in the English and
Hawaiian languages’ (p. 91).
The use of languages such as Hawaiian – with its links to other
Polynesian languages such as Tahitian, Samoan and Maori – is in
itself an important political statement. […] [T]he politics of rap
lyrics need to be understood not only in terms of the
interpretable meaning of the lyrics but also in the varieties of
language used. Although its use in Hawaii is limited, as Szego
(2003) notes in her discussion of Hawaiian schoolchildren learning
chanted poetry (mele), ‘young Native Hawaiians singing and
listening to music in their associated language demonstrate how
text performed and apprehended outside the domain of language
fluency can yield to sonic, semantic, and symbolic interpretation’
(p. 320). These students, with a limited capacity in Hawaiian
language, ‘experienced musically realized text as a gestalt … when
language was fused with musical sound, the interpretive
possibilities expanded’ (p. 322). This observation brings us […] to
the discussion of the somatic turn and transmodality: when
language is combined with music and bodily movement, it can
take on a very different set of meanings beyond those more
narrowly understood in discussions of language use in education.
According to Akindes, Sudden Rush ‘deliver messages of
Hawaiian nationalism in a musical format that speaks to Hawaiian
youth’ (2001, p. 93) while simultaneously disrupting ‘the false and
idealistic notion of purity or authenticity in music by contesting
the ideas of origins and by exemplifying how music is continually
evolving through a constant cut ’n’ mixing of melodies, rhythms,
styles, and themes’ (p. 95). As I suggested above, and as we shall
see in greater depth below, this contesting of origins and mixing
of styles is a significant way in which identity is refashioned
through hip-hop. For Sudden Rush, as for many contemporary
musicians, these mixes and reclamations are in no way
contradictory: reclaiming a sense of Hawaiian national identity
may involve many mixes of language, music and politics. Thus,
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while it may appear at first sight that Hawaiian rappers are but
reflexes of an American music industry, their work is in fact
directly in opposition to the American presence in Hawaii,
employs a mix of musical, cultural and linguistic influences, and
looks outward to the other Pacific Islands rather than over its
shoulder towards the colonial power.
‘Following the adoption of breakdancing by Maori and Pacific
Islander youth’, Mitchell (1998a) points out in the context of
Aotearoa-New Zealand, ‘rap music and hip hop culture became
an inevitable medium for musical expressions of Maori militancy’
(p. 41). As a result, he suggests (1998b), the already hybrid forms
of rap have become further hybridized, producing ‘strong musical,
political and cultural resonances in Aotearoa’ (p. 168). Maori and
other Pacific Islander rappers in Aotearoa-New Zealand ‘have
substituted Maori and Polynesian cultural expressions for the
African-American rhetoric of hip hop’. Upper Hutt Posse in
particular combine ‘the use of Maori traditional instruments,
militant patere and karanga (raps and calls to ancestors) and
invocations of the spirits of the forest (Tane Mohuta) and the
guardian of the sea (Tangaroa), and rhetoric borrowed from the
Nation of Islam’ (Mitchell, 2003a, p. 13). Auckland has thus
become a major centre for Pacific Island music, with many cross-
influences from the Samoan, Tongan, Fijian and other islander
people there. Samoan King Kapisi urges islanders to engage with
their own cultures and histories and to acknowledge the
interrelated Pacific: ‘I represent for all Pacific peoples from
Hawaii 2 Aotearoa’ (Fix Amnesia, Savage Thoughts). Kapisi urges
the ‘Newtown born coconut’ (Newtown is a suburb of Auckland
with a large Pacific islander population; coconut meaning ‘brown
on the outside, white on the inside’) to forget religion and to
‘check your history/Or you might lose yourself and your own
identity’ (Fix Amnesia). King Kapisi’s ‘Samoan Hip-hop
worldwide’ project reconnects the Samoan diaspora, urging them
to reconnect with their cultural heritage (Pearson, 2004).
And in the small New Caledonia scene, we see two parts of
interlinked flow, the black Pacific and the French Atlantic,
Francophone hip-hop and islander identity. Amid the anti-colonial
politics of the 1980s in New Caledonia kaneka music fused
Western music, and particularly reggae, with indigenous musical
forms. As Goldsworthy (1998) points out, kaneka is a distinctively
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
246
New Caledonian style of music that results from ‘a conscious,
deliberate attempt to achieve Kanak cultural identity through a
popular music medium’ (p. 45). Kanak musicians, he goes on,
‘have also strongly identified with this larger picture of black
solidarity and anti-hegemonic activity in their pursuit of their own
specific goals’ (p. 51). Like Sudden Rush in Hawaii, drawing on a
mixture of musical styles and articulating an anti-colonial politics,
Kaeka music has fused local languages and musical rhythms with
Western styles as part of an oppositional politics to French
colonial rule. Section Otoktone sing in their CD On Vient de la rue
(We’re From the Streets) – a name and title that immediately
locates these rappers as indigenous (autochtone) and yet part of
the hip-hop ideology of the street – of the problems faced by ‘la
nouvelle génération calédonienne’ (the new (New) Caledonian
generation), contrasting the colours of New Caledonia seen by the
tourists (white sand, blue sea, bronze bodies) with the greys of
the buildings and the nickel mines (a constant point of contention
in terms of ownership, exploitation and pollution).
The French-language hip-hop scene has been one of the most
significant for twenty years, a complex interlocked circle of flow
that links the vibrant music scenes in Paris and Marseille in
France; Dakar, Abidjan and Libreville in West Africa, and
Montreal in Quebec. Hip-hop in France developed in the banlieues
– the suburban housing projects where many poor, and first and
second generation immigrant populations live. Here, in
multiethnic mixes of people of Maghreb (Algeria, Tunisia,
Morocco), French African (Mali, Senegal, Gabon), French Antilles
(La Martinique, Guadeloupe) and other European (Portugal,
Romania, Italy) backgrounds, hip-hop emerged as a potent force
of new French expression (Cannon, 1997; Faure and Garcia, 2005;
Huq, 2001a, b; Prévos, 1998, 2001, 2002). Rap in France ‘uses a
street-speak version of French that includes African, Arab, gypsy
and American roots and is viewed with disapproval by
traditionalists for its disregard for traditional rules of grammar
and liberal use of neologisms’ (Huq, 2001a, p. 74). While Paris
became a centre for many movements and crossings of French-
language musicians, dancers and artists, the southern port city of
Marseille looked more resolutely southwards. Typical of the
movement was popular Marseille group IAM, whose members
have [Madagascan], Senegalese, Algerian, Spanish, Italian and
French backgrounds, and whose album Ombre est Lumière
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Mitchell (2003b) describes as ‘one of the all-time masterpieces of
world hip-hop’ (p. 108). Along with their sharp language use –
their album Métèque et mat evokes échec et mat (checkmate), Métèque
meaning more or less ‘wog’ and mat from the Arabic ‘to die’ (see
Swedenburg, 2001), while Ombre est Lumière (darkness is light) is a
play on the French son et lumière (sound and light) shows – they
developed an ideology which Prévos (2001) calls ‘pharaoism’ (p.
48) thus both linking to the Arabic background of many French
immigrants, and as Swedenburg (2001) argues giving ‘Egyptianist
Afrocentricity a Mediterranean inflection, asserting a kind of
“black Mediterranean”’ (p. 69).
[…]
Mixing and making other Englishes
One thing that […] clearly emerges from these accounts of circles
of flow is the constant mixing, borrowing, shifting and sampling
of music, languages, lyrics and ideas. Let us [consider] Rip Slyme
for a moment. […] [T]his Tokyo band […] may use snatches of
borrowed English – ‘Yo Bringing that, Yo Bring your Style’ – as
well as more locally produced English – ‘Five Guy’s Name is Rip
Slyme 5’ – but in the following example from the track ‘Tokyo
Classic’, we see a more complex mixture.
Lyrics Transliteration Translation
錦糸町出 Freaky
ダブルの
Japanese
Kinshichoo de
freaky
daburu no
Japanese
Freaky mixed
Japanese
from Kinshichoo
‘Tokyo Classic’
By naming Kinshichoo (a suburb of Tokyo) and by doing so in
kanji (Japanese characters of Chinese origin), Rip Slyme locate
their Japaneseness explicitly, yet at the same time they use the
English word for Japanese, seeming in the same instant to
refashion their identity from the outside. This Japanese identity is
then both ‘freaky’ and ‘double’, the latter a recently coined term
to describe people of mixed origin. English and Japanese flow
across the boundaries of identity, becoming both fixed (Rip Slyme
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
248
5, from Kinshichoo) and fluid (Yo, double, Japanese), producing
new possibilities of what it means to be Japanese, to use English,
to participate globally, to be local.
Other artists present different ways of embedding English in
Japanese (or Japanese in English). In the following lyrics, for
example, DJ Tonk (Move On) uses the English word ‘listen’,
written in katakana (rissun), followed by 2 (meaning ‘to’); and ‘our
blues moonlight’ (in katakana: buruusu muunraito) is juxtaposed
with the traditional-sounding Japanese (in kanji) ‘under the
moonlight’ (tsukiakari no shita). Here, then, we have the old and
the new, English and Japanese, contrasted, mixed and combined
in a way that makes them hard to disentangle.
Lyrics Transliteration Translation
リッスン
2俺達の
ブル–ス
ム–ンラ
イト月明
かりの下
rissun two oretachino
buruusu muunraito
tsukiakari no shita
Listen to our blues
moonlight under the
moonlight
In the example below from Zeebra’s The Rhyme Animal, Zeebra
plays with the different rhymes in katakna (dynamic, titanic),
producing a final mixed rhyme with the Japanese dai (big) and
panic (daipanikku – big panic – to rhyme with dainamikku –
dynamic). Perhaps what emerges here above all is the sense that
English and Japanese become so intertwined, and meaning is so
dependent on the mixture of the codes, that the very separability
of English and Japanese becomes an impossibility; the very notion
of whether English is invading Japanese culture or being used to
represent Japanese culture can simply no longer be asked.
Lyrics Transliteration Translation
のっけからダ
イナミック
まるでタイタ
ニック
想像を超える
大パニック
nokkekara
dainamikku marude
taitanikku souzouwo
koeru dai panikku
From the very
beginning, it was
dynamic, just like
Titanic, and an
unimaginable big
panic
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
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As with the circles of flow described above, many of these
performers are interlinked not only on a personal level (they
collaborate, work together, turn up on each other’s CDs) but on a
more general level of origins, movement and histories. Korean
MC JK of popular rap group Drunken Tiger grew up in LA,
trying to establish rap in Korean amid the cultural politics of Los
Angeles. Likewise, his friend MC Tasha, who, like Ilmari of Rip
Slyme, has a mixed cultural and linguistic familial background,
describes herself on the track ‘Wonder Woman’ as 난반먹통
Korean 혈통 (nahn bahn meok tong Korean heyol tong: half part
inkpot and Korean blood, or an ABK – (African) American Born
Korean). While her lyrics vary from love songs to a critique of
male Korean chauvinism, hypocrisy, domestic violence and
relationships between wealthy older men and young girls (Man,
Man, Man), it is the ways in which her lyrics create relations
between English and Korean that interest me here. From the
opening of ‘Memories … (Smiling Tears)’ from Tasha Hip-Hop
Album, for example, she builds a mixture of English and Korean
around the Chinese idiom (commonly used in Korea): 七顚八起
(chil jeon pahl gi) meaning: If I’m knocked seven times, I come
back on my eighth (or something like ‘no pain, no gain’).
Lyrics Transliteration Translation
Yo if I fall two times
I come back on my
third
절대로포기않지
and that’s my word
Jeol dae roh poh
gi ahnchi
I never give up
If I fall five times I
come harder on my
sixth
조금만더가면돼포
기않지난아직
Joh geum mahn
deo gah myeon
dwae poh gihi ahn
chi nahn ah jik
I’m not far from the
goal, I haven’t
given up yet
If I’m knocked 7
times I come back
on my eighth
칠전팔기내인생끝
까지가볼래
Chil jeon pahl gi
nae in saeng
gyeut ggah gi bohl
lae
Even if I fail seven
times, I will try
again; I will keep
trying until the end
of my life
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
250
Now knowledge of self thru
the pain in this world
난절대로포기않지
and that’s my word
Nahn jeol dae roh
poh gi ahn chi
I never
give up
In this example, then, Tasha uses a well-known Korean idiom and
embellishes it in the two languages, each phrase working with the
other to develop the meaning. Elsewhere, from the track
Meditation, Tasha combines English and Korean differently.
Unlike the lyrics above, where English and Korean complement
each other – the lyrics in English and Korean reinforce the
meaning – here she moves from English to Korean across both
meaning and sound: ‘Rainy day’ is echoed immediately in
Naerinae, also meaning rain, with the same rhyme – day, Naerinae,
igosae, smyeodeunae, goeenae – repeated through the rest. The
common rap feature of repeated rhymes within a sentence is here
reproduced across languages.
Lyrics Transliteration Translation
Rainy day
내리네
이곳에스며
드네
내작은방바
닥에고이네
Naerinae igosae
smyeodeunae nae
jahggeun bahng bah
dahg aeh goeenae
Rainy day, raining,
soaking and gathering
on the floor of my
small room
This use of rhymes across both languages is a feature of a
number of tracks. In ‘The Concrete Jungle’, she rhymes 돌려
(dohllyeo – turning) and 돌려 (dohllyeo – taking breath) with
‘mirror’. The mixture of English and Korean, held together
through repeated rhymes, creates a new level of meaning.
Lyrics Transliteration Translation
고개를 돌려 now
check the back
mirror 빨간 불에
멈춘 우린 잠시
숨을 돌려
Goh gae reul
dohllyeo … bbahl
gahn boorae
meom choon
woorin jahmsi
soomeul dohllyeo
Turning her head
and checking the
back mirror,
stopping by a red
light and taking
breath for a while
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
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What Tasha achieves here is a mixture of Korean and English
that combines the different ‘flows’, sounds and meanings of
English and Korean. There are therefore two senses to the flows
I have been discussing here. On the one hand, the interlocking
circles of flow that produce a constant movement of linguistic,
musical and cultural influences around the world. On the other
hand, the flows of rap lyrics, which are a crucial part of the
aesthetics of MC-ing (having a good flow is widely recognized as
central to the art of rap). As Krims points out, the ‘rhythmic
styles of MC-ing, or “flows”, are among the central aspects of rap
production and reception, and any discussion of rap genres that
takes musical poetics seriously demands a vocabulary of flow’
(Krims, 2000, p. 48). It is one thing, however, to master the flow
of one language (and there has been much debate over whether
some languages are better oriented towards rap flows than
others), but it is quite another skill to ‘flow-switch’ as Tasha does.
The skill here is not just to move between languages, creating a
set of new meanings by doing so, but also to move in and out of
different flows. By artfully integrating the flow of English and
Korean rap styles in a bilingual performance, she presents English
and Korean in new relationships.
References for this reading
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Rap) as Liberatory discourse. Discourse, 23(1), 82–98.
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Faure, S. and Garcia, M.C. (2005) Culture hip-hop: Jeunes des cités
et politiques publiques. Paris: La Dispute/SNEDIT.
Goldsworthy, D. (1998) Indigenization and socio-political identity
in the kaneka music of New Caledonia. In P. Hayward (ed.) Sound
Alliances: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Politics and Popular Music in
the Pacific. London: Cassell, pp. 45–61.
Huq, R. (2001a) The French connection: Francophone hip hop as
an institution in contemporary postcolonial France. Taboo: Journal
of Education and Culture, 5 (2 – Special themed issue), 69–84.
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contemporary postcolonial France. In A. Furlong and I.
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252
Guidikova (eds) Transitions of Youth Citizenship in Europe: Culture,
Subculture and Identity. London: Council of Europe Publishing,
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Krims, A. (2000) Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge:
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Islander music in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In P. Hayward (ed.)
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Outside the USA. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
pp. 1–38.
Mitchell, T. (2003a) Doin’ damage in my native language: the use
of ‘resistance vernaculars’ in hip hop in France, Italy, and
Aotearoa/New Zealand. In H. Berger and M. Carroll (eds) Global
Pop, Local Language. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
pp. 3–17.
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of Communication, 19(1), 106–110.
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hip hop, music video and diasporic space. Perfect Beat, 6 (4), 55–
66.
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the United States. Popular Music and Society, (22)2, 67–84.
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music and hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s. In T. Mitchell
(ed.) Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop Outside the USA.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 39–56.
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developments, prospects. In A-P. Durand (ed.) Black, Blanc, Beur :
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Rap Music and Hip-hop Culture in the Francophone World. Lanham,
MD: The Scarecrow Press, pp. 1–21.
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Mitchell (ed.) Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop Outside the USA.
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comprehensibility. In H. Berger and M. Carroll (eds) Global Pop,
Local Language. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
pp. 291–328.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
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Reading B: ‘Subterranean worksick blues’: humour
as subversion in two call centres
Phil Taylor and Peter Bain
Source: Edited version from Taylor, P. and Bain, P. (2003) ‘“Subterraneanworksick blues”: humour as subversion in two call centres’, OrganizationStudies, vol. 24, no. 9, pp. 1487–509.
Introduction
[…]
We continue to reject the simplistic and mistaken application of
the ‘electronic panopticon’ metaphor to the call centre, in which
supervisory power has been ‘rendered perfect’ and worker
resistance is nullified (Bain and Taylor 2000; Fernie and
Metcalf 1998). […] [O]ur research has uncovered manifold and
vigorous forms of individual, quasi-collective and collective
resistance (Bain and Taylor 1999, 2000; Taylor and Bain 1999,
2001, 2003) rooted in part in the experience of work in this
‘unique working environment’ (HSE 2001). Discontent with the
experience of task performance, employment conditions and the
‘managerial regime’ certainly underlay the manifestations of
workers’ humour from the two call centres on which this article is
based. The rich evidence of creative and subversive humour
presented here contributes further to the case against those who
believe that all workers can do is consent to totalizing systems of
surveillance and control which preclude divergences from
managerially defined norms of behaviour (for example, Sewell and
Wilkinson 1992).
[…]
Methodologies
[…]
‘T’ is one of four call centres studied in a project conducted
under the Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Future of
Work’ programme. The data utilized here comes from the period
October 1999–May 2000, when researchers engaged in intensive
observation of work processes; listening to calls while sitting
alongside agents, and discussing the task performance, formed the
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
255
main component of this fieldwork. Field notes recorded
observations and included accounts of informal interviews with
agents, supervisors and managers. Researchers had full access to
‘shop floor’ activities and, through sustained contact, gained the
confidence of key informants. Consequently, the study of humour
here draws mainly on ethnographic methods.
Research at Excell commenced in 1998. […] Research could not
involve direct observation, but relied upon the contemporaneous
testimony and recollection of workers interviewed off-site. This
generated three qualitative data sets. The first consists of
transcriptions of frequent meetings of a group of between four
and twelve employees. In effect, these are the proceedings of an
informal, loosely structured committee, striving to build a union
in circumstances of employer hostility, and whose debates and
decisions were recorded against a background of conflict. The
authors documented 27 such meetings between October 1998 and
May 1999. Second, 15 concurrent interviews were conducted with
agents, ex-employees and supervisors, exploring in detail
perceptions of the labour process and employee relations. Third,
from late 1999 into 2000, 10 interviews, each lasting two hours,
were conducted with workers who were encouraged to reflect on
the earlier period when they first organized themselves in the
Communication Workers Union (CWU). These lengthy accounts
by key informants generated thoughtful reflection on the purpose
and effects of workplace humour. Although based on data from
separate studies, the common organizational setting of the call
centre enables pertinent comparisons to be made and contrasts
drawn.
[…]
Humour at ‘T’: Undirected Subversion
Humour as Relief from Boredom and Routine
As some workers did make themselves the butt of their own
jokes, clowning did take place. For example, following the
company’s Christmas party, Andy, who had ‘got off ’ with the
daughter of a senior manager, acted out a ritual of self-ridicule.
Andy, nicknamed ‘Mr Cheese’, because of his unctuous telephone
manner, clearly could remember his actions on the night in
question, but feigned amnesia through excessive alcohol
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
256
consumption (Observation, 13 December 1999). Fellow workers
peppered him with questions on both mundane and intimate
details, to which Andy responded by acting the dumb fool. This
charade was played out in front of fresh audiences as, throughout
the day, other workers dropped by to interrogate the ‘victim’.
[…]
Several agents commented that having a laugh was the only thing
that ‘kept them going’. In a sales section with particularly rigorous
targets, Pat described the effects of incessant call handling, and
how the regime was forcing her to ‘exit’ after 11 months:
‘People are unhappy – lots of things but mainly the calls. It
seems to go in cycles. A new lot come in bright and fresh,
get disillusioned and some leave, then it’s new lambs to the
slaughter. I probably won’t be here next week because my
job interview yesterday went very well…. This place does
your head in, if it wasn’t for the jokers here it wouldn’t be
tolerable.’ (Interview, 27 February 2000)
A ‘community of comedians’, to use Collinson’s term, made work
‘tolerable’. In this community, a hierarchy, based on an ability to
make workmates laugh, was discernible, with Mark, Shona and
‘Norrie the Hun’ best at banter and ‘the wind-up’. The
community engaged in common practices motivated by the desire
to relieve boredom and the frustration of task performance.
Agents dealing with irritating, long-winded or slow customers
would typically hit their ‘mute’ button and, when inaudible to
customers, make sarcastic comments to close colleagues.
Whenever Hughie hit the mute, he would say ‘What’s that all
about?’ and burst out laughing, expressing amazement at
customers’ foibles (Observation, 10 December 1999). Typical
comments included ‘Wait till you hear this one,’ ‘That’s a new
one,’ ‘See these customers, outrageous man!’ and ‘Thick as [f**k]!’
Frequently, while conversing, agents’ eye contact, facial
movements and body language would convey similar expressions
of frustration and astonishment. Such comments and mannerisms
were part of a ritual, creating a sense of expectation among fellow
workers, eager to hear a full account of these interactions. If the
volume of incoming calls was sufficiently low as to create longish
breaks between calls (and no supervisor was close), an audience
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
257
would gather and proceed collectively to ‘rip the piss’ out of
customers, competing to recount examples of their folly. Since ‘T’
received calls from across the UK, opportunities arose to mimic
regional accents, a source of considerable amusement. Catch-
phrases from a popular Scottish television comedy ‘Chewing the
Fat’ were liberally borrowed, providing a shared medium of comic
expression.
Undoubtedly, these are examples of humour as coping or survival
strategies (Noon and Blyton 1997). The primary purpose is to
make the day more interesting, providing relief from the routine
of call handling. But this behaviour also ‘reflected and reinforced
a shared sense of self and a group identity and differentiation’
(Collinson 1988: 185), indicating the presence of a distinct
organizational subculture in sharp conflict with managerial values
and priorities. Verbal abuse of customers, even at a safe distance,
certainly ran counter to the principles of company culture. A
delightful irony was that while agents ‘slagged off ’ customers,
suspended from the ceiling above their heads were notices bearing
mission statements such as ‘Committed to putting the customer’s
needs first.’ In challenging management values, and undermining
the customer service ethos, these rituals should be seen as
subversive in their effects.
Humour and the Erosion of Team Leader Authority
Ackroyd and Thompson argue that workplace struggle is also
‘concerned with the matter of identity’ (1999: 101). Management,
at least rhetorically, has an interest in obtaining greater levels of
commitment from its workforce, an objective which may allow
employees to express opinions. Of course, such encouragement to
openness has sharply defined boundaries, and is permitted in so
far as it benefits the organization. Since the promise, suggested by
cultures of openness, may clash with the unchanged reality of
routine task performance, workers exploit these limited spaces,
inserting expressions of their interests which conflict with
management aims. Under these conditions, joking, which is
excused from the normal conventions of serious discourse,
becomes a means of conducting a satirical attack on management:
‘Joking is… perfectly appropriate when a group with power
is espousing a willingness to be intimate, but is still incapable
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
258
of admitting equality. It is in this sort of situation that joking
becomes a useful tool.’ (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999: 102)
The joking practices of agents at ‘T’ confirm these insights, most
pointedly in the way that humour was directed at undermining
team leaders’ authority. Formally, team leaders were responsible
for ensuring that the quantity and quality of an agent’s call
handling were satisfactory. Unacceptable performance levels
ostensibly were to be improved through coaching, although
exhortation or chastisement were equally common responses.
Most team leaders, recently promoted from the ranks, were
encouraged by senior management to maintain informal social
contact with erstwhile colleagues. It is the contradiction between
team leaders’ conventional and directive roles, and the compulsion
to act as if they were still ‘one of the gang’, which gives a distinct
edge to the banter directed toward them. [Two] examples follow.
‘Taking the Piss’
When call volumes were low, gossip quickly filled the gaps. On
this occasion, the stimulus was the previous Friday’s company
‘do’. The main topic, inevitably, was employees’ ill-behaviour: how
drunk so-and-so had been, who had felt which part of whose
anatomy, and who had got off with whom. Although risque, the
language was never sexist or offensive, with both sexes
participating as protagonists and ‘victims’. Sanction was given by
Monica, the team leader, who having excelled in the consumption
of alcohol, was herself the butt of much verbal sparring. For
example, ‘That dress must have been cheap, you’d only have to
pay for half of it, it had no back.’ Although two agents, Linda and
Mark, came in for ‘a proper slagging’, the sharpest barbs were
directed at Monica. The greatest hilarity occurred when an on-call
team member re-entered the conversation and, in trying to catch
up, would ask deliberately naive questions, pretending not to
know who was being discussed. This kept the joke going and
enabled agents to replay their attacks on Monica.
The Limits to Tolerance
A humorous ‘questionnaire’ was designed and distributed by
Hughie, following management permission on the grounds that it
was a pre-Christmas ‘bit of fun’. Everyone was polled on
questions like ‘Who is the sexiest? The grumpiest? The scariest?’
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
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As questionnaires circulated, jokes proliferated as workers
considered nominations for various categories. Once again, the
principal targets were team leaders, with the unpopular nominated
for unwelcome categories; ‘Nurse Ratched’ won the ‘grumpiest’
award. Evidently, the questionnaire almost crossed the line of
unacceptability as defined by management, as this snatch of
conversation reveals.
Hughie: ‘We had a question in the first version “Who is
going to get the sack before Christmas?” but we had to take
it out because they were cracking up.’
Al: ‘Who was cracking up?’
Hughie: ‘They [management] were cracking up because of
what’s happening to them (nodding over to campaigns
team).’
Clare: ‘That’s because they’re getting [f**ked]. All temps in
campaigns are to be laid off by December 19th.’
Team leaders were ambivalent. Although approving the
questionnaire, to the extent that some joined in discussing
nominations, a line was drawn when it strayed from what was
defined as harmless fun and touched on sensitive issues. Team
leaders even attempted to stifle spontaneity by insisting that
completed questionnaires were returned to Monica so that she
could compile the results. Such an approach tacitly acknowledges
that creative joking in a workplace regime of this kind can never
be purely harmless. Completed questionnaires revealed how
workers enthusiastically seized the opportunity to deride both
team leaders and those agents regarded as ‘yes men’.
[…]
Cynicism about Management in General
There is nothing novel in the circulation of cartoons, slogans,
poems, stories and gobbets of home-spun philosophizing,
delivering pithy, humorous or ironic messages, frequently of the
‘you don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps’ kind. The
proportion containing satirical attacks on management may have
increased at the expense of the more anodyne, although it is
difficult to be certain about this. Some are authored within the
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
260
workplace and contain references unique to the organization,
while others are generic, passed by hand or, now, frequently
forwarded as e-mail attachments or downloaded from the internet.
While such cyber-humour can be experienced by employees as
oppressive (Collinson 2002: 277), the two examples given here of
e-mail satire (Figures 1 and 2), which caused great amusement as
they circulated through networks of trusted colleagues at ‘T’,
should be seen as subversive. The first mocks the image of the
high-powered managerial meeting, implicitly contrasting its
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
261
Figure 1. ‘Meetings’: The Practical Alternative to Work
pretensions with the (unstated) efforts of ordinary workers. The
second can be seen in the context of tight time controls prevalent
in call centres, which often include measurement of toilet breaks.
Both contributed to the sense of distance between employees and
employers.
[…]
Humour at Excell: Conscious and Directed Subversion
The ‘Bad Boys’
At Excell, managers and supervisors themselves were largely
responsible for becoming the objects of relentless and unforgiving
joking. The incessant pressure to meet targets and their
intimidation of certain workers made some managers extremely
unpopular. Further, management unwittingly contributed to the
formation of an oppositional group by dubbing individuals seen
as troublesome as the ‘bad boys’. The more managers took petty
disciplinary action against these malcontents, the more they
cohered as a group and developed common forms of expression
and identity through a set of shared beliefs. Humour facilitated
the formation of this ‘out group’, uniting disparate individuals
into a collective organization.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
262
Figure 2. New Office Space
‘I think it [humour] was the glue that initially made collective
action possible. Without that, people had no obvious reason
to feel warmth, or commitment, or comradeship for anyone
else. We had to develop a sort of kinship and emotional
feelings and support for each other because we were up
against it… it didn’t happen organically, it happened quite
deliberately.’ (Interview, Gary, 12 December 2000)
The fact that this group of dissidents was funny made them, and
the union with which they were identified, more attractive.
‘Once people saw they could sit and have a laugh with
everybody who was involved, that was really important. And
the common ground that people shared was their ability to
laugh at these fools who were nominally controlling them.’
(Interview, Gary, 12 December 2000)
Humour as Part of a Conscious Strategy of Undermining
Management
‘Oh aye, it was always about a means to an end. It was never
a case of misbehaving for the sake of it – well I liked
misbehaving and having a laugh anyway – but it was done
for a reason.’ (Interview, Jimbo, 22 June 2000)
Management was ridiculed as part of a deliberate strategy of
undermining authority. The activists’ main objective was to
demonstrate to fellow workers that nobody need be frightened of
management. Belittling superiors, particularly those most
deserving of retribution, without incurring subsequent reprisals,
could successfully erode deference to authority. The jokes,
mocking and lampoonery enabled serious messages to be
communicated. The following examples demonstrate both the
inventive ways in which authority was undermined and a
sophisticated understanding of the role of the audience.
‘We would turn the whole scenario of control on its head, so
that fools could be kings for the day. If you say in front of a
manager, “I can’t believe this man earns £20,000 a year, have
you seen his shoes?” the allure can be shattered just by
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
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saying something as foolish as this.’ (Interview, Gary, 12
December 2000)
‘People like Sammy were really effective. He would develop a
routine, which he would use at every opportunity to berate
managers, but in a way that they couldn’t discipline him
because the questions he was asking were part of normal
conversation. He would ask managers questions that made
absolutely no sense, like “What’s your favourite colour Roy?”
and the conversation would go like this “I don’t know, I
don’t have a favourite colour.” “You must have a favourite
colour, everybody’s got one.” And when you ask managers
questions like that they immediately become wary, because
they don’t know where it’s leading. So Roy would walk away.
Ten minutes later Sammy would be standing right next to
him saying, “Have you got that answer for me? What’s the
colour Roy?” “I don’t know.” “Come on, I’m asking you
what your favourite colour is.” On and on like that. We
would create a situation where people working beside us
could see what it was like to make managers, who would
normally humiliate them, seem inadequate. And it was really
important because this was happening in a public space with
an audience. It didn’t have any meaning unless people could
see it happening.’ (Interview, Colin, 15 June 2000)
[…]
Humour and Trade Union Organization
At Excell, the boundary between subversive humour and
conscious trade union activity was frequently blurred as, for
example, when internal communication forums were subverted.
‘We would write our demands on flip charts, but not on the
first page. They would [later] be giving a briefing, using the
flip chart, and when they turned a page they would find
“Parity for Glasgow and Birmingham.” They knew my
writing and accused me but I denied it. They would insist,
“It was your writing.” I would say, “Did you see me writing
it?” The manager would go “No” and I would say, “Shut up
then.” And that would be that, because I would be backed
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
264
up, and they couldn’t prove it. We would always back each
other.’ (Interview, Jimbo, 22 June 2000)
Hundreds of union leaflets were photocopied during night shifts,
slipped under keyboards or placed in mail bins, and in the
morning managers would ‘go ballistic’. The leaflets had a serious
purpose, calling on management to solve ‘999’ service problems,
or raising demands over pay and conditions. They might contain
confidential data on company profitability or turnover,
information appropriated from managers’ desks (an example of
pilfering for collective purposes). However, the distribution of
serious leaflets was interspersed with scathing satire in the form
of poems or, in this case, ‘a recipe’ (see Figure 3).
By general agreement, managers’ furious reaction to the ‘recipe’
made this Jimbo’s most effective satirical act. The content is not
only funny, but succinctly gets to the heart of corporate priorities
and the realities of work. Two days later, union membership cards
were placed under the same keyboards and in the same mail bins,
as the activists consciously linked their satirical attack on Excell
with an open appeal to join the union.
[…]
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
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TAKEONE BUCKET OF TAX DODGING GRANTSTWENTY HORSES ARSES TO RUN THE PLACEONE PRIZE C***SUCKER (AMERICAN IS BEST)CHOP TWO GRAND OFF THE AVERAGE CALL CENTRE WAGEDICE WITH DEATH AND A FAULTY DATABASETENDERIZE THE SAPS THAT BELIEVE YOUSPRINKLE LIBERALLY WITH LIES AND DECEITPLACE THE LOT IN A F**KED UP ECONOMY AND HEAT FOR FOUR YEARSUNTIL IT REACHES BOILING POINT. THEN SIT ON YOUR FAT F***INGARSES AND DO SWEET FANNY ADAMS DRIVING AROUND IN YOURF***ING FREE MERCEDES WHILE WE ALL GET REPETITIVE STRAINSYNDROME IN OUR EARS FROM LISTENING TO THE SAME S***E YEARAFTER B***ARD YEAR, THAT YOU DON’T EVEN RECOGNIZE.THEN GO AND F**K YOURSELVES.
– A RECIPE FOR DISASTER –
Figure 3 ‘A Recipe for Disaster’ [Language which may be found offensive
has been censored.]
Conclusion
The evidence from both case studies suggests that ‘pure’ clowning
was relatively rare, and shaded into teasing and satire.
Overwhelmingly, satire, sometimes vicious in character and
directed at individual supervisors or management in general, was
the most common form of humour. Long-acknowledged motives
behind joking were also apparent, particularly relief from boredom
and routine. On occasions, the attempt to escape alienation took
call centre specific forms, as with the denigration of customers at
‘T’. Similarly, Collinson’s (1988) observation that humour reflected
and reinforced a shared sense of group identity is confirmed.
Humour and joking contributed to the development of attitudes
standing in sharp contrast to managerial values and priorities. […]
[…]
There is no evidence from these cases that the subversive effects
of humour were undermined by divisions created by sexism or
narrow preoccupations with masculine identity, as Collinson
found. From the perspective of gender analysis, the locations raise
interesting comparisons and contrasts. In both, the gender
composition was about 50/50, with little sexual division of labour
among agents, but, common to many call centres, women were
strongly represented in frontline supervision. At ‘T’, women
participated in joking rituals equally with men, and some were
leading comedians. To the extent that sexist humour was present,
the banter tended to be even-handed, with women equally dishing
it out, but, for the most part, humour was risque rather than
sexist. At Excell, there was a ‘laddish’ element to the humour,
which the union activists came to acknowledge and sought to
combat, particularly when more women joined the CWU and
some become leading members. However, as several participants
recalled, more significant was the camp quality of much of the
humour, stimulated by Jimbo’s presence, which makes it difficult
to squeeze the joking into a neat category of masculinity.
[…] Although subversive at both locations, humour was more
biting, even nasty, at Excell, with activists seeking an audience of
fellow workers to inflict the maximum humiliation on managers.
Undoubtedly, there was more to rail against at Excell, but the
most important factor was collective organization, the presence of
incipient workplace trade unionism. The activists were
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
266
instrumental in their use of humour, clear in the knowledge that
it helped make them and the union popular and served to weaken
managerial authority and legitimacy. Subversive satire was allied to
a wider collective purpose, while at ‘T’, despite the ‘sending up’
and creative satire, the widespread use of humour against
management and its values did not lead to trade union
organization. At Excell, union recognition and negotiated
improvements in pay and conditions were long-term objectives.
[…]
It is impossible to disentangle the precise contribution that
humour played in the ultimately successful unionization campaign
from that which derived from formal organizing activities. The
evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the informal
category of resistance and misbehaviour and the formal category
of organization should not be analytically polarized where
workgroups are prepared to use an array of both creative and
serious means to challenge managerial legitimacy. It was the
creative relationship between the two which gave a distinctively
effective edge to organizing activities at Excell.
Lastly, the efflorescence of humorous activities at a subterranean
level, that is, beneath the organizational surface, delivers a further
blow to those who liken the call centre to an electronic prison.
Resistance, disobedience and collective organization have emerged
in familiar and novel ways in these most contemporary of
workplaces.
References for this reading
Ackroyd, Stephen, and Paul Thompson 1998 ‘No laughing matter?
On the practicality of practical jokes: Teasing, clowning and satire
in the workplace’. Paper presented to the Work, Employment and
Society Conference, University of Cambridge.
Ackroyd, Stephen, and Paul Thompson 1999 Organizational
misbehaviour. London: Sage.
Bain, Peter, and Phil Taylor 1999 ‘Employee relations, worker
attitudes and trade union representation in call centres’. Paper
presented to the 17th International Labour Process Conference,
University of London.
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
267
Bain, Peter, and Phil Taylor 2000 ‘Entrapped by the “electronic
panopticon”? Worker resistance in the call centre’. New
Technology, Work and Employment 15/1: 2–18.
Collinson, David 1988 ‘Engineering humour: Masculinity, joking
and conflict in shop floor relations’. Organization Studies 9/2:
181–199.
Collinson, David 2002 ‘Managing humour’. Journal of Management
Studies 39/3: 269–288.
Fernie, Sue, and David Metcalf 1998 (Not) hanging on the
telephone: Payment systems in the new sweatshops. London: London
School of Economics, Centre for Economic Performance.
HSE 2001 Advice regarding call centre working practices. London:
Health and Safety Executive, Local Authority Unit.
Noon, Mike, and Paul Blyton 1997 The realities of work.
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Sewell, Graham, and Barry Wilkinson 1992 ‘Human resource
management in “surveillance” companies’ in Human resource
management and technical change. J. Clark (ed.), 137–155. London:
Sage.
Taylor, Phil, and Peter Bain 1999 ‘“An assembly line in the head”:
Work and employee relations in the call centre’. Industrial
Relations Journal 30/2: 101–117.
Taylor, Phil, and Peter Bain 2001 ‘Trade unions, workers’ rights
and the frontier of control in UK call centres’. Economic and
Industrial Democracy 22/1: 39–66.
Taylor, Phil, and Peter Bain 2003 ‘Call centre organising in
adversity: From Excell to Vertex’ in Union organising. G. Gall
(ed.). London: Routledge.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
268
Reading C: Is there a global ‘call centre’ speech
style?
Sue Fox
Source: Fox, S. (2011) ‘Is there a global “call centre” speech style?’, LinguisticsResearch Digest [Online]. Available at http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/is-there-global-call-centre-speech.html (Accessed 13January 2016).
Most research which has investigated the globalization effects on
language has focused on the spread of English and the way that it
supplants local languages, particularly in domains such as business,
higher education and politics. But can globalization also entail the
exportation of a particular speech style? Can people continue to
speak in the language associated with their national or ethnic
identity while using a speech style which is not necessarily
associated with that same nationality or ethnicity?
Researcher Anna Kristina Hultgren has been investigating the
speech style of call centre operators. Operators are generally given
very explicit instructions on how they must speak in interactions
with customers and these rules are often incorporated in
documents, taught in communication training programmes and
regularly assessed. Hultgren identifies a ‘rapport-building’ speech
style prescribed to call centre workers in four countries –
Denmark (DK), Britain (UK), Hong Kong (HK) and the
Philippines (PH). Although the call centre agents communicate in
different language varieties, the prescribed speech style is very
similar in all four countries.
Across all four call centres agents are advised to make customers
feel as though they are being listened to and in some cases are
even given devices, such as ‘urgh huh’, ‘ok’ and ‘I know’, which
they can deploy to show that they are engaged in ‘active listening’.
Related to this, agents must also acknowledge the customer needs
and make them feel understood. The agents are told that this
understanding can be signalled by such things as ‘summarising’
(UK), ‘confirming’ (DK), ‘checking/paraphrasing’ (HK) and
‘restating’ the problem, all very similar strategies. Equally
important is the fact that the agents must make themselves
understood. They are told to avoid jargon, technical terms and
Chapter 5 Talking and rapping in the globalised world: creativity curbed or unleashed?
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company-internal lingo, again a feature listed in the materials of
all four call centres. Other ways that the agents are told to ensure
that they are making themselves clear are by using ‘signposting’,
‘summarising’ or ‘headline techniques’; in other words, not just
doing what the caller has asked them to do but also actively
communicating to the customer what action they are taking.
Finally, the importance of ‘empathy’ is highlighted across all four
sets of materials. The agents are often told to engage callers in
small-talk which is usually unrelated to the transaction in hand.
Some of the materials even suggest topics for small talk. These
can be such things as asking how the caller is at the beginning of
the [call], asking about the weather or making general
conversation. Is all this sounding rather familiar?
In the second part of the investigation, Hultgren looks at the
compliance to these prescriptive rules in British and Danish
contexts. She considers eight different variables and finds no
significant differences for four of those variables; ‘ending the
transaction on a personal note’, ‘thanking the customer for the
call’, ‘providing a summary of the interaction’ and ‘engaging in
active listening’. However, for the other four variables –
‘greeting’, ‘acknowledgment’, ‘hold notification’ and ‘check
understanding’ – there was a significant difference between the
two countries. These differences are attributed to the Danish
agents being more unwilling to engage interpersonally with the
customer than their British counterparts.
Despite these localized adaptations of the prescribed rules,
Hultgren concludes by arguing that there is a global ‘call centre’
style, derived originally from ‘North-American cultural preferences
for informality and rapport’ which is being exported
independently of language. It is not about making everyone speak
the same language but about letting them speak their own
language but in a style that does not necessarily align with their
ethno-cultural identity.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
270
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and
production
Colleen McKenna
6.1 Introduction
What happens when creative work is regulated by the state,
corporations, interest groups or the artist? To what extent has the
internet enabled new models of authorship and distribution to emerge?
These questions will frame this chapter’s consideration of the
regulation, production and distribution of creative work in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the invention of the printing
press, the complex dynamics of authorship, ownership and production
have determined our access to creative texts. The publication and
distribution of creative work is regulated and restricted by a range of
economic, political, technical and legal forces – often in operation in
ways of which we are unaware. The themes of regulation, ownership
and production are explored in this chapter through four authentic
case studies: that is, accounts of debates and struggles around specific
instances of production:
. Harry Potter and fan fiction
. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the charges of
obscenity
. J. M. Coetzee’s literary works and his reflections on the impact of
state censorship
. the phenomenon of Wikipedia and changing models of authorship,
licensing and publishing.
The chapter opens with a consideration of the law and creativity,
followed by the first case study on fan fiction. It then turns to a
discussion of the regulation of content and distribution, illustrated
through the second case study, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This is
followed by an exploration of the impact that political and sectarian
pressure brings to bear on the act of writing itself, focusing on the
work of several literary writers (including Seamus Heaney and Salman
Rushdie) and using, in particular, the works of J. M. Coetzee as the
third case study. The chapter concludes by focusing on Wikipedia as
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
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the fourth case study and considers alternative methods of publishing,
curating, licensing and distributing creative work by looking at
UbuWeb, Creative Commons licensing and a ‘spreadable media’ model
(Jenkins et al., 2013).
A prominent theme explored in this chapter is ‘literariness’ and the
extent to which the cultural valuing of literary works has influenced
production, particularly in relation to the law and creativity. For
example, in the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, texts deemed ‘literary’
were spared prosecution. Additionally, being ‘literary’ has been seen as
a value worth defending in other contexts, reflected in the outcry at
the persecution of Salman Rushdie.
While focusing primarily on the verbal medium, this chapter also looks
at other creative forms, such as audio and video in the avant-garde
archive UbuWeb; the changing nature of music distribution; and non-
fiction work that is shared through Creative Commons licensing.
6.2 Regulating creativity
Legal frameworks have governed artistic production and distribution in
various ways, including inspection for offensive, sensitive or seditious
material, as determined by the state, and enforcement of copyright and
intellectual property rights (see ‘Selected legal Acts that govern creative
work’ box). Copyright grants the author of a work the exclusive ‘right’
to its use and dissemination, usually within a fixed period of time: for
example, 70 years from the date of publication. Although individual
countries have their own copyright laws, most align with international
agreements, such as the Berne Convention for the Protection of
Literary and Artistic Works.
Transgressions of these laws has resulted in censorship of texts,
restrictions on publication and distribution, destruction of books,
prosecution of publishers and, more recently, the closure of websites
that enable ‘illegal sharing’ of copyrighted work (e.g. fiction, music, art).
As digital media have extended options for publishing and distributing
creative work, new legal frameworks, such as the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, have been devised to resolve disputes surrounding
ownership and authorship and new forms of dissemination. The
change in technological and social practices in relation to creative work
is rapid – just think about how the formats for the distribution
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
272
(selling/sharing) of music have changed over the last four decades. At
times it seems that the law struggles to keep up.
Of course, regulation does not always take a legal form: the
distribution of creative work can also be disrupted and effectively
banned through ideological and social pressure – even violence – that
is situated outside legal frameworks and international agreements.
Selected legal Acts that govern creative work
The Obscene Publications Act series (England, Wales) – 1857,
1959, 1964
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
(international) –1886
Publications and Entertainment Act (South Africa) – 1963
World Intellectual Property Organisation (a United Nations agency,
international) – 1967
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (USA) – 1998
Creative Commons license (USA, international) – 2002
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) – proposed 2011; postponed 2012
Fiction and online communities: authorship, copyright and
genre
Fans of books and films frequently form communities based on their
shared enthusiasm, and these often revolve around participants’
writing; in the past, for example, groups co-wrote fanzines. With the
affordances of the internet for sharing and commenting on texts, a
new literary pursuit, fan fiction, has become a global, multilingual
phenomenon involving millions of fan writers.
Fan fiction involves taking established characters and creating new
contexts, plot lines and relationships for them. Among the most
popular fanfic communities (or fandoms) are Harry Potter groups,
which have hundreds of thousands of entries on the fanfic site
fanfiction.net and tens of thousands on Archive of Our Own (https://
archiveofourown.org).
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
273
Given the symbiotic relationship that fan fiction has with copyrighted
and branded material, it is not surprising that legal tensions arise in
relation to its publication. Issues that tend to emerge are:
. copyright and intellectual property rights disputes
. claims of tarnishing a brand’s image
. concerns that an author’s intended future plans may be
compromised or ‘taken’ by a fanfic writer.
Most fan fiction is published without the permission of the author of
the source texts or other ‘rights holders’ (such as those with interests
in associated brands and/or films) (Schwabach, 2011). Authors have an
ambivalent relationship with fanfic communities. On the one hand,
many (including J. K. Rowling) have acknowledged that fandoms
increase publicity and revenue for their books, films and related
merchandise. On the other hand, some authors object to the use of
their characters and settings in ways of which they disapprove or feel is
infringing their creative rights. For example, Anne Rice has had a
hostile relationship with writers of fan fiction and has legally pursued
those who publish texts using her characters (Schwabach, 2011).
E. Annie Proulx has also objected to fans’ ‘pornish rewrites’
(Schwabach, 2011, p. 7) of her work, notably the short story
‘Brokeback Mountain’ (Proulx, 1997).
Case Study 1: Harry Potter and the rise of fan fiction –
who owns the text?
The Harry Potter series emerged in 1997 with the publication of
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and culminated in 2007
with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. A hugely successful
literary series, sales of the books had totalled between 400 and
450 million as of July 2013 (Time, 2013).
The literature has stimulated a broad and varied ‘industry’,
including an eight-part Warner Bros. film series which, along with
associated merchandise and theme parks, has earned over
$15 billion for the Harry Potter brand (Thompson, 2008).
The rise of a fan base for the books and films coincided with the
growth of the internet and this combination has resulted in a wealth
of digital tribute sites and texts. The Harry Potter fanfic network is
among the largest of its kind, with over 680,000 Harry Potter
entries in the fanfiction.net ‘book’ section in 2014.
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
274
J. K. Rowling has actively acknowledged and encouraged Harry
Potter fanfic writers. However, as the Potter brand has grown, and
particularly with the involvement of Warner Bros. who own the film
rights, tensions have emerged between fan writers and the Potter
enterprise. One such clash, referred to by fans as ‘the Potter wars’
(Jenkins, 2006, p. 169), occurred when a number of young fans,
who had created fan-based, non-commercial online sites to share
information and fictional Potter-inspired texts, began to receive
threatening letters from Warner Bros. representatives, requesting
that the sites be taken down (Jenkins, 2006).
Claire Field, a 15-year-old who had created the online ‘Harry Potter
guide’ (www.harrypotterguide.co.uk) took her story to The Daily
Mirror, following the receipt of a cease-and-desist letter, thus
making public the heavy-handed approach that Warner Bros. were
taking to what were essentially children’s fan websites celebrating
Harry Potter (Jenkins, 2006). Following the publicising of Claire
Field’s experience, other teens who had experienced similar
responses from Warner Bros. representatives shared their stories
and stimulated an organised movement headed by Heather Lawver
– a teenager who had begun her own online ‘school newspaper’
‘The Daily Prophet’, which offered schoolchildren a space to share
their original Potter texts (Dargis and Scott, 2011).
Lawver ended up debating with a representative of Warner Bros. on
US television, and in an interview with Jenkins said, ‘We weren’t
disorganized little kids anymore. We had a public following and we
had a petition with 1500 signatures in a matter of two weeks. They
[Warner Bros.] finally had to negotiate with us’ (Jenkins, 2006,
p. 187). Ultimately, Warner Bros. capitulated and allowed sites such
as Claire Field’s and Heather Lawver’s to continue, provided that
they remained not-for-profit.
Activity 6.1
Allow about 1 hour and 15 minutes
Turn to Reading A, ‘Fan fiction and copyright’ by Aaron Schwabach, at
the end of this chapter. In this extract Schwabach is analysing the ‘Harry
Potter Lexicon’. As you read, consider the following questions:
. What is being suggested about the role of corporate interests and
creativity in this case?
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
275
. What broader observations would you make about fanfic texts and
their relationship to their source texts after reading Schwabach’s
account?
Discussion
The Harry Potter case illustrates the tensions that emerge between
authors and enthusiasts, particularly fanfic writers who are publishing
their own creative texts. As a brand like Harry Potter expands, this
relationship is further complicated by the introduction of commercial
rights holders, so even when an author is minded to see their readers as
a community, a corporation may be more driven to protect copyright and
economic interests. From a legal perspective, the legitimacy of the new
texts often hinges on whether the work is ‘derivative’ and/or
‘transformational’ and whether it contravenes ‘fair use’. However, the
judgment of the legality of these texts is subjective and nuanced, as the
account of the Vander Ark trial illustrates. For example, while it would
seem that fanfic is ‘derivative’ because it is based on a pre-existing
work, in fact the judgment in the Lexicon case suggests that being
‘based upon’ another work, does not necessarily make a work
‘derivative’, particularly if it can be shown to have transformed the
‘expression, meaning, or message’ of the original. Furthermore,
copyright holders appear to pick their battles and, while non-commercial
fan fiction is not necessarily ‘fair use’ (as is often assumed), it is often
overlooked by copyright holders as long as it is not profit making.
Jenkins (2006, p. 169) describes the ‘Potter wars’ as ‘the interplay – and
tension – between the top-down force of corporate convergence and
the bottom-up force of grassroots convergence’. The Potter war
exchanges took place early in the twenty-first century. Ten years on, at
the time of writing, some corporations take a different view of fan
engagement with copyrightable material if it ‘spreads’ interest in the
work. However, as fans are brought together in online networks – a
phenomenon in its infancy when the early Harry Potter novels were
released – they are potentially empowered, because as with the Potter
wars, brands cannot afford to alienate loyal, organised fans.
Activity 6.2
Allow about 20 minutes
Look at Figure 6.1. What observations can you make about fan fiction
based on this screenshot? What does it tell you about the nature of
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
276
readers and writers in this digital space? Consider how mode, layout,
style and vocabulary are used.
Discussion
Figure 6.1 is from an online environment with the potential for
multimodality (image, audio, video, etc.), and this screenshot shows that
written language is the dominant mode of communication on this web
page. Additionally, the vocabulary used on the site to define categories
is more commonly associated with books: ‘Words’ (as in word counts),
‘author’, ‘Reviews’, ‘Chapters’, ‘Romance’, ‘Adventure’ (some of this
book-oriented vocabulary is evident in this figure). This readerly
discourse first provides a structural framework for the site and, second,
perhaps, signals its literariness to readers.
Although hypertextual, that is linked to other content through user
clicks, the screen design is predicated on print-based literacy practices,
requiring us to read across and down the screen. Given the trend of
online sites – even those which largely trade on written communication
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
277
The Darkness and the Light by MissDemigodWizardThe Marauders and Lily and her friends are starting their seventh year at Hogwarts. But, Voldemort is slowly rising power and the waris just around the corner. To top it all off, Lily is starting to realise something, something she had denied from her first day at Hogwarts.PLEASE DONT SKIP BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF WORDS. :)Rated: K+ - English - Chapters: 1 - Words: 1,074 - Published: 46m ago - Lily Evans P., Marauders30 Days, A Marriage > by Lady Memory reviewsAn angry Severus and a horrified Hermione are put together in the same house because of a danger impending on her. Will thisforced cohabitation transform itself in real love in 30 days’ time? A slow crescendo with quarrels, drama, humour and suspense.The story is completed and, as it is in the form of a diary, it will be published a chapter a day.Rated: K+ - English - Romance/Adventure - Chapters: 19 - Words: 36,097 - Reviews: 114 - Favs: 32 - Follows: 70 - Updated: May 13 -Published: Apr 25 - Hermione G., Severus S.story ideas > by pjoaquamarine12story ideas inculdes Harry Potter and random ideas take them if you want just message me so I can see my ideas come to lifeRated: K+ - English - Chapters: 4 - Words: 321 - Updated: 1h ago - Published: May 12
Alexi Malfoy > by Voile HackDraco Malfoy and his younger sister, see each other for the first time in 3 years. All hell breaks loose and life goes on.Rated: T - English - Drama/Adventure - Chapters: 2 - Words - 1,106 - Favs: 1 - Follows: 4 - Updated: 1h ago - Published: May 13 -Sirius B., Draco M., Blaise Z., OCPoderoso, altivo e inmortal by MetisAndGalateaAbatida por la repentina desaparición de sus mejores amigos, Hermione decide viajar al pasado para destruir de una vez por todasa Voldemort. Planea asesinarlo en su niñez, pero sus planes cambian enormemente cuando crea un giratiempo y éste sólo puederetroceder cincuenta y cuatro años.Rated: T - Spanish - Mystery/Romance - Chapters: 1 - Words: 1,983 - Published: 1h ago - Hermione G.The Dark Days: A Prequal to the Harry Potter Series > by Raw Sewage WritingsSpies of the Dark Lord are everywhere, even within the ranks of the Ministry of Magic. No one can be trusted and hope is quicklyfading. It is a time of war and they are dark days…Rated: T - English - Drama/Mystery - Chapters: 4 - Words: 9,941 - Follows: 1 - Updated: 1h ago - Published: Apr 7 - Lucius M., RufusS., Aberforth D.Reading the Series at Hogwarts: Goblet of Fire > by TheAngelsCryInBlood reviewsHere is the reboot of my reading series set in The Order of The Phoenix and starting with the Goblet of Fire, Slash from the get go.Dumble, Molly, Ginny and Ron bashing along with Angels, Gods, Demons and everything else from the old series.Rated: T - English - Adventure/Drama - Chapters: 13 - Words: 56,012 - Reviews: 111 - Favs: 178 - Follows: 226 - Updated: 2h ago -Published: Dec 7, 2013 - [Harry P., Theodore N.]
Figure 6.1 A screenshot from the Harry Potter pages from www.fanfiction.net
(such as www.bbc.co.uk) – towards a dynamic, visual appeal, this
organisation feels rather dated and unadventurous. Like the use of
vocabulary, perhaps the text-heavy design is intended to foreground the
engagement with reading and writing. (Significantly, and perhaps for
reasons of copyright, the page is devoid of any of the recognisable Harry
Potter iconography.)
However, there are elements of social networking here: tags such as
‘Favs’, ‘Follows’, ‘Updated’ and date stamps as well as the use of
authors’ icons and screen names. Additionally, the prominent position of
the ‘reviews’ tag signals that analysis is a key activity on the site: on the
chapter pages, writers frequently request feedback from readers. The
role of members of this dialogic site vacillates between that of writer and
reader within the environment, mirroring the way that fanfic facilitates a
fluid interplay between reading and writing more broadly. Taken together,
these elements demonstrate that this site is not simply an archive, but it
is actually a community which is part of a broader participatory culture,
as Jenkins (2006) terms it, enabled by online media.
6.3 Regulating content and distribution: censorship
and surveillance
Literary texts and regulation
Regulation and restriction of creative work can take many guises. This
section explores literature and regulation, focusing on modernist and
late twentieth-century writing and the extent to which ‘literariness’
featured in the changing legal attitudes to obscenity. Specifically, you
will consider texts censored through the Obscene Publications Act
(OPA), the impact of state surveillance in South Africa, and
internationally orchestrated attempts to suppress Salman Rushdie’s
1988 novel, The Satanic Verses.
In the first half of the twentieth century, literary texts were subject to
assessment against the OPA. D. H. Lawrence fell foul of the Act twice
with The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928): in both
cases, expressions of sexuality and spoken discourse in his writing were
deemed to be obscene. Another text banned in the early twentieth
century was Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928
and, like The Rainbow, prosecuted under the 1857 version of the OPA
‘which prohibited the sale of books, pictures and “other articles” that
“depraved and corrupted” the morals of young people and shocked
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“the common feelings of decency in any well regulated mind”’
(Souhami, 1998, p. 202).
The Well of Loneliness was groundbreaking in its subtle exploration of
lesbian desire and was published to favourable reviews. However, four
weeks after publication, the editor of the Daily Express wrote a
scathing editorial condemning the subject matter and appealing to the
Home Secretary to prosecute the publisher. Court proceedings began
in November 1928, resulting in the book being banned and British
publication being stopped (Souhami, 1998; Potter, 2013).
Case Study 2: D. H. Lawrence and censorship – the
Obscene Publications Act
This case study outlines the obscenity charges brought against
D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover was Lawrence’s final major work. In 1928,
an uncensored edition was published in Italy and an abridged
version in the USA, before a censored version was published in the
UK in 1932. In 1960, Penguin Books produced an unabridged
edition and was charged under the recently introduced (1959) OPA,
effectively becoming a test case for the law, which allowed
publication of ‘obscene’ texts if their literary merit could be
demonstrated.
The case lasted less than three weeks and concluded with a verdict
of ‘not guilty’. The verdict was significant because it opened the
way for the UK publication of other texts containing explicit
material.
The second Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is dedicated
to the jurors in the obscenity trial:
For having published this book, Penguin Books were
prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959, at the
Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960.
This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three
women and nine men, who returned a verdict of ‘Not Guilty’,
and thus made D. H. Lawrence’s last novel available for the
first time to the public in the United Kingdom.
(Publisher’s dedication, in Lawrence, 1961)
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Writing on the 50-year anniversary of the ruling, Geoffrey
Robertson QC described the ruling as ‘a crucial step towards the
freedom of the written word’ (Robertson, 2010). Robertson argues
that the ruling was part of a broader move towards liberalism which
heralded the legalisation of homosexuality, abortion rights and the
end of the death penalty.
Activity 6.3
Allow about 1 hour and 30 minutes
Turn to Reading B, ‘Obscene modernism’ by Rachel Potter, at the end of
this chapter. After reading, consider how Extracts 1 and 2 illustrate
Potter’s points about:
. networks of control
. the role of language
. literary freedom.
Extract 1
The following extract is from Geoffrey Robertson’s analysis of the Lady
Chatterley trial on its 50th anniversary, published in The Guardian
(please note: this text contains language that may be considered
offensive):
In 1960, in the interests of keeping wives dutiful and servants
touching their forelocks, Lady Constance Chatterley’s affair
with a gamekeeper was unmentionable. The prosecutors were
complacent: they would have the judge on their side, and a
jury comprised of people of property, predominantly male,
middle aged, middle minded and middle class. And they had
four-letter words galore: the prosecuting counsel’s first request
was that a clerk in the DPP’s office should count them
carefully. In his opening speech to the jury, he played them as
if they were trump cards: “The word ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking’ appears
no less than 30 times…‘Cunt’ 14 times; ‘balls’ 13 times; ‘shit’
and ‘arse’ six times apiece; ‘cock’ four times; ‘piss’ three
times, and so on.”
But what the prosecution failed to comprehend was that the
1959 Act had wrought some important changes in the law.
Although it retained a “tendency to deprave and corrupt” as
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the test of obscenity, books had now to be “taken as a whole”
– that is, not judged solely on their purple passages – and
only in respect of persons likely to read them; in other words,
not 14-year-old schoolgirls, unless they were directed to that
teenage market. Most importantly, section 4 of the Act
provided that even if the jury found that the book tended to
deprave and corrupt it could nonetheless acquit if persuaded
that publication “is justified in the interests of science,
literature, art and learning or any other object of general
concern”.
(Robertson, 2010)
Extract 2
In 1928, James Douglas, editor of the Daily Express, wrote the following,
under the headline ‘A Book that Must Be Suppressed’, in an editorial for
the Sunday Express about Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness:
Its theme is utterly inadmissible in the novel … I am well
aware that sexual inversion and perversion are horrors which
exist among us today. They flaunt themselves in public places
with increasing effrontery and more insolently provocative
bravado. The decadent apostles of the most hideous and most
loathsome vices no longer conceal their degeneracy and their
degradation.
[…] The consequence is that this pestilence is devastating the
younger generation. It is wrecking young lives. It is defiling
young souls.
[…]
We must protect our children against their specious fallacies
and sophistries. Therefore, we must banish their propaganda
from our bookshops and libraries. I would rather give a
healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this
novel.
(Cited in Souhami, 1998, pp. 176–8)
In defence of literary freedom, Radclyffe Hall wrote to the Daily Herald:
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If seriously written psychological novels are to be subjected to
arbitrary attack from the Home Office, which attacks result in
their being withdrawn, what chance has our sane and well
educated public of obtaining the best output from publisher
and author?
Must there never be any new pastures for the writer? Never
any new aspects of social problems presented to the adult
and open minded reader? Is the reader to be treated like a
kind of mental dyspeptic whose literary food must be
predigested by Government Office before consumption?
…
On behalf of English literature I must protest against such
unwarrantable interference.
(Cited in Souhami, 1998, pp. 184–5)
Discussion
Potter argues that censorship was effected by formal and informal
networks of control involving lawyers, publishers, printers, judges, postal
workers, and so on. The presence of a network of control is evident in
Extract 2, which reveals the power of a newspaper editor who
successfully triggers a prosecution of a book already in circulation. By
this point, The Well of Loneliness had been supported by the publisher
and disseminated by printers and distributors, but was stopped through
the editorial influence of the Daily Express.
In the quotation in Extract 1, Robertson suggests ways in which this
nexus of power was undermined in the Lady Chatterley trial, first
because those who were formally part of the network – in this case the
prosecuting counsel – miscalculated the likelihood of support from the
jury and witnesses, and second because the 1959 Act enabled the
acquittal of publications which served the ‘interests of science, literature,
art and learning’. So, ‘literariness’ becomes a legal defence.
In both extracts, we see language as a site of struggle. Obscenities are
forensically tallied in Robertson’s account of the Lady Chatterley trial,
and Potter observes that Lawrence, and other modernist writers, drew on
obscenities as a deliberate, confrontational way of exploring sexual
themes as well as the language of sex itself.
Linguistically, Radclyffe Hall’s writing is unlike Lawrence’s in this respect,
with more subtle references to sex. An irony of Extract 2 is that it is
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Douglas’s text which is shocking to the twenty-first-century reader with
its vitriol and inflammatory language, designed to offend and divide.
Significantly, Douglas knowingly alludes to the 1857 OPA with his
reference to the corruption of ‘healthy’ boys and girls, thus tapping into a
formal network of control – the law.
Potter suggests that, beyond their value to shock, obscenities carried
with them a ‘transgressive energy’ which modernists associated with
literary freedom (see also Chapter 2, Sections 2.3 and 2.4 for creativity
and transgression). Thus, while part of the linguistic enterprise was to
foreground sexuality and the language of sex as suitable for literature,
another was to extend the boundaries of artistic freedom. In her plea for
free speech above, it is evident that Hall is exercised not so much by the
fact that her subject matter has been deemed offensive, but by the
circumscribing of topics for literature to only those approved by the
government.
Significantly, as Potter observes, there was a notable difference in the
response from the literary community between the prosecution of The
Rainbow in 1915 and that of The Well of Loneliness in 1928. At the time
of The Rainbow’s prosecution, Lawrence’s peers were relatively quiet;
however, during the prosecution of The Well of Loneliness, writers
including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley
openly protested. Potter argues that this change in writers’ willingness to
oppose censorship signalled a shift in attitudes which continued to gain
momentum until the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960
(Potter, 2013).
Undoubtedly in the second half of the twentieth century, social
attitudes towards ‘obscenity’ in literature and art were liberalised.
However, as the discussion of The Satanic Verses (later in this chapter)
will illustrate, less formal networks of regulation would threaten
freedom of speech several decades later.
Case Study 3: J. M. Coetzee – writing, politics and
surveillance
This case study addresses the secret, state-sponsored censoring of
Coetzee’s work, as well as Coetzee’s reflections on the impact of
censorship from Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996).
J. M. Coetzee is a South African writer and essayist who won the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. Among his best-known works is
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Disgrace (1999), a novel that explores the complexities of race
relationships in contemporary South Africa. Identity, sexuality and
politics are regular themes in his work.
Unlike D. H. Lawrence or Radclyffe Hall, none of Coetzee’s novels
was actually banned, although In the Heart of the Country (1977), a
book exploring colonisation, was briefly impounded by officials
(Head, 2009). Nonetheless, throughout much of his career he has
written in the shadow of a state system of censorship, which
began, formally, with the Publications and Entertainment Act
of 1963. This was followed by The Publications Act (1975), which
meant that books could be ruled ‘undesirable’ (and thus banned
from publication) if any of the following applied:
(a) it was indecent or obscene or offensive or harmful to
public morals
(b) it was blasphemous or offensive to the religious
convictions or feelings of any section of the population
(c) it brought any section of the population into ridicule or
contempt
(d) it was harmful to relations between any sections of the
population
(e) it prejudiced security, welfare, peace and good order
(f) it disclosed part of a judicial proceeding in which offensive
material was quoted.
(Adapted from Van Rooyen, 1987, p. 7)
Coetzee suggests that the censorship ‘apparatus’ only became
defunct as recently as 1990, and he has observed that until he was
50 all his creative work had to be approved by the state before it
could be published (Coetzee, 1996).
Activity 6.4
Allow about 15 minutes
In Giving Offense (1996), J. M. Coetzee approaches censorship from
many perspectives, including the philosophical and artistic. Read the
following extract from his essay, in which he describes the impact on the
writer of working in a censoring environment. How is Coetzee using
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metaphor to describe his experience of the relationship between the
writer and the censor?
At an individual level, the contest with the censor is all too
likely to assume an importance in the inner life of the writer
that at the very least diverts him from his proper occupation
and at its worst fascinates and even perverts the imagination.
In the personal records of writers who have operated under
censorship we find eloquent and despairing descriptions of
how the censor-figure is involuntarily incorporated into the
interior, psychic life, bringing with it humiliation, self-disgust,
and shame. In unwilling fantasies of this kind, the censor is
typically experienced as a parasite, a pathogenic invader of
the body-self, repudiated with visceral intensity but never
wholly expelled.
(Coetzee, 1996, p. 10)
Discussion
Coetzee has considered at length what it means for a writer, himself
included, to ‘create’ under the gaze of state censorship, both overt and
covert. In this account, the organic metaphors of parasite and pathogen
are compelling as the ‘censor’ is cast, in Coetzee’s account, as an
embodied attacker (insect or germ) which enters the creative core of the
artist, co-opting the artist, against their will, to self-censor or at least
‘govern the tongue’ as Heaney would have it (Heaney, 1988). One
thinks, too, of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a penitential structure in
which the mere potential existence of an observer causes the individual
under observation to self-regulate in response (Bentham, 1843).The
censor’s presence occupies intellectual space in the artist’s psyche, thus
affecting creativity whether or not the end product is restricted.
Many writers have explored the ways in which explicit and implicit
censorship shapes their work.
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Activity 6.5
Allow about 20 minutes
Read the following poem by Seamus Heaney. How is Heaney using the
event of passing through a checkpoint as a metaphor for writing? What
might be meant by the ‘frontier of writing’?
‘From the Frontier of Writing’
The tightness and the nilness round that spacewhen the car stops in the road, the troops inspectits make and number and, as one bends his face
towards your window, you catch sight of moreon a hill beyond, eyeing with intentdown cradled guns that hold you under cover
and everything is pure interrogationuntil a rifle motions and you movewith guarded unconcerned acceleration –
a little emptier, a little spentas always by that quiver in the self,subjugated, yes, and obedient.
So you drive on to the frontier of writingwhere it happens again. The guns on tripods;the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawkof clearance; the marksman training downout of the sun upon you like a hawk.
And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,as if you’d passed from behind a waterfallon the black current of a tarmac road
past armour-plated vehicles, out betweenthe posted soldiers flowing and recedinglike tree shadows into the polished windscreen.
(Heaney, 1987, p. 6)
Discussion
Like Coetzee’s work, Seamus Heaney’s poetry was never officially
censored; however, he has written at length about the difficulties of
maintaining artistic freedom when writing within and about a politicised
context, in this case Northern Ireland (see Chapter 2, Section 2.6).
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In this poem, there is an awareness, immediate and distant, of being
watched and inspected (‘everything is pure interrogation’) and the poem
explores the impact of these censoring forces on creativity and the
struggle to resist them.
As with Coetzee’s artist responding to the pathogenic censor, here, too,
the driver internalises the censoring gaze of the checkpoint and remains
‘a little emptier, a little spent / as always by that quiver in the self, /
subjugated, yes, and obedient’. The experience lives on once the
checkpoint has been passed through, and on arrival at ‘the frontier of
writing’ it is repeated, metaphorically, with the imagery of another
militarised, unyielding, judgemental scene. Yet, in the final stanzas, the
speaking subject is ‘through, arraigned yet freed’ and the poem closes
on an ambiguous note with the images of oppression and censure
receding but, one suspects, still present in the imagination. For me,
through the act of writing itself, art (poetry) fleetingly pushes back
against the controlling, oppressive environment. The poet, aware of the
danger of being complicit in his own subjugation, struggles to find
resistance through writing. An optimistic interpretation would construct
the frontier of writing as a sort of threshold which takes the writer into a
creative space, within view of, but just beyond, the political and sectarian
tensions of day-to-day existence.
Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses
Coetzee suggests that although certain systems of censorship have
been dismantled as political landscapes have changed in, for example,
South Africa and the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, new types
of censorship have emerged (Coetzee, 1996). An example he cites to
illustrate emergent attempts to suppress the publication of books
deemed ‘offensive’ is Salman Rushdie’s 1988 prizewinning The Satanic
Verses. The book tells the story of an Indian expatriate, Saladin
Chamcha, returning to his homeland, and explores, among other
things, alienation and expatriate identity using magical realism.
However, as the book gained notoriety, its representations of Islam
met with objections. The sense of outrage escalated and resulted in a
miasma of fear and violence: copies of the book were burned,
bookstores were firebombed, some of those involved with the
publication and distribution of the book were threatened, and in some
cases physically harmed and even killed. The Ayatollah Khomeini
issued a fatwa (ruling) calling for the death of the author, and Rushdie,
a leading novelist of his generation, went into hiding under police
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
287
protection for nearly 20 years. The book was banned in many
countries, including India (an import ban), Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,
Kenya, Singapore and South Africa. The Rushdie case illustrates the
changed climate of opposition and organisation in which some writers
and artists have found themselves in the early twenty-first century. The
targeting and attempted suppression of The Satanic Verses comprised a
loose but violent combination of government edicts, threats to
individuals and businesses, and menacing public protests characterised
by a global reach and chilling unpredictability. Unlike a legal decision,
there is no court of appeal or opportunity to argue one’s case.
Nick Cohen, analysing the treatment of Rushdie in You Can’t Read this
Book (2013), argues that despite the freedoms afforded us by digital
communications and the perceived ease of sharing information, there
have emerged new threats to free speech, particularly in relation to the
production and publication of creative texts. Rushdie, a passionate
advocate for freedom of expression, nonetheless concedes that authors
would find it difficult to have a book that was critical of Islam
published now (Gompertz, 2012). Cohen has similarly argued that no
novelist would risk writing such a text: an element of self-censorship
lives on as a legacy of the violent reactions to The Satanic Verses. As
Coetzee argues in Giving Offense, Cohen and Rushdie observe that we
have entered a different era of censure, one in which digital
communication both enables and inhibits free speech. The 2014 case
of Caroline Criado-Perez, a feminist campaigner who was targeted for
online abuse by Twitter users, two of whom were subsequently jailed,
has highlighted the potential censoring effect of social media,
particularly in attempts to silence women online (Topping, 2014).
6.4 Digital curation and distribution
The previous section has explored literary texts and regulation and
production. Here, we return to the affordances of digital environments
to produce, distribute and curate a range of art forms, including those
using video and audio.
Our first example is the elective, non-commercial UbuWeb (ubuweb.
com), an online archive which specialises in visual and performance
arts, including dance, music and theatre (see Figure 6.2). UbuWeb was
established in 1996 by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It is run wholly
by volunteers and uses server space donated from a network of
universities.
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Figure 6.2 Screenshot from UbuWeb (Source: UbuWeb, 2016)
Activity 6.6
Allow about 25 minutes
Read the quotations below from UbuWeb’s founder, Kenneth Goldsmith.
What conclusions do you draw about:
. the economic model on which UbuWeb is based?
. UbuWeb’s values in relation to art and ownership?
. the affordances of curating creative work online?
[B]y the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Cobbled
together, operating on no money and an all-volunteer staff,
UbuWeb has become the unlikely definitive source for all
things avant-garde on the internet. Never meant to be a
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permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of
reasons: our ISP pulls the plug, our university support dries
up, or we simply grow tired of it. Acquisition by a larger entity
is impossible: nothing is for sale. We don’t touch money. In
fact, what we host has never made money. Instead, the site is
filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists – the
music of Jean Dubuffet, the poetry of Dan Graham, Julian
Schnabel’s country music … – all of which was originally put
out in tiny editions and vanished quickly.
However the web provides the perfect place to restage these
works. With video, sound, and text remaining more faithful to
the original experience than, say, painting or sculpture, Ubu
proposes a different sort of revisionist art history, one based
on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on the
perceived, or market-based, centre …
…
… As time went on, we seemed to be outgrowing our original
taxonomies until we simply became a repository for the
“avant-garde” (whatever that means – our idea of what is
“avant-garde” seems to be changing all the time). UbuWeb
adheres to no one historical narrative, rather we’re more
interested in putting several disciplines into the same space
and seeing how they interact: poetry, music, film, and
literature from all periods encounter and bounce off of each
other in unexpected ways.
(Goldsmith, 2011)
Yet, in terms of how we’ve gone about building the archive, if
we had to ask for permission, we wouldn’t exist. Because we
have no money, we don’t ask permission. Asking permission
always involves paperwork and negotiations, lawyers, and
bank accounts. Yuk. But by doing things the wrong way, we’ve
been able to pretty much overnight build an archive that’s
made publically accessible for free of charge to anyone. And
that in turn has attracted a great number of film and video
makers to want to contribute their works to the archive
legitimately. The fastest growing part of Ubu’s film section is
by younger and living artists who want to be a part of Ubu.
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But if you want your works off Ubu, we never question it and
remove it immediately; it’s your work after all.
(Goldsmith, 2010)
Discussion
UbuWeb is distinct from other examples in this chapter in that it takes no
funding from anyone – no commercial backing, payment from individuals,
private donations or crowd sourcing. This has several implications. First,
as Goldsmith suggests, it means that UbuWeb is a fragile entity, whose
future is not guaranteed. However, at the same time, not having funding
means it is wholly free from commercial influence on artistic decisions
about what to curate. Furthermore, while a volunteer-based operation
may be limited in what it can do, it will not be reliant on government
funding or similar resources. So while Goldsmith refers to the precarious
nature of UbuWeb, it has survived since 1996 and as its reputation and
collections grow, its prospects seem good. In the second quote,
Goldsmith links this lack of financial backing to his position on copyright.
His rationale is that if UbuWeb is not profiting from the sharing of a work,
then the creator should not object; on the contrary, the implication is that
the work is being given a new audience and prestige through its
selection for the archive.
The language used to describe the site and the work it curates frames
the enterprise as being on the fringes of a more commercialised art
world. Terms such as ‘Cobbled together’, ‘detritus’, ‘ephemera’ and
‘peripheries’ create a sense of impermanence and an outsider status.
Yet, there is also a conviction that ‘by doing things the wrong way’ and
being outside the system, UbuWeb is actually doing things the right way
and has a certain legitimacy. So there exist contradictory impulses of the
marginal, illegitimate, uncertain nature of both the archive and its
material on the one hand, and its importance, reputation and centrality to
the avant-garde on the other.
Additionally, a recurrent theme in Goldsmith’s writing about UbuWeb is
the affordance of the internet in relation to the archiving of certain types
of creative work. He suggests that ephemeral ‘detritus’ that may not
have a defined market value and would be otherwise lost from view, can
be preserved and shared online. He argues that, while for some genres,
such as painting and sculpture, the internet is not a particularly good
environment for displaying, for other genres – film, music, concrete
poetry, dance – it is an excellent fit as a repository and means of
sharing. A digital space also enables a sense of serendipity and fluidity
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about the way in which art forms intersect and definitions (‘what is avant-
garde?’) and taxonomies are played with.
Finally, it is worth observing that the curation of and submission to this
archive is carefully controlled. This is not the open, community-based
approach that, for example, fanfic sites or Wikipedia embrace. Rather,
items must be selected for submission and volunteer editors look after
sub-collections. Nonetheless, UbuWeb is exploiting the internet as a site
of open distribution to a wider audience.
Distribution of creative work
Production, distribution and regulatory practices have changed
dramatically for some creative arts, such as music, since the late 1990s.
In particular, as with fanfic, the boundary between creator and
consumer has blurred as individuals are able to copy, remix and share
files.
The next activity looks at Reading C and considers the spreadable
model of distribution of creative work.
Activity 6.7
Allow about 1 hour and 45 minutes
Turn to Reading C, ‘Spreadable media’ by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and
Joshua Green, at the end of this chapter. As you read, consider the
following questions:
. What does Doctorow’s image of blowing a dandelion suggest about
how creative work is currently shared?
. How does this model of ‘spreadable media’ help to explain some of
the examples addressed earlier in this chapter?
. How is the ‘spreadable media’ model influencing the way in which we
engage with the creative practice of generating music?
Discussion
Doctorow’s image of the blown dandelion seedhead asks us to rethink
how creative work is shared (or ‘broadcast’ in Doctorow’s metaphor) and
controlled. Jenkins et al. argue that the image usefully illustrates what
they mean by ‘spreadable media’, the focus of the book from which this
reading has been taken. In this extract from the final chapter of the
book, Jenkins et al. underline what they see as the defining features of
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their model, ‘spreadable media’. These are: the flow of ideas, dispersed
material, open-ended participation, motivating and facilitating sharing.
The spreadable model foregrounds the significance of communities and
the role that they play in circulating, curating and appraising creative
work, acting as quasi-publishers. The model recasts the relationship
between audience and creator, in part by blurring distinctions between
these roles and recognising the multiple ways in which people respond
to and extend creative work. The Potter wars, for example, demonstrate
a lack of awareness of the ways in which fans of Harry Potter were
cultivating a community of enthusiasts and creators in their own right,
‘spreading’ free publicity.
Would the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover have been circumvented in
the age of spreadable media? We regularly see courts fail in attempts to
enforce injunctions on embargoed material that has been placed online.
On the other hand, spreadable practices leave electronic trails or
footprints that potentially identify who has downloaded and distributed
digital material and as governments grant themselves increased rights
over citizens’ digital privacy, then perhaps the dandelion method of
dissemination might be curtailed. So is it, paradoxically, harder to control
the movement of digital objects but easier to trace them?
The ways in which music is acquired, played, shared and remixed have
changed dramatically. In 1975 you might have bought a vinyl record and
played it on a record player. It was portable but fragile and easily
scratched. In 1985 you could purchase, play and, crucially, compile
cassette recordings. Cassette recorders enabled remixing and curating
of songs, but the medium, the cassette, was easily damaged. CDs
supplanted cassettes and were theoretically more durable and of better
quality, but they were a more fixed mode of distribution – more difficult to
alter or record on to.
Digitised music distributed in file formats has further altered the way we
consume, share and produce music. And, as music has become more
easily reproduced, downloaded and shared, new regulatory frameworks
have been devised to enforce copyright. As methods of acquiring music
rapidly changed, the clash between new practices (such as peer-to-peer
file sharing) and the enforcement of copyright came to a head in the
lawsuit against Napster (a file-sharing site) in 1999. Although Napster
was shut down in 2001 as a free file-sharing service, it is regarded by
many as the precursor to contemporary online music distribution (see
also Chapter 5, Section 5.3 for a network analysis of the digital sharing
of music).
As with fanfic practices, there is a blurring of boundaries between
creating and listening. For instance, pieces of music are remixed,
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parodied, rerecorded and redistributed on YouTube (see an example in
Chapter 2, Section 2.5). Our engagement with music is a good example
of the ways in which technology, creativity, social practices and legal
regulation intersect and interact.
Much of the controversy surrounding the distribution of music comes
down to notions of ownership. Doctorow’s approach to intellectual
property is not so much a legal sense of the term, as we saw it applied
in the Potter wars case, but rather a conceptual exploration: what does it
mean to ‘own’ the rights to creative work? As you will see in the next
section, entities such as Wikipedia and Creative Commons licensing
generally, are moving away from fixed texts with defined authors, to a
more fluid, multi-authored way of creating.
An important point made by Jenkins et al. in proposing the notion of
‘spreadable media’ is that while it is useful to draw on biological
metaphors in order to capture changing patterns of creativity and
production – such as ‘viral’, ‘meme’ – such creativity is not an
agentless activity. Of people’s participation, Jenkins et al. state:
Both individually and collectively, they exert agency in the
spreadability model. They are not merely impregnated with media
messages, nor are they at the service of the brand; rather, they
select material that matters to them from the much broader array
of media content on offer (which now includes audience creations
alongside industrially produced works).
(Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 294)
(See also Chapter 5 for a discussion of agency in relation to
glocalisation).
6.5 Creative Commons and alternative models of
authorship and ownership
Creative Commons (CC) licensing, sometimes referred to as ‘copyleft’,
is a means of asserting ‘authorship’ of a digitised, creative work (e.g. a
text, a photograph, an image) while simultaneously sanctioning the
sharing and free distribution of it. In this way, Creative Commons
offers an alternative to conventional models of licensing, in particular
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
294
that framed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) designed
to enforce copyright in digital environments.
CC operates at an intersection of creativity, technology and the values
of free distribution: its stated mission is to develop, sustain and
‘steward’ a ‘legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital
creativity, sharing, and innovation’ (Creative Commons, 2016).
Additionally, some CC licences allow a work to be modified and
republished: in this approach the creative work is not ‘fixed’ and nor is
its authorship or ownership. The CC licence shown in Figure 6.3
enables sharing in any format and adaptation. However, attribution is a
central tenet of CC and, with all CC licences, anyone sharing or
modifying a work must credit the originator, link to the source and
indicate whether changes were made.
Values, ownership and licensing
Creative Commons makes it possible for writers to signal their values,
widen recognition and build a following – especially when combined
with a spreadable model of distribution. Cory Doctorow publishes his
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
295
Figure 6.3 Screenshot of a CC licence 4.0
science fiction with CC licences and explains that he fears obscurity
rather than piracy:
For me – for pretty much every writer – the big problem isn’t
piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks to Tim O’Reilly for this great
aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today,
the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because
someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science
fiction sell half a million copies – in a world where 175,000 attend
the San Diego Comic Con alone, you’ve got to figure that most
of the people who “like science fiction” (and related geeky stuff
like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don’t really buy books.
I’m more interested in getting more of that wider audience into
the tent than making sure that everyone who’s in the tent bought
a ticket to be there.
…
Now, onto the artistic case. It’s the twenty-first century. Copying
stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if
it does, it’ll be because civilization has collapsed, at which point
we’ll have other problems). Hard drives aren’t going to get
bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won’t get
slower or harder to access. If you’re not making art with the
intention of having it copied, you’re not really making art for the
twenty-first century. There’s something charming about making
work you don’t want to be copied, in the same way that it’s nice
to go to a Pioneer Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith
shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But it’s hardly, you know,
contemporary.
(Doctorow, 2008)
For Doctorow, CC licences make sense artistically and help raise his
profile. Furthermore, he argues that the practices of reproducing and
sharing that have become established with the internet are beyond his
control anyway: like ‘trying to get the food-coloring out of the
swimming pool’ (Doctorow, 2008). However, there are dissenters
among cultural commentators, such as Andrew Keen who argues that
the ‘mob chaos’ of the internet, where anyone can copy and upload
material, is ‘corrosive’ and will ultimately be disastrous for creators and
consumers of culture (Keen and Bell, 2007). You may well have your
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
296
own thoughts about which vision of online creative practices you think
will prevail.
The free distribution and potential for adaptation with CC licences is
particularly well illustrated with Wikipedia, an iconic example of the
changing nature of creating, publishing and access. Case Study 4
focuses on Wikipedia and its models of joint authorship.
Case Study 4: Wikipedia and authorship
Wikipedia adopts a radical model of shared authorship, licensing
and publishing. Launched in 2001, Wikipedia is a free, open-
content ‘encyclopedia’ whose entries are co-authored by unpaid
volunteers and generally CC licensed. At the time of writing,
Wikipedia has 76,000 active contributors.
Writers effectively relinquish control of their text when they submit
it: entries are digital palimpsests and can be revised without limit.
Significantly, however, all submissions and subsequent edits can be
tracked using the ‘history’ and ‘source’ tabs. Therefore, unlike most
other texts, the creative process itself is documented and
transparent (within limits).
Wikipedia is run by Wikimedia, a not-for-profit organisation, and is
funded by voluntary financial contributions from readers. Unlike
other online sites, Wikipedia does not use advertising to raise
revenue, stating that advertising would be in conflict with its goal of
balance and neutrality, and that it would ultimately weaken readers’
confidence in the project (Wikipedia, 2016a).
While many have lauded its democratic, open approach to
constructing and sharing knowledge, criticisms of Wikipedia have
been levelled at the extent to which readers can trust the ‘authority’
of its contributors. While Wikipedia is often a first port of call for
information, its appropriateness as a ‘resource’, particularly for
academic work, is often questioned (Lea and Jones, 2011).
The final activity in this chapter returns to a consideration of
copyright, the law and the power of online communities. The Stop
Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) were put before
the US Congress in late 2011 as frameworks to police websites outside
US jurisdiction considered to be infringing copyright. The intention of
the proposed Acts was to cut off sites perceived to be engaged in
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
297
‘piracy’ from advertisers, search engines and payment sites, as well as
to block internet service providers from providing access to them
(Wikipedia, 2016b). The protest against the proposed Acts was
international and powerful, with strong responses from Wikipedia and
an estimated 115,000 websites as well as demonstration marches across
the USA. Tim Berners-Lee was among the prominent figures who
expressed outrage at the proposed legislation (Wikipedia, 2016c).
In January 2012, the English language Wikipedia staged a ‘day of
darkness’ blackout in response to the bills. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of
Wikipedia, argued that SOPA was ‘destructive’ and ‘set a frightening
precedent of internet censorship’ (cited in Davies, 2012). Within days
of the January protests, political support visibly waned and the Acts
were withdrawn.
Activity 6.8
Allow about 20 minutes
Look at the image in Figure 6.4, which was used on the English
language Wikipedia pages during the SOPA and PIPA protest in
January 2012. How do the authors use the semiotic resources at their
disposal to communicate concerns about the implications of SOPA and
PIPA?
Discussion
The use of grey and black is striking in this image, perhaps a reference
to being cast into a digital dark age and all that implies in relation to
knowledge making and distribution. The funereal imagery also implies a
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
298
Figure 6.4 Image used on Wikipedia during the SOPA and PIPA protest in
January 2012 (Source: Wikipedia, 2016c)
sense of loss, underscored further by the word ‘fatally’. The long shadow
of the reflection suggests such legislation would leave a bleak,
irreversible legacy. The reference to ‘human history’ seems designed to
foreground the magnitude of what has been created and what might be
jeopardised.
The plea to ‘imagine’ is significant and hints at creativity in relation to
free knowledge. The use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ positions the
reader as being on the side of the right-minded.
In the final sentence, the discourse shifts from first to second person and
the reader is enjoined to ‘Make your voice heard’ with icons for social
media outlets. This is the face of modern campaigning. The voice is a
digital one and the icons highlight the significance of the participatory
communities that Jenkins and others have described in Reading C. As
with the legislators in the Lady Chatterley trial (Section 6.3 and Reading
B), the politicians in this case seemed to misjudge the mood of the
people. This is perhaps another example of the transition described by
Jenkins et al. in relation to who controls distribution.
Finally, the social media symbols, encircled in hopeful, contrasting white
against the monochrome backdrop, are positioned as opportunities for
voices to be heard.
6.6 Conclusion
This chapter has explored creativity and power: the power of the state
(and associated networks) to censor creative work; the power of
corporations to restrict circulation of texts as they assert ownership of
ideas, characters and brands; and the power of loosely aligned,
ideologically driven groups to suppress the circulation of creative work.
However, we have also considered how changing societal attitudes have
undermined government censorship and ways in which digital
environments empower individuals or communities of writers, as in the
Potter wars and the opposition to the SOPA.
The role of audiences and the blurring of the boundaries between
producers and consumers of creative work have been recurrent themes.
Audiences can extend the scope of characters and landscapes in fan
fiction; they can remix and rerelease music; and they can be co-creators
in Wikipedia. As new models of publishing, authorship, curation and
licensing emerge, our previously held assumptions about intellectual
property rights are challenged.
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
299
In Reading C, Jenkins et al. refer to being in ‘a moment of transition’
in relation to the production and distribution of creative work. This
chapter has explored several transitional moments in the way creativity
is regulated: the shift in moral judgements signalled by the 1959 OPA
as tested by Lady Chatterley’s Lover; the coming together of artist,
corporation and fans in the Potter wars; the shift from state-sponsored
censorship to that of a more nebulous, borderless inhibition as
evidenced in the international aggression towards Salman Rushdie. A
similar moment of transition is signalled in the response to the SOPA.
As we move further into the twenty-first century, the tension between
creativity and regulation, particularly as experienced in digital domains,
will no doubt continue.
References
Bentham, J. (1843) The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Panopticon,Constitution, Colonies, Codification) (ed. J. Bowring), Online Library of Liberty[Online]. Available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bentham-the-works-of-jeremy-bentham-vol-4 (Accessed 2 March 2015).
Coetzee, J. M. (1996) Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, Chicago, IL,University of Chicago Press.
Cohen, N. (2013) You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom,London, Fourth Estate.
Creative Commons (2016) About [Online]. Available at https://creativecommons.org/about (Accessed 21 January 2016).
Dargis, M. and Scott, A. (2011) ‘The fans own the magic’, The New YorkTimes, 1 July [Online]. www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/movies/the-fans-are-all-right-for-harry-potter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (Accessed 2March 2015).
Davies, L. (2012) ‘Wikipedia begins blackout in protest against US anti-piracylaws’, The Guardian, 18 January [Online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jan/18/wikipedia-blackout-protest (Accessed 29February 2016).
Doctorow, C. (2008) About Little Brother [Online]. Available at http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/#freedownload/ (Accessed 10August 2015).
Goldsmith, K. (2010) An Open Letter to the Frameworks Community, 18October [Online]. Available at www.ubu.com/resources/frameworks.html(Accessed 2 March 2015).
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Gompertz, W. (2012) ‘Meeting Salman Rushdie’, BBC News, 17 September[Online]. Available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19621386(Accessed 2 March 2015).
Head, D. (2009) The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press.
Heaney, S. (1987) The Haw Lantern, London, Faber & Faber.
Heaney, S. (1988) The Government of the Tongue, London, Faber & Faber.
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide,New York, New York University Press.
Jenkins, H., Ford, S. and Green, J. (2013) Spreadable Media: Creating Valueand Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York, New York University Press(e-book version).
Keen, A. and Bell, E. (2007) ‘Is today’s internet killing our culture?’, TheGuardian, 10 August.
Lea, M. R. and Jones, S. (2011) ‘Digital literacies in higher education:exploring textual and technological practice’, Studies in Higher Education,vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 377–93.
Lawrence, D. H. (1961) Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth,Penguin Books.
Potter, R. (2013) Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment1900–1940, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Proulx, E. A. (1997) ‘Brokeback Mountain’, The New Yorker, 13 October.
Robertson, G. (2010) ‘The trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, The Guardian, 22October [Online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/22/dh-lawrence-lady-chatterley-trial (Accessed 2 March 2015).
Schwabach, A. (2011) Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works andIntellectual Property Protection, Farnham, Ashgate.
Souhami, D. (1998) The Trials of Radclyf fe Hall, London, Weidenfeld &Nicolson.
Thompson, S. (2008) ‘Business big shot: Harry Potter author JK Rowling’,The Times, 2 April.
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The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
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Reading A: Fan fiction and copyright
Aaron Schwabach
Source: Edited version from Schwabach, A. (2011) Fan Fiction and Copyright:Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection, Farnham, Ashgate,pp. 1–129.
Fan fiction, long a nearly invisible form of outsider art, has grown
exponentially in volume and legal importance in the past decade.
Because of its nature, authorship, and underground status, fan
fiction stands at an intersection of issues of property, sexuality,
and gender. […] Among the more celebrated disputes over fan
writings are a dispute between SF [science ficton] author Larry
Niven and fan author Elf Sternberg over the latter’s use in fanfic
of a fictional species of alien beings created by the former; a
dispute between SF author Marion Zimmer Bradley and fan
author Jean Lamb over a work by the former that purportedly
resembled a work by the latter; and the recent dispute between
author J.K. Rowling and fan webmaster Steven Vander Ark over
the Harry Potter Lexicon, which Rowling once praised and more
recently succeeded, briefly, in suppressing, until the parties
reached an accommodation.
Unlicensed fan fiction presents a dilemma for content owners:
while fan fiction may infringe on the content owners’ copyright
and trademark rights, the fans who create and share it are the
biggest, and for some genre works very nearly the only, market
for the owners’ works. Active enforcement of intellectual property
rights may alienate consumers – fans – and harm future revenues.
On the other horn of the dilemma, some rights-owners fear non-
enforcement of those rights may result in their loss.
Fan fiction provides fans with an opportunity to enjoy, discuss,
and most of all inhabit the canon texts in ways that would be
impossible without it. Despite its essential role, though, fan
fiction’s legal status remains unclear. Many fans, including
academic fans, believe that fan fiction is another type of
information that just wants to be free: all or nearly all non-
commercial fan fiction should be protected as fair use. In contrast
to previous generations, today we live in a world of symbols and
texts that are all, or nearly all, owned; fan fiction is a way of
combating the inevitable alienation this produces.
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
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Balanced against this are the interests of copyright owners. U.S.
copyright law protects some economic interests, but very few
non-economic interests. Owners may object to fan fiction that
alters the nature of the original work – the literary equivalent of
scribbling mustaches on Grant Wood’s American Gothic (which
would earn the scribbler a quick trip to a Chicago jail cell), or
perhaps of scribbling mustaches on a postcard of American Gothic
(which is perfectly legal, if not original), but in the case of works
of fiction on the page or on the screen, they are not likely to get
very far: in the U.S. such rights in original works of art are
protected by the Visual Artists’ Rights Act, but there is no
counterpart for works of fiction. […]
[…]
Copyright protects the text – that is, the expression – of a work
of fiction, and under certain conditions may protect characters
within the work. Fanfic rarely infringes by direct imitation of the
work; that would defeat the purpose of fanfic. Instead, fanfic
takes familiar story elements and combines them in unfamiliar
ways. Doing so may nonetheless violate the copyright in the
original work if the new work is a derivative work, because the
copyright owner has the sole right to control the making and
distribution of derivative works. Certain uses that might seem
infringing, even if they incorporate protected characters or are
otherwise derivative, may be protected as fair use, as parody, or if
the use is otherwise sufficiently transformative.
In a literary sense, fanfic is necessarily derivative; it cannot
function otherwise. […]
[…]
J.K. Rowling and the commercially published fan fiction
While tolerant and even encouraging of amateur fanfic, Rowling
and her publishers have had no tolerance for commercially
published fan fiction. Rowling has said that she has read and
enjoyed fanfic and has made no attempt to suppress it [Rowling,
2008], although Warner Brothers, which makes the Harry Potter
movies:
[I]s not always as kind. They have gone after people who
have used Harry Potter on their web sites and aggressively
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
304
fought for the rights to domains related to Harry Potter.
This has shut down a few Harry Potter fan sites with some
fan fiction. [Ibid.]
Despite these occasional excesses, though, “[t]here has been no
real effort on the part of Warner Brothers to seek to put an end
to Harry Potter fan fiction.” [Ibid.]
When movie copyrights are involved and an extra layer of
administration is added between the author and the fans,
tolerance tends to diminish. Thus Warner Brothers, the maker of
the Harry Potter movies, has cracked down on fan sites that
Rowling herself would most likely have left undisturbed. As seems
to be the norm in such matters, Warner Brothers’ enforcement
efforts have been at times ludicrously ham-handed:
[In December 2000] 15-year-old Claire Field received a letter
from Warner Brothers’ London legal department asking her
to turn over the name www.harrypotterguide.co.uk. Like her
dragon-defying idol, the British youth rebelled. She sent an
e-mail message to a British tabloid, the Mirror, which ran a
story about her. A U.K.-based online news site, the Register,
picked up the story, which was soon posted on fan-related
online newsgroups. Internet users from around world –
youngsters and adults alike – are now urging Field to fight
back.
“I’ve just read the news that the Evil Dark Arts experts
a.k.a. Warner Brothers are trying to cast some dark charms
and shut down this site. GOLLY! What total ROT. We have
got to get some good charms and wand waving to seriously
sort them out,” wrote a fellow Harry Potter fan on Field’s
Web site. [Grunier, 2000]
[…]
Such actions against noncommercial Harry Potter fandom seem
shortsighted; they show a misunderstanding of where Harry’s
money comes from, and of the value of fandom as free
advertising and marketing far more effective than any marketing
campaign Warner Brothers could actually buy. This
misunderstanding may be a temporary lapse, perhaps the result of
overzealous employees incompletely socialized into the culture of
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
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genre works; that would explain why these actions seem to be
more anomalous than not.
[…]
In general, the Harry Potter copyright machine has been tolerant
of fanfic and parody, even commercially published parody such as
the Belarusian adventures of Porri Gatter. Commercially published
parodies have also been tolerated in the Czech Republic, France,
Hungary, Indonesia, and throughout the English-speaking world,
even though the fair use and First Amendment concerns
underlying the U.S. Supreme Court’s protection of parody in
Campbell may have no counterparts in some countries. Works
which are merely new adventures of Harry Potter, […] or that
achieve substantial commercial success with a character based on
Harry Potter – Tanya Grotter – have not been tolerated.
Alternatively, commercially published works in certain large
markets—China, India, and Russia—may inspire a stronger
reaction because these countries are perceived, often incorrectly,
as more prone to copyright violation. India has been a particular
target: in addition to the lawsuits against Harry’s Bengali
adventures and his unrelated sound-alike Hari Puttar, the Potter
industry even sued the organizers of a Durga Puja festival in
Kolkata for building a large papier-mâché castle intended to
represent Hogwarts [AFP, 2007].
The HP Lexicon takes one step too far
The HP Lexicon, praised by Rowling, eventually went beyond
what she was willing to allow: in 2007 the site’s author, Steven
Vander Ark, and RDR Books, a small publisher in Muskegon,
Michigan, agreed to publish much of the information in the HP
Lexicon in book form. While the book could not reproduce the
entire content of the Lexicon website, with its detailed
descriptions and excerpted text for just about every person, place
and thing in the Potterverse, in its original form it still included
extensive sample text and, inevitably, spoilers for those who had
not yet read the entire series. Warner Brothers sued to stop
publication of the book. Although Rowling had not written a
guide to her own work, she stated that “[s]he had been planning
to write her own definitive encyclopaedia, the proceeds of which
she had intended to donate to charity.” [BBC NEWS, 2008] […]
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
306
[…]
Rowling herself admitted that she did not think the HP Lexicon
would displace sales of the Potter novels, and said that she was
not sure she had “the will or the heart” to write her own guide
[Ibid.]. Also, she stated that she was motivated not by economic
factors but by “outrage”; under U.S. law, copyright is meant to
protect the author’s economic rights, not to protect the author
from feeling outraged [Hartocollis, 2008]. Nonetheless, the court
enjoined publication of Vander Ark’s book.
Although the injunction may have been bad news for Vander Ark
and RDR, it was not necessarily bad news for fandom. Judge
Patterson’s opinion was at best lukewarm toward Rowling’s
arguments; he observed that “[i]ssuing an injunction in this case
both benefits and harms the public interest.” Perhaps most
importantly, the court found that the Lexicon was not a derivative
work: “A work is not derivative, however, simply because it is
‘based upon’ the preexisting works.” The court reasoned that the
very existence of exceptions for parody and critical commentary,
which are of necessity based upon the works they parody or
evaluate, requires that “derivative” mean something more than
merely “based upon.” The court adopted the reasoning of Judge
Posner in Ty, Inc. that “ownership of copyright does not confer a
legal right to control public evaluation of the copyrighted work.”
In a footnote it highlighted the necessarily inverse relationship
between derivativeness and transformativeness:
[t]he law in [the Second] Circuit has recognized that “even
when one work is ‘based upon’ another, ‘if the secondary
work sufficiently transforms the expression of the original
work such that the two works cease to be substantially
similar, then the secondary work is not a derivative work
and, for that matter, does not infringe the copyright of the
original work.’”
The version of the Lexicon considered by the court failed because
it copied Rowling’s text extensively in a way that was not a fair
use of Rowling’s material. Even so, some of the section 107
factors weighed in Vander Ark’s and RDR’s favor. The first factor,
purpose and character of the use, weighed in the defendants’
favor because the use was transformative – that is, it altered the
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
307
“expression, meaning, or message” of the original. The Lexicon is
a reference work; the seven Harry Potter novels tell a story. The
use of material from the two School Books [books used by Harry
at school, with annotations in the margin by Harry and his
friends] presented a bit more of a problem, because they are
partly reference works themselves. However, “the Lexicon’s use is
slightly transformative in that it adds a productive purpose to the
original material by synthesizing it within a complete reference
guide that refers readers to where information can be found in a
diversity of sources.” The best evidence of the transformative
nature of the Lexicon is that it was widely relied on as a reference
source, even by Warner Brothers, Electronic Arts (the makers of
Harry Potter video games), and Rowling herself. This was
undercut only slightly by defendants’ desire to make a profit by
providing the first comprehensive Harry Potter reference guide on
the market. Rowling’s and Warner Brothers’ complaint draws a
distinction that the court, and so far the law generally, do not
formally acknowledge, but that may become important in
assessing the legality of fanfic and other fan-generated content:
[T]here is a significant difference between giving the
innumerable Harry Potter fan sites latitude to discuss the
Harry Potter Works in the context of free of charge,
ephemeral websites and allowing a single fan site owner and
his publisher to commercially exploit the Harry Potter Books
in contravention of Ms. [Rowling’s] wishes and rights and to
the detriment of other Harry Potter fan sites.
The second factor, the nature of the underlying work, favored the
plaintiffs, as will always be the case with complex literary worlds:
“[i]n creating the Harry Potter novels and the companion books,
Rowling has given life to a wholly original universe of people,
creatures, places, and things … Such highly imaginative and
creative fictional works are close to the core of copyright
protection, particularly where the character of the secondary work
is not entirely transformative.”
References for this reading
[AFP (2007)] India Court Rejects Harry Potter Author’s Claim,
available at AFP, October 12, 2007, http://afp.google.com/
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
308
article/ALeqM5hZhGr-qlWfYdFig_iagNfYzU-l8w (last visited
October 19, 2010).
[BBC NEWS (2008)] Rowling Wins Book Copyright Claim, BBC
NEWS, September 8, 2008, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/
hi/entertainment/7605142.stm (last visited October 19, 2010).
[Grunier, S. (2000)] Warner Bros. Claims Harry Potter Sites,
ZDNET, December 21, 2000, http://news.zdnet.com/2100-
9595_22-96323.html
[Hartocollis, A. (2008)] Trial Over Potter Lexicon Ends With Olive
Branch, N.Y. TIMES, April 17, 2008, available at www.nytimes.com/
2008/04/17/nyregion/17potter.html?
_r=l&scp=5&sq=rowling&st=nyt&oref=slogin (last visited
October 19, 2010).
[Rowling, J.K. (2008)] Fan Works Inc., Fan Fiction Policies >>
Harry Potter: J.K. Rowling & Harry Potter!, www.fanworks.org/
writersresource/?tool=fanpolicy&action=define&authorid=108
(last visited August 19, 2008).
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
309
Reading B: Obscene modernism
Rachel Potter
Source: Edited version from Potter, R. (2013) Obscene Modernism: LiteraryCensorship and Experiment, 1900–1940, Oxford, Oxford University Press,pp. 1–5.
[Please note: this reading contains language that may be considered
offensive.]
Should there be limits on what literary texts express? If so, what
should these limits be and how should they be policed? These
questions preoccupied writers in the early twentieth century and
were important for the composition of novels and poems, as well
as discussions between writers about the proper boundaries of
literature. Literary texts have often fallen foul of the authorities,
whether on the grounds of blasphemy, political sedition, or
indecency. In the period of 1900–1940, however, the claim that
literary obscenity could corrupt the minds of the young and
impressionable fuelled the censorship of a huge number of
English-language texts and made it one of the most tightly
controlled periods in the history of literary expression. There
were a number of high-profile literary trials in the UK and the
United States, most notably the suppression of D. H. Lawrence’s
The Rainbow (London, 1915), James Joyce’s Ulysses (New
York, 1921), and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
(London, 1928). There were also less institutionalized, but
sometimes just as powerful, forms of censorship that worked to
control the dissemination of writing: customs officers, postmen,
publishers, publishers’ readers, printers, typists, and even other
writers all played their part in the censorship process. These
networks of control operated in a space between state authorities
and the spheres of business and literary exchange, and produced a
widespread and self-regulated structure of book censorship.
While some US and UK legislators attempted to strengthen the
domestic control of obscene books and to bolster national
borders against the influx of obscene books in the 1910s and
1920s, there was also a freeing up of attitudes to literary obscenity
in the early twentieth century. Ulysses altered the parameters of
fiction through its obscene words, but Judge Woolsey’s
groundbreaking decision to liberate the book from New York
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censorship in 1933 shifted the relationship between law and
literature. The literary trials and social changes of the early
twentieth century pointed the way for future developments. After
the Second World War attitudes to literary representations of
sexuality in the United States and UK changed further, with
statutory shifts and landmark rulings such as the Lady Chatterley’s
trial in the UK in 1960. But literary censorship did not go away in
the 1960s. It was merely transferred onto different terrain.
Censorship on the grounds of religious offence has re-emerged as
a significant issue in the past twenty years or so. In the UK, the
Racial and Religious Toleration Act of 2006 has replaced the old
laws of Blasphemy and Blasphemous libel, and works to prevent
the publication of writing that intends to incite religious hatred.
While the internet has made it extremely difficult to curtail the
dissemination of words, pressure groups have discovered new
ways to use the law to curtail the publication of offensive books.
[…]
Prosecutions for literary obscenity in Britain and America rose
exponentially from the 1870s through to the 1928 Well of
Loneliness trial in the UK and the 1933 Ulysses trial in America. A
literary drive towards frankness coincided with a new kind of
desire to stamp out sex in literature. The Obscene Publications
Act of 1857, as well as the interpretation of this law in the
Hicklin ruling of 1868, presided over the legal and editorial
censorship of modernist writing. These pieces of legislation
created both a particular structure of censorship, one which
enfranchised individuals and pressure groups to do much of the
work of censorship, and a very loose definition of obscene
writing. It was not necessary for a book to be considered obscene
as a whole; it merely had to be shown that a small extract from a
book, read out of context, had the ‘tendency’ to corrupt the mind
of a young person. Alongside these legal shifts, there was
increasing religious and moral pressure to stamp out obscenity in
fiction. What became known as the New Puritanism in America,
and ‘comstockery’ by those on the other side of the argument,
was run by Anthony Comstock, who created the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873. He famously boasted
two years before his death in 1915, ‘In the forty-one years I have
been [in New York] I have convicted persons enough to fill a
passenger train of 61 coaches…I have destroyed 160 tons of
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obscene literature.’ [Lewis, 1976, p. 11] Much of what he
destroyed seems innocuous now: the mere mention of
prostitution, for example, was enough to send a book to the
pulping machine. Literary shifts towards more direct
representations of the human body from the 1870s through to the
early decades of the twentieth century coincided with the rise in
legal prosecutions of literary obscenity.
Modernist and avant-garde writers, with their more deliberate
flouting of moral conventions and exploration of sex and the
language of sex, ratcheted up this confrontational dynamic. They
also took these explorations further, twisting the language of sex
in new directions and developing aestheticized explorations of the
obscene. The word ‘obscene’ is from the Latin obsēnus, meaning
adverse, inauspicious, ill-omened; also abominable, disgusting,
filthy, indecent. In this definition the obscene person or thing
needs to be cast out of the group to avoid contamination of other
members. At the same time, the word referred to ideas about the
limits of representation; to those aspects of humanity or language
which ought to remain off-stage. The civic and theatrical origins
of the word, as well as its connections to threat and infection
were carried over into its modern statutory definitions. Obscenity
legislation in the United States and UK focused largely on the
corruption that could be unleashed through the representation of
sex and homosexuality and images of disease and social
breakdown were widespread. In literary texts, however, the
obscene referred to a much wider range of ideas. Sexualized
obscene bodies, bodies that deliberately violated historically
specific religious and legal taboos – Connie and Mellors having
sex in the grounds of an aristocratic estate in Lady Chatterley’s
Lover or Leopold Bloom masturbating while listening to the
church choir in Ulysses – were commonplace in modernist texts.
But there were also representations of the obscene boundaries of
the human form: Molly Bloom’s menstruating flow at the end of
Ulysses, Fresca pissing in the street in the first draft of The Waste
Land, the description of Bloom ‘easing his bowels’ in Ulysses, or
Nathanael West’s journey up the anus of the Trojan horse in The
Dream Life of Balso Snell, explored and stretched the fluid
boundaries of the human subject. As well as the everyday obscene
of menstruating and excreting bodies, there were the smashed and
distorted bodies of the First World War, figured as ‘obscene as
cancer’ by Wilfred Owen. Other taboo bodies appeared in
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modernist and avant-garde texts, such as the sexualized physical
parts of Djuna Barnes’ lesbian subjects in Ladies’ Almanack. There
were the colloquial dirty words that were shouted from modernist
texts: the fucks, sluts, bitches, and cunts of Joyce’s, Lawrence’s,
Henry Miller’s, Lawrence Durrell’s, and Barnes’ texts. But the
obscene also took on moral significance for some writers, as its
meaning was pointed back at those who would curtail fiction on
the grounds of sex. For Lawrence it was the puritanical English
attitude to sex that was truly obscene, while for Miller it was the
militaristic violence of the 1930s. Finally, some of the most
intriguing explorations of obscenity moved outside the realm of
sex altogether. Wyndham Lewis and Djuna Barnes, in two novels
of the 1930s, The Revenge for Love (1937) and Nightwood (1936),
created grotesque images of bodies in the throes of obscene
laughter, capturing ideas of worldly exile and abjection.
Such literary explorations meant that the early twentieth century
was framed by an embattled context of legal censorship, and this
conflict between law and literature had artistic and legal effects.
One consequence was that it encouraged writers to connect
obscenity with literary freedom, so that obscene words and
images carried a transgressive energy with libertarian content.
Another was to incite writers to engage with censorship and
defend literary freedom. There were also material consequences of
this censorship culture. […] I argue that the resistance to
censorship mirrored, to some extent, the censorship networks that
controlled the dissemination of books. British and US customs
officials, postmen, printers and publishers operated as a loosely
connected network that curtailed the dissemination of modernist
writing. But, prohibited by the US and UK nation states,
modernist texts were often produced and circulated abroad,
mostly in Paris, so that modernist publishers created their own
semi-legal and private distribution networks in order to foil the
customs officials. The British and US authorities strengthened
their borders against the influx of obscene literature in the 1910s
and 1920s, and argued that obscene writing was a threat to
national security. But the period also saw the emergence of
international literary pressure groups, which created global
networks of writers and a robust defence of the international
rights of authors. Free speech groups, such as International P.E.N.
in the 1920s and 1930s, had an important impact on the claim
that authors had rights beyond national borders. The
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internationalism of these efforts affected debates about literary
freedom, censorship law, and the nation state. By the 1930s, it was
reasonable to ask whether the dissemination of texts could
actually be controlled by nation states. When the Nazis burned
books by Jewish and Socialist writers in 1933, P.E.N. created a
‘German Library of the Burned Books’, a kind of surrogate
library that contained ‘all those works which in the “Third Reich”
have been burned, censored, and suppressed’. [P.E.N. News, 1934,
pp. 3, 4] The list served to legitimize and construct an exiled
group identity which tied itself to a moral and legalistic position
outside of national borders. It signalled something that writers
had long been claiming in the face of censorship proceedings:
banning a book did not eradicate it. Books might be censored or
destroyed, but they would continue to have an existence, whether
by being legally available in another part of the world, as
unauthorized pirated editions, or until some future moment when
they could be brought inside the law again.
References for this reading
Felice Flanery Lewis, Literature, Obscenity and the Law
(Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1976), 11.
P.E.N. News, no. 62 (March 1934), 3, 4.
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Reading C: Spreadable media
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green
Source: Edited version from Jenkins, H., Ford, S. and Green, J. (2013)Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, NewYork, New York University Press, pp. 291–8.
Writing for Locus, a trade publication for science fiction writers,
Cory Doctorow challenges established assumptions surrounding
the need for maintaining tight control over intellectual property.
He suggests such norms are “hard-wired” into us as mammals:
Mammals invest a lot of energy in keeping track of the
disposition of each we spawn. It’s only natural, of course: we
invest so much energy and so many resources in our
offspring that it would be a shocking waste if they were to
wander away and fall off the balcony or flush themselves
down the garbage disposal. […] It follows naturally that we
invest a lot of importance in the individual disposition of
every copy of our artistic works as well, wringing our hands
over “not for resale” advance review copies that show up on
Amazon and tugging our beards at the thought of Google
making a scan of our books in order to index them for
searchers. (2008)
Such attitudes may emerge “naturally” from our mammalian
predispositions, but Doctorow notes that they are not the only
ways we can understand our creative output. We might reimagine
our current intellectual property regimes as they might operate in
a world dominated by dandelions. The dandelion is playing a law
of averages, with each plant producing more than 2,000 seeds per
year and sending them blowing off into the wind. The results are
hard to deny when we see the number of dandelions sprinkling
the U.S. landscape each spring.
Doctorow draws parallels between this dispersal of seeds and the
ways that artists increasingly tap into participatory systems of
circulation in order to reach desired audiences:
If you blow your works into the net like a dandelion clock
on the breeze, the net itself will take care of the copying
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
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costs. Your fans will paste-bomb your works into their
mailing list, making 60,000 copies so fast and so cheaply that
figuring out how much it cost in aggregate to make all those
copies would be orders of magnitude more expensive than
the copies themselves. What’s more, the winds of the
Internet will toss your works to every corner of the globe,
seeking out every fertile home that they may have – given
enough time and the right work, your stuff could someday
find its way over the transom of every reader who would
find it good and pleasing. (2008)
[…]
Doctorow’s account of circulation [is that] value and meaning get
created as grassroots communities tap into creative products as
resources for their own conversations and spread them to others
who share their interests. As institutions constructed by and for
mammals, media companies, educational institutions, newspapers,
and political campaigns display fear of this potential loss of
control and concern for the fates of their intellectual offspring.
The result has been, on the one hand, the development of
“enclaves” and “monopolies” which tighten the distribution of
their content and, on the other, a tendency to see grassroots acts
of circulation as random, unpredictable, even irrational.
But nothing seems to be stopping the dandelion seeds from
flowing beyond their walled gardens. As people pursue their own
agendas in sharing and discussing media content, they are helping
to spread the seeds – transforming commodities into gifts, turning
texts into resources, and asserting their own expanding
communication capacities.
The contemporary focus on the “viral” nature of circulation
expresses media companies’ and brands’ utter terror of the
unknown cultural processes now influencing all aspects of the
media and entertainment industries. To manage that terror, they
have often professed a mastery over a mysterious science that
allows them to produce “viral content,” rather than acknowledge
(and benefit from) the loss of control inherent in our networked
culture. Indeed, we have argued that these producers are
increasingly dependent on networked communities to circulate,
curate, and appraise their output. Web 2.0 companies have sought
to capture and capitalize on these generative activities; brands
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316
have sought to corral their own brand communities; and trolls
have sought to manufacture and spread “memes” for their own
malicious joy and to disrupt the operations of groups which take
the web too seriously. Perhaps we might understand content
creators as mammals occasionally pretending to be dandelions but
then reverting often back to their true natures, like the fable of
the scorpion who cannot resist stinging the frog carrying him
halfway through their journey across the river. If it doesn’t spread,
it’s dead; true enough. But sometimes producers would rather die
than give up control.
However, often, audiences are as ambivalent about being the wind
scattering the seeds as the production companies and brands are
about letting their spawn fly away. And audiences have reason to
be nervous: many Web 2.0 practices are far from benign, seeking
to tap into their “free labor” in ways which profit the companies
but may not respect the traditions and norms of participatory
culture.
Those who are most prepared to embrace spreadability have often
been the people with the least to lose from changing the current
system – […] civic activists […], […] independent and Christian
media producers […], and people from the developing world […].
In each case, these groups accept a loss of control, seeking to
forge partnerships with audiences that helped them expand and
accelerate the circulation of their output.
Of course, we need to be cautious about displacing one biological
metaphor with another: we […] critiqu[ed] the use of “viral”
metaphors that depict culture as “self-replicating,” and we now
appear to be on the verge of […] comparing culture to the
dandelion seeds simply blowing on the wind. However useful
Doctorow’s analogy may be, it is a metaphor, not a system by
which we propose to make sense of spreadable media. The
choices over how we deal with intellectual property are ultimately
cultural, political, and economic – not biologically hardwired. We
should be concerned if the economic interests of companies are
the only forces determining the terms of our cultural
participation, […].
Audience members are using the media texts at their disposal to
forge connections with each other, to mediate social relations and
make meaning of the world around them. Both individually and
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collectively, they exert agency in the spreadability model. They are
not merely impregnated with media messages, nor are they at the
service of the brand; rather, they select material that matters to
them from the much broader array of media content on offer
(which now includes audience creations alongside industrially
produced works). They do not simply pass along static texts; they
transform the material through active production processes or
through their own critiques and commentary, so that it better
serves their own social and expressive needs. Content – in whole
or through quotes – does not remain in fixed borders but rather
circulates in unpredicted and often unpredictable directions, not
the product of top-down design but rather the result of a
multitude of local decisions made by autonomous agents
negotiating their way through diverse cultural spaces.
Similarly, so-called consumers do not simply consume; they
recommend what they like to their friends, who recommend it to
their friends, who recommend it on down the line. They do not
simply “buy” cultural goods; they “buy into” a cultural economy
which rewards their participation. And, in such an environment,
any party can block or slow the spread of texts: if creators
construct legal or technical blocks, if third-party platform owners
choose to restrict the ways in which material can circulate, or if
audiences refuse to circulate content which fails to serve their
own interests.
Spreadable media expands the power of people to help shape
their everyday media environment, but it does not guarantee any
particular outcomes. Nevertheless, we believe these processes may
hold the potential for social and cultural change. We hope we
have illustrated the many ways that expanding access to the tools
of media production and circulation is transforming the media
landscape, allowing for greater responsiveness to audience
interest, for greater support for independent media producers, for
the wider circulation of civic and religious media, and for
expanded access to transnational media content.
[We are] describing a moment of transition, one in which an old
system is shattering without us yet knowing what is going to
replace it, one which is ripe in contradictions as audiences and
producers make competing bids for the new moral economy that
will displace the broadcast paradigm which has dominated cultural
production and distribution throughout the twentieth century. Our
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318
[discussion represents] snapshots of this new culture-in-
development, glimpses into possible futures if some of these
tensions can be resolved. [Our] arguments […] represent appeals
to construct a system which pays more attention to the public
interest – defined not through elite institutions but by the public
itself, through its acts of appraisal, curation, and circulation.
Toward that end, let us revisit the claims about spreadability […].
Some of those statements about what constitutes a “spreadable
media” environment may have […] seemed arbitrary, overstated,
or even overwhelming to some of you. But our hope is that, in
light of our various investigations and examples […], our claims
will now be clear. Our intention is that the journey we’ve taken
[…] gives you a road map for a better understanding of how
value and meaning are being made and appraised in an age of
spreadability, a better understanding of some of the models for
understanding and transforming business practice in this
environment, and some language that might help us more
accurately describe and discuss the evolution of media circulation.
So […], spreadability focuses on the following:
The flow of ideas. [We have] sought to explain the rapid and
widespread circulation of media content not through a metaphor
of “virality” but through analyzing the social motives of those
who are actually doing the spreading. These practices often occur
at the intersection between an old media ecology based on
corporate control and a new media ecology based on
noncommercial sharing. These peer-to-peer exchanges may take
many forms – from the kinds of reciprocity characteristic of
traditional and modern forms of a gift economy to contexts of
competition and contestation among rival groups. The exchange
of media helps to anchor ongoing relationships and thus occurs
most often when the content being exchanged says something
significant about the parties involved. We have questioned the
industry’s assumption that it can create “brand communities” and
“fan communities” around its products, suggesting instead that
most of these exchanges occur within existing communities and
ongoing conversations. As marketers and other content creators
enter these spaces, they must think about questions of
transparency and authenticity and the differences in their own
commercial motivations and the social motivations of community
members. They must think about the types of content these
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
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communities most want and need, which best provides fodder for
the conversations and activities in which such groups are already
invested. And they must think about what happens as content
travels across cultural boundaries, sometimes stripped of its
original context, creating “impure” texts which are not simply
distributed from culture to culture but – in the process – often
bear the mark of audiences that remake, reinterpret, and
transform content.
Dispersed material. While [our] argument has centered on ways the
public can shape localized and participatory acts of curation and
circulation to their own ends, it is clear that content creators of
all types have deep stakes in how their content spreads. Brands,
for example, have seen spreadable media as a means of expanding
the resonance of company messages and developing more
meaningful relationships with current or potential customers.
Broadcast networks and producers have seen transmedia strategies
as a means of intensifying audiences’ engagement and deepening
fans’ investment in their success. Activist groups have deployed
“cultural acupuncture” to accelerate the spread and to amplify the
reach of their messages, even as they have also struggled with the
consequences of having their ideas and images sometimes used
against them. Thus, creators have to think about creating multiple
access points to content and texts that are both “grabbable” and
“quotable” – which are technically and aesthetically easy for
audiences to share.
Diversified experiences. Under the spreadability paradigm, mass-
produced and mass-distributed content is often customized and
localized for niche audiences, not by commercial producers but
rather by other community members. Fans evangelize for
entertainment they want others to enjoy. In the process, they
function as translators between a text’s contexts of production
and reception. Audiences act as “multipliers” who attach new
meaning to existing properties, as “appraisers” who evaluate the
worth of different bids on our attention, as “lead users” who
anticipate new markets for newly released content, as “retro
curators” who discover forgotten content which may still hold
cultural and economic value, and as “pop cosmopolitans” who
seek cultural difference and help to educate others about content
they’ve discovered from other parts of the world. And producers
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must think about these various motivations as they design content
and respond to audience feedback.
Open-ended participation. These acts of appraisal and circulation
reflect the practices of participatory culture. Participatory culture
is not new – it has, in fact, multiple histories (through fandom,
through struggles for greater popular control over media, through
histories of craft or activism) which go back at least to the
nineteenth century. What we are calling participatory culture has
much in common with these and much older forms of folk
cultural production and exchange. In thinking about these various
histories, it is crucial to realize that participatory activities differ
substantially, depending on the community and the media
property in question. We must be careful not to define
participation too narrowly in ways that prioritize “drillable texts”
over “accretion texts,” video creation over fan debate, or
“affirmational” fan activity over “transformational” fan activity.
Cultural participation takes different forms within different legal,
economic, and technological contexts. Some people have confused
participatory culture with Web 2.0, but Web 2.0 is a business
model through which commercial platforms seek to court and
capture the participatory energies of desired markets and to
harness them toward their own ends. While these Web 2.0
platforms may offer new technical affordances that further the
goals of participatory culture, friction almost always exists
between the desires of producers and audiences, a gap which has
resulted in ongoing struggles around the terms of participation.
Contemporary culture is becoming more participatory, especially
compared with earlier media ecologies primarily reliant on
traditional mass media. However, not everyone is allowed to
participate, not everyone is able to participate, not everyone wants
to participate, and not everyone who participates does so on equal
terms. The word “participation” has a history in both political
and cultural discourse, and the overlap between the two begs
closer consideration. In some cases, networked publics are tapping
this expanded communication capacity to create a more diverse
culture – challenging entrenched institutions, expanding economic
opportunities, and even, in the case of religious media, perhaps
saving our souls. Others are simply using it to get on with the
business of their everyday lives.
Chapter 6 Ownership, regulation and production
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Motivating and facilitating sharing. The current media environment
has become increasingly conducive to the spread of media
content. Partially, spreadability is the result of shifts in the nature
of technologies which make it easier to produce, upload,
download, appropriate, remix, recirculate, and embed content.
Digitization has made it simpler to change formats and cheaper to
circulate content. Partially, spreadability is the result of legal
struggles, as many groups are questioning the logic of tight
control over intellectual property and as mundane practices of
unauthorized use are making legal claims that seek to regulate
circulation moot. Whether media producers desire it or not, they
can no longer control what their audiences do with their content
once it leaves their hands. Seeking to compensate for this loss of
control, media producers and networks are developing new
business models seeking to benefit from at least some forms of
grass-roots circulation. The result is a more permissive climate,
one where cease-and-desist letters are giving way to appeals to
help spread the word. And even more radical experimentation is
taking place around independent and alternative media, which
must collaborate with supporters to survive. As producers
consider how audiences will create “divergences” from official
systems of distribution, listening to such practices might provide
insight for new models for content creation and circulation, proof
of an unanticipated surplus audience eager to engage with
material, or indications of emerging popularity for texts that had
been removed from commercial circulation.
Reference for this reading
Doctorow, Cory. 2008. “Think like a Dandelion.” Locus, May.
http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/05/cory-doctorow-
think-like-dandelion.html.
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Chapter 7 Looking back, leaping
forwards: a personal–political review
with critical–creative prospects
Rob Pope
7.1 Introduction
Look before you leap is criticism’s motto. Leap before you look is
creativity’s.
(Forster, 1951, p. 123, cited in Pope, 2005, p. xvii)
Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of
entering an old text from a new critical direction …
(Rich, 2001, p. 11)
This chapter will involve looking and leaping, being critical and
creative. In Adrienne Rich’s terms, it involves a radical act of ‘re-
vision’: looking back to see with fresh eyes, entering texts from new
directions. The main aim of the chapter is to encourage you to take a
fresh look at the key terms and ideas that inform this book as a whole,
and to do so in ways that are experimental and perhaps challenging. By
doing this, hopefully you will be encouraged to press beyond
conventional distinctions that are often made when discussing
creativity, which reflect whole clusters of supposedly opposite terms,
such as literary–non literary, personal–political, private–public, creative–
critical, rational–emotional, serious–play and reality–art.
This chapter will try to challenge these dichotomies and suggest that
we should adopt a fundamentally dynamic critical–creative approach to
the personal–political nature of verbal expression and interaction. The
dashes are crucial in each case. They express an underlying tension, an
essential interdependence: you can’t think or say the one without at
least implying the other.
Chapter 7 Looking back, leaping forwards: a personal–political review with critical–creative prospects
323
Here, in brief, is what this chapter does:
. Section 7.2, ‘Challenging dichotomies, and key terms recast’, takes a
fresh, historical and theoretical look at the core ideas of the
chapters in the book, and points to other ideas that are currently
emerging, as well as older terms worth revisiting. This is done
through using clusters of words and ideas in a variety of shapes and
designs, which you are invited to adapt and add to.
. Section 7.3, ‘Extended text, extending practice’, develops the
preceding theoretical activity through detailed work on two linked
series of texts – Alice Oswald’s poem Dart (2010 [2002]) and Bob
Dylan’s song ‘A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall’ (1963) – in a wide range
of genres and media. ‘Water’ figures centrally in both series of texts
and it provides an apt metaphor for a recurrent theme throughout
this chapter and, indeed, this book as a whole, in that the creative
process can be seen, in large measure, as the recycling, reusing and
transforming of resources, much as water evaporates, falls, freezes
and melts in a continuous process that is vital to all life on our
planet.
However, before proceeding, because some of the methods may be
unfamiliar, it is worth clarifying that the overall aims of this chapter are
to:
. encourage a critical-creative approach to texts, combining critical
analysis with creative reproduction
. invite you as a reader to explore your own powers of re-reading
and, by extension, re-writing, key terms as well as core texts
. promote an understanding of politics that acknowledges the
personal and public dimensions of power
. use these same approaches and perspectives to help you revisit the
terms and texts featured in this book.
The approach taken in this chapter is therefore quite different from
that taken in the other chapters. An obvious difference is that the texts
you are asked to read are embedded within the main chapter – this is
to reflect my interest in encouraging you to see the interconnectedness
between re-reading and re-writing, critiquing and creating. A second
difference is that the chapter involves more activities, to enable you to
explore your own perspectives, than commentary from an author (me).
It may be helpful as you work through the chapter to imagine it more
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
324
as a workshop: it is designedly open-ended and exploratory, and will
involve you in examining, refining and revisiting your own
understandings and ideas about key concepts in this book.
7.2 Challenging dichotomies, and key terms recast
Throughout this chapter you are invited to engage in both critical and
creative activity. These are often presented as opposites or
incompatible, but framing them in this way can obscure their
complementary value and usefulness. Some preliminary distinctions –
and connections – are worth making at this point. Broadly, by being
critical I mean making analytical distinctions and arguing about
particular problems; by being creative I mean playing with and making
(creating) ideas, texts, images, and so on. I see both approaches as
essential for reaching an understanding about complex concepts, for
generating alternative possibilities and coming up with fresh solutions.
This potentially double-edged nature of critical and creative activity is
implicit throughout this book; this chapter simply attempts to make
that relation explicit and productive. With this in mind, let us begin to
critique some existing definitions of creativity and create some new
ones in the process.
Defining ‘creativity’
A good place to start an exploration of the notion of creativity is with
the influential writer and critic, Raymond Williams. Williams was
particularly interested in how the idea of culture has evolved over time,
an interest which led to his writing Keywords (1983), a book which
investigates in detail different words associated with culture.
Activity 7.1
Allow about 1 hour
1 Read through the extract on creativity from Raymond Williams,
reproduced in the ‘Creative’ box. Read it a couple of times or until
you feel that you have a good grasp of what the main terms and
issues are.
2 Next, summarise – in effect, rewrite – what you have learned, using
the steps set out below:
◦ Make a list of the main changes in the meanings and
applications of the various ‘create’ words (‘creation’, ‘creator’,
‘creative’, etc.) used in Williams’s extract. Do this down the
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page like a simple shopping list or checklist, so that you can
re-read the passage and check off items or insert ones you’ve
missed or had second thoughts about. (If the first list ends up
a mess, you will find it helpful to redo it.) The important thing
is to produce a clear, broadly linear structure to begin with.
This list can now be used to help inform a couple of further re-
readings and re-writings.
◦ Turn your list into a diagram in order to represent verbally and
visually the relations among the various versions of creativity.
This might take the form of a triangle, a square, a spiral, a
‘scatter’ – perhaps linked by arrows or dotted lines: whatever
shape seems to suit or fit. (Suitable shapes often take a while
to emerge, so be prepared to experiment until you settle on
one you are satisfied with.) You might, for example, want to
distinguish religious, artistic, commercial and other views of
creativity. These could be represented in a way that
emphasises opposition or interconnection, or some other
relation. Sometimes diagrams take the form of a map, flow
chart or timeline. Feel free to explore these possibilities too.
What is important here is to settle on a verbal–visual
representation that fits the text and suits you. (For an
example, see Figure 7.1.)
◦ Re-present the extract dramatically as a series of brief
speeches or thoughts. This might take the form of speech or
thought ‘bubbles’ springing from the text (as in cartoons) or a
scripted mini-dialogue with named or representative speakers
expressing different points of view. For instance, Augustine,
Tasso, Sidney and Wordsworth are all named and quoted in
the passage, while ‘God’, ‘the poet’, ‘advertising copywriters’
and others also have a palpable presence. Voicing some of
these positions dramatically – and perhaps indicating some of
their implications in order to produce brief imaginative
exchanges – is a good way of exposing the multivoiced nature
of Williams’s text while also transforming critical monologue
into creative dialogue.
3 Consider what light the process throws on the relationship between
critical and creative engagement.
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God the Creator Creative artist Creativity of humanity
Figure 7.1 A visual representation of Williams’s entry for ‘creative’ (Adapted
from Swann et al., 2011, p. 2)
Creative
Creative in modern English has a general sense of original and
innovative, and an associated special sense of productive. It is also
used to distinguish certain kinds of work, as in creative writing,
the creative arts. It is interesting to see how this now
commonplace but still, on reflection, surprising word came to be
used, and how this relates to some of its current difficulties.
Create came into English from the stem of the past participle of
[the root word] creare, L[atin] make or produce. This inherent
relation to the sense of something having been made, and thus to a
past event, was exact, for the word was mainly used in the precise
context of the original divine creation of the world: creation itself,
and creature, have the same root stem. Moreover, within that
system of belief, as Augustine [354–430] insisted, ‘creatura non
potest creare’ – the ‘creature’ – who has been created – cannot
himself create. This context remained decisive until at least [the
sixteenth century], and the extension of the word to indicate
present or future making – that is to say a kind of making by men –
is part of the major transformation of thought which we now
describe as the humanism of the Renaissance. ‘There are two
creators,’ wrote Torquato Tasso (1544–95), ‘God and the poet’. This
sense of human creation, specifically in works of the imagination, is
the decisive source of the modern meaning. In his Apologie for
Poetrie, Philip Sidney (1554–86) saw God as having made Nature
but having also made man in his own likeness, giving him the
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capacity ‘with the force of a divine breath’ to imagine and make
things beyond Nature.
…
By [the late seventeenth century], however, both create and
creation can be found commonly in a modern sense, and during
[the eighteenth century] each word acquired a conscious
association with ART [another of Williams’s keywords], a word
which was itself changing in a complementary direction. It was in
relation to this, in [the eighteenth century], that creative was
coined. Since the word evidently denotes a faculty, it had to wait on
general acceptance of create and creation as human actions,
without necessary reference to a past divine event. By 1815
Wordsworth could write confidently to the painter Haydon: ‘High is
our calling, friend, Creative Art.’ This runs back to the earliest
specific reference I have come across: ‘companion of the Muse,
Creative Power, Imagination’ (Mallet, 1728). … The decisive
development was the conscious and then conventional association
of creative with art and thought. By [the early nineteenth century] it
was conscious and powerful; by [the mid-nineteenth century]
conventional. Creativity, a general name for the faculty, followed in
[the twentieth century]. [In fact, the first recorded instance of
‘creativity’, according to the second edition of the Oxford English
Dictionary (1989), is slightly earlier, 1875; but the word did not even
have an entry in the edition that Williams was using.]
This is clearly an important and significant history, and in its
emphasis on human capacity the term has steadily become more
important. But there is one obvious difficulty. The word puts a
necessary stress on originality and innovation, and when we
remember the history we can see that these are not trivial claims.
Indeed we try to clarify this by distinguishing between innovation
and novelty, though novelty has both serious and trivial senses.
The difficulty arises when a word once intended, and often still
intended, to embody a high and serious claim, becomes so
conventional, as a description of certain general kinds of activity,
that it is applied to practices for which, in the absence of the
convention, nobody would think of making such claims. Thus any
imitative or stereotyped literary work can be called, by convention,
creative writing, and advertising copywriters officially describe
themselves as creative.
(Williams, 1983, pp. 82–4)
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Discussion
Whether you responded with a small diagram and/or a brief drama – or
in some other way entirely – what’s important is that you did something
to and with the extract. You have not just re-read but actually re-written it
– on paper or screen, as well as in your head. In this way you will have
become aware that the business of defining creativity to some extent
always involves re-creating definitions. You will also have demonstrated
that interpretation is an act of performance (involving specific modes,
media and genres – in this case using pens, paper, keyboards, perhaps
colour), not simply the rehearsal of some single, abstract truth. In this
respect, even highly generalised theoretical discourse has a deeply
particular, material aspect to it. For instance, it’s one thing to identify the
French rationalist philosopher René Descartes with the position and
proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’ (Cogito, ergo sum). But it’s quite
another to discover that this famously free-standing one-liner in fact
occurs as just one of many subclauses in a long sentence, which itself is
part of a text that is framed as ‘meditation’ and ‘diary’ as much as
‘philosophical treatise’ (see Descartes, 2008 [1637]). Such is the
difference between disembodied idea and actual utterance – ‘theory in
theory’, so to speak, and ‘theory in practice’.
It is possible to go on to identify other potential key terms mentioned
in the box above – aside from the ‘create’ words as such. You will
have noticed that ‘original’ and ‘originality’, ‘innovative’ and
‘innovation’, ‘produce’ and ‘productive’, ‘make’ and ‘making’, ‘art’ and
‘arts’ are all used by Williams to help define the ‘create’ words. They
can be represented diagrammatically or in some other way and can fit
into, extend or even cut across the picture of creativity being
developed. They can occasion ‘pictures’ (verbal–visual representations)
of their own. But obviously these terms can themselves be defined,
singly or together, and prompt further refinement, radical overhaul or
outright rejection of some of the aspects of creativity already identified.
In short, there is much more work that could be done. And it too
could be done in seriously playful ways.
Turning just a few of these alternative terms into lists, diagrams and
dramas would make for many hours – if not days! – of studious fun.
In various ways, it would also be original, productive, and so forth, as
well as be about those terms and ideas.
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Defining ‘politics’
In this section you will continue your exploration (begun in Chapter 1)
of the concept of ‘politics’, not by reading a specific text to prompt a
number of rewritings (as you did in Activity 7.1), but by considering a
provisional verbal–visual ‘shape’ of my own. Everything here is offered
as serious provocation but should not be treated too solemnly.
Figure 7.2 was generated by, quite literally, ‘drawing lines’ between
terms that kept cropping up in and around dictionary and thesaurus
entries on ‘politics’. It was then a matter of putting them in order with
a couple of lines that made sense (direct derivations at the top, looser
associations at the bottom) and placing the key term at the centre –
surrounded by question marks for good measure. In rather more detail,
the kinds of enquiry this diagram is designed to express and prompt
are as follows. The upper part traces a line from the Greek city states
(polis), through the body politic of the Roman Empire, to the modern
politician of French and other revolutions. The lower line draws
attention to some suggestive and potentially awkward relations between
the police, as an instrument of public law and order, and policy as the
design and planning of priorities, especially in the state. Meanwhile,
what counts as proper or improper and polite or impolite is part of the
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330
? ? ? ? ?
??
??
??
??
??
??
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
??
?
??
?
??
??
??
! ! ! ! !polis (Greek) politic (Latin) politician (French)
POLITICS
police policy polite, impolite
Figure 7.2 A possible ‘shape’
social mix too. All these terms and issues, it is suggested, are likely to
crop up in an investigation of what ‘politics’ has meant in the past and
in an interrogation of what it may yet mean. The list of one-liners and
phrases in the next box is simply another, slightly more discursive way
of highlighting commonly held views ranging from the cynical to the
considered.
Some common quotations and collocations
‘Man is by nature a political animal’ (Aristotle, 1999 [335 BCE], p. 5)
‘War is merely the continuation of policy by other means’ (von
Clausewitz, 1984 [1832], p. 87)
‘Politics is the art of the possible’ (von Bismarck, cited in von
Poschinger, 1895, p. 248)
‘The personal is political’
‘Party politics’
‘Sexual politics’
‘Politically (in)correct’
‘Politicians are all the same’
‘Let’s not talk about politics’
Together, then, the diagram and the list might lead one to ask
questions, and even frame further enquiries, along something like the
following lines. How far, with any particular text, are the politics
matters of public or personal concern – to do with states and inter-/
national institutions or with local and immediately pressing situations?
Party politics or sexual politics, for example? And how ‘impolite’ is it
to insist that other politics – representing other dimensions of class,
ethnicity, religion, sexuality, etc. – be brought to bear? And so forth.
Activity 7.2
Allow about 45 minutes
Using any material from this book, or other appropriate reference
materials, create your own ‘shape’ to define politics.
You could use some of the standard dictionaries and thesauruses, as
well as key texts on this topic. Potential resources include Williams
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331
(1983), Bennett et al. (2005), Pope (2005) and the Arts Council of
England and Creative Partnership research reviews (2006–12). Add any
quotations or sayings that you find particularly revealing. Verbal, visual
and other materials for such a reshaping of ideas of politics are in fact to
be found everywhere – in books, on the internet, on the street, in your
bag or pocket. The challenge is precisely one of choosing and re-
combining. Dictionaries and the other reference books will help by
grounding your investigation in language, and therefore history and
culture, providing information as well as insight.
Random fishing or concerted trawls on the internet are likely to be the
first recourse for many readers. More immediately and perhaps most
usefully, however, you might begin with the chapters in this book. So
flick through the book in hand and then work systematically through its
contents lists and, above all, the index. (If you are using an ebook
version of this text, you could carry out a keyword search.) Either way,
you will find plenty of references to and discussions of ‘politics’ (it’s in
the book’s title after all), and plenty of things to quote and comment on,
as well as to question. Go about this both looking for and expecting
some kind of particular ‘shape’ or ‘design’ to form. It will gradually – and
perhaps at some point suddenly – emerge. Often it begins, as above,
simply by the act of noting and listing things. Keep in mind the overall
aim – trying to coordinate your own developing thoughts on what
‘politics’ can mean – and you will find you are also ‘revising’ parts of the
book in and on your own terms.
Discussion
There are, of course, lots of possible shapes that you could make in
creatively representing definitions of politics. Another cluster might
feature power, for example. This is a persistent term in definitions of
politics and readily extends to powerful, powerless, empowering,
disempowered, ‘balance of power’, ‘powers that be’, etc. (see Bennett
et al., 2005, pp. 274–8). Such an enquiry could also, with the help of a
dictionary such as the OED (Simpson and Weiner, 1989), trace the root
of the term through the French pouvoir, ‘to be able to, can do’, and go
on to pick up yet other closely associated terms such as potent,
impotent and potential. All these would throw revealing light on what
‘powers’ – personal and public, intimate and international – might be at
stake in a fresh re-visioning of politics.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of visually charged and verbally weighted
constructions of politics in terms of party politics, political allegiances
and political systems. Here are just some that occur to me:
. politics of ‘the Right’, ‘the Left’ and ‘the Centre’
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. Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green, Independent …
. Democrat, Republican, ‘Tea Party’ …
. autocratic, dictatorship, oligarchic, populist, democratic, socialist,
anarchist …
. majority rule, minority, coalition, holding the balance of power …
. local and central government, national politics and international
relations …
. personality politics, multiculturalism, mass movements, global
governance …
. proportional representation, ‘one person one vote’, ‘first-past-the-
post’ …
. ‘show of hands’, ballot box, ‘ballots and bullets’, paper, electronic …
. ‘straw polls’, media polls, party-political broadcasts, televised leader
debates … .
The lists go on and on. So the very act of drawing them up can be
decisive in terms of selection and combination, who or what gets
included or excluded. In fact, making lists is probably the most
fundamental critical and creative act we routinely engage in – from
shopping lists, to-do lists, ‘address books’ and media listings to whom to
invite to a party and who counts as a member of any kind of party,
political and otherwise. Reviewing the list above will readily – perhaps all
too readily – suggest visualisations along oppositional, hierarchic and
more or less convergent or divergent lines. Meanwhile, every name,
noun or phrase – even a part of a word – brings along its own historical
baggage and cultural associations: ‘Republican’, ‘Labour’, ‘one person
(man?) one vote’, ‘democrat/-ic’, ‘social/-ist’. Such baggage needs
examining, repacking and sometimes discarding and replacing
completely; for the associations can be helpful or harmful, reassuring or
misleading. What’s more, for better and worse, many of the images
conjured up along each of the lines in the list above are often spatially
static or only dynamic in one direction (‘Left – Centre – Right’?).
Getting beyond stereotyped images and reflex reactions in order to
develop subtle, flexible and fully multidimensional responses is therefore
a crucial first step – or, rather, it is if currently dominant views of politics
are not only to be critiqued but also recreated. Imaginative thinking can
never be completely content with existing images, although it always
starts with them. ‘I must Create a System. or be enslav’d by another
Mans’ is how William Blake put it with characteristic panache in his
visionary poem Jerusalem (Blake, 1804–20). (Blake’s work is itself an
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inspiring object lesson in compound verbal–visual design; see Blake,
2009 and also Chapter 3, Section 3.3.)
The kinds of verbal–visual design featured in this section are a natural
complement to more conventional analytical writing and argument
(Mullarkey, 2006, gives a good theoretical overview, especially the final
chapters: ‘Thinking in diagrams’ and ‘The shape of thoughts to come’).
Such devices are especially relevant when treating creativity and
language because they offer opportunities to experiment as well as
explain, to demonstrate as well as describe – in short, to be both
creative and critical with words. But the principle applies equally to the
exploration of any culturally central term and concept: ‘politics’ and
‘power’ in the present instance. A diagram, a mini-drama, a list of
quotations – to begin with just the act of highlighting a term with
inverted commas or italics – these are all graphic and potentially
provocative ways of initiating further enquiries even while retracing
previous ones. More than purely personal or commercially constrained
‘mind maps’, such devices can help challenge theory and change
practices. They are what good ‘presenters’ of all kinds use when they
want not just to reinforce an existing message, but actually to re-
present and invite re-valuation.
In this respect, as is widely recognised, the graphics projected on
screens or printed on paper handouts to support ‘presentations’ can be
a bore or a boon. It depends both on whether they merely duplicate or
actually extend what has already been said, as well as on who has the
‘power’ to make the ‘point’ in the first place – and then respond in the
next (for further discussion, see Pope, 2005: Chapters 3 and 4; and
Pope, 2011). In fact, we could well add re-presentation, in the richest
sense, to re-vision, in Rich’s sense, to the current designedly critical–
creative vocabulary. And the emphasis, as always, is on ‘re-’ meaning
doing things not just again but afresh. You saw, for example, in
Chapter 5 of this book how the global phenomenon of hip hop can be
re-visioned and re-presented to have meaning at the local level. The
same principle, realised differently and at length, applies to the tasks in
the next section.
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7.3 Extended texts, extending practices
Now you are going to explore two longer stretches of text: Alice
Oswald’s poem Dart and Bob Dylan’s song ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna
Fall’. Both texts involve representations of water: what it is and does,
how people relate to it, and what it can mean, practically and
metaphorically. They also provide extended examples of people
working critically and creatively with language and other media, in ways
that are deeply personal as well as highly political. In reading, viewing
and actively coming to grips with these materials, you will hopefully be
prompted to think of possible writing and rewriting projects.
The first text, Alice Oswald’s Dart, is a dramatic narrative and poetic
meditation based on the river of that name; it was composed using live
recordings as well as archive material. The second text (really a series
of texts) is prompted by and organised around Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard
Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’; this features in a political photo-book, a
travelling exhibition, and an ecological activists’ website. Together,
these two texts address matters of pressing human concern, both
through the medium of water.
All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings
We begin with the poem Dart by Alice Oswald. This is a long dramatic
and narrative poem that follows the course of the river from where it
springs to where it flows into the sea. Oswald (b.1966) currently still
lives in Devon near the River Dart. In her preface, the author gives an
insight into the process of composition:
This poem is made from the language of people who live and
work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording
conversations with people who know the river. I’ve used these
records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of
characters – linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a
songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the
margin where one voice changes into another. These do not refer
to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as
the river’s mutterings.
(Oswald, 2010 [2002], preface)
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The broader context is also worth clarifying. The poem was composed
as part of the Poetry Society’s ‘Poetry Places’ project funded by the
Arts Council of England’s ‘Arts for Everyone’ scheme; it later won the
T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize.
Activity 7.3
Allow about 1 hour
Now read and re-read the extract from Alice Oswald’s poem reproduced
in this activity. Begin by reading the text all the way through, silently and
then aloud. (The identifications in the margins are Oswald’s.) Look and
listen out for all the ways in which the language varies and the voices
change. The main thing is to let the words run through your mind and
mouth and ears. Doing it for or with someone else can be very revealing
too.
After a few readings, silently and out loud, you will have a feel for the
texture and structure of the poem. What it’s about and how it’s done will
start to become familiar. The following questions and activities should
help you make the most of your readings and performances.
. Where does one ‘voice’ or ‘language variety’ give way to another,
and what are the clues and cues for this in layout, sound-patterning,
changes in vocabulary, and syntax (in addition to Oswald’s marginal
notes).
. How do these cues affect the way you read the poem out loud,
perhaps by adopting a different pace, tone and manner?
. How would you characterise these various voices in (a) a single
word; (b) a phrase; (c) a sentence or two?
. Does it help to distinguish some aspects of the voices as external
(‘outer’, tending towards speech, almost audible) and other aspects
as internal (‘inner’, tending towards thought, almost inaudible)?
Consider what in the text prompts you to think this and how it might
affect your performance.
. Go on to look and listen for places where one voice or style seems to
overlay or break into another.
. Finally, would you say that there is still a single continuous voice
running through – perhaps underneath or alongside – this whole
piece? In her preface to the poem, which you have just read, Oswald
says: ‘All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.’ So where
does that leave her – and you? And would you, for example, include
the marginal notes in a live reading?
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Extract from Dart by Alice Oswald
( … a dreamer
And then I saw the river’s dream-self walkdown to the ringmesh netting by the bridgeto feel the edge of shingle brush the edgeof sleep and float a world up like a corkout of its body’s liquid dark.Like in a waterfall one small twig caughtcatches a stick, a straw, a sack, a meshof leaves, a fragile wickerwork of floodbrash,I saw all things catch and reticulateinto this dreaming of the Dartthat sinks like a feather falls, not quitein full possession of its weight)
I wake wide in a swim ofseagulls, scavengers, monomaniac, madrubbish pickers, mating blatantly, screaming
and slouch off scumming and flashing andhatching fliesto the milk factory, staring at routine things:looking down the glass lines: bottles on beltsgoing round bends. Watching out for breakages,working nights. Building up prestige. Me withmy hands under the tap, with my brain coated ina thin film of milk. In the fridge, in thewarehouse, wearing ear-protectors.
dairyworker…
I’m in a rationalised set-up, a superplant.Everything’s stainless and risk can be spun offby centrifugal motion: blood, excrement, faecalmatter from the farms
have you forgotten the force that orders theworld’s fieldsand sets all cities in their sites, this nomadpulling the sun and moon, placeless in all places,born with her stones, with her circular bird-voice,carrying everywhere her quarters?
I’m in milk, 600,000,000 gallons a week.
processing, separating, blending. Very precisequantities of raw milk added to skim, piped intosilos, little screwed outlets pouring out milk to
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be sampled. Milk clarified milk homogenisedand pasteurised and when it rains, the rivercomes under the ringmesh netting, full of non-potable water. All those pathogens and spoilageorganisms! We have to think of our customers.We take pride in safety, we discard thirty bottleseither side of a breakage. We’ve got weights andchecks and trading standards
and a duck’s nest in the leat with four blue eggs
and all the latest equipment, all stainless steel soimmaculate you can see your soul in it, in ahairnet, in white overalls and safety shoes.
It’s a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twentythousand cubic metres beingpumped in, stirred and settled out and wastedoff, looped back, macerated, digested, clarifiedand returned to the river. I’m used to the idea. Ifork the screenings out – a stink-mass ofloopaper and whathaveyou, rags cotton buds,you name it. I measure the intake through aflume and if there’s too much, I waste it offdown the stormflow, it’s not my problem.
sewageworker
When you think of all the milk we get fromUnigate, fats and proteins and detergentsfoaming up and the rain and all the publicsewers pumping in all day, it’s like a prisoner upto his neck in water in a cell with only a hand-pump to keep himself conscious, the wholeplace is always on the point of going under.
So we only treat the primary flow, we keep itmoving up these screws, we get the solidssettled out and then push the activated sludgeback through. Not much I can do.
I walk on metal grilles above smelly water, Iclimb the ladder, I stand on a bridge above abrown lagoon, little flocs of sludge and clarifiedliquor spilling over the edge of the outer circle.The bridge is turning very slowly, sweeping thespill-off round and I’m thinking illicit sneakingthoughts – no one can see me up here, just meand machinery and tiny organisms.
I’m in charge as far as Dartmoor, themetabolism of the whole South West, starting
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with clouds and flushing down throughbuildings and bodies into this underground gridof pipes, all ending up with me up here on mybridge – a flare of methane burning off blue atone end of the works and a culvert of cleanwater discharging out the other end, twentyBOD, nine ammonia, all the time, as and when
(Oswald, 2010 [2002], pp. 28–30)
Discussion
(This is a lengthy comment because the text is multilayered and many-
voiced; possible readings, silent and out loud, are correspondingly
various and variable.)
Overall appearance on the page, especially spacing and layout, are the
first things that strike the eye, even before getting to meaning. So to
begin with I would be guided by the fact that most of the opening lines
don’t go all the way across the page and have plenty of space around
and between them. At the same time, the lines are uneven in length and
not organised in regular blocks. In other words, the first part is in a kind
of free verse and organised in what are usually called ‘verse paragraphs’
(by analogy with prose). Much of the text later does look like prose
because it stretches all the way across the page and comes in
recognisable paragraphs; though even these are interspersed with the
odd single line that stands out, and only some of them begin with a
capital letter. This much is obvious at a glance.
Slightly less obvious is the fact that any reading out loud is going to
have to engage with the persistent tension between sense and
sentences that run on and lines that keep on ‘turning’ at the ends
(‘verse’ initially meant neither more nor less than ‘a turn’, as in ‘reverse’).
With ‘free verse’ like this, because of the irregularity, that engagement
has to be especially flexible and resourceful. So, from the very first lines,
I would be looking, listening and feeling out for the length and strength
of pauses to register the effect of line endings. In the first two lines, for
instance, I would dwell firmly yet lightly on the gap introduced into the
phrasal verb ‘walk down’. This is here made to straddle two lines, and
marking the gap with a slight delay would be enough to signal a telling
difference: ‘(And then I saw the river’s dream-self walk / down to the
ringmesh netting by the bridge’. Thus the line itself turns ‘down’ even as
the sense flows on and the sentence continues; it’s a fine instance of
verse run-over, sometimes also called enjambment. What’s more, what
these lines expressly tell us is that we are here partaking of a special
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dream-like state, where the vision is metaphorical, heightened and
personified.
The punctuation is telling too. The opening bracket suggests this is in
some sense a world apart and yet apparently going on already: we are
plunging into the middle of an oddly separate yet ongoing experience. In
this respect the explicit identification of ‘a dreamer’ in the margin is
reassuring but almost superfluous. It’s a handy clue for the reader to
know who is speaking/thinking/dreaming, but like the identification of the
speaker in a play script, would probably not be read out loud. (It should
be pointed out that the opening of this extract had to be slightly edited
for this chapter. The initial bracket and the marginal identification of ‘a
dreamer’ apply to this passage but are drawn from a few lines earlier,
and the ellipsis has been added to signal the absence of those lines.
The broader point is that every re-production of a text entails a
transformation, in this case to fit a reading activity in a textbook.)
The opening prepares me for at least one voice that will be sensitive to
symbolic meaning and tuned along poetic lines. That is, as the last lines
of the first verse paragraph confirm, at least some of this will be a
‘dreaming of the Dart’, rich in imagery and sound-patterning (‘that sinks
like a feather falls’), and scrupulous in weighing values as well as verses
(‘in full possession of its weight’). When I’m reading/performing the poem
I would therefore deliver the more obviously poetic lines with particular
care, poise and precision, attentive to line endings and alert to nuances
of sound, sense and perception. My voice is that of an older male and
quite deep, but I would not want it to be fuzzy or muddy here. Your voice
may well be different, and your performance – like your interpretation –
will naturally be in some respects unique.
In addition to what I shall call the ‘poetic dream voice’ of Dart, although it
might also be called something like ‘the river’s verse voice’, we need to
recall the author’s prefatory remark that ‘All voices should be read as the
river’s mutterings.’ At all events, it’s a voice that surfaces later from time
to time, even in the midst of the apparently more prosaic, workaday
language identified with the ‘dairy worker’ and ‘sewage worker’. One of
several instances that stand out for me is the gap – and jump – within
the dairy worker’s declaration of faith in the industrial process: ‘We take
pride in safety, we discard thirty bottles either side of a break. We’ve got
weights and checks and trading standards’, which continues shortly with
‘and all the latest equipment, all stainless steel’. And yet there, tucked in
the middle of that sentence, is a line clearly set apart: ‘and a duck’s nest
in the leat with four blue eggs’. This sounds a distinctly poetic and
slightly archaic or dialectal note (a ‘leat’ is older English for a
watercourse) and also offers a passing, highly particular celebration of
nature. In effect, it’s a one-line miniature word-painting. On the page it
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stands out – and in performance it would ring out – as markedly,
perhaps refreshingly different from the surrounding celebration of
industrial hypermodernity. What’s more, that same, sinuously ongoing
yet variably spaced and paced sentence maintains a kind of dual vision
and double-discourse to the end: ‘and all the latest equipment, all
stainless steel so immaculate you can see your soul in it, in a hairnet, in
white overalls and safety shoes’. Stainless steel … soul … hairnet …?
These words belong to worlds that are usually kept apart. Yet here they
are made to collide and fuse. The challenges for the reader, especially
out loud, are both demanding and revealing. I must have read these
lines out a dozen times – each time more or less differently, more or less
satisfied with the effect.
The same goes for the rest of the passage, always with shifting
demands and variable responses. The sewage worker also has words
that belong to many worlds. Much of the time they represent formal
technical registers to do with the processing of sewage: for example, ‘I
measure the intake through a flume and if there’s too much, I waste it off
down the stormflow’. But these technicalities, which are often informed
by a sense of a system at full stretch and an operative under rising
pressure, are relieved by snatches of colloquial comment and frank
disclosure: ‘it’s not my problem … Not much I can do … all the time, as
and when’. Meanwhile, again, that ‘poetic dream voice’ keeps emerging
in one guise or another. For while both the dairy worker and the sewage
worker are represented through language that may be called ‘prosaic’ in
both senses (i.e. routine and not poetry), there are odd flashes and the
rhythmic stresses and strains of more overtly ‘poetic’ language too.
Sometimes this is a matter of an arresting sound effect: ‘It’s a rush, a
sploosh of sewage’. Sometimes it’s something more sustained and
perhaps unsettling: ‘and I’m thinking illicit sneaking thoughts – no one
can see me up here, just me and machinery and tiny organisms’.
Meanwhile, all the time, there are tricky decisions to come to about who
precisely is speaking or thinking what and why, and corresponding
adjustments to make in delivery. For example, with the dairy worker, ‘Me
with my hands under the tap’ sounds convincingly colloquial and context-
bound; whereas ‘I’m in a rationalised set-up, a superplant’ could be a bit
of personal boasting but has a hint of corporate-speak about it too. But
then, immediately afterwards, the poetic dream voice seems to cut in
with a direct address to the dairy worker, and by extension the reader:
‘have you forgotten the force that orders the world’s fields / and sets all
cities in their sites’. This language is also slightly archaic and mannered,
and in fact sounds like a quotation from a religious or philosophical text
(which I haven’t been able to identify yet). And so on. Decisions,
decisions … in the first place about who immediately is speaking these
words or thinking these thoughts, and in the second and third places
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about what discourses are indirectly in play from the distant past and the
insistent present. Sure, ‘All voices’ may ultimately be read, as Oswald
suggests, ‘as the river’s mutterings’. But that still leaves plenty of
pressingly immediate and more or less open questions about which
particular voices and presences (points of view, perspectives, even
absences) are potentially in play within and around the text at any one
time. The answer, of course, is not one but many and shifting. So we
may talk of re-voicings as well as re-visions. Your voice – like mine –
has a say in these too.
There are some theoretical issues that readily arise from the above
reflections on your reading and performance. The following questions
will help develop these: they connect directly to the key terms and
ideas already explored in Section 7.2.
Activity 7.4
Allow about 45 minutes
Now answer the following questions on Oswald’s poem:
. Drawing on what you know about the composition and occasion of
the poem, and your experience of reading it, how would you
characterise the kinds of creation or creativity involved?
. Do you pick up a particular ‘politics’ in and around this piece:
ecological and environmental, and perhaps based on occupation and
gender too? How do these relate to the kinds of poetics in play?
. In particular, weigh the kinds of human–nature relation in the
balance: how far do we see people apart from or as a part of nature
– alongside or above, within or without?
. More generally, consider the kinds of power that are in play –
perhaps with equal emphasis on both terms. That is, who or what is
represented as having what kind of power (control, influence) over
whom or what? And what room for play (flexibility, freedom) is there
in the representation of those roles and relations – whether in the
text as composed or the text as performed? (This could also be
framed as a question on the relations between ethics and aesthetics,
as between politics and poetics in the second bullet point in this list.)
Discussion
Here are some of my own provisional thoughts to help the process
along. For instance, I tend to theorise the whole issue of creativity/
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creation along the lines of re-creativity and re-creation. This is perhaps
particularly obvious with this poem given that the poet’s compositional
process was based on tape-recorded interviews. As for the politics and
poetics of all of this, I would certainly be thinking about the relations
between milk factories, sewage works and ‘the river’s dream-self’ (still
wondering what that might be). And I would look closely at the
representations of the various processes, including the speech-thoughts
of the workers. But all the time I am aware – and my reading aloud and
reflections on it would constantly remind me – that this is a narrative and
dramatic poem with many made-up figures, ‘voices’ and sound effects in
play. The shifts and switches of texture – and therefore perspective –
range from the subtle and passing (‘Me with my hands under the tap,
with my brain coated in a thin film of milk’) to the obviously over-the-top
(‘I’m in milk, 600,000,000 gallons a week.’).
Even a single word can serve to conjure up a whole world, multiple
worlds: ‘sploosh’ (children’s speech, cartooning, onomatopoeia);
‘Unigate’ (milkmen, milk van, corporate capital); ‘BOD’ (‘Biological
Oxygen Demand’, technical measure of organic activity); ‘floodbrash’ (an
older dialect word for what’s left after a flood, sometimes used of artistic
effects); and so on. Each of these may serve as a clue to explore the
shifting grounds of interpretation and as a cue for a specifically nuanced
performance. There is, to be sure, a strongly implicit ecological agenda
and a specific environment (‘the Dart’) at issue. But there are
motivations, thoughts, feelings and effects that flow through and reach
beyond those issues alone. You, too, will have views on what these are,
and your own ways of seeing and saying them.
Subtle and complex texts can only be enriched by further re-reading;
they are never exhausted. Strong theories and core terms are the same;
they are prodigiously productive when pushed to the limit. Beyond that
they need to be refined or replaced by other ideas and, sometimes,
practices. The next section takes a more overtly multimedia approach
to a variable text in changing contexts.
It doesn’t really matter where a song comes from – it just
matters where it takes you
In this section you are invited to work through a series of activities to
consider another text, and to reflect on what its various
transformations over a considerable period of time can tell us about
the nature of creativity. The activities are organised around the various
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stages of production and reproduction to help you track key moments
of creativity.
The text you are going to consider is a Bob Dylan song, ‘A Hard
Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ (1963), whose transformations can be tracked
over more than 50 years: through the production of the song itself to a
travelling exhibition about climate change. Each emerges from a
moment of re-production. Even the ‘original’ song does not emerge
from nowhere but is a response to particular circumstances and echoes
previous texts (for another example, see Chapter 2, Section 2.5). At
each moment of re-production, there is a change in medium, context
and function, so the precise meanings and effects of the material vary
accordingly. In terms of power, the text is constantly being re-aligned
to express different individual and collective aims; so it acts as both
the source and the site of a wide variety of personal–political agendas.
You have seen throughout this book how texts can be recontextualised,
repurposed and revisioned for their creators’ own personal and
political ends. To be sure, someone and something called ‘Bob Dylan’s
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”’ is in a sense there all the time. But in
other senses, through other modes and moments of reproduction, a
whole lot of other people and things keep on getting in on the act.
The following activities are organised around two examples of creative
re-production. Activities 7.5, 7.6 and 7.7 focus on the way the song
comes into being, including the songwriter’s reflections. Then,
Activities 7.8 and 7.9 focus on the way the song is developed as part
of a travelling (and virtual) exhibition on climate change.
Activity 7.5
Allow about 40 minutes
Read the last verse of ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, which is
reproduced in this activity. Then use the following questions to help firm
up your bearings and to identify specific aspects of the particular world
represented. You will notice that some of these questions overlap and
feed into each other:
. Who is represented ‘within’ the text, and who is doing the
representing ‘outside’ it? (Characters/figures, speakers, narrators,
performers, authors, etc.) For instance, Dylan is the text’s author
(outside the text) and there seems to be a dialogue going on (inside
the text).
. When and where are these things taking place, again distinguishing
‘inner’ textual and ‘outer’ contextual dimensions? (e.g. times and
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places sung and talked about; times and places of composition and
communication.)
. What basically is the text about? (Subject matter, topic.) Try to say
this in a phrase or two to begin with, and then a full sentence. For
instance, the text is ‘a bleak vison of the world’; a full sentence would
perhaps elaborate on this description.
. What kind of text is it and what is it made of? (Genres and media.) In
practice, talk of the kind or type of text often combines aspects of
genre and medium (e.g. ‘buddy movie’, ‘TV documentary’ and ‘eco-
activists’ website’).
. Why was it made – why does it seem to have been done?
(Motivation, purpose, function.) Attempting to discern the many and
various reasons – private and public, individual and collective,
deliberate and accidental, conscious and otherwise – why something
comes to be made is a fascinating, even if frustrating, task.
. How is it done – how well – and how do you respond? (Style and
structure, value and evaluation.) This draws together a wide range of
considerations, ranging from specific choices and combinations of
words (style) to larger aspects of textual organisation (structure).
Naturally, such considerations involve general issues of tradition and
judgement (‘how well’, value) as well as particular instances of
personal taste, awareness and expectation (‘response’, evaluation).
Extract from ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ by Bob Dylan
…
Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?I’m a-goin back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forestWhere the people are many and their hands are all emptyWhere the pellets of poison are flooding their watersWhere the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prisonWhere the executioner’s face is always well hiddenWhere hunger is ugly, where souls are forgottenWhere black is the color, where none is the numberAnd I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe itAnd reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see itThen I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
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It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
(Dylan, 1963)
Discussion
In terms of the who in this text, there are two main voices, which seem
to be of a parent and son. Notice the voicing of the insistent first-person
speech within the verses ‘I’m a-goin’, ‘I’ll walk’, ‘I’ll tell it and think it and
speak it and breathe it’. And notice how this is framed by repeated
questioning from the older speaker, presumably the parent (‘what’ll you
do now, my blue-eyed son? … my darling young one?’). Of the character
of the son, we can be certain of one thing – he has courage. The modal
‘will’ emphasises his determination to go out into the horrors of the world
he describes (see below) in order to bear witness to it. It is instructive to
consider how far this is substantially a dramatic monologue and what
would be lost (or gained) by taking the dialogue frame away.
The disorientating nature of the text makes the when and where
particularly difficult to ascertain. The use of the present simple tense,
mostly of the verb ‘to be’, suggests a place without past or future. As for
the place (or is it places?), ‘the deepest black forest’ is surprisingly
populated by people whose ‘hands are all empty’ (of what?). It is a world
where waters are the victims of flooding rather than its perpetrators. In
short, it is somewhere without the comfort of familiar reference points –
‘Where black is the color, where none is the number’. The only
seemingly positive image ‘the home in the valley’ is immediately and
brutally undermined by the following ‘meets the damp dirty prison’. What
is certain about this world is its horror – a place of executioners,
forgotten souls and hard, hard rain.
Exploring the who, when and where has already given us some notion of
the what of this text. So, for example, it could be validly described as ‘a
parent–son exchange which shows a bleak vision of the world that the
son is determined to bear witness to’. Of course, this is only one of
many possible descriptions and interpretations. Your own analysis may
concur with, complement or even, in places, contradict the one above.
As for what kind of text it is and what it is made of, it might be called a
‘political/polemical commentary’ which is presented (at least here) in the
medium of the ‘the printed word’, although, of course, it was originally
conceived of as being heard through the medium of song. Perhaps the
most elusive answer is that to the question of why it was made. We ask
such questions all the time, even when we know there are no
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straightforward, complete answers. What prompted Dylan to write the
song? Even if we had the chance to ask him that question, his response
could not be taken as the one and only definitive answer. Beside any
irretrievably subconscious motivations, his answer would be filtered
through and coloured by the prism of his subsequent experiences.
In terms of how it is done, how well and how you respond to it, this is of
course a matter of personal taste (see Chapter 4, Section 4.3). After all,
you might love, loathe or not care or know much about Dylan at this
point. What is important is that you can articulate why you feel as you do
and, as part of your response, are able to point to textual features which
influence that feeling. You might, for example, consider the parallelism
(repeated yet varied phrasing); structural refrain; density and intensity of
metaphor; use of line and verse as visual as well as oral/aural
dimensions of utterance organisation.
Activity 7.6
Allow about 30 minutes
Find recordings of the song by Dylan and other artists. (These should be
easy to find online – YouTube is probably a good place to start.)
Change, modify and develop your answers to the questions in the
previous activity in the light of listening to these performances. How do
the different treatments affect your interpretation?
Discussion
What is the effect of Dylan’s edgy nasal chanting and raw acoustic
guitar? Maybe you would characterise the sound differently. For
instance, how would you describe the precise rise and fall of voice and
emotion in the refrain: ‘And it’s a hard … It’s a hard rai-ai-ai-ai-ai-n’s a-
gonna fa-a-all’?
In searching for the song, you may well have come across a number of
Dylan’s performances of it at various stages of his long career. You may
also have come across different artists covering the song in their own
distinctive ways. Every single instance of reproduction and reception is
to some extent a fresh event and an occasion for a slightly or very
different interpretation. In this respect, all interpretations are
performative: they actively realise new possibilities and don’t just register
pre-existing realities. Indeed, even a silent reading of the written text can
be seen as a performative interpretation. And, much as Dylan has
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realised this song in different ways over his career, our reading of the
same text can change each time we come to it.
Activity 7.7
Allow about 30 minutes
Now read the quotations from Dylan below, which relate to the moment
of inspiration that triggered his writing of the song. Again, revisit the
‘who’, ‘when’, etc. questions (see Activity 7.5) and modify your answers
in the light of your reading of these quotes. Dylan recalls composing the
song in 1962 at a time when there had been tense confrontation
between the United States and the Soviet Union about the latter’s siting
of missiles in Cuba.
I wrote it [‘A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall’] at the time of the
Cuban crisis. I was in Bleecker Street in New York. We just
hung around at night – people sat around wondering if it was
the end, and so did I. Would 10 o’clock the next day ever
come? … It was a song of desperation. What could we do?
Could we control the men on the verge of wiping us out? The
words came fast – very fast. It was a song of terror. Line after
line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness.
(Cited in Hard Rain Project, 2016a)
[But] it doesn’t really matter where a song comes from. It just
matters where it takes you. (R. Hilburn interview, The Los
Angeles Times, April 4, 2004)
(Cited in Bieri, 2008, p. 128)
Discussion
You may find that Dylan’s reflections on what inspired the song enrich
your own understanding of it. On the other hand, you may feel that it
narrows down and closes off potential interpretations. For Dylan, writing
the above account in retrospect, it clearly didn’t ‘really matter where a
song comes from’. Historically speaking, however, and in terms of the
musical and literary influences bearing on him personally at the moment
of composition, it clearly did and does matter. In fact, Dylan was writing
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in a long-standing song and ballad tradition and out of an increasingly
commercial contemporary ‘folk’ scene. His opening words and the
ongoing dramatic frame ‘Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?’
derive from the ‘Where have you been, my son’ formula that stretches
back to the English and Scottish border ballads collected by Bishop
Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (2015 [1765]) and, most
famously, in ‘Lord Randal’ featured by Sir Walter Scott in his Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border (2016 [1802–03]). The latter opens ‘O where hae
ye been, Lord Randal, my son?’ (for a full text and commentary, see
Pope and Macrae, 2012). Dylan also drew on and elsewhere paid
homage to the folk-song-collecting and protest-song-performing activities
of Pete and Peggy Seeger and Woody Guthrie, as did Joan Baez, Joni
Mitchell and other ‘folk’ singer-songwriters who emerged in the 1960s.
So, as noted in other parts of this book, a text never emerges from
nowhere. It always has its influences and antecedents, however
creatively original it may appear.
In the activities that follow you are asked to explore the second
example of creative reproduction, which focuses on the way the song
(words and sound) was taken up and developed as part of an
exhibition on climate change (involving images as well as words and
sound).
Activity 7.8
Allow about 30 minutes
The full words sung by Dylan can be heard online (see Hard Rain
Project, 2016b), where they accompany a montage of images from the
book Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature (Edwards, 2009).
Each image is matched with a line from the Dylan song and all together
they constitute a visual–verbal montage of the whole thing.
Below are some examples. (Please note, some of these images may be
considered distressing.) Look at the images next to their corresponding
lines and answer the following question:
. How do these images change or modify your understanding of the
lyrics?
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Figure 7.3 ‘And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall’
Figure 7.4 ‘I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’’
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Figure 7.5 ‘I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it’
Figure 7.6 ‘Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’’
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Discussion
Clearly, the photographs influence my/your interpretation of the lyrics
while the lyrics similarly impact on my/your understanding of the
photographs. So, for example, the seemingly innocuous ‘I met a white
man who walked a black dog’ assumes a particularly sinister meaning
when juxtaposed with Figure 7.7. This is a clandestine (and
subsequently notorious) mobile phone shot of a naked detainee being
threatened by a US soldier with a dog in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, 2004. As with
other multimodal texts that you have encountered in previous chapters,
the meanings of the images and the words together are not simply
additive, but, rather, emerge through the interaction between them. Thus,
meaning lies as much in the relationship between the words and images
as it does in the words and images. Think back, for example, to some of
the political texts in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book where humour arises
from the interplay between words and images.
Activity 7.9
Allow about 30 minutes
The following commentary was written by Fred Pearce (2007),
environment consultant for the New Scientist. Its main theme is that of
climate change. Read the text and comment on the effectiveness of
deploying Dylan’s lyrics in highlighting this crisis.
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Figure 7.7 ‘I met a white man who walked a black dog’
Water is our most fundamental natural resource. We cannot
survive without it. But it is also our most renewable resource.
Those clouds forming over the Indian Ocean are just the latest
step in a never-ending water cycle. The stuff we drink today is
the same water that the first fish swam in, which the dinosaurs
drank and which froze across much of the globe during the ice
ages. Our planet probably has no more and no less than it
ever has. Each day some 200 trillion gallons evaporate from
the oceans or the land to keep the water cycle in motion. On
average it stays in the air for ten days before falling again as
rain.
But from the High Andes to the plains of India, from southern
Europe to northern China, rain is becoming increasingly
unpredictable. Global warming is pumping more energy into
weather systems and making them more intense, and that can
bring both floods and droughts. In places, rivers are running
dry as rains fail and we take ever more water to irrigate our
crops. Conflicts over remaining supplies loom. In other places,
warmer air is making storm clouds more intense and
generating super-storms and hurricanes. Hard rains are
creating havoc.
(Pearce, 2007)
Discussion
Your reflections might have included references to the fittingly
apocalyptic flavour in Dylan’s lyrics. Also, the refrain about ‘hard rain’
reflects the increasingly intense nature of the world’s weather systems
as a result of climate change, making water a bringer of death and
devastation, rather than life and sustenance. The use of Dylan’s song for
the project is clearly another example of a text that is recontextualised
and repurposed for particular political ends.
7.4 Conclusion
There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to
the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the
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boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the
dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended
once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the
process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue.
(Bakhtin, 1986a, p. 170)
The epigraph above is taken from a piece that Bakhtin first drafted in
1945; he added the words in brackets in 1972. They are among the last
words he ever wrote. Significantly and symptomatically, given Bakhtin’s
insistence on the ceaseless exchange of partly unique utterances, this
text is itself open to variable translation and interpretation, and
multiple transmission. So are all others. The above translation, for
instance, happens to match my own translation of the original, based
on the collection Estetika Slovesnovo Tvortchestva (‘Aesthetics of Verbal
Creation’) (Bakhtin, 1986b). However, a rather different translation,
working from the same volume, is offered in the classic introduction to
‘dialogism’ (Holquist, 2002). In addition to all sorts of slight variations
in wording, the main difference is that Holquist drops the brackets that
are in the original. Meanwhile, curiously, another rather different
translation of this passage (with the brackets this time) is reproduced
on the cover of a standard Bakhtin anthology (Bakhtin et al., 1994) –
but doesn’t actually appear inside! My argument is not with the author
and editor of these volumes, which are authoritative and invaluable.
The point is that even notionally ‘the same text’ is constantly changing
and ceaselessly subject to the varying aims and emphases of different
writers and re-producers – even leaving aside accidents, mistakes and
deliberate misrepresentation. Translation is simply one of the more
obvious forms of textual transformation. Again, then, the key concept,
awkward and picky though it may appear, is re-production: ‘producing
afresh’ even while apparently just ‘producing again’. So it’s always a
case of ‘something new’ from ‘something old’ and, conversely,
‘something old’ in ‘something new’.
Here we return to Adrienne Rich’s notion of re-vision, also introduced
at the beginning of this chapter, in order to move the term into pole
position:
Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of
entering an old text from a new critical direction …
(Rich, 2001, p. 11)
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In this, the very last section in the book, which is the last of a series
of three, you are encouraged to pause for thought – and action. Re-
vision, in fact. And that, as the above definition reminds us, is
something far more searching and refreshing than simple ‘revision’,
with its usual emphasis on repetition and reinforcement. With all this
in mind, use this final checklist to help take a fresh look at what you
know and have done – and might now see and say otherwise. Do this
systematically but not too solemnly, and in any order that suits you:
. Whenever you come across discussion of key terms such as
‘creativity’, ‘politics’, ‘power’ and ‘language’ – ‘discourse’, ‘literature’,
‘narrative’, ‘performance’ and ‘poetry’ are just a few of the others –
explore the connections, distinctions and oppositions in play. Try
doing this diagrammatically (through verbal-visual shapes) and
dramatically (through points of view and voices).
. Every text, performance or image featured is of a certain kind and
in a particular material. Notice what that particular genre and
medium predispose you to see and say. Then consider how putting it
in another genre or medium would prompt you to see and say it
differently.
. All mediated communications entail moments and modes of (re)
production that are both plural and singular : plural in that various
times, places and persons are involved; singular in that the actual
instance or event is in some respects unique. Try to maintain a
sense of both.
. Each text has a potentially personal as well as public dimension, and
may express both individual and social concerns. Consider the
power relations in play within and around a particular text, and
whether it expresses a particular politics.
. Story and history are both kinds of narrative; drama and
conversation are both kinds of dialogue. Whenever you meet a text
that is routinely categorised as one of these kinds, consider how it
might be conceived and perhaps re-cast as the other.
. ‘Poetic’ texts are often thought to be more overtly patterned and
perhaps metaphorical than ‘prosaic’ ones. Try decreasing or
increasing the patterning and metaphor in some of the texts you
meet, gauge what the effect is and how far the poetry/prose
distinction holds.
Chapter 7 Looking back, leaping forwards: a personal–political review with critical–creative prospects
355
. Expand any of the above analyses through systematic application of
the questions ‘Who?’, ‘What?’, ‘When?’, ‘Where?’, ‘Why?’ and
‘How?’
. Extend them critically and creatively by asking: ‘What if …?’, ‘What
else …?’
This checklist can help to provide a frame for active re-vision. But it
will only work if you respond in and on your own terms. After all, the
whole point is that you may now prefer to say and do things rather
differently.
This chapter is dedicated to the memory and celebration of Terry
Hawkes, 1932–2014. Teacher, scholar, editor and provocateur
extraordinaire.
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Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources:
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have
been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make
the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
Images
Figure 1.1: Taken from: http://voiceseducation.org/content/aung-san-
suu-kyi-nobel-peace-prize-acceptance-speech-twenty-one-years-later.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Licence https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/; Figure 1.3 (top left): © The Baim Collection
Ltd; Figure 1.3 (top right): This England © DC Thomson & Co Ltd,
2014; Figure 1.3 (bottom left): Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/File:ThisHappyBreedDVD.jpg. Director David lean, Produced by
Noel Coward. Eagle-Lion Distributors Limited (UK); Figure 1.3
(bottom right): From http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480025/.
Copyright © 1990-2015 IMDb.com, Inc.; Figure 1.4: © Serdar Dalgic.
Taken from Twitter @serdaroncode; Figure 1.5: © Neymar Jr. Taken
from Twitter @neymarjr; Figure 1.6 (text): Garcez, B. (2014) ‘We are
all monkeys’, BBC Trending, © BBC. Reproduced by permission.
[Online] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-27191333
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from Twitter @neymarjr; Figure 1.6 (bottom image): © Sergio Aguero;
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Economist Newspaper Limited 2015; Figure 2.1: © epa european
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Overlaid text reproduced widely; Figure 2.4: Zack, Liesbeth. 2012.
‘”Leave, I want to have a shower!” The use of humour on the signs
and banners seen during the demonstrations in Tahrir Square’. R.
Genis et al. (eds.), Between West and East. Festschrift for Wim
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Europese Studies 20); Figure 2.5: Reproduced with permission from
Martin Tojo, L. (2014) ‘Taking over the Square’, Journal of Language
and Politics, vol. 13, no. 14, John Benjamins Publishing Company;
Acknowledgements
359
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permission © The Hershey Company; Figure 3.2: Photo © Norman
Parkinson; Figure 3.4: Taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/
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uselang=en-gb; Figure 3.5: Taken from https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Tyger.jpg?uselang=en-gb; Figure 3.6: Taken from http://
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reproduced by permission; Figure 3.9: Taken from: http://www.
historyworld.co.uk/; Chapter 3 Reading B, Figure 1 (top): © Videocon;
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licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en;
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/ Getty Images; Figure 5.1 (left): © JuSun / www.istockphoto.com;
Figure 5.1 (right): Reproduced with permission © Dalton Higgins;
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rman1770/Cartoonstock.com; Figure 5.5: © James McGowan;
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368/crazy-gk; Figure 5.9: Taken from http://www.eastcoastteam.8k.
com/ © East Coast Team; Figure 5.10: Adapted from Allington,
Dueck, and Jordanous (2015) by Daniel Allington; Figure 5.11: ©
Image Scotland / Alamy; Figure 5.12: Taken from: http://
telecorpproducts.com/imaqes/evalform1_lrg.gif © 2009 Telecorp
Products Inc. All Rights Reserved; Chapter 5 Reading B, Figure 1:
Image © iStockphoto.com / AIMSTOCK; Chapter 5 Reading B,
Figure 2: © iStockphoto.com / riskms; Figure 6.1: Taken from www.
fanfiction.net; Figure 6.2: Taken from www.ubu.com; Figure 6.3:
Creative Commons; Figure 6.4: Taken from: https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
History_Wikipedia_English_SOPA_2012_Blackout2.jpg. This file is
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/; Figure 7.3: © Mark Edwards/
Hard Rain Picture Library; Figure 7.4: © Nigel Dickinson/
nigeldickinson.com; Figure 7.5: © Mark Edwards/Hard Rain Picture
Library; Figure 7.6: © Mark Edwards/Hard Rain Picture Library;
Figure 7.7: Taken from http://www.hardrainproject.com/pageflip/01/
hard_rain_book.html, photographer unknown.
Text
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platform for linguistic creativity and polical dissent’, © Mariam
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(McDonald’s ‘Favourites’ campaign): Taken from http://jeffreyhill.
typepad.com/english/2009/10/mcdonalds-poetry-ad.html#.
VgkaQtJVhBe; page 139 (History): Taken from: http://www.unilever.
ca/our-brands/detail/ben-and-jerrys/396352/. © Unilever 2015; pages
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choice in advertising to bilinguals: asymmetric effects for multinationals
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Language History, Cambridge University Press; pages 213–15 (Reading
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London, W11 1JN; page 229 (Table 5.1): Song lyrics and translation
from: Alim, H. S., Ibrahim, A. and Pennycook, A. (2009) Global
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From OPENED GROUND: SELECTED POEMS 1966–1996 by
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permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and Faber and Faber
Ltd; pages 289–90 (Goldsmith quote): Taken from: http://www.
poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/ubuweb-at-15-years-an-
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Networked Culture, © New York University Press; pages 327–8
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Oswald): Alice Oswald, excerpt from ‘Dart’ from Spacecraft Voyage 1:
New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2007 by Alice Oswald. Used with
permission of Faber & Faber Ltd and The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.
graywolfpress.org; pages 345–6 (Extract from ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna
Fall’ by Bob Dylan): © Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan Music Co., Special
Rider Music; page 353 (Pearce quote): Pearce, F. (2007) ‘Water: the
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The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
364
Index
abbreviations in textspeak 204–6
Aboelezz, Mariam 82–4, 103–11
Achebe, Chinua 146–7
Ackroyd, Stephen 258–9
adhocracy 43, 53–4
advertisements
linguistic creativity 123–32linguistic innovation 185
multimodality 130–1, 142
multiple voices 137–40
poetic function 122–3
political dimension 142–7, 149–58, 161–9
product descriptions 120–1
purpose 119, 134
see also postersaesthetics 72, 177
Afro-Caribbeans 20
agency 219–20, 241
in call centres 236, 237–8, 255–67
language of hip hop 226–33, 244–52
Ahlbrecht, Bernd 156
Ahluwalia, Rohini 145, 161–9
Akindes, F.Y. 227, 244–5Al Shabi, Abul Qassim 109
Alim, H.S. 217
Allas, Marcia, 51–2
Allington, D. 231, 232–3
Alves, Dani 35, 38, 41
Amazon 44
Amis, Kingsley 194–5
amphibrach 124anthropology 30, 37, 176, 178
appropriateness in language use 176
Arab Freedom Anthem (song) 85
Arab spring 18, 44, 56, 62
Arabic language 80, 83–4, 104, 106–8, 110
archives, digital 288–92
Aristotle 23, 26, 29, 73, 331
Arnold, Matthew 29–30, 31assonance 72
Athens occupation 82
Auden, W.H. 91, 113
audiences 27, 58, 299
Augustine 327
Aung San Suu Kyi 24–6, 27
Austen, Jane 136
authority
creativity and tradition 180–4
team leaders 258–60see also power
authorship
alternative models of 294–9
fan fiction 273–8, 303–8
Bagnara, S. 238
Bain, Peter 220, 237–8, 255–67
Bakhtin, Mikhail 20–1, 22, 23, 34, 38, 71, 84, 137,353–4
Ball, A.F. 21
Balzac, Honoré de 135
Barnes, Djuna 313
Barthes, Roland 135, 154
BBC Trending 41–2
Beimers, P. 195–6
Bell, E. 296Ben&Jerry’s ice cream 138–40, 142
Bennett, T. 332
Bentham, Jeremy 285
Berners-Lee, Tim 298
Bhatia,Tej K. 163, 164
Bieri, G. 348
bilingualism 145, 161–9, 190
Billig, M. 78Blair, Tony 74–6
Blake, William 33, 125–31, 134, 333–4
blogs 209, 211
book blogs 195
food blogs 223–4
Obama’s speech 73–4, 97
Blyton, Paul 258
Bollywood movies 163Bourdieu, Pierre 174, 219
Brathwaite, Edward Kamu 114
British Asians 191–2, 213–15
Index
365
British National Corpus 171–2
Burgess, Anthony 189
Bush, George W. 186, 207, 209, 211
Cairns, H. 26
call centres 217–18, 220, 233–41, 255–70
Excell 237, 256, 262–7
management
authority 258–60
cynicism about 260–2
undermining 263–4
‘T’ call centre 256–9, 261–2, 266–7trade unions 256, 264–5, 266–7
Cameron, D. 178, 181, 194, 220, 235
Campion, Thomas 116
Cannon, S. 247
capitalism 142–4, 153–7
Carey, John 193
carnivals 84–5
Carter, Ronald 27, 30, 38–9, 70, 238cartoons 87, 222, 326
censorship 272, 278–88, 310–14
internet 297–9
centrifugal force 22
centripetal force 22
Chesters, G. 84
Chinese language 84, 108
Chomsky, Noam 50, 178Chouliaraki, L. 93
Chrabota, Boguslaw 153
‘Circles of flow’ (Pennycook) 227, 244–52
climate change 352–3
‘The Clod and the Pebble’ (Blake) 125–9, 131
Coca Cola 222
Coetzee, J.M. 283–5, 287
Cohen, Nick 288Collinson, David 258, 261, 266
comics 51–3
Communication Workers Union (CWU) 256, 266
Communism 143
computer games 189
Comstock, Anthony 311
‘conlangs’ 188–9
consonants in textspeak 203constitutive intertextuality 109–10
consumer attitudes 145
Convergence Culture (Jenkins) 42–3, 50–5
Cook, G. 149
copyright 272
creative commons licensing 294–9
Digital Millennium Copyright Act 272, 295
and fan fiction 275–6, 303–8and music 293
correctness in language use 176
counter-space 82–4, 103–11
Cranach, Lucas 61
create 327–8
‘Creating a counter-space: Tahrir Square’ (Aboelezz)
82–4, 103–11
creation 328creative 327–8
creative commons licensing 294–9
creative work, distribution of 292–4, 315–22
creative writing 181, 327, 328
creativity
and agency 219–20, 241
in call centres 237–8, 255–67
in hip hop 226–33, 244–52authority and tradition 180–4
critical–creative approach 323–56
and cultural values 29–34
defining 119, 325–9
economic asset 183
elitism and language of literature 192–7
and hip hop 226–33
and originality 29, 34–9, 78in political discourse 65–71, 92–3
analysis 71–3
copying and remixing 85–8
value of 88–92, 113–17
and power 299
re-creativity 343
regulating 272–8, 303–8
and value 171–3, 197–8see also linguistic creativity
Criado-Perez, Caroline 288
critical–creative approach 323–56
critical discourse analysis (CDA) 71, 77–8, 143
‘croppies’ 89–90
crowd, power and wisdom of 39–45, 50–64
Crystal, David 65, 73–4, 77, 97–102, 179–80, 201–6
cultural capital 174
culture
convergence culture 42–3, 50–5
definitions 30
high and popular 31–4, 188–92
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
366
participatory 321
sociocultural context 20, 22
transcultural flows 228–9
values 29–34, 272Culture and Anarchy (Arnold) 29–30
cummings, e.e. 185
Curzan, Anne 184, 187, 207–11
Cyrus, Miley 86
Dargis, M. 275
Darnton, Robert 63
Dart (Oswald) 324, 335–43Davies, L., 298
Dawkins, Richard 39, 87
De Vries, Kimberly M. 51–2
defamiliarisation 29
democracy 153
demonstrations 66, 68, 78–85, 103–11
Descartes, René 329
dialogical writing 34
Díaz, Junot 188–92
dichotomies, challenging 324, 325–34
dictionaries 187
digital curation and distribution 288–94, 315–22
Digital Millennium Copyright Act 272, 295
dilemmas 78
discourse 71
critical discourse analysis 71, 77–8, 143metaphors in 155
monologic 135, 137, 138
participation in 59–60
transgressive 105, 283
Western marketing 143–4, 149–58
see also political discourse
displaced interaction 27
Dixons’ Christmas advertisement 137–8, 140DJ’ing 217–18
Doctorow, Cory 53, 292–4, 295–6, 315–16
Dostoevsky Fyodor, 137
Douglas, James 281–3
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (Owen) 85
Duranti, A. 219
Duszak, A. 109
Dylan, Bob 324, 344–53
Eagleton, T. 30
East Coast Team 228–30
Eastern Europe, marketing in 143–4, 149–58
Edwards, M. 349–52
Egyptian Arabic 83, 108
Egyptian demonstrations 79–80, 82–5, 103–11
Eisenhower, General Dwight 123El Amrani, I. 106
Eliot, T.S. 189–90, 193, 283
elitism 192–7
Elizabeth I, Queen 27–8
Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion 123–5, 127, 131
Ellis, Warren 52–3
eloquence 177
‘elvish’ language 188–9embetterment 211
empathy 270
English language
in advertising 165–7
as global language 83, 108, 144–6
mixed Englishes 248–52
‘non-standard’ 19–20, 22
poetry 115–16proper English 213–14
as second language 163, 230
in social media 40, 45
teaching of 180–3
entextualisation 34, 37
Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 35–6, 37, 39, 44
Essex, Earl of 27–8
ethnicity 36, 99–100, 189Afro-Caribbeans 20
and call centre language 269
and hip hop 226, 247
ethos 23, 26, 72
Excell call centre 237, 256, 262–7
Facebook 44
‘fair use’ 276Fairclough, Norman 69, 74–9, 93, 109, 150, 155, 236
Fairey, Shepard 87
fan fiction 273–8
and copyright 275–6, 303–8
Faure, S. 247
feedback 278
Ferguson, C.A. 108
Ferguson, M. 151Fernie, Sue 255
fiction
fan fiction 273–8, 303–8
mixed languages 189
Index
367
Field, Claire 275, 305
Fifty Shades of Grey (James) 195–7
films 85, 87, 189
Bollywood movies 163fan based 273, 274–5, 304–5
Finnegan’s Wake (Joyce) 116, 189
folk songs 349
Formalists 29, 77
Forster, E.M. 283, 323
Fox, Sue 239, 269–70
free verse 339
French language 145–6, 247–8‘From the Frontier of Writing’ (Heaney) 286–7
frontier imagery 155–6
Fukuyama, F. 149, 154
The Future of English (Graddol) 144
Garcez, Bruno 41
Garcia, M.C. 247
Gawne, L. 178gender 219
at call centres 266
and comics 52
and linguistic innovation 186
and online abuse 288
German language 44, 57–8, 59, 61, 146
Giddens, A. 219
Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Coetzee) 283–5Global Frequency (Ellis) 52–3
globalisation 221–6, 240–1
advertising 142–7, 149–58, 161–9
call centres 217, 233–40, 269–70
definition 221
English language 83, 108, 144–6
hip hop 217, 226–33, 244–52
and the internet 41, 240glocalisation 221–2, 223–5, 241
in hip hop 226–7
Goldsmith, Kenneth 288–91
Goldsworthy, D. 246
Gompertz, W. 288
Google 44
Gordon, George 30
Gove, Michael 182, 183Graddol, David 144
graffiti 105, 174, 217–19
grammar 181–2
grass-roots political activity 78–85, 103–11
Greeks, Ancient 23
Greenblatt, S. 25, 33
Gribbon, L. 81
Grunier, S. 305
Hall, Radclyffe 278–9, 281–3, 310
Hall, S. 151, 152
Halliday, M.A.K. 151
Hamilton, E. 26
Han, Jin K. 161
Hansen, M.H. 22
Hard Rain Project 348, 349–52‘A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall’ (Dylan) 324, 344–53
Harding, Warren G. 207–9
Harrison, Tony 114
Harry Potter groups 273–8, 303–8
Hartocollis, A. 307
Hawaiian hip hop 227, 244–6
Hawas, S. 81
Hawkes, Terry 356Hazlitt, William 37, 46
Head, D. 284
Heaney, Seamus 67, 69, 285
‘From the Frontier of Writing’ 286–7
‘The redress of poetry’ 91–2, 113–17
‘Requiem for the Croppies’ 89–91
heightened reflexivity 93
Herman, E.S. 50Hesserl, S. 82
heterogeneity 221
heteroglossic language 34, 137–8
Hiatt, Mary 186
Higgins, Christina 230
‘high’ culture 31–4, 188–92
Hindi 145, 163–9
hip hop 217–19, 226–33, 240, 244–52Hirschkop, K. 21
Hoban, Russell 189
Holquist, M. 354
Homer 30, 192
homogenisation 221–2, 225, 238
Horace 85
Hoston, W.T. 74
Hughes, Ted 114Hultgren, A.K. 239, 269–70
humour
cartoons 87, 222, 326
cyber-humour 261
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
368
in demonstrations 79, 83–4, 106–7, 109–10
and incongruity 37
in posters 18
and power 38in social media 45, 79–80
subversive 237–8, 255–67
Humphrys, John 19, 20
Huq, R. 247
hypertextual 277
iambic octameter 126
ideologylanguage ideologies 176
meaning of 21, 22
political party 75
and racism 36
images
culture and 31–3
Hard Rain 349–52
internet censorship 297–9political discourse 66–8, 80–1
Wild West 155–7
see also advertisements; cartoons; films; graffiti;
television
incongruity 37
indexical sign 71
India 145, 163–9
Indignados movement 82innovation in language see linguistic creativity;
linguistic innovation
interdiscursivity 109
International P.E.N. 313–14
internet
censorship 297–9
creative commons licensing 294–9
creative language 178curation and distribution 288–94, 315–22
cyber-humour 261
fan fiction 273–8, 303–8
memes 39, 41, 87–8, 240
regulating 272
SoundCloud website 231–2
Wikipedia 43, 53–4, 297–9
see also social mediainterpretation 329, 347
intertextuality 71, 108–10, 152–7
The Interview (film) 17
Irish literature 115–16
‘Is there a global “call centre” speech style?’ (Fox)
239, 269–70
Islam 287–8
Ivan the Terrible Part II (film) 28
Jakobson, Roman 121, 123
James, E.L. 195–7
Jameson, F. 149, 157
Japanese hip hop 248–9
Jefferson, Thomas 187, 210, 211
Jeffries, L. 29, 141
Jenkins, Henry 87, 272, 275, 276, 278Convergence Culture 42–3, 50–5
‘Spreadable media’ 292–4, 315–22
Jerusalem (anthem) 33, 333
Jespersen, Otto 186
jokes, political 106–7
Jones, S. 297
Jonson, Ben 211
Jowett, G. 74Joyce, James 192, 194
Finnegan’s Wake 116, 189
Ulysses 310, 312
judgements 173, 197–8
on language use 175–7
of value 184–7
Kapisi, King 246Kaufman, J.C. 29, 34, 218, 227
Keegan, W. 154, 157
Keen, Andrew 296
Kelly-Holmes, Helen 143–4, 149–58, 221
Kelman, James 192
Keraitim, S. 105
Keyes, C.L. 217, 219
Keywords (Williams) 325Kim Jong-un 17
King, Martin Luther 102
King Crazy GK 228–30
knowledge sharing 54
Korean hip hop 250–2
Koslow, Scott 161, 162, 163
Kress, Gunther 41
Krims, A. 252Krishna, Aradhna 145, 161–9
Kristeva, J. 71
Labour party 75, 77
Index
369
Labov, W. 178, 183, 186
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 278, 279–81, 282,
283
languageagency in 219–20
hip hop 226–33, 244–52
creativity in see linguistic creativity
heteroglossic 34, 137–8
ideologies 176
of literature 192–7
metalanguage 175
patterning of 123–5, 127socialisation 176
‘standard’ form of 22
and value 174–7
see also linguistic entries; mixed languages;
individual languages
‘Language choice in advertising to bilinguals’
(Krishna and Ahluwalia) 145, 161–9
language usejudgements on 175–7
political dimension 19–23
Larkin, Philip 194
Latin language 57–8, 61
Lawrence, D.H. 278, 279–81, 282, 283, 310
Lawver, Heather 275
Lea, M.R. 297
Leader, Z. 194, 195Leech, G. 136
Lefebvre, H. 82, 83, 103
Leo X, Pope 57–9
Lewis, Felice Flannery 312
Lewis, Wyndham 313
Liberman, M. 186
Lillis, T. 83
linguistic creativity 147, 178–80in advertisement and poem 123–32
and purpose 132–5
linguistic innovation 184–7, 207–11
linguistics 174–5
deviation 69
list making 325–6, 333
literariness 272, 277, 278, 282
literary stylistics 121–3literature
creativity 147
and the English language 146
language of 192–7
multimodality 141–2
in political discourse 27–9, 31
regulating 278–88, 310–14
see also fiction; poetrylocalisation 144–6, 221–3, 225, 241
in call centres 239
logos 23, 26, 72, 74
Londonstani (Malkani) 177, 191–2, 213–15
Luna, David 161, 162, 168
Luther, Martin 44–5, 56–64
lyrics and images 349–52
McChesney, Robert 50
McDonald’s 221–5
advertisements 185
‘Favourites’ campaign 131–2, 142
MacDonogh, Thomas 116
McGuigan, J. 30
McIntyre, D. 29, 141
Maclagan, E.R.D. 33Macrae, A. 349
Madrid occupations 68, 80, 82
Mahon, Derek 117
Makram, Omar 105, 106
Malkani, Gautam 177, 191–2, 213–15
Mallet, D. 328
mandation 209–10
Maori hip hop 227, 246market discourse 143–4, 149–58
Marti, P. 238
Martin-Rojo, L. 80, 82
material intertextuality 109
Maybin, J. 30, 34, 238
Mazzolini, Sylvester 59
MC-ing 252
meaningsin advertisements 127–8
ideology 21, 22
obscenity 312–13
media
and hip hop 217
historical perspective 44–5, 56–64
multimedia campaign 60–2
participation in 43, 50–3, 59–60, 68, 321production in 42, 69
spreadability 292–4, 315–22
see also films; internet; posters; social media;
television
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
370
media concentration 50
Mehrez, Samia 79, 105
memes 39, 41, 67, 69, 87–8, 240
metalanguage 175
metaphors 26
in discourse 155
in political discourse 69, 72, 76–7, 80
water as 324, 335
in writing 285–7
Metcalf, David 255
MetroLyrics 86
Miller, Mark Crispin 50Milroy, J. and L. 183
misunderestimate 207
Mitchell, T. 226, 227, 244, 246, 248
mixed languages 162, 164, 167–8, 188–92
Londonstani 177, 191–2, 213–15
other Englishes 248–52
mode 72
‘The modern politics of “not real” words’ (Curzan)187, 207–11
monologic discourse 135, 137, 138
Morreall, J. 37, 46
Morris, Pam 21
Morrison, C.D. 217, 219
The Movement writers 194–5
movies see films
Mubarak, Hosni 80, 83–4, 104, 107–8, 110Mukarovský J., 29
Mulholland, K. 218, 238
Mullarkey, J. 334
multimedia campaign 60–2
multimodality 72, 277
advertisements 130–1, 142
literature 141–2
lyrics and images 349–52multinational corporations 161–2, 165–7
multiple voices 135–40
Murdock, G. 153
Murray, Les A. 114
music
distribution of 293–4
rap music 174, 217–18
Myers-Scotton, Carol 162, 163, 166
Napster 293
Nassar, A. 103
National Curriculum 182
national stereotypes 145–6
neologisms 132, 187, 197, 207
networked public 58
Neuberger, J. 29New Caledonia hip hop 246–7
New Puritanism 311
news ballads 60–1
Neymar tweet 35–6, 38, 40–1
Ngugi wa Thiong’o 146
nominalisation 76–7
‘non-standard’ English 19–20, 22
Noon, Mike 258normalcy 207–8
North Korea 17
Northern Ireland 90–1, 115, 286
novelty see originality
Obama, Barack 36, 37, 67–8, 87, 187
victory speech 73–4, 97–102
obscene 312–13‘Obscene modernism’ (Potter) 280–3, 310–14
Obscene Publications Act 272, 273, 278–83, 311
occupations 78–84, 103–11
Occupy movement 79
Ochs, E. 176
O’Donnell, V. 74
Okrent, A. 189
‘On Obama’s victory style’ (Crystal) 73–4, 97–102originality, and creativity 29, 34–9, 78
Orwell, George 177
Oswald, Alice 324, 335–43
outsourcing 217
Owen, Wilfred 85, 312
Palin, Sarah 209–10
pamphlets 57–60, 61–3Panovic, I. 178
Parry, Sir Hubert 33
participation in media 43, 50–3, 59–60, 68, 321
‘Party in the CIA’ (Yankovic) 86
‘Party in the USA’ (Cyrus) 86
pathos 23, 26, 72, 74
patterning of language 123–5, 127
Pearce, Fred 352–3Pearson, S. 246
Pennay, M. 231
Penney, J. 87
Pennycook, Alastair 226, 227, 231, 244–52
Index
371
Peracchio, Laura A. 161, 162, 168
Percy, T. 349
performance 141–2
interpretation 329, 347political 73–4, 87
personal–political review 323–56
persuasion 23–6
Peterson, C. 18
Pettegree, Andrew 62–3
Phillips, W. 87
phonological creativity 123–4
Piller, Ingrid 163, 166Pinker, S. 175
plainness in language use 177
Plato 26
Platt, John 162
poetry
in campaign website 134
extended exploration 335–43
function 121–3linguistic creativity 125–31
in political discourse 89–92, 113–17
redress of 91–2, 113–17
text poetry 179, 201–2, 205
polis 21, 90, 330
political dimension
advertising 142–7, 149–58, 161–9
language use 19–23political discourse
creativity 65–71, 92–3
analysis 71–3
copying and remixing 85–8
value of 88–92, 113–17
grass-roots 78–85, 103–11
literature in schools 31
literature’s status in 27–9performance 73–4, 87
rhetoric 23–6
speeches 73–8, 97–102
see also demonstrations; posters
politics
definitions 21–2, 330–4
Dylan’s song 348
‘The modern politics of “not real” words’ 187,207–11
personal–political review 323–56
political systems 332–3
and surveillance 283–7
of understanding 188–92
of value 173–4
pop songs, remixing 86
Pope, R. 70, 323, 332, 334, 349‘popular’ culture 31–4, 188–92
posters
culture and 32–4
political 17–18, 35–6, 37, 39
Potter, Rachel 279, 280–3, 310–14
Pound, Ezra 193, 194
power 332, 334
and creativity 299of the crowd 39–45, 50–63
and evaluation 173
and globalisation 225–6
and humour 38
and media control 42, 43–4, 50
newspaper editor 282–3
see also authority
Prévos, A.J.M. 247, 248Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 136
problematizations 77–8
production in media 42, 69
progressives 180, 183
propaganda 74
Protect IP Act 297–8
Protestant Reformation 18, 44–5, 56–64
Proulx, E. Annie 274public space, occupation 80–2
punctuation marks in textspeak 203
purpose
advertisements 119, 134
and linguistic creativity 132–5
Raaflaub, K. 22
Racial and Religious Toleration Act 311racism 36, 40–1
Rae, John 180–1
The Rainbow (Lawrence) 278, 283, 310
rap music 174, 217–18
re-creativity 343
re-vision 323, 334, 354–6
rebus abbreviation 202
recontextualisation 34, 37, 38, 46in political discourse 85–8
‘The redress of poetry’ (Heaney) 91–2, 113–17
referential sign 71
referential texts 27
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
372
refudiate 210
regulating
creativity 272–8, 303–8
literary texts 278–88, 310–14remixing 68, 86–8
representational texts 27
reprints 59
reproduction, creative 344, 349, 354
‘Requiem for the Croppies’ (Heaney) 89–91
Rheingold, Howard 53
rhetoric 23–6, 67, 72
political speeches 73–8, 97–102rhymes 72
rhythm 131
Rice, Anne 274
Rich, Adrienne 114, 323, 354
Richard II (Shakespeare) 25, 27–8, 31, 33
Robertson, Geoffrey 280–1, 282
Robertson, R. 221, 223
Rogers, S. 79Rowling, J.K. 274, 275, 303, 304–8
‘rule of three’ rhetoric 98
Rushdie, Salman 278, 287–8
Russell, A.G.B. 33
Russian Formalists 29
Sarrasine (Balzac) 135
The Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 278, 287–8Saving Tigers campaign 133–5
Schellekens, E. 70
Schieffelin, B. 176
Schloss, J.G. 217
Schmitt, Bernd H. 161
Schwabach, Aaron 274, 275–6, 303–8
Scollon, R. and S.B.K. 105
scorecard, call centre 234–6Scott, A. 275
Scott, Sir Walter 349
Sebba, M. 105
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) 39
Sequential Tarts 51–2
Sewell, Graham 255
Shakespeare, William 25, 27–8, 31, 185
Shannon, C. 151Shepherd, D. 21
Short, M. 136
Sidney, Philip 327
Silver, Norman 179, 201–2, 205
similes 72
Simpson, J. 332
slang 191–2, 214–15
slogans 123, 165smart mobs 53
social class 219
social media
and demonstrations 85
humour in 45, 79–80
power of the crowd 39–45, 50–64
replication and mutation 18, 36
see also blogs; internet; Twitter; YouTube‘Social media in the sixteenth century’ (Standage)
44–5, 56–64
social semiotics 71–2
social stereotypes 185
sociocultural context 20, 22
sociolinguists 178
Socrates 74
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Blake) 125,128–9
Souhami, D. 279, 281–2
SoundCloud website 231–2
South Africa 278, 283–5
speech styles 239, 269–70
‘spin’ 74
‘spin doctors’ 74
‘Spreadable media’ (Jenkins) 292–4, 315–22Stalin, Josef 28
Standage, Tom 44–5, 56–64
Standard Arabic 83, 108
‘standard’ form of language 22
Starbucks 222
Sternberg, R.J. 29, 34, 218, 227
Stop Online Piracy Act 297–8
street dance 217–18structural intertextuality 109
stylistics 72
literary 121–3
in political speech 73–4, 76–7, 97–102
‘Subterranean worksick blues’ (Taylor and Bain)
237–8, 255–67
subversive humour 237–8, 255–67
Sudden Rush 244–5surveillance 278, 283–7
Sutherland, John 179–80
Swahili 228–30
Swann, J. 30, 70, 77, 219, 221, 238
Index
373
Swedenburg, T. 248
synthetic personalisation 236
Szego, C. 245
‘T’ call centre 256–9, 261–2, 266–7
tactical frivolity 84
Tagg, C. 19
Tahrir Square 82–4, 103–11
Takashi, K. 163, 166
Tanzanian hip hop 228–30
Tasso, Torquato 327
‘taste’ 71Tavassoli, Nader T. 161
Tawil-Souri, H. 104
Taylor, Phil 220, 237–8, 255–67
television 163, 189
versus Twitter 40, 42
Tetzel, Johann 57, 59
text messages 19, 20, 22
Textline database 143, 151Textspeak 20, 179–80, 185, 201–6
‘The discourse of Western marketing’ (Kelly-
Holmes) 143–4, 149–58
Thompson, Paul 258–9
Thompson, S. 274
Toffler, Alvin 41
Tolkien, J.R.R. 188
Top Boy (tv programme) 19, 20, 22Topping A. 288
trade unions 256, 264–5, 266–7
traditionalists 180–4
transcultural flows 228–9
transgressive discourses 105, 283
translation 354
‘trickle down’ metaphor 69
Trudgill, P. 22Tufekci, Zeynep 62
Twitter 42, 44, 209, 211
Neymar tweet 35–6, 38, 40–1
‘The Tyger’ (Blake) 129–30, 134
Tylor, Edward Burnett 30
UbuWeb 288–92
Ulysses (Joyce) 310, 312understanding, politics of 188–92
unregulated space 108
value
conflicting values 180–4
and creativity 171–3, 197–8
in political discourse 88–92, 113–17
cultural 29–34, 272judgement of 184–7
and language 174–7
politics of 173–4
Van Rooyen, J.C.W. 284
Vander Ark, Steven 276, 303, 306–7
Vaughan, J. 178
verse paragraphs 339
Vinson, J. 194voice in text 336, 340, 342, 346
von Clausewitz, C. 331
von Poschinger, H.R. 331
vowels in textspeak 203
Walcott, Derek 114, 192, 193
Wales, Jimmy 298
Walker, Alice 192Waller, D. 150
Warner Bros. 274–5, 304–5, 308
Warshauer Freedman S., 21
The Waste Land (Eliot) 189–90
water as metaphor 324, 335
The Way Women Write (Hiatt) 186
Weaver, W. 151
Weber, Heidi 162Weiner, E. 332
The Well of Loneliness (Hall) 278–9, 281–3, 310
Welsh, I. 84
Western marketing discourse 143–4, 149–58
Widdowson, H. 27
Wikipedia 43, 53–4, 297–9
Wild West imagery 155–7
Wilkinson, Barry 255Williams, Raymond 30, 325–9, 331
Willmott, R. 128
Winkler, M.M. 85
Withnall, A. 17
woodcuts 61
Woolard, K. 176
Woolf, Virginia 192, 193, 194, 283
Wordsworth, William 328writing
creative 181, 327, 328
dialogical 34
metaphors in 285–7
The politics of language and creativity in a globalised world
374
Yankovic, Weird Al 86
YouTube 68, 85, 122, 294, 347
Zack, Liesbeth 79–80, 106–7
Zephaniah, Benjamin 114
Zhang, Shi 161
Zimmer, Ben 210–11
Index
375
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