TPCS 26: Complexity, accent and conviviality: Concluding comments

By Jan Blommaert

Concluding comments

This paper comprises the written concluding comments of Jan Blommaert to the AAAL 2012, Boston, panel on "Constructing identities in transnational spaces". The panel consisted of: 

• Anna De Fina: Radio broadcast as transactional space: the creation and negotiation of identities in and through Spanish language radio in the U.S.
• Sabina Perrino: Veneto out of Italy? Dialect, Migration, and Transnational Identity
• Stanton Wortham & Catherine Rhodes: The Emergent Identity of a Young Immigrant: A Multi-scale Analysis
• Li Wei & Zhu Hua: Translanguaging in universities and beyond: Multilingual practices of Chinese students of different backgrounds
• Zane Goebel: Indonesians doing togetherness in Japan
• Elaine Chun: Reading Asian embodiments of Blackness on Youtube.

***

I must open with an emphatic thanks to the presenters in this panel; they offered me a collection of papers of exceptional quality that prompted me to reflect again on issues that I find tremendously relevant.

Towards complexity 

For one thing, the papers document, as well as stimulate, the gradual recognition of the fact that the contemporary semiotics of culture and identity need to be captured in terms of complexity rather than in terms of multiplicity or plurality. “Multi”-frames offer us very little purchase – a vocabulary including “multi-lingual”, “multi-cultural” or “pluri-“, “inter-“, “cross-“ and “trans-“ notions all suggest an a priori existence of separable units (language, culture, identity), and they suggest that the encounter of such separable units produces peculiar new units: “multilingual” repertoires, “mixed” or “hybrid” identities and so forth. Such frames, thus, suggest that the strange and unfamiliar features of globalization and superdiversity only occur in the zones of contact between different units – while such units remain ontologically intact and can still be defined and identified in singular terms. We still see ‘English’ and ‘Spanish’, ‘Mandarin’ or ‘Javanese’ encountering other, equally ontologically singular units. The term ‘code-switching’ emblematizes this view: two distinct ‘codes’ are involved in patterns of shifting and mixing. 

A complexity perspective, on the other hand, suggests that the real work of creation and innovation – the real dynamics of language, culture and identity – is done inside such units. It is not just the contact between, say, ‘English’ and ‘Spanish’ that creates new hybrid forms; in the course of such processes, both English and Spanish themselves are changed and reconfigured, and participants walk away from such encounters with fundamentally changed repertoires. Such repertoires will afterwards be deployed in all forms of communication – ‘cross-cultural’ or not, according to the classic definitions. It is the semiotic system itself that is affected by globalization and superdiversity; the mobilization of people, their repertoires and practices affects the totality of the sociolinguistic (or socio-semiotic) economies in and through which they move. The ‘mixed’ speech of teenagers intensely engaged in globalized semiotic work through social media, gaming and so forth, influences and is rapidly adopted by these kids’ parents too – even if the level of activity in such hybrid spaces and hybridizing practices of the parents is significantly inferior to that of their kids. Access to different scales, and incorporation of cultural material from a variety of scales, creates conditions in which earlier dyadic distinctions such as ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ no longer appear to function well, as Worthan and Rhodes correctly argue.

In such a view, a term such as ‘code-switching’ is hardly an accurate descriptor of what goes on. We see, in actual fact, perpetual processes of creative coding, of the continuous production of new codes not – at least sociolinguistically – in any salient way tied to ‘languages’ in the classic sense of the term; Sharma & Rampton (2011) use the notion of ‘lectal focusing’ instead: participants focus meaningfully and in a nonrandom way on specific resources in a repertoire that is, fundamentally, ‘hybridized’, multiscalar and shot through with relatively unpredictable and unstable patterns of stratified indexical orderliness. Topics can trigger foci on specific resources – ‘Standard English’ versus ‘Gujarati’ resources, for instance – and topic shifts involve a whole array of shifts in footing, subjective orietation, participant framework, intensity of interactional engagement, authority and so on.

How to quote: Blommaert, J. (2012). Complexity, accent and conviviality: Concluding comments. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 26).

Read the full working paper here: Complexity, accent and conviviality: Concluding comments.