Citation
- Bleich, David. The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2013.
Contents
Introduction: The Contested Subject
Part One: The Materiality of Language
Chapter 1: Premises and Backgrounds
Chapter 2: Received Standards in the Study of Language
Chapter 3: Materiality and Genre
Chapter 4: The Unity of Language and Thought
Chapter 5: Materiality and the Contemporary Study of Language
Chapter 6: Recognizing Politics in the Study of Language
Part Two: Language in the University
Chapter 7: Frustrations of Academic Language
Chapter 8: The Protected Institution
Chapter 9: The Sacred Language
Chapter 10: Language Uses in Science, the Heir of Latin
Chapter 11: Language and Human Survival
Chapter 12: The Materiality of Literature and the Contested Subject
Works Cited and Consulted
Author
David Bleich is Professor of English at the University of Rochester and author of Know and Tell: A Pedagogy of Disclosure, Genre, and Membership and The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations, among other books.
Context
David Bleich sees the human body, its affective life, social life, and political functions as belonging to the study of language. In The Materiality of Language, Bleich addresses the need to end centuries of limiting access to language and its many contexts of use. To recognize language as material and treat it as such, argues Bleich, is to remove restrictions to language access due to historic patterns of academic censorship and unfair gender practices. Language is understood as a key path in the formation of all social and political relations, and becomes available for study by all speakers, who may regulate it, change it, and make it flexible like other material things.
Thesis
A clear and direct formulation of language ideology
The analysis of subject creation as an affective process of recognizing and sharing the same affective state and language as the means for materializing affective states
Methodology
Key Terms
Materiality of Language – all functions of speech and writing relative to the social, intersubjective scenes of their use. Language is material in the sense that it has tangible effects and that it matters all the time.
Criticisms and Questions
-The materiality of language is an axiom, a postulate, a fundamental assumption, a Kuhnian paradigm that leads to new approaches to the study and teaching of language, but is still not a part of our ordinary sense of what language is and does. It suspends the preoccupa- tion with the referential and communicative functions of language and tries to examine all functions of speech and writing relative to the social, intersubjective scenes of their of their use.
– The materiality of language suggests that, socially, language has been separated from “actualities” and treated as simply as an instrument of reference or conveyance. This approach to language has enabled the continued stable existence of the “intelligentsia,” that is, the overwhelmingly unbalanced population of the well-educated.
– The political movement for the enfranchisement of women and other subaltern constituencies has tried to counter this assumption of the pri- macy of the mind in isolation from material things. Thinking about “the body” is also an attempt to materialize the sense of what a human mind is, to recognize it in the “context” in which it must exist: living bodies.
– Christine Iwanick: Her (taken-from-Zola) figure of “living out loud” presents the use of language as an essential ingredient in subjective and intersubjective experience. But it also refers to the ability of language to bring our emotional lives into public places. Her discussion of theoretical formulations in the work of Bakhtin and Derrida also notes their struggle, especially Derrida’s, to recognize the emotional potential of all language use (“the play of language”), and somehow to reconcile this potential with the severe, even imperious, strictures called for by the conventions of academic writ- ing. She traces some of the history of the idea of the materiality of language, and she presents statements and explanations of the view that language is a “thing,” rather than an insubstantial or spiritual entity. At the same time her juxtaposition of views of modern and postmodern thought also implies some of the achievement of the postmodern wish to cultivate awareness of the living context of our uses of language.
– Because language and genres are material, research into their manifestations, uses, variations, and details does matter, and the members of established professions know this, if only intuitively. Certainly politicians have always known it. This brings us to the underlying rationale for taking the materiality and genres of language seri- ously: they give all (rather than just “expert”) language users the means to interact with every other aspect of society in which what is said carries weight or is binding on people in some way. It provides yet another explanation of why totalitarian social systems have prevented people-slaves and women, for example-from acquiring literacy at all, why they have always found ways to appropriate the public language (that is, to lie) for purposes of regulating mass psychology. The nonviolent response to this trope of political domination is now, and has always been, the bringing of language to those who don’t have it. Yet if the language is always thought of as “only words,” it has been already deauthorized. What MacKinnon maintains about por- nography I think is true of any use of language: it affects our bodies, our communi ties, and our “mass” identities. I think we should teach language with this in mind.
Introduction: The Contested Subject
-the materiality of language is a ground for desacrilizing texts, no reason to automatically consider written texts more permanent.
Part One: The Materiality of Language
Chapter 1: Premises and Backgrounds
-Lorenzo valla was actually chill about vernacular and saw language as living
Chapter 2: Received Standards in the Study of Language
Chapter 3: Materiality and Genre
-it could be political sedition or heresy when the reference to a gengre is challened of rejected.
-Witgennstein’s ideas: language game sprachespiel, form of life lebensformen (cannot take out the heart to understand its function), family resemblence, description instead of explananation “if language functions ideally, it’s transparent” language is simultaneously referential and gestural
-if phenomena are hidden in plain sight, the materiality of languageis repressed.
J.L. Austin: speech acts and locutionism dude. “How to do things with words”
Bakhtin: -various viewpoints and worldviews cross and converge in all speech
-addressivity: words and sentences belong to nobody – language is not living language until it appears in a genre which defines its context and social situation -Russian formalists: something particular about literary language. -different national language are different speech genres -national speech is a reference to national culture.
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Chapter 4: The Unity of Language and Thought
