Gimlé

There are, in my view, three kinds of theoretical writing.

1. Analysis and debate. Analyse an idea, story or event using all the theoretical and rhetorical tools available to you.

2. Bullshit mumbo-jumbo. Pie-in-the-sky intellectual masturbation. Everybody who’s been in academia has encountered this. I figure that it accounts for at the very least ninety per cent of academic writing. Others might be more generous.

3. Provocation. Overstate your position to such a degree that people will have argue with them.

The best example of 3. is Roland Barthe’s Death of the Author. Suddenly after a relatively short essay by Barthe’s, the whole focus of literary debate had shifted. By pushing against the boundaries Barthes had changed the goalposts and forced people to at least consider a new alternate point of view.

I’m so-so at 1. too good for my own health at 2. and enjoy writing 3. more than I should do. Although I don’t pretend to be as good at aggravating people into action as Barthes was.

It’s about wandering off into one direction, going as far as you can until you find a wall, leaning towards the wall and then pushing with all your might. “Death of the Blogger” was one such essay, good fun to write, pushed a particular point I believed in as far as I thought it would go.

The fact that it was not even more extreme just goes to show how conservative in these matters I really am.

Another example would be the “In So Many Other Ways”. As Jeff Ward rightfully points out it would be very hard to imagine language and culture separate in any shape or form. Which makes quite a few of the arguments and points in the essay rather suspect.

As language is the carrier of culture it is downright impossible to find out where one ends and the other starts.

But anybody who thinks that language and culture are autonomous things is very badly mistaken. Culture and language are human products. They are by definition affected by human actions. And many cultures are fighting for their survival these days.

Unless you suppose that language laws, word councils, name laws, dubbing, legally mandated translations, word and language quotas, subtitling by fiat, film funds that only fund films made in the national language, strict teaching laws, language officers that read through every single script for every single radio show…

… must all be some sort of quaint European custom.

There is a cultural war going on. The winners’ cultures get to stay alive.

It is fairly likely, if the current trends continue, that Europe in two hundred years will be a Europe with only six or seven languages. The number of languages in Europe that went extinct in the nineteenth and twentieth century is frightening.

The reason why Icelanders and the Icelandic authorities behave as if the Icelandic language is under siege is simple.

It is under siege and losing simply isn’t an option.

Kinda puts a slant on how you view all these linguistic and cultural debates. I’ll be damned if I’ll let people continue to believe that language and culture are these symbiotic autonomous juggernauts that waltz over foreign cultures “just because.”

If you drive a car and run over a baby, you don’t put the SUV in chains and plonk it in solitary confinement.

No, you put the driver in the slammer.

A healthy respect of foreign cultures and domestic minority cultures in the American and English public would go a long way towards changing the slant in the English language culture. Even today the enlightened academics I work with, who are around foreign students every day of the week, treat foreign cultures in the same way you’d treat a friends’ new, cute pet doggie.

“Oh, really! How nice. I’ve always thought that those fairy tales of yours are soooooo charming.”

And I won’t repeat the vitriolic things some of them say about the Welsh language.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.