Date: 24-Oct-2008
From: Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay <anekantarediffmail.com>
Subject: Lesbian Discourses
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Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-680.html
AUTHOR: Koller, VeronikaTITLE: Lesbian DiscoursesSUBTITLE: Images of a CommunitySERIES TITLE: Routledge Studies in LinguisticsPUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)YEAR: 2008
Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay, Indian statistical Institute
SUMMARYThis is a book on sexuality, or rather on the corporeal - or on the language ofa specific counter-hegemonic ''marginal'' sexual behavior, that struggles to showthe concerned community's visibility as a (non-) mirror of ''other'', though thismarginalized ''other'''s imagination is also a dominant mainstream communalimagiNATION.
The book is searching a/many standpoint/s of lesbians in the givenspatio-temporal constraints of England, Germany (partly), and the United States.The module of imagined state (of affairs) here is not the religion, neitherlanguage, nor so called ''race'', but the woman-woman relationship or the care ofimagined collective selves. This book, from the perspective of linguistics, is aplurisecular metadiscourse on the discourse of/on lesbianism.
As the site of relationship is always staked by the ''other'', the language ofrelationship is always context-sensitive - it cannot escape the non-discursivelocus and this book is an account of not the abstracted or extracted languagesof the lesbians, but the context-sensitive mono-/dia/poly-logues of the lesbiansas speaking subjects in different decades of this and last centuries. The authorbypasses the individual subjectivism in a non-authoritarian manner and thusinaugurates many new spaces for further sustainable dialogues.
Moreover, the author is an insider - she is inhabiting within the''becoming''/''being'' and ''having'' of (the author herself discussed this phenomenonwithin the neo-Hegelian framework) imagined community, but that empatheticinvolvement does not bring any uncritical attitude on the part of the author.She, at the moment of writing, is alienated herself from the communal feelings,deploys the critical discourse analysis with historical perspective(s) to thegiven texts, which are marginalized documents, viz. blogs, leaflets, pamphlets,glossy magazines and interviews, all of which escape the gaze of a formalanalyst (p.11).
The book is divided into seven chapters. The very first chapter introduces theconstitution of a lesbian community in a given context, covering all thepossible wh-questions in this regard. The whole plans and programs of the bookwith methodological details are depicted with precision in the next chapter. Theother four chapters describe the ontological breaks, ruptures, thresholds of thesupposed community among three decades of the last century and the first decadeof the current century with socio-political and economic conditions of a givensociety. The consumerist subsumption of the supposed community is vivid in thedescription of a 90s scenario. What is important to note here is the emergenceof heteroglossic polyphony in the 1990s that triggers not only contradictingvoices, but the celebration (or rather ''sale''-bration in the marketfundamentalist sense of the term) of plurality and its subsequent consumeristsubsumption. The political agenda for this community-for itself is also depictedby the author by keeping a low profile. Lastly, in the conclusion, the fuzzinessof the supposed community is revealed after a long journey by deploying thecritical discourse analysis as the author herself concludes that lesbians are''[l]ess a cohesive nation than a federation of states'' (p. 192). This is animportant observation that escapes the romantic trap of essentialism and the badfaith for making of a grand narrative of lesbians as a singular homogenousentity. The historical analysis of the author is not similar to the ahistoricalcomparative philological analysis.
The important inclusion of a glossary of key-terms as they are used in this bookis worth mentioning as that glossary helps not only the initiators ofsociolinguistics, but the people with a non-linguistic background, who arelikely to read a non-consumerist ''something'' on lesbians without knowing theintricacies of linguistics.
EVALUATIONThe book is far from some works of traditional sociolinguistics that only did,peculiarly enough, ''sociology'' of language without bothering about sociology orsocial science per se(e.g., executing a work on the co-relationship betweenarbitrary sounds and society). The recent trends in socio-linguistics, after theadvent of post-structuralism and some interventions of continental philosophers,are showing a crucial paradigmatic shift in the attitudes of the newsociolinguistic researchers. They are doing research with engagement andalienation - both at a time, with social responsibility and knowledge of socialsciences without being bothered about the supposed autonomy of their discipline.This convergence of disciplines is much desirable and Koller's work is withinthis new paradigm of convergence(s) of academic disciplines.
For every decade's discourses, the author analyzes the dispersion of deicticcategories, especially the deployment of pronouns, ''I'' and ''we'' in the lesbiandiscourse. The excellent analysis reveals the self-reflexivity as well asanaphoric reflexivity of the author as well as the community. The differencebetween author's meta-discourse and lesbian discourse is that the author,through these egocentric particulars is willing to participate in a largerdomain of academics with self-reflexivity, whereas lesbians are generallyunwilling to self-reflect –rather they are trying to reflect in the mirror ofthe dominant other, therefore the gradual proliferation (instead of repression)of lesbian discourse is observed in a form of negation embedded in the assertionof constructed selfhood or vice versa. Here come the allegations, accusations,blaming against outside as well as inside in the narratives of lesbians. Allthese negative markers in language are deployed to assert one's own imaginedcommunity. Moreover, the lesbian language is not an anti-language in Halliday'ssense of the term, as claimed by Koller (p. 19) as speakers of anti-languagemaintain secrecy, relexicalize citation forms and sometimes ovelexicalize thehost-culture' s linguistic repertoire. All the texts analyzed by Koller do notreveal such features (secrecy, overlexicalization, relexicalization andextensive use of metaphor) as pointed out by Halliday in the case ofanti-language. In fact, Koller re-uses Halliday's term ''antilanguage'' byoverlexicalizing it and by providing a novel definition. That definition,extending the form of Halliday's definition, inaugurates a new testimonialproposition of a paradoxical ''truth'': ''My voice is not my voice, it is others'voice'' (cf. Derrida, 1998).
The abovementioned difference between analyzer and analyzed leads to a crucialproblem of appropriation and distribution of lesbian text and meta-text (on thelesbian text) in a given context. The lesbian discourses are not only produced,distributed and received (as pointed out by Koller, p. 8) in thecapitalo-centric market, it is also appropriated, approximated and re-codified.The author does not mention this appropriation and seldom points out the controlof discourse - she circles around only production, distribution and reception ofthe texts. By this exclusion of appropriation of discourse, the author missesthe point made by Foucault as she comments that according to Foucault, ''[t]hereis no pre-discursive reality...'' (p.13). Yes, there is pre-discursive reality inFoucault's meta-discourse, though Foucault avoided the biographical details ofthe producer of the discourse to escape the trap of ethnocentricism. That doesnot entail that Foucault did not concentrate on the overdeterministicrelationship between non-discursive formation and discursive formation. Foucaultintroduced the notion of dispotif or apparatus, which is both discursive andpre-/non-discursive and that also includes ''scientific statement'' or a book likethis, where the pseudo-''secrets'' or unsaid domain of one community is overtlydiscussed - the silencemes of so-called marginalized sexuality is reportedthrough the ''scientific'' book by defeating the Freudian repressive hypothesis(cf. Foucault, 1980). And this reporting through ''scientific statements'' helpsto sustain perfect governmentality - researchers are reporting to subscribegoverning state and mercantile enterprise by (re-)producing inherited culturalcapital of knowledge industry. This situation is almost analogous to thecondition of an anti-patriarch, anti-capitalist group, say lesbians, who are,paradoxically enough, demand/desire-ing to get the ''right'' form the agency thatthey are opposing.
Thus, nothing can be escaped from the omnipotent gaze of panopticon. All theaforementioned paradoxes are 'essential' features of the meta-critical discourseproducers like us, who, as watchdogs, are reporting (as we cannot sustainwithout it), though in a non-authoritarian manner, the inner domains ofdifferent communities (''they'' may be lesbians, gay, slum-dwellers orchild-labor) to the ''welfare'' govern-mental agencies. The present reviewer, whois also an insider of the academic community, is totally ignorant about the pathof combating from this type of academic anatomo-bio politics or ethics, wherethe academician herself is penetrating/intervening the corporeal of the subjectby objectifying ''it'' and forming a discipline through technical and criticaldiscourses. When I am going through this excellent first-of-its-kind book, I wasalso suffering from ambivalent aporia - I was, as a reader and as a member ofthe academic tribe, trying to understand my positional subjectivity: may Isurvey and report a community's behavior, or not? Am I harming or benefiting theconcerned community at the moment of deploying disciplinary technology? Thisthinking may lead to another problem of polymorphous bio-power that is alsodiscussed in the book in reference to Foucault's power/knowledge nexus.
The author distinguishes the spoken and written discourses in a Saussurianmanner. As she mentioned the proper name of ''Derrida'' several times, thediscourse on problematic non-causal, non-deterministic relationship betweenspeaking and writing as representations is much expected in reference toarchewriting. The same comment is also applicable to the sex/gender dichotomy asused in the book. Though the author is well aware of the difference, the problemof biological sex and cultural gender is not reflected in the analysis ofdiscourse.
The displacement-condensation phenomena in metaphor and metonymy are discussedfrom the standpoint of cognitive science, not from the perspectives ofpsychoanalysis, so also the cases of ''images'' as discussed by Koller. Thesetraces of structuralism and ''science'' in this work lead this work more closelyto a structural scientific work rather than a so-called post-modern work, thoughso called post-modernism is also a part of this book and one of the author'sintentions. The decade-wise survey, following the Gregorian almanac, is also aproblematic one as pre-discursive real-symbolic-imaginary do not always followsuch an arbitrary linear path, though, pragmatically speaking, it serves tocommunicate easily.
Thus the space of this book is hybrid (similar to quantum-classical fusion inthe some domains of contemporary physics) - and this hybrid space cannot beavoided in a ''well structured normalized'' academic book - as even the languageof madness was represented in a ''normal'' language - we all know that classicalexample of madness and civilization.
REFERENCESDerrida, J. 1998. _Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin_.Stanford California: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, M. 1980. _Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews_, Ed. Gordon, C. RandomHouse, Inc.
Foucault, M.1988. _The History of Sexuality: an Introduction_. Vol.1. New York:Vintage Book.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. _Language as a Social Semiotic_. London Edward Arnold.
ABOUT THE REVIEWERDebaprasad Bandyopadhyay is a faculty member of the Indian StatisticalInstitute, Kolkata, India. He has published 4 books, more than 180 researcharticles, papers, reviews and popular writings in Bangla and in English inreputed journals and academic magazines. He is now working on Silenceme, YayatiComplex and on the concept of ''errors'' in mad(wo)man's language .
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