Observatoire du discours financier en traduction - flexibility

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

René Lemieux — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 12:43:13 +0000

The thesis of the seventh chapter of John Sinclair’s Trust the Text (2004) is difficult, as it highlights the necessity of refraining from taking a stance on an emotionally charged problem (neoliberalism, for our purposes) in order to describe how language makes its meaning.

Sinclair begins by identifying two general trends in language analysis: subjectivity and objectivity (and my reader will probably already anticipate the difficulties involved therein). “The basic task is the explication of the text, and while some scholars reject any systematic approach, relying instead on a direct appeal to the sensitivities of their audience, many prefer to make use of descriptive schemes, claiming that they have several advantages over the self-reliance of the individual.” (Sinclair 2004: 115) Citing Norman Fairclough among others, for Sinclair ‘critical discourse analysis’ = subjectivity, against which he situates his own descriptivism and objectivism. Text study, as he puts it, is a slow and laborious process in that it is expected to be comprehensive; it must cover, indeed saturate, the entire field of its context. He quickly concedes, however, that such analyses will always fall short of their goals, “since at extremely refined levels of interpretation there is almost certain to be a personal element, no shared system of analysis will be considered accurate. This reservation, of course, applies to all areas of intellectual inquiry.” (ibid.: 116) The reality of any observation involves a certain slippage between subjectivity and objectivity, but ideally, a context would be without subject. Technology has given linguists the possibility of studying large corpora, objectively, in contrast to the appeal to emotion on the part of the subjectivism of critical discourse analysis. “Reference can be made to the huge accumulation of usage that is lodged in the corpora, providing evidence of shades of meaning and subtleties of expression that have not until now been transferable into the shaded area.” (ibid.: 117)

Using Fairclough’s analysis of flexibility as an example (see Fairclough 1999), Sinclair dismisses as an Orwellian paranoia the notion that a word having exclusively unpleasant consequences for its users would occur only in positive or benign contexts. Corpus linguistics, he argues, goes beyond an individual’s capacity to inspect a certain discourse like that of flexibility. “For example, the flexibility reported in Fairclough’s paper is represented as uniformly undesirable for those who are obliged to be flexible, and yet there are plenty of instances in the corpus of flexible and flexibility used with approval by people other than the captains of industry.” (Sinclair 2004: 119-20) Citing 13,318 occurrences of the word in his corpus, Sinclair notes that the majority of these are positive, and Fairclough’s argument thereby all the weaker. But this point is just banal; of course flexibility is generally a good thing I think most people prefer over rigidity. People generally prefer freedom over control, and life over death.

The thing with words is that a championing of ‘freedom’ can just as easily be rallied to support the unsanctioned military invasion of a country by the US, just as a championing of ‘life’ can bizarrely justify both blowing up abortion clinics and encouraging the death penalty. Flexibility also works to ensure high turnover rates, decrease workers’ rights, reduce trade barriers, foster unemployment, all the while maintaining the lifestyle of the planet’s wealthiest elite. Sinclair’s argument is that “citation of ‘used language’ proves nothing in itself about language unless the process of selectivity that is inevitable in such circumstances is controlled.” (ibid.: 120)

Sinclair has a point; of course one can’t only focus on observing those occurrences of a term that support one’s ethico-political claim. But perhaps two different aims are at stake here: one could study throughout the entire corpora of financial print culture occurrences of the word ‘dollar,’ but the reasons why one would do so would be lost on me. It’s unfair to say of Fairclough that his focus on certain concepts lack context, particularly because context itself is neither subjective nor objective, any observation of discourse will always entail a certain normativity.

The strangest thing of Sinclair’s book for me is in fact its opening dedication to M.A.K. Halliday, one of the founders of ecolinguistics. Halliday undertook laborious deconstructions of the grammatical metaphor in English to reveal that many of our blind spots concerning environmental degradation were built into the structure of the language itself (see his “New Ways of Meaning” in The Ecolinguistics Reader). An awareness of these structures, it is hoped, would pave the way for a more just ecological future. Indeed, if context is itself the oikos of ecology and economy, any observation or description of language bears within itself, or is inextricably bound up with a possible resistance, critique and normativity for a more just economical, and ecological future.

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

flexibilité

flexibility

néolibéralisme

Global Capitalism and Critical Awareness of Language

Fairclough, Norman. « Global Capitalism And Critical Awareness Of Language ». Language Awareness 8, no 2 (1999), 71-83.

Article(s)

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics

Halliday, M. AK. « New Ways Of Meaning: The Challenge To Applied Linguistics ». Dans The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology And Environment, 175-202. New York: Continuum, 2006.

Article(s)

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse

Sinclair, John. Trust The Text: Language, Corpus And Discourse. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Article(s)

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

René Lemieux — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 15:16:30 +0000

Norman Fairclough, it seems, might follow Bourdieu in suggesting that a critical awareness of language, or CLA, can serve to challenge the dominant discourses of global capitalism. Citing an earlier paper of his, he writes, CLA should be “a prerequisite for effective democratic citizenship, and should therefore be seen as an entitlement for citizens, especially children developing towards citizenship in the educational system.” (Fairclough 1999: 71) The example he uses, fruitful for our purposes here, is the discourse of flexibility, and Fairclough retraces the general arguments put forth by Harvey I covered in a previous blog post concerning the shift between Fordism and flexible accumulation. Flexibility, he argues, is not an inevitable feature of global capitalism, but rather “a real feature of contemporary economies for which there is ample scientific evidence.” (ibid.: 72) Here, both the discourse of flexibility and its real effects are inextricably intertwined;

the discourse is an irreducible part of the reality. The change from Fordism to flexible accumulation is inconceivable without the change in economic discourse. Why? Because the emerging global economy is the site of a struggle between the old and the new, and the discourse of flexibility is a vital symbolic weapon in that struggle. It is as Bourdieu (1998) has put it a ‘strong discourse,’ that is a discourse which is backed by the strength of all the economic and social forces (the banks, the multinational corporations, politicians and so on) who are trying to make flexibility – the new global capitalism – even more of a reality than it already is (Fairclough 1999: 72).

Fairclough then sends about finding examples through a wide variety of texts in what Leigh Claire La Berge has called ‘financial print culture,’ (2014: 8) everything from books written by ‘management gurus’ to economic and noneconomic discourses in the press.

However, he notes, flexibility also permeates everyday language. Fairclough gives here the example of ‘Stephen,’ who works illegally doing small, flexible ‘fiddly’ jobs while collecting social security, who uses the discourse of flexibility in explaining his position. “It’s a matter of us being cheaper… It’s just the flexibility. You’re just there for when the jobs come up, and he [the ‘hirer and firer’] will come and get you when you’re needed.” (Fairclough 1999: 73) Here, Fairclough writes, is not just a case of everyday language becoming colonized by the language of the powerful: “here is ‘Stephen’ appropriating the discourse in construing his own perfectly coherent rationale for his (illegal) way of living. One aspect of economic flexibility from his perspective is that companies need the flexibility of workers doing fiddly jobs.” (ibid.) A critical awareness of language, then, allows people to reflect on dominant discourses such as that of flexibility, allows them to ask questions such as “what insights [flexibility] gives us into the way economies work or could work, and what other insights it cuts us off from; whose discourse it is, and what they gain from its use; what other discourses there are around, and how this one has become so dominant.” (ibid.)

When observation is thought in terms of this critical reflection, as does the Odft, it challenges the hegemony of dominant discourses and fosters the invention of new possibilities and knowledges of life in its oikoi. “If on the other hand language and other semiotic modalities are viewed as simply transparent media for reflecting what is, the development of knowledge is likely to be impeded.” (ibid.: 75) But the fact that all social life is textually mediated opens onto a dangerous dialectic, he writes, of colonization and appropriation on the one hand and emancipation on the other.

It opens up unprecedented resources for people to shape their lives in new ways drawing upon knowledges, perspectives and discourses which are generated all over the world. But in so doing it opens up new areas of their lives to the play of power. There is a colonisation-appropriation dialectic at work… if people are to live in this complex world rather than just be carried along by it, they need resources to examine their placing within this dialectic… and those resources include a critical awareness of language and discourse which can only come through language education (ibid.: 75-76).

Here again is reiterated the key problematic of this excursus; what grounds the opposition between living in the world and being carried along by the world as concerns language or discourse? Does the discourse of flexibility carry people along in the world, preventing them from living it (as Bourdieu at times seems to suggest), or does it also convince people they are indeed living in the world when they are really just being carried along by it? If activity and passivity, the performative and constative, normative and descriptive aren’t so dissociable here, it’s perhaps because capital itself also works in blurring these distinctions, as Derrida hints at in his seminar La Peine de mort (2015: 268). If I’m still in the spirit of Fairclough’s argument, the object of a critical awareness of language would not be to restitute activity and passivity, etc., to their proper positions beyond a logic of capital, but to work through their contamination in making dominant discourses foreign to themselves, to take into account the perhaps infinitely differentiated contexts within which their tropes occur. Context, then, is an inextricable condition of resisting neoliberalism, but what is context? Does it offer any clarification on the subjective/objective, the act and its others in observing and thinking about how the tropes of neoliberal discourse are translated in and out of financial print culture?

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

L’essence du néoliberalisme

Bourdieu, Pierre. « L’Essence Du Néoliberalisme ». Le Monde Diplomatique, 1998, 3. https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/03/BOURDIEU/3609.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market

Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts Of Resistance: Against The Tyranny Of The Market. Richard Nice. New York: New Press, 1999.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Séminaire La peine de mort. Volume II (2000-2001)

Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire La Peine De Mort. Volume Ii (2000-2001). Geoffrey Bennington et Crépon, Marc. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2015.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Observation as Critique in Financial Discourse

Global Capitalism and Critical Awareness of Language

Fairclough, Norman. « Global Capitalism And Critical Awareness Of Language ». Language Awareness 8, no 2 (1999), 71-83.

Article(s)

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

La Berge, Leigh Claire. Scandals And Abstraction: Financial Fiction Of The Long 1980S. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

René Lemieux — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:18:44 +0000

I want to flesh out certain descriptive and normative, theoretical and practical, ontological and ethical aporetics in the concept of flexibility in financial discourse through the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

Bourdieu begins his intervention “Job Insecurity is Everywhere Now” by asking what the final outcome, the ‘point’ of the intellectual discussions at the Rencontres européennes contre la précarité, a conference attended by civil servants, politicians, trade unionists and economists, both employed and unemployed. Economists in particular bear the brunt of his critique in their lack of concern with social reality, “or indeed with reality at all.” (Bourdieu 1999: 81) Bourdieu rejects the Walrasian myth of a ‘pure theory’ (the idea that all economics can be understood by way of mathematics) as underlying the stubbornness by which economists are able to present neoliberalism as an inevitability (1998). Academics, including economists, have great responsibilities, particularly when, “by their silence or their complicity, they contribute to the maintenance of the symbolic order which is the condition of the functioning of the economic order.” (Bourdieu 1999: 82)

Bourdieu’s key argument here is that job insecurity robs people not only of a future, but of a belief in the future that can impel one to change it, of a capacity to “project themselves into the future.” Evoking Marx’s 11^th thesis here, “to conceive a revolutionary project, in other words a reasoned ambition to transform the present by reference to a projected future.” (ibid.: 83) Neoliberalism works precisely by making people feel insecure about their future, and presenting even exploitative work as a privilege and a commodity, flexploitation thus forces workers into accepting neoliberalism through this constant threat of insecurity, of losing their jobs.

So insecurity acts directly on those it touches (and whom it renders incapable of mobilizing themselves) and indirectly on all the others, through the fear it arouses, which is methodologically exploited by all the insecurity-inducing strategies, such as the introduction of the notorious ‘flexibility,’ – which, it will have become clear, is inspired as much by political as economic reasons. One thus begins to suspect that insecurity is the product not of an economic inevitability, identified with the much-heralded ‘globalization,’ but of a political will (ibid.: 84).

In another piece, Bourdieu poses otherwise the alleged inevitability of the contemporary economic world and its ‘flexible’ labour market. “What if it were in reality, only the implementation of a utopia, neo-liberalism, thus converted into a political programme, but a utopia which, with the aid of the economic theory to which it subscribes, manages to see itself as the scientific description of reality?” (ibid.: 94) Neoliberalism is not, he writes, a desocialized and dehistoricized ‘theory,’ but is capable of “making itself true.” (ibid.: 95)

An essential point may be held in anticipation here; if neoliberalism simply were an economic inevitability, as the economists Bourdieu criticizes seem to suggest, then perhaps all that one could do is observe, interpret and describe its mechanisms, as a classical scientist describes gravity with little concern of changing or critiquing its laws. The reason this is insufficient is that the job insecurity made possible by discourses of flexibility itself resists a simple compartmentalization between theory and practice, the descriptive and the normative; it is animated by a political will that, as I showed with Harvey in a previous blog post, works to keep the rich rich at whatever cost to others, the environment, indeed really the economy itself. As Bourdieu writes, “it seems to me that what is presented as an economic system governed by the iron laws of a kind of social nature is in reality a political system that can only be set up with the active or passive complicity of the official political powers.” (ibid.: 86) This notion of passive and active complicity highlights what I’m talking about here; complicity is not only passive or theoretical, it crosses over into activity and the practical: practice can just as much serve to reinforce a dominant discourse as it can to critique it, it is not universally revolutionary. (This is, I’d suggest, one of the points of a total coherence between a dialectics of neoliberalism and the dialectical materialism hinted at in the 11^th thesis.)

Bourdieu seems to agree; along with many other features it shares with Marxism, neoliberalism is grounded in a belief in the utopia, this time that of an ‘absolute reign of flexibility,’ a ‘free trade faith’ that allows it to justify the dissolution of all forms of collective solidarity (the nation-state, work groups, unions, societies and cooperatives, the family) in the interest of a (false) Darwinian struggle for existence between individuals, one that justifies an “extraordinary mass of suffering.” (ibid.: 102) But there is a possible resistance against this ‘liberalism.’ Bourdieu warns against reading any thought of ‘conservation’ as ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’; conservation can amount to resistance, “so long as we know how to conduct the symbolic struggle against the incessant work of the neo-liberal ‘thinkers’ aimed at discrediting and disqualifying the heritage of words, traditions and representations associated with the historical conquests of the social movements of the past and the present.” (ibid.: 103)

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

L’essence du néoliberalisme

Bourdieu, Pierre. « L’Essence Du Néoliberalisme ». Le Monde Diplomatique, 1998, 3. https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/03/BOURDIEU/3609.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market

Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts Of Resistance: Against The Tyranny Of The Market. Richard Nice. New York: New Press, 1999.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Theses On Feuerbach

Marx, Karl. Theses On Feuerbach, 1845. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

Article(s)

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Observation as Critique in Financial Discourse

Histoire, repérage et traduction du terme « flexibility »

René Lemieux — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 21:38:45 +0000

En vue du Deuxième Colloque international sur la traduction économique, commerciale, financière et institutionnelle (UQTR, 17-18 août 2016), nous proposons une étude qualitative du terme « flexibility » et de ses équivalents « souplesse », « flexibilité » et « adaptabilité » dans un corpus constitué de textes provenant de diverses institutions : les journaux canadiens, les sociétés de capitaux, la Banque du Canada et la Fed.

Le terme et ses dérivés présentent un intérêt sur le plan conceptuel, voire idéologique, car les idées de flexibilité, d’assouplissement et d’adaptabilité sont au cœur des réformes bancaire, financière et monétaire, sans parler du marché de l’emploi et des nouvelles méthodes de gestion du personnel qui ont marqué les quarante dernières années. À l’égard de la main d’œuvre, Pierre Bourdieu avait lancé le terme « flexploitation » (1998) pour dénoncer le règne de la flexibilité imposée à la main d’œuvre précarisée par des contrats de courte durée, des horaires variables, des quarts de nuit et un climat de concurrence entretenu par des objectifs de rendement personnels, dernier gadget de la gestion participative et moyen d’auto-exploitation qui ne dit pas son nom, toujours selon Bourdieu.

Daniel Simeoni (1993) exhortait les traducteurs à une critique de la fonction structurante de la langue structurée par les institutions. Tout usager initié aux langues de spécialité relevant des domaines économique, bancaire, financier et administratif doit connaître le rôle qu’il joue dans la reproduction des formes du discours dominant dictées par les normes lexicales et perpétuées par la terminologie, les cooccurrents et les formules dites consacrées.

C’est donc un éclairage critique que nous comptons jeter sur le terme « flexibility », entre autres mots porteurs du discours néolibéral qui impose un ordre symbolique régi par la logique des marchés (productivité, compétitivité et adaptabilité maximales).

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

Contre-feux: Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l'invasion néo-libérale

Bourdieu, Pierre. Contre-Feux: Propos Pour Servir À La Résistance Contre L'invasion Néo-Libérale. Paris: Liber-Raisons d'agir, 1998.

Article(s)

Histoire, repérage et traduction du terme « flexibility »

L’institution dans la langue: lexique et pensée d’État

Simeoni, Daniel. « L’Institution Dans La Langue: Lexique Et Pensée D’État ». Ttr 6, no 1 (1993), 171-202. http://www.erudit.org/revue/TTR/1993/v6/n1/037143ar.pdf.

Article(s)

Histoire, repérage et traduction du terme « flexibility »