Book reviews / System 28 (2000) 447465

461

The Politics of English. A Marxist View of Language. Marnie Holborow; Sage, London, 1999, 222 pp. Writers in this eld have a wearisome tendency to strike radical poses while espousing views that, on closer examination, often prove to be a recipe for keeping things pretty much as they are. It is with some delight then that the jaded reader can report that Marnie Holborow does not fall into this category. Writing from an explicitly Marxist viewpoint, her measured, understated tone serves only to enhance the eectiveness of a critique which strives to reclaim the social nature of language and reject the overblown claims of theorists who see the world as having no reality outside the vortex of discourse. I imagine that the word `Marxist' in the previous paragraph may already have convinced some readers that neither Holborow's book nor this review of it merit their further attention. Surely, they might argue, Marxism is crude, deterministic old hat and has long since been discredited in the wider world as well as the academy. Holborow, mercifully, is not that kind of Marxist. For her, Marxism oers a method rather than a cosmology, and her arguments ought to appeal to anybody who thinks that postmodernist views of the relationship between language and society in general, and the work of Michel Foucault in particular, have too often gone unchallenged in recent years. Holborow sets out by addressing the legacy of the shaven-headed gloomster in her introduction. She summarises his views in the following way: Discourse in Foucault's account is pivotal. Foucault's discursive formations share with structuralism the methodological procedure of providing denitions within a closed system. Like Saussure's langue, it is self-referential in so far as discourses are dened in relation to other discourses. But its idealism goes all the way down; discourse swallows up all other phenomena, social, political, ideological. (p. 6) She goes on to acknowledge that Foucault, eternally reluctant to allow himself to be tied down, might have been unhappy with the starkness of her summary. However, anyone at all familiar with his work would be obliged to acknowledge its fundamental accuracy. Reality, it would appear, is entirely a by-product of our discursive practices. What are the consequences of such a view of the world? Holborow is right on the mark when she suggests that no concept of justice can survive in a world where the notion of truth is relativised to particular discursive practices and that: If discourse is the prism through which reality is grasped, indeed is reality, how do you get out of language? What decides whether you can contest a discursive practice? At what point and for what reasons do you break the linguistic chain? Furthermore, if linguistic representation is everything, then politics becomes simply the rephrasing of language [F F F] a question of style. (p. 7)There is more. The academic fashion for all things postcolonial can sometimes lead to the

462

Book reviews / System 28 (2000) 447465

impression being given that the great empires were talked and written into existence. Indeed one is sometimes tempted to think that they consisted of little more than the orientalist gaze of western intellectuals and politicians playing on their unfortunate colonial subjects. Holborow is not having any of this. As she acutely observes, Descriptions of starvation are not the same as being hungry. The discourses of imperialism are dierent to the devastating consequences for the actual lives of countless Indians, Africans or Irish, wrought by colonial capitalism. (p. 8) The only thing that may possibly be missing from her discussion is an explicit acknowledgement that Foucault's notion of discourse can be a useful one, provided that it is not allowed to go `all the way down'. The author goes on to conclude her introductory remarks by wondering to what we can ascribe the popularity, in the academy and outside it, of the ``discourse is all'' world view. She draws the contentious but credible conclusion that it must have something to do with disillusioned 1960s radicals, having given up on eorts to change the world, trying instead to have it talked and written about in a dierent way. Having thus eectively dealt with some of the exaggerations and distortions inherent in Foucault's vision, the author turns her attention to the legacy of Marx. Marxism is frequently accused of representing relations between the economic base of society with its political and cultural superstructure in excessively simple terms, i.e. with the former rigidly and inexorably determining the shape of the latter. Many go farther and reject the base/superstructure view entirely. It is one of the signal services performed by the author to have gone back to what the founders of Marxism actually wrote in order to determine their views. On the basis of these readings, she convincingly states that: Marx never argued that the cultural and political spheres passively reect the economic base [F F F] while the social relations of production set limits to developments in the superstructure, there is an interaction of all elements [F F F] the relationship is not predetermined or simply reective, but dialectical. (p. 23) She also refers to the process whereby ideas appear to take on a life of their own, unhooked from the material reality that helped to produce them, when she argues that: The sheer power that consciousness confers produces another eect: that ideas seem cut loose of reality, as if free-standing, oating above the constraints of the material world [F F F] this impression can lead to a distorted view of human mind over matter, to an overblown view of mental power over reality. Instead of history being seen as part of a dialectical process between humans and the material world, mind comes to be seen as the prime mover of historical change. (p. 21)

Book reviews / System 28 (2000) 447465

463

Her comments in this section make it clear that Holborow has not fallen out of the Foucauldian frying pan where language makes the world only to land in the re of vulgar Marxism where there is a lock-step relationship between the economic and cultural and linguistic. There is much more here that ought to cause even the most sceptical reader to pause and contemplate before dismissing the Marxist view of language and society as being past its `sell by' date. After an enlightening for this reader at any rate exposition of the work of the Russian linguists Volosinov and Vygotsky, Holborow turns her attention to the politics of English in the world today. It may seem a statement of the obvious to maintain that: The dominance of English today is the continuation of a process started in the earliest days of capitalism, deepened by the expansion of the British Empire and given further impetus by the commanding position of American capitalism in this century. (p. 57) However, I think it is well worth repeating because a great deal is written about the expansion of English that may as well have been written about the growth of moss on a damp rock one rather gets the impression that it kind of just happened. She goes on to make the worthwhile point that the spread of English, great though it has been, is easy to exaggerate and that, like global capitalism, it has passed large sectors of humanity by. Turning to the way in which certain sectors of the academy have dealt with the legacies of the empires, once more she hits the nail on the head: Colonial `discursive practices', in other words, are not the same as the actual practice of colonialism, any more than it was imperial `discourse' that ran the slave trade or destroyed India's cotton industry. Crude materialism drove the imperial project and in Victorian Britain this was universally taken for granted, by apologists and detractors alike. Today [F F F] seen through the intellectual haze of postmodern introspection, such fundamental questions of material primacy are not so readily accepted. (p. 63) One is tempted to suggest that a scroll bearing this quotation should be xed to the door of the Arts faculty of every university in the English-speaking world. Robert Phillipson and Alastair Pennycook have in recent years made wellintentioned contributions to the debates surrounding the role of English and English language teaching in the world. Their work receives its critical due here. While acknowledging, that Phillipson's work has ``F F Fraised themes hitherto unaired within English language teachingF F F'' (p. 74), and lauding his ``F F Fopen anti-imperialist stanceF F F''(p. 75) she takes him to task on a number of points. These focus on the inadequacy of a simplistic northsouth, centreperiphery, theoretical framework that prevents him from seeing that it is local elites who are the ``F F Fagents and beneciaries of capitalist development'' (p. 77), and that, consequently, nationalism (including linguistic nationalism) does not necessarily represent an adequate response to imperialism.

464

Book reviews / System 28 (2000) 447465

Alastair Pennycook's work, though bearing the surface marks of greater sophistication, is shown to suer from what, perhaps, are even more severe problems. For him, there is no rational body of knowledge and no overriding social causes to human activity, merely `discourse practices' that are hegemonic [F F F]. He also holds that the role of discourse in the process of domination is central. (p. 81) Holborow correctly identies the main problems which focus on the elevation of language and discourse at the expense of esh and blood social and economic factors with these views, most of which can be ascribed to Pennycook's adherence to a strict Foucauldianism. However, another accusation could be added to the charge sheet, that of performative contradiction. If there is no truth, only `truth' relativised to particular discursive practices, then this insight must apply to Pennycook's own work too. His epistemological relativism pulls the rug from under his own critique. We simply cannot believe what he says. He tells us so himself. Holborow concludes her section on the role of English in the world by pointing out that Like railways, language can be used for many purposes, and not always those laid down by British engineers. She is also correct to say that there is nothing necessarily progressive about linguistic nationalism and draws on the sorry tale of the Irish language forcibly suppressed by British colonialists and later subject to attempts at forcible revival by conservative native elites to make her all too accurate case. By this stage the reader will not be surprised to learn that Holborow is sceptical about certain aspects of contemporary feminism. She doubts the existence of separate men's and women's languages and further questions the possibility of purging language of sexist features by such top-down strategies as dictionary reform. She also thinks the desire for such reform can distract feminists from more serious issues. Referring to one particular writer's criticism of sexist remarks by President Bush concerning the invasion of Grenada, she says that Sticks and stones, alas, are of a dierent order to words. Concentration on speech codes misfocuses and misres; it eclipses more severe social realities [F F F]. (p. 113) Anyone who has ever believed claims for linguistic reforms being the precursor of broader social change will nd plenty of food for thought here. On the debates surrounding standard English Holborow's generally sensible discussion succeeds in demonstrating that many commonsense views in this area are not what they appear to be and concludes by saying that:

Book reviews / System 28 (2000) 447465

465

Over-rigid demarcations between non-standard varieties and standard dialects can lead to giving codes and varieties a causative role in inequality, whose roots lie in society not in language. (p. 185) There is a lot of truth in this, but as a speaker of Hiberno-English, I am very glad that I had the opportunity to learn the standard written form and am aware that command of it has opened doors that may otherwise have remained closed to me. Marnie Holborow's book is perceptive, well-written and timely. The fairness with which she treats her opponents' arguments only adds to the power of her critique a critique that demonstrates that postmodernist thought, far from providing a basis for achieving any kind of social justice, serves instead to domesticate and neutralise demands for real change. It should be read by anyone with an interest in the role of English in the world, and more generally, in relations between language, discourse and society. Eamonn McDonagh E. Frias 24-7a, (1414) Buenos Aires, Argentina E-mail: address: eamonn@arnet.com.ar
PII: S0346-251X(00)00025-00025-7