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Nombre de lectures	54
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Legends of the Center: System, Self, and
Linguistic Consciousness
Janet Giltrow
Department of English
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4
giltrow@interchange.ubc.ca
Abstract
Commentators on language standardization, including Bourdieu and Bakhtin, provide
various perspectives on what this chapter calls modern linguistic consciousness: speakers’
awareness of their own speech in relation to others’ and in relation to the operation of
centralizing system. In this chapter, these formulations are used to analyze interview data
collected from readers and writers at a South Asian university—and, in turn, these data
elaborate the picture of modern linguistic consciousness. Readers and writers can pick out
self amidst the words of others, and in the presence of centralizing mandates; they can
position themselves in working spaces adjacent to system, and, while recognizing speech
norms, imagine themselves as not occupying those norms. Linguistic consciousness can be
detected in the expression of rules—but rules themselves turn out to be complex spaces
hosting diverse possibilities. Moreover, modern systems, in managing the speech of
populations, may not always operate exclusively in the service of the centre.

Modernity has struggled to locate system in diversity, and then self in system. Reasoning about
language has hosted many episodes of the struggle, as the normative face of speech confronts the
private one—the rise, decline, and residual of structuralist explanations of language being the
commanding example.
In the aftermath of structuralism’s ascendancy, the search for a modern conception of language
goes on in many domains, for questions persist about the nature of the speaker’s participation in
the system. New-rhetorical genre theory has de-centered attention by disregarding universal
measures of communicative effectiveness and focusing instead on local contexts for expression,
and the regularities in situation, form, and content (or “symbolized experience” (Burke, quoted in
C. Miller, 1984, p. 160) which develop over accumulating instances. These regularities are
visible in textual outcomes, but, more important for this discussion, they are apprehended in
language-users’ intersubjective consciousness: speakers’ and listeners’ not only recognize typical
situations but also recognize one another’s mutual awareness. If we look for self in this model of
individuals’ participation in a system, we find it in speakers’ identification with the roles and
motives available in the speech situation, and performance of these roles and experience of these
motives. If we want to add agency to conceptions of self, we find it in the contingencies of
situation: typifiable but also historical, contexts change—at least partly in response to individual
instances of participation. This view of self and agency comes at some cost to ideals of
originality and self-expression, but also with some profit to ideals of the sociality of language.
Writing Selves/Writing Societies, Bazerman & Russell Published February 1, 2003
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/ Copyright © 2003 by the Authors & Editors
System, Self, and Linguistic Consciousness, Giltrow Page 364
In the genre-theoretical model, consciousness is a play of intersubjectivity—and it is also
structured for tacitness. Intersubjective recognitions go on at levels not entirely available for
explicit expression. Tacitness explains discrepancies between what language-users do and what
they say about what they do, and explains the inadequacy of rule-giving and direct instruction in
speakers’ learning of a genre new to them. In this chapter, I look again at what people say they
are doing, but with a different or complementary interpretation of what has been taken to be
discrepant: the excess, the seemingly overgeneralized surplus as language-users give an account
1of themselves and of others. In this chapter, I try the proposal that some of what speakers and
writers, listeners and readers say about language is also an expression of a broader domain of
linguistic consciousness, and, further, that it is an indication of modernity itself: a sign of center
and system, and self in relation to those. While later sections of this chapter silently consult new-
rhetorical genre theory, I mainly intend to resume linguistic explanations of speaker and system,
for these continue, and they go beyond the structuralist analysis of competence which formerly
attached speakers to their language. Thereby, they uncover areas of sociality and planes of
regularity which genre theory, given its focus on the contingencies of local contexts, has had to
take for granted: standard language and its extensions.
In this chapter, I first look into a relatively recent round of discussion which inquires into
language through critical analyses of centralizing systems which regulate its use. The prominent
commentators I will briefly cite – James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, Tony Crowley, Pierre
Bourdieu, Deborah Cameron – are not always in sight from disciplinary perspectives in rhetoric
and writing, for they all keep in mind processes of language standardization, usually a province
of sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. But each gestures far beyond the usual topics of
2standardization mechanisms and their realization in lexicon, morphology, and syntax. The
standard is advanced not only by dictionaries and grammars but by the provisions of modernity:
institutions, roles, disciplines, techniques, policies, publicity. From the perspective of these
accounts, the “standard” is only one expression of centralizing forces and motivations. Equally,
each analyzes standard as established not by decree but in the intersection of system and self in
linguistic consciousness, which speaks to what Bakhtin calls “verbal-ideological consciousness”
(1981, p. 342). Each discovers aspects of language-users’ awareness or behavior in the presence
of centralizing systems and amid populations administered by those systems. Moreover, tracing
links to Bakhtin’s reasoning, we are reminded that Bakhtin had in mind more than heteroglossia
3and dialogism when he explained the sociality of language. By putting Bakhtin in the company
of current theorists of the standard, we are reminded that Bakhtin’s observations of genre, often
cited by new-rhetorical genre theorists, took place in a context of reasoning about the broader
formations of modernity. Each of these writers addresses the forces Bakhtin describes as
centripetal (roughly, centralizing and homogenizing) and centrifugal (roughly, decentralizing
and diversifying), and they also offer hints of certain irrepressible conditions which we can find
specified in Bakhtin’s account. These conditions restore self to settings that might seem most
likely to elide it. We can also discover these conditions, with some complications, in the
comments of those cited in the second part of this chapter: readers and writers in the English
department of a South Asian university.
Writing Selves/Writing Societies, Bazerman & Russell Published February 1, 2003
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/ Copyright © 2003 by the Authors & Editors
System, Self, and Linguistic Consciousness, Giltrow Page 365
Standard and Center
James Milroy and Lesley Milroy’s landmark Authority in Language: Investigating Language
4Prescription and Standardisation (1985/1991) examines the historical centralizing forces
accompanying the production of Standard English. Most forcefully, they note first that
standardization, in the presence of variety, ordains one form, and second that the prescription is
not equal to the task, for variety persists. So standardization is not to be viewed as accomplishing
actual uniformity in speech, but as inducing widespread consciousness of the standard, and of
companion variety. Consciousness of the standard produces auxiliary discourses and publicity,
among them the “complaint tradition,” which inspires both officials and citizens to lament over
variety and interpret it as decline and deterioration. The complaint tradition is one index of
linguistic consciousness: in the current round of discussion, it is an early indication of positions
and attitudes vis-à-vis system and self, the speech of others and one’s own speech.
While Milroy and Milroy defend speech variety from centralizing insult, however, they leave
writing to fend for itself. Standardization, they say, is a requisite for modern systems, assuring
clarity of communication across time and space. At the same time, Milroy and Milroy’s critique
of prescriptivism points to reform: They recommend changes to conceptions of variety in spoken
English, urging such change in educational policy especially. To this extent, liberal-reformist
aims can be themselves normalizing, and centralizing—corrections to the system.
Tony Crowley’s genealogy of the standard (Standard English and the Politics of Language,
1989) exposes centralizing forces as personages and postures, defensive against the barbarians at
the gate, and the “mob” within. Crowley’s story of the standard, and its contribution to nation as
comfort to official anxiety over class conflic