Can language be commodified? Toward a Marxist theory of language commodification

ABSTRACT

This article begins with an overview of the literature on language commodification and the Marxist critiques of this concept. I argue that, while these critiques have raised pertinent issues surrounding the concept of language commodification, they are limited by their reliance on Karl Polanyi’s notion of fictitious commodification, which suggests that entities like land, labor, money and, likewise, language cannot be commodities because they have not been produced to be sold in the market. Drawing on Nancy Fraser, who suggests that fictitious commodities are different from regular commodities not because of their ontological status but because of the role they play in maintaining the conditions of possibility for human life, I try to reorient the debate on language commodification by proposing a new theoretical understanding of this term, grounded in a Marxist approach to language as a social, historical and ideological practice.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Alexandre Duchêne, who planted the seed for this project during a couple of conversations in 2016 and 2017; to Mi-Cha Flubacher, Elisabeth Barakos and Helen Kelly-Holmes, who encouraged me to publish a preliminary – and very different – version of this paper presented at the Second International Conference on Sociolinguistics in Budapest in 2018; and to Will Simpson, who read and commented on an earlier draft. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and stimulating remarks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I owe this insight to Will Simpson (personal communication, February 6, 2021). A similar point is made by Holborow (2015).

2. “As regards the individual, it is clear e. g. that he relates even to language itself as his own only as the natural member of a human community. Language as the product of an individual is an impossibility” (Marx, 1973, p. 490).

3. That is to say, the idea that “language is not the translation and transmission of a thought that pre-exists it” (Lecercle, 2009, p. 94).

4. Vološinov was not equidistant with respect to the dichotomy between individualist subjectivism and abstract objectivism. While he strongly opposed abstract objectivism and the Saussurean philosophy of language, he respected Vossler’s work and drew on it, “even as he sought to overcome its psychologism” (Brandist, 2002, p. 91).

5. Reification, a key term of Marxist theory, “refers to the moment that a process or relation is generalized into an abstraction, and thereby turned into a ‘thing’. (…) Reification refers to the generation of a ‘phantom objectivity’, meaning that a human creation (…) takes the character of ‘a force that controls human beings’” (Bewes, 2002, pp. 3–4).

6. Although this concept was not systematically developed by Marx and Engels (Küttler, 2011), it is central to Louis Althusser’s Marxist structuralism (Hall, 2016).

7. A number of theorizations of “discourse” were developed in France in the late 1960s and 1970s, including Foucault’s (1969) famous theory of discursive formations (formations discursives) and Benveniste’s (1974) theory of enunciation (énonciation), which was further developed by authors like Oswald Ducrot, Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni and others.

8. Cf., Marcuse’s (2002) critique of the authoritarian elements that permeate language in advanced industrial society: “Functionalization of language helps to repel non-conformist elements from the structure and movement of speech. Vocabulary and syntax are equally affected. Society expresses its requirements directly in the linguistic material but not without opposition; the popular language strikes with spiteful and defiant humor at the official and semi-official discourse. Slang and colloquial speech have rarely been so creative. It is as if the common man (or his anonymous spokesman) would in his speech assert his humanity against the powers that be” (p. 89). See, also Halliday’s (1976) work on anti-languages.

9. Hall (2016) used the notion of articulation to avoid causal reductionism or determinism: “By ‘articulation,’ I mean the form of a connection or link that can make a unity of two different elements under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute, and essential for all times; it is not necessarily given in all cases as a law or a fact of life. It requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, and so one has to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made” (p. 121).

10. That is, Saussurean structuralism and Chomsky’s generative grammar. There are linguistic theories whose epistemological principles are compatible with a Marxist theory of language, like systemic functional linguistics and integrational linguistics. For systemic functional linguistics, see Halliday as cited in Martin (2013): “If I may be allowed to invert Chomsky’s dictum, I would say that language is an infinite system that generates a finite body of text. This means that we can never do full justice to the system” (p. 62); “what is transmitted to us through language, when we learn it as children, is in fact the social system; (…) our experience is codified in language through the intermediary of the social structure” (p. 36). For integrational linguistics, see, Harris (1998): “For the integrationist, we are starting from the wrong end if we suppose that linguistic communication presupposes languages. The right theoretical priority is exactly the reverse: languages presuppose communication” (p. 5); “linguistic analysis does not require the assumption that there are languages” (p. 50).

11. Simpson and O’Regan (2018) trace it back to medieval Europe; Mey (1985), to ancient Rome. Arguably, language – as an extremely complex social practice – almost invites reification, i.e., being imagined as a thing with an independent existence.

12. For raciolinguistics, see, Rosa and Flores (2017): “A raciolinguistic perspective (…) interrogates the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. (…) We seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized in particular societal contexts, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy on a global scale.” (p. 622). For translanguaging, see, García and Otheguy (2019): “Translanguaging rests on the idea that the concept of the named language, and the related concepts of language purity and verbal hygiene were constructed to support ideologies of racial, class, and gender superiority” (p. 25).