The Language Teacher

In his response to my article in The Language Teacher (Pennycook, 1997), Craig Sower (1998) has three main lines of critique: that language is more than a political act; that Marxism is not an adequate frame of analysis for looking at imperialism, language rights, or language classrooms; and that the notion of an an emergent Western world culture is ethnocentric. Ultimately, he recommends that we take a critical look at Critical Applied Linguistics (CALx). I do not really disagree with any of these points: I agree that language is more than a political act. I agree that Marxism is a problematic framework for looking at many things, and that we should not adhere to a simplistic view of Western imperialism (which I thought was the point of my opening paragraph). Finally, I agree that we should be critical about Critical Applied Linguistics. But, in making these valuable points, I find Sower's understanding of language, politics, and CALx rather unsatisfactory.

Sower may well be right that there are better terms than "acts of desire for capital." This tentative and preliminary formulation was intended to focus on the use of English not only in terms of communication, but also in terms of the performance of motivated, political acts in social spaces. In place of this political view of language, Sower offers us an unhelpful argument that "the use of English, indeed the use of language, does not cause injustice. The problems...arise from human nature, not linguistic choices" (1998, p. 35). But such a reliance on some essentialist version of "human nature," and on a view of language as somehow disconnected from social, cultural, or economic injustice, is surely inadequate. There is now an immense body of work, whether looking at language and gender, institutional discourse, language and social class, codeswitching, language and ethnicity, language planning, or whatever, to suggest that language use and language choice--who speaks, when, in what way, about what, to whom--are not simply reducible to human nature but rather are social, cultural, and political acts, and indeed are intimately tied up with questions of inequality, injustice, and power. And once we see language as social action, we can acknowledge that it creates as much as it reflects social relations (e.g., Cameron, 1995). Sower says language use is more than a political act. Fine. But is it ever less than a political act? I think not.

Instead of engaging with such concerns, Sower seems determined to cast my views and other work in Critical Applied Linguistics as Marxist-inspired and then to discredit Marxism by reference to the problems with Marxist state regimes. But both criticisms rather miss the point. I agree absolutely that Marxist views on many things are deterministic, reductionist, and materialist, and I have written at some length on these matters (e.g., Pennycook, 1994a, 1994b). Nevertheless, in order to understand how power operates in the context of language, we need to draw on critical theory, and part of that tradition derives from Marx. To critique Marxist states, however, has virtually nothing to do with this. Thus, I object on the one hand to the attempt to descredit Marxism by dealing with its state manifestation rather than as a body of critical thought, and on the other hand to the attempt to suggest that CALx is nothing but Marxism. If Sower had not quoted so selectively, it would be clear that my notion of CALx acknowledges the importance of some neo-Marxist thought while drawing on a far broader critical domain. This is how the quote used by Sower continues:

CALx has also started to reflect the changing nature of critical thought in general, thus looking increasingly to the work done in cultural studies, feminism, queer theory, or anti-racism, while drawing on postmodernist, poststructuralist and postcolonialist approaches to knowledge and the world. From these perspectives have emerged a far more complex understanding of the relationships between language, culture, discourse, and subjectivity, and a belief that research needs to focus on an analysis of the micropolitics of the everyday.

(Pennycook, in press)

Such domains of critical work are usually anathema to more Marxist orientations. As I went on in that article, CALx in my view is more than a simple addition of politics to language issues, but rather addresses "critical questions to do with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, cultural difference, ideology, inequality, identity, and subjectivity in the areas of language use, language learning, and language teaching" (Pennycook, in press). For some reason, Sower seems determined to focus only on my acknowledgment that neo-Marxist structuralist analysis may have something to say, and to ignore this attempt to develop a broadly based critical approach to applied linguistics. While many may not agree with my position, I think CALx needs a fairer treatment than to be dismised as Marxist. Thus, while welcoming Sower's attention to my work, while agreeing with many of his arguments that we should not assume a simplistic version of globalization or Westernization (which, as I have suggested, my article was trying also to oppose), or that language needs to be seen as far more than a reflex of economic structures, I think we need to engage with the politics of language and to find tools to do so. Developing a broadly based notion of Critical Applied Linguistics would seem to be one way of going about this.

References

Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal hygiene. London: Routledge.

Pennycook, A. (1994a). The cultural politics of English as an international language. London: Longman.

Pennycook, A. (1994b). Incommensurable discourse? Applied Linguistics, 15(2), 115-138.

Pennycook, A. (1997). English and capital: Some thoughts. The Language Teacher, 21(10), 55-57.

Pennycook, A. (in press). Critical Applied Linguistics and education. In R. Wodak (Ed.), Language policy and political issues in education. Volume 1 of D. Corson (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and education. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Sower, C. (1998). Some second thoughts on English and capital: A response to Pennycook. The Language Teacher, 22(1), 34-35.