Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:53 Page Number: 263 12 Title Name: Coupland Critical debates Discourse, boundaries, and social change Sari Pietikäinen 1. Introduction: shifting boundaries, transforming critique Language boundaries and categories are a classical sociolinguistic issue in accounts of linguistic diversity and change. However, the status of boundaries and categories is called into question in the complex and shifting terrain of theoretical and political debates (cf. Blommaert, this volume, Chapter 11). How should such boundaries and categories be best understood and defined? One important perspective, adopted in this chapter, is that the construction of sociolinguistic boundaries always involves questions of power. That is, we need to ask when, how, on what grounds, and by whom they are defined and operationalized. These questions have consequences for many key issues of interest in sociolinguistics, including identity and social inequalities. This perspective is often taken as a form of critical language research, although we also need to question what is actually meant by the concept of ‘criticality’. As a heterogeneous and debated project in itself, the concept of the critical is frequently used in different strands of research into language, power, and social change (see, e.g., Fairclough 1992; Pennycook 2001; 2012; Mesthrie 2009; Heller 2011; Duchêne et al. 2013). Often, theorization of the complex relationships between language, power, and social change, as developed by Foucault, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov, forms the baseline of critical perspectives, but there are obviously different historical developments and emphases within language research interested in these issues (see, e.g., Woolard 1985; Blommaert 2005; Heller 2011; Wodak 2011). For instance, we can trace back uses of the term ‘critical’ to Critical Linguistics, a perspective developed by linguists and literary theorists at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom (Fowler et al. 1979; Kress and Hodge 1979) during the 1970s, aiming to explore relationships between language use and ideologies, basing their work on Halliday´s systemic functional linguistics. This work continued in the 1980s under the label of Critical Discourse Analysis, a heterogeneous approach to the study of language use as part of social practice, with a focus of reproduction of social and political hegemony and power relations (see, e.g., Fairclough 1992; van Dijk 1993; Wodak 1996). 263 Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:53 Page Number: 264 264 Title Name: Coupland Power, mediation, and critique In other fields of language research too, for example in critical applied linguistics (Pennycook 2001), the term ‘critical’ marks a focus on the ways in which power and inequality figure in the arenas of language teaching, language policy, and language testing. In sociolinguistics, we can trace the roots of critical research in the works by Hymes (1974) and Gumperz (1982) in emphasizing an understanding of language as embedded in larger social systems and in the structuration of social difference, as well as reflecting the impact of Bourdieu’s work in exploring the role language plays in the political field and in processes of social (re)production (see, e.g., Hanks 2005; Heller 2011). Contemporary critical stances in sociolinguistics often evolve around questions of social difference and inequality in relation to linguistic diversity, particularly under the new, shifting conditions of mobility, globalization, and new economy, often accompanied by the argument that we need research that is aligned to a more ethnographic approach (cf. Blommaert 2010; Heller 2011; Duchêne et al. 2013). What these various ways of using the term ‘critical’ seem to have in common is that they mark a step away – or perhaps a step forward – from “merely” descriptive approaches to language research and that they challenge the idea of objectivist sociolinguistic research. Rather, a starting point is found in the idea that power always matters in sociolinguistic affairs and that research needs to investigate how language figures and is figured in changing relationships of power. The prevalence of the term ‘critical’ nowadays is hardly surprising, as the term evokes important questions that relate to power, inequality, resistance, and change. Also the growing demands of various research funding and assessment enterprises, insisting that research must have demonstrable social relevance, give renewed currency to critical work (cf. Curry and Lillis 2013). At the same time, research done under the critical label has itself been critiqued for its arguably deterministic and biased views of social change and of the directions it should take, for its a priori assumptions about relationships between language and power, and for losing its groundings and relevance under new conditions (e.g. Hammersley 1997; Toolan 1997; Breeze 2011). Yet many researchers continue to use the term ‘critical’, albeit with an attempt to renew its meaning and scope, at times indexed by newly coined terminology, such as “postcritical”, by emphasizing transdisciplinary work (such as multi-sited ethnography, nexus analysis, and discourse ethnography), or through foregrounding the work’s time–space aspects (in using concepts such as circulation and trajectories). ‘Critical’ has become a problematic term under current circumstances, if we agree that societies are suffering crises of authority and legitimation of any knowledge or of any political action (Phillips 2000: 14). The critical tag is not alone in these crises, as many other concepts that were conceived in the modernist frame – such as language, nation, and citizen – have also become Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:53 Page Number: 265 Title Name: Coupland Discourse, boundaries, and change 265 problematic concepts (Pennycook 2010). What ‘critical’ meant thirty or sixty years ago may not map onto the concerns and interests of current research, being undertaken in a context where the understanding of centres and margins is shifting and where power bases are tending to become polycentric. Also, various disciplinary developments around critical research have created different ontologies and epistemologies, not all of which are compatible. Criticality comes in different shapes and forms, and what the term means in sociolinguistics may or may not be synonymous with the sense(s) invoked in critical approaches in discourse studies, applied linguistics, sociology, and so forth. These problems associated with the term ‘critical’ do not mean that questions related to language, power, or social change are currently less important or pressing, but rather that what critical means now is partly ambiguous and is certainly changing. Starting from a core interest in language, power, and social change, critical language research has become a complex enterprise with rhizomatic connections to a wide range of theories, methods, and questions. While much of critical language research seems to continue to question and reflect on what is taken for granted – especially in terms of ideological critique (cf. Thomas 1993; Määttä and Pietikäinen 2014) – we seem to be at a point of ontological and epistemological transition as regards understanding what ‘critical’ means. Criticality is not alone in this transition, as similar kinds of ontological and epistemological questioning can be found in other fields researching language in society. For example, Reyes (2014: 267) discusses what she calls the “Super-New-Big” trend in examining large-scale changes in the contemporary moment. Otsuji and Pennycook (2010, and see Pennycook, this volume, Chapter 9) reflect on the various prefixes (metro/trans/poly) now being attached to ‘language’ or ‘lingualism’ as ways of exploring multilingual language use without necessarily endorsing established disciplinary assumptions. These transitions are part of the development of theories and concepts. As Foucault ([1969] 1972: 3) reminds us, discussing disciplinary changes, beneath apparent continuity and development there are always interruptions, displacements, and transformations of traditions and concepts. The concept of ‘critical’ is no different. Similarly to the three waves of feminist studies (Eckert, this volume, Chapter 3) or to the several ‘turns’ in sociology and cultural studies, critical language research has also gone through various phases (see, e.g., Pennycook 2001). In the remainder of this chapter,1 I explore some more specific ways in which the term ‘critical’ has been employed in language research regarding 1 This chapter has benefited from discussions on critical language research in the Jyväskylä Discourse Think Tank (2013), and I wish warmly to thank all the participants. Nikolas Coupland, Alexandre Duchêne, Monica Heller, and Helen Kelly-Holmes have provided very helpful Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:54 Page Number: 266 266 Title Name: Coupland Power, mediation, and critique language, power, and social change. To exemplify these developments, I locate the discussions around debates regarding sociolinguistic boundaries in a context of the multilingual indigenous Sámi community in Finland. Similarly to many other indigenous and minority language communities, the Sámi community continues to undergo intersecting linguistic, political, and economic changes related to, for example, indigenous language rights and revitalization, political and cultural sovereignty, contested legal definitions of the category of Sámi, and an economic change from primarily production to service industries, mainly tourism (Lehtola 2012; Pietikäinen 2013). All these changes disturb boundaries and create debates about the “right” course of action on Sámi identity and language politics, economic development, and other issues (Pietikäinen 2013; 2014; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2013). Various appropriations and applications of the concept of criticality appear to be in circulation, and further reflections upon how the term may help or hinder research into language and social change is needed. In the following, I treat the various approaches to criticality as themselves forming a discourse contingent upon particular historical conditions, claims for “the truth”, actors, and possibilities (cf. Luke 2002: 97) in the changing Sámi context. Foucault (as quoted in Weedon 1987: 108) argues that discourses are ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity, and power relations that inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. This conceptualization includes the very idea that discourses have a material power and systematically form, shape, and change the definitions of objects circulating within them (Pennycook 2010; Määttä and Pietikäinen 2014). I focus on three concurring and intersecting discourses about the critical, stemming from previous critical language research and operating in the indigenous Sámi context. In an attempt to highlight the logics of each discourse, I call these (1) emancipatory critique, (2) ethnographic critique, and (3) carnivalesque critique. I end with a discussion of criticality as an unfinished project and on the concept of rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) as a way forward. 2. Emancipatory critique One broad, influential approach to examining language, power, and social change has been through the work known as critical theory, a tradition of work associated with the Frankfurt school, a group of German philosophers and social theorists from the latter part of the twentieth century who worked comments on the various versions of this chapter and I am grateful for them. The chapter is produced in the context of the Peripheral Multilingualism research project, funded by the Academy of Finland. Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:54 Page Number: 267 Title Name: Coupland Discourse, boundaries, and change 267 within a Western European Marxist tradition (cf. Agar 1991; Bronner 1994; Pennycook 2001). Agar (1991: 107) describes how a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory, according to a specific practical purpose: A theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982: 244). This version of critical work, with its normative dimension, has been popular in various social and political movements, including those supporting minority and indigenous language rights. This is no wonder, as this version of the critical seems to provide a clear criterion and direction for both social change and political action. Within the field of language research, a discourse of emancipatory critique of this kind became popular towards the end of the twentieth century, especially (as noted above) in research carried out under the umbrella term Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (cf. Blommaert 2005; Pennycook 2010; Forchtner 2011). While in itself a heterogeneous enterprise that incorporates various strands and foci, the CDA approach is characterized by a concern for language, power, and emancipation that is largely inherited from the critical theory tradition (Forchtner 2011; Zhang et al. 2011). For example, one of the grounding scholars of CDA, Norman Fairclough (1995: 132), suggests that CDA is about investigating how “practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony” (see also Kelly-Holmes, this volume, Chapter 7). Luke (2002: 106) argues that the prevailing project of CDA is that of the critique of ideology, which it shares with most forms of textual analysis and the presupposition of normative orders. As the pioneering CDA scholar Ruth Wodak concludes (2011: 52), CDA aims at “producing enlightenment and emancipation”. CDA has been acknowledged to have been successful in putting questions of language, power, and domination in the foreground; in presenting an explicit agenda for change; and in bringing linguistic and textual analysis into a dialogue with (critical) sociological theories. At the same time, it has also inherited many of the same objections as critical theory in general. These relate to CDA’s lack of reflexivity on its own philosophical foundations, its readiness to take some key categories unproblematically for granted, and its tendency to orient itself towards unproblematized and static assumptions about power relations (oppressors/oppressed, majority/minority), as well as its belief in the awareness of inequality as a step towards emancipation (see, e.g., Hammersley 1997; Schegloff 1997; Slembrouck 2001; Verschueren 2001; Luke 2002; Blommaert 2005; Heller and Pujolar 2009; Pennycook 2010; also Heller and Duchêne, this volume, Chapter 6). Pennycook (2012: 129–130) points out how the unproblematized and nonlocalized use of some key concepts creates Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:54 Page Number: 268 268 Title Name: Coupland Power, mediation, and critique new kinds of problems: “reaffirm[ing] concepts such as emancipation, awareness, rationality, objectivity, quality, democracy and transformation which, from another perspective, may be viewed as products by the same system that gives rise to those very problems that this framework aims to critique. Thus, it both critiques and reproduces at the same time”. This kind of reproduction of problematic boundaries, particularly between centres and margins, as well as internal hierarchies, can be found in many minority and indigenous language contexts (Heller 2011; Pietikäinen 2014), as a kind of a recursive echo of nation–state logics. These typical strengths and problems of emancipatory critique materialize in the Sámi context, where this kind of critique operates with a particular longstanding view of the power imbalance between what is considered to be the centre (the nation–state, the ethnic and linguistic majority) and the periphery or minority (the Sámi community, Sámiland), and, moreover, with a default set of strategies for overcoming this power imbalance. These include promoting equal status, access, and rights for Sámi people and for their cultural, political, linguistic, and economic practices. In some cases these strategies translate into the active promotion of particular rights for the Sámi, applicable in their domicile area or when interacting with authorities. Importantly, for emancipatory critique to work, sociolinguistic boundaries need to be fixed: There need to be clear criteria, or at least a consensus, as to what counts as Sámi, indigenous, endangered, and minority, and how these can be identified, accounted, maintained, or developed. This rather fixed view of power relations, of who is Sámi and who is Finn, and of the objects and tools for critiquing and ultimately changing these relationships, continues to be the dominant frame informing much political mobilization in the Sámi context. It has been successfully employed in promoting indigenous legal, political, and linguistics rights; in implementing the cultural sovereignty of the Sámi people; and in informing many Sámi language and cultural revitalization projects. It plays a crucial role in various enumerative practices (of the number of Sámi language speakers, of the number of Sámi living in the Sámi domicile area, etc.), feeding into the logics of emancipatory discourse: The relatively small or large numbers of Sámi language speakers, for example, have been used as indicators of how necessary (in the case of small or decreasing numbers) or effective (in the case of large or increasing numbers) language revitalization projects are. At the same time, emancipatory critique is problematic in the Sámi context. It reproduces its own centres and margins, in fact in ways that are quite similar to how the modernist nation–state system that it sets out to critique does, by endorsing fixed boundaries around the category of Sáminess. In the process, it includes some bodies, histories, and practices and excludes others. At the same time, there is an increasing need to account for the multiplicity, complexity, and ambiguity around being and becoming Sámi. There are more and more Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:54 Page Number: 269 Title Name: Coupland Discourse, boundaries, and change 269 bodies, repertoires, experiences, and trajectories that do not fit comfortably into these official categories. This situation generates increasing critique “from the ground up”, directed at this fixedness of categories and at the policing of linguistic and ethnic boundaries. For example, new speakers of the endangered Sámi languages (cf. O’Rourke et al. 2015) – those who have learnt the Sámi languages outside the family context, typically later in the life, and especially those learners who do not have a Sámi heritage – disturb the category of “Sámi speaker”, which has so far mainly referred to people with Sámi heritage. This is also a political and legal question, as competence in Sámi languages and the ways it has been acquired are part of a legal dispute around who counts as Sámi, what criteria are used, and who gets to decide (Valkonen 2009; Joona 2013). In this moment of transition, the current official legal definition of the category of “Sámi”, provided by the Finnish Sámi Parliament, the highest legal authority in Finnish Sámi issues, has been criticized as being too narrow and exclusive, and the countercritique to this critique has been described as interference in the internal issues of Sámi community and as an attempt to colonialize the Sámi community from the inside (Sarivaara 2012). The Sámi example illustrates how emancipatory critique may not be as straightforward on the ground as it first seems. It may have both intended as well as unintended impacts. It can be a powerful strategy for engaging with various legal and educational institutions operating with similar kinds of normative frameworks. At the same time, it tends to create local tensions between what is now perceived as the “elite Sámi”, with acknowledged statuses and legally granted rights, on one hand, and those with far more hybrid and complex genealogies, on the other. In this sense, the emancipatory critique is simultaneously both part of the solution and part of the problem. The example also illustrates how sociolinguistic boundaries result from the discursive processes and objectives of social contests: What becomes fixed – at least for a while – as denoting “being Sámi” is the result of discourse work and a precarious yet strategic use of essentialism (Spivak 1988; cf. Wee, this volume, Chapter 15). The changing conditions of globalization, as well as novel spaces, modes, and understandings of activism and social change, have all created theoretical and empirical challenges for emancipatory critical research (cf. Luke 2002; Zhang et al. 2011). Investment in one view of power relations and in one way to change them may limit the possibilities for emancipatory critical work to engage locally and to think of alternative strategies for social change and related political projects. At times, this makes emancipatory work mistrustful of approaches which start with the premises of locally embedded, decentred, and networked views on language, power, and social change. Next, I turn to look at this kind of critical work, which I refer to as ethnographic critique. Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:54 Page Number: 270 Title Name: Coupland 270 Power, mediation, and critique 3. Ethnographic critique If emancipatory critique starts with a set view of what seems to be the problem and with a set of strategies to solve it, ethnographic critique begins from the other end. It rejects the totalizing tendency of the emancipatory critical view to create a single universal knowledge or truth and simple dualisms (powerful/ powerless, just/unjust, etc.) that go with it. Instead, it locates knowledge production in multiple positions, in changing local conditions, and in individual stories. Ethnographic critique is in an alliance with postmodern thinking insofar as it explicitly rejects totalizing perspectives on history and society – grand narratives – and attempts to explain the world in terms of patterned interrelationships (Agar 1991: 116). What becomes the focus of interest, then, is the ways in which different social experiences, conditions, and consequences of (say) being a Sámi are framed by various discourses at a given historical moment, how people make sense of them, and, importantly for the critical dimension, how they map upwards or are linked to wider social, historical, and economic structurations. The attempt here is to explore particular event- and process-based configurations of power and knowledge that emerge at a particular time and place within encounters that are historically conditioned (Patton 2006: 268). When discussing critical sociolinguistics and ethnography, Heller (2011: 34) describes ‘critical’ to mean “describing, understanding and explaining the relations of social difference and social inequality that shape our world”. The critical stance manifests itself in ethnographic work with research foci related to social issues and power relations as they emerge in local or individual practices and experiences, as part of wider patterning of social organization. To research “small” things is simultaneously to examine “big” things (cf., e.g., Heller 2011; Madison 2012). Ethnographic critique emphasizes material and historical dimensions – that is, how social relations came to be the way they are (Pennycook 2001: 6; Cook 2013: 966) – and what becomes fixed under what kind of conditions, and with what consequences (Heller 2011). Here we can see a link between ethnography and the Foucauldian idea that power and knowledge are the same thing (cf. Ball 1994). Foucault ([1969] 1972) insists that knowledge must be traced to different discourses that frame the knowledge formulated within them, and which are constituted historically. In much critical language research, this position of Foucault’s has been interpreted as a call for an ethnographic approach – an examination of what counts as knowledge in a particular time and place, according to what criteria, and decided by whom. This includes reflections of the position of the researcher as a knowledge producer and the ways in which knowledge is obtained and constructed (Madison 2012). A story told by a Sámi man that I call here Antero, in the context of ethnographic research on language biographies, is a story of boundary work Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:54 Page Number: 271 Title Name: Coupland Discourse, boundaries, and change 271 related to language-ideological debates over who owns the Sámi languages, and on what grounds. Antero is a senior Sámi with a multilingual repertoire, including Inari Sámi, one of the least common Sámi languages, which has about 400 speakers (Kulonen et al. 2005). The story illustrates how power and knowledge are intertwined with real, material consequences on the construction of sociolinguistic boundaries, and impacting on individuals’ legitimacy as Sámi language speakers. In terms of language biography, Antero is a typical example of his generation of Sámi. In his childhood, before the Second World War in preindustrialized Finnish Lapland, Antero learnt and used Inari Sámi at home and in his village, hearing other Sámi languages and Finnish occasionally being used by travellers and by relatives. Entering the Finnish school system at the age of seven changed his linguistic practices drastically. At boarding school, a strict Finnish-only language policy was applied, and Antero learnt to read and write in Finnish only. Because of the long distances, Antero was able to visit home only during a few holidays in the school year, and gradually his language practices shifted from Inari Sámi to mainly Finnish. Over the next decades, Finnish became his main language for everyday activities, relating to work opportunities and a family life with non-Inari Sámi speakers. Only later in life, when Antero decided to establish a tourism business as a part of the ongoing economic development of the area, the Inari Sámi language acquired new value as an index of authenticity. At this time in his life, at least partly prompted by the example set by his grandchildren who were taking part in Inari Sámi-medium education, Antero decided to take part in an Inari Sámi language course designed for speakers lacking literacy skills. But in the end he stayed there only few days, as he got into a languageideological argument with the teachers over the correct pronunciation of one particular word. The story of Antero illustrates local conditions and complexities related to sociolinguistic boundaries: how the criterion for being a Sámi speaker can change over time and space, how it is possible to be a legitimate Sámi speaker “here” but not “there”. The story also shows how the aims of language revitalization, typically framed by emancipatory goals, are actually a highly complex issue “on the ground”, in the everyday life of the people and community. Using Inari Sámi as a language of education turns out to work well for some people in certain situations, and not so well for others in other situations (cf. Heller 2011). Being classified as a Sámi speaker (or as a new speaker, or as not being a Sámi speaker) may have both desirable and undesirable consequences for the same people (Sarivaara 2012), as this kind of boundary work has to do with the construction of social stratification and differentiation (Heller 2001: 117; 2011: 34–35; Blackledge and Creese 2010: 5). As Antero’s story illustrates, sociolinguistic boundaries are not natural objects but discursive constructions, or what Heller (2011: 36) describes as “ideas that Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:55 Page Number: 272 272 Title Name: Coupland Power, mediation, and critique people struggle over, sometimes working hard to make them real . . . and sometimes trying to redefine or even destroy them”. A similar kind of discursive work can be found in the language-ideological tensions that exist between the categories of dialect and language (cf. Duchêne 2008: 10). The typical limitation associated with ethnographic critique relates to its lack of universality, and consequently its difficulties in connecting small, local practices with the big picture (cf. Heller 2001: 118). Further, in critical (minority) language research, ethnographic critique is at times seen to be too relativistic and postmodernist, which can be interpreted as unhelpful, and even harmful, to social and political action. For example, recent sociolinguistic discussions about what a “mother tongue” or a “first language” is and where boundaries around particular languages are positioned can be interpreted as relativistic and giving in too much to a postmodernist deconstruction, undermining and disregarding attempts by many minority and indigenous language communities to strengthen their languages (see, e.g., Olthuis et al. 2013: 177–184). At the same time, Heller (2011: 10) emphasizes that ethnography is a powerful way to examine how what happens locally is not distinct from wider patters of social organization or from the ways in which categorization is used to reproduce or challenge social inequality. Ethnographic critique may thus help in understanding processes underlying the ways in which categories and boundaries, such as “Inari Sámi speaker” or “mother tongue”, became what they are at a particular moment and place, and the local conditions under which they operate (cf. Blackledge and Creese 2010; Heller 2011). It also sheds light on various particular debates about boundaries, the consequences of particular categories, and the ways in which people cope and strategize with them. While ethnographic critique helps in problematizing boundaries, the next version of the critique sheds light on ways in which they can be transgressed. 4. Carnivalesque critique Perhaps more than the two previous versions of critique, carnivalesque critique has a flavour of counterculture, grass-roots, perhaps even lightness and marginality to it. Rather than being part of more “established” versions of critique, that is, part of a political movement or a social project, carnivalesque critique is typically found in a fleeting moments of popular culture, such as graffiti, political parodies, and various media “mash-ups”. In these contexts, playful and ironic carnivalesque critique is used to poke fun at and disturb fixed categories and boundaries with humor. It is used to shed light on the absurdity of fixed relations between language, culture, ethnicity, nationality, and geography and to explore how such relations are resisted, defied, or rearranged with appropriations of hybridity, exaggeration, and unfinishedness (Bakhtin 1986; Pennycook 2010). Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:55 Page Number: 273 Title Name: Coupland Discourse, boundaries, and change 273 In this version of criticality, ambivalence, fleeting temporality, and humor become the method of critique (Clifford 2013; Pietikäinen 2013). In the Sámi context, carnivalesque critique seems to be linked to emerging imaginations and practices of being and becoming Sámi – to be found, for example, in hybrid comedy shows, tourism performances, and progressive arts. In the field of critical language research, interest in carnivalesque critique, as both a research topic and a mode of critique of language boundaries and categories, is relatively recent, as it has perhaps so far been seen as too ephemeral and light to be taken seriously (see, however, Pennycook 2007; Lamarre 2014; Pietikäinen 2014). Despite its apparent lightness, carnivalesque critique is serious about language, power, and social change. In the current era of multiple transitions, cross-sections and mobilities, it has become a promising concept for examining the dynamics of power in multidirectional and intersecting social and political changes. It engages with critical discussions and activism by troubling essentializing notions of identity and by recognizing that identities shift and change over time and space, just as the institutions and structures that delineate them shift and change (Wilson 2013: 3). Carnivalesque strategies are used to challenge hegemonic social orders through grotesque realism and inversion of hierarchies and exaggeration, inviting audiences to critically reflect upon the constructed nature of the social world (Martin and Renegar 2007). This multiplicity with a critical edge has made carnivalesque critique popular among many current political identity projects related to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and others, which aim to start with multiplicity and intersectionality rather than dichotomic categorization. For critical language researchers, it provides a nexus point, a conjuncture to explore overlapping practices of politics, popular culture, and social change in a moment of transition and multiplicity (cf. Pietikäinen 2014; Pietikäinen et al. forthcoming). Here again, the works of Michel Foucault have been used to unravel the transgressive potential of carnival and what it might offer in terms of critique. Foucault (1997 [1963]) argues that “transgression is an action which involves the limits . . . limit and transgression depend on each other” (p. 33). He continues, “[T]ransgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes or to be more exact to recognize itself for the first time” (p. 34). Transgression therefore does not deny limits or boundaries but rather exceeds them, thus completing them while disclosing a reflexive act of denial and affirmation. This understanding of transgression opens up alternative ways of thinking critically about what is perceived as normative, standard, or taboo (sacred) and what is perceived as counternormative, opposite, or deviant (profane), and, importantly, how these boundaries can be problematized and changed. Going back to our earlier discussion about languages and boundaries, the idealized models of bounded Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:55 Page Number: 274 274 Title Name: Coupland Power, mediation, and critique and autonomous languages that are used in many projects framed by emancipatory critique tend to conflict with the hybrid, mixed, and changing multilingual practices and identities that characterize the lived reality of many minority language speakers, highlighted by ethnographic critique. Transgressive, carnivalesque critique, then, starts from the status quo and aims to go beyond prevailing boundaries by problematizing existing fixed ontologies of sociolinguistic boundaries, while also providing alternative ways to move forward that capture both fluidity and fixedness – the dynamics of power (cf. Pennycook 2007). It also challenges us to rethink the very notion of critique itself, as well as the social change it promises to bring. These alternative imaginations of being and becoming Sámi seem to foreground heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1986; see also Blackledge and Creese 2014) as a starting point and push for novel ways to account for and to validate change, multiplicity, and ambiguity. Bakhtin argues (1968: 10) that “carnival can be seen as a temporal liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order”. Carnival is transgressive in its very nature – a “genuine transgression”, Bakhtin (1968) suggests. Carnival is transgressive because it stirs up and shakes thought that is based on the logics of identity categories and boundaries (Lechte 1990: 109). The attempt – or at least the spirit – of carnival is to dislocate, counterbalance, and disturb normalizing and totalizing categories and boundaries and to show that they too are products of a system of discourses and practices, and as such are subject to change. Thus, one possible way to bring critical reflection into this system is through “carnivalization”. In the Sámi context, with ongoing debates around categories and boundaries, carnivalesque critique can be found in some particular shifts and moments related to ways of understanding, using, and talking about Sámi resources. An example of this is a highly popular, albeit somewhat controversial Sámi TV comedy show called Märät Säpikkäät/Njuoska Bittut. A key element of the program is performing and trying out alternative Sámi identities and intersecting various linguistic, ethnic, and gender boundaries. The show portrays and makes jokes about iconic and easily recognized characters visiting Sámiland, including ignorant tourists, “wanna-be-Sámis”, “fake-Sámis”, and Helsinki people (people from the capital of Finland, in the country’s southern centre), as well as iconic Sámi figures such as “Super-Sámis” (Sámi activists) and “city-Sámis”. The show seems to escape from – or at least to laugh at – some of the traditional, fixed boundaries, including the Sámi/Finnish, minority/ majority, North/South, centre/periphery, and female/male distinctions, and their absurdity in everyday life, which is characterized by an intersection of various simultaneous identities and complex ways of belonging (Pietikäinen 2014). The show is about critiquing and transgressing these boundaries: Laughter is a way to make stereotypes and fixed categories visible, perhaps to shake them, and potentially to open a space for reflection. It allows people in Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:55 Page Number: 275 Title Name: Coupland Discourse, boundaries, and change 275 the show to perform “taboo” or “profane” things behind the protective shield of humor (again see Pietikäinen et al. forthcoming). The viewer may see the show as just humor, political critique, or simply as being offensive and in bad taste, and the reception of the Märät Säpikäät/Njuoska Bittut show seems to include all these options (cf. Aikio et al. 2013). The comedy show marks a point in history where carnivalization and laughter in the context of Sámi identity have become possible. In the Bakhtinian sense of the carnival world, laughter shakes up the authoritative notion of boundaries, making room for a multiplicity of voices and meanings. The pregiven, regular categories and conventions are broken, reversed, and subverted through mockery, parody, and humor. The show is a playful, though carefully planned, strategic (and economically viable) performance. It purposefully moulds together the requirement of ownership and appropriation of Sámi languages, as well as the need for entertainment, into a TV show that licenses laughing and play as well as temporal crossings between categories and positions, with potential for more serious, political implications. Carnivalesque critique simultaneously plays with and against these norms. It can be simultaneously reflective, banal, critical, and humorous, allowing ambivalent voices to address diverse audiences and trying to articulate the ongoing, ever-shifting, multidimensional, heterogeneous, and ambiguous aspects that constitute the current local Sámi predicament and its diverse realities. Given its humorous character, carnivalesque critique may be disregarded, because it fails the test of amounting to “proper” critique. It has indeed been criticized as not presenting any way forward, only “turning everything into a big joke”. Also its ephemerality has been thought to make it irrelevant to the deeper and more extensive temporality of projects oriented towards social change. At the same time, it can, I suggest, be seen as an alternative model of critique, celebrating as it does processes of becoming, change, and renewal, while being hostile to all that is static or complete. In the Sámi context carnivalesque critique seems to provide a way to address multiple, shifting norms and diverse realities by creating practices and performances that are important for emerging ways of being and doing Sáminess. Such performances and practices critique the prevailing categories and norms. They employ both fixity and fluidity to create a polyphony that plays with previous orders and norms. The dissolution of the division between the sacred (norm) and the profane (its opposite) invites us to reflect on what boundaries are sanctioned, what novel boundaries and crossings are allowed, which identities are uplifted, and which boundaries are saved. These performances and practices make sense locally and are meaningful in relation to the constantly changing social, spatial, and symbolic environments in which they are enacted and interpreted. For example, the character portrayals of the “wanna-be Sámi” and the “SuperSámi” are recognizable types within the community, and the question of who Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:55 Page Number: 276 276 Title Name: Coupland Power, mediation, and critique would best fit these characterizations is subject to discussion. Finally, the Sámi version of carnivalesque critique has managed to involve new participants in the discussion about sociolinguistic boundaries, people who are typically absent from more emancipatory critique: young people, the non-Sámilanguage speakers, and others from the margins of dominant ways of doing critique in the Sámi context. 5. Unfinished critique: roots and rhizomes When discussing critique and sociolinguistics, Heller (2001: 117) talks about “the project of critique” when dealing with various ongoing developments and shortcomings in different disciplines’ engagement with the construction of relations of social difference and inequality. To me this underlines the fact that any kind of critique is an ongoing and unfinished process, embedded in a particular time and space, and that rather than trying to find “the truth” or “the best version” of a critical stance, where the alternative is to abandon the whole project, it makes more sense to try to understand the conditions and consequences of meanings and usages of criticality in a given time and space – how critique is understood, developed, and applied; by whom; and in whose name. In this chapter, I have tried to show what kinds of lens are offered by three versions of critique – emancipatory, ethnographic, and carnivalesque – to provide insight into shifting and complex sorts of boundary work in shifting multilingual, indigenous Sámi contexts. Each of these modes of critique obviously has its pros and cons. Emancipatory critique seems to work when there is a consensus on the goals and on the means to achieve them, but falls short when it encounters disagreement, complexities, or multiplicities. The strength of the ethnographic critique is in problematizing categories found “on the ground” and in bringing local practices into view in relation to wider social and cultural processes, but it faces challenges in terms of its grounding for political projects, and it potentially struggles to escape the dangers of excessive relativism (Pennycook 2012). Carnivalesque critique seems to provide alternative spaces, audiences, and practices for political identity projects, but raises doubts through its fleeting and apparently noncommittal attitude towards social, political, and economic structures and their long-term development. However, all three take language as a key focus of critique, and discourse as a resource for constructing that critique. This in turn points towards the centrality of discourse in any critical project. If we take as our starting point the Foucauldian view of discourse as socially constructed and constitutive to our ways of knowing and talking about that knowledge, then the conditions, trajectories, and consequences of circulating discourses about the issue under scrutiny become directly relevant for critical sociolinguistic research. Such a view is neither just a description of abstract Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:55 Page Number: 277 Title Name: Coupland Discourse, boundaries, and change 277 processes and structures nor merely a bland theory of language in society or discourse as social action; it in fact amounts to a politics of social organization (cf. Pennycook 1990; Heller 2001). In this view, “reality” and “construction” are not opposite; rather, this dichotomy dissolves. Critical questions concern the workings of discourses: their logics, their genealogy and anatomy, and their ecology. One possible way forward in developing the project of critique can be found in the rhizomatic ontology developed by French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1987); this is a provocative critique of modernity’s discourses and institutions and provides a promising starting point for thinking about critique in terms of its complexity, connectivity, and intersectionality of discourses. The rhizome can be seen as a theoretical metaphor of an interconnected and irreducible multiplicity of ongoing processes. It is a metaphorical representation of knowledge that could account for interconnectivity and multiplicity among the nodes in a network. It resists tree-like knowledge charting causality along chronological lines, and instead favours a nomadic system of movement (Heckman 2002; Walling 2010). I would like to argue this kind of rhizomatic thinking can be useful in describing the complex dynamics and manifold interrelationships between discourse and economics, between shifting sociopolitical forces and language practices, between environment, culture, and identity. It can help in finding new ways forward beyond fixed, a priori categorizations of people, languages, and places, in situations where static categories are no longer sufficient to account for current complexities and multiplicities. In this sense a rhizomatic approach provides a critique of the dichotomous representations of fixed boundaries, unchanging categories, and totalizing politics which were typical of modernist thinking, and which now prove to be inadequate to the task of explaining what is happening on the ground. It enables us to envision a system of dynamic changes that are never complete. The risks with a rhizomatic approach relate to a danger of depoliticizing practices that are crucial for many identity struggles or to the risk of a certain kind of romanticization of processual rhizomatic approach, which may lack deep engagement with the powers of orders and taxonomies (Wallin 2010). Also Deleuze and Guattari themselves caution against celebration of rhizomatics in writing that “there exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome” (p. 15). Taking up these potentials and limitations with a rhizomatic approach, one way of moving forward could be to start with the assumption that neither the rhizome (the potential for things to deterritorialize and enter into new assemblages) nor the root tree (the stratification of things into orders, taxonomies, or structures) is primary. Sometimes more stability is what is required; at other times more fluidity is needed to overcome overtly rigid system or open up new innovations. Comp. by: Kumar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 12 Date:9/3/16 Time:18:47:56 Page Number: 278 278 Title Name: Coupland Power, mediation, and critique Consequently, a rhizomatic discourse approach to boundary work at a particular time and space is not a closed or unchanging perspective, but rather an open system that emerges and transforms in the course of interaction. The relationships between language practices and their networked characteristics are implied and are seen in connection with historical, social, economic, and political practices and processes. They are neither linear nor separate, but instead any text, sign, or speech act potentially includes several interlinked discourses, which are connected to and across each other. Thus discourse can be seen as a historically embedded practice of knowledge construction, with material consequences and with rhizomatic connections to other spaces, times, and practices. What becomes crucial, then, is to understand which processes, actors, and resources are brought together under the logics of a particular discourse, and what the conditions and consequences of the discourse are. Using a rhizomatic discourse approach, it is possible to trace, map, and connect the historicities and the emergence of discourses across spaces and practices, while shifting away from fixed, ahistorical, static meanings. As discourses are productive as well as reflective of social relations, the focus is on “becoming” rather than on “being”. These intersecting discourses on criticality offer lenses into the questions of language, power, and social change. 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