- Email: [email protected]
The Language of Everyday Life
Language & Communication 22 (2002) 107–112 www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom
Book review
The Language of Everyday Life By Judy Delin. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. ISBN 0-7619-6090-2 This book is offered to beginning students of ‘language, communication, and media studies’ as an introduction to the methods of a discipline that goes unnamed in the book, but which one might presume to be called something like ‘linguistic analysis.’ Judy Delin, who serves as the Director of the Centre for Research in Language and Communication at Stirling University, aims to ‘introduce a skill’ by presenting model analyses of such discursive events as sports reporting, news reporting, interviews, instructions (written and spoken), magazine features, and advertising. These analyses consist mostly of attaching terms — ‘reverse wh-clefts,’ ‘back-channeling,’ ‘time-critical utterance,’ and about two hundred others — to the micro-phenomena of routine discourse that would otherwise hum along anonymously. ‘Other features that build the image of the product,’ she says in one characteristic comment, ‘are gradable adjectives: in the anti-perspirant advert, for example, the product is described as ‘‘the longest lasting Lady.’’’ A final chapter urges students to create research projects of their own. It is full of helpful hints: get a good subject (‘bus tickets . . . might prove rather limiting’), ‘get permission’ from people before you start taping, know when to use the tie-clip mike and when to go with the boundary mike, make sure to switch the microphone on, set the tape speed correctly, and of course, ‘remember to switch the microphones off when you’ve finished using them, or the batteries will drain.’ Ultimately, the author hopes that her book will generate ‘a sense of wonder at what we do through and with language day by day.’ This reader did finish the book with a sense of wonder, but it was directed at the book itself, and at the author’s assurance that its arrival would be eagerly greeted by large numbers of students impatient with theory and itching to ‘dive straight in,’ to ‘get their hands dirty and get into texts’. How this book could satisfy such disorderly appetites remains unclear, but larger and more interesting questions gather around the overall argument of the book. Delin sets out to contest the view that ‘everyday talk is a distinct discourse type’ that contrasts with other types such as advertising, institutional conversation, legal language, political discourse, and so forth. She proposes instead that her chosen ‘text types’ are so common (‘I have not deliberately gone for the weird’) that they constitute ‘an important part of our everyday experi-
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ence, and the features of all of them overlap substantially with the features of everyday language.’ Unfortunately, this apparently harmless and preliminary comment introduces confusion into the entire project. For by proposing a Venn diagram in which various kinds of discourse overlap with the larger category of ‘the everyday,’ Delin raises, without seeming to realize it, a number of questions. If all of these distinct ‘text types’ share some features with the everyday, then what features are not shared? What features peculiar to interviews, for example, are not part of everyday life? And if sports commentary consists of narrating, elaborating, and summarizing; if it involves ‘gaze’ in which ‘speaker 1 may look at speaker 2,’ ‘turn-taking’ in which speakers alternate and ‘speech errors’ in which they screw up; if it displays ‘unplanned language,’ ‘coordinating conjunctions,’ and ‘non-canonical syntax’; if it can be assessed in terms of its ‘pitch’ and ‘intonation’ — then where, precisely, is its difference from the everyday? And, since so many of these text types can include, through quotation or other means, nearly all the features adduced as distinctive of sports commentary, interviews, magazine features, and so forth, then how is one type to be differentiated from any of the others? What features of the everyday do not exist in any of the distinct types Delin studies? Where is the pure everydayness of language to be found? And what, finally, is language? How is it distinguished from ‘communication’ in general at Stirling University? What is considered to be the relation of language to cries, marks, gestures, thoughts? Are these understood to be aspects of language, of communication, of both, or of neither? The failure to recognize, much less address, such questions lends a certain mystery to this most prosaic of books. What is the point of the skill that Delin introduces, if that skill cannot succeed in identifying distinctive features of a given category? Absent clean categories, what are the features to which Delin gives names features of? What, in short, is she doing? For the most part, one cannot call her work ‘analysis,’ for analysis, unlike ‘advertising,’ is a specific and distinct discourse. It requires, first, an object — paradigmatically, a text — whose character or significance is not self-evident. This primary object in turn requires, in order for its real nature or full import to be manifest, a secondary discourse. The analytical text represents the form and other features of the primary text, situates that text in the relevant contexts, and on that basis constructs an account of chosen aspects of the primary text in their full dimensions, realizing the potential of the primary text by saying both what the primary text says and what it does not or cannot say but nevertheless indicates or suggests. Even in this highly compressed account of analysis, it is evident that naming does not qualify. Delin does, however, engage in analysis in one respect. Readers will, she says at the start, ‘be aware throughout the book of the influence of researchers who see the use of language as an ideological activity.’ Delin has in mind a specifically postMarxist understanding of ideology not as ‘false consciousness’ or ‘the imposed values of the ruling class,’ but simply as the set of largely unconscious and generally unstated beliefs that silently arrange hierarchies of values, structuring the sense of reality available to members of a given culture. When, for example, an advertise-
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ment says that a certain shampoo ‘gives a healthy shine’ to hair, it presumes without argument the value of shiny hair. This value, being culture-specific rather than universal, contingent rather than necessary, qualifies as ideological in Delin’s definition of that term. Participating in — indeed, constructing — the sense of ordinary reality, the language of everyday life must be an ideological language, and linguistic analysis must take the form of ideology critique. Delin’s casual adoption of this account of ideology suggests the pervasiveness of the posthumous influence of Roland Barthes, who argued that bourgeois ‘mythology’ sought to create the feeling that middle-class values, institutions, and practices were neutral, normal, and global, thereby removing them from the field of cultural contestation. Ideology, Delin says in this vein, confirms certain assumptions in a way that gives them the status of common sense even though they ‘actually reflect, enshrine, and even create differential relationships of power in society.’ The effectiveness of ideology depends upon concealment; restoring history and contingency to what had seemed immutable, ideology-critique creates a sense of power or control. Once you become fully aware that shiny hair is a cultural rather than a universal value, you will become alarmed at the way in which the advertisement exploits you, turning your helpless but good-faith participation in the cultural system to the advantage of the shampoo-maker. You will become immune to the allure of the ad, and may even flaunt your dull and matted hair, and perhaps your dirty hands as well, as a defiantly cosmopolitan gesture of identification with humanity at large. As Delin says, her book ‘is intended to be empowering.’ The sense that the real subject is ideology informs several premises underlying Delin’s project. She presumes, for example, that communication is essentially strategic. Beneath the ‘eliciting exchanges,’ ‘multi-unit turns,’ ‘speech events,’ and ‘subordinate clauses’ that she so patiently identifies lies a set of motivations, decisions, and choices. In her introduction, Delin enumerates the ‘levels of description’ on which the book will operate, including production values, rhetorical structure, conversation structure, syntax, lexical choice, semantics, pragmatics, and sound. The definitions of each of these terms stress the speaker’s or writer’s conscious intention. Thus ‘production values’ are described as ways in which ‘certain types are constructed around expectations of what they will, and will not, contain’; ‘conversation structure’ designates ‘how a dialogue is constructed in ‘turns’ between speakers’; and ‘semantics’ indicates ‘the way meaning is conveyed by certain grammatical and lexical choices.’ And the overall project is to see how ‘all the levels listed above are orchestrated together to make a text work.’ Her curious decision to call her discursive types ‘texts’ even though a number of them, including interviews, spoken instructions, and sports commentary, are predominantly oral modes must be understood as part of a second entailment of the ideological conception of everyday language. Texts invite a kind of scrutiny that spoken utterances resist. We do not, while sweating through an aerobics class, feel the need to identify as ‘narration’ the instructor’s statement that ‘we’re gonna do a basic up tap down tap to the side,’ as a ‘directive’ her instruction to ‘take the arms right through a chest press,’ or as ‘comments on other aspects of the class’ state-
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ments such as ‘that’s it, that’s good, keep it up.’ Such naming becomes possible only with a transcript. Writing invites a kind of analysis that reconstructs a history of decisions. To a far greater extent than speech, writing can usefully be regarded as a record of encrypted choices, and texts offer themselves as problems to be solved, objects on which to do research, an assemblage of ‘features’ that contribute to making the discourse ‘work’. Speech flies by so rapidly, disappearing with the moment, that it only rarely seems to contain anything worth pondering at all. But texts can be pored over, probed for traces of strategic decision-making, assessed and reassessed. Thus the presumption that the language of everyday life is an ideological language coordinates with the seemingly unrelated, even apparently incongruous presumption that everyday language takes textual form. In order fully to appreciate the role of ideology in Delin’s work, one must understand something of the history of the term. In its original meaning, ‘ideology’ referred not to ideas themselves, but rather to the study of ideas. Emerging in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the word designated the inquiry into the genesis of social ideas, a new branch of learning intended to demystify opinion. Ideology in this sense is in fact the defining accomplishment in the intellectual field of the Revolution, and indeed of the French Enlightenment. With Marx and Engels, ideology became the object rather than the method of study, and has remained so, even as that object has undergone revolutions of its own. ‘Vulgar Marxism’ defines ideology as the ‘false consciousness’ imposed on the masses by the ruling class through their control of power, including the power of the media. The Barthesian view endorsed by Delin represents a contemporary ‘post-Marxist’ emphasis on the dissemination not of ideas but of values, concerns, attitudes, and needs; and not by the ruling class as such but by the decentered forces of capital. In a post-Marxist ethos, advertisements, which confirm ideas rather than create them, replace propaganda as the prime site of ideology. This might seem to represent a gentling-down of ideology as power becomes democratized, but in another respect post-Marxist ideology is more alarming than its predecessor, for while the opinions of the ruling class may be privately rejected by anyone, there is no escape from an almost entirely unconscious ‘set of beliefs, or entire belief system, through which a group or culture views the world’. Especially in an enlightened culture such as our own, in which the value of self-consciousness and self-criticism goes without saying, ideology is virtually invincible: we critique it all the time, but in doing so, we only confirm our obedience to the ideology of freedom, rationality, and autonomy, the ideology of liberal democracy — the ideology of capital. In a post-Marxist ethos, the surest sign that one is in the grip of ideology is the belief that one’s statements are simply rational, as when one engages in ideology critique. The history of ideology provides a far more interesting angle of vision on Delin’ s project than she seems to realize. Relying almost exclusively on a single book on the subject (which she pronounces ‘somewhat indigestible because of the intricacy of theory that builds up throughout’), Delin ignores the striking fact that ideology has been bound up with the language of everyday life from the very first. Destutt de Tracy, the leader of the ‘ideologues’ in the Section of Analysis of Sensations and
G.G. Harpham / Language & Communication 22 (2002) 107–112
111
Ideas, in the Moral and Political Sciences division of the Institut Nationale, was working on a Grammar at the same time as he was producing his 4-volume Projet d ‘e´le´ments d ‘ide´ologie (1801–1815). And in this latter work, de Tracy tried to establish ‘a grammar and language modeled after mathematics. . . in which each idea was assigned its corresponding linguistic sign’. The progress of the theory of ideology since Marx and Engels has consisted essentially of the progressive discovery of deeper and more intimate connections between ideology and language. V. N. Volosinov, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek btr all these theorists of ideology converge on a single premise: that the nature of ideology can be understood by reference to the nature of language. None of them receives a mention in The Language of Everyday Life. Delin may feel that her argument stands well apart from the complexities of theoretical dispute, being empirical rather than theoretical, devoted to specifics rather than to abstractions. But her own account of ideology suggests an investment in one among the many theories on offer. And, in fact, names and categories are abstractions, even small theories, and Delin cannot claim innocence in this respect. She ought, at the very least, to reflect in her book some awareness that the approach to ideology through language has a long and rich history, a history that she is, of course, free to contest but not precisely free to ignore. If she had considered her project in this light, she might have been led to a serious discussion of the central issue raised by, but not in, her book: the mutual determination, in a democratic ethos, of ideology and the language of everyday life, and the obstacles to analysis created by it. Perhaps the most ‘ideological’ premise of Delin’s study is that everyday language can be an object of research at all. This is clearly a cultural or even an institutional prejudice, natural to a Director of the Centre for Research in Language and Communication. And from the point of view of strict rationality, it cannot be defended. How can one claim to stand in the observer’s position outside everyday language? So full of terminology, Delin never seems to imagine that the two terms in her title are simply incapable of being determined as limited, bounded objects of the sort on which one can do useful research. She has busily attached names and classifications to a number of linguistic entities, but has failed to address the larger issue of the non-existence of her field of inquiry. Delin is, however, hardly to be blamed, for her ideology is also ours. We believe that we can study ideology even when we have defined ideology as that which evaporates into mundane reality itself. We believe this because we wish to think that we can freely control our world, including the very thoughts we think, by exercising the tremendous power of rational critique, beginning with the bestowal of names. The academy itself is the institutional form of this wish, the limitations of which only become apparent on rare occasions. Delin’s book represents one of those occasions, as it tries to specify, which is to say, to limit the limitless, to describe as a set of text types an all-encompassing atmosphere of meaning. What drives this book is nothing less than the desire to know and to master that atmosphere. So rigorously superficial in its approach, The Language of
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Everyday Life is actually a testament to an ancient, profound, and even admirable desire. Geoffrey Galt Harpham Department of English Tulane University New Orleans, LA 70118 USA E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S0271-5309(01)00014-3
Book review
The Language of Everyday Life By Judy Delin. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. ISBN 0-7619-6090-2 This book is offered to beginning students of ‘language, communication, and media studies’ as an introduction to the methods of a discipline that goes unnamed in the book, but which one might presume to be called something like ‘linguistic analysis.’ Judy Delin, who serves as the Director of the Centre for Research in Language and Communication at Stirling University, aims to ‘introduce a skill’ by presenting model analyses of such discursive events as sports reporting, news reporting, interviews, instructions (written and spoken), magazine features, and advertising. These analyses consist mostly of attaching terms — ‘reverse wh-clefts,’ ‘back-channeling,’ ‘time-critical utterance,’ and about two hundred others — to the micro-phenomena of routine discourse that would otherwise hum along anonymously. ‘Other features that build the image of the product,’ she says in one characteristic comment, ‘are gradable adjectives: in the anti-perspirant advert, for example, the product is described as ‘‘the longest lasting Lady.’’’ A final chapter urges students to create research projects of their own. It is full of helpful hints: get a good subject (‘bus tickets . . . might prove rather limiting’), ‘get permission’ from people before you start taping, know when to use the tie-clip mike and when to go with the boundary mike, make sure to switch the microphone on, set the tape speed correctly, and of course, ‘remember to switch the microphones off when you’ve finished using them, or the batteries will drain.’ Ultimately, the author hopes that her book will generate ‘a sense of wonder at what we do through and with language day by day.’ This reader did finish the book with a sense of wonder, but it was directed at the book itself, and at the author’s assurance that its arrival would be eagerly greeted by large numbers of students impatient with theory and itching to ‘dive straight in,’ to ‘get their hands dirty and get into texts’. How this book could satisfy such disorderly appetites remains unclear, but larger and more interesting questions gather around the overall argument of the book. Delin sets out to contest the view that ‘everyday talk is a distinct discourse type’ that contrasts with other types such as advertising, institutional conversation, legal language, political discourse, and so forth. She proposes instead that her chosen ‘text types’ are so common (‘I have not deliberately gone for the weird’) that they constitute ‘an important part of our everyday experi-
108
G.G. Harpham / Language & Communication 22 (2002) 107–112
ence, and the features of all of them overlap substantially with the features of everyday language.’ Unfortunately, this apparently harmless and preliminary comment introduces confusion into the entire project. For by proposing a Venn diagram in which various kinds of discourse overlap with the larger category of ‘the everyday,’ Delin raises, without seeming to realize it, a number of questions. If all of these distinct ‘text types’ share some features with the everyday, then what features are not shared? What features peculiar to interviews, for example, are not part of everyday life? And if sports commentary consists of narrating, elaborating, and summarizing; if it involves ‘gaze’ in which ‘speaker 1 may look at speaker 2,’ ‘turn-taking’ in which speakers alternate and ‘speech errors’ in which they screw up; if it displays ‘unplanned language,’ ‘coordinating conjunctions,’ and ‘non-canonical syntax’; if it can be assessed in terms of its ‘pitch’ and ‘intonation’ — then where, precisely, is its difference from the everyday? And, since so many of these text types can include, through quotation or other means, nearly all the features adduced as distinctive of sports commentary, interviews, magazine features, and so forth, then how is one type to be differentiated from any of the others? What features of the everyday do not exist in any of the distinct types Delin studies? Where is the pure everydayness of language to be found? And what, finally, is language? How is it distinguished from ‘communication’ in general at Stirling University? What is considered to be the relation of language to cries, marks, gestures, thoughts? Are these understood to be aspects of language, of communication, of both, or of neither? The failure to recognize, much less address, such questions lends a certain mystery to this most prosaic of books. What is the point of the skill that Delin introduces, if that skill cannot succeed in identifying distinctive features of a given category? Absent clean categories, what are the features to which Delin gives names features of? What, in short, is she doing? For the most part, one cannot call her work ‘analysis,’ for analysis, unlike ‘advertising,’ is a specific and distinct discourse. It requires, first, an object — paradigmatically, a text — whose character or significance is not self-evident. This primary object in turn requires, in order for its real nature or full import to be manifest, a secondary discourse. The analytical text represents the form and other features of the primary text, situates that text in the relevant contexts, and on that basis constructs an account of chosen aspects of the primary text in their full dimensions, realizing the potential of the primary text by saying both what the primary text says and what it does not or cannot say but nevertheless indicates or suggests. Even in this highly compressed account of analysis, it is evident that naming does not qualify. Delin does, however, engage in analysis in one respect. Readers will, she says at the start, ‘be aware throughout the book of the influence of researchers who see the use of language as an ideological activity.’ Delin has in mind a specifically postMarxist understanding of ideology not as ‘false consciousness’ or ‘the imposed values of the ruling class,’ but simply as the set of largely unconscious and generally unstated beliefs that silently arrange hierarchies of values, structuring the sense of reality available to members of a given culture. When, for example, an advertise-
G.G. Harpham / Language & Communication 22 (2002) 107–112
109
ment says that a certain shampoo ‘gives a healthy shine’ to hair, it presumes without argument the value of shiny hair. This value, being culture-specific rather than universal, contingent rather than necessary, qualifies as ideological in Delin’s definition of that term. Participating in — indeed, constructing — the sense of ordinary reality, the language of everyday life must be an ideological language, and linguistic analysis must take the form of ideology critique. Delin’s casual adoption of this account of ideology suggests the pervasiveness of the posthumous influence of Roland Barthes, who argued that bourgeois ‘mythology’ sought to create the feeling that middle-class values, institutions, and practices were neutral, normal, and global, thereby removing them from the field of cultural contestation. Ideology, Delin says in this vein, confirms certain assumptions in a way that gives them the status of common sense even though they ‘actually reflect, enshrine, and even create differential relationships of power in society.’ The effectiveness of ideology depends upon concealment; restoring history and contingency to what had seemed immutable, ideology-critique creates a sense of power or control. Once you become fully aware that shiny hair is a cultural rather than a universal value, you will become alarmed at the way in which the advertisement exploits you, turning your helpless but good-faith participation in the cultural system to the advantage of the shampoo-maker. You will become immune to the allure of the ad, and may even flaunt your dull and matted hair, and perhaps your dirty hands as well, as a defiantly cosmopolitan gesture of identification with humanity at large. As Delin says, her book ‘is intended to be empowering.’ The sense that the real subject is ideology informs several premises underlying Delin’s project. She presumes, for example, that communication is essentially strategic. Beneath the ‘eliciting exchanges,’ ‘multi-unit turns,’ ‘speech events,’ and ‘subordinate clauses’ that she so patiently identifies lies a set of motivations, decisions, and choices. In her introduction, Delin enumerates the ‘levels of description’ on which the book will operate, including production values, rhetorical structure, conversation structure, syntax, lexical choice, semantics, pragmatics, and sound. The definitions of each of these terms stress the speaker’s or writer’s conscious intention. Thus ‘production values’ are described as ways in which ‘certain types are constructed around expectations of what they will, and will not, contain’; ‘conversation structure’ designates ‘how a dialogue is constructed in ‘turns’ between speakers’; and ‘semantics’ indicates ‘the way meaning is conveyed by certain grammatical and lexical choices.’ And the overall project is to see how ‘all the levels listed above are orchestrated together to make a text work.’ Her curious decision to call her discursive types ‘texts’ even though a number of them, including interviews, spoken instructions, and sports commentary, are predominantly oral modes must be understood as part of a second entailment of the ideological conception of everyday language. Texts invite a kind of scrutiny that spoken utterances resist. We do not, while sweating through an aerobics class, feel the need to identify as ‘narration’ the instructor’s statement that ‘we’re gonna do a basic up tap down tap to the side,’ as a ‘directive’ her instruction to ‘take the arms right through a chest press,’ or as ‘comments on other aspects of the class’ state-
110
G.G. Harpham / Language & Communication 22 (2002) 107–112
ments such as ‘that’s it, that’s good, keep it up.’ Such naming becomes possible only with a transcript. Writing invites a kind of analysis that reconstructs a history of decisions. To a far greater extent than speech, writing can usefully be regarded as a record of encrypted choices, and texts offer themselves as problems to be solved, objects on which to do research, an assemblage of ‘features’ that contribute to making the discourse ‘work’. Speech flies by so rapidly, disappearing with the moment, that it only rarely seems to contain anything worth pondering at all. But texts can be pored over, probed for traces of strategic decision-making, assessed and reassessed. Thus the presumption that the language of everyday life is an ideological language coordinates with the seemingly unrelated, even apparently incongruous presumption that everyday language takes textual form. In order fully to appreciate the role of ideology in Delin’s work, one must understand something of the history of the term. In its original meaning, ‘ideology’ referred not to ideas themselves, but rather to the study of ideas. Emerging in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the word designated the inquiry into the genesis of social ideas, a new branch of learning intended to demystify opinion. Ideology in this sense is in fact the defining accomplishment in the intellectual field of the Revolution, and indeed of the French Enlightenment. With Marx and Engels, ideology became the object rather than the method of study, and has remained so, even as that object has undergone revolutions of its own. ‘Vulgar Marxism’ defines ideology as the ‘false consciousness’ imposed on the masses by the ruling class through their control of power, including the power of the media. The Barthesian view endorsed by Delin represents a contemporary ‘post-Marxist’ emphasis on the dissemination not of ideas but of values, concerns, attitudes, and needs; and not by the ruling class as such but by the decentered forces of capital. In a post-Marxist ethos, advertisements, which confirm ideas rather than create them, replace propaganda as the prime site of ideology. This might seem to represent a gentling-down of ideology as power becomes democratized, but in another respect post-Marxist ideology is more alarming than its predecessor, for while the opinions of the ruling class may be privately rejected by anyone, there is no escape from an almost entirely unconscious ‘set of beliefs, or entire belief system, through which a group or culture views the world’. Especially in an enlightened culture such as our own, in which the value of self-consciousness and self-criticism goes without saying, ideology is virtually invincible: we critique it all the time, but in doing so, we only confirm our obedience to the ideology of freedom, rationality, and autonomy, the ideology of liberal democracy — the ideology of capital. In a post-Marxist ethos, the surest sign that one is in the grip of ideology is the belief that one’s statements are simply rational, as when one engages in ideology critique. The history of ideology provides a far more interesting angle of vision on Delin’ s project than she seems to realize. Relying almost exclusively on a single book on the subject (which she pronounces ‘somewhat indigestible because of the intricacy of theory that builds up throughout’), Delin ignores the striking fact that ideology has been bound up with the language of everyday life from the very first. Destutt de Tracy, the leader of the ‘ideologues’ in the Section of Analysis of Sensations and
G.G. Harpham / Language & Communication 22 (2002) 107–112
111
Ideas, in the Moral and Political Sciences division of the Institut Nationale, was working on a Grammar at the same time as he was producing his 4-volume Projet d ‘e´le´ments d ‘ide´ologie (1801–1815). And in this latter work, de Tracy tried to establish ‘a grammar and language modeled after mathematics. . . in which each idea was assigned its corresponding linguistic sign’. The progress of the theory of ideology since Marx and Engels has consisted essentially of the progressive discovery of deeper and more intimate connections between ideology and language. V. N. Volosinov, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek btr all these theorists of ideology converge on a single premise: that the nature of ideology can be understood by reference to the nature of language. None of them receives a mention in The Language of Everyday Life. Delin may feel that her argument stands well apart from the complexities of theoretical dispute, being empirical rather than theoretical, devoted to specifics rather than to abstractions. But her own account of ideology suggests an investment in one among the many theories on offer. And, in fact, names and categories are abstractions, even small theories, and Delin cannot claim innocence in this respect. She ought, at the very least, to reflect in her book some awareness that the approach to ideology through language has a long and rich history, a history that she is, of course, free to contest but not precisely free to ignore. If she had considered her project in this light, she might have been led to a serious discussion of the central issue raised by, but not in, her book: the mutual determination, in a democratic ethos, of ideology and the language of everyday life, and the obstacles to analysis created by it. Perhaps the most ‘ideological’ premise of Delin’s study is that everyday language can be an object of research at all. This is clearly a cultural or even an institutional prejudice, natural to a Director of the Centre for Research in Language and Communication. And from the point of view of strict rationality, it cannot be defended. How can one claim to stand in the observer’s position outside everyday language? So full of terminology, Delin never seems to imagine that the two terms in her title are simply incapable of being determined as limited, bounded objects of the sort on which one can do useful research. She has busily attached names and classifications to a number of linguistic entities, but has failed to address the larger issue of the non-existence of her field of inquiry. Delin is, however, hardly to be blamed, for her ideology is also ours. We believe that we can study ideology even when we have defined ideology as that which evaporates into mundane reality itself. We believe this because we wish to think that we can freely control our world, including the very thoughts we think, by exercising the tremendous power of rational critique, beginning with the bestowal of names. The academy itself is the institutional form of this wish, the limitations of which only become apparent on rare occasions. Delin’s book represents one of those occasions, as it tries to specify, which is to say, to limit the limitless, to describe as a set of text types an all-encompassing atmosphere of meaning. What drives this book is nothing less than the desire to know and to master that atmosphere. So rigorously superficial in its approach, The Language of
112
G.G. Harpham / Language & Communication 22 (2002) 107–112
Everyday Life is actually a testament to an ancient, profound, and even admirable desire. Geoffrey Galt Harpham Department of English Tulane University New Orleans, LA 70118 USA E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S0271-5309(01)00014-3