The Geopolitics of Culture from a Systemic Functional Standpoint

The Geopolitics of Culture from a Systemic Functional Standpoint

Robert de Beaugrande

Paper at the Systemic Functional Congress on

Cross-Cultural Currents, Language Functions, and Literacy

Beijing, China, 18-22 July 1995

Proceedings suppressed

Pupils in the Yoruba medium experimental group performed significantly better in English, Mathematics, Yoruba, and Science than the control group taught the same subjects through the medium of English. [...] First, second and foreign languages combine to construct a more comprehensive perspective on the world.

— Victor Owhotu on the Ife project in Nigeria

[abstract]

At present, multiculturalism and multilingualism are rapidly becoming the predominant conditions all around the world, even in societies like England and the U.S. that were long considered monocultural and monolingual. The most urgent social issue is whether the intensifying contacts among cultures will be confrontational or co-operative. Substantial evidence indicates that without extensive cultural planning and designing, confrontation will win out, with disastrous consequences in terms of global violence and misery in the next century. A large-scale transdisciplinary and functionalist agenda must be designed and implemented in institutional policy, education, and science.

A. The formalist imposition in language policy, education and science

1. The 20th century has witnessed a pervasive conflict numerous fields in Western institutions have been divided between two diverging 'epistomologies'.1 Formalism holds that the world is best described by classifying things in terms of features, shapes, and patterns. Functionalism holds that the world is best described by modelling events in terms of processes, interactions, and goals. Numerous fields ranging from language policies to school systems to sciences have been subjected to a formalist imposition that gains dominance by resolutely exploiting both commonsensical and professional notions about what should be judged proper, correct, businesslike, impartial, rigorous, scientific, and so on. It can justly be called an imposition because it claims exclusive and absolute authority on the basis of idealised practices that it does not and cannot sustain. It projects an orderly, idealised world free from the rich and messy details and contingencies of human knowledge and experience, outside of time, purged of contradictions and conflict — a world governed only by laws, rules, and timeless truths, strict, logical, and perfectly structured.

2. The imposition has also sponsored the widespread and tenacious bias that a formalist theory, method, or project requires no justification, whereas a functionalist one must always justify itself or else pay tribute to formalism by striving to be 'formal'. This bias conceals the stark prospect that formalism cannot be justified on social and cognitive grounds. In principle, formalism is unable to account for its itself with its own means, i.e. to state in 'formal' terms or 'logical proofs' why it is humanly relevant or useful — or, to use the currently accredited term, to state what is its ecological validity. If such an account were demanded, we would soon recognise that formalism does not, as it pretends to, discover in some domain a perfect, ultimate order and rationality that simultaneously describes and explains the timeless essence. Instead, it creates an idealised formal substitute and describes that, as if doing so would automatically produce an explanation. Formalism roundly turns away from the lived experience and natural data of human affairs and devotes its efforts to developing formal terminologies and technical notations into which a handful of carefully screened data are rewritten to make them worthy of scientific attention. The technicality conceals how radically the data are being rarefied and trivialised for purposes of analysis (cf. § 21, 68). In this way, formalism hurries over the genuine but disturbing complexity of human activities in order to contemplate the artificial but reassuring complexity of its own formulas and notations.

3. For purposes of the present paper, three domains of the formalist imposition can be cited: language policy, education, and science. In language policy, formalism upholds a single 'standard' language variety that everyone must accept and adopt in order to share in the benefits of the society. This 'standard' variety is supposedly authorised by its own timeless 'correctness' and requires no rational or social justification. A realistic assessment would typically find these interconnected traits:

(a) The standard variety is spoken by a social or cultural elite, often by one that constitutes a powerful and wealthy minority of the total population. Indeed, it may be spoken by that elite only on special occasions such as the institutional discourse of church and state.

(b) The variety is conservative in preferring older forms and variations and resisting or denying change. The older forms are declared 'correct and the newer forms 'incorrect'.

(c) The variety is artificially stabilised, usually through a written medium or even a single prestigious body of texts, e.g. sacred texts of a religion.

The 'standard' language variety is thus claimed to the sole proper medium for universal usage when it obviously cannot be so. Instead, the standard variety actually functions as a pretext to empower the elite that use it and disempower all the non-elites that do not. As we have seen in recent decades, this pretext is most important in 'democratic' societies where other pretexts for inequality and discrimination, such as race, sex, and religion, have been outlawed. Virtually no society protects l;inguistic human rights (cf. Phillipson & Skuttnab-Kangas [eds.] in press).

4. The official theory is that the standard variety is freely offered to be acquired by everyone who will make the effort. In concrete practice, most people cannot change their own language variety even if they wanted to, partly because it is so richly associated with their personal, social, and cultural identity and environment, and partly because society and education have provided no systematic methods for making the change (cf. § 7f). The proportion of citizens who are motivated and talented enough to make the change anyway is far too modest to endanger the elite; besides, they implicitly reaffirm the value claimed for the standard.

5. The 'standard' variety offers a primary resource for underwriting a public policy of monoculturalism that distorts or blots out the real diversities of culture (cf. section B). Formalism innocently purports to be merely promoting 'good grammar', 'proper speech', and 'high standards', while it is really disempowering alternative cultures and legitimising inequality. Just as the standard is declared the sole and universal variety, the culture of its main group(s) of users is declared the truly legitimate one, to be 'protected' against 'encroachment' from the rest (§ 37ff).

6. In education, formalism upholds the doctrine that all human knowledge subsists in a single set of timelessly true facts; these are to be learned and tested one by one with questions having a single correct answer that can be strictly distinguished by its form from any 'wrong' answer. Here, the imposition consists of reducing and fragmenting human knowledge, and of denying the relevance of human knowledge that resists such a treatment. As in language policy, 'correctness' usurps the key role for legitimising inequality in the disguise of 'personal merit'. Again, the official rationale is that the knowledge is freely offered to be acquired by everyone who will make the effort. All learners are 'taught' the same 'material' and given the same 'tests'; how well they do is entirely up to them.

7. By no coincidence, language education closely reflects language policy by campaigning to promote the 'standard' variety, once more in the name of 'good grammar', 'proper speech', and so on. Yet in most school settings, the only methods offered for acquiring the standard are trying to imitate standard speakers, and memorising unsystematic lists of 'rules'. The learners are naturally disoriented, since imitation is a tricky and doubtful method (especially for pronunciation) with a taste of mockery or even fakery, and since many of these 'rules' are whimsical, contrived, or simply wrong, and differ sharply from one teacher or textbook to another. Just as naturally, success is reserved for learners from cultural backgrounds whose language varieties already resemble the 'standard' variety, and is withheld from most learners with alternative culture and language varieties. And so — again by no coincidence — the language area of the school curriculum often has the highest concentration of failure, even when all the learners are native speakers of the language as a whole.

8. Worse yet, the speakers of some non-standard varieties are thought to require 'remediation', as if some severe defect or illness were involved. The usual remediation is merely more drill in imitating standard speakers or learning quirky rules, which is inherently incapable of supporting systematic change. The most probable outcome is rather to alienate the learners by convincing them that their own language variety is irredeemably 'wrong' while withholding effective means for changing it. Moreover, 'remediation' programmes have radically underestimated the risks and pressures learners would incur among family and peers if they really did switch to the standard (cf. Baugh 1983; Fordham 1988).

9. In science, formalism upholds the doctrine that science continually progresses toward a single complete and correct account for all the facts in the universe. The account is to be constructed by piling fact upon fact and by testing and verifying the 'correct' explanation for every fact. As in education, the imposition reduces and fragments human knowledge into 'testable facts and denies the relevance of knowledge that does not lend itself to such a treatment. Formalism handily exploits commonplace notions of how 'science' should be done, e.g. that science:

(a) deals with things that can be directly observed;

(b) formulates general statements or laws independently of individual contexts;

(d) pursues disinterested knowledge free from the pressures of social reality;

(e) uses mathematical notations such as equations to represent 'laws' or 'discoveries'.

These notions expediently interlock to mystify the social and cognitive processes whereby science is actually practised as both individual and communal activity. (cf. Gilbert & Mulkay 1984; Bazerman 1985; Lemke 1990; Halliday & Martin 1993). Scientists are pressured to mimic the portrayer of Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest, who keeps having to perform the tricky stage direction ‘enter invisible’ (I, ii., 374; II, i, 184 and 297; II, ii, 47).

10. Whether in language policy, education, or science, the formalist imposition has the same consequence of claiming absolute authority on the basis of idealised practices that are not and cannot be sustained (cf. § 1):

(a) In language policy, the supposed 'standard' variety is much less stable and clearly circumscribed that it is asserted to be. Many so-called 'rules' for 'correct usage' do not constitute any systematic or accurate description of what a speaker of the standard variety would actually say or of how the standard variety actually works. These 'rules' only stigmatise a potpourri of specific usages that are declared 'incorrect' precisely because many people do say them. So these usages represent how the language works more accurately than do the 'rules'.

(b) In education, the 'correctness' of the 'right' answers is often enforced by arbitrary, inconsistent, or even phoney criteria. An answer may be counted 'wrong' simply because it does not have the exact form of the expected 'right answer' even though its content is much the same, e.g. when learners are asked to give a 'definition' of a technical term and only the exact words of the textbook definition' are 'counted right'; this danger is especially acute on 'multiple choice tests' scored by machines, which can only distinguish forms. Moreover, as we know from extensive empirical evidence, reproducing the form of a definition by no means requires a substantive understanding of its content, but may become a substitute for understanding.

(c) In science, stringent procedures of 'testing' can lead to purely artifactual findings, produced by the experimental set-up and thus quite unrepresentative of what happens under natural and spontaneous conditions. The many experiments on 'human learning' in the 'behaviourist paradigm', for example, were conducted under highly unnatural conditions on the premise that learning follows a few extremely general laws, and does not, as we know today, richly adapt to the conditions of its situational context (cf. Kintsch 1977).

11. In sum, formalism seeks to present a united front all across the institutions of our 'modern Western' societies to disguise questionable or arbitrary practices and de facto inequalities behind a proudly touted allegiance to criteria of correctness, standards, fact, truth, rigour, objectivity, and so on. The frequently observable reality that many people do not use 'good grammar', that many schools or teachers do not know the 'right answers', and that many scientists give irrelevant explanations, are always construed to be regrettable minor lapses of isolated individuals and not the natural, indeed inevitable consequences of the formalist imposition.

12. The imposition has not been achieved by some explicit plan, but rather has been generated by fundamental contradictions between theory versus practice in 'modern Western' societies. In theory, all citizens have the same basic rights to free speech, public education, and scientific training; in practice, the great majority are excluded. So policies and practices have evolved to legitimise the practical exclusion and to protect the theory of inclusion from being openly discredited. Everybody is pressured to act as if the formalist criteria of correctness, standards, facts, and so on, can and should applied to all serious matters, without inquiring who is empowered to decide how they shall be applied when variations or disagreements arise.

13. Ominously, the formalist imposition frees its supporters from facing up to their human responsibilities and from living up to their own proclaimed criteria. The pursuit of correctness, fact, and so on is taken to be a self-justifying disinterested enterprise that need not explain its relevance to human concerns and urgent problems. In effect, formalism is a licensed failure to make connections, to promulgate and accept official truths and certified facts, and to defer all important decisions to experts who can understand what ordinary people cannot.

14. Similarly, the formalist imposition deploys discourse as a medium for empowering some voices while disempowering and silencing other voices. Conducting the discourse of official institutions, schools, and sciences in the elite 'standard' variety strongly determines who shall have access. Here also, no plan is required; those discoursal practices of officials, educators, and scientists which help to sustain the basic contradiction between equality and inclusion in theory versus inequality and exclusion in practice are simply more likely to survive in the long-term evolution than are discoursal practices which do not — irrespective of what the participants may consciously want or intend. Many institutions, educators, and scientists sincerely want to engage in discourse in order to encourage social progress, to help people, and to disseminate knowledge; but the hidden pressures to do otherwise win out unless special new measures are implemented and actively sustained over a very long term. Not at all surprisingly, most measures eventually bog down or become diluted until the old routines again dominate discoursal practices.

15. For a long time, I shared the opinion of distinguished colleagues like Michael Halliday and Henry Widdowson that we should all adopt an ecumenical stance, wherein formalism and functionalism could peacefully coexist and go their separate and equal ways. But three factors have compelled me to reconsider. First, most formalist tactics and discourse do not manifest any inclination toward peace but only an aggressive barrage of patronisings or dismissals of functionalism for being 'informal', 'pre-theoretical' 'fuzzy', 'vague', 'undisciplined', and so on — all of which are buzzwords meaning 'not formalised'. We could escape such censure only by reducing and fragmenting our methods and data to the point where much of the authentic functionality has been eliminated — and thus by contradicting the main purpose of our enterprise. Besides, formalism has given us numerous demonstrations of a 'formalising' that is so blatantly contrived and arbitrary that attempting to mimic it would require us to surrender our intellectual integrity (cf. § 28).

16. Second, some versions of formalism have decided to call themselves 'functional' in order to improve their image without altering their methods. Inevitably, these versions promulgate a rarefied and idealised concept of a 'function' being merely what a form contributes to a structure, pattern, or system. The concept of 'function' is quietly disconnected from the broader cognitive and social content addressed for example by Halliday's (1994) recent small but important book on Language in a Changing World (cf. § 69)

17. Third, formalism supplies a blanket alibi for social inequality, failed communication, and authoritarian practices we can no longer afford without incurring global disaster through technological violence, environmental depletion, and abysmal public ignorance. Trying to establish peaceful co-existence with such an alibi is not just naive but in effect acquiesces in the alibi and helps to keep it in place, especially at a stage when the simple continuance of current practices will suffice to bring about the disaster (Halliday 1994)

18. I can only conclude that functionalism has no genuine choice but to come to itself by seizing the initiative and setting a comprehensive agenda to make all the connections that formalism cannot and will not make. We shall openly assess and justify the relevance and usefulness of all our projects and programmes, and shall demand that others do likewise, including the formalist ones. And we shall use our methods and results to promote and support a parallel assessment of our institutions, schools, and sciences.

B. Formalism, functionalism, monoculturalism, and multiculturalism

19. The foregoing section in my paper has should show why I consider it exquisitely appropriate and timely that the topic of 'Cross-Cultural Currents, Language Functions, and Literacy' be the theme of a Systemic Functional Congress. This Congress gives a tangible signal that the assessment I have briefly presented is already being taken quite seriously and is not merely some personal campaign or utopian defiance of the scale and power of the formalist imposition. Such a Congress offers a global forum for making connections among disciplines, among institutions, and among cultures, so that we can all move together toward a larger and richer picture of what our several enterprises can contribute in such a sombre global situation.

20. This Congress is a highly appropriate setting to explore two 'natural alliances': one between formalism and monoculturalism, and the other between functionalism and multiculturalism. We can the consider the cultural implications of the current division of our academic scene: on the formalist side, compartmentalised fields and disciplines, rigid hierarchies of rank and prestige, quantitative research, and standardised tests; on the functionalist side, inter- or transdisciplinarity, floating teams, qualitative research, and creative projects.

21. I shall consider here only two disciplines closely concerned with language and culture. In the discipline of linguistics, over 70 years of research has been invested in describing 'language by itself' ('Saussure's langue') as an abstract formal system that 'underlies' real discourse without being actually 'manifested' by it. After closely working through the discourse of mainstream linguistics (Beaugrande 1991a), I have concluded that 'language' is a technical fiction intended to have just those properties that formalism proposed to describe. Ever since, formalist linguistics has been uneasily divided between factions trying to make the concept of language less fictitious by gathering and analysing real data versus factions trying to make the concept of language more technical by borrowing or inventing obscure terminologies and notations. Since real data naturally compromise the 'formality' and rigour of the description, the 'technical' group of factions has dominated orthodox formalism and promoted a bi-directional strategy. In one direction, linguists start from a formal language such as predicate logic and reapply its terms and procedures to natural language, exploiting any analogies they can find or devise. In the other direction, they start with a natural language and attempt to 'freeze' it into some formal system that resembles a formal language. This 'cryogenic linguistics' — or 'cryogenerative grammar' if you like ghastly puns — can only present a trivial picture of human language even when, as Michael Halliday remarked at last year's Systemic Functional Congress in Belgium, the formalists grandly tell us how 'creative' language is. No other picture can emerge because the more trivial and uncreative aspects are precisely the easiest ones to formalise (cf. 2, 68).

22. The formalist alliance with monoculturalism in linguistics has been most volubly and articulated by Professor Chomsky, the all-time grand dragon and paper tiger of linguistic formalism, when he decreed that 'linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous speech-community' (1965: 3). Just as formalist linguistics had to reinvent language as a technical fiction, it also had invent a 'speech-community to whom no real people belong. The motive was to rescue the theory and evade the responsibility of engaging with real speaker-listeners in heterogeneous speech-communities, who would immediately raise issues that stoutly resist being formalised, such as the maintenance of social inequality through language, and who would eventually ask for guidance and help that Chomskyan linguistics is both regally indisposed and frankly unable to give. In effect, such a linguistics silences the voices of alternative cultures on the specious grounds that 'actual speech' is 'degenerate in quality' and replete with 'non-sentences', 'fragments', and 'deviant expressions' (Chomsky 1965: 43f, 31, 58, 201, 25). By constructing descriptions that reduce language to formal patterns, formalism effaces all evidence that every real language offers a contestable choices among varieties, each with some adaptive value for its own cultural groups of speakers. The 'freezing' of language implied by linguistic formalism naturally 'freezes out' the disempowered varieties while appealing to grand notions like 'rigour'. Formalism can thereby mystify the status of the 'standard' variety as the abstract representation of the 'language by itself' of 'competence', while its traits — modelled after the lexicogrammar of mainstream intellectual written culture — are quietly taken over into the formal notations and categories. In the words of the prominent feminist and linguist Deborah Cameron (1992: 46),

linguistic science [has] built a vast edifice of mystifying theoretical explanation on the assumption that grammar is a 'natural' autonomous system that cultural practices play no part in shaping

Such a linguistics has good reason not to check its descriptions against real data and real native-speaker informants. So formalist linguists have devoted much of their energies to devising elaborate and slippery arguments why their description cannot be required to acknowledge the rich and contestable connections between language and culture. We accordingly need to draw a further distinction in the discipline of linguistics (see Beaugrande in press a, for discussion). Fieldwork linguists go out to 'work' in the ‘field’ of cultural and social activities and carefully record what native speakers are actually observed to say. Homework linguists (to coin a new phrase) 'work' at 'home' or in the office and use introspection and intuition to determine what native speakers (including themselves) are presumed to know about their language. Fieldwork is necessarily functionalist in its methods even when its official theories are formalist because you cannot make sense of your data without considering what the language is being used for in real contexts. Only homework can be completely formalist because you can quietly invent your own data without focusing attention on real contexts. Over the twentieth century, formalist linguists migrated from fieldwork to homework as they moved from phonology and morphology, which extract descriptions directly from units discovered in data, over to syntax and semantics, which postulate 'underlying' organisation only indirectly reflected in data. This move has been accompanied by a widespread breakdown in consensus, because the formalist disconnection of 'language by itself' from cognitive and social constraints inevitably makes the organisation of syntax and, even more of semantics, look arbitrary and opaque; no two attempts to 'freeze' them are likely to get the same results. So formalist homeworkers are obliged to smuggle in, in the guise of 'formal rules', the cognitive and social constraints of their own culture, and to become entrained in monocultural chauvinism dressed up as formal science.

23. In contrast to linguistics, the discipline of anthropology must be much more wary of taking monoculturalism to be the universal norm. To deny the variations and contacts among cultures would be to betray the main motivation for having a science of anthropology in the first place. So formalism has adopted a different tack in the approach known as anthropological structuralism, with close affinities to formalist ‘structural linguistics’. This approach also disconnects itself from the lived experience of people in a culture and 'explains' their activities and customs in terms of 'underlying structures'. In one famous study, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964) set up a ‘binary opposition’ between ‘nature’ versus ‘culture’ and aligned it with roasted food (direct contact with flame) versus boiled food (separated from flame by container and water) — meals as messages. From there he argued that roasted food would be served to guests or strangers, who come in from the ‘natural’ world outside, and boiled food to close kin, who are directly within the culture. But surely the availability of fuels and utensils was the humanly relevant factor.

24. Here again, formalism dramatically reduces the richness of human data and then confidently offers its own reduction as an explanation (cf. § 2). No account is provided of how such a ‘universal opposition’ could have gotten actualised in cultural practices. Indeed, since members of the culture are asserted to be not consciously aware of these abstract semantic categories or binary oppositions, their own explanations of why they act this way are not admissible as counter-evidence. So the idea that people could be influenced in the choice of foods and cooking methods by formal categories can be palmed off as cultural science by well-fed Western academics who are under no material constraints to choose one type of food over any other, and who see ‘nature’ in binary opposition to ‘culture’ because in their own culture natural subsistence has been heavily overlaid by technological impositions (artificial foodstuffs, synthetic fibres, etc.). Pre-modern, non-Western cultures choose the foods and cooking methods imposed by material constraints, and may well regard ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as a harmonious unity rather than an opposition.

25. Still, many anthropologists have been drawn toward formalist 'structuralism' as a tactic for dealing with multiculturalism by rarefying it into formal systems and reinstating monoculturalism on the 'deeper' level of 'universals'. Insofar as these 'universals' are formulated by members of 'Western mainstream cultures', their dominant cultural assumptions are 'naturally' universalised. When Lévi-Strauss nostalgically remarks that 'formerly in France boiled chicken was for the family meal, whole roasted meat was for the banquet', he blithely gives away just where his 'universal' came from.

26. Yet anthropology cannot emulate formalist linguistics in simply arguing away the need to check its descriptions against real data and real informants. Instead, an important conceptual distinction has been taken over from fieldwork linguistics, which, as I remarked in § 22, is always functionalist in its methods even when its theories are still formalist. This distinction contrasts the emic perspective determining what actions ‘mean’ within a culture or cultural group, against the etic perspective bearing on tangible human actions and their motives and consequences. Operationally, the ‘emic’ might be associated with the insider’s viewpoint (usually the native participant’s) and the ‘etic’ with the outsider’s (usually an observer’s). Or, the ‘emic’ might be culture-specific and the ‘etic’ shared by all cultures in highlighting the primary human needs such as food, shelter, and production of goods. Anthropologists try to move from the outsider's viewpoint to the insider's and to gain an emic understanding that is still informed by an etic one. As a procedural principle, anthropologists are cautious about judging the cultures they study by the cultures they hail from; but their claim to have grasped the studied culture on a higher plane is anchored to their status as outsiders. Malinowski vowed that ‘in the field one has to face a chaos of facts’ which ‘can be fixed only by interpretation, by seeing them sub specie aeternitatis’ — ‘only laws and generalisations are scientific facts, and field work consists only and exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic social reality, in subordinating it to general rules’.Geert 81 He merely repeated the formalist imposition and asserted once again that science is disconnected from the culture of the scientists (cf. § 9).

27. The distinction between emic and etic encourages us to pay careful attention to the participants' openly asserted cultural constraints on what they say they do and why, but also to the underlying social and material constraints on what might make them do it. We may expect to find that emic and etic frequently ‘do not match’, because, in the words of Marvin Harris (1990: 69f).

much of social life, even in band and village societies, is a product of intersecting and often conflicting meanings and intentions. In chiefdoms and states, these intersections and conflicts often take the form of a struggle for power between men and women, social classes, factions, and ethnic or religious and racial groups, the outcome of which cannot conceivably be predicted or retrodicted even with the most perfect knowledge of the emic cultures [...] It is only through the etic accounts of behaviour stream events that unintended outcomes, or outcomes intended but dependent on differential amounts of power, can be predicted or retrodicted.

Every culture, whether 'modern' or 'pre-modern', entails some connections that are not officially acknowledged because influential people do not wish it. Similar restraints are exercised upon formalist science, usually in the very act of claiming objectivity and cultural neutrality.

28. These considerations lead us back to our own 'natural alliance': the one between functionalism and multiculturalism (§ 20). We might well start from one of Michael Halliday's most famous sayings: 'meaning is a form of action'. This saying had has a major surprise value for all who have been persuaded by formalism that 'meaning is a form' — full stop. Virtually all the garden-variety John-Lyons-approved 'semantics' (Lyons 1977) has been a decidedly formalist enterprise that holds forth the promise that meanings can be accounted for by formal analysis into 'semantic features', 'semantic universals', 'predicates', 'quantifiers', and so on. The only important insight I can see emerging for all this 'research' is that the promise can never be fulfilled, because once again, the analysis is again contrived and arbitrary, and consensus constantly breaks down (cf. § 15, 22). When you abstract meaning away the context of human actions, it does not settle down into stability and determinacy, but does just the opposite; the more you try to analyse it out of context, the more it evades you.

29. I would propose that the most useful successor to formalist theories could be a theory of adaptive meaning (cf. Beaugrande in preparation).2 Language and discourse are conceived to be adaptive action spaces wherein the participants in a culture deploy, negotiate, and contest the meanings of things in ways that adapt to their respective situation. In general, all meanings are adaptive in the very basic senses that (a) language obviously represents an adaptive triumph in human evolution, and (b) that the consensus that words or utterances 'mean something' is antecedent to all communication. But the consensus about what they mean must be continually regulated in discourse (whence the failure of all formalist semantics). The discourse participants will seek to construct those meanings that have some adaptive value for their own situation and goals.

30. This theory predicts that terms with a potentially high adaptive value are 'natural attractors' of multiple and contestable meanings. As a culture becomes diversified or contacts other cultures, the control over meanings tends to be contested, and discourse works out the ratios between empowered meanings versus disempowered meanings. This ratio creates numerous competitions wherein certain meanings are adaptive for some participants and maladaptive for others. Since people typically regard their own adaptive meanings as 'true', 'correct' 'obvious', ;certain', and so on, formalism is appealing even to folk-wisdom far removed from institutions like science.

31. Consider the 'meanings' of the word 'culture'. The Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (p. 345) shows a significant split between the evaluative and exclusive meaning of ‘the quality of being well-mannered and well-educated, especially when you have a good knowledge of the arts’ versus the neutral and inclusive meaning of ‘the ideas, customs, and art that are produced or shared by a particular society’. The exclusive meaning has a high adaptive value for the elites who posses the approved 'manners' and 'education', and a low one for everybody else; so the discourse of the elites thematically works to establish the exclusive meaning as the 'normal one, giving us such common pairs of terms as 'cultured' versus 'uncultured' or 'high Cue' versus 'low culture,' which would be meaningless if the inclusive meaning prevailed. The success of this discourse is manifested in the ways that ordinary people also adopt such pairs of terms even when the meanings are maladaptive for them and are not related to any reliable consensus about criteria. The most common criterion is a formalist one: the language variety a persons uses. But the personal consequences are resolutely functionalist: the human rights you can claim, the job and wages you can expect, and so on.

32. The two meanings of 'culture' account for the contradiction that throughout much of human history, genuine monocultural societies have been relatively rare, yet monocultural policies have been relatively common. Policies which actually concern the exclusive meaning of 'culture' can be legitimised on the pretext that they concern the inclusive meaning — precisely the move with a high adaptive value for sustaining the basic social contradiction in societies between equality and inclusion in theory versus inequality and exclusion in practice (cf. § 12, 14). The exclusive meaning treats an elite culture as if it were the only valid culture and thus underwrites an official monoculturalism regardless of the actual cultural situation. So in a state of de facto multiculturalism, such as we see in most 'modern societies' today, 'culture' in the sense of the arts, literature, history, and so on has become an arena for an increasingly militant monoculturalism (cf. § 37ff).

33. This monoculturalism tops the agenda of the so-called 'New Right': an international coalition of wealthy and powerful elites who recognise that sweeping social and economic change is under way and who are grimly determined to ensure that all of its negative effects, such as recession, poverty, unemployment, and the breakdown of social services will be deflected onto everybody else. What is genuinely 'New' is the degree to which the coalition has replaced its traditional reliance on dictators, stormtroopers, and death squads with a set of strategies for operating within 'parliamentary democracy'. The coalition has thereby managed to enlist broad segments of the voting population, mainly white males, who are not well off but are being promised more money, better jobs, and so on for helping the conservative leadership take them away from disempowered groups of women, minorities, and immigrants. Groups positioned toward the top and the bottom of the socioeconomic scale rally around their supposedly shared 'mainstream culture' to roll back the human rights of everyone else.

34. The collocation 'cultural war' in Pat Buchanan's keynote speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention is quite appropriate for a situation in which 'culture' is being made the hottest issue in dramatically polarised societies. We are poised to repeat the great lesson of history: societies disintegrate into chaos, decadence, and universal strife not just when multiculturalism develops but when multiculturalism is violently denied and repressed by a militant monoculturalism of the elites. In such a situation, alternative cultures quickly become symbolic pretexts for blanket denials of human rights. Such is precisely the case today in the US, Britain France, Germany, and other 'modern Western' societies who are reeling under the shock waves of the global recession that their own greedy and wasteful policies have created. So far, the 'cultural war' has been largely fought out with by rhetorical and bureaucratic attacks, punctuated by countless but minor incidents of violence against members of alternative cultures. But we can already see the logical next stage in regions, like Somalia, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, and Rwanda, to name only the most infamous cases, where the Right still uses its more traditional tactics.

35. 'New Right' discourse is a textbook case for a theory of adaptive meanings. Here, a whole series of ameliorative and inclusive terms are being subjected to forceful displacements to empower and to disempower through inclusive meanings. 'Individual freedom' means the 'freedom' to discriminate, attack and silence. 'Free speech' means 'freely' propagating racist, sexist, and chauvinist discourse without interference from social or legal regulations. The 'free market' means an economic system where prices and wages are 'freely' manipulated by the rich and powerful without any regulation for worker safety, environmental protection, health and unemployment benefits, and so on. 'Prosperity' means ensuring a maximal accumulation of capital among the rich. 'Equality' means the removal of all social and governmental measures for combatting inequality. 'Fairness' means refusing to consider or make amends for a long history of unfairness. 'Family values' means putting women back in the kitchen and the nursery as full-time unpaid domestics. 'Morality' means the compulsion to follow puritan codes of behaviour or else suffer draconian punishments. 'Right to life' means the 'right' to prevent abortions, if necessary by killing the personnel of clinics who perform them.

36. Forceful displacements are being made on pejorative terms as well. 'Politics' means any policy that the New Right opposes (cf. § 40f). 'Discrimination' means giving preferred treatment to anyone who is not a mainstream white male. 'Racism' means activities carried out to promote racial equality. 'Homeless' means winos and junkies. 'Unemployment' means a state of deliberate inactivity motivated by sheer laziness. All these displacements have a highly adaptive meaning for the New Right and even more highly maladaptive meaning for their many targets. These terms serve to sustain a discourse with terms like 'freedom' and 'equality' that would never be openly opposed, while pursing policies of the most blatant unfreedom and inequality. And the victims of the policies can be defined as 'victimisers' who take the blame for their own sufferings, while the defenders of their rights are transformed into violators of human rights (cf. van Dijk 1987, 1988; Wodak [ed.] 1989).

37. For their supporters in what might be called 'low culture, the 'New Right churns out 'hate speech' for clogs the mass media, many of them owned by wealthy right-wing conglomerates. Two examples will suffice, one from Pat Robertson, a U.S. TV Evangelist and presidential candidate on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (it was defeated) [1] (quoted in Time 27 Sept. 1992, p. 16), and the other an ‘Ad Parody’ of a ‘Free Sensitivity Workshop’ from the Florida Review (10 Dec. 1990, p. 8), one of the obscurely funded campus newspapers of the New Right {2}:

[1] It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.

[2] White Males Learn how to stop hating: jobless black lesbians, gay white whales, rich immigrants, homeless Marxist poets, AIDS infected bisexuals, overaged hippies, overpaid union workers on strike, spoiled brats protesting on the corners of the University, Veterans for Peace, leftovers from the sixties who’re tenured, serial killers for the environment, animal rights terrorists, oppressed environmentalists for the reform of crack laws.

Here, the transformation of victims into victimisers and defenders of their rights into violators of human rights reaches a stride extreme. Clearly, the 'enemies list' of the New Right is long and diverse indeed: not just the tenured university faculty and student peace movements, plus the defenders of women, minorities, and gays on and off campus, but the jobless, the homeless, the labour movement, immigrants, AIDS victims, Veterans, immigrants, poets, environmentalists, and advocates of animal rights and of more humane drug-law enforcement — all jumbled together and charged with greed, laziness, terrorism, and mass murder.

38. Such extremist 'hate speech' might seem to defy all belief, but, in the current 'cultural war' it does have a significant adaptive value. It is tailored to a target audience of white male voters who are already angry or scared about the rights gained by women, minorities, and immigrants, and are desperate for pretexts to suppress them. Also, it gains simply by setting a style for public discourse that is already right-wing because it maximises confrontation and destruction. It goads the opponents into counterattacks that can also be seized as evidence of ‘intolerance’ against ‘free speech’.

39. For their supporters in what might be called 'high culture, the 'New Right' produces supposedly scientific or philosophical books purporting to prove that prosperity is incompatible with equality, or that the darker races are biologically inferior, or that the Jewish holocaust was a hoax, etc. etc. A favourite theme is the grave perils of 'multiculturalism'' argued in staid editorials like these from the American National Review:

[3] many current public policies have an unmistakable tendency to deconstruct the American nation, [such as] official bilinguism and multiculturalism (22 June 1992, e.a. = emphasis added)

[4] multiculturalism is far more than a radical ideology or misconceived educational reform: it is a mainstream phenomenon, a systematic dismantling of America’s unitary national identity in response to unprecedented ethnic and racial transformation [...] the debunking of multiculturalism must continue. (27 April 1992, e.a)

Apparently, the old cliché of the 'uncultured masses' is no longer useful, because a contingent of voters must be recruited from the working-class. So the 'good' monocultural sector must be enlisted against the bad multicultural sector, irrespective of social class.

40. The terms 'politics' and 'political' merit special scrutiny here. They have long had a pejorative meaning of 'biased, partisan, narrowly devoted to special interests' that ironically has the greatest adaptive value for the very 'politicians' it devalues. This meaning is ideal for discrediting all 'political' solutions to social problems and for lulling the general population into a cynical disinterest in what the politicians are in fact doing. The meaning also implies the handy fiction of a non-political free space where you can position your own ideology and agenda while making the routine appeal to formalist values of objectivity, truth, and so on (cf. § 11).

41. The natural alliance between formalism and monoculturalism (§ 20ff) is well confirmed by the New Right or 'neo-conservative' offensive in or against the universities, which have naturally become leading centres for 'multicultural' projects and programmes, as portrayed by Michael Apple (1985), Henry Giroux (1992), and Stanley Fish (1994). Once more a position of neutrality is claimed against which all counter-positions are 'political', whereas the 'left' or 'liberal' sides make no such claim:

For many liberal and left academics, the university is generally regarded as a site constituted in relations of power and representing various political and ethical interests. [...] neo-conservative educators believe that the true interests of the university transcend political and normative concerns and that the latter represent an agenda being pushed exclusively by left-wing academics who are undermining the most basic principles of university life. [Yet] the neo-conservative attacks against affirmative action, ethnic studies, radical scholarship, modernity and anything else that threatens the traditional curriculum and the power it supports represent a particularised, not a universalised view of the university and its relationship to the wider society [...] Underlying this form of criticism is the not so invisible ideological appeal to the 'white man's burden' to educate those who exist outside the parameters of civilised culture; the rhetoric betrays the colonising logic at heart of the reactionary political agenda that characterises the cultural offensive of such groups as the National Association of Scholars [...] The claim to objectivity, truth, and principles that transcend history and power [...] is nothing more than a rhetorical mask that barely conceals their own highly charged ideological agenda (Henry Giroux, Border Crossings p.107).

The irony is indigestibly rich. The New Right-wing discourse invokes the formalist ideals of 'objectivity' and 'truth' while abjectly betraying them with all its actions and statements appealing to greed, selfishness, envy, prejudice, racism, sexism, and ignorance. Left-wing discourse' asserts that 'culture' and 'freedom' are universal privileges that can be actualised in society only through mutual co-operation and respect for differences, and is rewarded by being described by the Right in terms like these:

[5] remnants of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, militants and racists both black and white,p.2] [who] teach students not to respect the values that their parents have taught them.4 [...] These former radicals, now tenured and even respected members of the community, have 50 minutes 3 times a week to indoctrinate their students; anyone who objects is simply denounced as a racist or a fascist (Florida Review)

Such discourse is new to the universities, and its strident intensity reflects the strain of paradoxically attempting to change intellectual policies from an violently anti-intellectual position. But the formalist imposition in education and science described in section A has in many ways already set the stage. The current storm of controversy over culture and cultural institutions such as the universities is merely the latest and most comprehensive clash between formalism versus functionalism.

42. The power of formalism to set the agenda in the universities is perhaps most startling when it is upheld by academics who profess to be resolutely left-wing. A recent interview with grand dragon Chomsky displays the outcome quite graphically (Chomsky, Olsen, & Faigley 1991; riposte in Beaugrande 1991b). There, he announces that, in 'the way the world actually is', there is 'little overlap' between the 'things he finds intellectually interesting' and the 'things he finds humanly significant' (1991: 85f). Then, he takes a page straight out of New Right discourse by declaring it 'a real fallacy' if a 'linguist' tries to be 'socially useful'; 'there’s a lot of careerism in this' and it indicates 'very poor moral judgement' (1991: 88). 'Studying the way in which language is used to facilitate authority' 'is not intellectually interesting' and is 'of marginal human significance'.

43. Perhaps to lend a sheen of authority to the 'moral judgement' he passes on 'useful linguistics,' he proposes the correct way of 'studying' 'moral judgement' — just the same way he thinks you should study language. 'You take people [actually, he never 'takes' real people!] and ask what is the nature of the moral system they have' (1991: 87). Skipping right over such studies, which he says 'we’re not in a position' to undertake, he asserts that people 'make moral judgements' 'in coherent ways and with a high degree of consistency'. He attributes this of course to 'a theory or system or a structure underlying' 'an unbounded range of moral judgement' — which sounds to me like a (cryo)generative grammar for assigning ethical descriptions to an infinite set of moral sentences, say, about how glowingly John and Mary are to be 'admired' for the 'sincerity' they display by always doing such grammatical things. Chomsky's formalism authorises him to ignore the extensive contrary evidence from recent empirical research in sociology, social psychology, and discourse analysis, disciplines he frankly scorns and which have all worked hard to be useful. Otherwise, he would know that moral judgements and their justifications in 'modern societies' reveal not 'coherence' and 'consistency', but an appalling lack of them.

44. Even more startlingly congenial for right-wing discourse is Chomsky's (1991: 87) avowal made on the subject of 'charismatic leaders':

[6] I think that's one of the reasons that I am very much in favour of corruption. I think it's one of the best things there is. You'll notice that in my books I never criticise corruption. I think it's a wonderful thing. I'd much rather have a corrupt leader than a power-hungry leader. A corrupt leader is going to rob people but not cause that much trouble [...] The more corrupt these guys are, the better off we are. I think we all ought to applaud corruption. (Chomsky)

Surely no genuine political activist could fail to recognise that money is power, and that corruption is at the heart of the political and social 'trouble' in most of the world. But a staunch formalist can fail to do so, using here the pronoun 'we' whose real referent is not 'we the people of the United States' but 'we the rich white elite minority'. To be criticised by such a man for our 'moral judgement' is actually a high compliment — if he 'applauded' us, we would not be 'corrupt'?

45. Evidently, Chomsky naively takes over the narrow and pejorative sense of 'politics', e.g. when he portrays 'politicians' using 'complicated mechanism of propaganda and coercion 'in a depoliticised society' and goes on to 'applaud corruption' as a way of keeping potentially dangerous politicians distracted with 'sex and Cadillacs' (1991: 86f). In a broader sense of 'politics, the US is intensely 'politicised' by politicians who are not at all distracted from what they are doing, namely maintaining the fiction that the population cannot realistically expect 'mere politics' to remedy the flagrant social inequalities that favour the supporters of those same politicians. Chomsky's pronouncement proves how well they have succeeded and suggests why they might also see the adaptive value of showering money and attention on formalists like him, who use their authority to ordain 'the way the world actually is' and to discourage people from pursuing issues that are 'humanly significant' and from 'studying the way in which language is used to facilitate authority' (§ 42).

46. The collocation 'political correctness' shows how a recent term can have its meaning been pushed clear across the political spectrum. It began as an ameliorative term on the left and has been aggressively turned into a pejorative term on the right. It is defined in the 1991 edition of Webster's Random House College Dictionary (p. 1045) as 'marked by or adhering to a typically progressive orthodoxy on issues involving especially race, gender, sexual affinity, or ecology'. The definition already shows the adaptive strain between being 'progressive' (left-wing meaning) versus being 'orthodox' (right-wing meaning). Evidently, the narrow pejorative sense of 'political', from which the right has profited so much, has been enlisted to infect the otherwise sacrosanct formalist notion of 'correctness'. As Stan Fish (1994) has shown, the term has been appropriated by the New Right discourse in the meanings of intolerance about race, gender, etc., and of a left-wing tyranny that inject politics into non-political contexts such as education and science.

47. In such a situation, the meanings of the terms 'monocultural' and 'multicultural' themselves need to be carefully watched. A valuable resource can be found in large computer corpuses of authentic data, which enable a trend of 'homework linguistics' that does not withdraw into arid formalisms (cf. § 22; Beaugrande in press b). In April 1995, I asked Prof. John Sinclair for a listing of all the occurrences of these two terms in the 'Bank of English' at Birmingham University, which contains some 200 million words of running text from contemporary spoken and written sources, including: British and American books; newspapers (Times, Independent, Guardian, Today, Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, Economist); magazines (e.g., Esquire, Good Housekeeping); ‘ephemera’ such as letter-box mailings (e.g., YMCA appeal for homeless people, Friends of the Earth Tropical Rainforest Campaign), radio broadcasts (British Broadcasting Corporation in the UK and National Public Radio in the US); and recordings of conversations.

48. John predicted that we might not get many occurrences, but he was only partly right. We did get very few (4) for 'monocultural', and all of them with the agricultural meaning of 'raising a single crop', which is also the only meaning given in Webster's Random House College Dictionary. Evidently, public discourse has not created a balanced counterpart to 'multicultural' to designate a stance or society centred on just one culture. This finding fits the familiar tactic of monoculturalism to remain invisible, as if it had no doctrine or politics of its own but were only the neutral zero grade from which all other cultural positions can be objectively viewed as deviant. The news media and their owners must see an adaptive value in not discussing or even mentioning 'monoculturalism' lest its meaning become a topic of public controversy, especially its racist, sexist, and neo-colonialist ideology.

49. For 'multicultural', only one occurrence referred to agriculture:

[7] < compaction problems related to multicultural grain corn production in south- >

The rest of the data confirmed my prediction that its meaning is very much an 'attractor' of senses with diverse adaptive values. Table 1 (next page displays the more interesting data, sorted under straightforward headings. I have italicised the key words I used to do the classifying.

___________________________________________________________________________

< there is no way back from today's multicultural society to the ethnic >

< elements of a new, more open, multicultural America # And you know, >

< and more fully portraying the multicultural nature of Britain's society. >

< <t> Britain is supposed to be a multicultural society, but how much one group >

< good news was the extent to which multicultural values and activities had >

< Siegel: Can Los Angeles be a true multicultural city? Black, white, Korean and >

< and co-operatively together in a multicultural country is one of the most>

< to recognise the developing multicultural make up of society as a pearl >

< the virtues of a multiracial, multicultural society. At the outset it is >

< responded to the need for greater multicultural awareness by incorporating >

< The fiercest battleground of the multicultural wars, however, involves the >

< strength. Here, any nebulous multicultural civility would be an evasion of >

< es or the complications of our multicultural society in ways that the young c >

< of quality is sacrificed for multicultural equality <LTH> by Steven >

< on Channel 4 is bad, only the multicultural programmes it seems. <LTH> The >

< 4 Commissioning Editor for multicultural Programmes, who slavishly >

< I call an illusion -- that language was multicultural, was multiracial, and we had a >

< been replaced by the buzzword 'multicultural' # which by definition separates

2. an agenda that ought be realised

< a halt on violence. We call on a multicultural revolution of values in our >

< seek peace and political stability, multicultural sensitivity, quality consciousness>

< the ideal of a multilingual, multicultural and multireligious society once >

< issue, for me, of racial and -- and multicultural, multi-ethnic agendae. Hinojosa: >

< host: Fighting racial hatred with multicultural theater and music # The story >

3a. a goal in education

< of race relations legislation, multicultural education policies and racism >

< University of London's Centre for multicultural Education, entitled, "Youth >

<the campus all the benefits of a multicultural environment. <LTH> In addition >

< and a requirement to attend multicultural training programs. Despite >

< of reports on the struggle over multicultural education # US public schools >

< controversy over a the use of a multicultural curriculum in schools is >

< who are angry that the multicultural curriculum will teach children >

< and want to throw out the entire multicultural curriculum, but the New York >

< position of having to do remedial multicultural education for roughly a third >

< many schools are phasing out multicultural subjects, it is being claimed. >

< of cliches about the necessity of multicultural diversity, the iniquity of Arts >

< to ask questions such as, who multicultural educations is for, and, to what >

< and Tyson, 3, in the same heady, multicultural swirl. The travelling Cherry >

Table 1

___________________________________________________________________________

50. Of course, my headings are not really clear-cut. For example, statements about 'accepting' or having 'no way back' from the multicultural society, or about 'requirements' for multicultural education, often turn out to be hedged in context with qualifications (notice the 'but's!) about not adopting policies that a genuine acceptance ought to imply. So the proporions between 1a versus 1b and 3a versus 3b are probably skewed toward more 'acceptance' than is being advocated.

51. The most approving meanings of the term, as we can see, relate to fashions, arts, and commerce. The notion that culture can commodified and fetishised to serve the immensely lucrative industries of nostalgia and tourism has long been practised with 'mainstream' at home and foreign cultures overseas. If multiculturalism can now be harnessed to reanimate a jaded consumerate in the UK and the US, the media and their rich owners joyously agree. Many social innovations of the past have been effectively blunted by commodifying them, as when the 'revolutionary' movement of the 1960s were emptied of content and made into 'chic' styles of clothing and music. Signs of a similar commodification of multiculturalism can be seen in Bank of English data and on the streets of many of our larger cities. Menawhile, the non-Western cultures are being relentlessly pressured to adopt 'mainstream Western culture', which is itself defined not just by its own commodities but by the doctrine of a world that is nothing but commodities. (cf. § 62).

52. So far at least, the consensus among business interests — including those who bankroll the conservatives and their fierce monocultural offensive — still appears to be that attacks on multiculturalism do not make for good advertising. The spadework is better left to public discourse about conservatives in parliament saying what they're paid to or individual members of non-mainstream cultures doing evil deeds, or about anti-racists being 'the real racists', and so on and so on.

53. Interestingly, nearly all the references to 'multiculturalism' apply to the U.K. and the U.S. and not to the multitude of multicultural areas elsewhere So the central public meaning of the term connotes 'domestic multiculturalism as a fairly new situation whose consequences have yet to be seen'. Only two uses departed from the trend, one referring to India [8] and one to China [9]:

[8] < After a happy childhood in the multicultural mix of British India, the 11-year old >

[9] < a country that is monolingual and multicultural and has been for thousands of years >

Both are far from innocent. [8] invokes nostalgia for the British Empire, which extracted such enormous wealth from India as to leave it behind in an economic shambles; and also hints that immigrants would be 'happier' back home — a well-known conservative theme. [9