Abstract
This article discusses the materiality of language in relation to subjectivity, politics, and social psychology. Whereas social psychology has traditionally disregarded language, especially in its material dimension as voice, recent decades have seen important developments. The developing “social psychology of language” foregrounds subjectivity as constituted in relation to particular languages and particular ways of speaking these languages, and acknowledges that these particularities are politically encoded. However, an important dimension of the human voice is still being neglected in the social psychology of language, namely the way it is domesticated according to the dominant principle of political and cultural organization in modernity, the nation-state. It is argued that social psychology, through its own conceptual entanglement with the nation-state, is in historical collusion with ideologies that render language visible mainly in national terms, and thus reproduces rather than challenges contemporary constellations of language, subjectivity, and the political.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bauman, Z. (1992). Soil, Blood and Identity. The Sociological Review, 40 (4), pp. 675–701.
Beck, U. (2003). Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent. Constellations, 10 (4), pp. 453–468.
Billig, M. (1987). Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Blackledge, A. (2006). The Magical Frontier Between the Dominant and the Dominated: Sociolinguistics and Social Justice in a Multilingual World. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 27 (1), pp. 22–41.
Blommaert, J., Creve, L. and Willaert, E. (2006). On Being Declared Illiterate: Language-Ideological Disqualifications in Dutch Classes for Immigrants in Belgium.Language & Communication, 26, pp. 34–54.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Oxford: Polity Press.
Budach, G., Roy, S. and Heller, M. (2003). Community and Commodity in French Ontario. Language in Society, 32, pp. 603–627.
Burkitt, I. (1999). Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity. London: Sage.
Chipkin, I. (2007). Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of ‘The People’. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Crossley, N. (2001). The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire. London: Sage.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1975). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.
Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Dolar, M. (2006). A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Guattari, F. (1996). Soft Subversions. New York: Semiotext(e).
Habermas, J. (1985). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hage, G. (2003). Against Paranoid Nationalism: Seeking for Hope in a Shrinking Society. London: Pluto Press.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harris, R. and Rampton, B. (eds) (2003). The Language, Ethnicity and Race Reader. London: Routledge.
Hobsbawm, E. (1990). Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hogg, M.A. and Abrams, D. (1988). Social Identifications: A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes. London: Routledge.
Jacquemet, M. (2005). Transidiomatic Practices: Language and Power in the Age of Globalization. Language & Communication, 25, pp. 257–277.
Jourdan, C. and Tuite, K. (eds) (2006). Language, Culture, and Society: Key Topics in Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Karmani, S. (2006). Good Muslims Speak English. Critical Discourse Studies, 3 (1), pp. 103–105.
Kroskity, P.V. (ed.) (2000). Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Kymlicka, W. and Patten, A. (eds) (2003). Language Rights and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lacan, J. (2001). Écrits: A Selection. London: Routledge.
Lambert, W.E., Hodgson, R.C., Gardner, R.C. and Fillenbaum, S. (1960). Evaluation Reactions to Spoken Language. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60, pp. 44–51.
Liebkind, K. (1999). Social Psychology. In Fishman, J.A. (ed.) Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 140–151.
Linke, U. (2004). Ethnolinguistic Racism: The Predicaments of Sovereignty and Nationhood Under Global Capitalism. Anthropological Theory, 4 (2), pp. 205–228.
May, S. (2001). Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language. New York: Longman.
Narkunas, J.P. (2005). Capital Flows Through Language: Market English, Biopower and the World Bank. Theoria, 52 (108), pp. 28–55.
Noels, K.A., Giles, H. and Le Poire, B. (2003). Language and Communication Processes. In Hogg, M.A. and Cooper, J. (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Social Psychology. London: Sage, pp. 232–257.
Papadopoulos, D. (2004). Editorial: Psychology and the Political. The International Journal of Critical Psychology, 12, pp. 5–13.
Papadopoulos, D. (2007). Into the voice box. [WWW document] http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/05/14/into-the-voice-box/ (accessed 27 November 2007).
Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage.
Reicher, S. and Hopkins, N. (2001). Self and Nation: Categorization, Contestation and Mobilization. London: Sage.
Rose, N. (1996). Inventing Our Selves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stam, H.J. (ed.) (1998). The Body and Psychology. London: Sage.
Tajfel, H. (1978). Differentiation Between Social Groups: Studies in the Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. London: Academic Press.
Wallerstein, I. (ed.) (1996). Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Claire Haggard and Derek Hook for their comments on an earlier version of this article.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Painter, D. The Voice Devoid Of Any Accent: Language, Subjectivity, And Social Psychology. Subjectivity 23, 174–187 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.11
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.11