Are culture and identity linguistic entities? (sidenotes to the “social turn” in language teaching)

Abstract

Since the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy and-in general-in all the humanities of the mid-20th century, there has been a continuous oscillation in the importance attached to the code (language “in itself”) and that attributed to its “use ” (language “in context”). Thus, since the mid-1970s, there has also been talk of a “social turn”. For the teaching of language and literature, this has led to the emergence of the concept of “literate practices”: the series of social uses of language and its implications for particular individuals, such as interaction, the construction of the “self”, prestige and social mobility, etc. At the same time, the theoretical opposition between “literacy practices” vs. “cognitive processes” is directed from the “social turn” (specifically from the New Literature Studies) against the prevailing cognitivism, which focuses on the processes of abstraction and symbolic representation carried out by the psychological subject. This paper, on the contrary, tries to show how such a concept of “practice” is limited to broadening the spectrum of the linguistic / cognitive debate on culture and identity, in order to include the variety of media / contexts (for example, social networks) and marginal texts (the “vernacular / digital” use of language versus the dominant / institutionalized use) and discourse (the series of beliefs, prejudices, attitudes towards one or another “form of communication”). Our intention is to show how this current wave of socially oriented studies does not take into account that which ideologically characterizes certain social relations and which, in Juan Carlos Rodríguez’s theory (2017), is called “ideological unconscious”: here, we ar referring to the ideology of the “free subject”, specific to our modern (and postmodern) social relations. Like linguisticism and cognitivism, the social turn understands that the “ideological component” of communication is a contextual / external element to the “communicative subject”, something that would affect the value of such literate practices, thus making less privileged individuals feel a “prejudice” regarding their own subjective center, at the same time supposedly pure or authentic (that is de-ideologized). Our objection to this vision, then, consists in emphasizing that the ideological, as unconscious and systemic, is not something “external”, and that therefore the expression and interaction on the margins (those vernacular discoursive practices) also reproduce dominant ideology, regardless of whether or not individuals accuse a certain level of institutional pressure.