On borders, ruptures, thresholds & mundanity

I’ve been struggling to connect my disparate thoughts on this week’s readings into a semi-coherent post. Yet I’m realizing that at the crux of my various reflections are the notions of borders, ruptures, and thresholds: aspects of our environment that exist in natural and man-made capacities, and that can simultaneously serve welcoming and exclusionary purposes. So far in class we’ve emphasized the locally-specific duality of linguistic practices: for instance, the way that pronouncing “Greenwich” as “GREN-itch” in Philadelphia reveals you’re not from South Philly, while pronouncing it the “Philadelphia-proper” way of “GREEN-witch” in NYC shows you’re not from the village. Both pronunciations of “Greenwich” are right, and both are wrong; and the practice of “citizen sociolinguistics” exists at the border of these separate/connected worlds.

I want to situate the practice of “citizen sociolinguistics” in this way, because I think the “Greenwich” example illustrates the complexity of metalinguistic inquiry in a sort of tangible way. This complexity brings me to the first of my musings sparked by our readings, this idea of citizen sociolinguistics as “…build[ing] awareness and spark[ing] dialog about complex forms of linguistic diversity,” (Rymes 2019 “Medium is the Method” pp. 6). I’m fascinated by how people talk, and also how they talk about how they talk; so the existence of an academic discipline (?) designed around these very processes, designed to further quotidian conversations about language diversity, is something I find quite exciting. But it also confuses me.

Perhaps my confusion is stemming from my own misunderstandings around the “purpose” of citizen sociolinguistics; and perhaps it’s narrow-minded of me to ascribe one singular “purpose” to something as inherently nuanced and dynamic and nebulous as the study of how people talk about language. But the “citizen sociolinguistic” conversations we’ve been having in class so far, that compile academic scholarship and memes and tweets into the fodder for discussions in an “ivory tower”-like setting, feels kind of weird to me, almost against the spirit of “true” citizen sociolinguistic work (…do I even have the authority to make that claim?). Admittedly, the internet sources we’ve discussed are from publicly published interfaces. The authors were putting information into the public world, and once information is put out into the world, it is impossible for its source to control where it goes and what it becomes. I recognize this, and I imagine this was known to any individuals posting things on public forums. But what would they think if they could hear our class conversations? What might they think about how their own comments have been repurposed (“hacked”?) into academic fodder? Would they be intrigued? Unhappy? Proud? Would they even care? Does any of this matter?

That being said, I recognize that the conversations I was just referencing took place in a class designed to teach us about “citizen sociolinguistics”. But “citizen sociolinguistics” is an act that thrives because of the regular contributions of ordinary people; beyond this blog, should such “ordinary people” have more of role in conversing with us as we converse about them? I guess the question at the core of this rambling dilemma is: how can we extend “citizen sociolinguistic” conversations to include all potential parties, to the extent that they wish to be included, when linguistic practices are inherently as exclusive as they are inclusive; and when it seems to take rupturing some artificial boundary or space to even instigate such conversations?

These uncertainties lead me to the final topic I’d like to cover in this post: some of the writings of Georges Perec, a mid-twentieth century French experimental/post-memory author. One of Perec’s well-known pieces is a short book called Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (very rough translation, Sophie please feel free to step in: “Attempt at exhausting a Parisian site”). Basically, the “structure” of the book is the antithesis of how students are generally taught to structure writing: a list of not-necessarily-related observations, linked only by their momentary relevance to a particular geographic place, without a plot, characters, or even theme. The goal of the piece seems more to just capture one person’s perspective of a certain place at a certain time, in all of its mundane details: colors of people, cars, signs; the weather; noises heard; snippets of conversation; etc. Essentially: to revel in the ordinary, in completely “unruptured” spaces, where everything and everyone functions in whatever boring ways they normally do. The reason I bring this up is because I wonder how the practice of paying attention to mundane, ordinary, even boring realities could be combined with the citizen sociolinguistic practice of engaging at the borders, thresholds, and ruptures. What might citizen sociolinguistics look like, sound like, become, if it’s something that doesn’t need to be sparked by awe or arrest? I have no idea if this is even a broadly relevant question, let alone how I might answer it. But understanding that with citizen sociolinguistics, “the medium is the method”, I have hope that we might be able to find out.