By Jacqueline Urla
Introduction
Recent rethinking of Habermas' Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere by Negt and Kluge (1993), and feminist and social historians Nancy
Fraser (1993), Joan Landes (1988), and Geoff Eley (1992), among others,
has argued persuasively that the bourgeois public sphere has, from its
inception, been built upon powerful mechanisms of exclusion. The idealized
image of a democratic theatre of free and equal participation in debate,
they claim, has always been a fiction predicated on the mandatory silencing
of entire social groups, vital social issues, and indeed, "of any
difference that cannot be assimilated, rationalized, and subsumed"
(Hansen 1993b:198). This is especially clear in the case of those citizens
who do not or will not speak the language of civil society. The linguistic
terrorism performed with a vengeance during the French Revolution and reenacted
in Official English initiatives in the United States more recently, reveal
to us how deeply monolingualism has been ingrained in liberal conceptions
of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. But perhaps
silencing may not be the best way to describe the fate of linguistic minorities
or other marginalized groups. For, as Miriam Hansen (1993b) notes, what
the more recent work on public spheres suggests is that "the"
public sphere has never been as uniform or as totalizing as it represents
itself to be. Proliferating in the interstices of the bourgeois public
-- in salons, coffeehouses, book clubs, working class and subaltern forms
of popular culture -- are numerous counterpublics that give lie to the
presumed homogeneity of the imaginary public. Spurred in part by ethnic
nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, speakers
and writers of "barbarous" tongues and "illegitimate patois"
can be seen as one among the counterpublics who avail themselves of any
number of "media" -- from novels to oral poetry, from song and
regional presses to, more recently, various forms of electronic media --
to give expression to other kinds of social experience and perspectives
on who the public is, what its interests might be, and what its voice sounds
like.
This article examines the contemporary formation of one such counterpublic
in the small towns and cities of the southern Basque country. Here, in
the years since Franco's death, one finds among Basque radical nationalist
youth a self conscious attempt to make use of intentionally marginal or
"outlaw" publicity -- street graffiti, zines, low-power free
radio -- as well as a lively rock music scene, to give voice to their minoritized
language and their not-so-polite critiques of the state, consumer capitalism,
police repression, and a host of other social concerns. The alternative
media and expressive culture of radical youth can be seen as creating a
public sphere in the sense of a discursive matrix within which social experience
is articulated, negotiated, and contested (Hansen 1993a). However, as I
hope to show, the sphere they have created differs significantly from the
kind of public typically imagined within minority language revitalization
and/or ethnic nationalist movements. The latter typically are bourgeois
and universalistic in nature; the nation or linguistic community is imagined
in the singular and envisioned primarily as a reading and writing public.
Furthermore, in the Basque nationalist movement, as in many other linguistic
minority movements, language politics tend to be oriented towards normalization,
expanding literacy, and gaining legitimacy within the terms of state hegemonic
language hierarchies. The past century has seen ethnic minority intellectuals
form their own language academies, literary and scientific societies, and
mobilize the tools of linguistic analysis, orthographic reform, mapping,
and even the census in order to document the "truth" of their
language and to reform the language according to notions of what constitutes
a "modern" or "rational" language (Urla 1993). The
kind of practical exigencies and urgency minority linguists and planners
feel to transform their language into what Bourdieu (1991) calls a "langue
autorisé", to demonstrate its equivalence to other "world"
languages, leads them to a concern with boundary drawing, purifying, and
standardizing more commonly associated with the language ideology of the
dominant public sphere.
Scholars have tended to focus upon these normalizing processes, yet
if we look to other arenas like the marginalized publicity of radical youth,
we find a very different picture. What follows is an exploration of the
public sphere of radical free radio, its distinctive ideology of radical
democratic communication, and how these are reflected in a variety of linguistic
strategies. Existing on the margins of legality, ephemeral, and often nomadic
in both a geographic and temporal sense, free radios provide a soundtrack
for minority languages, values, and cultural expression by pirating the
airwaves, appearing and disappearing on the f.m. dial. The public constructed
by radical youth is perhaps better described as a partial public, a segment
of a plural, rather than singular, counterpublic sphere (cf. Hansen 1993b:209).
Secondly, it is decidedly oppositional, challenging both the Spanish state
and the Basque regional government's control over the terms of public discourse
and the exclusions that control entails. Thirdly, while one of the aims
of free radio stations is to open new avenues for the circulation of Basque,
programmers embrace a more hybrid, playful, and anti-normative set of language
practices than do language activists in other areas of language revitalization.
Looking beyond formal language politics, beyond the academies and literacy
programs, to the particular modes of address and other linguistic forms
used in these kinds of experiments in local media, I suggest, reveals a
more heterogeneous conception of publics and language than our studies
of minority language movements might otherwise convey.
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