Outlaw language
Jacqueline Urla · Pragmatics Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) · 1995
Recent rethinking of Habermas' Stntctural Transformatiort of the Public Sphere by Negt and Kluge (1993), and feminist and social historians Nancy Fraser (1993), Joan landes (1988), andGeoff 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, "ot 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 Libert6, Egalit6, anci Fraternit6.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, cofteehouses, 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 mediato 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 fbrmation of one such counterpublic 1 I woulcl like to thank the many members of Molotoff Irratia in Hermani and Paotxa in Usurbil who welcomed me to their stations and gave generously of their time.I owe a special debt to Jakoba Rekondo, who first brought free radio to my attention and has provided guidance, prodding, and support throughout this project.Thanks also to Jokin Eizagirre, Olatz Mikeleiz, Ana