Original Ar ticle

T H E VO I C E D E VO I D O F A N Y ACCENT: L ANGUAGE, SUBJ ECTIVITY, AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Desm ond Pai nter
Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Correspondence: Desmond Painter, Department of Psychology, Stellenbosch University, PO Box X1, Stellenbosch 7602, South Africa E-mail: dpainter@sun.ac.za

A b s t ra c t
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.

Ke y wo rds
language; materiality; corporeality; nationalism; social psychology Subjectivity (2008) 23, 174187. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.11

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I n t r o d u ct i o n

n a recent book, in which he develops a philosophical and psychoanalytic theory of the voice, Mladen Dolar offers some illuminating remarks on the neglect of the materiality of language in philosophy, social theory, and everyday thinking:
If we speak in order to make sense, to signify, to convey something, then the voice is the material support of bringing about meaning, yet it does not contribute to it itself. It is, rather, something like a vanishing mediator, (y) it makes the utterance possible, but it disappears in it, it goes up in smoke in the meaning being produced. Even on the most banal level of daily experience, when we listen to someone speak, we may at first be very much aware of his or her voice and its particular qualities, its color and accent, but soon we accommodate to it and concentrate only on the meaning that is conveyed. The voice itself is like the Wittgensteinian ladder to be discarded when we have successfully climbed to the top that is, when we have made our ascent to the peak of meaning. The voice is the instrument, the vehicle, the medium, and the meaning is the goal. This gives rise to a spontaneous opposition where the voice appears as materiality opposed to the ideality of meaning. The ideality can emerge only through the materiality of the means, but the means does not seem to contribute to meaning. (Dolar, 2006, p. 5)

Dolar here embarks on a project entirely different from the argument I will be developing in this article. While he articulates an account of language and subjectivity based on a psychoanalytic reading of the materiality of the voice, I am interested in something much more modest in scope: the materiality of language in social psychology. In referring to the materiality of language, I include some of the more literal qualities Dolar attributes to voice things like the prosody, the intonation and the accent, the melody, the redundant, the variations and so forth (p. 9) that characterize individual speaking. But I am also, and specifically, referring to the domesticated voice: the socially encoded and politically regimented aspects of human language production. When people speak they do so in different accents, dialects and, of course, in altogether different languages. They make different sounds in worlds where aural differences fulfil functions similar to the visual stigmata of sex or race: they are principles of both visibility and invisibility; they propel subjects along different social and political trajectories; and they enable and restrict vertical and horizontal mobility across social and political terrain. To insist on the materiality of language and the voice might seem innocuous and even superfluous. Who would disagree? Nobody, probably, but then equally nobody would deny that human beings have bodies, and yet the social sciences have only recently started paying attention to the embodied nature of social and psychological life (e.g., Stam, 1998; Burkitt, 1999; Crossley, 2001). The same
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kind of invisibility frequently also befalls language, and this is certainly not unrelated to the longstanding neglect of the social and historical dimensions of the body in social theory. Language is such an ubiquitous feature of human life of individuals, groups and regions, for reasons that I shall discuss in the following section that it is easily made transparent, especially its material dimensions: even when focused on explicitly, as is the case with social theory informed by various strands of discourse theory, language is often dematerialized. Attention is less on the material voice or the particular language spoken than it is on meaning existing independently of these. One is certainly much more likely to come across discussions of topics like globalization, migration, and racism in studies of language than one is to encounter discussions of language particular languages and dimensions of language politics in standard social science texts on these topics. Even in normative political philosophy, language is but rarely foregrounded in debates about citizenship and democracy (May, 2001; Kymlicka and Patten, 2003); and when it is, it is generally discussed in relation to minority rights and cultural identities in existing nation-states, which somewhat forecloses broader, more radical discussions about language and subjectivity in contemporary political realities. The focus in political theory and political philosophy, once again, often tends towards a dematerialization of language, with the particularities of languages and speech assimilated into more idealized notion like Habermass (1985) theory of communicative action. It is precisely this tendency that Dolar diagnoses as a pervasive linguistic bias, one that treats voice as what does not contribute to making sense (p. 5, emphasis in the original). The consequence is that important dimensions of the contribution language makes to contemporary constellations of subjectivity and the political are neglected at least, that is, outside of those disciplines that pay explicit attention to language, like sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, the sociology of language and so forth (e.g., Kroskity, 2000; Harris and Rampton, 2003; Jourdan and Tuite, 2006). This article, however, focuses on social psychology specifically, and it is in the context of this discipline that I will further develop my argument. For much of its history social psychology has paid very little attention to language. Even when language does become a focal point, as in the so-called discursive turn in social psychology (e.g., Billig, 1987; Potter and Wetherell, 1987), it is not without problems. The discursive turn has informed a kind of linguistic reductionism, or what could even be referred to as a residual cognitivism, which stands in stark contrast to approaches that insist on the corporeality of the subject and on the material (and not just symbolic) conditions of social life. Despite privileging language-related phenomena, like discourses, narratives, and rhetoric, these are treated as generalized and abstracted categories: the subject becomes audible in relation to language in general, not necessarily in relation to particular languages, dialects, or accents. Social psychology has moved from calculating to talking heads, it seems, in the
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process bypassing the materiality of language as embodied performance and as social and political institution. Its focus on language further decorporealizes the subject, rather than amplifying language as a dimension of our corporeal existence. Although a number of approaches to discourse (and conversation) analysis pay attention to material aspects of speech, such as pauses between words and the speed and volume of utterances, their use is not widespread in social psychological research. Discourse analytic studies generally approach the speaking subject in pursuit of what Dolar refers to as the ideality of meaning (p. 5). On the other hand, the growing literature on embodiment and materiality in the social sciences and in psychology specifically has also paid little attention to the corporeal dimensions of language and speech. Here, too, the voice is given only marginal attention as one of the ways in which subjects are embodied and embody the social world. In this regard one may recall, somewhat out of context, a statement of Lacan (2001, p. 95): Speech is in fact a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is. There is certainly no shortage of theoretical resources that would allow social psychology to flesh out the speaking subject along these lines: phenomenology, psychoanalysis, different trajectories of postcolonial theory, poststructuralist authors like Bourdieu (1991) and others register, explicitly and implicitly, the materiality of language and the speaking voice consider, for example, Fanon (1967) and Derridas (1998) reflections on speaking and inhabiting French as a colonial language. Such theoretical scaffolding would make it possible to treat things like accents as more than simply material features of speech, but meaningful practices revealing the ways subjects inhabit their worlds and relationships in fully realized corporeal ways. But I will not be developing such ideas in this article, nor will I pay further attention to discursive approaches in social psychology. My interest, instead, is with the development of a social psychology of language in the mainstream, experimental approach to the discipline. Through its focus on topics like accent evaluation and attitudes to languages and language groups, this tradition has foregrounded the material dimensions of language and voice in a more systematic way than has been the case in discursive social psychology. However, an important dimension of the human voice is still being neglected in the social psychology of language, namely the way it is tied up with the dominant principle of political and cultural organization of modernity, the nation-state. I will argue that social psychology, through its own conceptual entanglement with the nation-state, is in historical collusion with ideologies that materializes language mainly in national terms, and thus reproduces rather than challenges contemporary constellations of language, subjectivity, and the political. In short, I am concerned with the kinds of linguistic worlds and subjectivities that are assumed and corroborated when social psychologists claim to pay attention to language, or to hear their subjects speak that is, when
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they are interested not only in what their research subjects say, but in how they sound.

To b e h e a rd : L a n g u a ge , s ta te , a n d s ubje c t
According to Deleuze and Guattari (1975, pp. 3536), Any language, rich or poor, always implies the deterritorialization of the mouth, the tongue, and the teeth. This process, which involves a kind of denaturalizing of the function of the mouth, is a key moment in becoming a human subject. Throughout modernity, the deterritorializing movement of the mouth that they refer to has been captured by an attendant, powerful reterritorialization: the establishment of the cultural, political, and economic matrix of the modern state and the creation of citizen-subjects. In this regard, consider another statement by Dolar (2006):
Imagine someone reading the news on TV with a heavy regional accent. It would sound absurd, for the state, by definition, does not have an accent. A person with an accent can appear in a talk-show, speaking in her own voice, but not in an official capacity. The official voice is the voice devoid of any accent. (p. 191)

What Dolar refers to as the official voice is a collusion of the nation-state ideal and the standard version of a language. The domesticated voice is, quite literally, the nationalized voice. It is, first of all, a manufactured and regulated voice: the state requires and works towards a homogenization of all communication (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 45). The official, nationalized voice is also a regulatory technology; it orders and reproduces the cultural, political, and economic terrain of the state. While language is therefore certainly a symbol and instrument of national unification, standardization and mobilization, it equally is an instrument of diversification, hierarchization, and restriction of movement. If, according to Narkunas (2005, p. 37), language has been a central technique for the state to reproduce itself during the emergence and institutionalization of the European nation state and colonialism, often by distinguishing the boundary between humans and other forms of life like animals, this is only one side of the coin. Language also facilitates the reproduction of the state by distinguishing between different kinds of human subject: between natives and immigrants; between citizens and non-citizens; between different economic classes; between racialized groups; between metropolitan elites and those from rural areas; and between the hegemonic national culture and those who are identified or identify themselves as ethnic or minorities. This is not primarily a question of some having voice and others being left voiceless in the representational structures of liberal democracy. Rather, ones voice, ones audibility, literally positions one within and in relation to the state. In the words of Felix Guattari
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(1996, p. 19), The national language is the instrument of translatability which specifies each persons way of speaking. Language played and continues to play a complex set of roles in nation-states. For theorists of nationalism like Ernest Gellner (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm (1990), the development of national economies and their new, more complex labour requirements demanded the linguistic homogenization of the state. Such homogeneous, national languages did not exist, nor did the boundaries of existing speech communities coincide with those of the envisaged political communities of nationalism. States may have required large, standardized languages to become nation-states, but languages themselves required the state, or at least the cultural logic of nationalism, to be imagined and developed as national languages. It is through inheriting or accumulating linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) that individuals and groups could become national subjects, and through the institutions and reach of the nation-state that national citizens were being produced as linguistic subjects. In this sense one should accentuate both the empowering or mobilizing and disempowering or violent role of language in the context of nationstates. Hobsbawm (1990, p. 115) is certainly correct when he writes: Elsewhere he or she was little better than a dumb animal: a mute bundle of muscles. From the point of view of poor men looking for work to better themselves in a modern world there was nothing wrong with peasants being turned into Frenchmen or Poles and Italians in Chicago learning English and wishing to become Americans. This resonates with Ghassan Hages (2003) notion of the modern state as a mechanism for the distribution of hope. Through its creation and distribution of linguistic capital, relying primarily on national education, the modern state produced the linguistic subject as a hoping subject. The opposite is certainly equally true. One should resist the economic reductionism of Gellner and Hobsbawm in favour of a view of language as biopolitical mechanism not only producing mobile, hoping subjects, but delineating the very limits of the population as national population. Here I agree with Narkunas (2005):
Nation states, as biopolitical forces, have historically fostered their legitimacy through citizens in mixing the desire for exercising social control by defining the very epistemological limits of what society can be. National languages and literatures have performed an essential part in the creation and sanctioning of culture in the West to define the history of human experience through national subject formation. (p. 36)

The important point here is that language plays a role in the states definition and policing of the epistemological limits of what society can be. Language is not simply a cultural epiphenomenon of more fundamental economic processes. It functions as a measure of population (Chipkin, 2007, p. 13), setting both
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the outer limits of society that is, the question of who legitimately belongs to the national community and its inner limits or demarcations the status, movement and mobility, for example, that different subjects like classes, the sexes, and racialized groups are afforded. This political role of language remains essentially unchanged in an era of economic and cultural globalization, decreasing national autonomy and increasingly porous national borders. Language in fact aggressively reasserts itself as a moveable, material frontier assisting the regulation of populations in terms of their belonging, movement, and access to public life. This is why ideologies and practices of language (e.g., language testing for citizenship) have become such important ingredients in the political response to migration in various European countries (e.g., Blackledge, 2006; Blommaert et al., 2006), and in the politics of racism more generally (e.g., Linke, 2004), as is captured particularly well in this recent comment on the intersection of language and racial ideologies in the United Kingdom (Karmani, 2006, p. 103): Good Muslims speak English. Consider in this regard also the following comments by Papadopoulos (2007), who reflects on the cultural politics of voice and accent in the context of the creation of a discourse of the new migrant in Britain: New migrants speak dodgy English and undermine national sovereignty and the last remaining bits of the crumbling welfare system. How can they dare to demand regularisation without speaking the language? Language as persecution. Language as a symptom of British neurosis. He continues:
What Im interested in is how the materiality of the voice box sustains the trajectories of racialisation on the one hand and criminalisation of mobility on the other. The materiality of the voice box acts as the point of gravity of British doubled-sided racism against the non-integrated on the one hand and the illegal on the other. We are used to responding to this by engaging separately in the politics of race and the politics of migration. But this distinction is no longer sustainable. Voice, racialisation, accents, detention centres, precarious labour, racial oppression, deportations are all made of the same stuff of matter: bodies which do not match.

S o c i a l p s y c h o l o gy, l a n gu a ge , a n d t h e n a t i o n - s t a t e
As little as two decades ago, it was still possible for Hogg and Abrams (1988, p. 188) to write the following: Social psychology in general skirts around language, affords it no distinctive focus, and instead focuses upon communication exclusively as information transmission. Twenty years on, and the situation remains virtually unchanged. Social psychology in general still affords language only marginal attention. Language is, for the most part, simply a taken-for-granted, transparent dimension of the phenomena social psychology studies and of the disciplines epistemological relation to these phenomena.
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In fact, in much of social psychology the human subject is treated as functionally mute: language, indeed, is frequently treated as a methodological contaminant. The pre-fabricated statements in questionnaires and the strict regimentation of verbal instructions in experimental situations reduce language to a problem that needs to be solved, rather than acknowledging it as an irreducible dimension of human subjectivity and sociality. According to Hogg and Abrams (1988, p. 191) the reason for this neglect of language in social psychology was that language lies beyond the explanatory reach of the conceptual apparatus of individualistic social psychology. Language is an emergent property of interaction which transcends individuality and has properties of collective mental phenomena such as intersubjectivity and normativeness. A social psychology more responsive to the interactional and emergent properties of social life, and to the social dimensions of cognition and perception, would restore language to its appropriate position. This, indeed, was the rhetorical work Hogg and Abrams (1988) were performing at the time: lamenting the neglect of language in mainstream social psychology allowed them the opportunity to introduce a new look social psychology of language that consolidated the scattered studies on topics like accent evaluation and language attitudes emerging in the 1960s (e.g., Lambert et al., 1960) from the vantage point of their favoured theoretical approach, social identity theory. By foregrounding the fact that people speak and speak differently from one another, and that these linguistic differences are socially and politically encoded by categories like race, ethnicity, class, and gender, language was thus finally put on the agenda in social psychology (for an overview, see Noels et al., 2003). However, the social psychology of language did not, and perhaps could not, break with the normative politico-linguistic orders in which social psychology was and remains embedded. A comment by Hogg and Abrams (1988, p. 191) that comes almost as an aside is revealing in this regard: A further reason for language being social psychologys blindspot is not unique to social psychology: it may be common to us all. As we go about our taken-for-granted daily lives, the world is largely treated as being as it appears. They may well have been correct in saying that the neglect of language is not unique to social psychology, but their statement still begs the question: why would the world appear linguistically neutral? What is it about the worlds we live in that makes it possible for language to be forgotten, or to be treated as a transparent aspect of it? This commonplace can only be common to us all to the extent that we live in normatively monolingual societies that is, in societies that have defined themselves in terms of linguistic homogeneity and that have subsequently been subjected to regimes of linguistic homogenization. It is indeed a world of appearances: very few, if any, societies are truly monolingual. Social psychologys neglect of language is therefore more than a mere oversight; it is an ideological collusion. By not acknowledging this ideological collusion, social psychology finds itself facing a curious dilemma: by making language visible the normative linguistic
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order is merely corroborated. This was and remains, as I have demonstrated in the previous sections, to a large extent a national order. Language becomes visible in social psychology always in relation to a set of assumptions about linguistic normativity: minority languages in relation to the language of the nation-state; the dialect and the accent in relation to the standard version of the language; bilingualism and multilingualism in relation to the more normative assumptions about individual and societal monolingualism. In short, things like the dialect, the accent, and the ethno-linguistic identity become visible against the background of an essentially unquestioned but historically specific normative linguistic order: the standard language, the unmarked code, the national identity; the whole set of linguistic paraphernalia historically associated with the modern nation-state. In this regard, social psychology is certainly not unique. The commonsense notion of society as a fixed container of authenticated national subjects, interchangeable at a level of abstraction guaranteed by what Bourdieu (1991) refers to as a legitimate national culture (p. 46), is deeply rooted in the social sciences. Zygmunt Bauman (1992) claims that when sociologists refer to society, they usually have in mind the nation and, thus, rather than foregrounding its historicity, adds to its ideological concealment. Billig (1995, p. 53) makes a similar claim, namely that for sociologists it is a banal cliche to define their discipline as the science of society; and it is just as banal a habit of thought to imagine society as a bounded, independent entity. Ulrich Beck (2003) refers to this tendency in the social sciences as methodological nationalism. According to him, Methodological nationalism takes the following premises for granted: it equates societies with nation-state societies, and sees states and their governments as the cornerstones of socialscientific analysis (p. 453). He also refers to the nation as the main perceptual grid of social science (p. 454), and then goes even further to argue that to some extent, much of social science is a prisoner of the nation-state (p. 454). None of this is surprising, since it is in the service of the development of modern nation-states that the social sciences developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries:
Nearly all social scientists assumed that these political boundaries fixed the spatial parameters of other key interactions the sociologists society, the macroeconomists national economy, the political scientists polity, the historians nation. Each assumed a fundamental spatial congruence between political, social, and economic processes. In this sense, social science was very much a creature, if not a creation, of the states, taking their boundaries as crucial social containers. (Wallerstein, 1996, pp. 2627)

Indeed, social psychology too is deeply nationally invested. According to Reicher and Hopkins (2001, p. 6), social psychology is as thoroughly haunted by the nation as the nation is haunted by psychology. It not only tacitly accepts
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the national ordering of the world; it also assumes the nation in its conceptual and theoretical development. Here the re-emergence of the concept of the group in social psychology since the early 1970s is a case on point. Henri Tajfel (1978) is quite explicit: We shall adopt a concept of group identical to the definition of nationy (cited in Reicher and Hopkins, 2001, p. 6). This certainly did not mean that the nation and nationalism became important topics for the social psychology inspired by his work. The concept of the group was meant to be a psychological category abstract enough so that any particular kind of collectivity could be encapsulated by it. Even though the concept of the group thus assumed the historically specific phenomenon of the nation, nation and nationality disappeared from analytic view, save as passing exemplars of the general category. To quote Reicher and Hopkins (2001, p. 5) once more: So whether spoken or not, it is often the nation that frames the concerns that guide social psychological research, it is often the nation that social psychologists have in mind when they address collective phenomena that social psychologists frame their core concepts. But it is not simply a case of social psychology being informed by the nation. The development of modern, democratic nation-states was equally informed and supported by the social sciences, including social psychology. Social psychology, in the words of Nikolas Rose (1996), quite literally developed as a science of democracy. In this regard it is instructive that language should have been absent from the dominant approach to social psychology that emerged in the USA during the first half of the 20th century. The USA, as a society of recent immigrants, was at that stage only in the process of becoming predominantly monolingual. Social psychology thus did not reflect the multilingual character of the society in which it developed, but instead the ideological ideal of a world in which language has already disappeared as an element of sub-national division. Similarly, the social psychology of language began to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s at a time of the so-called ethnic revival, multiculturalism and the challenge posed to liberal democratic societies by diversity and cultural minorities, and then tellingly in countries like Wales and Canada. According to Liebkind (1999, p. 150), The ethnic revival gave a veritable vitamin injection to the social psychology of language. Initially the social psychology of language took the form of a mainstream reaction to the ethnic revival (p. 150), that is, an attempt to consolidate the normative political order against the threat of national fragmentation. Later, however, linguistic difference and multilingualism were treated more positively: as embodying an emerging ideal of the multicultural state. Even though social psychology here re-imagined the subject and society in relation to language, it still did not fundamentally break with the national imagination of society, identity, and language. The discipline renewed its ideological collusion with a nationalist, state-centric view of language and subjectivity. To conclude, the national imagining of society means that the social sciences tend to perceive the social world in terms of bounded units in which locality and
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identity intersect and the principle of a people is embodied in a manufactured national culture where language is both a symbol and privileged instrument of nationalization, monoculturalization, and national subject formation. Social psychology, in subscribing to this view of language, society and subjectivity both when language is neglected and when it is made visible in its materiality, finds itself in a situation similar to linguistics, as critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari:
But the scientific model taking language as an object of study is one with the political model by which language is homogenized, centralized, standardized, becoming a language of power, a major or dominant language. Linguistics can claim all it wants to be science, nothing but pure science it wouldnt be the first time that the order of pure science was used to secure the requirements of another order. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, pp. 111112)

Conclusion
I have argued that language has played a historically fundamental role in the production of national subjects, and that it has been within this matrix of language, nation-state, and subject that language has also proven to be crucial to the politics of class, race, and migration. How has this changed in recent times? Emerging global conditions increasingly disentangle modernist notions of language, community, and a fixed sense of either national or ethnic subjectivity. Instead, language and various linguistic capacities and practices become commodified, especially in an economic reality where the exchange of information becomes a primary form of production in globalized networks that link many different linguistic markets (Budach et al., 2003, p. 604). In this changing environment language practices gain new status as exchangeable resources (p. 604), with linguistic wealth and poverty defined, measured, and acquired in new ways. When various assemblages of linguistic skills are required and inculcated in new labour markets, becoming measurable skills valued precisely for their transidiomatic (Jacquemet, 2005) and transnational portability, their just-in-time adaptability, and their ability to be de-linked from any prior national of ethnic linguistic habitus, new relationships between language, society, and the linguistic subjectivities of modernity are clearly enabled. Some go as far as claiming that we find ourselves in a post-disciplinary society that is no longer premised on the fabrication of mass individuality or institutionally appropriate subjects (e.g., Papadopoulos, 2004). According to Hardt and Negri (2000), it is not a question of the production of subjectivity having ceased, but that it is no longer tied to modernist, disciplinary institutions of the kind in which Rose and others locate psychology. According to authors of Empire, the place of the production of subjectivity is no longer defined in the
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same way (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 196): where the processes of subject formation were once tied neatly to different modern national institutions, each with its own logic the family, the school, the prison, the army it now spreads across the entire social terrain. Because language has been an important instrument in the production of subjectivity in these modern national institutions, and has been itself a product of these institutions, there is interesting work to be done in this regard. How, precisely, does language mediate between the emergent subjectivities of globalization, politics and the market in particular, often still national contexts? I have also argued that all is not transidiomatic and transnational where language is concerned. Language remains a crucial principle in national politics especially in the construction of symbolic-material barriers in terms of which certain bodies are racialized and defined as out of place, and especially in times when national borders are seemingly more porous and national languages no longer mediate between subject, culture, and economy in quite the same way. Language remains an important dimension of subjectivity in the changing language environments of contemporary nationalisms, racisms, and late capitalism more generally. In this regard the critical study of language has not been served well by social psychology. This discipline has addressed the material aspects of language and voice in its margins, and in this regard has made some important contributions. Unfortunately, social psychology is itself deeply shaped by and invested in modern political imaginaries, notably those of nationalism. Instead of simply calling for an increased focus on language matters in social psychology, then, the critical call is that social psychology interrogates more deeply how it is constituted in relation to language, and what kinds of normative linguistic orders it thereby serves to reinforce.

Acknowledgem ents
Many thanks to Claire Haggard and Derek Hook for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

A b o u t th e a u t h o r
Desmond Painter is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He has co-edited, with Kevin Durrheim and Martin Terre Blanche, the second edition of Research in Practice (2006, UCT Press) and, with Clifford van Ommen, the forthcoming Interiors: A History of Psychology in South Africa (Unisa Press). His current research focuses on language ideological debates and media representations of race and racism in post-apartheid South Africa.
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Language and Subjectivity