Vicarious Language

Vicarious Language Inoue

In the introductory chapter to Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, Inouesketches her analysis of women’s language in Japan, “a vicarious language that universally represents and speaks for the voice of Japanese women that is not theirs.” (4) Inoue relies on Derrida’s concept of the supplement, “an inessential surplus, which is added to that which is already complete, and at the same time, supplants the absence in what claims to be complete” (9) and Butler’s elaboration, the abject, those “who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of the law.” (10) She uses these concepts to perform an “inversion” (11); instead of inductively identifying the formation women’s language from the language patterns of actual Japanese women, she begins with the linguistic ideology itself and explores “the absent presence of the abject [the actual women] and the present absence of its subject, origin, and identity [the ideology’s self-erasure]” in its discourse. (11) A central mechanism of modernity comes into view: the imposition and self-erasure of ideologies which exclude the abject. “It is the discourse that makes the person who invokes it look like its agent.” (22)

“people are not so much the origin of language as the invokers of language” (23)

Using these concepts, she identifies women’s language as

She describes her approach as an “inversion;” instead of “I would like to invoke the very category of women’s language and to look at moments of its own epistemic failure from within.” (11)

“My strategy thus is not so much subversion as inversion. Rather than turning the abject into an ethnographic subject as positive knowledge, say, “the language used by working-class women,” and thus positing those women as external to the identity of women’s language, I would like to invoke the very category of women’s language and to look at moments of its own epistemic failure from within, by foregrounding the absent presence of the abject and the present absence of its subject, origin, and identity within the discourse of women’s language.” (11)

Finally,

-> Tie this to modernism more broadly What ‘tele-aural phenomena’ dominate schools?

The supplement

“Accordingly, the cultural form of Japanese modernity and modern subjectivity is not to be conflated with those of the West. Japan’s experience of modernity is one of many modernities that simultaneously coexist. As Harootunian puts it, “co-eval modernity… calls attention to the experience of sharing the same temporality, that whatever and however a society develops, it is simply taking place at the same time as other modernities. But the experience also, and necessarily, marks a difference. What co-eval suggests is contemporaneity yet the possibility of difference.”

“I vicariously experienced women’s language through the media. When I was a child, I encountered women’s language as foremost the language of whiteness.”

—> Wants to invert the assumptions about where women’s language comes from…

“Women’s langage” excessively signified for me things more often than, or even other than, femaleness. It figured an excess of meaning that the gender binary fails to contain, such as commodity consumption, whiteness, nonhuman (female) automatons and creatures, the middle class, Tokyo, the modern, and the media. The temporal order that underwrote my encounter with women’s language also inverted the naturalized history of women’s language, which presupposes its natural spontaneous evolution out of the inherent traits of the Japanese femaleness of real Japanese women. My first encounter with women’s language was a series of disembodied and synthetic copies and imitations, and only ex post facto did I discover—to my pleasant surprise—the living organic bodies that used women’s language.”

“It is inherently disembodied and vicarious as a tele-aural phenomenon, in which the copy precedes the original.”

“It is “the supplement” (Derrida 1976:144-145), an inessential surplus, which is added to that which is already complete and, at the same time, supplants the absence in what claims to be complete. In this contradictory move, the supplement is posited as exterior and extra to the identity and yet is necessary for the identity to be full and complete. The fact that the identity needs the supplement means that it is deficient and can be complete only with the presence of the supplement. It follows that the supplement is inside the identity that excludes it It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of (145; italics in original). The supplement’s absent presence then endlessly defers and thus wrenches the stability and fruition of the identity."

“This is the epistemology of those for whom neither “speaking women’s language” nor “not speaking women’s language” is a viable or meaningful choice and for whom there is no organic origin of women’s language. Occupying the place of the supplement, their experiences of women’s language are designated as secondary and derivative (failed) representations of the original and the idea of women’s language By virtue of being the supplement, however, they lay bare traces of difference prior to being recalled and suppressed by the gender binary."

Inoue describes her strategy as an “inversion,”

Inoue can

“their violent recasting of politics as aesthetics"

“In this study, I pursue a different direction and seek to understand women’s language as a network of cultural practices of objectifying femaleness/femininity and mapping a reified gender binary onto the sounds, figures, manners, and organizations of talk."

“Instead of asking whether or not linguistic characterization of women’s language use is empirically valid, I ask how such empirical questions are possible and thinkable to begin with, what kind of “truth” of women’s language they produce, …"