Technologies of the Self: Corporeal Affects of English

To move past speaking foreign words to taking them into your body—absorbing their meanings into who you are—feeling the grain of the language rough against your skin—that is the most difficult of all.

—Noëlle Janaczewska, The History of Water

I felt very strongly that the body was somehow styled differently and that I was required to move differently . . .

—Eva Hoffman, "Life in a New Language"

I grew up in Australia in the 1950s on the outskirts of Melbourne. Land was cheap enough to be settled by postwar immigrants, like my family, "flooding" into the country. We struggled to acquire English, a notoriously difficult enterprise since, according to my parents, it did not abide by the usual linguistic rules of logic. There were far too many exceptions, for example, in the disjunction between pronunciation and spelling. In revenge, my mother informed us, only semihumorously, that the idiosyncratic Australian intonation would result in thin lips and protruding chins—as we could easily observe everywhere around us. This was my first exposure to the idea that there could be somatic and even affective attributes of language: One might experience affectively, as well as be outwardly marked by, the embodiment of a language. ¹ This anecdote functions as a kind of mise en scène to this article, in which the English language as a strand in globalization will be examined in relation to other components: diasporic movements as linked to debates around corporeality. ² The argument is that while English as such does not automatically convey an imperial or colonizing charge, its embeddedness within various pedagogical and disciplinary regimes of subjugation (whether these relate to colonization, neoimperialism, or migration) and its attachment to a tradition of English studies mean that it cannot function neutrally as a worldwide lingua franca. More particularly, I examine the somatic effects and affects of English when it is acquired within an immigrant context and displaces other prior languages. Globalization is often glibly invoked as a homogenizing force but, paradoxically, it yields useful meanings only when analyzed within very specific locations. Similarly, the ways in which individuals narrativize the process of acquiring English as a foreign language lose their particularity in the wake of decades of debates around corporeality. The body is both unique as well as caught up within broadly generic accounts of regimes of disciplinarity.

English as world language, a force undermining the linguistic and cultural diversity of the world, has functioned as a given in many debates dealing either with postcolonialism or as subsumed in overarching conceptions of globalization. ³ At a tangent to such assumptions, it becomes increasingly clear that any residual notions of English itself as constituting a unified language have been changed completely by the various "englishes" proliferating around the world, whether these are part of the ex-Empire and thus harnessed to a spectrum of distinctive programs of education, or not. ⁴ The details of what it means, corporeally and viscerally, to speak these englishes at the same time that one is encouraged to pursue English (in its received standard form) and to register these effects in narrative texts are not examined as closely. How, more precisely, does English/english write on the body in ways that may be deciphered from written texts? Is it possible to map this process as a technology of subjectivity and a disciplining of bodies in quite specific material ways outside the more general means by which bodies have traditionally been marked or disciplined by educational institutions? Indeed, is it even possible to isolate the effects of a particular language from a program of studies imbued with an imperial history, as has been the case with English and English studies?

The concept of a technology of the self derives from the work of Michel Foucault. ⁵ Foucault glosses this notion in a number of ways: as "the history of how an individual acts upon himself" and more...