Sommer: Whole/Parts

Reading Doris Sommer's "Language, Culture, and Society" brought up a couple of thoughts. First, I am reminded that, being that that I am going to write a thesis and have never looked into what elements the exam would contain, I was recently informed by another student that the exam had a focus on race, gender, sexuality, and class as well as text, author, and reader. Sommer's work seems to have some insight into a connection between all of these.

Second: I love, absolutely love how Sommer associates democracy and language use to art when she says

Democracy, like art, thrives on strangeness, surprise, on risk and the dangerous rub of conflict (6).

She also touches on diversity, commenting on the many various histories the global world is made of. This diversity results in the proliferation of many bi- or multi-lingual peoples. The words we use and the ways we use them are signifiers of our culture and society, they mark us as insiders or outsiders, and sometimes as both. Language can be a tool to link two (or more) very different ways of living, it can also be a small slip between life and death, it can liberate, communicate, and tell sometimes too much about the person speaking, and can also be an art form. 

Language and the use of more than one language allows a speaker to play with the different meanings, lifestyles, and mores that accompany those languages. This play is the art that Sommer's touches on, the possibility that a second language may not be mastered allows for a roughness in speech, even mistakes. She notes that "all languages are equally equipped to describe human experience" (6), but that the addition of a second or third language has its advantages in that it gives the speaker "greater problem-solving capacity, a talent close to artistic creativity" (10).

I enjoyed her argument for the addition of more than one language, as opposed to English-Only moves toward single language usage, and appreciated her look into the duality of double-consciousness over assimilation, as well as her look into the disadvantaged language learners in a society that looks down upon them. Sommer's piece signals to me the many parts of the whole. The parts are varied and diverse and though seemingly very distinct, Sommer's points to many of the advantages of overlap, specifically considering language in any tongue as the whole. Language in any tongue can examine human experience and relate it to anyone willing and open to listen. 

Language is dangerous and fun, it is risky, but as Sommer's points out, "creative risk is a condition of democracy" (6).