Communication studies cartography in the Lusophone world

Lusophony as a linguistic dispute

By raising the question of Lusophony, I bring to debate the issue of the languages of culture, science, and communication in wide transnational spaces. In the French sociological tradition of Pierre Bourdieu, the language issue had been placed as a practical matter, as it expresses strategic interests and positions of power within a certain territorial and political field, and it has to ensure the hegemony within that field. That is, the language dispute expresses the struggle for a particular symbolic ordering of the world. We see it especially in Language and Symbolic Power (Bourdieu, 1991) and in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu, 1979). ¹

I emphasize the fact that in Language and Symbolic Power are developed, among others, the following subjects: ‘The production and reproduction of legitimate language’, ‘Price formation and the anticipation of profits’, ‘Authorized language’, ‘On symbolic power’, ‘Political representation’, and ‘Identity and representation’.

Summarizing the views of Pierre Bourdieu, but transposing it from the use of a language by an individual for the use of a particular language in the interactions between communities, in extended geo-cultural and strategic spaces, we can say that languages can be understood as the product of the relationship between a ‘language market’ and a ‘linguistic habitus’. When individuals use a certain language in a given geo-cultural and strategic space, they make use of accumulated resources, however, implicitly adapting themselves to the requirements of the political field or of the market of global exchanges.

I think, however, that the postcolonial tradition, from Franz Fanon (1963, 1986) to Eduard Said (1994), and from Stuart Hall (1997) to Gayatri Spivak (1987) and to Homi Bhabha (1994), allows us to be more ambitious today in consideration of the languages of culture, science, and communication in wide transnational spaces. The postcolonial tradition allows us to face what we name globalization as a movement of technological mobilization of goods, bodies, and souls, to the market, and also as a cultural homogenization movement, that a single language, English, helps to settle, being, however, our obligation to question the blind spot of this kinetic – after all, what it is here silenced: the subaltern and dominated, the people from former colonies, the minorities, the peripheries, the diasporas, the migrants, the refugees, all those are excluded, and thus their cultures and languages. ²

For this reason, as we today interrogate the sense of the human, we can no longer stop thinking about the wraith of the Western metaphysics of unity, from the Greco-Roman tradition, based on the logos (as sovereign decision-making instance), to the Jewish-Christian tradition, based on the sun/bolé (an image that reunites), both founders of logocentrism, ethnocentrism, imperialism, colonialism, and productivism.

This movement of technological mobilization toward the market is seen in the metaphors of the ‘world-economy’ (Wallerstein, 1974), ‘world culture’ (Lipovetsky and Serroy, 2008), and ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996).

From European expansion to the globalization of markets by technology

Historical research has insisted, in recent times, on the possible analogy between current globalization, a ‘technological circumnavigation’ founded on information technologies that move us to the market, and the first globalization, implemented by the European expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries. ³

Also in Portugal, historical research on European expansion, and specifically on the Portuguese expansion, had, in recent years, a great increase. These studies have highlighted the association between the outbreak of modern European expansion and the remarkable advances made in that period in physics, mathematics, astronomy, and cartography. ⁴

But just as the European expansion of the 15th and 16th centuries cannot be thought of only as an opening to the ‘diversity of the world’, but rather as a colonization movement, which not only served the meeting between people, ⁵ but also the assimilation-integration and world domination by Western design, so the debate on languages must go through the same movement of postcolonial deconstruction.

The image of circumnavigation may then help us to figure out our journey, a journey embedded in technological experience, the contemporary experience par excellence. ⁶ Resembling the times of European expansion, contemporary man does today, through technology, a journey, moving from the culture of the one to the culture of the multiple. The former one is logocentric, ethnocentric, imperialistic, colonialist, and productivist. It is characterized, therefore, by exclusion, assimilating and destroying the difference. In contrast, the culture of the multiple and the mixing is associated with participation, intercultural communication, difference, with a postcolonial culture (Martins, 2015, 2011a, 2011b).

The circumnavigation classically indicates the experience of crossing oceans and exceeding the prescribed limits, let them be seas, lands, or knowledge. And, in my view, it is a good metaphor to characterize the current Lusophone experience, an experience today largely technological. ⁷

In classical navigation, we relied mostly on the stars to lead us in the night. But modern circumnavigation relies especially in instruments as the sextant, the astrolabe, and the armillary sphere. And with time, we stopped looking at the stars and we started to look at screens, as Virilio (2001: 135) notes. That is, from the history of sense that had stars as a part, the West gave way to screens (Martins, 2011a). And in this crossing, a ‘technological skin’ (De Kerckhove, 1995) was developed, a skin for the affection, that is, for the be-together, for the be-with-others.

By adopting the imagery of the screens, the electronic circumnavigation implements the cyberculture paradigm as a journey toward the New America of a new cultural archive, which reactivates the old, the archaism or even the mythology (Jenkins, 2008; Martins, 1998) and, at the same time, continuously reconfigures the community, by the desire to be with-others. And it’s the history, the whole history, both of colonization and of postcolonialism, which is now recapitulated in this desire of community.

Therefore, the journey that the people of the Portuguese-speaking world, speakers of Portuguese, are called to do is a technological mobilization for interknowledge, dialogue, and cooperation. It is also a journey to their gathering in an expanded geostrategic and cultural area, respecting the differences and the dignity of the national languages (in Angola, Mozambique, Timor-Leste, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and Sao Tome and Principe), challenging a hegemonic globalization of financial and speculative nature and spoken in a single language, English. It is, finally, a journey into the attachment to the value of heterogeneity, to the seduction of a net woven from threads of many colors and textures, a network of people and different countries, able to resist its reduction to an artificial unit.

The decolonization of language

In discussing language policies in postcolonial terms, decolonizing them, we remain in line with the same process of deconstruction that we used to analyze Western maritime expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries.

This postcolonial deconstruction is even more necessary because technological circumnavigation exposes us, today, to the greatest dangers. I give as an example the current terms of the language debate in Portugal, which in some cases resembles a wild messianic narrative.

In an interview to the site ‘Inteligência Económica’, following the presentation of the report Potencial Económico da Língua Portuguesa (Economic Potential of the Portuguese Language), a study commissioned by the Portuguese Camões Institute (the main public institute for cooperation and promotion of Portuguese language) to ISCTE-IUL (University Institute of Lisbon), Luís Reto, Rector of the University and coordinator of the project, raised the question of the languages in the following terms: ‘This is the time of the Portuguese’, and, pointing immediately the economic route to the Portuguese language, he warned that the navigation is now toward a new cultural archive, where the language is ‘product’ and ‘economic value’ and the assessment of its significance is measured in terms of percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). ⁸ Launched, then, to the sea of its transformation ‘in a world economic power’, the course of the Portuguese language would be, on one hand, ‘the Lusophone community’ and, on the other, ‘the value created for the exterior, for a networked economy’. ⁹

The idea of looking at language itself as a commodity, ‘as a product’ (Reto, 2012), a language for knowledge and trade, is an excellent illustration of this current world trend of technological mobilization for the market. The main chapters of the above mentioned work on the economic potential of the Portuguese language read as follows: ‘Network effects and economic value of the language’, ‘Value of the language and cultural and creative industries as a percentage of GDP’, ‘Foreign trade and foreign direct investment (FDI)’, and ‘Migration flows and tourism’.

Concluding remark

A language of culture and thinking must be, also, a language of knowledge. This was the reason why the scientific communities of Communication Sciences of the Lusophone countries founded in 1998, the Lusophone Federation of Communication Sciences, with the following objectives: Promote the development of Communication Sciences in the Lusophone geo and cultural region, encourage cooperation between Portuguese-speaking countries, increase the international role of the Portuguese-speaking researchers communities in terms of scientific production, and sponsor the publication of scientific work in Portuguese.

But the battle for the conversion of the Portuguese language in a language of knowledge and science has barely begun. Science communication and language policies decide who has the power to define the social reality and the power to impose such representation. And in these circumstances, the experience we have in the world is the standardization of thought and knowledge: researchers are expected to publish mainly in English, citations are more and more made from articles and books published in English, applications for funding and reports are written in English, and scientific paradigms follow Anglo-Saxon tradition.