Language and social knowledge

Of meaning, interpretation and language

Isaac Ariail Reed’s (2011) Interpretation and Social Knowledge is a thoughtful account of the role interpretation plays in the interaction between theory and evidence. Unlike realist and normative epistemic modes, the interpretive method of bringing theory and evidence together, Reed argues, focuses on the ‘arrangements of signification and representation, the layers of social meaning, that shape human experience’ (2011: 10). In other words, while for both realist and normative epistemic modes ‘theory, by referencing a new world, enables us to comprehend the evidence as the expression of something both deeper and more general’, the interpretive epistemic mode aims at ‘resignify[ing] the evidence by recontextualizing it into a set of deeper meanings that are also historically and socially limited’ (2011: 91–2). Reed argues against seeing historically and socially limited accounts as theoretically limited, and suggests that we understand this groundedness of meaning in social and historical context as valuable, and equally theoretical.

In addition to being limited by its historical and social context, social meaning is of course also linguistically bound. I would further argue that language is not only one of the key components of what we refer to as social context, but also one that shapes much of what we mean by social context. While this is by no means a radical suggestion, the relationship between the linguistic and the social remains undertheorized within sociology. Bourdieu’s critique of Saussurian linguistic structuralism, and his consequent turn to ‘speech acts’ to theorize language as an activity and as practice might be about all that sociology has as far as sociological accounts of language go (Bourdieu, 1990, 1991). However useful, this approach is limited, as Judith Butler (1999) has pointed out, insofar as it treats the speaking subject as a ‘language user’. Bourdieu (1991) argues that such usage does not happen in a vacuum, and that language does not exist outside of its social and institutional contexts. Yet his attempt to balance the subjectivism speech acts can imply leads him to (over)emphasize the limit put on the speaker’s habitus by social fields. In the process, Butler (1999) argues, what gets lost are the ways in which the subject is partially constituted linguistically – by being declared a ‘girl’, for instance.

I agree with Butler’s (1999) position that the linguistic and the social are co-constitutive, yet this is not enough to get us out of the bind Raymond Williams (1978) has forewarned us about: when we understand language as a system of signs to which ‘users’ might have differential access as a result of their habitus, not only are we overlooking the role of language in the constitution of subjects, but we are also projecting language beyond history (1978). Further, Williams cautions us against theorizing language as either the ‘isolated creative word’ that leads to idealism, or as simply referring to a pre-existing social reality in the vein of a positivist, objectivist materialism. ¹ Instead, he suggests, we need to understand language as practical human activity that is deeply intertwined with history and material production of the world, and the meanings that are attached to it.

Via Williams (1978), I am suggesting then that a heightened attention to language in Reed’s (2011) interpretive epistemic mode will help further theorizing of the relationship between meaning and the social, and hence strengthen the case for interpretation. Further, the historicity of language underlined by Williams (1978) provides a useful way to historicize landscapes of meaning in Reed’s (2011) framework, and to treat them as the active fields they are. It is not that Reed’s (2011) work actively denies that change happens, but it simply does not weave shifts in social meaning into its fabric. Historicizing language translates into historicizing meaning, epistemology, knowledge-production, and inevitably theory. Following Williams (1978) then, theory’s attentiveness to social and historical specificity is not simply ‘equally valuable’, but I would suggest it is vital for rigorous knowledge-production.

Historical change of course rarely happens randomly. One form of linguistic change not explicitly discussed by Williams (1978) is the transformation languages undergo as a result of global circulations of words and idioms. In a post-colonial and globalizing world (with neo-imperial tendencies), not just bodies and technologies, but also languages travel, and new vocabulary enters the political and social imagination of peoples all over the world. And such travel does not happen uniformly in each direction. Given Williams’ (1978) concept of the emergent refers to a space of pre-articulation, when changes in the culture have not yet met their vocabulary, what happens when vocabulary emerges at times before social formations? In other words, if language is practical consciousness, what effect do changes in the available vocabulary have on the practices of the subjects living within that language?

In this piece I make the following suggestions using a vignette from my work: Reed’s (2011) framework of ‘landscapes of meaning’ would benefit from weaving in the significance of language (not Language, which erases both the historicity and cultural specificities of languages) to meaning-making – both because it would make room for variations in landscapes across (linguistic) space, but also because it would incorporate an understanding of language, and therefore interpretation, as a practical and historically changing activity. I am not offering this latter point as a recycled version of the old ‘no knowledge is objective’ argument. Instead I am providing a way to historicize ourselves as knowledge-producers, and understand our epistemological commitments as historical, and practical parts of the ongoing project of knowing the world. Further, paying attention to the uneven travel of language also challenges the analytical distinction Reed maintains between the normative and the interpretive epistemic modes. I argue that Reed’s interpretive epistemic mode is a radical sociological theory of method because it does not find theory to be diminished, but rather strengthened, by historical and social contextualization. This perspective opens the door for sociological theory to become something to be learned (also) from ethnographers.

Transnational circuits of language and meaning

In my own work, I am also interested in the question of what role language plays in painting the social landscape we all live our lives on, as Reed beautifully puts it, and what kinds of changes in social life are affected by changes in availability of particular vocabularies, linguistic tools and devices. In my book Queer in Translation: Paradoxes of Westernization and Sexual Others in the Turkish Nation (2011), I ask: what kinds of effects are produced by the travel and ‘translation’ of western concepts of non-normative genders and sexualities to the ‘non-western’ context of Turkey? ² What kinds of conversations are opened up by terms such as ‘gender identity’, ‘sexual orientation’, ‘LGBT rights’ or ‘hate crimes’? What dialogues are foreclosed? What does it mean to have to think and speak with a new political vocabulary? And one that is presented as better educated and more desirable? What kinds of shifts happen in the culture with changes in the practical consciousness, and how people practice politics?

As an ethnographer, no matter how deep my interest in language, I did not set out to study ‘discourse’ per se, and entered the field curious about the ways in which LGBT politics were practiced in Turkey. Yet I soon discovered that such practices were shaped very much by the kinds of languages available to queer activists. As my project expanded from looking at the kinds of languages that were used and discourses that were produced by queer activists to including non-activist queers as well as non-queer groups/entities who produced discourses about queers, I became increasingly convinced that particular ‘western’ concepts that traveled to the Turkish context were employed when talking about queers, or when talking about queer politics. These concepts worked to effect what counted as viable politics – what kinds of solidarities were imaginable, what kinds of deaths were die-able. The use of western concepts in Turkish LGBT politics exposed the contradictions produced by a superimposition of a western liberal secular justice and political system onto other formations.

I refer to one of the case studies I use in Queer in Translation as the ‘production of an Islamic backlash against homosexuality in Turkey’. The period between 2008 and 2010 saw an increasingly public debate of homosexual rights – a first for the Turkish Republic. The particular context in which these debates took place was the redrafting of the Turkish Constitution by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; from here on AKP) – the Islamist-leaning party that has been in power in Turkey for the last 13 years. AKP’s leader Prime Minister Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic and authoritarian political style has been recently covered in the international media, especially following the violent police suppression of Gezi Park protests that started in Istanbul in May 2013 and quickly spread to the rest of the nation. When I started my fieldwork back in the summer of 2008, however, AKP, thanks to their progressive politics – especially regarding ethnic rights and the anti-militarization of the national politics – enjoyed significant support from different factions in the country.

AKP’s politics included, for instance, initiating the first Kurdish language official television station, ameliorating relationships with Armenia and taking steps towards mutual opening of borders – referred to as the Kurdish opening and the Armenian opening, respectively. In addition, AKP was considering a ‘headscarf opening’, which would repeal the ban of Islamic headscarf-wearing on public university campuses. The party was also passing packages of laws to fit the Copenhagen criteria of the European Union accession process. Yet AKP’s most hotly debated undertaking at the time was their proposal to re-draft the Constitution, which had been drafted in 1980 by the generals of the Turkish Armed Forces who had staged the last military coup in the nation. Many secularists agreed with the major left-wing opposition party CHP’s fears that the civil constitution was only a façade for AKP to lay down the groundwork for strengthening their position in power. ³ They suspected that AKP was planning to accomplish this by weakening the position of the military, which many staunch secularists understood to be the ‘guarantor’ of the secular system in the nation.

On the other hand, anti-militaristic progressives in the nation, regardless of whether or not they were aligned with AKP’s overall politics, were agreeable to the idea of a civil constitution. Most LGBT activists were among the latter group. Because of their larger anti-militaristic politics, as well as their hope that there might be a space for a ‘homosexual opening’ among AKP’s democratic steps, Istanbul-based LGBT Solidarity Association Lambdaistanbul, as well as the Ankara-based KaosGL and Pembe Hayat associations started a signature campaign asking for newly emerging concepts on the political landscape of LGBT activists, ‘cinsel yönelim’ (sexual orientation) and ‘cinsiyet kimliği’ (gender identity), to be included in the new constitution. What followed was a discursive reworking of this demand through a liberal equating of different kinds of civil rights requests under pleas for ‘freedom’, and especially an association between ‘homosexual rights’ and the right to wear the Islamic headscarf.

The first person to equate LGBT rights and the headscarf opening was neither a woman headscarf activist nor an LGBT activist however, but rather the Minister of State, Burhan Kuzu. Kuzu made a public declaration in the summer of 2008 in order to alleviate secularists’ fears that the headscarf opening would only produce a slippery slope. This logic, familiar to American audiences from various conservative arguments including those against gay marriage, maintained that allowing headscarf wearing at public universities would create a slippery slope for demands to allow it at high schools, then middle schools, and finally elementary schools. Thus, allowing headscarf wearing at any level of public education implied an eventual coercion of the girl children of the nation, presumably by their male kin or schoolmates, to don the headscarf at an early age. Hoping to calm such fears, Kuzu declared: ‘We do not have to respond to every request’, referring to possible future demands for headscarves at elementary schools. ‘There is a high level of claims from homosexuals for equality and the right to marriage. ⁴ Are we going to give it to them simply because they are asking for it? We are obliged to act within the responsibilities of [the party in] power’ (Çolak and Karakus, 2008).

Recasting headscarf-politics into moderate/reasonable versus extremist/unreasonable demands, Kuzu made a rhetorical move to simultaneously break down the slippery slope continuum headscarf critics had employed, and established AKP’s political position as ‘moderate’. ‘Demands of homosexuals’ functioned as a self-explanatory marker of ‘unreason’ presumed to unite those on either side of the headscarf debate. While such comparison was only made in order to call both the (potential) demands to allow headscarves at elementary schools and the demands of homosexuals’ unreasonable requests, made presumably by unreasonable citizens, it provided rhetorical ammunition for those who already believed that both the government and the women asking for the right to wear the headscarf to be kendine Müslüman (Muslims to themselves). This expression indicates not only self-seeking motives on behalf of those who are labeled as Muslims to themselves – suggesting they are only after their own rights, liberties and welfare – but also points out a deep-seated insincerity underlining Islam’s emphasis on justice and welfare for all. To be a true Muslim therefore is to be a Muslim to everyone. As such, in its contemporary use against pious Muslim groups in Turkey, the expression ‘Muslim to her/himself’ marries religious insincerity with political insincerity and simultaneously dismisses the religiosity and the political motives of Muslim groups, and in particular of women with headscarves, producing them as untrustworthy political actors by definition. In the following months and years, Kuzu’s rhetorical move putting headscarf rights and homosexual rights on the same plane would be turned on its head by some secularists. Homosexual rights would be used as a litmus test for pious Muslims, especially for women with headscarves – a test to see whether they could be trusted with democratic rights and liberties. Such trust that lies at the heart of citizenship and is presumed for most citizens was not assumed for women with headscarves, who were feared to be ‘Muslim to themselves’ only.

Renaming, recategorizing and political erasures

There were at least three distinct Muslim voices that emerged in the aftermath of Burhan Kuzu’s statement about the topic of homosexuality in talk shows, and other popular media, including the print media. I will briefly sketch each response, but I would like to highlight the fact that none of these statements fell under the liberal framework of an open ‘support of LGBT rights’, and hence were treated as a ‘failed’ response. These failed responses were then further categorized by LGBT activists as ‘homophobic’ – another term entering the political landscape via LGBT activism.

For one, some headscarf activists, when probed about whether they were supporting homosexual rights, now that they were demanding the right to headscarves as a human right. They said they did not know much about the state of homosexuals in the country, and hence were unable to provide any commentary on the issue. However, such answers were not satisfactory for the secularist ears. On one very popular TV show, for instance, two women with headscarves who were guests discussing the headscarf ban in the nation were probed over and over again about their position on homosexual rights, even after gently refusing to answer the question and citing their own lack of knowledge. Hence, this litmus test turned out to be one they had to take, and they had to pass in order to prove the political sincerity of their support for democratic rights (Fatih Altaylı ile Teke Tek, 2008).

A second response emerged in March 2010 when in the major daily paper Hürriyet the Minister Responsible for the Woman and the Family, Aliye Kavaf, made the declaration that ‘homosexuality is an illness, and it should be cured’ (Bildirici, 2010). A group of Islamic NGOs – initially formed loosely as human rights associations against cruelty, to work against the headscarf ban – came out in support of Minister Kavaf. Making the first major public declaration of Islamic groups on homosexuality in the country, 21 associations, and an umbrella organization that houses 160 organizations, a group of over 50 Muslim women and men publicly reading an ‘open letter’ to the Minister that maintained that homosexuality was considered a sin by all monotheistic religions. The letter outlined work crucial to prevent the extinction of humankind that must be done against the ‘homosexual lobby’ by the Ministry Responsible for the Woman and the Family, as well as Ministries of Internal Affairs and Education (Mazlumder, 2010). As such, they married an argument of religious sin with a biological/evolutionary argument of the extinction of humankind, to support the position of ‘homosexuality as illness’.

Many secularists and LGBT activists heavily criticized this declaration, some openly announcing that these associations had failed the litmus test. However, there was another group of Muslims who joined the critical group. This third response to homosexuality as a litmus test refused to adopt the human rights framework mobilized by secularists. Instead, they asked why Muslims would accept a secular scientific framework of homosexuality as illness without questioning the power/knowledge structure that made possible both the initial declaration of homosexuality as an illness in the West and the subsequent removal of it from the category of illness/abnormality. A prominent figure in this camp, Hilal Kaplan, columnist for the daily paper Taraf, argued that homosexuality was a sin, but it was no more a sin than adultery, drinking alcohol or smoking, and hence that it should not be treated as if it was a more severe offense than any of those acts (Çintay, 2008). This group also insisted that under no conditions could cruelty against homosexuals be tolerated within an Islamic framework. Kaplan openly criticized Muslims’ reactions containing no acknowledgment or critique of the breach of rights of LGBT people and cruelty towards homosexuals, such as police brutality or being murdered by family members. Yet she also took a firm stance in suggesting that being called ‘homophobic’ would not deter her from declaring that homosexuality is a sin (Kaplan, 2010). Insisting that women with headscarves, who had sacrificed on so many fronts for their beliefs, including their education, declare that they support homosexual rights was a major inconsistency, and those who made such demands were simply ‘blackmail democrats’. Despite critical differences in their position regarding homosexuality, all these Muslim voices were grouped together as ‘homophobic’, and the nuances of their arguments were unheard in this particular translation of human rights, homosexual/LGBT rights, and homophobia to the contemporary political moment in Turkey. Kaplan was indeed granted the ‘hormonlu domates’ (tomato with hormone) award for the ‘most homophobic journalist of the year’ during the following summer’s Pride week.

To conclude: Landscapes moving and shifting

For my analytic purposes, this story accomplishes a few important things. First, it points to the historically and transnationally shifting nature of language, and hence the transnationality and historicity of meaning. In other words, the landscape that comprises social meanings available to subjects living in contemporary Turkey is not a static one. Vocabularies that were previously unavailable, such as homosexual rights, gender identity, sexual orientation, and homophobia, create new frameworks for interpreting the social world for the very subjects who occupy it. These new terms change the existing landscapes of meaning, at times creating epistemic rifts between present ways of understanding the world and newly emerging ones. Homophobia emerges as an organizing term that makes sense of every voice that ‘fails’ to utter support for ‘homosexual rights’. Hence, new language around LGBT rights and homophobia, coupled with new uses of the old saying ‘kendine Müslüman’ (Muslim to one’s self), recasts an old belief – that homosexuality is a sin, and that cruelty against anyone, including homosexuals, is impermissible – as a new contradiction, produces quite different Muslim voices as homophobic, and forecloses dialogues between segments of the population that could benefit from being in solidarity with each other. Such solidarity against ‘cruelty’ is especially urgent in the light of the increasingly violent police-state contemporary Turkey has become.

This story also illustrates that social meaning is inevitably linguistically bound, and exemplifies language as a practical human activity. None of the frameworks of ‘homosexuality as sin’, ‘homosexuality as illness’ and ‘homophobia’ are invented by subjects using them. Yet the subjects who engage in these debates are not merely free ‘language users’ who select what framework works best for their purposes either; they are bound by the social, political and religious realities that infuse their everyday lives. In fact, the series of events I recounted show how an emphasis on agency is employed precisely by those who would like to cast the contradiction Muslim women inhabit as a politically motivated, and a politically and religiously insincere position. These subjects’ engagement with language, discourse and meaning is not simply determined either, exemplified by the multiplicity of the Muslim responses to the question of where they stand vis-à-vis ‘homosexual rights’. The linguistic frameworks available to subjects shape what kinds of politics can be practiced by them, who can be perceived as an ally, and what kinds of solidarities are imaginable.

Finally, I hope to contribute to Reed’s analytics also by demonstrating that it is not exactly possible to extract the normative from the interpretive. Language and vocabulary do not travel in all directions with equal intensity, and to complicate matters, emergent language and vocabulary do not enter landscapes on homogeneous terms, where they are equally available to those populating a particular landscape of meaning. ⁵ The story I told illustrates that the question of political solidarity is at the end a question of whom we can even have political conversations with, and what draws the limits of such conversations. For Muslim women, stating that homosexuality is a sin according to Islam and adding that they are against any cruelty targeting homosexuals is not a contradiction, given Islam’s position against cruelty, and according to mainstream interpretations against homosexuality. Yet from a secular liberal perspective that situates politics around ‘rights’, this is a major contradiction at best and a deep insincerity at worst. Further, calling homosexuality an illness or a sin makes little difference in the western secular liberal framework. This framework also fails to hear an ethics of anti-cruelty as valuable unless it is accompanied by a politics of rights – unless these Muslim women also are able to openly state their support for ‘homosexual rights’. The tension between an epistemology of rights and an epistemology of cruelty is not one between equals however. In the secular liberal framework of contemporary Turkey, Islam is often associated with backwardness and incompatibility with the modern world order by secularists in ways a western liberal framework is not, and by definition cannot be. Given that meaning and interpretation are linguistically bound, and yet not every epistemic mode is seen as equally legitimate in relation to dominant forms of making sense of the world, I suggest part of the task of the scholar engaging in an interpretive epistemic mode of theorizing needs to be an acknowledgment of who adapts to and benefits from newly emerging frameworks and which subjects are left out of them.

I imagine this method I refer to as a sociology of translation to incorporate transnational ways of seeing into the interpretive epistemic mode Reed beautifully describes (Sandell, 2010). It can also provide guidance for one way in which we can do sociology in an increasingly transnational world. Further, taking into account the facts that a) landscapes of meaning are not static, and b) a key element that contributes to their change is the language available to those inhabiting the landscape will sharpen Reed’s epistemic interpretive mode to theorize landscapes of meaning as active and changing. Finally, what this transnational interpretive epistemic mode also promises is the ability to analyze the inequality in access to meaning, and to social interpretation itself. ⁶