Читать книгу Channeling Moroccanness - Becky L. Schulthies - Страница 12

Phaticity, or ideologies about mediums of social connection, have relied on infrastructural conduits (channels and communicative modalities such as speech and writing), psychological attachments (relationality), and sociality conventions (see Kockelman 2010, 408). The concept has a long genealogy in anthropology but has been arguably undertheorized until recently (Nozawa 2015; Lemon 2017). Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski labeled the purpose of talk designed to foster social relations as phatic communion. It was his critique of referentialism, a European Enlightenment ideology in which the primary purpose of language was to refer to or reflect things as they are in the world (Malinowski 1936 [1923], 315; see also Bauman and Briggs 2003). For Malinowski, the main function of everyday talk in small-scale societies, like the Trobriand Islands where he lived for several years, was to create and maintain social relationships in a ritualized fashion (hence the communion metaphor). Since their primary purpose was connectedness, everyday talk was really the medium for building relationships. Jakobson also thought sociality was a key function of communication in all societies. Interaction did more than refer to things or convey information (referential function). It also expressed aspects of a sender’s identity or affective state (emotive function); recognized and invited addressees or interlocutors (conative function); called attention to the form of the message (poetic function); reflexively evaluated the grammar and social meanings of the code itself (metalingual function); and included the maintenance of relationality through spoken, whistled, signed, drummed, sung, and written channels (phatic function). Jakobson expanded Malinowski’s idea that phatic communication served a psychosocial bond. He included the signaling of interactional openings and closings, as well as the materiality of visual/aural perception and attention in his “Hello, can you hear me?” and “Are you listening?” examples (Jakobson 1960, 355). Phaticity was about channels, perception, and sociality.

Both Malinowski and Jakobson saw phatic function as routinized, repetitive, and socially significant yet unremarkable for participants. Small talk, greetings, leave-takings, chatting, rapport talk were important for relational work. For analytical purposes, the scholars separated phaticity, connection mechanisms, from referential meaning, the information bearing part of communication. Subsequent linguistic anthropologists demonstrated the ways that interactions can layer sign modes and functions (Hymes 1962, 32; Silverstein 1976, 24; Briggs 1986, 53): a bit of talk could be metalinguistic (talk about talk) and expressive (indexing something about the speaker’s identity) or phatic (doing relational work) and referential (stating how media conveys messages). Importantly, the phatic function involved work, the labor of connecting signers and interpreters (Elyachar 2010, 455). As Elyachar noted, phatic connectivity in urban and transregional Arab contexts did not rely on direct proximity or one-to-one psychological models of contact, but rather “a generalized disposition to create, maintain, and extend communicative channels” through exchange of affect, money, information, and faith (2010, 458). Like Elyachar, I trace the relationality labor of Fassi channel ideologies, but do so through their responses to laments of communicative failure that precipitated reform work.

Channels in Fez were diverse but significant infrastructures. They could be electronic media, named languages, written or spoken language modalities, ways of practicing Islam. They could also be neighbors couriering news; colleagues posting a religious video on Facebook and precipitating on- and offline comments; a friend triangulating a loan for a relative living in another country through a Moroccan friend of a friend they knew living there. People served as channel nodes who sent, received, interpreted, and reshaped messages, belief, currency, and sentiment. Throughout this book, I analytically track the moments when Fassis served as channels themselves by foregrounding or erasing classic phatic media such as language code modalities (written, spoken, aural, visual, Moroccan Arabic, formal Arabic) and ideologies about mediation devices and their failures. For example, in Fez television was cast as an interlocutor or background noise, when in practice it could be both. I tend to highlight phatic labor specialists, individuals who inserted nodes into the connectivity webs of these communities by making legible channel infrastructures and translating their meaning for others. In the following episode, I describe one such example of phatic labor.

الحلقة ٤: مداكرة على السياسة الفرسنية

Episode 4: Interpreting French Politics

Friday afternoons were quiet and slow in the Fez medina, the old walled city. The normally bustling commerce and tourist venues stood shuttered and locked so people could rest and attend the communal Friday noon prayer. Even those in the populist neighborhoods of the ville nouvelle would gather for a longer lunch break after the Friday prayer—often over couscous. Toufiq had invited me to lunch with his family that afternoon. While changing work and school schedules did not allow the whole family to gather for lunch every day (Newcomb 2017), the television was an important contributor to the social gathering. We had all just leaned back into the couches surrounding the table, with a large half-eaten couscous platter resting in the center. The television had been on throughout lunch, but we only turned our attention to watching al-Arabiyya news after eating. Al-Arabiyya satellite station had been created by Saudi businessmen in 2003 as a counter to Qatari-managed al-Jazeera, started in 1996. Interest in both news stations waxed and waned in the Arabic-speaking world depending on events (Cherribi 2017; Darwish 2009; El-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003; Khalil and Kraidy 2009; Lynch 2006; Rinnawi 2006). Most Fassi families channel-surfed between news stations, including French and English programs, in order to triangulate perspectives. Toufiq’s father, Mohammed, followed the news out of habit rather than real interest in events. Discussing current events was part of his sociality outside the house as well as within it. The current al-Arabiyya report was about the Saudi foreign minister visiting France and showed an image of the newly elected French president at that time, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The family had worked in the Fez medina for generations. The grandfather operated several communal bakeries and supplied bread (and smuggled guns) during the French occupation. The father, Mohammed, broke into the tourist trade in the 1970s, learning conversational French, English, Spanish, Italian, and German as he bartered Moroccan handwoven carpets, antiques, and hospitality. The eldest son, Toufiq, followed his father’s craft, selling carpets in the plurilingual enclaves of a medina bazaar. He had learned formal French and Arabic in school and English as a third language up through the first year of university. The bazaar where he worked contracted with tour guides to bring both large bus groups and smaller private tours to the three-hundred-year-old historic house, to see the marble and tile mosaics, water fountains, gypsum wall carvings, painted woodwork ceilings—and carpets for sale. In the small talk moments after Toufiq answered their questions about Moroccan aesthetics and customs, he plied these potential clients with questions of his own about their politics, sports, and life.

As we languidly listened to the news after lunch, Toufiq launched into a commentary about French tourist responses to their May election.²⁶ He said most of them claimed it was the youth who voted the president into power. Some of these tourists didn’t like their president because they feared he would change everything. As he was recounting their views Toufiq mixed French and Arabic in a common form of urban darīja, mostly when he was quoting the tourists or paraphrasing their positions. This led his sister Loubna to jump in, opining in French why she thought a majority supported the president. Although she had studied Spanish as a third language in high school, she worked at a service call center for a French telecommunications company that had outsourced its labor to Morocco, where they didn’t have to pay as much for French-speaking employees. Her interactions with French clients were about media promotions and telephone plans, but to build rapport with her clients she tried to keep abreast of French social life via French media programming. As she spoke, Toufiq translated a few of the French political words in Arabic for his mother, whose schooling was limited to Qur’anic classes at the local mosque, and a younger sister, whose French knowledge primarily covered phrases that had entered into everyday Moroccan use or the conversational domains she was just learning at school. His father regularly interjected with jaded jabs about the corruption of elected officials. This precipitated agreement through slight nods by the mother, a resigned darīja vocable, ايوا, īywā, “well …” that trailed off into a sigh by Loubna, and Toufiq’s counternarrative of youth civic projects inspired by Egyptian religious television figure Amr Khaled.

In this episode, Mohammed’s family illustrated phatic communion, the ritual after-meal conversations of relational work. I had observed this Fassi family, as well as many others, engaging in this kind of activity over the last decade. It did not qualify, however, as gossip or small talk, but—spurred by the news broadcast—political commentary imbedded in the connectivity webs of Moroccanness. Toufiq’s family called it لاحتكاك (liḥtikāk): associations and knowledge that came from regular contact, mingling, and friction (in the sense of heated and generative exchange). Morocco has a long history of contact with French tourists, missionaries, ethnographers, militaries, and administrators (Burke 2014), as well as French language and policies (Ennaji 2005). Traces of French influence continued in the bilingual Moroccan educational system (Boutieri 2016), French-language tourism relations described earlier, but also in the naturalized use of French language forms among seemingly illiterate and unschooled Arabic speakers. The news broadcast was in the transnational standard Arabic, fuṣḥā, a written and spoken language acquired primarily through formal schooling. Spanish and French were also acquired primarily in schools, though also through contact with tourists and broadcast media, as related in this account. The linguistic code they associated with everyday Fassi interactions was darīja, which included regional and social variants such as Toufiq’s unmarked French-Fassi Arabic urban way of speaking.

On the surface this appeared as a story of linguistic mediators, in which Toufiq rendered standard Arabic news and French conversational interactions meaningful for family members who hadn’t acquired those language skills (Wagner, Messick, and Spratt 1986). My Fassi interlocutors, however, viewed these interpretive events as collaborative relationality and knowledge making. For Toufiq, contact could create impassioned critique and disagreement even as it affirmed social connection. It involved friction: repeated contact, a labor of distributed literacy (see Chapter 2), and ideologies of languages as channels that connect—however imperfectly—signers and interpreters.

In anthropological theorizing, channel and code have been described using a similar analytical metaphor (or trope): language codes (the speech habits of a population however understood) and channels (socially recognized communicative mediums such as writing, speech, gestures) are bridges that facilitate or filter interpretation and circulation. They connect signers and interpreters physically and perceptually through channels, cognitively and socially through codes (Kockelman 2010, 406). The bridge trope occurs in discussions of media as language channels:

Spoken utterances mediate relations among co-present communicators, print artifacts at greater remove in time and space, electronic technologies at varying degrees of mutual awareness, directness of contact, and possibilities of reciprocation. To speak of communicative mediation is to observe that communicative signs formulate a bridge or connection among those they link, mediating social relations through activities of uptake and response at different scales of social history. (Agha 2011, 163)

In this quote, Agha explicitly linked linguistic codes with media channels. They served as social bridges between signers and interpreters, though “receivers” shaped those collectivities by the ways they responded to the messages across contexts. Agha viewed spoken, print, and electronic media as all material channels mediating social relations: “Utterances and discourses are themselves material objects made through human activity—made, in a physical sense, out of vibrating columns of air, ink on paper, pixels in electronic media—which exercise real effects upon our senses, minds, and modes of social organization” (Agha 2007, 2–3). As recounted in Episode 4, linguistic codes (urban French-infused darīja, French, and standard Arabic) mediated the family’s relations as channels for renewing their family closeness as well as transnational politics they connected to their own lives (telecommunications and tourist clients).²⁷ Importantly, I explore the social-material effects of these phatic moments, when Fassis foregrounded or erased language forms and channel affordances.

I will argue that Fassis see codes and channels as partaking of some of the same qualities. They are both tools of connectedness, both susceptible to hidden agendas (parasites), invisible when they work well and troublesome when appropriate connection fails. More importantly, when channels (whether language forms or media) become visible because of their supposed failure or backgrounded because they are working well, they change the participant structures of media engagement and thus relationality (Gershon and Manning 2014, 544–45). Situating how Fassis understood them at any moment may help understand how these language codes and media channels mediated Moroccanness. My Moroccan interlocutors slipped between lamenting codes and channels as troublesome bridges and taken-for-granted mediums for bringing them together. In other words, they regularly critiqued the idea that language and media were designed to bring people together, even as in other contexts they expected language and media channels to do so. As Eisenlohr noted, both linguistic codes and media channels move between highly visible elements of communication and disappearing in moments of mediation (2011, 267). Gershon and Manning argued that language codes and media channels were distinguished analytically when scholars moved away from co-present interaction and viewed media’s materiality as different from language (2014, 539). Shaping this distinction was the ideology of spoken language as a default, immaterial medium for meaning (a widespread Enlightenment idea; see Irvine 1989) and media as the various material and technological extensions that facilitate meaning’s circulation (Eisenlohr 2011, 267). Other scholars didn’t make this distinction: “media” included mediums, communicative channels, technologies, platforms, genres, and products (Spitulnik 2000, 148). It was a shifter, referring to whatever the users meant. In this way, media could be both an intermediary and a mediator, a medium and an actor. Language and media forms could be the means to connect Moroccans, but also shape and even constrain what it meant to connect as Moroccans in Fez.

I adopt Kockelman’s blend of Peircian semiotic theory (Peirce 1955 [1897–1910], 80) and actor-network mediation (Serres 2007 [1980], 65; Latour 2005, 39) to suggest how this might work (Kockelman 2010, 413). When Toufiq spoke French-influenced darīja at home, he was employing it as a channel connecting himself to his family and other darīja speakers. This was darīja as intermediary. Samira Sitail employed darīja-dubbed serials as part of a pluralism project to decenter formal Arabic’s hold over Moroccanness. Critics viewed Samira Sitail’s darīja television programs as serving a different kind of purpose—diverting Moroccans both through bad programming and by darijization of public life. This was darīja as mediator. In this way, 2M’s urban French–influenced darīja mediated Moroccans through form and content, leaving material effects on social relations. Kockelman called this the parasitic function, when codes become troubling mediators of Moroccanness (because of associations linked to the channel), rather than an intermediary conduit connecting Moroccans. To be clear, French-influenced darīja mediated social relations in Toufiq’s family as well, but less visibly and explicitly. The family did not see darīja at that moment as a problematic channel in the ways Samira Satail and her critics did in their interactions. French-influenced darīja was both code and channel, parasite and facilitator, medium and mediator, material and nonvisible—depending on the context. Making a channel visible as a problematic mediator of relationality was key to Fassi sociality reform projects.

I explore Fassi responses to other examples of mediation/intermediary labor of communicative reform in Chapters 3 and 4. From the late 2000s to 2016, a group of Moroccan cultural producers repurposed a rhymed prose form of darīja (هدرة الميزان [hadra lmīzan]) associated with grandmothers and street performers to convey “modern” Moroccan civic values. Most often this involved promoting equality for women. In doing so, they sought to make a linguistic form, rhymed prose, into a mediator of Moroccanness, shaping viewers’ perceptions of civic engagement through a nostalgic medium primed with equality content. As I ethnographically followed the social life of this register through everyday media practices, I recognized the way phaticity shaped the actor possibilities of rhymed prose. The kinds of phatic communion described in Episodes 3 and 4 didn’t always involve focused attention to programming content. I track the ways my Fassi interlocutors nostalgically appreciated the reproduction of hadra lmīzan on television but seemed to miss entirely the “modern” civic values content. They did so because of implicit and explicit media consumption and relationality ideologies embedded in their webs of everyday phatic connectivity.

Building from the moral relationality of the rhymed prose in heritage television programs, in Chapter 4 I analyze the ways laments about Arabic writing have shaped practices of phatic connection in Fez. I look at the ways Fassis engaged darīja writing as a blending of multisensory channels tied to specific media platforms: folklore books, WhatsApp, advertising billboards, and newsprint. Merging the aural/spoken soundscape (Hirschkind 2006) and the visual/graphic linguascape (Blommaert 2013), I examine the intertwining of these sensorial channels in the sounding of darīja script and scripting of darīja sounds by reading subjects (see Inoue 2006), everyday Moroccans who authorized themselves to weigh in on the politics of writing. In the face of debates about the role of language in Moroccan relationality, Fassi everyday scriptic heterogeneity pointed to a practice of ambivalence toward written darīja in specific media platforms, but not others. The platforms of writing mattered to the phatic work of connecting Moroccans in Fez.

This is an ethnography about the ideologies and anxieties Fassis shared with me about the mediums of that connectedness: spoken and written language forms, electronic and print media, and the personas indexed by them. More significantly, it is about how Fassis connected, identified each other, and failed to relate. It is about the mediating of overlapping and differentiated Moroccanness projects in urban Fez and describing the phatic communion rituals that furthered the political productivity of communicative failure. The constant critique of failed connectivity evidenced Fassis investment in communicative reform, both as a reviving of “lost” sociality and a recalibrating of future relationality forms. As carefully cultivated relations, the everyday work and pleasure of media talk (talk during and about media events) facilitated access to and participation in Moroccanness projects as conversations unfolded. While there were many participant frameworks, or configurations of interactional roles and statuses (Goodwin and Goodwin 2006), that I participated in throughout my fieldwork, the primary location for much of my research was Fassi homes. I conducted interviews with Moroccan media producers, public school teachers, and public intellectuals, as well as observing countless everyday interactions spanning a decade—some of which I audio-recorded and others about which I took detailed observational fieldnotes. This book includes a very small portion of all these interactions, but ones I feel give a sense of relationality labor in Fez.