Nicholas Faraclas

Subaltern Currents and Transgressive Waters: Trans-Oceanic Agents and 'Creole' Languages

When we look at oceans, it becomes difficult to avoid seeing what we don't give ourselves permission to see on land.

When we look at 'creole' languages, it becomes difficult to avoid seeing what we don't give ourselves permission to see as part of our 'scientific' understanding of 'non-creole' languages.

While we can pretend, according to the dominant metaphysical paradigm, that what we encounter on land is largely of a particle, defined, static and predictable nature, as soon as we encounter the oceans, particles dissolve into waves, boundaries are washed away, stasis breaks like a wave and predictability swirls into chaos.

While we can pretend, according to the dominant paradigm of linguistic science, that what we encounter in 'non-creole' standardized European languages (as well as in the linguistic 'universals' which are based on those languages) can be reduced to discrete units, isolated from context, immobilized, and predicted by mechanical laws, as soon as we encounter 'creole' languages, units morph into quantum shape-shifters, text and context merge, boundaries are transgressed, and the only constants that remain are unstoppable dynamism and unpredictable variation.

Physicists tell us that 95% of the cosmos consists of 'dark' energy and matter, which their science cannot see, much less understand.

Linguists tell us that 95% of human linguistic behavior is irrelevant to their obsession with idealized constructs such as Universal Grammar and Formal Semantics, and therefore does not need to be seen, much less understood by their discipline.

The oceans invite us to resolve and dissolve artificial oppositions such as land/sea, particle/wave upon which we have built our current 95% 'blind' worldview.

'Creole' languages invite us to resolve and dissolve artificial oppositions such as creole/non-creole, language/context, and competence/performance upon which we have built our current 95% 'blind' linguistics.

In this presentation, we reconsider the striking similarities between the Atlantic 'creoles' and the Pacific 'creoles', which in the past have been described and explained mainly with reference to linguistic 'universals'. In our study of the multiplex ocean-mediated contacts among subaltern seaborne agents involved in the shaping of these languages, a fascinating and dynamic entanglement of waves and currents of a historical, social, political, economic and linguistic nature emerges which compels us not only to reconceptualize the ways in which we account for these similarities, but also compels us to reconceptualize the ways in which we study language.