DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2003.2317.2.11 Page 363 Legends of the Center: System, Self, and Linguistic Consciousness Janet Giltrow Department of English University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4 giltrow@interchange.ubc.ca Abstract Commentators on language standardization, including Bourdieu and Bakhtin, provide various perspectives on what this chapter calls modern linguistic consciousness: speakers’ awareness of their own speech in relation to others’ and in relation to the operation of centralizing system. In this chapter, these formulations are used to analyze interview data collected from readers and writers at a South Asian university—and, in turn, these data elaborate the picture of modern linguistic consciousness. Readers and writers can pick out self amidst the words of others, and in the presence of centralizing mandates; they can position themselves in working spaces adjacent to system, and, while recognizing speech norms, imagine themselves as not occupying those norms. Linguistic consciousness can be detected in the expression of rules—but rules themselves turn out to be complex spaces hosting diverse possibilities. Moreover, modern systems, in managing the speech of populations, may not always operate exclusively in the service of the centre. Modernity has struggled to locate system in diversity, and then self in system. Reasoning about language has hosted many episodes of the struggle, as the normative face of speech confronts the private one—the rise, decline, and residual of structuralist explanations of language being the commanding example. In the aftermath of structuralism’s ascendancy, the search for a modern conception of language goes on in many domains, for questions persist about the nature of the speaker’s participation in the system. New-rhetorical genre theory has de-centered attention by disregarding universal measures of communicative effectiveness and focusing instead on local contexts for expression, and the regularities in situation, form, and content (or “symbolized experience” (Burke, quoted in C. Miller, 1984, p. 160) which develop over accumulating instances. These regularities are visible in textual outcomes, but, more important for this discussion, they are apprehended in language-users’ intersubjective consciousness: speakers’ and listeners’ not only recognize typical situations but also recognize one another’s mutual awareness. If we look for self in this model of individuals’ participation in a system, we find it in speakers’ identification with the roles and motives available in the speech situation, and performance of these roles and experience of these motives. If we want to add agency to conceptions of self, we find it in the contingencies of situation: typifiable but also historical, contexts change—at least partly in response to individual instances of participation. This view of self and agency comes at some cost to ideals of originality and self-expression, but also with some profit to ideals of the sociality of language.