PIDGIN interrupted transmission as a Space of Digital Disruption
My interest in the work of Erika Tan arose from my desire to explore the territory of the transculturated individual, to find out whether the individual of mixed ethnicity had insight into the contact zones in-between cultural spaces. In particular, I am interested in exploring the hybrid cultural productions arising out of the liminal space, those productions that are marked by sameness and difference, by slippage and free play. This led me to PIDGIN interrupted transmission1, an installation created by Erika Tan for the Norwich Gallery in the last months of 2001.2
My first issue in dealing with PIDGIN is its status as a dismantled installation. 3 As I have not seen the piece, I will refer principally to the monologue published in conjunction with the installation and a review piece by Susan Pui San Lok that describes the writer’s subjective impressions of the piece.4 My analysis of the experiential aspects of PIDGIN will therefore be mediated by the subjectivity of Lok while my discussion of Tan’s ideas will be a dialogue with the texts within the monologue. These texts include an interview with Tan and essays from Steven Bode and Nikos Papastergiadis.5
I will explore PIDGIN in relation to a number of core concerns. I will examine Tan’s understanding of linguistic hybridity in the context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and intentional hybridity. I will ask how a multi-media piece articulates heteroglossia through strategies of slippage, looping, disjunction and repetition. What is the role of contradiction and contestation as against fusion and organicism in PIDGIN? Is hybridity related to freedom or is the individual living in the liminal space destined to live out a life paralysed by uncertainty? Is Tan interested in pointing to the inherent instability of language and why does she reject narrativity in PIDGIN? What is the relationship of the linguistic signifier to the signified? Can secondary languages decentre primary languages such as English or Chinese? Is linguistic heteroglossia an antidote to globalisation’s tendency to cultural and linguistic homogeneity?
Finally, I will explore the issue of identity formation in relation to PIDGIN. Does Tan have a particular acuity of vision in relation to hybridity as a result of her transculturated status? Does the work enable the viewer to realise their own subject position? Is the environment immersive or does it privilege sight over physicality? Is the visitor to PIDGIN a viewer, participant or user? Is PIDGIN empowering or disempowering or simultaneously both?
Figure 1: Video Still
It seems to me that PIDGIN celebrates heteroglossia, the productivity, multiplicity and the open-ended nature of language, and the desire to communicate. While it acknowledges the difficulty of communicating across languages and cultures, it recognises the creativity of ‘borderline skirmishes’ without reducing such communication to translation as a closure.6
Simon Willmoth’s comments in conversation with Tan take us to the heart of PIDGIN where the ‘productivity, multiplicity and the open-ended nature of language’7 is demonstrated through a plurality of interweaving digitally originated media forms. Articulating an almost rampant hybridity of texts, video sequences, photographic images and sonic collage, PIDGIN presents mediascapes that are pregnant with signification, suggestive of what is to come but never allowing the viewing subject satisfaction of resolution. Susan Pui San Lok describes the experience of PIDGIN in the following terms:
Blinds down, the gallery is darkened, dim. Light flickers, bouncing from double projections that double the dimensions, two to four, of obliquely opposing walls. Pigeons flock, stilled mid-flight in black and white, later flying into and past the artist’s lens, colourful; a head in profile, lips moving, whispers (- me, my lips to E.’s ear); pages of texts in unfamiliar scripts; text messages, abbreviations and decodings; and aerial views of a flat, indistinct landscape. Somewhere in the sequence is the announcement ‘an exercise in: phonological stretching’. Falling for the authority of the caption, an old love of linearity re-surfacing, I catch myself wondering if I have arrived, by chance, at the beginning, realising much later that there is none.8
The process of continually aroused and arrested linguistic progression is central to the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia where a polyphony of contesting voices arise from a patchwork quilt of interweaving social discourses. Within the multiplicity of social discourses, centrifugal and centripetal forces ensure the production of meaning remains constantly in process, unfinalizable.9 Heteroglossia is characterised by social languages or discourses that each articulate distinctive ‘objects, meanings and values’ and which can be ‘juxtaposed to one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically.’10 This dialogical interrelationship of social languages is central to PIDGIN where interweaving texts articulate the communication process producing new meanings but also revealing the breakdowns of the process.
Figure 2: Video still from ‘broken telephone/Chinese whispers’
Heteroglossia’s simultaneous fusion and diffusion is represented by PIDGIN in a video piece entitled broken telephone/Chinese whispers where a group of people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds are filmed. In this experiment, a message is ‘relayed and progressively distorted, through successive iterations’ as it passes round the group.11 The video piece highlights the creative potential for the production of meaning within the communication process but also points to the inherently fragile nature of language where the unambiguous transmission of meaning is dependent on people sharing the same social and linguistic backgrounds.
Figure 3: Transliterations
In another video piece, a number of texts are put through a process of ‘transliteration’, in which a non native English speaker is asked to transcribe canonical English texts such as Karl Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party. The transcription which has already begun to bear only vague resemblance to the original since the person transcribing recognises only the sounds and not the meaning is then read out to camera by another non English speaker.12 The listener’s subjective experience of this process is described by Lok as rendering ‘a range of strangely inflected, splintered Englishes…through a collage of approximate sounds in Chinese, Greek, Arabic, Dutch and Afrikaans into alternative pidgin languages.’13
However within the babble of alien utterances, there are occasional moments of meaning where a familiar sounding English word or phrase is recognised. The process is further complicated when the viewer notices on the nearby PC monitor a momentary synchronisation between the scrolling text on the screen and the text being read out aloud.14 At this point, it may become apparent that the speaker is reading a strangely mangled English text. Tan wishes to explore how the signification process can be disrupted through the setting up of a chain of mediations where sounds and phonemes are used but where meaning is not transmitted. Once again, PIDGIN raises issues concerning the fragility of communication and the chasm that must be breached between the signifier and signified. Viewers of PIDGIN are encouraged to question pre-determined ideas of causality and correspondence between signifier and signified where what is signified is far more than the sum of its phonemes. This radical disjunction of the signifier and the signified is used by Tan to demonstrate the elasticity of language within her vision of a world of creatively interacting linguistic and social languages.
Tan’s interest in the creative potential of language is linked to concerns over the linguistic hegemony of Chinese and English. According to Tan, both languages are the most spoken in the world and with the rise of global capitalism which sweeps away cultural difference, this dominance can only increase.15 In the following text cited in Tan’s monologue, colonising linguistic strategies are articulated where Chinese is aggressively pitched against Pidgin English.
If you’re marketing internationally you need to communicate in the local language. Pidgin English may be the business language, but Chinese is the most used world-wide. Think about that. More than one billion Chinese consumers; one market, one language. Meantime specialising as we do in international Business to Business Accounts we help put together the whole ball of wax - Advertising, Marketing collaterals, Telesales, Direct Response Marketing, WWW and Internet marketing - simultaneously in the languages you need. Project dependent we use translation productivity tools - computer assisted and machine translation…Just think of the time and cost saving. One brief - and the entire integrated approach is put on your desk. And we’re in a lot of countries too.16
Tan is concerned about globalisation and its tendency to diminish cultural difference17 – its tendency to arrest the productive hybridity in the contact zone where creativity is heightened. This is where the importance of secondary languages comes into play. Pidgin English developed to facilitate trade between the Chinese and British18 but while the initial purpose of this development was purely pragmatic, an alternative purpose was to be revealed. Bakhtin describes this process where the production of secondary linguistic discourses throws light on the primary discourse creating a zone of detached critique – a place where the primary language now exists in relation to a new language which is able to reveal its dominating objective ‘to centralize verbal-ideological thought’.19 This relativizing of one language against another creates a zone of resistance to the unitary languages search for absolute authority. In The Heteroglot Novel, Bakhtin describes this process in relation to ‘low’ and ‘high’ literary forms where the secondary discourse has the potential to decentre the primary discourse through devices such as irony and parody:20
Hereroglossia, as organised in these low genres, was not merely heteroglossia vis-à-vis the accepted literary language…that is, vis-à-vis the linguistic centre of the nation and the epoch, but was heteroglossia consciously opposed to this literary language. It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time.21
The ability to turn linguistic hierarchies upside down through parody and irony is fundamental to the formation of contestatory and anti-colonializing counter-discourses of resistance. Perhaps the representation of pidgin languages as bastardisations of main languages can be understood against this potentially disruptive function where the secondary language reflects back to the colonizing linguistic authority a distorted trace of itself. In a breach of the coloniser/colonised binary, the basis of colonial control, the pidgin language creates ambivalence in the relations between the two discourses blurring sharp delineations of colonial identity. Homi Bhabha describes this potential erosion of colonial identity where a combination of sameness and difference becomes menacing to the power discourse:
…the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double…What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely ‘rupture’ the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence.22
The defensive strategy of a unitary linguistic power in the face of an agitating secondary language is to pigeonhole that language as debased – something that must be quarantined. This notion of debasement is closely allied to a fear of miscegenation where pidgin languages are suggestive of unspeakable sexual acts between races.23 Pidgin languages summon up a dialectic of desire and disgust in the colonizing discourse where there is simultaneously a narcissistic desire for the other where the trace of itself is reflected but also a horror since the chasm between itself and the other is being breached.
The subversive nature of pidgin languages as vehicles of agitation is celebrated by Tan in PIDGIN. Tan’s contestatory hybridity is articulated across many levels, in particular the interaction between different forms of digital media. Acting as a metaphor for linguistic hybridity, Tan creates an installation where the convergence and divergence of differing media are driven by the latest multi-media TRAXä software running on SMARTPAXä hardware.24 TRAXä as the central software driver of PIDGIN works on a multi-tracked pre-programmed timeline principle where individual pieces of media are activated by trigger points.25 This pre-determined sequencing of Tan’s installation appears to contrast with the unpredictable nature of heteroglossia where competing and dynamic social languages intermingle.
Figure 4: TRAX user interface
Perhaps this need to exercise control within the representation of linguistic disjunction in PIDGIN reflects the strategies of the primary language of authority in relation to the secondary pidgin language. Confronted by the variegated and rampant growth of heteroglossia, the master discourse must control otherwise a crisis of meaning will break out. Bakhtin outlines this need for a dialogical interaction between master and secondary discourses as the prerequisite for an orderly development. The unpredictability of Heteroglossia is a necessary dialogical counterpart to the fixed unitary nature of the primary language26 where there is ‘no play within its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions.’27 The secondary Pidgin language therefore agitates the primary language and opens up the possibility of ‘independent ideological life’.28 While Bakhtin may have been referring in a sideways glance to the dangerous ossification of Marxist ideology in the 1930s, the relevance of heteroglossia to the development of global capitalism today could not be sharper. In the monologue to PIDGIN, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is quoted:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary the first condition of existence for all earlier… classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away. All new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life and relations of his kind.29
As Marx prophetically announced, capitalism is a restless force that must transform in its wake all that it encounters. In a ceaseless search for new markets, social relations are relentlessly transformed. In Tan’s view, this globalising and unfettered capitalism is a homogenizing force that leads to the erasure of cultural difference.30 Pidgin languages and their creative capabilities are presented as an antidote to the monolithic tendencies of global capital. This contestation of linguistic hegemony is articulated in PIDGIN through slippages and disjunctions, repetitions and circularity. Such strategies are reflected in Tan’s ‘ruse’31 of the PC monitor screen where the timeline, although at times appearing to synchronise with other media, is in fact a simulation. Tan explains:
The ‘fake’ timeline acts as a slight ‘ruse’, giving a sense of comfort by referencing a structure, but in reality this ‘structure’ is artificial and a simplified version of the real timeline programme. If you look carefully, there are discrepancies in the timing of events, so when the timeline shows that something has been triggered, there may be a time-lapse between representation of action and real action.32
On encountering the PC screen, the keyboard/mouse/monitor point and click paradigm33 is activated and the viewer becomes expectant of an interactive engagement with the computer. However on closer inspection, the paradigm is incomplete since there is no keyboard or mouse. The viewer is frustrated and disempowered since there is simply a monitor screen displaying timelines and texts – the expected interactive engagement has been cancelled and the viewer is as powerless and distanced from the action as a television viewer. The disempowerment is heightened through careful inspection of monitor content. Initially there appears to be a synchronous relationship between what is displayed on the monitor and the audio-visual material. However, even this is not the case since the display does not represent the underlying software code running on a hidden server out of view.
Figure 5: Monitor
The viewer is doubly disempowered since the promise of technological transparency suggested by the monitor has been violated. The ethical prerogative of the monitor as window to the underlying code behind Tan’s work has been transgressed. Indeed, the promise of ‘file sharing = life sharing’ has been ripped away as the viewer is denied access to the underlying motivations behind Tan’s work:
Whoever works with a computer on a daily basis, at least for a few years, will soon realize that his own computer resembles more and more its owner. You share everything with your computer: your time (often even 13 hours per day), your space (desktop), your culture (bookmarks), your personal relationships (e-mails), your memories (photo archives), your ideas, your projects, etc. To sum up, a computer with the passing of time, ends up looking like its owner’s brain.34
Technological transparency has been replaced by slippage where the screen appears to sometimes synchronize with audio-visual media and then at other times to move out of synchronicity into total disjunction.35 The viewer has been robbed of the transparency promised by the keyboard/mouse/monitor point and click paradigm and instead has been presented with an inauthentic representation of the underlying codes within PIDGIN.
Tan is pointing to how the chain of signification can be interrupted by the ‘ruse’ of the PC monitor where language can be demonstrated not to be a transparent medium and signifier cannot simply represent signified. Instead, a complex chain of mediations between signifier and signified are suggested - where the same signifier may take on numerous connoted meanings according to the discursive fields in which it is articulated. The same utterance may therefore have different connoted meanings according to the social space in which it occurs.36 Bakhtin’s concept of intentional hybridity elaborates the way in which a single utterance can hold within it a doubly connoted social meaning. Intentional hybridity requires ‘two linguistic consciousnesses to be present, the one being represented and the other doing the representing, with each belonging to a different system of language.’37 In the single hybrid utterance ‘a mixture of two social languages…come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance.’38 Intentional hybridity where a single utterance is double voiced, double accented and double languaged39 creates an arena for the contestation of dominant languages since the pidgin utterance holds within it both the trace of the dominant language and its dialogically related other. As discussed earlier in relation to Bhabha, this potentially unsettles the dominant discourse since it sees within its other a trace of itself. This quality of a single signified to hold within itself doubly connoted meanings is explored in Tan’s ruse of the PC monitor where a number of devices interrupt the usual chain of signification as the keyboard/mouse/monitor point and click paradigm is activated and then serially frustrated.
The ruse of the PC monitor has one more frustration in store for the unwary observer. Robbed of interactivity, the viewer is also stripped of temporality and linear narrativity. The presentation of TRAXä on the monitor activates the keyboard/mouse/monitor point and click paradigm associated with the commercial/personal/domestic computer space’s efficient implementation of work focused tasks. Such systems have a tendency towards predictability and completetedness where the user is empowered by ergonomically designed software applications to find the most efficient solution to the problem in hand.40 In the case of PIDGIN, a user interface designed as an interactive control tool is turned into a purely presentational medium in a gallery. Furthermore, as rapidly becomes apparent to the viewer, the temporality and narrativity implied by the user interface timeline are illusory since repetition and circularity soon assert themselves in the absence of beginnings and endings. Lok describes this sense of disruption where ‘falling for the authority of the caption, an old love of linearity re-surfacing, I catch myself wondering if I have arrived, by chance, at the beginning, realising much later that there is none.’41
With one hand, PIDGIN gives but with the other takes away as viewers are serially deprived of their ability to control becoming observers of a mechanically determined sequence to which they are denied the key to the underlying codes. But is Tan’s vision really so negative? Is the space at the periphery away from the certainties of the fixed discourses of dominant languages simply a disempowered space of chaos and flux? Tan points instead to the dialogical corollary of disempowerment. The contact zone between cultures where contestatory discourses fight it out dialogically is also the source of personal creativity and freedom. In agitating the centre, heteroglossia creates empowerment through the construction of independent identities born of intellectual struggle:42
The importance of struggling with another’s discourse, its influence in the history of an individual’s coming to ideological consciousness, is enormous. One’s own discourse and one’s own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other’s discourse.43
Instead of the monolithic identities encouraged by global capital - where global media and branding strategies encourage the increasing homogeneity of language - in heteroglossia hybrid cultural identities are created in a dynamic process of differentiation. This is the space where essentialised and arrested notions of cultural diversity are disrupted. In the unitary zone where authoritative discourses articulate a liberal multi-culturalism promoting fixed cultural identities rooted in constructed histories of difference there can be only limited movement. Here the dominant discourse articulates itself in distinction to an exotic periphery that is controlled through its location away from the centre.44 A panoptical relation where the master discourse both reifies the ‘other’ into an ossified relation of hierarchical inferiority to itself and partitions the ‘other’ into abstracted essentialised identities.45 In pidgin languages, such reifying tendencies of monolithic discourse are countered by a fluidity that disrupts the cold fixed abstractions of classificatory knowledge. This is why PIDGIN is process rather than object orientated – where Tan’s installation is far more than the sum of the individual media tracks.
Language’s power to dominate and disempower is reflected in Tan’s robbing of interactivity from PIDGIN however empowerment comes from the productive hybridity in the contact zone where discourses transmutate in a contestatory dialogical play. At this moment, the PIDGIN observer becomes a player through immersion in the experience of PIDGIN. Moving around the installation between video and audio sources, changing positionality, the player is able to take control of the digital environment – to forge ever more inventive junctions of meaning from the hybrid digital forms around him or her.
Navigating around the installation, the player is able to realise their own subject position in relation to the changing mediascapes of PIDGIN. The PIDGIN player is no longer the passive observer of their own disempowerment but the master of their own experience – the disconcerting visual and sonic abstractions becomes immersive as the player joins with Tan in a celebration of the interstitial space where creative freedom reigns in the face of authoritative discourse.
It’s the determination to make whatever you’ve got translate into something that has meaning for me. The desire to communicate as much as you possibly can from minimal vocabulary is perhaps what I find most compelling about the project. It’s the creativity involved in that desire and the ingenuity, as well as the appropriation, the stealing and the lawlessness of that process that I like. I wanted to translate that into the way I made the piece.46
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (London, 1977)
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York, 2002)
Datatron True Trax Multimedia User Manual,http://www.dataton.com/products/acrobat/trax-3-user-manual.pdf(April 14, 2003)
Steve Dietz, ‘Ten Dreams of Technology’, Leonardo, 35.5 (2002), pp.509-22
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979)
Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, ‘Diaspora’s daughters, Africa’s orphans?: On lineage, authenticity and ‘mixed race’ identity’, in Heidi Mirza ed., Black British Feminism: A Reader (London and New York, 1998)
Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, ‘Writing Home: Reconfiguring the (English)-African diaspora’, in Kwesi Owusu ed., Black British Culture and Society (London and New York, 2000)
Michael Keith and Steve Pile, ‘Conclusion: Towards New Radical Geographies’, in Michael Keith and Steve Pile, eds., Place and the Politics of Identity (London, 1993)
Pam Morris ed., The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov (London, New York, Melbourne and Auckland, 1994)
Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalisation, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Cambridge, Oxford and Malden, 2000)
Christiane Paul, ‘Renderings of Digital Art’, Leonardo, 35.5 (2002), pp.471-84
Alan Peacock, ‘Towards an Aesthetic of “the Interactive”’, Digital Creativity 12.4 (2001), pp.237-46
Susan Pui Lok, Translators’ Notes (Or, ‘Pidgin’, and Other Corruptions), http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volume5issue1/7.htm (April 14, 2003)
Julie H. Reiss, From Margin To Centre: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge and London, 1999)
Bruce Wand, ‘Director’s Statement’, Leonardo, 35.5 (2002), pp.467-9
Benjamin Weil, ‘Art in Digital Times: From Technology to Instrument’, Leonardo, 35.5 (2002), pp.523-37
Simon Willmoth ed., Erika Tan: PIDGIN interrupted transmission (Norwich, 2001)
Diana Yeh, ‘Ethnicities on the Move: “British-Chinese” Art – Identity, Subjectivity, Politics and Beyond’, Critical Quarterly, 42.2 (July 2000), pp.65-91
Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York, 1995)
Written by Eugene Perera
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