Perception as racialization: Listening and psychic process in postcolonial contexts

Miyako Inoue's body of work (2003, 2004, 2006, among others) has exposed the creation of a hegemonic listening subject via the negative construal of antagonized Others, figures who act as a foil to the virtuous hegemon. In her paradigmatic case, she interrogates male intellectuals' identification of young, elite schoolgirl speech in late 19th century and early 20th century Japan as a cultural threat to the modernizing national project of the time. Inoue masterfully explains the role of this crucial geopolitical turning point—the period of Meiji reforms—in defining the auditive perceptions of these intellectuals. She clarifies that their language ideology of “improper” feminine speech developed intertwined with broader anxieties about economic and political control as elites debated the future of the country. Ultimately, Inoue demonstrates that listening subjects (and I would venture, perceiving subjects more generally) (re)produce extant ideologies in the very act of listening, just as much as speaking (or sign-encoding) subjects do in speaking. In reading through the excellent work in this anthology, I began to reflect specifically on Inoue's concept of the “psychic object,” explored in the 2003 article included. Inoue finds that Lacan's notion of the objet petit a applies to the Japanese male intellectual's gendered codification of the schoolgirl's speech as deficient, inappropriate, and even immoral. She defines the psychic object following Lacan (1977: 103) as “something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of lack.” As Lacan and Lacanian scholars describe it, the objet petit a is not an object at all, but instead the lack that causes desire to arise in the first place. The individual's relationship to a given object is therefore mediated by this inherent sense of lack that drives them toward or away from said object. This mediating impulse comes to define the individual's stance vis-à-vis people, places, and objects across a lifetime. Inoue offers psychoanalytic theory as one entry point into how ideology becomes interiorized, successfully transferred (psychoanalytic pun intended) and adopted as naturally occurring. She grounds her explanation in political economy (the crisis of the Meiji regime) but goes a step further: material and ideological conditions shape the subject at a deeper (i.e., subconscious) level, thus their experience of the sound of young, modern Japanese women as “unpleasant” and “impertinent.” In short, these conditions into which listening subjects are socialized come to shape their perception of others' speech. Bringing together the combined perspectives of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology opens avenues to recognize racialization as a similarly embedded contextual feature of listening, and this embeddedness itself as a psychic process defined by larger sociocultural formations. Inoue's paradigmatic case demonstrates that the constitution of an agentive political subject within a moment of large-scale sociopolitical and economic crisis requires, she argues, the disavowal of alternate assertions of subjectivity, especially in public spaces. Disempowering these potentially burgeoning new perspectives would ostensibly repair the split between modernity and tradition, a split that the male intellectuals were already in the process of negotiating in the Meiji period, and which figures such as the class-transgressing schoolgirl threatened to exacerbate. I propose that by studying the phenomenology of listening as an inherently social practice, based on work like the one in this collection, we can empirically identify racialization immanent in listening and/or perceiving. Smalls (2018) and Reyes (2017) provide powerful explanations for how ideologies of listening are decanted from (post)colonial sociopolitical processes. Indexical and iconic signs that mark individuals and communities as deficient or unmodern have no natural origin: the causal relationship between sign and identity becomes naturalized under extant ideologies of race. In the Americas, for example, as many authors have written about, the trifecta of settler, native, and slave as circulating stock characters—precisely, social personae (after Agha, 2003, cited by D'Onofrio, 2019)—has organized the sociopolitical and economic possibilities for individuals from the colonial period to present day. Such personae are both building blocks and precipitates of sociohistorical processes with impacts both material and ideological. As Reyes (2017) reminds us, citing Quijano (2000: 533): “rac[e] has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established.” In Reyes' example, the Spanish caste system's juridical impact on racialized people's livelihoods and political agency clashed with the US colonial state after the Spanish American War, producing new social personae both weak and strong, traditional and transgressive, which became immediate sources for later personae that emerged in future decades. These reconfigured personae, however, sustained the colonial racial hierarchy that, as Smalls (2018: 376) writes, relied on an unquestioned “perpetually violent nation-state…pathologies of global structures that position whiteness (and its correlates) at its apex.” Smalls cites documents like the 1965 Moynihan Report in the United States and its role in legislation that continued to position Black Americans as culturally inferior, ignorant, and therefore violent, long after the end of legal slavery. She refers to this process as the construction and upholding of an “episteme” of anti-Blackness. But how could social research account for the incorporation of epistemes and other psychic processes into the individual experience of listening? Specifically, I see the work of the various authors collected in this issue pointing to racialization embedded in perception in postcolonial contexts: Canada, the US, and the Philippines. D'Onofrio's piece, for example, confirms via a controlled listening experiment based on perceived social personae what Rosa and Flores (2017) have proposed, that “language ideologies associated with social categories produce the perception of linguistic signs” (D'Onofrio, 2019: 348). Based on the results of her study, Campbell-Kibler (2021) similarly concludes that “one shortcut developed by our social perception systems is to allow ambient information to shape our sociolinguistic perceptions without always allowing our deliberative knowledge a full chance to review its relevance.” (268). In other words, the perception of linguistic signs is strongly impacted by non-linguistic signs that trigger assumptions about what the listener is experiencing. Specifically, visual indexes of race configure perceptions of linguistic signs accordingly in listeners. Edwards (2018) demonstrates, through the concept of affordances, that subjects' capacity to perceive contracts or expands based upon their environment, from floors to benches. While her case is specific to protactile language users, it is evident that this is true for others as well. For example, Wong and Babel (2017: 608) cite Clopper and Bradlow (2009) to explain that native listeners “are better at identifying speakers' geographic origin than non-native listeners, who lack sufficient familiarity with variation in their non-native language to ascertain how it may signal membership.” While Edwards describes channels and their affordances, and Wong and Babel describe indexical signs, it is quite apparent that listening and perceiving are formed by the conditions under which a listener is socialized into their speech community. The translation of the world around us from somatic, sensory stimuli (sound waves on cochlea, light wave particles on rods and cones, or magnetic repellence of epidermic surface) into cognition is a process that engages multiple signs of multiple types all at once. Campbell-Kibler (2021) specifies that moments of perception include “deliberate” and “automatic” reactions to a given experience. She distinguishes “automatic as a contrast to deliberative control, meaning processes which can proceed without deliberative effort or, more strongly, those which cannot be prevented deliberatively, such as reading text in a familiar language” (256). Campbell-Kibler finds that information about a speaker's race influences the categories into which listeners sort said speakers, even when research teams specifically prompt listeners to disregard non-auditory features of the speakers they will hear from. by assuming that all talkers are White, they are in fact reinforcing the notion that White speech is the default, neutral, unmarked ‘true Canadian’ variety and non-white varieties are marked with foreignness and social exclusion. Even if listeners are not sensitive to ethnolinguistic variation, they still seem to use White as their internal reference to which other options are compared (p. 619) Even under their hypothesis that responders held some anxiety to make racializing claims or fear of reproducing racist ideologies, defaulting to hearing the register most indexical of White Canadian English speakers as the standard already reproduces hierarchies of intelligibility and prestige that listeners assume as naturally more correct. The very notion of a standard unquestioningly assumes a historically defined trajectory, as fact rather than entirely sociological and—Inoue would argue—psychic process. Thus racialization defines the contours of automatic responses to visual–auditory stimuli. In Wong and Babel's study, white speakers are identified at significantly higher levels of accuracy than non-white speakers and, in D'Onofrio's, visual indexical signs presented by the speakers set crucial assumptions about identity across the board: Asian versus Asian American, and native versus non-native speaker. As D'Onofrio's experiment establishes, no hairstyle or clothing choice can be neutral. “Together,” D'Onofrio (2019: 361) writes, “stylistic differences appear to index quite different personae, with different assumptions about the speaker's background, occupation, and behaviours.” What the sociolinguistic research on listening confirms, therefore, is that there can be no “race blind” listening process in modern interactions (per the oft-heard claim in the US that one “doesn't see color”). In other words, people hear color, much like Rosa (2019) indicates in his book on racial evaluations of Black and Latinx youths in a school setting. A person may not share these evaluations unless prompted, yet racialization acts automatically through eyes and ears, much like “reading text in a familiar language (Stroop, 1935)” (Campbell-Kibler, 2021: 256). Analyzed together, the work in this anthology demonstrates that culturally defined psychic processes impact automatic elements of perception, sustaining colonialism as “a structure, not an event (Wolfe 2006: 388)” (in Reyes, 2017: 210). Specifically, effects on automatic perception become empirically evident when studied jointly by sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists.ii After all, Sapir's (1933) foundational work on the psychological components of phonemic perception provides a precedent for studying the incorporation of linguistic systems as the interiorizing of external sociocultural conditions. What the incorporation of psychic processes adds to the study of perception is an explanation of why “ideology x” and not “ideology z” becomes ingrained at the individual level within a given sociohistorical context. Inoue's is an interdisciplinary move from merely describing trends as circulating and instead recognizing subject formation empirically through an analysis of perception. Such a provocation exposes to us how the listening subject is made via the cultural shaping of desire, rather than accept circulation alone as a causal force of indexicality, and indexicality moving toward iconicity. The interventions in this special issue provide a powerful bridge between social theories of subjectivity and empirical behavioral effects. Moreover, his interdisciplinary exploration between sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and beyond is not restricted to psychoanalytic theory, but can emerge from other fields that study subject formation as a psychic process.

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