Crisis Thinking, Sensuous Reflexivity, and Solving Real Issues

In "Voices of Modernity," Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs write their grand overview of the birth and maturation of modernity. Bauman and Briggs understand modernity as a discursive construction that opposes traditional and modern developments, ways of being, and modes of understanding. Central in this narrative project of modernity have been conceptions of language. A first step in founding modernity involved John Locke's imagination of language as a separate, autonomous domain of human intervention, standing apart from nature and from the social world. The second step was Locke's argument that language needed to be purified so that its use could be trusted in these two other domains. In order to make language a tool for the accurate exchange of empirical knowledge, and less dangerously prone to misunderstanding in the political sphere, it needed to be stripped from ambivalence, intertextuality, connotation, and emotion--qualities thought of by elites attributed to those they found ignorant, superstitious, lower class, indigenous, and rural. This paper discusses other papers found in this issue of "AILA Review," which focus on social mobility in the context of modernity, and examines M. Archer's social theory. The author of this paper suggests that the concern with social mobility highlights a particular quality of the issue, but also raises concerns that applied (and socio-) linguistics may have to address as a field.