Language and Work

Abstract

In recent decades, technological advances have facilitated the globalization of the business world, the dislocation of work and the expansion of marketplaces, challenging the traditional distribution of roles, skills and knowledge in workplaces. In the new social order, ‘service’ is to a significant extent accomplished by interacting with people, with the result that the ideal employee is conceived as a flexible and adaptable worker, able to master soft skills in order to improve economic performances and outcomes. The present study has a double aim: it engages in a thinking process around the notion of language commodification to investigate the way in which the hyper-competitive globalized economy affects the social practices of language, and it shows how processes of commodification change our idea of language itself. I will draw on the thesis proposed by Paolo Virno in his work, A Grammar of the Multitude, to emphasise how language has become an essential attribute that turns people into potential work force. If traditionally workers used to sell their physical labour by performing routine tasks, now – in the late capitalist economy – they sell their intellectual and communicative competences, both as an objectified skill and as cultural product. Intellect, therefore, has become part of the negotiable skills of labour. This means that language is no longer conceived as an abstract faculty nor just a set of rules, now language is labour in itself. The second part of my research project responds to Paolo Virno’s thesis about the linguistic faculty that every human being possesses, in order to demonstrate that linguist competences problematize the very notion of a hierarchisation of speakers according to their empirical performances. The central question guiding my study, in conclusion, will be the recognition of social inequalities that the passage from potential linguistic ability to concrete speech acts generates.