Outlaw Language: Creating Alternative Public Spheres in Basque Free Radio

Abstract

Recent rethinking of Habermas' Stntctural Transformatiort of the Public Sphere by Negt and Kluge (1993), and feminist and social historians Nancy Fraser (1993), Joan landes (1988), and Geoff Eley (1992), among others, has argued persuasively that the bourgeois public sphere has, from its inception, been built upon powerful mechanisms of exclusion. The idealized image of a democratic theatre of free and equal participation in debate, they claim, has always been a fiction predicated on the mandatory silencing of entire social groups, vital social issues, and indeed, "ot any difference that cannot be assimilated, rationalized, and subsumed" (Hansen 1993b: 198). This is especially clear in the case of those cit izens who do not or wil l not speak the language of civil society. The linguistic terrorism performed with a vengeance during the French Revolution and reenacted in Official English initiatives in the United States more recently, reveal to us how deeply monolingualism has been ingrained in l iberal conceptions of Libert6, Egalit6, anci Fraternit6. But perhaps silencing may not be the best way to describe the fate of linguistic minorit ies or other marginalized groups. For, as Miriam Hansen (1993b) notes, what he more recent work on public spheres uggests i that "the" public sphere has never been as uniform or as totalizing as it represents itself to be. Proliferating in the interstices of the bourgeois public -in salons, cofteehouses, book clubs, working class and subaltern forms of popular culture -are numerous counterpublics that give lie to the presumed homogeneity of the imaginary public. Spurred in part by ethnic nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, speakers and writers of "barbarous" tongues and "i l legitimate patois" can be seen as one among the counterpublics who avail themselves of any number of "media" from novels to oral poetry, from song and regional presses to, more recently, various forms of electronic media to give expression to other kinds of social experience and perspectives on who the public is. what its interests might be, and what its voice sounds like. This article examines the contemporary fbrmation of one such counterpublic