2 - The Problem of Value

Summary

In Chapter 2, I argue that our ability to distill and evaluate what “multilingualism” is has been jarred, since the 1970s and even before, by profound transformations in political economy and its systems of value. An idealized economistic version of “multilingualism” has been engineered, for various mono- and multilingual subjects to embody or resist. I describe this production of an economistic model of “ordolingualism” as a mimesis of a mimesis, or what Michael Taussig has called a “mimetic excess” (1993, p. 252). Since the 1990s, this economistic dispositive of “ordolingualism” has functioned, with increasing allure, as an authoritative global infrastructure I call supralingualism, which is designed to suppress, manage, and alleviate the complex subjective and interactional experience of lived multilingualism.