J. Paul Narkunas, Penn State University, The Behrend College The Cash-Nexus of Language: The World Bank and the Study of English

In 1997 the World Bank Group² published in English one of its many country studies entitled Vietnam: Education Financing. Its goal was to measure "what changes in educational policies will ensure that students who pass through the system today will acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for Vietnam to complete the transition successfully from a planned to a market economy?"² The educational system performs a disciplinary function for the Bank by using the technologies of the nation-state to cultivate productive humans for transnational companies who do business in the region. Certain attributes, however, bring excellent returns:
Many foreign languages have been imposed on Vietnam over the centuries-Chinese, French, and Russian. Today, English has emerged as the dominant language for business in the East Asian region, and there is considerable incentive for Vietnamese to learn English, especially as Vietnam joins Association Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) and the economy opens up. According to preliminary HEGTS (Higher Education Graduate Tracer Study) results, those graduates with more than elementary proficiency in the English language earn 8 percent more than do others. English language training will increase the lifetime earnings of recent graduates enough to yield a rate of return of between five and eight percent on the individuals' investments.³

The World Bank ignores England's, and the United States' colonial and imperial legacy in the world, and particularly in Southeast Asia throughout Vietnam: Education Financing. Instead, English proliferates "naturally" because it is an effect of value-free inhuman forces of complexity--of the market, capital, and system. The Bank suggests that the colonial ventures of France and China in Vietnam willfully exercised force in the sovereign interests of specific nation-states. Instead, the flow of English happens for the Bank due to the "spontaneous" organization of market forces. English is somehow global for the Bank, unable to be ascribed to a particular imperial, colonial, or even national tradition. Learning English as a primary, secondary, or tertiary language indicates not a particular configuration of power in an international order of nation-states, but rather the success of human subjects to integrate themselves into the global market or, as the Bank suggests, consent to the "right" attitude.

In this paper, I will address what the Bank's mechanical rationalism and economism take for granted about English and the consensus of economic development in a global economic system. Thinking of English within the center of the humanist tradition as a sign of a national history, literature, and culture has fallen apart, and fails to consider English's increasing role as a language of the global market, flowing as capital. Yet English outside the humanist tradition of cultural formation does not unleash mere anarchy upon the world, but forces reflection on how English functions more as a commodity, a mechanism, and a device.
The transformation of English from signifier of national culture to commodity announces, I think, emerging relations of force other than sovereign power and the institutional structures of the nation-state. Consequently, it is apt to consider how English operates as a form of what Michel Foucault, writing about the history of European Modernity, calls "bio-power." Bio-power produces and manages a "population" that exists indeterminate of geography, or such technologies of the nation-state as language, culture, and history.⁴ In other words, the population is the primary locus of organized "biopolitics," not the state, nation, or people. Indeed, bio-power names dynamic networks of relations that construct the human as a technical system (regardless of geography)--a matrix or locus where force and power relations are exercised, challenged, and simultaneously codified. It is for this reason that I will use the term "Market English" in this analysis to emphasize that the language is not connected to a specific nation-state, culture, or national history, and to draw attention to the virtual universalization of neo-liberalist discourses (laissez-faire economics) through the consensus of development.

THE WORLD BANK AND US

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) form the Bretton Woods institutions; they were created in 1945 as economic regulatory mechanisms to police potential economic crises lurking in the global economic system.⁵ Beginning as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) to help rebuild Europe after WWII, the Bank soon branched out into making loans for the impoverished world. All business, including consulting work in client countries (done more often than not by companies in the US and member countries of the OECD), is in English. Although the Bank is technically defined as an umbrella organization of the United Nations, it has since grown to become the wealthiest and most influential development institution of the world, holding 11 percent of the public and private debt in the impoverished world. Nation-states form partnerships with the Bretton Woods institutions because they need an infusion of capital and have no other options.

Following a singular ideology of economic development, countries in the "developing world" often equate the Bank, with good reason, to an institution of US power politics. The goals and policies of the US State Department and the specific goals of the national government's Cold War power politics once directly affected the Bank⁶; however, its function has transformed since Robert Strange McNamara's reign as President (1968-1981). McNamara is undoubtedly one of the most defining figures in the Bank's history. He is perhaps better remembered as the US's Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, where he was responsible for much of the US's military escalation during the Vietnam War, earning him the moniker of the "Butcher of Hanoi" during the late 60's. Significantly, McNamara left the Secretary of Defense position in 1968-ironically at both the height of US intervention in Vietnam and opposition to it-to become President of the World Bank. McNamara's greatest legacy at the Bank was the Structural Adjustment Loans (SAL's). Programs of "structural adjustment" invariably require currency devaluation, trade liberalization, privatization of state industries, a reduced role for government (including reduced social spending), high interest rates, and a compression of wages. These strategies interfere in the economic policy of autonomous nation-states by obligating them to shift resources from production for the domestic economy to export in the global market. There is an obvious uneven relationship between the Bank and the countries it "helps" because of the structure of debt. The Bank uses debt to formulate a consensus around laissez-faire economics, a.k.a. free market liberalism. The endless drain of capital, people, and resources to service debts to the World Bank and its creditors makes it impossible, however, to realize the economic benefits and freedoms that the World Bank claims to adduce. In this capacity, debt operates as a system of management and control, a hybrid form of hegemony and incorporation into the global market. In other words, debt functions as a complex matrix of power and management techniques that challenge the sovereign power of nation-states through fluid and dynamic "open" systems of control. Debt to the World Bank engenders statist forms of control ("étatisation" and biopower in Foucault's parlance) in an array of intellectual, political, economic, and cultural formations that usurp the sovereign force of the nation-state.

The "partnership" between the World Bank and Vietnam indicates how nation-states auction their sovereign power to global institutions "will-fully" because of a general lack of alternatives. In 1986 the government of Vietnam instigated a policy of doi moi, "Renovation," that sanctioned a program of market liberalization in Vietnam. Since Vietnam's movement to a market economy began, however, the dollar has become the store of value and, in effect, a safer mechanism of exchange than the local currency, the dong. As a result, Vietnam's economy is tied to the fluctuations of the American dollar, which is the standard of value rather than its national currency. The Vietnamese nation-state does not provide a mode of resistance to financial or global capital in its "partnership" with the World Bank, which has become especially apparent in light of the World Bank's initiatives on education in Vietnam. The Bank has pledged over $83.3 million to implement programs of "coherence, flexibility, accountability, efficiency and transparency" for Vietnam's education system. Due to these sizable loans, the Vietnamese state's oversight of projects in education depends upon the imperatives and loan agreements of the World Bank.

The waning sovereignty of Vietnam over the education of its "people" is not an isolated case. The Bank has increasingly focused on education as part of its "human capital" development initiatives throughout the 90's, demonstrating that it is no longer merely the tool of infrastructure building. The Bank plays a singularly important role in international lending for education because it is armed with endless reserves of capital, an army of consultants, and a neo-liberal economic mission to perfect. Affecting education policy is very important for the Bank because of the nation-state's historical role as the primary educator of its "citizens," and the lasting impact education can have in a particular country. To help make its vision a reality, the Bank has shifted its resources and lending from material and utilitarian productions-say the building of a school or providing money for books--, to information, knowledge, and policy reform to refine the performance of human capital.

Nation-states have historically fostered their legitimacy through citizens. Education plays the primary role, therefore, in the production of citizen-subjects "for themselves" and "in themselves" through the state. Language and national literatures have performed an essential part in the creation and sanctioning of culture in the west to define the history of human experience through subject formation. The organic model of culture that unites the "authentic" cultural subject with a language comes from the German idealist tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johann Fichte, and, most synthetically, Alexander von Humboldt. The "learning process" includes accumulating knowledge over time [Wissenshaft], expertise in language, national history, and a set of identities by which to recognize the community and its differentiation from other communities. Training or Bildung forms the character and morality of individuals as reflections of that culture [Bildung], or in other words as subjects of the state.⁷ Indeed, technologies of the state codify culture and histories to produce continuity between generations and ascribe a culture to a territory; in the process, they circulate an ideal and guiding principle of what its citizens are supposed to embody.

The Bank does not require citizen-subjects, so critical to modernity's organization of knowledge and the history of the nation-state. As a result, the Bank has little use for the nation-state system's tools of national culture, national history, and a national literature; therefore, the Bank's concept of education substantially differs from humanist and Enlightenment concepts of education, which see the human with a culture and subjectivity as the central facet of the system. Instead, the World Bank institutes the German idealist's development model of Bildung formation with human subject formation developing or unfolding over time, but utility is both the origin and final goal (telos) of the Bank's education policies. The Bank has no need for something like the "human condition". Education, for the Bank, produces total quality managers who can perpetually acquire new skills and consume mechanized, and easily fungible knowledge. These new managers efficiently plug-into networks of relations (problem-solving for example) to manipulate forces without disrupting the efficiency of the system. They operate as conduits of and for information--like living databases--that have the capacity to act in a number of fluid situations. Rather than cut funding for client country's educational programs, the Bank multiplies forms of training, making it seemingly perpetual because humans as capital must consistently refine themselves or develop.

The World Bank determines, in effect, the limits of what life has value. In other words, the Bank tries to define the limit of what was previously the sovereign decision of states over its people, namely what "life is worth living." As Giorgio Agamben convincingly argues through the work of Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin in Homo Sacer⁸ the sovereign decision of who or what can be a citizen (in the community or nomos) gives way to defining what a human is and can be, where life exists. Foucault's thought on bio-power suggests a shift from considering the rules of law and the structures of the state, emblematized through the exercising of force, to focus on how "norms" are produced and conducted through the codification of regulatory processes that "govern" a population or society. Bio-power forces reflection on the regulation of populations, regardless of geography, where structures operate that traverse national boundaries and the juridical technologies of nation-states: "because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population ... A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life."⁹ For Foucault regulating "life" does not entail only the biological formation of preserving the species, but codifying value systems, forms of knowledge, political possibilities, and the "regimes of truth." Agamben takes up Foucault's notion of bio-power by scrutinizing a distinction between two concepts of life from Greek philosophy, represented by Aristotle's different words for life in the Nicomachean Ethics, bios and zo_. Bios describes a determined or political form of life, and zo_ "bare" or natural life. Living beings are emblematic of sovereign power's "fundamental activity"; indeed, "life"--not the polis, communitas, or natio-- are the originary element for the political life of bios. Life that carries a certain political relevance or social existence (bios) is deemed sacred, and hence can be protected by the protocols of sovereignty and such technologies of different nation-state as rights and laws. Homo Sacer, or "bare life," is, on the other hand, that life which can be killed without committing homicide, in other words it is not recognized in the domain of law, citizen, and/or human. For Agamben "bare life" is "life that can be killed but not sacrificed"; it is not human, but still pre-differentiated energy. The sovereign decision of what life is worth living, central to the production of creating peoples, cultures, and languages, defers to more utilitarian and "bare" concerns. Transnational institutions like the World Bank try to manage life by defining the limit of "bare life"--what life can be killed but not sacrificed. Certain humans are expendable, but they cannot be sacrificed callously. Rather, the market must make humanitarian gestures for "bare life" humans to contribute, even if it entails bringing conditions that will result in their being killed slowly and systematically through toxins. They are "bare life" humans: life that can be killed, but not sacrificed.

In a similar vein, life that is not "sufficiently educated" along the Bank's policies will not have the "right" to live. Bio-power in this emerging formation is exercised to conduct forms of life that follow the discourses of market liberalization and economic development-in other words, the production of humans as capital. Life that falls outside this system has ironically the "right to die" in the name of perfecting a higher performing (economic) system. The market exercises decisions on who lives or dies, and produces populations of "bare life"-life that is expendable because it has not sufficiently adapted to the demands of the market--and "global life"--life that is worth living because it follows market consensus.
Market English is a skill or tool that expedites the efficiency of the global economic system. English maintains hegemony in the publication industry of global intellectual production with particular significance in medicine, science, and economics. According to UNESCO statistics, 1.3 billion out of the 3 billion humans in the world have some familiarity with English. Fifty percent of all translations in the world are into English, while only 6% of the world's intellectual production is translated from another language into English.¹⁰ This is not to suggest that English is being standardized--far from it if one considers Singapore English (Singlish), Jamaican English, Hong Kong English, or the multiple forms of linguistic expression in every country where English is spoken. Rather language as constitutive of a particular national tradition is losing its critical force. The Goethean notion of literature representing the best ideas of a particular national language does not hold in this context. Nor does the project of Weltliteratur initially proposed by Goethe and extended by Erich Auerbach of great books and a curious synthesis of all the world's literatures indicate English's ubiquity. The circulation of English is not designed to circulate the best ideas of American or British authors in the creation of a world culture, unless John Grisham and Agatha Christie are deemed the pinnacle of national culture. I want to emphasize, therefore, that English does not function as a universal global language, but an instrumental language conducive to international commerce, tourism, and international governance technologies. For example, it is the official language of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Asia-Pacific Economic Council (APEC), custom declarations, air-traffic controllers and maritime agreements, and international contracts.

Although English's ubiquity in Asia does mark the trace of an imperial legacy of the United States and Britain, it does not need to be formally funded by state organizations in the US and Britain. Therefore, it does not follow the same acculturation technologies of mimicry and assimilation moving from the core to the periphery as colonialism and imperialism did. In fact, English language training is frequently left to private companies. An effect of this formation is that English language programs teach "Basic English" or "tourist English," which merely provide a series of English language scripts of various client contexts that can be rehearsed. However, any use of English outside of the script exceeds the limits of this mechanized or transparent English. The US and Britain are, therefore, not selling culture or a specific "English" or "American" way of life with its language, but rather a commodity that facilitates market integration and the cash-nexus. Needless to say, this system helps companies from the US and Britain to penetrate and gain leverage in markets throughout the world.

Market English does not reflect a specific national culture, but flows with transnational capital, seeming to belong to everyone and no one, much like the market. Market English transforms continuously from its standardized or grammatical form, for much of it derives from televisual media, music, and movies. In this formation English is oral and visual, not textual and symbolic, or the domain of the law and technique of state. The language is, therefore, more likely inflected by the lyrics of the Spice Girls than Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare. Consequently, new formations of humans emerge who can rehearse the song lyrics of the Britney Spears or Rage Against the Machine with impeccable American accents, but can not understand what they are saying. With Market English we frequently have an "articulation without reference," an enunciation without reference. A language divorced from reference, national history, and state formation indicates an interesting facet of Market English's circulation. English increasingly operates as a vehicle of communication detached from the notion of a bond between a state, national identity or culture, historical tradition, and geographical territory that guided modernity and the European nation-state.

Developing into "authentic" market subjects for the World Bank and in the process transcending the disciplinary mechanisms of the nation-state requires learning English. The Bank does not need, however, to promote English in its curriculum reform, nor does it attach English language training to its loan requirements. Access to, and knowledge of, English may provide, I think, an instance of bio-power and facilitate the production of new forms of life: a "global human" who gains advantage through knowledge of the market and the possibility of becoming freed from the determinate horizon of the nation. Let me elaborate with an example.

Vietnam has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Indeed, UNESCO awarded it a King Sejong bronze medal award for literacy in 1997 for Vietnam's commitment to literacy because more than 91% of its population can read and write Vietnamese.¹¹ In the aftermath of its 1975 victory over the US-backed South Vietnam, the government of "unified" Vietnam allocated considerable money to maintain the language as the bearer of the culture. Vietnam's iterative government mandates on language acquisition and literacy adhered to the humanist and Enlightenment conceptions of culture I outlined above. In this regard, Vietnam demonstrates an often-repeated move by countries in the wake of decolonization. By preserving the language, national history and culture are unshackled or reborn at the moment of decolonization. In this capacity, the condition of "Vietnameseness" is marked as the ability to speak and be literate in the language.

Since moving to market reforms, however, the level of those who are "functionally literate" has not dropped. Yet an increasing number of literate Vietnamese subjects do not have the necessary skills to work with/for transnational corporations because they do not speak English.¹² They have become, in the language of commerce, redundant. Literate Vietnamese merely become redundant or stores of culture that have no value in the market. Culture conceived as reflection of linguistic expression or as vehicle of knowledge does not seem, I think, to have a future in this brave new world. Rather, in the terms of bio-power, literate Vietnamese are forms of life that must adapt to the needs of the market for English speakers ... or die.

The previous decision of sovereignty on language as emblematic of the "right of entry" into the "imagined community" cedes to the "right" of exchange between mechanisms of communication that expedite the flow of goods, services, and people. Language acquisition is no longer the right of entry for citizenship, but can help define "life that is worth living" in the impoverished world, as exemplified by Vietnam. Those who speak English have a comparative advantage in the present, despite the fact that more humans in the world speak Chinese and Hindi. English will become another accumulated form of knowledge necessary to achieve a type of integration into the market. Others will be considered redundant and relegated to the black hole of poverty. The exercising of bio-power systematically determines and simultaneously exterminates bare life in the developing world. It comes armed with a self-righteous benevolence that cannot conceive of its technical prowess in killing without sacrificing.

Market English forces reflection on inchoate formations of society, and on what forms society and community. Language must be thought differently--in other words no longer as an organic structure of being and identity, of language marking culture. Organic formations of language codify the "collective assemblage of enunciation" that exists within each language to engender a national subject who speaks a language. Languages conceived as organic forms, put other languages into relation and mark their differences. They gain coherence for state institutions only when articulated next to other languages. In other words, language becomes "communicational" and "informational" precisely when other people do not understand it. The residual power of organic notions of language and reference, we see proliferating in heinous acts of ethnic violence, where language and ethnicity are collapsed into being.

It may help first to recognize the indeterminacy of semiotic regimes as a coalescence of several coexisting regimes of signs that do not add up to predetermined register of writing, or have a corresponding referent. We need to acknowledge that every sign is merely a sign of another sign, the referent does not hold. There is enunciation without reference. As Michel Foucault suggests, language must be a thinking that simultaneously provokes the "outside of thought"-thinking that unravels the limits of nation, people, and aggregates of identities. The "thought of the outside" does not presume a subject with an interiority, a being with a soul from which consciousness emits. The "thought of the outside" unravels correspondences between words and things, and visibility and truth. Language functions for Foucault as an indeterminate matter, a collective aggregate of enunciation that does not have the human as an object: "when language arrives at its own edge, what it finds is not a positively that contradicts it but the void that will efface it. Into that void it must go, consenting to come undone in the rumbling, in the immediate negation of what it says, in a silence that is not the intimacy of a secret but a pure outside where words endlessly unravel."¹³ By invoking Foucault's "thought of the outside," I am suggesting nothing less than the need to think language physically and mathematically as aggregates of enunciation.

Considering language as fluctuating matter and function may provide some lines of flight for thinking's potential in the emerging global system. Such thinking highlights the inorganic forms of language, as a dynamic materiality of molecular formations. In short, it is to think the manner in which language is not a pre-given, but relations of forces, energy, and molecules that forces of power try to discipline, domesticate, make national or native. The World Bank and its organs reiterate the habit of Enlightenment notions of language as reflecting a human subjectivity, expressing a human will, or embodying the nation/culture, yet unhinge it from the nation for utilitarian purposes. Thinking language differently from this Enlightenment model is imperative for departments of English in the US surfing the borderlines of obsolescence. Otherwise, we may sit waiting for a debt to be repaid by language's redemptive qualities, and the immaculate return of state sovereignty and cultural resistance. And yet the debt we think is only a state of emergency is the rule.

Notes

¹ The World Bank Group actually encompasses five separate agencies: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Development Corporation, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes. See Catherine Caufield's Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996) for an important analysis of the Bank.

² See Vietnam: Education Financing (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997), p. xiii.

³ Ibid., p. 109.

⁴ See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

⁵ See Susan George's and Fabrizio Sabelli's Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994) for further details.

⁶ See numerous examples in Caufield.

⁷ This entire paragraph owes a debt to Bill Readings' The University in Ruin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Reflections on the Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 1991).

⁸ Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

⁹ The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, p. 137, 144.

¹⁰ See the UNESCO website section for translation statistics in "Index Translationum: Did you Know? English Domaintes," at http://www.unesco.org/culture/xtrans/html_engl/index6.htm. As UNESCO acknowledges: "Certain publishing houses tend to use the difficulty of finding good translators as an excuse to hide their reluctance to pay translation rights...This is perhaps one way of controlling the market and maintaining the cultural dominance of English and the market is controlled through what is on offer, through the availability of products sold by the industry of culture-whether it is music, or films, or books."

¹¹ See Newsletters: Embassy of Vietnam in the US, No. 9702, October 2, 1997, available at http://www.vietnamembassy-usa.org/newleter9102.html.

¹² See "Standing Out in the Crowd", Vietnam Business Journal Vol. VI, No. 4 (July/August 1998).

¹³ Ibid., p. 152