Lingualscape

Excerpt from my recent published article"

Bang Bang Bang – Nonsense or an Alternative Language?

The Lingualscape in the Chinese Remake of I Am a Singer "

Language implies a certain structure or code (Bauman and Briggs

2003; Makoni and Pennycook 2005). To acknowledge what Derrida calls

the “untranslatable” is a post-structuralist escape from the “violence of

representation” (Derrida 2000). Lie points out that even in music, the socalled

“universal language,” there still exists a “resistance to a foreignlanguage

lyric” (Lie 2012). Foreigners are the ones from a different culture

speaking different languages. When one culture, in the course of engaging

with another culture, requires the foreigner to speak the host language,

the host culture performs violence as a host. This so-called hospitality is

conditional; as Jacques Derrida suggests, it forces foreigners to be one of

“us” and thus “violently erases the heterogeneity of others” (Derrida 2000).

The uttering of the quasi-nonsense “bang bang bang ” is both a foreigners’

revolt against violent conditional hospitality and the host’s open acceptance

of the foreigners’ utterings. Language is not a transparent medium; rather, it

is constructed, if not manipulated, by various intentions within the nationstate

apparatus. By both acknowledging human linguistic diversity and

staying alert to the agenda of control through language, the uttering of the

meaningless yet meaningful “bang bang bang ” in Hwang’s performance

opens a window of connecting audiences free of cohesive violence. Thus, I

venture to propose that the de-territorialising lingualscape in the Sino-Korean

engagement of musical TV shows is a reconstruction of a world order through

nonofficial language – a new world order reimagined through the apparatus

of screen, one that is decentred, eliminating barriers for communication and

establishing visual relations through which audiences achieve a vernacular

relationship to one another. It is an order in which affective qualities mediate

the relationships between the audiences. The live and offscreen audiences are

related and communicate with each other, experiencing affective interactions

that traverse on- and offscreen environments...