Linguistic form: a political epistemology

This chapter explores ideological dimensions of contemporary mainstream linguistics, especially with reference to the ``unique form hypothesis'': the assumption that each language has a single form, which it is the role of linguistics to characterize. The chapter surveys grounds for scepticism about the hypothesis, reviews some recent ideological critiques of linguistics, and sketches the contours of a speculative ``political epistemology'' of the unique form hypothesis, suggesting how well-known critiques of the other social sciences might apply to structural linguistics research. It pays special attention to the unique form hypothesis' role as a vehicle for the discretionary intellectual authority of the linguistic expert -- in the pedagogical context, the lecturer who serves as the origin and authority of the ideas about language structure transmitted to the linguistics student. This authority is argued to replicate and so to normalize, in the domain of education, the kinds of relations of social domination on which contemporary political orders rest. As a result of this discussion, the theoretical biases of contemporary linguistics are replaced in the broader socio-ideological context to which they belong, and considered with respect to some classic political critiques of ``bourgeois'' social science.\label{q:riemer:domination