Engaging Superdiversity: The Poiesis-Infrastructures Nexus and Language Practices in Combinatorial Spaces

Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk and Massimiliano Spotti

This book bears the fruit of a group of sociolinguists who, over the last five years, have been exploring the notion of superdiversity. This introduction aims to report and reflect on these engagements, as well as to explore how the latter can trigger future engagements also from other social and human sciences. We argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. In order for this to happen, sociolinguistic superdiversity needs to be properly conceptualized. We argue that engaging the notions of 'poiesis' and 'infrastructure', recombined in the 'poiesis-infrastructures nexus' could constitute a first step in this process of exposing the sociolinguistically-enriched notion of superdiversity. The poiesis-infrastructures nexus is an attempt to rebuild the agency-structure equation by embedding it in a materialist ontology of creative production and the environments in which they take place. The poiesis side of the equation covers social and cultural praxis, iterations and transformations. Infrastructures comprise the normativities, ecologies and affordances that enable and constraint this social and cultural production.

The vantage point is a short, informal note on superdiversity by the late Gerd Baumann (personal communication, spring 2012). Writing when 'super-diversity' – hyphenated at that time – was beginning to boom, Baumann hailed its heuristic prospects and ethnographic challenges while rejecting its usefulness as a summary term. This introduction will largely take the same stance, happily building further on the hasty notes that bear witness to Baumann's tempestuous acumen. His nascent ideas undergird our introduction of the different chapters in this volume whose authors took on the task of engaging the notion of superdiversity during the same booming period (2011 to 2014) when Baumann was jotting down his views.

Looking back on the time when Vertovec (2005) coined the term superdiversity, it is evident that the latter hinged on a flourishing post-1989 anthropology of transnationalism that was trying to break free from its sedentarism and methodological nationalism (Malkki, 1992; Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003) and searching out the contours of an anthropology that explored simultaneity and heterogeneity among and within migrating groups (Grillo, 2001; Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004; Portes et al., 1999; Werbner, 2002) in an increasingly interconnected world (Das & Poole, 2004; Ferguson & Gupta, 2002). Despite its potential pertinence and timeliness, it was not until 2010 that superdiversity began to show up regularly in the academic literature – including in the writings of those who were about to form the working group now known as the International Consortium on Language and Superdiversity (InCoLaS) (Arnaut, 2011; Blommaert, 2010: 6; Creese & Blackledge, 2010; Jørgensen et al., 2016; Rampton, 2010).

The initial intellectual dynamic of InCoLaS largely revolved around the 'Language and Superdiversity'manifesto co-authored by Blommaert and Rampton (2011, also 2016). This position paper was a major achievement. Apart from explaining superdiversity to sociolinguists and indicating how to 'apply' it to the benefit of sociolinguistic analysis, it demonstrated how a range of both established and more innovative notions and tools from contemporary sociolinguistics, (linguistic) anthropology and sociology were generating data and insights amounting to an emergent 'superdiversity of language' research programme capable of 'seeing', describing and analysing how people are shaping their lives within ever more pervasive interconnectivity and newly emerging forms of commonality. In hindsight, Blommaert and Rampton's position paper heralded the 'voyage in' of superdiversity into large sections of sociolinguistics. In these introductory notes, we re-visit the notion by tracing its past journey while trying to prepare its future itinerary by making suggestions for its partial reconceptualising. The main concern here is to organise superdiversity's 'voyage out' from sociolinguistics to the human and social sciences. So far, the sociolinguistics of superdiversity are leaving only minimal traces in the anthropological or sociological superdiversity literature; see, e.g. the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies38 (4); Stringer (2014), Phillips and Webber (2014) and Aspinall (2012) are other examples. The issue may well be one of translating insights and findings. 'Poiesis' in combination with 'infrastructure', we argue, may act as intermediary or bridging concepts because they grasp the current academic imagination in matters of diversity and mobility.

Whether they were presented as work-in-progress papers during InCoLaS meetings several years ago or added more recently, each in their own way, the chapters in this volume can be seen as constituting moments in superdiversity's 'voyage in'. Over a period of five years (and counting), small-scale InCoLaS meetings were hosted by the consortium's main institutional members: the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen (2011, 2012), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity...