at varying degrees of mutual awareness, directness of contact, and possibilities of reciprocation. To speak of communicative mediation is to observe that communicative signs formulate a bridge or connection among those they link, mediating social relations through activities of uptake and response at different scales of social history. (Agha 2011, 163)
In this quote, Agha explicitly linked linguistic codes with media channels. They served as social bridges between signers and interpreters, though “receivers” shaped those collectivities by the ways they responded to the messages across contexts. Agha viewed spoken, print, and electronic media as all material channels mediating social relations: “Utterances and discourses are themselves material objects made through human activity—made, in a physical sense, out of vibrating columns of air, ink on paper, pixels in electronic media—which exercise real effects upon our senses, minds, and modes of social organization” (Agha 2007, 2–3). As recounted in Episode 4, linguistic codes (urban French-infused darīja, French, and standard Arabic) mediated the family’s relations as channels for renewing their family closeness as well as transnational politics they connected to their own lives (telecommunications and tourist clients).27 Importantly, I explore the social-material effects of these phatic moments, when Fassis foregrounded or erased language forms and channel affordances.
I will argue that Fassis see codes and channels as partaking of some of the same qualities. They are both tools of connectedness, both susceptible to hidden agendas (parasites), invisible when they work well and troublesome when appropriate connection fails. More importantly, when channels (whether language forms or media) become visible because of their supposed failure or backgrounded because they are working well, they change the participant structures of media engagement and thus relationality (Gershon and Manning 2014, 544–45). Situating how Fassis understood them at any moment may help understand how these language codes and media channels mediated Moroccanness. My Moroccan interlocutors slipped between lamenting codes and channels as troublesome bridges and taken-for-granted mediums for bringing them together. In other words, they regularly critiqued the idea that language and media were designed to bring people together, even as in other contexts they expected language and media channels to do so. As Eisenlohr noted, both linguistic codes and media channels move between highly visible elements of communication and disappearing in moments of mediation (2011, 267). Gershon and Manning argued that language codes and media channels were distinguished analytically when scholars moved away from co-present interaction and viewed media’s materiality as different from language (2014, 539). Shaping this distinction was the ideology of spoken language as a default, immaterial medium for meaning (a widespread Enlightenment idea; see Irvine 1989) and media as the various material and technological extensions that facilitate meaning’s circulation (Eisenlohr 2011, 267). Other scholars didn’t make this distinction: “media” included mediums, communicative channels, technologies, platforms, genres, and products (Spitulnik 2000, 148). It was a shifter, referring to whatever the users meant. In this way, media could be both an intermediary and a mediator, a medium and an actor. Language and media forms could be the means to connect Moroccans, but also shape and even constrain what it meant to connect as Moroccans in Fez.
I adopt Kockelman’s blend of Peircian semiotic theory (Peirce 1955 [1897–1910], 80) and actor-network mediation (Serres 2007 [1980], 65; Latour 2005, 39) to suggest how this might work (Kockelman 2010, 413). When Toufiq spoke French-influenced darīja at home, he was employing it as a channel connecting himself to his family and other darīja speakers. This was darīja as intermediary. Samira Sitail employed darīja-dubbed serials as part of a pluralism project to decenter formal Arabic’s hold over Moroccanness. Critics viewed Samira Sitail’s darīja television programs as serving a different kind of purpose—diverting Moroccans both through bad programming and by darijization of public life. This was darīja as mediator. In this way, 2M’s urban French–influenced darīja mediated Moroccans through form and content, leaving material effects on social relations. Kockelman called this the parasitic function, when codes become troubling mediators of Moroccanness (because of associations linked to the channel), rather than an intermediary conduit connecting Moroccans. To be clear, French-influenced darīja mediated social relations in Toufiq’s family as well, but less visibly and explicitly. The family did not see darīja at that moment as a problematic channel in the ways Samira Satail and her critics did in their interactions. French-influenced darīja was both code and channel, parasite and facilitator, medium and mediator, material and nonvisible—depending on the context. Making a channel visible as a problematic mediator of relationality was key to Fassi sociality reform projects.
I explore Fassi responses to other examples of mediation/intermediary labor of communicative reform in Chapters 3 and 4. From the late 2000s to 2016, a group of Moroccan cultural producers repurposed a rhymed prose form of darīja (هدرة الميزان [hadra lmīzan]) associated with grandmothers and street performers to convey “modern” Moroccan civic values. Most often this involved promoting equality for women. In doing so, they sought to make a linguistic form, rhymed prose, into a mediator of Moroccanness, shaping viewers’ perceptions of civic engagement through a nostalgic medium primed with equality content. As I ethnographically followed the social life of this register through everyday media practices, I recognized the way phaticity shaped the actor possibilities of rhymed prose. The kinds of phatic communion described in Episodes 3 and 4 didn’t always involve focused attention to programming content. I track the ways my Fassi interlocutors nostalgically appreciated the reproduction of hadra lmīzan on television but seemed to miss entirely the “modern” civic values content. They did so because of implicit and explicit media consumption and relationality ideologies embedded in their webs of everyday phatic connectivity.
Building from the moral relationality of the rhymed prose in heritage television programs, in Chapter 4 I analyze the ways laments about Arabic writing have shaped practices of phatic connection in Fez. I look at the ways Fassis engaged darīja writing as a blending of multisensory channels tied to specific media platforms: folklore books, WhatsApp, advertising billboards, and newsprint. Merging the aural/spoken soundscape (Hirschkind 2006) and the visual/graphic linguascape (Blommaert 2013), I examine the intertwining of these sensorial channels in the sounding of darīja script and scripting of darīja sounds by reading subjects (see Inoue 2006), everyday Moroccans who authorized themselves to weigh in on the politics of writing. In the face of debates about the role of language in Moroccan relationality, Fassi everyday scriptic heterogeneity pointed to a practice of ambivalence toward written darīja in specific media platforms, but not others. The platforms of writing mattered to the phatic work of connecting Moroccans in Fez.
This is an ethnography about the ideologies and anxieties Fassis shared with me about the mediums of that connectedness: spoken and written language forms, electronic and print media, and the personas indexed by them. More significantly, it is about how Fassis connected, identified each other, and failed to relate. It is about the mediating of overlapping and differentiated Moroccanness projects in urban Fez and describing the phatic communion rituals that furthered the political productivity of communicative failure. The constant critique of failed connectivity evidenced Fassis investment in communicative reform, both as a reviving of “lost” sociality and a recalibrating of future relationality forms. As carefully cultivated relations, the everyday work and pleasure of media talk (talk during and about media events) facilitated access to and participation in Moroccanness projects as conversations unfolded. While there were many participant frameworks, or configurations of interactional roles and statuses (Goodwin and Goodwin 2006), that I participated in throughout my fieldwork, the primary location for much of my research was Fassi homes. I conducted interviews with Moroccan media producers, public school teachers, and public intellectuals, as well as observing countless everyday interactions spanning a decade—some of which I audio-recorded and others about which I
