"(T)hat which is excluded in the enactment of knowledge-discourse-power practices plays a constitutive role in the production of phenomena - exclusions matter both to bodies that come to matter and those excluded from mattering… these entangled practices are productive, and who and what are excluded through these entangled practices matter" (Barad 2007: 57).
I am concerned here with the 'who' and 'what' referred to in the quote above, with the nature of their exclusions in the 'entangled practices' of domestic work and in the entangled relations between paid domestic workers and those for whom they work. And in particular, I am concerned with how these exclusions matter, as well as what they tell us about language practices and how we study them. I started to address these themes in a recently published paper in the Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics (2022, 7, 89-107) and in this paper I take this work further to consider the implications for sociolinguistics and applied linguistics research of taking such exclusions seriously and addressing the ethical implications that are involved. I examine multiple instances, including historical and contemporary examples in the literature on domestic workers as well as empirical research from South Africa, where I focus on interactive relations of intimacy and distance, conviviality and hostility in domestic worker and employer interactions, starting from an example of a slave-owner in pre-abolition England, referring to a 'house-slave' of his: "A slave is a slave and can be sold, but you can eat with him, talk with him, travel with him" (Mason, 1962:29). I start from what Barad (2010: 249) describes as "a discontinuity at the heart of meaning itself" as "the irreducible excess of a disjointure" at the heart of things. Domestic work offers up plenty of such discontinuities and disjointures, where relations of heightened inequality and exploitation counter-exist with relations of familiarity, attachment, conviviality and intimacy, where particular instances of language in social interaction draw on but hide these disjointures. As far as language research is concerned this points to some challenges as to how to go forward, in that particular instances of discursive interaction can be seen to be troubled by an absence or loss, "that which language does not capture" (Butler 1993: 67), thus including "an essential unknowing" which underlies and may undermine what is apparent regarding identity and intention on the part of the people involved, in the language they use. How are intention, identity and agency displaced and rerouted in such entangled practices? How do we consider the buried, accumulated, and interwoven intentions of actors who are less determinate and unitary than we are used to seeing them as being? I draw on particular examples of interactions between and discourses about domestic workers and employers to consider these questions and what they say to us about language and its place in material-discursive practices when we have attempted to dissolve the divides between meaning and materiality, macro and micro, social and technical, along with nature and culture.
