'ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US': Heteroglossia, language and laughter

Abstract

At the turn of the millennium, ‘All your base are belong to us’ became one of the first, ‘viral’ internet memes. Following Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of ‘heteroglossia’, I demonstrate how its non-standardness came to embody anxiety. In the context of my study, it illustrates the tension between the ideology of standardisation and legitimisation typical of the nation state and an increasing challenge to homogenising forces posed by transnational movements and the appropriation of more fluid linguistic resources across political, cultural and social spaces of late capitalism (Heller and Duchêne, 2012). Focusing on this utterance, I champion the role of the ‘fool’ in creating a ‘laughing truth’ that degrades conceptions of absoluteness and authority (Bakhtin, 1984). First, I establish a contrast between linguistic fixity and ‘laughter’ within the graffiti of a rural, Bedouin village of the Arabian Gulf. Following the utterance to the Hong Kong Street market, I establish ‘All your base are belong to us’ as a ‘laughing truth’ embedded in the ‘new’ global economy and consumer culture. In conclusion, I establish that, like the text-based artist, this role of the ‘fool’ can “demystify and demythologise language for those prepared to listen” (Jaworski, 2014:20) and ‘laugh'.