The need, but importantly, the possibility.
Violence and Language
By Mary Louise Pratt on May 21, 2011
I find violence very unsatisfying as an object of study. We intellectuals use the term all the time as if we knew and agreed on what it is, what the term refers to. But in fact I think the concept of violence doesn't have contours for us -- perhaps that is something we can discuss. Violence has scenarios, like the ones we have been discussing, it has nodes, but I'm not sure what its contours are. It is an abstraction. And at the same time, it is unsatisfying when we analyze violence in the concrete, as a thing that is either present or absent. Doing this also almost always feels inadequate, in part because violence is always potentially present.
-The main topic I'd like to talk about today, however, is language and violence. In our common sense, we often speak as if violence and language were mutually exclusive. We think one begins where the other ends: when people stop talking, they start fighting, when they stop fighting they start talking. We see violence and words, violence and language, in complementary distribution. We also think of violence as often that which is beyond language. People often describe war as being beyond words. But violence actually is almost always accompanied by language.
One of the reasons why language cannot grasp violence, I think, is that it is usually embedded in it. When violence occurs, it seems to rely much of the time on a discursive accompaniment that assigns the violence its meaning. Such verbal framing marks the social character of violence. Anthropologists say that aggression is biological, violence is social. It seems to me that very often the accompanying language gives violence its social meaning, gives it its social character. So even though violence might erupt when dialogue stops, language is usually there as an accompaniment to violence. This is also true in the case of torture. Elaine Scarry's famous book, The Body in Pain, describes torture as the thing beyond language, that which breaks past the possibility of language. But in fact, as testimonial texts reveal, torture is almost always accompanied by a verbal commentary that assigns it a social or interpersonal meaning. For example, torture may be accompanied by interrogation, and the relation between them works both ways. Torture can be an instrument for interrogation, but it's just as common I believe that interrogation is the alibi or the pretext for cruelty.
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When trying to grasp the ability of language to wound, to destroy, and to harm, Riley specifies and emphasizes the absolute importance of something that linguists have never figured out what to do with, which is the reality of inner speech; the reality of language that goes on in the head. Inner speech, Riley argues, is the carrier of linguistic injury. She states, "Injurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of the one at whom it was aimed... The curse does work."[4] She reflects eloquently in her work on the effects of what she calls "this sonorous and indwelling aspect of vindictive words." "Repeated over time those words can in-grow" she says, "embedding themselves in the hearer until the message is no longer felt to come from the outside."[5] This for her is the crucial way that words can wound. Riley notes that words of love and beauty can also indwell and have the same capacity to repeat themselves in the mind but she says "Love's work pales in comparison with Hate's work because hate injures and injury requires healing." Language, on the other hand, is indifferent to that distinction. Language operates, as she says, "with a deep indifference as to where the side of the good may lie."[6] So there is no function within the linguistic system that distinguishes between the word of love and the word of hate. The need for and the possibility of linguistic healing then, is probably the clearest evidence of the reality of linguistic harm. And that is what I have to say.
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By Mary Louise Pratt on May 21, 2011
I find violence very unsatisfying as an object of study. We intellectuals use the term all the time as if we knew and agreed on what it is, what the term refers to. But in fact I think the concept of violence doesn't have contours for us -- perhaps that is something we can discuss. Violence has scenarios, like the ones we have been discussing, it has nodes, but I'm not sure what its contours are. It is an abstraction. And at the same time, it is unsatisfying when we analyze violence in the concrete, as a thing that is either present or absent. Doing this also almost always feels inadequate, in part because violence is always potentially present.
-The main topic I'd like to talk about today, however, is language and violence. In our common sense, we often speak as if violence and language were mutually exclusive. We think one begins where the other ends: when people stop talking, they start fighting, when they stop fighting they start talking. We see violence and words, violence and language, in complementary distribution. We also think of violence as often that which is beyond language. People often describe war as being beyond words. But violence actually is almost always accompanied by language.
One of the reasons why language cannot grasp violence, I think, is that it is usually embedded in it. When violence occurs, it seems to rely much of the time on a discursive accompaniment that assigns the violence its meaning. Such verbal framing marks the social character of violence. Anthropologists say that aggression is biological, violence is social. It seems to me that very often the accompanying language gives violence its social meaning, gives it its social character. So even though violence might erupt when dialogue stops, language is usually there as an accompaniment to violence. This is also true in the case of torture. Elaine Scarry's famous book, The Body in Pain, describes torture as the thing beyond language, that which breaks past the possibility of language. But in fact, as testimonial texts reveal, torture is almost always accompanied by a verbal commentary that assigns it a social or interpersonal meaning. For example, torture may be accompanied by interrogation, and the relation between them works both ways. Torture can be an instrument for interrogation, but it's just as common I believe that interrogation is the alibi or the pretext for cruelty.
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When trying to grasp the ability of language to wound, to destroy, and to harm, Riley specifies and emphasizes the absolute importance of something that linguists have never figured out what to do with, which is the reality of inner speech; the reality of language that goes on in the head. Inner speech, Riley argues, is the carrier of linguistic injury. She states, "Injurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of the one at whom it was aimed... The curse does work."[4] She reflects eloquently in her work on the effects of what she calls "this sonorous and indwelling aspect of vindictive words." "Repeated over time those words can in-grow" she says, "embedding themselves in the hearer until the message is no longer felt to come from the outside."[5] This for her is the crucial way that words can wound. Riley notes that words of love and beauty can also indwell and have the same capacity to repeat themselves in the mind but she says "Love's work pales in comparison with Hate's work because hate injures and injury requires healing." Language, on the other hand, is indifferent to that distinction. Language operates, as she says, "with a deep indifference as to where the side of the good may lie."[6] So there is no function within the linguistic system that distinguishes between the word of love and the word of hate. The need for and the possibility of linguistic healing then, is probably the clearest evidence of the reality of linguistic harm. And that is what I have to say.
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