Doing Violence to Language

In their trite language, shallow reasoning and obsession with status the "News Agents" podcast team of Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall quickly established themselves as the voice of liberal Middle England: patronising, entitled and fundamentally anti-intellectual. But the Bondi Beach murders and the immediate unanimity of the press in claiming that this is what "globalise the intifada" means has now prompted them to grapple with the linguistic turn in philosophy, albeit half a century late. Obviously they weren't about to start quoting Foucault, let alone Wittegenstein, but they were happy to dabble in speech-act theory as Maitlis asked "If language becomes entrenched, does it become the beginning of violence? Is language itself violent?" Sopel's response was to note that two propositions can be simultaneously true: that words in support of Palestinians can be legitimate and also intimidating to Jews, which makes it a "knotty problem" for the police. As an aside, the police appear to have cut the knot by agreeing to arrest people if there is enough media clamour over certain phrases and then let the courts sort it out.

This was a fatuous exchange that simply highlighted once more the pernicious role of asymmetric balance in broadcast media. Thus the right of pro-Palestinian protestors to articulate a political demand is balanced by the right of certain British Jews to not feel uncomfortable. The historian Simon Schama chipped in on Twitter to cite John Stuart Mill's harm principle, which can be summarised as: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." This is more popularly interpreted by the phrase (often misattributed to Mill) "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins". But the problem with this is that the point at which another's action becomes a harm to you may not be as obvious as the end of your nose. UK law is quite clear that words can only be considered illegal if they constitute hate speech, incitement or defamation. The problem arises in determining what words amount to hate, incitement or defamation.

In the 1970s, the linguistic turn led to a recognition that vocabularies and grammar reflect structures of power. At the practical level, the result was a lot more attention being paid to the effect of language. There were positive aspects to this, such as the growing social unacceptability of racist, homophobic and misogynistic remarks, but also negative aspects, such as moralising and tone-policing. As these developments were seen as progressive, the inevitable reactionary response was an initial focus on "free speech absolutism", which largely boiled down to the right of powerful white men to verbally abuse minorities. But this has now given way on the political right to an explicit embrace of censorship, often by the same people who still insist on their right to free speech. This apparent paradox is easily resolved when you realise that it is founded on a hierarchy of regard: certain people's feelings matter and should be protected by the state, while other people's feelings don't matter so you are free to insult them. It is an example of Wilhoit's Law in action.

The right has always recuperated progressive ideas and rhetoric for reactionary ends. Thus the concept of liberty, which began as a demand for the freedom of religious conscience, eventually came to mean little more than the rights of property-holders. The "language is violence" trope is just the latest example of this process. A phrase once associated with feminists critiquing consumer culture is now deployed to justify banning protests. Perhaps the most startling example of recuperation in recent years has been the transformation of "radical" feminism from an emancipatory and generous project into a reactionary and paranoid one whose apparent goal is to excise the very possibility of gender non-conformance. This obviously doesn't describe all feminists or all feminist practice, but you'd struggle to appreciate that if you relied on the media, which simply emphasises the point that language en masse - the volume of words used to describe the world through the channels of public discourse - inevitably reflects the power structures of the day.

The current debate about what can and cannot be said is the inevitable consequence of the government's foolish decision to go beyond proscribing Palestine Action to banning expressions of support for the organisation. This has opened the door for demands to ban various phrases purely on the grounds of subjective interpretation. Thus "from the river to the sea" is interpreted as a call to wipe Israel off the map, rather than a demand for equal rights, while "globalise the intifada" is interpreted as a call for the genocide of all Jews, rather than solidarity with the Palestinian people's struggle. That these interpretations are contested should be evidence enough that they cannot reasonably be banned, but the political speech-act that is the call for their banning is not intended to outlaw specific phrases but to cultivate a climate in which support for the Palestinian cause is always illegitimate. This demand will not be satisfied until the very word "Palestine" is outlawed as harmful to the sensitivities of British Jews. 

What we are witnessing can legitimately be described using that much-abused term Orwellian, whereby a political issue becomes ever more difficult to address as the language is circumscribed. But the world of 1984 is not one in which public discourse is uniformly limited so much as it is stratified by class. The tightly-controlled Newspeak is the argot of the managerial class and the intelligentisa. Prolespeak, the organic language of the mass of workers, is beyond the party's control, hence why Winston Smith believes that it is only among the proles that hope lies, and hence why the party relies on pornography and sentimentality to keep the workers quiet. In Britain today, the common culture is ever more reliant on a media diet of pornography (property porn, food porn etc) and sentimentality, while the intelligentsia is marginalised as irrelevant, and the managerial class employs a vocabulary that emphasises the individual over the collective through the jargon of entrepreneurialism and psychotherapy ("solidarity" is as infra dig as socialism).

In this environment, political discourse is infantilised. Commentators are obsessed with the pettiness of "who's in, who's out" and the playground taunting of the House of Commons. Inquiry is limited to asking politicians to comment on the words of other politicians, rather than to explain policy. And worst of all, the public are assumed to have an intellectual capacity that doesn't extend beyond moronic metaphors about maxed-out credit cards. But if the public is taken to be stupid, it is also taken to be dangerous. An ill-mannered mob that is prey to demagogues (our commentators have all read their Plato), but also an organic mass that is capable of directed action against their betters when activated by agitators. The common thread is the belief that language is both a potential danger (inflammatory) and a potential salve (placatory). 

Orwell was wrong to imagine that sculpting the language of the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia was the basis of totalitarianism, not least because both of those fractions of society are only too keen to self-police for reasons of career advancement and social status. The authority of the state has always depended on preventing ideas in free circulation among the upper strata from reaching the lower. The tragedy of the French Revolution for conservatives, and subsequently for many liberals like Simon Schama, was that ideas of liberty and enlightenment were perverted when deployed among the lower orders, leading to an orgy of violence. Likewise, Emily Maitlis is not suggesting that language is a tool of structural violence, an insight that might lead her to question her own role, but that in the wrong hands it can be destabilising. What the British politico-media caste is arguing for is straighforward censorship.