Linguistic Disobedience

Restoring Power to Civic Language

Yuliya Komska, Michelle Moyd, David Gramling

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319920092
• eBook ISBN: 9783319920108
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book asks how we—as citizens, immigrants, activists, teachers—can counter the abuse of language in our midst. How can we take back the power of language from those who flaunt that power to silence or erase us and our fellows? In search of answers, Linguistic Disobedience recalls ages and situations that made critiquing, correcting, and caring for language essential for survival. From turn-of-the-twentieth-century Central Europe to the miseries of the Third Reich, from the Movement for Black Lives to the ongoing effort to decolonize African languages, the study and practice of linguistic disobedience have been crucial. But what are we to do today, when reactionary supremacists and authoritarians are screen-testing their own forms of so-called disobedience to quash oppositional social justice movements and their languages? Blending lyric essay with cultural criticism, historical analysis, and applied linguistics, Linguistic Disobedience offers suggestions for a hopefulpathway forward in violent times.

© The Author(s) 2019

Yuliya Komska, Michelle Moyd and David GramlingLinguistic Disobediencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92010-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Obeying and Disobeying

Yuliya Komska¹ , Michelle Moyd² and David Gramling³

(1)

Department of German Studies, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

(2)

Department of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

(3)

Department of German Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

End Abstract

This little book was conceived and written in a moment when sitting on our hands and waiting it out wasn’t an option, when the need for academics and teachers to take action and a clear stand felt more important than ever in our adult lives, and when we were each personally interested in clarifying for ourselves what was and wasn’t important in our stances toward language in public life. Our students, our colleagues, our children, our friends around the world—they were all asking fundamental, urgent questions of and around us, and we found we were in as good a position as anyone else to search hard for answers. To dodge the moment, its questions, and its responsibilities, because we were too busy or too jaded or too scared, sounded like the epitome of moral oblivion, the likes of which many generations before us came to regret, bitterly.

If you find something in this book that supports you, too, in listening for the questions of the age in your own hometown, neighborhood, and classroom, we will be delighted—and delighted to hear of it. None of us—Yuliya, Michelle, or David—deems herself a particularly wise or seasoned activist around any of the core questions we consider together in these pages. But we accept such inexpertise as a condition, if not a precondition, for beginning to take some of our own honest and exploratory steps toward restoring power to civic language in an age of suffering, violence, racism, outrage, and impunity. We are each haunted and moved by the general question: What kind of ancestor will you be? This is a question that such long-at-rest, treasured elders as Harriet Tubman, Václav Havel, James Baldwin, Berta Cáceres, Audre Lorde, and others contended with on our behalf, under their own darkening skies.

An initial question, then: What is linguistic obedience? Whether or not we instinctively favor the notion of obeying rules or people, it would be easy enough to say that being obedient in language is essentially the same as being decorous, well-behaved, orderly, moderate, even pious. Surely, in some historical eras, linguistic obedience has meant speaking in complete sentences; forming logical, doctrinaire, or prudent opinions; speaking in a way befitting one’s promises, duties, and commitments; not speaking above one’s station; being sparing with non-verbal cues such as gestures and eye-rolls; heeding authority; expressing oneself in a way that conveys deference and humility toward the addressee; or showing veneration toward the place and setting where one endeavors to make meaning. From Latin to Old French and onward, the etymology of obedience (ob-, “toward,” and audiere, “listen”) suggests an act of hearing in the direction of one thing, rather than another. An obedient speaker-listener hears in the direction of a given command, and not in the direction of noise, temptation, heresy, or chaos. The directional prefix “ob-” tells us that obedience is always an action of choosing one over several potential focal points of attention—a father rather than a sister, wealth rather than well-being, brute force rather than complex insight. Or, deciding to do otherwise.

Looking into the word obey itself (how it arose historically, as well as its current usage), we sense a conflict between two potential understandings. In the one sense, linguistic obedience may mean speaking with orderly decorum, deference, credulity, even submission—perhaps the most common understanding of obedience in its English-language meaning. In the other, directional sense conveyed by its etymology, though, obedience always implies “hearing toward power”—and thus hearing away from, or to the detriment of, other meanings potentially heard and hearable, which in the moment lack power to compel listening.

Although orderly decorum and the power to compel listening have long been culturally and economically interwoven, there is no natural connection between them. The first is a way of characterizing the speaker and her speech, while the second describes her stance toward authority and advantage. A person can exhibit one, the other, or both characteristics, but it is just as possible for his or her language to fulfill one vision of obedience, while utterly confounding the other.

And so, ours is an important historical moment to ask: what happens when power itself utters, promotes, and unleashes chaos and meaninglessness, rather than the conventionally expected forms of order and authority? When, for one reason or another, those in power outright reject the kinds of order and moderation presumed to be the default guise of bourgeois, colonial, and rationalist Liberal traditions? What happens when power claims, or appears to claim, linguistic disobedience as its own native idiom, its own badge of honor, its own liberatory prerogative and outsider identity, its own tool for interactional hegemony? What stance is left for “the powerless” then? Václav Havel (1985) used this term to describe an entire citizenry under conditions of dictatorship. Are we, who live in a democracy, the latter-day “powerless” with regard to language, when the powerful have hijacked disobedience and remade it in their own image? How can we bring that image into sharper focus to help us better direct our opposition to it?

Much of our public discourse tends to view disobedience through the lens of charismatic, righteous dissent and its various cultural, political, and religious percolations—in light of which “obedience” is seen as the unrighteous, uncritical opposite. Obedient, we often take for granted, is she who speaks or writes in pat phrases, in a blandly unimposing or even ebullient tone, in compliant and normative language, while avoiding explosive, censored, taboo, or sticky questions. Obedient is he who knows when to speak and when to keep quiet, when to stick his neck out and when to regroup to see another day. Obedient are they who read from, or at least know, the scripts and lines generally expected of them, who don’t ask too many questions about what the words imply, don’t go searching for meaning between the lines, and neither praise nor criticize the shared language. The obedient often speak against their own interests, so as to not rock the boat. They reproduce coercive paradigms of thought, feeling, and identity, recycling the language of their oppressors and of past ages, despite knowing better. “Nothing will change in American politics,” wrote one prominent commentator, David Green, in 2012, “so long as a majority of Americans remain linguistically obedient, passively accepting the vocabularies of politicians and media alike.” Disobedience, again, appears to be the obvious critical antidote, an urgent issue for education and public health, even.

These impressions arise from a long history of critical animus toward, and veneration of, (dis)obedience—from Confucius to Virgil, from Nietzsche to Marx. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, his 1852 post-mortem of the 1848 February Revolution, Karl Marx casts linguistic obedience as a kind of cognitive impairment:

The nation feels like the mad Englishman in Bedlam who thinks he is living in the time of the old Pharaohs and daily bewails the hard labor he must perform in the Ethiopian gold mines, immured in this subterranean prison, a pale lamp fastened to his head, the overseer of the slaves behind him with a long whip, and at the exits a confused welter of barbarian war slaves who understand neither the forced laborers nor each other, since they speak no common language. “And all this,” sighs the mad Englishman, “is expected of me, a freeborn Briton, in order to make gold for the Pharaohs.” (65)

This image of obedience as false consciousness is a powerful and satisfying idea, one that sets up a convenient opposition between critical experts-with-insight and laypersons trapped in the hamster wheel of delusion. Easily, the first category of person gets credited with articulate and transformative awareness. But often, we find, such expert critics are simply more savvy around the predominant protocols, Liberal lineages, and “hidden transcripts”—to use James C. Scott’s term (1990)—of disobeying. Correspondingly, the second group either has had no sustained recourse to the bank of such powerful ciphers and conventions, collectively dubbed “Aesopian language” by the Soviet dissident and American researcher of dissent Lev Loseff (1984), or rejects them quietly, being labeled as obedient in exchange.

Such a simplistic binary becomes even shakier if we acknowledge that experts often tend to “listen toward” (that is, obey) only a limited, charismatic range of disobedient practices. In language, many alternatives, like those cultivated in African-American Vernacular English and other critical vernaculars, are often not readily grasped by elites and pundits who are inattentive to Black meanings and styles (McWhorter 2016; Makoni et al. 2003).¹ The linguist Deborah Tannen (1981, p. 144) calls this prevalent and deeply consequential kind of interactional misrecognition “the opacity of style.” Only by opening up to what is less familiar or less accessible can linguistic disobedience evolve into a more democratic practice.

Disobedience, one would expect in light of these nuances, escapes any standardized prescription. And yet, decade upon decade of its study suggest otherwise. At least since Henry David Thoreau, it has been a suspect and oxymoronic propensity of disobedience chroniclers—and those who write about them—to devise clandestine sets of virtues and dispositions, to organize and order forms of obeying and disobeying, as though the spoils of obedience were the ultimate piety to be recovered and restored. The only sanctioned course under such a scheme is to work ever harder at becoming expert, or, on the other end of things, to convert lay users of language to critical consciousness and contrary action by vigilantly dispensing how-to advice. This notion of exacting self-cultivation and mass conversion may have worked in historical settings that still traded on the ideal of maintaining elite intellectual hierarchies and their respective models of cultural stewardship—let’s say, before and during the age of bourgeois revolutions and early Fordism. Recruiting for this traditional vision of linguistic disobedience will, however, reach an impasse in twenty-first century democracies, where disobedience in the guises of “creative disruption” and “outside-the-box” lingustic behavior have themselves become the go-to tools for wealthy, powerful men’s repression of others.

Disobedience, in other words, is not what it used to be. Darling enfants terribles of reactionary supremacist elites, like Milo Yiannapoulos, fetishize conventional expressions of unruliness and translate them into self-aggrandizing, offensive, and pointlessly verbose autobiographies, while young activists like Emma González in Parkland, Florida, move the world with their humility, empathy, ability to “hear toward” others, to speak eloquently with and within silence. While activists like Ijeoma Oluo write books to help white people sort out their feelings around the question “What if I talk about race wrong?” (2018), the President of the United States (and the Commander in Chief of its armed forces) baldly taunts world-class athletes of color on Twitter. Little sense can be made of these inversions based on the charismatic traditional opposition between obedience and disobedience alone. But our age is not entirely unprecedented on this point. Already in 1967, Joan Didion—and before her Lionel Trilling, in different terms—foresaw similar dumbfounding and injurious truths. She asked, then in reference to the Trump of the day, Howard Hughes: “Why have we made a folk hero out of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes? […] Of course we don’t admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another” (2008, pp. 71–72).

Fifty years later, the elusive cleft between obedience and disobedience continues to widen in American civic life, always with language somewhere at the heart of the matter. A Washington political editor for the far-right news network Breitbart freely announced in 2017 that “the goal eventually is the full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media. We envision a day when CNN is no longer in business. We envision a day when The New York Times closes its doors. I think that day is possible” (Clark 2017). Every day makes clearer that traditional conceptions of linguistic (dis)obedience verge on impossible after Donald Trump was chosen President by 62,979,879 voting US citizens, thus throwing the already precarious New World Order of the 1990s into a bleary tailspin. Time has come to rethink these conceptions.

Antisociality: A Growth Industry

To plot the uneasy twinhood of linguistic disobedience and obedience as it has developed up until today, let us briefly consider one of Donald Trump’s most unforgettable verbal coups—a word that here, too, refers to a seizure of power on multiple political levels. In a 2005 conversation about women with a white male reporter and member of an influential political family, Trump hypothesized that “when you’re a star you can grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” Was this obedient or disobedient speech, given received definitions? According to the decorum model, consensus might be that he is performing disobedience in order to show that he can afford to actively flout traditional modes of propriety and, by this token, assert the prerogative to establish his own symbolic system, his own idiolect, his own parole—a heightened and screen-tested version, perhaps, of what the anthropologist Jane Hill (1995) described as “white linguistic disorder.”

But details intercede. As Trump gets off his event bus with the reporter recording him—right after he notes with surprised self-admiration that he “can do anything”—he also says: “It’s always good if you don’t fall out of the bus. Like Ford, Gerald Ford, remember?” The conversation is no longer only about the dos but equally about the don’ts. Don’t behave like Gera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Obeying and Disobeying
• 2. Critique
• 3. Correction
• 4. Care
• 5. Epilogue: Finding Our Minds
• Back Matter