Re/aktion: The Struggle for the Language

text by Katya Sander
Inflammatory pamphlet about
the struggle for the language
(for what you say, you are)

Language is the tool, arena, process and form of parliamentary democracy. Difficult to do justice to in description, but impossible not to do. It is a toolkit with whose aid history/ies morality, tenancies, agreements and compromises become consensus both as Law (and often Truth). And language is at the same time a bevy of clattering machines which enables us to protest, controvert, and – perhaps – renegotiate the Law and all its interim Truths, written and unwritten. So it’s not immaterial how we treat language: deploy, decode, denounce and describe it. – The very term ‘it’ is interesting, it makes ‘it’ (i.e. language) identical with an innocuous heap of greasy widgets, tools and machine parts which, without itself having any influence over events allows the Law to be present, familiar, localized, fixed (ratified) – which is to say that ‘it’ is also what makes power visible, decipherable, transparent – and perhaps complied with? That’s how ‘it’ is often described, at any rate – language, that is. When parliament orders a survey on power and democracy in order to get a fix on the topography of power, its pinnacles, its chains of command and eel-like properties; or when the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and the Danish Film Institute sponsor a competition for programmes which will reveal once and for all what power truly amounts to, and who has it; or when the tabloid Ekstra Bladet bids power ‘welcome onto the front page’ (indeed it has the power to do so) they all seem to be saying that language is essentially one – pragmatic and transparent – something with which we can nail others down. ‘Power’ for instance. Like a word, an imprint, a mark, a wall.

This picture is an attractive one for it seems to offer us a handle on power – knowledge of it, an understanding of it. It’s nice to think that there’s some sort of supervision going on so power doesn’t get ahead of itself, over our heads. For who wants to be powerless? Power over power, in other words. And are we indeed not grateful that language is apparently so good to us and that there are people volunteering to keep power in check so we are free to think about other things?

This presents a pleasing picture, but if set alongside democracy’s notion of power as the conduct of debates between polar opposites with language as their arena the neat demarcations and clearly segregated segments begin to blur. The picture itself is all too intent on overlooking its own status as language (the picture, that is) and that it is precisely language that makes it possible to formulate, dissect, criticize and thus also influence and reformulate power. The normally well-buffed words ‘power’ and ‘language’ begin to dull before our eyes, the objects of investigation merge with its tools and the tail bites its mouth: for language does not only guide but also – when one least expects it – misguides, and while ‘power’ looks like a single word it is a complexity – mechanisms and processes, elaborations and complications, relations and negotiations whose lineaments always include, among other things, language. And like ‘power’, ‘language’ is merely a diaphanous curtain hung before a vast host of maintenance devices, preservation techniques, survival strategies, privileges and species of influence, representations, tactics and manoeuvres. To have a share in language is to have a share in power.

Power and language are not processes we can opt out of; in our diverse relationships we perform and navigate in them and with them, alongside them and in virtue of them. Power and language. And in the course of so doing, the body too, the flesh, respiratory passages, insight, distinctions, knowledge. Precisification, definition, naming. Listening to get a chance to speak, pretending not to hear in order not to speak, talking over in order to be heard, speaking without being heard, hearing without being addressed, being addressed without being able to answer. To be denied one’s language and condemned to learn another. To be localized in a language in which one doesn’t belong. Or to efface certain words from one’s vocabulary and insist on reiterating others. To repeat some sentences so often that they become a sound, a truth, or a strange distillate. A fluid unguent which smears grammar about itself, a sap that flows between the words and us and implies all that is left unsaid. To reserve for oneself the right to refrain from saying everything and yet still be heard.

These are fluids pumped into the vasculatory system separating us; pockets and vesicles are filled with our words and our speech when we address others, when loving and hating. And it is lubrications such as these that make it possible, for instance, to talk about ‘them’ and ‘us’ without needing to explicitate and yet still be understood. Or to be able to repeat the epithet ‘criminal immigrant’ as though there were something self-evident about it – being charged and found guilty in virtue language alone, through repetition, and thus automatically the guiltier the more it is repeated. Or, consistently to apply the term ‘Danish citizens’ to some people and ‘Danes’ to others, simply taking for granted that there is no need to explain or account for this curious difference (precisely because those who do not always-already understand and recognize this distinction are precisely those who should not be invited into the language.) Or to substitute definitions such as ‘war of aggression’ with ‘defensive war’, and ‘occupying power’ with ‘liberating force’, in order to elude the laws and conventions one normally talks about fighting for. You can be convicted for what you say; violence can be inflicted with words, and what you say you are. The language is vast and only a fool doesn’t fear his commerce with it. It pulses through every segment of dream, every sliver of desire, and we all inhabit it, even those who have not chosen it – even those who are privileged enough to believe they can opt out of it.

In a democracy which we constantly affirm to ourselves that we believe in and fight for, power and its ecologies live, of necessity, in language, and vice versa. They condition our speech, our texts, our listening and our reading, our knowledge, our bodies and the conclusions we draw from them. And we perform and navigate with and in them when we practise democracy, when we talk and listen or decide not to. So it is important to take language seriously; to use it purposively with delight and with reverence, to listen when it is being used against us, seeking to understand how it plays within us, in our nervous systems and bloodstream, glands and vessels; to struggle against and for it, to rearm; to rediscover new words and invent antiquarian forgotten grammars and put them into circulation, muttering about their purling through organs and digestions, retinas and inflammations just as it is all the time necessary actively to terrorize, infiltrate and corrupt the tacit systems which address us, inscribe themselves, making us interlocutors on premises with which we do not concur. For these articulations cannot be ignored out of existence or silenced to death, they only become stronger by not being spoken out against, twisted, abused, interrogated, denied, shouted at. Count yourself out, speak out, say so, remonstrate, resign. To offer resistance, linguistic resistance, in the everyday and in dreams, between the lines, on telephones, over signs, alongside utopias, between speeches, advertisements, messages, words and their distortions that you won’t endorse. We must listen attentively, prick up our ears and speak out against; give corrections utterance, meet contempt with contempt and discredit cocksure utterances with obscene language, dialects, accents and speech impediments – invented, strategic, as well as congenital. We must take others to mean what they say, grossly and in broad daylight, and we must squall in concert but also sing merrily out of tune in every canon in which we’re asked to join, as soon as we hear what lurks implicitly between the lines, robbing others of the chance to respond.

We must insist on a democracy where a vote is not just a cross but speech and language rather, muttering, chatting and giving utterance, the readiness to listen and the chance to be heard. Access to language is as imperative as the power to define it. Don’t give language away, don’t let it ooze away, leaving it to voices that are in possession because they think it’s their natural right to speak and maintain it, to keep it well oiled and do so. Fight for language – against it and with it.

Katya Sander