Silence Is Violence, and So Is Speech

Abstract

This synoptic essay reflects on contemporary impasses in the cultural politics of language. I argue that current controversies about linguistic violence reflect an unresolved tension between two distinct registers in which debates about language operate. One framework, best characterized in terms of the basic categories of discourse and power, is oriented toward the critique of structure; the other, which instead emphasizes speech and harm, is oriented toward the criticism of behavior. I contextualize both sensibilities historically and argue that the tension between them is itself a symptom of deeper dynamics in contemporary political life. We cannot resolve debates about linguistic violence simply through conceptual analysis or reinterpretation; instead, we must reexamine how language itself is being transformed by more fundamental kinds of social, political, and technological change.

Acknowledgments

This essay is based on a lecture delivered in the “Free Speech Battles” series at the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Pennsylvania, April 2021. For their generous attention and incisive comments across several stages of drafting and revision, I am grateful to Sigal Ben-Porath, Wendy Brown, William Callison, Chris Chambers, Kevin Duong, Jill Frank, Jeffrey Green, Robyn Marasco, Nishin Nathwani, Paul North, Alicia Steinmetz, Yves Winter, and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An illustrative, but by no means exhaustive, set of examples across five decades: Newton Garver, in the foundational article “What Violence Is” (The Nation, June 24, 1968), writes that across all the moral and ethical debates over violence “there runs a certain obscurity: it is never entirely clear just what violence is” (819); Kenneth W. Grundy and Michael A. Weinstein, in Ideologies of Violence (Columbus: Merrill, 1974), write that “violence” does not have “a single definition upon which specialists agree” (1); C. A. J. Coady’s influential article “The Idea of Violence” (Journal of Applied Philosophy 3, no. 1, 1986) suggests that “violence is a central idea for political theory but there is very little agreement about how it should be understood” (3); Vittorio Bufacchi, in Violence: A Philosophical Anthology (New York: Palgrave, 2009), writes that “there seems to be much confusion about what violence is” (1); Richard Bernstein, Violence (New York: Polity, 2013), points to the “enormous confusion about what we even mean by violence” (1); Mark Vorobej, in The Concept of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2016), reminds us that “violence remains a complex, unwieldy and highly contested concept that is, frankly, not well understood” (1). Each of these quotations appears on the very first page of its respective text.

2 The quotation is from Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 90.

3 V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 19.

4 See, for example, John Dewey, “Force, Violence and Law,” The New Republic 5 (1916); Raymond Williams, “Violence” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976); Robert Paul Wolff, “On Violence,” The Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 19 (1969), 601–16; and the historical discussion of the terminology of United States government reports in Erin Pineda, The Awful Roar: Civil Disobedience, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Creative Disorder (doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 2015), 15. For a useful overview of major definitional approaches (typological rather than historical), see C. A. J. Coady, “The Idea of Violence,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 3, no. 1 (1986), 3–19.

5 As Erin Pineda has written, “violence is defined [in the Commission’s report] in terms both vague and capacious, as ‘the unlawful threat or use of force by any group that results in or is intended to result in the injury or forcible restraint or intimidation of persons, or the destruction or forcible seizure of property’ – but appears never to apply to police or state action” (The Awful Roar, 15).

6 For an overview of variants of this usage and the traditional marginality of alternatives to it, see Wolff, “On Violence.” As late as 1976, the Marxian scholar Raymond Williams, summarizing the term’s history in an entry in Keywords, still could write that its application “seems to be specialized to ‘unauthorized’ uses” of physical interference with others—“terrorists” are properly called violent, but one’s own cops or soldiers never can be (278).

7 Galtung helped found the discipline of peace and conflict studies; he presented his notion of “structural violence” most notably in the influential early article “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91. On the term’s prehistory and legacy, see Yves Winter, “Violence and Visibility,” New Political Science 34, no. 2 (2012): 195–202.

8 See Garver, “What Violence Is,” The Nation, June 24, 1968: 819–22; on its influence and reception, see, for example, Joseph Betz, “Violence: Garver’s Definition and a Deweyan Correction,” Ethics 87, no. 4 (1977): 339–51.

9 See Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power (New York: Random House, 1967), and the discussion in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 8. On the subsequent development of the perspective modeled by Garver and Galtung, see James Dodd, Phenomenological Reflections on Violence (New York: Routledge, 2017), 18ff.; Yves Winter, ed., “Symposium: Revisiting Johan Galtung’s Concept of Structural Violence,” New Political Science 34, no. 2 (2012): 191–227; Vorobej, The Concept of Violence, Ch. 2; and Vittorio Bufacchi, Violence and Social Justice (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), Ch. 1.

10 See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

11 Sklansky, A Pattern of Violence (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 200, 210. Sklansky offers an extended and useful analysis of how ideas about what violence is—and where it comes from—have shaped American law since the 1960s. An anonymous reviewer suggests that the view I have here attributed to a broadly Millian perspective is more properly characteristic of the position represented in US jurisprudence by Louis Brandeis than it is of Mill’s liberalism itself; I do not disagree, but I am here more interested in how a more or less “Millian tradition” has played out in American public debate (including in its intersection with liberal jurisprudence) than I am in the exegesis of Mill’s views on their own terms. I am grateful for the reviewer’s comments on the legal-theoretical debates and regret that I do not have the space to take them up more fully here. For Sklansky’s analysis of Brandeis and his legacy, see 201ff.

12 Rehmann, Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 180. Stuart Hall makes a closely parallel argument in “The Problem of Ideology—Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986), 28–44, 32.

13 For a synoptic picture of this encounter of Marxist critique with other forms of “Theory,” see Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (New York: Verso, 1983), Ch. 2.

14 See Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: MacMillan, 1988), 271–313.

15 Indeed, much of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is dedicated to a critique of Foucault. But in the present context, what they have in common despite themselves is more symptomatically significant than what divides them.

16 For example, for an ethnographic study of the usefulness of Bourdieu’s “symbolic violence” in assessing experiences of environmental harm and extreme poverty, see Javier Auyero and Débora Alejandra Swistun, Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

17 On aspects of this relation see, for example, Dodd, Phenomenological Reflections on Violence, 25ff., and Yves Winter, Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5f. Galtung himself tried his hand at extending his account of violence into representational and linguistic phenomena, in an intervention much less influential than his earlier account of structural violence had been; see his “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990): 291–305.

18 On the relationship between theories of sexual and gendered violence and theories of structural violence, see Mary Anglin, “Feminist Perspectives on Structural Violence,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 5, no. 2 (1998): 145–51, and Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, “The Feminist Politics of Naming Violence,” Feminist Theory 21, no. 2 (2019): 199–216. On the origins of the turn to theorizing rape in terms of violence, see Catharine MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 218ff.

19 A similar dilemma shapes contemporary debates about institutional violence beyond language in particular; cf. Butler, The Force of Nonviolence (New York: Verso, 2020), 2: “To understand structural or systemic violence, one needs … to find frameworks more encompassing than those that rely on two figures, one striking and the other struck. Of course, any account of violence that cannot explain the strike, the blow, the act of sexual violence (including rape), or that fails to understand the way violence can work in the intimate dyad or the face-to-face encounter fails descriptively, and analytically, to clarify what violence is…”

20 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 5ff.

21 See especially Mari Matsuda, “Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim’s Story,” Michigan Law Review 87, no. 8 (1989): 2320–81; Charles R. Lawrence, “If He Hollers Let Him Go: Regulating Racist Speech on Campus,” Duke Law Journal 1990, no. 3 (1990), 431–83. Lawrence argues that “the use of racial epithets … is a form of ‘violence by speech’” (452n87). Both essays were reprinted in Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (New York: Routledge, [1993] 2018), a collection jointly co-authored with Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw; the volume became a foundational text in critical-race–theoretical approaches to speech and expression.

22 See in particular MacKinnon’s influential lecture “Francis Biddle’s Sister,” published as “Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 20 (1984): 1–70, and her later book Only Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Rae Langton reconstructed the argument of MacKinnon’s lecture in explicitly Austinian terms in her essay “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, no. 4. (1993), 293–330. Judith Butler’s critical assessment of both Langton and Matsuda, in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), helped bring the theory of speech-acts into the humanities more broadly; on Butler, see further below.

23 Excitable Speech, 50.

24 See Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 149ff.

25 Derrida’s most influential direct engagement with Austin’s theory of speech-acts appears in Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988); his wider contributions to the theory of language, discourse, and textuality—exemplified most famously in such works as Of Grammatology—are too numerous to list. Gayatri Spivak made her name partly as the translator of the latter into English in the 1970s, and Derrida is invoked favorably (in contrast to Foucault and Deleuze) in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” where Spivak introduced the term epistemic violence. For Butler on Austin and Althusser (with attention also to Derrida and Foucault), see Excitable Speech, especially “Introduction: Linguistic Vulnerability” (1–42).

26 This is not to say that debates about Mill and his ideas do not figure in today’s fights over language. But contemporary advocates of the classical Millian position, who now identify with both the right and the left, are best understood as advocates of a minimalist speech-and-harm framework, perhaps despite themselves: by arguing that offensive or objectionable speech is not “actually” harmful, or not sufficiently harmful to warrant interference or redress, they take for granted that debates about language should play out in these speech-and-harm terms, merely disputing how those underlying categories ought to be interpreted and applied.

27 At the level of conceptual reconstruction, the situation is analogous to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analysis of the cultural dynamics of the idea of homosexuality as it unfolded in the ambiguous space between competing “universalizing” and “minoritizing” frameworks in the late twentieth century—frameworks which existed alongside (and within) each other, rather than in a classically Foucaultian relationship of supersession; see especially “Axiom 5” in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 44–8.

28 Cf. Michel Foucault’s agenda-setting remark: “Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies,” History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 27.

29 Contrast, for example, the rather divergent accounts of “epistemic violence” offered respectively in Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and in Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 236–57. Where for Spivak the concept is a systemic and depersonalized notion rather than an ethical one, Dotson transforms “epistemic violence” into a category of wrongful behavior.

30 For a recent example, written at the intersection of activist and academic debates, see Sarah Schulman, Conflict is not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016), especially 92ff., where she takes up the definition of violence and its complexities. The democratic theorist John Keane likewise presents an eloquent, but ultimately unsatisfactory, defense of definitional restriction in Violence and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 34ff. On the limits of attempts to revise our idea of harm in the philosophical and legal tradition inspired in large part by Mill’s approach, see Bernard Harcourt, “The Collapse of the Harm Principle,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 90, no. 1 (1999): 109–94.

31 For a sharp recent statement of the more or less Foucaultian interpretation of neoliberal rationality in everyday life, see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), esp. 30ff.; for a classic presentation of an analogous view in Marxian terms, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2ff. Though it has not seen as sustained a reception in the critical literature on neoliberal reason, Herbert Marcuse’s account of “one-dimensional thinking” directly anticipated many of the key insights of both the “poststructuralist” and the “materialist” interpretations; see especially One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), chapters 1, 2, and 4. Marcuse, not incidentally, linked the rise of one-dimensional thinking to the specifically technological character of advanced industrial society, on which more below.

32 Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 21.

33 Harvey, Brief History, 3.

34 Ibid., 159.