Languaging Madness
In a course I taught this semester, my students and I analyzed how the media covers second language and citizenship issues. We tried to remain critical of the way social activists, academics, and the media in general use language to define “crisis.” We tried to remain aware that a fact isn't a fact per se, unless experienced by participants in a similar way — which is still problematic, but not less real.
As I told my students, facts are a narrative representation. Language is all we have to mediate that which hurts to others and to us, the truth; it can only be apprehended as a relational operation, as I see it.
Recently, an ABC news report offered a curious headline. It read, “Benjamin Netanyahu: Hamas Committing ‘Double War Crime’ Rails Against ‘Mad Islamists.'” Double war… Mad Islamists… And what did civilians have to do with mad Islamists anyways? Are they them? Do they harbor terrorists? What are we talking about here?
These stories, of course, made me think not so much about what the author was referring to but rather how he was re-telling the story. These articles appeared to equate terrorists with an entire nation struggling with corruption, opportunists, and a bankrupt government.
But the people are not their government. Nor does the government necessarily represent the interests of the people. The structure in which government is set up in "democratic" nations across the globe still involves the dictatorship of an economic system. This system — namely capitalism — has many c(f)laws. Free expression only gets you as far the socioeconomic position you occupy in society.
In another piece on U.S. immigration and children’s retention at concentration-style camps, we read the following statement by a border patrol senior official:
Catching illegal aliens is part of the job… Processing is part of the job. But babysitting is not part of the job, and that’s what a lot of the agents have been doing. The agents are the children’s most frequent escorts and often the ones to explain to them what is happening and what lies ahead. Many of the agents are bilingual, and Mr. Del Cueto said it was fair to assume that many of the children do not comprehend the gravity of their situation. Speaking to reporters at the start of the tour of the site here, Chief Padilla said that his agents were working to fulfill a “humanitarian mission” while carrying out their task of securing the border.
Capturing children and detaining them is a humanitarian mission, as the policeman states. This is what the security officers in charge of border security ascribe to as a logic to reflect upon what they do and come to terms with it linguistically. This is how reality is shaped. Children are "captured" for their own good, as do animals in a zoo. For their preservation.
Every day, media coverage uses a type of language to describe migration that characterizes the phenomenon as a crisis, often times as a disease. What stands out as ironic is that data have shown immigration to the US decreasing in the past decade. This "crisis" thus refers to how the general population is reported reacting to the arrival of newer immigrants, particularly those immigrants from more impoverished nations.
Yet, it is important to bear in mind here that children who travel to the U.S. to escape wars and gang violence in certain Central American countries or Mexican workers who move to the U.S., for example, do so precisely because of neoliberal policies that were beneficial to the U.S. And then, when these policies do not work, they produce unemployment, further misery and migration. It becomes necessary to deal with this byproduct of capitalism, to catch illegals.
The use of the expression "catching illegals" is telling because it reveals how dehumanization symptomatically begins with language that is used to describe the subjects we speak of. This type of language has become so normalized in news channels that we don't think twice about the nature of what is being described. We are sociocognitively wired to absorb media without much conscious thought in the act. We register media as a fact often distant from our reality.
Of course, this is not true. What the media covers around the world is very near us.
The impact of the words chosen to characterize a humanitarian crisis do matter when we convey the stories of others. Ethics binds us to debate the nature of those labels we attribute to people. Thus respecting hypocritical politicians or pundits who treat and refer to undocumented immigrants as diseased animals, evils that must be contained, is not and cannot be admissible societal behavior. These so-called persistent statements full of “freedom of speech” must be shamed in public and officials dismissed based on their lack of competence to serve the citizenry.
But we whites can be sensitive about our privilege and cannot see past our liberal selves. Comments to us must refer to the subject and not the system and the role of subjects in perpetuating it. But we must remain aware to the fact that the problem always resides in both subjects and the systems they create. It is not an either or situation.
Deconstructing the subtleties and how the media reports facts do matter as an educational project. Discourse Studies is a subject essential to the future of democratic nations, an important subject that in my view should be a conscious objective of school curricula. Yet, the prescriptive curriculum that we practice in schools today disempowers teachers to act like intellectuals, precluding them from demanding a critical level of analysis from students.
Yet, to appease everyone, to avoid conflict in the classroom, the "public opinion" demands that we adhere to a sanitized language for education. To appease everyone we ultimately appease no one.
Within this zeitgeist of policing language, the teaching profession became reduced to a form of technical literacy in which very little space is left to teachers to manage conflict. But in the words of French linguist Roland Barthes, conflict constitutes the moral state of our difference. If this is the case, why should we avoid opportunities to deal with it in schools?
One of the greatest challenges today in our information society is knowing what to believe in. Amidst the avalanche of contradicting reports available to us, we simply do not know in whom to trust. Looking for nuances in discourse (language), as it turns out, can leave one perplexed because we begin to challenge accepting facts as such as well as the “authority” of their representatives.
The stories of mothers, fathers and children silenced by bombs today, however, are louder than life itself, more real than any reality we can conceive — unless this has happened to us, of course. The stories written about these truths conceal a type of pain that is so real that it resists any form of representation. This pain resists language.
But if language is all we have, when does it become not enough? How do we find language that entangles us to one another rather than separates us, language that goes beyond our differences and unites us in conflict?
