Steinmetz, Willibald, “New Perspectives on the Study of Language and Power in the Short Twentieth Century"

Steinmetz, Willibald, “New Perspectives on the Study of Language and Power in the Short Twentieth Century,” in Steinmetz, Willibald (ed.), Political Languages in the Age of Extremes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. P. 3–51.

Steinmetz starts by the mastery of political languages in the 20^th century became a mass phenomenon, rather than only a sphere practiced by intellectuals. He adds that the mass media revolution also contributed to a changing role of political languages in the organization and mobilization of their societies. “[P]olitics, rather than breaking into two separate spheres, is better understood as a continuum of verbal, visual, and other communicative performances by all kinds of political actors, ruling elites, media professionals, party organizations, and individual citizens.” (4) “[T]he notion that political decisions can somehow be isolated from the continuous

flow of communication preparing them, lending words to them, symbolizing, legitimizing, and interpreting them seems to be questionable.” (4-5)

Steinmetz then addresses a question, to what degree the political stability of regimes depended on their skill and ability to control linguistic production in the political sphere. He makes an excellent point that “strict policies to enforce certain usages of language resulted in ritualized forms of communication which, in the long run, impaired the regimes’ capacity to learn and to handle crises.” (5) This certainly worked in the case with the USSR. He discusses that although people were able to escape from the symbolic frameworks imposed on them by political languages around them, “they were forced time and again to resort to the very terms and concepts they abhorred.” (5)

Steinmetz then moves to discuss the project of his volume (to give a transnational picture of the relationship between power and language in the twentieth century) and offers several case studies to illustrate this relationship. He starts with Raymond Williams, an English linguist who studied historical context of language change in post-war Britain, moves to Reinhart Koselleck with his wartime experience of the Eastern front and a Soviet prisoner of war camp. “His first academic work, Kritik und Krise, accepted as a doctoral thesis in 1954 and published in 1959 was devoted to uncovering the ‘pathogenesis’, as he called it, of this mental habit of subjecting present political structures to a permanent moral critique by an appeal to history conceived of as a unified, teleological process.” (11) His relation with Carl Shmitt and consequent disapproval of Anglo-American liberalism. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe – “Koselleck’s hypothesis that the decisive semantic shifts which inaugurated our own modern age took place in the so-called Sattelzeit, at least in the German-speaking countries.” (12)

Steinmetz then moves to discuss literary works with the agenda “to attribute what is narrated to the authors’ own, or their relatives’ and acquaintances’, personal ‘spaces of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectation’.” (13) He starts with Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. “Grossman thus makes clear that it was not just the choice of words, the lexical side of language, that decided one’s fate, but at least as much how things were uttered and how they were understood by those who were present or were told about the situation later.” (17) Grossman thanks to his literary method is able to describe not only shifts in concepts, but also in “non-lexical elements”: “the body language of facial expression and gestures; the emotions signalled by tone, voice, pauses, or silence; the influence of the reactions expected from interlocutors to what people said or suppressed.” (19)

Another example is autobiography by Ruth Klüger, a Jewish-Austrian literary scholar. “Klüger describes how she developed communicative competence and asserted a language of her own in adverse surroundings where the boundaries of what could be said were almost always set by men, though often enforced by women, in Klüger’s youth above all by her mother… If the book has a political message, it is the insight that an exclusionary or derogatory ideology can never be countered unless one avoids reproducing its key concepts and manners of speech.” (21) A description of how other people (psychotherapist, e.g.) refuse to use her concepts to describe her experience and, thus, ignore her identity and try instead to impose on her another “proper” identity.

Finally, Steinmetz goes to analyze Václav Havel’s writing. “The term ‘post-totalitarian’ was coined by Havel himself in the dismal decade after the crushing of the Prague Spring of 1968. He used the term to define a system which no longer relied on crude terror, mass executions, concentration camps, or Gulags, but primarily on the compliance of its own citizens.” (26)

“[Havel] stringently dissected the communicative patterns which had caused the system’s intellectual immobility and made it incapable of coping with reality effectively. Three mechanisms in particular, he suggested, brought about what he then called ‘evasive thinking’, that is, ‘a way of thinking that turns away from the core of the matter to something else’. The first was the use of ‘magic words’ which either deflected criticism of bad conditions, as when a fallen window sill in a housing estate was called a ‘local matter’, or seemed to suggest that the means to handle such negative conditions, in this case ‘socialist maintenance by the tenants’, were a necessary stage in the development of socialism. The second was what he called ‘false contextualization’, which placed specific grievances, such as rotting buildings, into ever wider contexts until one was made to believe that the buildings have to rot because otherwise ‘we would have long ago been involved in World War Three’ and the ‘prospects of mankind’ would be endangered. The third was ‘dialectical metaphysics’, a form of reasoning which dissolved concrete realities in ‘vacuous verbal balancing acts’ such as ‘in a certain sense yes, but in another sense no’, ‘we must not, on the one hand, overestimate, nor, on the other hand, should we underestimate’, and so on.” (27) All this led to the ritualization of language and its inability to cope with change in the outside world. “Ritualized communication had resulted in an anonymization of power and created a ‘social auto-totality’.” (28) Redefinition of old terms as a strategy to cope with the Communist regime: by “such attempts to redefine things and build up corresponding ‘parallel structures’, Havel hoped to initiate a ‘creeping process’ that would, in the end, erode the post-totalitarian systems.” (29) Similar tendencies on the other side of the Iron Curtain.