‘Voice Potential’: Language and Symbolic Capital in Othello

Summary

Before Brabanzio complains to the Venetian senators of Othello’s marriage, Iago warns Othello that ‘the magnifico is much beloved, / And hath in his effect a voice potential / As double as the Duke’s’. Brabanzio’s words will exert power – the power to ‘divorce you, / Or put upon you . . . restraint or grievance’ (1.2.12–15). Their power, however, will depend not upon Brabanzio’s rhetorical skill but instead upon his social position – that is, both on his aristocratic status (‘magnifico’) and on the accumulated credit he has with his auditors (‘much beloved’). How his speech is received will depend less on what he says than on the social site from which it is uttered. Othello rebuts Iago’s position, but he does not dispute Iago’s presupposition that linguistic competence counts for less than rank or otherwise attributed status in this matter of ‘voice potential’: ‘My services which I have done the signory’, he responds, ‘Shall out-tongue his complaints’ (1.2.18–19). In the event, Othello’s voice does outweigh Brabanzio’s, with an unanticipated element affecting the reception of their discourse and the outcome of the scene: that is, the exigency of the military threat to Cyprus.

In 'The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges', the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu develops a market analogy to explain how utterances receive their values in particular contexts and how, in turn, the conditions of reception affect discourse production. Giving discourse pragmatics a sociological turn, he asks questions critical to the Senate scene and to other situations in Othello: whose speech is it that gets recognized? whose speech is listened to and obeyed? who remains silent? and whose speech fails to gain attention or credit? In Bourdieu's account, language in any situation will be worth what those who speak it are deemed to be worth: its price will depend on the symbolic power relation between the speakers, on their respective levels of 'symbolic capital'.