What’s in a Wall?
Consider the following incident of the Trump presidency that divided the country and partially paralyzed the U.S. government in December 2018 and January 2019. One of the major promises of candidate Trump on the campaign trail for the U.S. presidency was that he was going to build a wall on the southern border of the United States to keep out what he called: “Mexican rapists, drug dealers, criminals” and other illegal immigrants.1 The idea of a border wall was the brainchild of his political advisers who were looking for a mnemonic device to make sure that their candidate – who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about his talents as a builder – would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was to be a signature issue in his nascent campaign. “How do we get him to continue to talk about immigration?” they said. “We’re going to get him to talk about how he’s going to build a wall (Gunderman, Reference Gunderman2016).”
During his presidential campaign, Trump made his plans to build a “beautiful solid border wall” a central part of his platform: “I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them [sic] very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall” (ibidem).
A feature of Trump’s rallies in 2016 and 2017 were crowds chanting “Build that wall!” After his party’s defeat in the midterm elections of November 2018, the president appeared to back away from his promise, alternately referring to the planned wall as a “steel fence” or a “steel slat barrier.” Indeed, the debate in which Trump and the Republican leadership engaged with congressional Democrats and which led to the longest government shutdown in history seemed to be an argument about language. In his morning tweets, Trump sought to blame the media for the discrepancy and said he still envisioned an “all concrete” wall in some areas but that a “see through” barrier at the U.S.–Mexico border would be more appropriate in other areas based on what he had been told by “experts at Border Patrol.” In mid-December, Trump further shifted his stance, arguing in a tweet: “we are not building a Concrete Wall, we are building artistically designed steel slats.” Then, in a Christmas Day appearance in which he blamed Democrats for the government shutdown, Trump described the border barrier as “a wall or fence, whatever they’d like to call it.” Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump’s close confidants, said that the president is seeking “a physical barrier along the border in places that make sense,” asserting that “the wall has become a metaphor for border security.”
By January, as the government shutdown was already in its fifth week, the new speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi “quietly but directly called Mr. Trump out on his lying and ‘fearmongering’ about immigration … and mocked his planned border wall as a ‘beaded curtain’ and ‘a manhood thing for him.’” But more importantly, Donald Trump’s linguistic waverings on how to name the wall became a symptom of political waffling that got both parties angry. For the Democrats, a wall was “immoral, un-American, and ineffective.” For Trump’s supporters, Donald Trump was breaking his campaign promise.2
Trump’s semantic wavering also gave rise to multiple speculations as to the meaning of his obsession with the wall. Democrat columnist Frank Bruni wrote:
It’s funny that we are still talking about the physical features of what President Trump wants or will settle for on our country’s southern border – about whether it will be concrete or steel, solid or slatted, a fancied-up fence or, in Nancy Pelosi’s hilariously acerbic dig, a “beaded curtain.” Because it’s not really a wall that Trump is after, if indeed it ever was. It’s a victory for victory’s sake. It’s a show of his might. It’s proof of his potency.3
Republicans interpreted all this renaming of the wall as a negotiation opening. Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, said that while he thought the shutdown was “going to drag on a lot longer,” Mr. Trump’s shift in wall materials could provide a semantic opening to advance the talks. “If he has to give up a concrete wall, replace it with a steel fence in order to do that so that Democrats can say, ‘See? He’s not building a wall anymore’, that should help us move in the right direction,” Mr. Mulvaney said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “If that’s not evidence of the president’s desire to try and resolve this, I don’t know what is.”4
In the end, some voices started to emerge that interpreted the debate about the wall as a symptom of something much bigger.
The wall has become a metaphor to Mr. Trump and his millions of supporters. It represents a divide between “us” and “them”, a physical demarcation for those who refuse to accept that in just a few decades, a majority of the country will be people of color. Mr. Trump promised it in 2015, in the same speech in which he announced his candidacy and called Mexican immigrants rapists, criminals and drug traffickers. His goal was to exploit the anxiety of voters in an increasingly multicultural, multiethnic society. Mr. Trump’s wall is a symbol for those who want to make America white again.
Three months later, after the president declared a national state of emergency but did not get from Congress the money he needed to build this wall, he backed off his threat to “close the entire border with Mexico” and announced: “We’re really making progress at letting people know this is an emergency” and the Secretary of Homeland Security conceded that the focus on the wall was, partly, a stunt.
Well, I think part of that is just a – it’s an optic. To have the president stand in front of the wall indicates immediately to any viewer that he’s at the border. But I think his message is about the dual crisis [security and humanitarian] and how we need Congress to act, to give us the authority to address [it].5
If I have dwelled rather extensively on this incident, it is because it illustrates many of the aspects of symbolic power that we will be dealing with in this chapter. Only a recognition of the symbolic nature of the wall can explain the intensity of the current debate and the virulence of the sentiments expressed. Will the United States be a monolingual and monocultural white nation or a multilingual multicultural society? What is at stake is not only the very identity of the nation but what the critic Abrahamian calls “the coming of the global citizen” (Abrahamian Reference Abrahamian2015). The very idea of national borders has been made complicated by technology and globalization. The real walls, Abrahamian argues, are not at a border, but in the digital, commercial, political forces that control us.
The term “symbolic” can have four meanings in its relation to language and power. The first is that language, like music or painting, is called a symbolic system because it is composed of signs and symbols that combine together in a rule-governed, systematic way to make meaning. The four letters of the sign w-a-l-l combined with the two other words in the string “build-that-wall” evoke in the minds of the listeners the concept of a prototypical structure erected to protect some people in and keep other people out. But symbolic systems not only refer to the real world, they structure things in people’s minds by categorizing them (category: wall), making distinctions (wall vs. fence) and evaluating them (a beautiful wall). Thus, symbolic systems are at once structured (by syntactic, lexical, discourse rules), and they themselves structure our representations of the world. In this chapter, we first examine how this symbolic relation to things is what gives humans a power to represent reality that other living species do not have.
The wall incident also gives us a glimpse into a second meaning of the term “symbolic,” namely the power of symbols to create semiotic relations of similarity, contiguity or conventionality with other symbols, that listeners interpret as such. For example, a wall can be imagined as “tall” because /tall/ sounds like or rhymes with /wall/ (iconic relation of similarity); it can be envisaged as solid and sturdy because of its close association with the sturdy walls of a house and with their function to protect and defend a family (indexical relation of contiguity); but a wall can also be seen as just an arbitrary word out of the dictionary, that might be called mur in French or Mauer in German (symbolic relation of conventionality). How the utterance “Build that wall” will be interpreted – whether iconically, indexically or symbolically – will depend on the relations the speakers and listeners create between the words uttered and other words or signs produced in that particular context, and in past or imagined ones.6
There is a third meaning of the term “symbolic” to be gleaned from this incident. The meanings given to the wall by the various actors are more or less conventional/arbitrary, more or less nonarbitrary or motivated by the actors’ desire to pursue their own political interests. The power to manipulate the meaning of signs and to impose those meanings on others and make them “stick” is a symbolic power, because it acts not through physical force but through our mental representations as mediated by symbolic forms. As we shall see in the rest of this chapter and in Chapter 4 these representations will become embodied in the rituals of everyday life, including such rituals as electoral rallies at which the rhythmical “Build that wall!” slogan is chanted in unison by the crowds and reproduced by the media. The power of suggestion of these words does not come from such utterances alone, but from the indirect institutional legitimacy of the people who utter them as supporters of a legitimately elected president of the United States.
Finally, there is a fourth meaning to this incident that is rather puzzling. For all the hoopla about how to name the wall, Donald Trump does not seem to care how it is called, provided he can declare that he will “build-a-wall” and declare the mission accomplished once it is “done.” But what will be done? He recently admitted that words don’t matter: “Wall or fence, whatever they’d like to call it” and “Never mind how you call it: a wall, a barrier, a fence, sleet slats. These are only words. What counts is action. I am a man of action.” We have the uneasy feeling that his words are becoming unmoored from their conventional referents, so it becomes difficult to know how to interpret what he really means. Is it all symbolic posturing? Metaphoric spectacle? Display of potency? Reality TV?7 We will need to examine the term “symbolic” as applied to the construction of meaning, and to its relationship to truth.
I discuss each of these four aspects of symbolic power – the power to signify, the power to interpret, the power to manipulate, the power to construct meaning – in the remainder of this chapter.
1.1 The Power to Signify and Categorize
Signification, Value, Indexicality
The challenge of meaning-making has been captured by linguists who study the structure of the linguistic system and cognitive linguists who study the relation between speaking and thinking. Most language-teaching textbooks take a Saussurean view of language. The linguistic sign, we are told, is formed of two parts like the two sides of a sheet of paper – the signifier or sound-image and the signified or concept. As “a two-sided psychological entity,” it links together not “the material sound, a purely physical thing” and a specific object in the world, but “the psychological imprint of a sound, the impression it makes on our senses” and “an abstract concept” (Saussure Reference Saussure and Baskin1959 p.66). So, if the teacher holds up a piece of chalk and says “This is a chalk,” she is not quite correct. The sound /’tʃɔ:k/ does not denote this particular piece of chalk, but rather it evokes in the minds of the learners the concept of a chalk that is in this case long, round and white, but might be in other classrooms thick, square and yellow and still be called “chalk.” The combination of the sound /’tʃɔ:k/ and its concept constitutes its signification. Linguists point out the important fact that the meaning of a sign lies not only in its signification (the relation between signifier and signified) but also in its value, that is, in its difference from other signs (e.g., it is similar in function, say, to a pen or a magic marker, but different from an eraser).
In addition to the structural aspect of signification and value, semioticians distinguish between two kinds of signification – denotative and connotative – to account for meanings that are referential and associative respectively. One might think that a piece of chalk has only a straightforward denotative meaning as “device for writing on blackboards” until someone says: “You want some chalk? Don’t you have a laptop?” and you realize that using chalk to write on a blackboard might connote old-fashioned teaching practices. As Saussure says: “In language there are only differences” (Saussure Reference Saussure and Baskin1959, p.120). Chalk, ballpoint pen, typewriter and computer denote different writing technologies, but they connote different degrees of technological sophistication.
If connotation is a term used by semioticians, indexicality is a term used by linguistic anthropologists to refer not just to conventional semantic associations of the Saussurean kind, or loose connotations, but to whole ways of talking that mirror the social stratifications found in society and the social, cultural and political views that speakers and writers hold. The phrase “order of indexicality” coined by Michael Silverstein (Reference Silverstein2003) refers to “stratified patterns of social meanings to which people orient when communicating” (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2005a:253). For example, the word “invasion” at the southern border indexes on one rational level the entry of large numbers of people seeking asylum in the United States; on another, more emotional level, the word can index the take-over of territory, a hostile and illegitimate entry, or even an attack on our country by foreign armies out to kill us. The way people talk indexes much about who they are and which position they hold in the increasingly stratified American society.
Categories of the Embodied Mind
If words have the power to evoke abstract concepts like “chalks” and “blackboards” in someone’s head, it is because these concepts are organized into cognitive categories that orient our thoughts according to the specific logic of a given language, for instance instruments vs. surfaces (writing on a blackboard), walls vs. screens that we have experienced through our minds and bodies. Anthropologists like Edward Sapir argued that “language is a guide to social reality,” that it even “conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes” and that “the worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”(Sapir Reference Sapir1949:69). Others went further and suggested that the language we speak not only guides, but determines the way we think, indeed makes us prisoners of the concepts it evokes in the mind (Whorf 1956).8 This is without taking into account the work of interpretation and translation that we consider in the next section. As cognitive linguists like George Lakoff (Reference Lakoff1987, chapters 4 and 18) or Dan Slobin (Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996) have argued, it is not that the way we speak determines the way we think, but that in order to speak at all, we need to think in categories that are (unconsciously) recognized and accepted by the members of a speech community. These categories are both linguistic (the way we speak) and cognitive (the way our mind works) and they are deeply embedded in our bodily experience (Johnson Reference Johnson1987; Varela et al. Reference Varela, Thompson and Rosch1991).
Lakoff’s Idealized Cognitive Models
For example, Trump’s use of the sign /’wɔ:l/ in “I will build a great wall” was available to him from the English language, but it came already organized into cognitive categories that went beyond just “support/protection.” The idealized cognitive model evoked by the word “wall” encompasses experiential categories like “inside/outside,” “container/contained,” “inclusion/exclusion,” “Self/Other.” It elicits images of the Great Wall of China, Israel’s border wall with the Palestinian territories, the Berlin Wall, all built to prevent invaders from coming in or, in the latter cases, residents from going out. The president started talking back his characterization of the wall (“I never proposed 2000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shining sea”) and started proposing alternative names such as steel wall, steel fence, steel slats, see-through-barrier, in the hope that by changing the signifier he could change the signified in people’s minds. But that did not take into account the power of the cognitive categories associated with these signifiers. They all evoked an idealized cognitive model of a prototypical barrier meant to keep out strangers, foreigners, outsiders, in short, people not like us, to protect Us against Them. Not only did this model contradict the model evoked by the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to the shores of the New World, but, given the context in which Trump used the term, it seemed to restrict the Us vs. Them to white U.S.-born Americans vs. brown-skinned Latinos. It was perceived by many as a xenophobic and racist cognitive model.9
1.2 The Power to Interpret
As Saussure sought to delineate the domain of linguistics, he distinguished between langue, the abstract linguistic system found in grammar books and dictionaries, and parole, the living language used by speakers and writers in everyday life. Because of the rule-governed nature of langue and the idiosyncratic nature of parole, he restricted the domain of linguistics to the study of langue. But if we consider language not just as linguistic system, but as communicative practice, we have to recognize that in practice langue and parole are inseparable. The symbolic forms or linguistic signs that constitute language as a symbolic system can be viewed by speakers and hearers either as type-level forms that are part of langue, that is, an abstract system, or as token-level relations that are part of parole, that is, actual utterances in context (Hanks Reference Hanks1996:45). As abstract types these signs are arbitrary, that is, they have no natural relation to what they designate, and their meaning depends entirely on social convention. Saussurean linguists study types and their structure. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists study tokens and their use. As tokens of language use, these signs are non-arbitrary; they have iconic, indexical or symbolic relations to their objects (p.84).
Peirce’s Interpretants
Whether an object is read as an icon, an index or a symbol depends on what the semiotician C.S. Peirce called “the interpretant,” namely a second sign that enables a person to interpret the first (Van Lier Reference Van Lier2004:68). For example, the sign “wall” might create in the minds of listeners another simple sign, for example, “STOP,” or a larger signifying discourse, for example, “anti-immigration policies.” This other sign, or interpretant, constitutes an “ideological horizon” (Hanks Reference Hanks1996:43) that helps the person make sense of what s/he hears. As the first sign stands for a concept or ideal type of object, the relation of that type to its specific token in the real world will be interpreted as being more or less similar to other tokens (or iconic), more or less contiguous to others (or indexical), or more or less conform to the type (or conventional). For example, upon hearing “I will build a wall,” some people might imagine this wall to be iconically similar to the Great Wall of China keeping hordes of enemies at bay, and they might feel a sense of patriotic pride. Others might associate it indexically with caravans of poor asylum-seeking families and feel outraged. Yet others will remain on the conventional level of the dictionary or of conventional wisdom and take the utterance as an objective statement of fact. As we shall see in Chapter 4, one of the political strategies for negating the effects of symbolic power is taking words for their literal meaning alone and ignoring their indexical value. By trying to change the type-level form of the sign “wall” to make it more acceptable, rather than considering the token-level form of the sign’s ideological horizon, Trump chose to remain on the symbolic conventional aspect of the sign and deliberately ignored its more contextual – iconic and indexical – aspects. In any case, as a token of the English language, the utterance “I will build a wall” will be interpreted by the listeners against the ideological horizon of their experience and knowledge of the world. It will therefore inevitably elicit a personal reaction (fear and hatred of immigrants or outrage at the one who uttered those words).10
Semiotic vs. Symbolic Relations
It is important here to distinguish between semiotic and symbolic relations. First, these three kinds of semiosis (meaning making process) are in a hierarchical relation to one another, the symbolic relation being the highest and including the indexical and the iconic. For example, the symbol “wall” can refer to an object made of brick-and-mortar but it cannot avoid evoking lower semiotic levels, such as an image in the mind, or association with other symbols like “exclusion” or “protection” depending on one’s political views.
Second, while all three semiotic relations need to be interpreted, symbols are addressed to someone and require that addressee’s interpretation. While icons have an immediate and direct impact on the viewer, symbols have more complex meanings precisely because they can also be read iconically and indexically. Hence the need for a relational thinking and interpretive power that chimpanzees, for example, do not have. People might disagree on how to interpret the indexical relations evoked by the word “wall,” but the symbolic power of an utterance such as “build that wall!” repeated in unison at a campaign rally depends on the supporters recognizing the legitimacy of the author of these words in a democratic society. This legitimacy is also supported by the crowd’s belief in what the philosopher Paul Grice (Reference Grice, Cole and Morgan1975) has called “the cooperative principle” in conversation understood as exchange of information. At first glance, it seems as if Donald Trump consistently flouts Grice’s four basic maxims of quantity (don’t say more than required), quality (be clear), sincerity (be sincere) and relevance (be relevant), in the same manner as he revels in breaking all expectations of normal social behavior. He repeats himself and says much more than is required to convey his message, his use of words is vague and obfuscating, his sincerity is questionable and so is the relevance of his utterances to the good of anyone else than Donald J. Trump. But upon second thought, Trump’s very disregard for Gricean maxims is a sign that his discourse is not meant to inform his supporters, but to appeal to their emotions, fuel their outrage and present himself as a savior above the norms of civil discourse.
Third, symbols function in combination with other symbols (Saussure’s combinatory or syntagmatic principle) to form symbolic systems or codes. When combined with the indexical meanings of these other symbols, they are likely to develop not only idealized cognitive models of concepts, but “metapragmatic” or “metacultural” models of social reality as well, that is, recognizable types of persons or objects in recognizable situations (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Basso and Selby1976; Wortham Reference Wortham2006:32).11 A wall to keep “Mexican rapists, drug dealers and criminals” out of the United States is one such metacultural model that Trump supporters adopt and with which they frame any news they hear about the wall. It has also, as we know, prompted some to take violent action against Latino immigrants and other minority groups in the United States.12 Thus, while all three semiotic relations make meaning, they make it in different ways and with different effects.
Sapir’s Condensation Symbols
Saying that symbols are conventional systems of reference is not to say that their meaning is arbitrary. As mentioned in the last section, a symbol at the type level is arbitrary, but the same symbol at the token level is not arbitrary at all. The word “wall” might be arbitrary as a symbol of the English linguistic system, but in Trump’s mouth that same word carries with it all the iconicity and the indexicality of its context, and it is the result of the speaker’s deliberate choice of words. Trump knew what reaction he would elicit from his supporters by having them repeat the phrase: “Build a wall.” That phrase became more than a conventional linguistic symbol. It became what Edward Sapir called a “condensation symbol, whose actual significance is out of all proportion to the apparent triviality of meaning suggested by its mere form” (Sapir Reference Sapir1934:493). Sapir explains the two different kinds of symbolism. The first is referential symbolism, manifested in “oral speech, writing, the telegraph code, national flags and other organizations of symbols which are agreed upon as economical devices for purposes of reference” (Sapir Reference Sapir1934:493). The second type of symbolism is condensation symbolism “a highly condensed form of substitutive behavior for direct expression, allowing for the ready release of emotional tension in conscious or unconscious form.” He adds: “In actual behavior both types are generally blended” (Sapir Reference Sapir1934:493).
Any symbol can become a condensation symbol. Even seemingly purely referential educational practices as conventionalized spelling and standard pronunciation, can easily become the object of violent debates and substitutive forms of emotional expression among educators and the public at large. In the case of Trump’s wall, it is interesting to see how a simple phrase, “build a wall,” scribbled on a notepad by his advisers as a purely mnemonic device to remind the presidential candidate to talk about immigration at his rallies, could be turned into a condensation symbol so potent that it caused the government to shut down for more than a month, taking hostage in its symbolic grip both the president and the nation at large.
Condensation symbols can emerge especially in times of danger and threat. For example, before September 11, 2001, wearing an American flag pin on your lapel meant nothing more than that you were an American. The flag referred to a nation called “the U.S.A.” and that was the nation you belonged to. After the attacks on the World Trade Center, the lapel pin ceased to be simply a sign, it became a condensation symbol for patriotism and even national loyalty. The fact that Barack Obama did not wear an American flag lapel pin when he campaigned for the presidency in 2007 raised eyebrows and Republicans started putting into question his loyalty to the United States. Some, like Donald Trump, insisted on seeing his birth certificate. Obama relented and started wearing the pin again, but it is interesting to read what his reasons had been for not doing so.
WATERLOO, Iowa – Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, D-Ill., said he will no longer wear an American flag lapel pin because it has become a substitute for “true patriotism” since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “My attitude is that I’m less concerned about what you’re wearing on your lapel than what’s in your heart,” he told the campaign crowd Thursday. “You show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who serve. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and ideals. That’s what we have to lead with is our values and our ideals, [...] The truth is that right after 9/11 I had a pin. But shortly after 9/11, particularly because we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.”13
Here we have the clash between two symbolic systems: on the one hand, pins, flags and other symbolic devices that can quickly become shibboleths, that is, words or objects used to test your legitimacy and exert control over you as a member of a social group; on the other hand, symbolic action such as speaking out on important issues and leading with values and ideals. In a sense, Obama is discarding the use of concrete objects like flags and words and prefers to focus on verbal action as a sign of “true patriotism.” This is the opposite of what Trump does when he insists on seeing Obama’s lapel pin and birth certificate in order to give him legitimacy. The controversies over lapel pins and border walls are part of larger symbolic political struggles that are increasingly consuming the public sphere as people and nations are trying to accommodate to the new global realities that threaten the integrity of nation states.
1.3 The Power to Manipulate
We have seen how a populist politician, backed by the power of the presidency, has the power to transform a string of conventionally accepted linguistic signs like “to build a wall” into a powerful condensation symbol that won him the election in 2016. The fundamental ambiguity of symbolic reference that can be interpreted in different ways, as type or token, and as iconic, indexical or symbolic relation, enabled him to switch in and out of levels of interpretation, and eventually impose onto others the meaning that best suited his interests – in this case, the liberty to flout linguistic expectations and to make words irrelevant.
Barthes’ Myth
The French semiologist and literary critic Roland Barthes conceptualized the way that a referential symbol becomes a condensation symbol, which he called “myth” (Barthes Reference Barthes and Cape1972). Myth, he said, is a linguistic sign whose meaning has been slightly displaced from a first semiological chain consisting of: signifier + signified = (arbitrary) sign, to a second semiological chain composed of the first sign, that now becomes the signifier of this second chain, combined with a totally non-arbitrary, highly motivated signified to form a non-arbitrary second sign. Consider, for example, Barthes’ famous example of the cover of the June/July 1955 issue of the French weekly Paris-Match featuring a Black African youngster saluting the French flag at a big military show in Paris. The first semiological chain links a signifier s1 (a photograph) with a signified s2 (West African youngster, called Diouf from Ouagadougou (Burkina-Faso), shown saluting the flag) to form a sign S (saluting Black African youngster). The second semiological chain empties S of its historicity; it makes S into a new signifier s’1 (saluting Black African youngster) linked to a new signified s’2 (subject of the French colonial empire showing allegiance to the French flag) to construct a new S’ (French imperiality).14 Barthes called this new S’ “myth,” in order to underscore its dubious relationship to historical reality and factual truth. With his promise to “build on the southwest border a ‘great, beautiful’ wall that ‘Mexico will pay for’ in the name of ‘border security,’” Trump plays with two semiological chains: the first referential chain of facts (building a wall jointly with Mexico to ensure security at the border) and the second symbolic chain of myths (a “Wall” that “Mexico” will “pay for” for greater “border security”). It is that second chain that indexes for Democrats an unacceptable manifestation of xenophobia, vengeance and nationalism.
Myth, Barthes says, is “speech stolen and restored,” that is, speech emptied of its historicity and of the fundamental ambiguity of its many connotations. Indeed, it transforms connotation into denotation and imposes on the addressees only one denotational meaning. Trump’s reference to his addressees as “the-American-people” mythifies the sign “people” by deliberately ignoring its many other meanings such as “national community,” “U.S. citizenry,” “multilingual/multicultural society,” and imposing only one meaning or myth, namely “America- first populists.” But of course such a symbolic transformation by a single actor may become part of public meaning or standardized interpretation only if the “semantic manipulator has sufficient power, authority, prestige or legitimacy to make his interpretation stick” (Turner Reference Turner1975:154). As we know, such a legitimacy is often contested and not only in the higher echelons of political power. Whether between parents and children, teachers and students, native and non-native speakers, bosses and employees, and even among children in the playground, meaning is constantly being negotiated. But, unlike what many language educators may think, the negotiability of symbolic forms is due not so much to the imperfect fit between the form and the content of an utterance, but mainly to the multiplicity of alternatives and the range of interpretations, manipulations and choices available to social actors.
Semiological Manipulation
As a semiologist, Barthes’ was fascinated and angered by the increased use of publicity for marketing purposes that was slowly taking hold in the Europe of the 1950’s. Having attended the Steichen photograph exhibition “The Family of Man” that was showing in Paris at the time, he was angry at seeing human beings, who had slaughtered each other across the globe during World War II only a few years back, now depicted as a “family.” The exhibition, which featured human beings in all walks of life, born and dying, playing and working, laughing and crying, was technically superb and the desire for peace that its title conveyed was admirable, but for a Frenchman, who had just lived through five years of fascist Vichy ideology under the motto “Travail, famille, patrie” [Work, Family, Fatherland], the family metaphor was tainted. He felt that it had become a conservative “myth” designed by the American exhibit producers to counter the socialist myth of international brotherhood and was thus part of the symbolic warfare that the United States was waging against the Soviet Union. In the same manner that this exhibit projected a politically conservative message, the young African on the cover of Paris Match projected a colonialist message, meant to reinforce the symbolic power of the French colonial system, and the PANZANI ad for Italian pasta reinforced the power of free market capitalism (Barthes Reference Barthes and Heath1977:33). All three images were part of a system of domination that used symbolic representation to further its political and ideological agenda.
Of course, myths as manipulative symbols are not only used for nefarious purposes. At the end of his essay “Myth Today,” Barthes acknowledges that the mythical imagination is one of the essential characteristics of the human species. The power to create myths is the basis not only of obfuscating propaganda and murderous ideologies, but also the source of religious faith, poetic beauty and literary truths. In fact, says Barthes, myth can only be countered with other myths, not with objective facts. As a literary critic, Barthes felt that verbal art had a responsibility to “say the world” as it saw it, rather than persuading the world how it should be or how people should see it. Hence his quest for non-instrumental, non-interested uses of language. He believed that there could be in certain literary forms a “zero degree” instrumentality (Barthes Reference Barthes and Howard1982). His dream of a language that would just express the world, not try to manipulate, persuade or seduce it has been shared by many poets and artists. It has produced some of the most moving poetry, precisely because, as Auden wrote about the death of W. B. Yeats,
1.4 The Power to Construct Meaning
Indeed, what is then the difference between a PANZANI pasta ad, which makes us see tomatoes, cheese and nutmeg in a different way and makes us dream of Italian beaches, sun and dolce vita while we are eating our spaghetti, and a beautiful poem that moves us to tears? Don’t both appeal to our senses and our imagination, one through visual, the other through verbal symbolic forms?
Jakobson’s Poetic Power
It was around the time of Barthes’ Mythologies that the linguist and semiologist Roman Jakobson started searching for the stylistic principle that myths and literature had in common (Jakobson Reference Jakobson and Sebeok1960). What makes a text “literary?”, he asked; what is this literariness (literaturnost’) that is common to poems, advertisements and political slogans and gives them the power to touch people and move them to action? After identifying six components of the communicative situation – the addresser, the addressee, the message, the contact, the channel, and the content, he came to the conclusion that it was the focus on the message itself, its self-referentiality, that distinguished the literary text from other forms of text. The literary quality of a poem, ad or slogan appeals to both the perceptual and the symbolic self by drawing attention to its symbolic structure. Consider, for example, the following short poem by Emily Dickinson (Reference Dickinson1993:13):
This poem refers to a familiar content (words spoken, people speaking) and to an addresser (the lyrical I) making contact with an addressee reader/listener (some say, I say) through the channel of the printed page. But what makes this poem particularly striking is the way it draws attention to its style: the way the words are arranged on the page, the carefully crafted parallelisms, the rhymes, the choice of simple vocabulary. There is nothing arbitrary about the signs on the page. The choice and alignment of the words obey the principle of equivalence of any linguistic utterance, that is, the slots in the first sentence are filled by linguistic structures that fit into the syntax of the English language, that is, subject (a word), verb (is), predicate (dead). But there is one major difference: the word “said” in the second line (instead of “uttered” or “written”) does not depend only on an idea the poet had in her head, but was deliberately chosen to rhyme with “dead” in the first line and to contrast with “say” in the third. The word “dead” itself at the end of line 1 anticipates the antonym “live” at the end of line 5, thus creating a dynamic tension within the poem that is both stylistic and ideational. It is through this poetic structure that we understand the poem to be about the life and death of language as used by speakers in everyday life. What makes this text a poem is not exclusively its referential content, but the dynamic style of its message. Indeed, Jakobson notes that while “dead” (a predicate) and “said”(a verb) are not equivalent paradigms in linguistic terms, they are equivalent in sound, position and shape (four letters), in the same way that the words “dead/said” that start the poem are the (negative) equivalent of the words “to live/that day” that close the poem. Because it is a poem, we tend to interpret these signs as symbols with a deeper metaphorical meaning than just their referential truth. For instance, we may attribute significance to the simplicity of its vocabulary as a metaphor for the simplicity of truth.
The Power of the Political Slogan
To what extent is the symbolic power of this poem any different from that of advertisements, slogans or political pronouncements? Consider, for example, the following slogan chanted by Trump and his supporters at the many rallies he has conducted as president:
TRUMP: And who is going to pay for the wall?
CROWD (ON CUE): Mexico!
TRUMP (CUPPING HIS EARS): Again. WHO is going to pay for the wall?
CROWD: MEXICO!
TRUMP: Yeah! We are going make MEXICO pay for that wall!
The rhythmic repetition of the rhetorical question and the chorus response of the crowd provide an additional meaning to what originally might have been heard as a statement of fact. Making Mexico “pay for the wall” is no longer just meant as having Mexico foot the bill, but as a way of punishing Mexico for supposedly sending its drug dealers, rapists and criminals across our borders and making Mexicans “pay for their crimes.” The effect is not achieved through its truth value but through its incantatory resonances. As Jakobson (Reference Jakobson and Sebeok1960) noted, in poetry the principle of equivalence is projected from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination, that is, the choice of words and their sequence on the syntagmatic axis is not determined by their paradigmatic referential content (their dictionary definitions), but by the formal properties of the exchange (rhythmic chanting and repetition building up to a crescendo of popular frenzy) similar to an audiolingual sentence completion drill. What Trump is doing by using such a rhetorical strategy is to turn “Mexico” into a myth (a country of criminals). “Pay” no longer denotes a monetary procedure but gets turned into a metaphor that indexes revenge and punishment. Indeed, Mexico never agreed to foot the bill and the U.S. Congress never appropriated the funds. But the rhythmical to and fro of the mob’s slogan enacts the ritual beating that Trump vows to administer Mexico at its southern border and is of one piece with the physical abuses of asylum seekers that are happening there.
The Power of Genre
What’s the difference, then, between Trump’s and Dickinson’s discourses? It is useful to remember that symbols, myths and poetry are not symbolic in themselves, but are interpreted as such. We are moved by the poem because we read it as a poem, and do not expect it to report on facts and objective truths. We expect poems to put us in a certain mood, to reveal truths that cannot be expressed directly in so many words. By contrast, we don’t usually read a presidential statement for its poetic qualities, unless we are discourse analysts or communication scholars. In marketing publicity, we are ready to be persuaded, even seduced by the product an ad is selling and to go and buy it, but its mythic quality had better be concealed (as in Packard Reference Packard1957) or else we might not buy the product.
That is where we go back to the expectations of the speech community we started with in the Saussurean model of language. We have seen that the meaning of a word is to be found not only in the link between the sound-image and the concept it represents, but also in its value as compared to other words within the same speech system. Furthermore, when seen as communication, these words are not just labels but cognitive categories that index other words that people use to interpret what they hear. This is why a speech community is necessary not only to create a linguistic system called English or French, but also to interpret the use of this linguistic system in communicative practice. When Saussure wrote that “The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up, by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value” (Saussure Reference Saussure and Baskin1959:113), he suggested that the individual cannot fix the meaning of any given word without knowing what the context, that is, the situation, the genre, the participants, expects it to be.
In the case of Dickinson’s poem and Trump’s political statement, it is the genre that embodies the expectations of their respective speech communities and that determines how these two texts will be interpreted. Hence the uncertainty about the speech genres of some of Trump’s pronouncements and the dismay of the media at the president not speaking the truth. By conflating the genres of the business deal, the religious exhortatory, the political stump speech, and the TV show, Trump is disrupting the very basis of his speech community and its common interpretation of events.15
1.5 “Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch.” Really?
In each of the sections so far we have seen that the power to signify, interpret, manipulate and construct meaning through signs does not come from just referring to objects in the world. It comes from being aware of the relation between the two parts of a sign and of its relation to the other signs that it evokes in people’s minds. But most of all it comes from having the power to have those signs recognized and accepted by members of a speech community. It is ultimately the community of language users that is the only social guarantor of a linguistic system, even if scientists, marketing strategists and poets constantly try to push the boundaries of language to make it say new things.16
The story by the Swiss author Peter Bichsel “Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch” [A table is a table] (Bichsel Reference Bichsel1969) is a humorous illustration of what it means to push those boundaries. An old man in a gray coat, gray hat and gray trousers leading a lonely life in some furnished room in a little gray town decides one day to bring about some change in his life by renaming all the furniture in his room. After all, he thinks, the French call a bed “lit,” a picture “tableau” and a chair “chaise,” so why can’t I? So he starts calling his bed “picture,” the chair “alarm clock,” the table “carpet,” and the newspaper “bed.” In the morning he stays longer in the picture, sits on the alarm clock and eats his breakfast on the carpet while reading the bed. This discovery made him all excited. At last life was becoming interesting! Soon he had invented a whole new language that gave him so much pleasure that he hardly went out anymore. After a while, he did go out, but he had to laugh when people said “Nice weather today” or “Are you going to the football game?” for he no longer understood what they were talking about. Not only could he not understand other people, but he could not share his excitement about his new discovery for they couldn’t understand him. So he stopped talking. In the end, he only talked to himself and didn’t even greet people anymore.
This story, written in 1969, was a staple text in beginning German language textbooks in the U.S. before the advent of communicative language teaching because of the simplicity of its language. It was meant also to counter the belief of many beginning learners that words are just a bunch of labels for the familiar furniture of the universe. It would be viewed today as a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to learn how to communicate in a foreign language. However, it raises a more complex question that language teachers have avoided asking: What prevented the Swiss people from learning the old man’s language? After all, they were willing to learn French or English in school, so why couldn’t the old man teach them his language? What does it take to change the linguistic habits of a speech community? Chapter 2 attempts to respond to these questions by further discussing the power of social actors to represent social reality.
Suggestions for Further Reading
As the father of structuralism, Saussure (1916, chapter 1 and chapters 4–5) is essential for understanding the linguistic sign and the post-structuralist critics of Saussure in the 1970’s and 19’80s. Deacon (Reference Deacon1997, part I) offers a necessary semiotic supplement to Saussure that helps understand how symbolic power comes into the picture. C. S. Peirce (Reference Peirce, Houser and Kloesel1992, 1998) is a notoriously difficult read, but van Lier (Reference Van Lier2004) offers an accessible overview of Peircean semiotics. The classical essay on language by Sapir (Reference Sapir1949) adds the anthropological perspective. Together these four readings provide the foundation for a discussion of the symbolic in symbolic power. Sapir’s essay on the status of linguistics as a science (Reference Sapir1949) and Whorf (Reference Whorf and Caroll1991) are crucial to understanding the relation of language, thought and our embodied self. Lakoff (Reference Lakoff1987, chapter 18), Kramsch (Reference Kramsch, Davies and Elder2004), Slobin (Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996) and the papers in Gumperz and Levinson (Reference Gumperz and Levinson1996) show that language relativity is today a well-accepted phenomenon that adds to the complexity of communication across cultures. For a good discussion of orders of indexicality and the metapragmatic organization principle, see Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2010, chapter 2). Voloshinov (Reference Voloshinov, Matejka and Titunik1973) is not an easy read, but he provides a crucial backdrop to Bakhtin, discussed in Chapter 9, and so does Schultz (Reference Schultz1990). Those interested in myth and how it remains at work in the present day should read Barthes (Reference Barthes and Cape1972, Reference Barthes and Heath1977), Ricoeur (Reference Ricoeur and Pellauer2016), as well as Basso (Reference Basso1990) and Hyde (Reference Hyde1998).
“La Raison du Plus Fort…”
In his Reference Marin and Houle1988 book Portrait of the King, Louis Marin, a contemporary of Foucault and Bourdieu, analyzes the source of the King’s absolute power under the reign of Louis XIV (1662–1715). Drawing on Pascal’s commentaries, Marin asks the following questions: How does (brute) force become power and what role does discourse play in this transformation? What does the discourse of power look like? For this, Marin considers the following fable, published by Jean de la Fontaine, the well-known poet at Louis XIV’s court in Versailles, in his collection of fables (1668–1694) and used since then in every schoolbook in French public schools.
Like Aesop’s fables from which they are inspired, La Fontaine’s fables use animal protagonists to illustrate human foibles and follies, and the power struggles that ensue. For example, the fable of “The frog who wants to make herself as a big as an ox” and ends up inflating herself to death makes fun of people who want to be someone they are not.1 In “The fox and the crow,” the fox manipulates the vanity of the crow to make him lose the cheese he holds in his beak by persuading him to show what a lovely voice he has; it makes fun of those who listen to flattery.2 While in these two fables, the moral of the story comes at the end, the moral of “The wolf and the lamb” is given to us up front: “The reason of the more powerful is always the best/ We will show it presently on the following case.” Indeed, readers might not understand the moral of a story in which a wolf eats up a lamb. Isn’t it what wolves are wont to do? Where’s the problem?
2.1 The Reason of the More Powerful
The problem as stated by Marin is this: Why does the wolf need to argue with the lamb over more than twenty lines before he actually pounces on him and devours him? Why does he need to justify himself with moral arguments, find a reason to use the overwhelming physical superiority that he evidently has? Let’s look at how he does this.
It is made clear from the start that the wolf is hungry and wants to kill the lamb in order to still his hunger. But he starts by engaging the lamb in what amounts to a rational, judicial procedure in order to justify his action. First, he accuses him of temerity or impudence, that is, not only for muddying the water but for behaving as if he were as entitled as the wolf to drink from that stream, thus framing his behavior from the start in terms of symbolic power differential. By declaring the water of the stream his property (“my beverage”), the wolf makes the lamb’s crime a crime of lèse Majesté. The wolf adds insult to injury by using the derogatory second person pronoun Tu (“tu seras châtié”). The answer of the lamb addresses both accusations with unimpeachable deference and submission: physically the lamb cannot possibly muddy the wolf’s water since he is drinking downstream from him; symbolically, the lamb gives all the signs necessary to show himself inferior to his accuser “Sire… Votre Majesté [Your Majesty].” Combined with the second person plural form of the pronoun, the third person form of address is here the ultimate sign of respect from a subject to his sovereign or a servant to his master (see “Madame est servie” [Her ladyship is served]). Unimpressed by the lamb’s polite and rational arguments, the wolf brutally re-imposes his representation of things (“You are muddying it”), further using the insulting Tu form. His tactic from now on is going to seek to reverse the public perception of wolves and lambs by portraying himself as the victim, thus eliciting in the reader feelings of compassion that will attach them to him, not to the lamb.
If the first accusation had to do with an alleged attack against the wolf’s authority, the second has to do with his reputation (his symbolic self), as he accuses the lamb of badmouthing him in the past. The lamb responds again with impeccable factual logic: “I wasn’t yet born.” The third accusation shifts from blaming the message to blaming the messenger: “If it’s not you, then it’s your brother” and again the lamb’s response remains at the level of facts (“I don’t have a brother”). After these three false accusations, the wolf changes tactics. Broadening his grievance to the lamb’s social and cultural identity in a shepherd economy, the wolf moves from blaming the individual messenger to blaming the messenger’s family and clan (“you, your shepherds and your dogs”), all of whom he sees as threats to his royal absolute power. But having expanded the scope of his grievance, it becomes difficult for the wolf to justify his impending attack on a newborn lamb. Since the facts don’t provide him with the legitimation he seeks, he has to resort to a higher authority – On me l’a dit: il faut que je me venge [I have been told: I have to take revenge].
The colon is key here. The indeterminate pronoun “l’’” (it) in “On me l’a dit [I have been told it]” points anaphorically both backward and forward. Both “You are a curse, so I have been told (backward anaphora),” and “I’ve been told that I have to take revenge (forward anaphora)” – in both cases, Public Opinion and Reasons of State, attributed to an impersonal “On,” prevail. The King has to take revenge to save his honor, but he can also deflect responsibility onto his counselors and ministers.3 This action becomes a matter of national honor and national security. And he can always plausibly deny that his action was self-interested. Indeed, it is important to note that the wolf’s revenge is not a psychological sense of vindictiveness or thirst for payback; it is rather the reestablishment of a balance of power between the two parties, the shepherds and the wolves, and their respective reputation or honor. In La Fontaine’s fable, “On me l’a dit” becomes the “filter bubble” through which anything the lamb might say is heard and received. Having smeared the reputation of the lamb and discredited his family and his people over nineteen lines, the wolf’s discourse has undermined any objective facts the lamb might adduce. It has prepared us for line 20 that legitimizes the wolf’s killing of the lamb by placing the responsibility on the institution of the Monarchy itself. The dialogue was from the start clearly not about water drinking rights, but about the honor of the Monarchy as institution.
Thus the stated moral of the fable: “The reason of the more powerful is always the best” is less a prescriptive statement than a faithful description of the way that symbolic power functions. The powerful, says Marin, need reasons to legitimize their power.4 Brute force without justice can be contested, gratuitous violence can be criticized, disputed. But by using the discourse of justice, that is, by representing himself as an unjustly hounded victim, the wolf adds an imaginary layer to brute force, and thereby gains what is called “power.” Brute force needs to appropriate for itself the discourse of justice, to stand for justice and to be taken as judicially equitable. In order to do that, the wolf has to refrain from pouncing on the lamb immediately. He has to use language, that is, linguistic signs, to represent himself and act upon the imagination of both the lamb and the readers. The purpose of this representation is not to speak the truth, but to create a symbolic world in which his action (i.e., his killing of the lamb) will be legitimate. A moral world, that both the lamb and the readers will buy into by virtue of its axiological rhetoric.5
One might wonder why the lamb is portrayed as responding to the wolf’s accusations in this way, when he should know that any such response will be taken as an act of overt defiance. This lamb, despite his young age, sounds like a Cartesian product of the Renaissance. First addressing the wolf as “Your Majesty” and “Sire” shows that he knows his place in the social structure and has already learned with mother’s milk the art of flattery. Then, he sticks to the facts and his talking points, which shows him to be rational and logical. But his quick wit and logical repartees may be perceived as “throwing shade” on the wolf, that is, expressing subtle contempt for the wolf’s baseless accusations. His insistence on his innocence could be seen as making the wolf look like a fool. One could wonder whether La Fontaine himself, by cautioning his readers against the abuses of the King’s power, might not be reinforcing the absolute nature of that power under the motto: “All publicity is good publicity,” even for the killing of an innocent lamb. Certainly, the popularity that the fable has enjoyed among young public school children in France since the seventeenth century suggests that they accept as a fact of nature the reasons given by the powerful to justify their actions.6
Power can only be exercised with the complicity of those upon whom it is exercised. The lamb is complicit by engaging the wolf into a rational dialogue of truth, the reader is complicit by accepting the premise of the moral stated at the beginning. The power of both the wolf and the poet is exercised through the imagination – the representation, aroused by language, of what could happen, how brute force could be deployed, what destruction could be wreaked for anyone who dares challenge it. Some critics have noted that the outcome is all the more cruel because the dialogue has raised hopes that in the end the wolf might be persuaded by the lamb’s arguments. That this does not happen because the argument was made in bad faith makes the moral of the story all the more ambiguous. Are the reasons given by the more powerful wolf the best because they are good reasons or because he is the strongest, as in the English proverb “might makes right”? La Fontaine, living as he did at the court of Versailles at the height of Louis XIV’s reign, was not about to put the power of the sovereign in doubt. He himself admired the King and would have condemned those who believed that the King’s power was subject to logical and legal negotiation.7
2.2 From Reference to Representation: Saussure and Beyond
We have seen that language and other symbolic systems enable people not only to refer to things in the world but to represent them in our minds and to communicate these representations to others. Saussure schematized this in the form of the famous two heads connected by two dotted lines moving from A’s brain to A’s mouth, then from A’s mouth to B’s ear and on to B’s brain and vice versa (see Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 Saussure’s two talking heads (Reference Saussure and Baskin1959:11)
What moves back and forth between A and B is not the sound-image nor the concept, which are both psychological entities, but their encoded symbolic representation. Speakers hope that the representation that reaches the other’s brain is the same as the representation that was in their own, but the process of representation is complex and ambiguous.
Upon rereading the fable of “The wolf and the lamb,” we can see how complex this process is. First, the wolf’s words are meant not only to refer to drinking water but to elicit a mental schema in the lamb’s mind – a mental schema of guilt and responsibility that is both psychological and affective. We can hear the cognitive disbelief and emotional indignation of the lamb in his response: “How could I do that? I was not yet born.” The legitimation of the wolf’s symbolic power requires the wolf to manipulate the lamb into believing he is guilty of muddying the water and thus make him complicit in his own death through shame.8 And so the readers are also asked to legitimize the reasoning of the powerful. Second, the wolf is portrayed as performing the power of the King towards his subjects. We are dealing here with a second meaning of “representation,” that of putting on a show, of staging or constructing a social reality through words. Not only does the wolf construct a dubious narrative about the lamb, but the poet himself constructs this narrative to edify or caution his readers. Third, the wolf manages to persuade the lamb not only to address him as one would a king (Your Majesty), but to see in him the representative or delegate of a higher power, be it God or the State (L’Etat c’est moi). That act of delegation is expressed by the ominous and vague pronoun “on” (“on me l’a dit”) that serves as the ultimate justification for the wolf’s action. I return to these three forms of representation in Sections 2.3–2.5.
The fact that even an absolute monarch like Louis XIV needs to provide legitimate reasons for his actions or else the people will not accept his authority is the ultimate moral of the story. Indeed, the exercise of symbolic power is not about objective truth but about whether one can get people to agree that it is true. The reason that the wolf and the lamb don’t agree on the meaning of the French verb “troubler” (as in troubler mon breuvage / to muddy my water) is that they each have different interests in that encounter. For the lamb, who is merely interested in quenching his thirst, troubler means concretely “to muddy the water.” The wolf, eager to assert his authority and to legitimize his impending killing, “to muddy the water” means to question his authority. Despite Saussure’s idealized speech situation, that sees the structural relation of the signifier troubler and the signified (troubled water) as the two sides of a sheet of paper, the fit between the two is far from perfect because of the different interests and motivations of the two speakers.
Beyond the gap between signifier and signified, the process of representation encounters also a gap between the concept in head A and the concept in head B. This gap is illustrated in Saussure’s schema by the two dotted lines that bridge the distance between the ear and the brain of each of the interlocutors, and between head A and head B. However hard the interlocutors try, that distance will remain. The impossibility of a perfect fit has been seen as an eternal absence that no act of communication can completely abolish. We have seen that symbols are open to multiple interpretations depending on how they are read, that is, which interpretant is chosen to disambiguate them. Literary critics like Derrida (Reference Derrida and Bass1978) talk about the meaning of a word as being constantly “deferred.” And Bakhtin showed eloquently that truth can only be gotten at indirectly through allegories, metaphors … and fables (see Chapter 9). The impossibility of perfect representation and yet the unavoidable necessity to try to close the gap lead to symbolic power struggles not only between kings and their subjects but between people in everyday life.
2.3 The Power of Symbolic Representation
Not all exchanges are as insidious as the one between the wolf and the lamb. In everyday life, we are constantly engaging in small exercises of symbolic power. We have seen (in the Introduction) how symbolic power is “the power to construct reality” and to have others recognize/accept this reality, that is, misrecognize its constructed nature. We don’t usually like to think that what we say about the world is anything else than what the world really is. How can a common greeting like “Nice weather today, eh?” construct the weather? Isn’t it just stating what is? We are ready to admit that the question is more than a statement of fact; that it is a greeting, a way of making contact (phatic communion), being friendly. But surely the weather is a fact that is independent of my talking about it?
Well – yes and no. For sure, I do not make the weather by talking about it. But by drawing someone’s attention to it, by passing judgment on it, by not saying that it rained the whole of last week but only saying that today is nice weather, as well as through my tone of voice, my facial expression and my body language, I give the weather a meaning, I influence the perception of my interlocutor as to its importance, as well as to the fact that I speak English, and that I use English like a native speaker. I am in a sense, albeit on a more modest scale than Bourdieu’s definition seems to suggest, displaying symbolic power, that is, the “power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world” (see Introduction). The “eh?,” that seeks recognition, acknowledgement and complicity in my assessment of the weather could be seen as an exercise of symbolic power in constructing people’s representation of the social world by “mobilizing” their attention, their solicitude, their feelings and their belief that talking about the weather as a form of greeting is the most natural and legitimate thing to do. And if the encounter is between a man and a woman, the whole utterance could be understood as the power of the pick-up line.9
Or consider the following anecdote. My 2-year-old German grandson tried to get me to take him out for a walk by using the only two words he knew: “Schuhe anziehen” [put on your shoes]. But Oma didn’t seem to be paying attention, so he insisted with a plaintive voice: “Oma, Schuhe anziehen!” Oma then slipped on her shoes but didn’t budge. He got really upset, pulled at her coat and cried: “Schuhe anziehen, Oma!! Schuhe anziehen!!!” Clearly, the representation evoked in his mind by the words he was using (going for a walk) was not the same as the one Oma had upon hearing these words (putting on shoes). Of course she had understood what he meant, but had decided to respond to what he said, because she really didn’t want to go out. After a while, she decided to respond to his desire rather than to his words. She gave him a big hug and took him for a walk. Who would deny that already at that age a child knows how to engage in symbolic power struggles with adults?
Despite Saussure’s diagram and the folk belief that language is just the “conduit” for the exchange of information (Reddy Reference Reddy and Ortony1993), words and their representations do not travel, unscathed, from a mouth to an ear. They are affected along the way by emotions like desire, self-respect, pleasure or displeasure, by memories of former interactions and expectations of future ones. They are also the object of small or big power struggles between people with different interests like the one between Oma and her grandson. These subjective factors have objective effects and one recognizes their power indirectly from their effects. Oma didn’t realize the importance that the child attached to the phrase “Schuhe anziehen” before he started crying. In fact, he was only ventriloquating what he had often heard his mother say and was disconcerted to find out that it didn’t have the same effect on his grandmother. Even though his sentence was perfectly correct and comprehensible, his words failed to mobilize her, so he had to mobilize her through other means.
Precisely because we have to use linguistic, gestural, visual symbols to communicate with others, we are, with every utterance, playing with our and others’ symbolic representations of the social world. In the following, I return to the three meanings of the notion of symbolic representation we encountered in the analysis of La Fontaine’s fable in order to tease out their broader theoretical significance: representation as cognitive schema, as staged performance and as social and political ritual. In the following, I use the term “representation” both in the French sense used by Bourdieu (“mental representations” and social/cultural “objectified representations”) and in the English sense.10
2.4 Three Ways of Looking at Symbolic Representation
Representation as Mental/Bodily Schema – Lakoff, Johnson
The first meaning of representation is the one we usually associate with “image in the mind.” From a psycholinguistic perspective, we could say that “representation” is another word for epistemic and affective “schema,” a concept studied in language education mostly by scholars interested in the teaching of reading. In Cook’s words, “schemata are mental representations of typical instances […] used in discourse processing to predict and make sense of the particular instance which the discourse describes” (Cook Reference Cook1994:11). Cognitive science theory, however, has reminded us that the mind is “embodied” (Varela et al. Reference Varela, Thompson and Rosch1991) and that the idealized cognitive models (Lakoff Reference Lakoff1987: chapter 4) that we encountered in the previous chapter are not disembodied representations, but are very much anchored in the physical dimensions of our body or “body-in-mind” (Johnson Reference Johnson1987; see also Slobin Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996).11 Representation in this first sense has, therefore, the following three characteristics:
Representation renders something which is absent present.
In the same manner as a photograph, a portrait or a statue render present someone absent, imagined or no longer there, so words give presence to distant or absent people or things. They can even substitute/be a metonymy or a metaphor for the real person (see condensation symbols in Chapter 1). In Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, the hat of the governor prominently displayed on a staff in the town square had to be greeted by passers-by as it stood for or was used as a symbol of the governor himself. Similarly, some Christians cross themselves when walking by a church, thus re-present-ing, that is, making Christ and the cross “present again” through the symbol for Christianity.
Representation as embodied cognition.
As already mentioned, representation is an activity of the embodied mind and the learning of a first or a second language is also the learning of a particular relation to our body (see Kramsch Reference Kramsch2009a). As Bourdieu writes:
We learn bodily. The social order inscribes itself in bodies through this permanent confrontation [of our body and the world], which may be more or less dramatic but is always largely marked by affectivity and, more precisely, by affective transactions with the environment.
But what Bourdieu and cognitive scientists mean by body is more than just our head, hands and feet. It means at once:
– the space of the body (perceptions, sensations, emotions, feelings);
– the time of the body (memories, desires, anticipations, projections); and
– the reality of the body (actual/virtual reality, imagination, words made flesh, e.g., violent actions provoked by violent words).
Representation is both a construction of the embodied mind and a tool to manipulate other people’s representations through slogans, flags, emblems, badges, crosses and so on.
Representation organizes social reality.
Through the lexical and syntactic categories it provides, language as representation organizes reality into, say, animate and inanimate entities, insiders and outsiders, males and females, and classifies them, hierarchizes them, sequences them to yield a world that makes sense to us. Words give shape to inchoate thoughts. This is the principle behind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of language relativity that was mentioned in Chapter 1.12
In Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff uses Borges’ description of a fictional Chinese encyclopedia as a memorable example of the power of language users to organize reality. This encyclopedia, titled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, gives a taxonomy of the animal kingdom that can only make us laugh.
On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into: (a) those that belong to the emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) that resemble flies from a distance (Borges 1966, p.108).
Such a representation is disorienting. It produces a bodily reaction of helplessness precisely because our mind, our perceptions, our whole mind-and-body experience is thrown off. Our embodied mind expects the rationality that comes with alphabetical order, the hierarchy it implies, the subcategorizations of the term “animals” that it suggests – but all those expectations are flouted in this Chinese encyclopedia. Wedesperately struggle to find the logic behind the words and to fathom the intention of the writer. Lakoff comments: “Borges, of course, deals with the fantastic. [But] the fact is that people around the world categorize things in ways that both boggle the Western mind and stump Western linguists and anthropologists” (ibidem). Also among Westerners, scholars from different intellectual traditions expressed in different languages cut up reality in different ways, sometimes making it difficult to participate in international research projects even if everyone speaks English (Kramsch Reference Kramsch2009b; Zarate and Liddicoat Reference Zarate and Liddicoat2009).
Representation as Staged Performance – Goffman, Foucault
Closely related to representation as mental and embodied schema is representation as staged performance. In this sense, as Goffman has shown (Reference Goffman1959), the presentation of self in everyday life is both a presentation and a representation of how one wishes to be seen, exemplified today by the self-profiling on Facebook and other social media. The capacity to influence other people’s representations of oneself and the addiction to these representations caused by the need for constant public sanction are one example of the insidious and invisible symbolic power exercised by language and pictures in online media (see Chapters 7 and 8).13
As spectacle and performance, representation brings about what it represents (see Chapter 4). According to Bourdieu, representations are “performative statements which seek to bring about what they state, to restore at one and the same time the objective structures and the subjective relation to those structures” (Reference Bourdieu, Raymond and Adamson1991:225, my emphasis). For instance, talking about people’s regional or ethnic identity as displayed through such indices or criteria as language, dialect and accent, Bourdieu says:
[We should not] forget that, in social practice, these criteria are the object of mental representations, i.e., acts of perception and appreciation, of cognition and recognition, in which agents invest their interests and their presuppositions, and of objectified representations, in things (emblems, flags, badges, etc.) or acts, self-interested strategies of symbolic manipulation which aim at determining the (mental) representation that other people may form of these properties and their bearers. […] Struggles over ethnic or regional identity […] are a particular case of the different struggles over classifications, struggles over the monopoly of the power to make people see and believe, to get them to know and recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world and, thereby, to make and unmake groups.
Bourdieu clearly shows in this quote how mental/perceptual representations, coupled with acts and strategies of symbolic manipulation, can have performative effects in not only creating prejudice and discrimination, but in shaping social groups and prompting them to action.
In Discipline and Punish (1977/Reference Foucault and Sheridan1995), Michel Foucault gives a dramatic illustration of the power of these two forms of representation – as staged performance and as mental/bodily schema – through a graphic comparison of the public execution of Damiens the regicide in 1757, and the daily schedule of prisoners in the House for young offenders in Paris in 1837. On the one hand, we have the excruciating description of the torture and execution of Damiens, who attempted to kill Louis XV while he was travelling. This description or staged representation by the Gazette d’Amsterdam of April 1, 1757, is quoted by Foucault as follows:
On 2 March 1757, Damiens the regicide was condemned “to make amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris” where he was to be “taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds”; then, “in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.”
The detailed representation of the execution in the Amsterdam Gazette is meant to elicit and solidify in the minds of the readers a mental schema of overwhelming monarchical power, of “imbalance and excess” in the same manner as the ritual performance of Damiens’ execution in the public square was meant to act not as a deterrent, but as an edifying spectacle that would instruct the masses, build their spiritual strength and restore their faith in the King’s absolute power. As Damiens had disrupted the divine order of the cosmos by trying to kill the representative of God on earth, so was the ritual of punishment intended to make the world whole again. As Foucault writes: “The condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king” (p.29). The body of the condemned becomes the place where the vengeance of the sovereign is applied, the anchoring point for the manifestation of the King’s power.
Hence the symbolic meaning of each of the details given. By melting wax and sulfur together, the two ingredients of the King’s seal, and pouring the mixture into Damiens’ wounds, the sovereign puts his mark, brand, sign, royal seal on the body of the condemned. Yellow bee’s wax, yellow green sulfur, gray lead, yellow olive, dark brown resin are all natural elements that return the body to the earth that, according to the Bible, it comes from. Sulfur used to fumigate and disinfect is applied here as a ritual of purification. The musculature that holds the body together – breasts, thighs, calves – is taken apart. The body itself is drawn apart by four horses and quartered at the image of the four points of the compass, like the macrocosm. The dismembered body is then burned to ashes and the ashes scattered to the winds to ensure that it is not only not remembered but rendered invisible, nameless, erased altogether from human memory. The regicide’s punishment is a ceremonial celebration of the restoration of world order disturbed by the criminal act – a re-activation of monarchical power.
Foucault argues that such a spectacle of sovereign power had not only a mental representational, but also a performative effect on the masses. It taught them who they were, by making them into the subjects the King wanted them to be. In the same way as a theater play or a fable represents, that is, stages or performs human actions and their consequences, so did the “spectacle of the scaffold” hold up to the people, as in a mirror, “the affirmation of [monarchical] power and of its intrinsic superiority” (p.49) and of the role they as subjects had to play in that performance.
On the other hand, and by contrast, the Rules for the House of young prisoners in Paris published eighty years later by a certain Léon Faucher (1838 cited in Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan1995:6–7) made use of another kind of symbolic representation to punish and reeducate young offenders. No longer did the display of power impose itself directly through physical force and corporal punishment. Over the eighteenth century, brute force like the one displayed in Damiens’ execution increasingly failed to edify the masses and to legitimize the power of the King. People slowly turned away in disgust at the barbarity of the sentence. Foucault describes the change in the way power was exercised, namely from external physical destruction to internal self-discipline. By 1837, young offenders were being reeducated to the power of law and order by being held to a strict daily schedule of activities that represented and taught them self-discipline under strict surveillance. Here, for example, Art.17 and 18 of the Rules for the House of young prisoners in Paris.
Art.17 The prisoners’ day will begin at six in the morning in winter and at five in summer. They will work for nine hours a day throughout the year. Two hours a day will be devoted to instruction. Work and the day will end at nine o’clock in winter and at eight in summer.
Art.18 Rising. At the first drum-roll, the prisoners must rise and dress in silence, as the supervisor opens the cell doors. At the second drum-roll, they must be dressed and make their beds. At the third, they must line up and proceed to the chapel for morning prayer. There is a five-minute interval between each drum-roll.
Prayers, work, meals, school, bedtime were regulated hour by hour. The schedule, posted on the walls of the prison for all to see, was the public representation of a disciplinary voice that the prisoners were to make their own not only by performing its words, but by monitoring their progress as well. Slowly they would internalize the rules and exercise their own surveillance. The rigorous discipline imposed on criminals and delinquents was meant to bind criminals not through visual and mental images of physical retaliation and retribution, but through the reasoned performance of textual rules and regulations, controlled and monitored through panoptic observation and evaluation.
Representation as Delegation – Hanks, Bourdieu
The third meaning of representation is the one we generally use to denote the process of standing for someone else. A social group delegates someone to represent the group, people elect their representatives in government, political candidates stand for their constituencies, CEOs for their corporations, teachers for their academic institutions, parents for their families. We have seen how in La Fontaine’s fable the wolf’s ultimate argument relied on his claim to represent a higher Reason of State that forced him to take revenge for perceived wrongs.
Delegates exert vicarious power, they are the incarnation of a bigger, invisible authority that gives their words and actions legitimacy. One could say that any member of a language community stands for the community that invisibly monitors the communicative competence of its members, that is, what it is feasible, appropriate and systemically possible to say, and what is in fact done with this language (Hymes Reference Hymes, Ammon, Dittmar and Mattheier1987:224). The symbolic power of an individual is always a delegated power exercised invisibly by institutions, even though that power is constantly contested by individuals who, like the old man in the Bichsel story (Chapter 1), try and push its boundaries.
Representatives not only stand for, they also speak for, entities that are larger than the individual. Although we don’t tend to think of it that way, as speakers we wield symbolic power by virtue of using communicative practices usually associated with representation as delegation. In the following paragraphs, I look at four of these practices: vicarious speech, hurled speech, reported speech and oracle effects.
Vicarious speech. In many instances of everyday life, speakers speak for others, and depending on the context, this can be accepted as normal or seen as offensive. When a teacher says to her 6-year old students: “Let us be quiet now,” this is understood as totally appropriate, but if she says it to 22-year-old undergraduates, it might be understood as condescending. When a mother addresses her infant in a high-pitched voice, “Does she wants her milk now?”, she is using motherese to give voice to an infant who cannot yet speak; it is heard as a legitimate exercise of motherly solicitude. But when a man responds to a female colleague who complains about being treated unfairly at work: “There she goes again!” in the presence of other male friends, the use of the third person could be perceived by the woman as offensive, for he is not directly addressing her but indirectly putting her down by addressing his male friends about her. This is the reason why such speech is sometimes presented as a teasing (“I was only joking”), rather than an insulting strategy, thus allowing the participants to save face while providing the speaker with an alibi (see Chapter 4). This is also why in some families children are taught never to talk about someone in the third person in that person’s presence. This kind of communicative practice has been studied by linguistic anthropologists as a form of hurled speech.
Hurled speech. William Hanks (Hanks Reference Hanks1996:259–265) has studied “hurled speech” as discourse between two parties that Hanks calls “the instigator” and “the pivot,” performed within earshot of a third party that he calls “the target.” Like gossip, such discourse is usually meant to denigrate the target through speech that, albeit directly addressed to the pivot, is indirectly “thrown at” the target, who is meant to overhear it. Thus, for example, two women at the market are engaged in gossip face to face, when the target comes into view. The instigator says to the pivot mockingly, in a loud voice that can also be overheard by any passer-by: “Wow! Where are you going? You’ve dressed yourself well” and the pivot answers: “Oh there’s someone I need to see!”, their subsequent laughter implying sexual wrongdoing. Hanks comments: “The attack is invasive of the target. It attempts to dominate the target by subordinating her to the accepted values of the group, values like family propriety, monogamy and muted attractiveness in daily public settings” (p.263). Once attacked the target can confront her attackers directly, but she risks physical confrontation or what may be seen as unseemly behavior for a woman; or she can ignore the attack, but this might backfire, leaving the audience to believe that she indeed has a lover at the market. But, if she is accompanied, she might in turn use her companion as a pivot to reciprocate in kind, for example by throwing back hurled speech at her attacker such as “The poor dog, it doesn’t see its own tail, it sees only the tail of others” (p.264).14
Speech and thought (re)presentation. Discourse analysts have identified various ways in which speakers manipulate the speech of others and thereby exercise various degrees of symbolic control over them. This has been seen in terms of narrator’s representation of speech or action as an indicator of narrator control. For example, in Franz Kafka’s short story “Give it up!”, the narrator uses a not only vague, but narratively coercive way of describing a man seeking directions from a policeman on how to get to the station. “He spotted a policeman and asked him the way.” The policeman answers: “You are asking me the way?” and the man answers: “Yes, because I don’t know it.” When we look at the various ways the initial request could have been reported, we notice that the narrator chose the one that gave the man the least amount of symbolic power. Direct speech representation (“How do I get to the station?”) would have given the man maximal narrative agency. Indirect speech (“He asked him how he could get to the station”) or free indirect speech (“He approached the policeman. How could he get to the station?”) would have reduced the man’s narrative voice but retained the specificity of his request. By choosing to merely represent the speech act performed (“he asked him the way”), the narrator constrains the autonomy of the man and puts it squarely within his own narrative control. As Mick Short comments: “as we move from [the first to the last form of representation], the contribution of the character becomes more and more muted” (Short Reference Short1996:293).
Oracle effect. The fourth instance of representation as delegation is what Bourdieu calls “the oracle effect” of political or ecclesiastical speech. In the same way as the oracles of the Pythia in Delphi were interpreted by the priests as the words of Apollo himself, so are politicians today said to usurp the voice of the people to speak not only to and for the people, but in lieu of the people; and so do pastors, clergymen, and well-intended kindergarten teachers who use “we” rather than “I” to show their identification with the individuals in their care. The oracle effect is to give the impression that one is both the messenger and the interpreter of the message, that is, that one is not only a symbolic delegate of the people, but the people itself.
The oracle effect […] is what enables the authorized spokesperson to take his authority from the group which authorizes him in order to exercise recognized constraint, symbolic violence, on each of the isolated members of the group […] I am the group. I am an incarnation of the collective and, by virtue of that fact, I am the one who manipulates the group in the very name of the group.
Bourdieu calls this kind of representation “usurpatory ventriloquism” (p.211) or “legitimate imposture” (p.214). It would be wrong to take these negative terms as a condemnation of these practices. On the contrary, Bourdieu always seeks to show that symbolic power is the name of the social game that people who are the delegates of powerful entities like the Government, the Church or the Academy have to play, and not only corrupt politicians, untrustworthy clergymen or dishonest intellectuals.
Populist politicians are only an extreme case of representative delegates that don’t just speak for the people but actively construct the people in whose name they speak. Which means, in the case of representative democracy, the people are both the constituency they are speaking for and the audience they are speaking at, the latter containing potential recruits for the former.
In sum: Whether it be a mental embodied schema, a staged performance, or an act of delegation, symbolic representation is a view of the world that encapsulates our innermost desires, perceptions, memories and aspirations and is therefore prone to manipulation by self and others. In other words, it is what makes us into social actors in a symbolic power game that constitutes the realm of the “political” (le politique) in the broad sense of the term (see Introduction).
2.5 The Politics of Representation
The Bakhtin scholar and literary critic Michael Holquist reflects on the reasons why Bakhtin, as a Russian orthodox Christian and a Soviet communist, was so interested in parable and allegory. Faced with the “increasing gap between his own religious and metaphysical ideas and the Soviet government’s ever more militant insistence on adherence to Russian Communism” (Holquist Reference Holquist and Greenblatt1981:180), Bakhtin developed a theory that Holquist calls “dialogism” (Holquist Reference Holquist1990), which sees human utterances as being by definition a contest, a struggle between one’s voice and the voice of others. The words we use have been used by others in other places at other times, says Bakhtin; they carry with them a historical baggage that affects their meaning in the present.15 Dialogism is a theory of language that does not start with the linguistic sign, as in Saussure, but with the duality of self and other, indeed self in other and other in self in every word that we utter. In Holquist’s formulation: “I can appropriate meaning to my own purposes only by ventriloquating others” (Holquist Reference Holquist and Greenblatt1981:169).
But this ventriloquation is inherently conflictual, as “individual consciousness never fully replicates the structure of the society’s public values” (p.179). Faced with this fundamental contradiction built into the very fabric of language, every utterance seeks to make meaning indirectly not only in trying to understand events, but in trying to persuade others of our understanding. This gap between my representation of things and that of others is precisely the essence of politics understood as the power game of political interests (le politique; see Introduction). “If we begin by assuming that all representation must be indirect, that all utterance is ventriloquism, then it will be clear […] that difficulties do exist in moving from epistemology to persuasion. This is because difficulties exist in the very politics of any utterance, difficulties that at their most powerful exist in the politics of culture systems” (pp.181–182), that is, in the clashes between value systems.
By suggesting that all utterances are political, that is, represent conflictual value systems, Holquist and Bakhtin rejoin Bourdieu’s views on the power of symbolic representation. We can summarize these views as follows:
– In language, “relations of communication are always, inseparably, power relations which, in form and content, depend on the material or symbolic power accumulated by the agents (or institutions) involved in these relations” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu, Raymond and Adamson1991:167).
– Language reproduces material/physical distinctions into symbolic distinctions.
– It imposes ways of representing and classifying persons, things and events and makes these classifications seem natural.
– It makes these representations stick through the power of suggestion.
– Because the power of suggestion appeals to our emotions as well as our cognition, the clash of representations is inevitably associated with moral values (Johnson Reference Johnson1993).
– Symbolic power strives to remain invisible and misrecognized as such.
– Ultimately, the clash of representations is part of the permanent struggle to define reality (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu, Raymond and Adamson1991:224).16
Suggestions for Further Reading
To further understand the gap between Saussure’s head A and head B, see Kress (Reference Kress1993) for his discussion of the arbitrary vs. motivated nature of the linguistic sign, and Derrida (Reference Derrida and Graff1977:18) for his notion of deferment (or différance). Goffman (Reference Goffman1959, Reference Goffman1967, Reference Goffman1981) is a must to understand the presentation and representation of self in everyday life. Berger and Luckman (Reference Berger and Luckman1966) is a classic for understanding representation as the social construction of reality. This social construction passes inevitably through the body and the embodied mind. Those interested in how cognition is intimately linked to (bodily) emotions, interests and desires should read Lakoff (Reference Lakoff1987), Johnson (Reference Johnson1987), Varela et al. (Reference Varela, Thompson and Rosch1991), Gumperz and Levinson (Reference Gumperz and Levinson1996), Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2009a). Very useful discourse analytic tools to interpret the representation of symbolic power in plays and prose can be found in Fowler (Reference Fowler1996), Short (Reference Short1996) and Simpson (Reference Simpson1997). Interpretation of the tu/vous distinction in La Fontaine’s fable will be greatly illuminated by reading the famous essay by Brown and Gilman (Reference Brown, Gilman and Sebeok1960) on the pronouns of power and solidarity.
“Pfui! Garstiger Struwwelpeter!”
When I studied German in France and moved to Germany in the early sixties, the first books I discovered were some of the traditional children’s books that were being read by German parents to their children. My knowledge of German was good enough for me to enjoy the adventures of mischievous boys like Max und Moritz and the abundant cartoon-like pictures that accompanied the stories. But the book that intrigued me most was Der Struwwelpeter [Disheveled Peter], written and illustrated by the doctor and psychiatrist Heinrich Hoffmann for his 3-year-old son Carl Philipp, and published in Frankfurt in 1845 under the title “Der Struwwelpeter. Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder für Kinder von 3 bis 6 Jahren”[Disheveled Peter. Funny stories and humorous pictures for children between 3 and 6 years old] (Hoffmann Reference Hoffmann1986). The book contains nine stories about unruly children and their punishment for bad behavior, for example, the story of little Pauline who plays with matches, Conrad who sucks his thumb, Kaspar who will not eat his soup and Philipp who fidgets on his chair. The book was an immediate success both in Germany and abroad and has been translated in more than 40 different languages.1
At the time, I took an anthropological interest in those stories and took them for the cultural icons they had become in German culture. They were, in my view, representations of over-the-top punishments that today one could only laugh at. It was only when I came to the United States in the late sixties and encountered the indignation of my American friends at my reading such “authoritarian” and “violent” stories to my children – even for fun – that I realized there might be more to these narratives than I thought. Indeed, while corporal punishment was still alive and well in many rural schools in the southern parts of the United States, it had largely become politically incorrect in many urban schools and families in other parts of the country,2 and cases of “child abuse” were very much in the public consciousness (Hacking Reference Hacking1999b, chapter 5). But then, I thought, why were American children exposed to so many violent films on television? And why were many brutal Westerns not equally politically incorrect?
My children were by then five and three, and I was trying to get used to American child-rearing practices: do not let your children play outside without any clothes on; do not scold them, do not spank them; do not make them feel guilty; always give them a choice of what to wear, what to eat and what to do. But it didn’t seem to work. My children just wouldn’t do as they were told; in my view they were unruly and ill-behaved. A well-intentioned neighbor suggested I consult a child counselor. After listening to my story, the counselor looked at me and said with a calm voice: “‘Mrs Kramsch, you have a communication problem’.” I burst out laughing: “What do you mean? Should I speak louder? Slower? In a different language?” I came out of the counselor’s office thinking: “Ils sont fous, ces Américains!” [Those Americans are crazy!]3
It was clear that the counselor and I had quite different representations of what it meant to raise a child and I certainly did not understand the symbolic value of “good communication” for an American. What I perceived as a challenge to my authority as a mother, he seemed to take as a technical problem; where I saw it as my responsibility to transmit our family values to my children, he seemed to suggest that I adopt the clear, precise, informative communication style of a tape recorder. Why couldn’t he see that my problem as an immigrant to the U.S. was my loss of control over my own children? But what exactly had I lost and how did I lose it?
In this chapter, we continue our exploration of the power of symbolic representation to shape people’s perceptions of the social world. We examine in particular how children’s books represent and transmit social and moral values. This will lead us to consider the role of narrative representation in shaping children’s symbolic identities and, ultimately, their actions.
3.1 A Narrative of Power: Der Struwwelpeter (1845)
The picture on the cover page is startling. A strapping young lad standing on a pedestal, arms extended and legs apart, looks at the reader straight in the eye, his hair like a lion’s mane, his fingernails like animal claws. This is “Disheveled Peter,” who has refused to have his hair cut and his nails trimmed for almost a year. The expression on his face is serious but inscrutable: Is he proud? Dejected? Sad?
On the front of the pedestal, decorated on both sides with aesthetically pleasing pictures of scissors and combs, we can read the following inscription.
| Sieh einmal, hier steht er, | Look at him! Here he is! |
| Pfui! Der S t r u w w e l p e t e r! | Pfui, disheveled P e t e r! |
| An den Händen beiden | On both his hands |
| Ließ er sich nicht schneiden | He has not let anyone cut |
| Seine Nägel fast ein Jahr; | His nails for almost a year; |
| Kämmen ließ er nicht sein Haar. | He has not let anyone comb his hair. |
| Pfui! ruft da ein jeder. | No wonder everyone says: Pfui! |
| Garst’ger Struwwelpeter ! | Ghastly disheveled Peter! |
The book, written for 3–6-year-olds, is not meant to be deciphered by children who have not yet learned how to read. It is meant to be read aloud by parents or grandparents, who perform the text while pointing to the pictures and encouraging children to repeat the words after them: “Pfui! Ghastly disheveled Peter!” The text refers to two practices that children are known to dislike − haircut and nail trim, but that they have to undergo if they are to be respected by others in their community. By representing these practices and the opprobrium incurred for neglecting to perform them, the child is socialized into identifying with the person uttering these words and hopefully becomes that very person when he grows up. In Bourdieu’s terms, the child develops a habitus that will value a neat and clean appearance by having his hair and nails cut in the proper way. How does this story achieve this?
“Sieh einmal” [“Look!”]. Addressed directly by the parent in the second-person singular intimate form of address, the child is enjoined to turn his attention to his delinquent counterpart. “Hier steht er” [“Here he is”] is on the page, visible to the child’s scrutiny and stigmatizing judgment, together with the derogatory compound name: “Struwwelpeter”. This coinage affixes the epithet “strubbelig or struwwelig” [“disheveled”] to a boy called Peter and makes it into an intrinsic attribute: “Peter-the-disheveled.” A living boy called Peter thus serves as a negative image or “myth” (see Chapter 1) of what the child will become if he doesn’t do as he’s told. The child is invited to point to this boy while exclaiming: “Pfui!” – a kind of hurled speech addressed to this negative image (see Chapter 2). By adopting this discourse, the child embodies the values of his parents with proper manners and acceptable behaviors. The amount of exclamation points enhances the indignation that such bad behavior deserves. The symbolic power of the stigmatizing “Pfui!” is increased by the avowed complicity and social consensus of all well-behaved persons (“ein jeder” [“everyone”]) who cannot fail to cry out, like the child: “Pfui! Ghastly Struwwelpeter!”
Pierre Bourdieu has used the term “symbolic violence” as a synonym of symbolic power to underscore the fact that the power to construct social reality “does violence” to persons and practices by persuading them to change their behavior. In this sense, the story of Struwwelpeter, read aloud at bedtime by a loved parent, does violence to the child by mobilizing not only his or her cognitive understanding but his emotional self as well, that is, his embodied mind (Johnson Reference Johnson1987). The child recognizes his own desires (not wanting to have his hair cut), and in part he empathizes with Peter, in part he rejects him for fear of being called names and suffering the same fate as the boy. The representation of bad behavior is meant to help replace the natural desires of the child with the self-discipline of the cultured adult who has internalized the values of the surrounding middle-class culture.
Symbolic violence is nowhere more visible than in educational endeavors where to educate is to e-ducere, that is, to lead out of a state of dangerous desires to a state of cultured discipline.4 But in the case of Struwwelpeter and the other anti-heroes in Hoffmann’s book, is this violence physical or symbolic? Each story in the book represents a different incarnation of the disheveled Peter archetype and the punishment the character gets for his/her bad behavior. I want to examine in particular four other characters in the book − Pauline, Konrad, Kaspar and Philipp, and how their story reinforces the message we get from the Struwwelpeter case. I first summarize each of the four stories; I then explore in each case the nature of the offense, the nature of the punishment and the workings of symbolic power.
The Very Sad Story with the Matchbox
Aesthetically displayed across two pages, we have a story in rhyming verse that starts with “Paulinchen war allein zu Haus’/die Eltern waren beide aus” [Little Pauline was alone at home/ both parents had gone out] and that serves as a commentary to four graphically illustrated scenes:
1) Pauline, dragging her doll, spots a box of matches on the dresser and decides to strike one as she has seen her mother do, while in the same frame Minz and Maunz the cats raise their paws in warning: “Father has forbidden this! / Miau! Mio! Miau! Mio! / Don’t touch! Or else you will go up in flames!.”
2) Pauline doesn’t listen to the cats / “the match burns with a lovely light / exactly the way you can see it in the picture.” The cats again raise their paws in warning: “Mother has forbidden this!”
3) “But alas! Her dress catches fire, her apron burns, you can see the flames / her hand is burning, her hair is burning / Indeed, the whole child is burning!” The picture shows Pauline engulfed in flames, arms outstretched, her mouth opened to a scream. The cats continue to wail and scream for help.
4) The last picture shows the two little kitties sitting on both sides of a neat little pile of ashes, their tears running in two dainty rivulets around two little red shoes. The text reads: “Everything is totally burned / The poor child, skin and hair / Only a little heap of ashes remains / And two shoes, so dainty and fine… Where, oh where are the poor parents?”
Unlike Struwwelpeter of whom we are told directly the nature of his delinquency but not the punishment he received, Pauline’s story is a vivid narrative of what happens to children who play with matches. But what lesson is the child supposed to take away from that story? At three years of age, most children are not able to comprehend what it means to die, let alone to be burned alive. Moreover the attractive images with their flowery framings, the memorable rhymes, the repetitions and refrains, the predictable outcome, the jolly metaphors and the aesthetic staging of Pauline’s remains transform a gruesome fate into an entertaining story. So where is the punishment?
The Story of the Thumbsucker
This story too is told over two pages with four illustrations corresponding to the four episodes of the story. Like Pauline, Konrad finds himself alone one day, his mother having gone out for errands. Despite her warnings not to suck his thumb or else the tailor will cut it off, Konrad sticks his thumb in his mouth as soon as she is gone. Suddenly the tailor jumps into the room and rushes towards the thumb-sucking boy. The third picture features an outsized tailor with an outsized pair ofscissors slicing Konrad’s thumbs as if they were paper; we see drops of blood falling into a puddle on the floor. “Alas! Now it’s klipp and klapp / the great big scissors cut Konrad’s thumbs / the great big sharp scissors!! Hey! You should hear Konrad screaming.” In the last picture a dejected Konrad stands facing the reader, arms outstretched, displaying two hands with missing thumbs. The text reads: “When the mother returns home / Konrad is in a pretty sad state / There he stands, without his thumbs / Both of them are gone.”
As in Pauline’s story, the punishment for disobeying parental injunctions is severe: physical death in the first case, disfiguration in the second. And yet, apart from the drops of blood and Konrad’s screams, the boy is not represented as being in physical pain. And when his mother comes back home, he is said to be “in a pretty sad state,” but not to be hurting very badly. We didn’t see Pauline’s physical suffering while burning to death and so it is here – we are invited to look at Konrad, not to feel his pain. So here again: what kind of punishment is this?
The Story of Soupy Kaspar
This story is told in four illustrated episodes, the last one of which is smaller than the other three for reasons that will become clear. Kaspar, a healthy, fat boy with red and healthy cheeks, used to eat his soup well when it came to the table. But one day he decided he didn’t want to eat his soup. He stomped the floor screaming: “I won’t eat my soup! No! I won’t eat any soup!/ No, I don’t want any soup!” The next day, he was already much thinner and yet when the soup arrived on the table he went into the same tantrum again: “I won’t eat my soup! No!…” on the third day, “alack and alas! Look how thin and weak Kaspar has become!” and yet the same happened again: “I won’t eat my soup! No! / I won’t eat any soup! No! I don’t want any soup!” “On the fourth day at last, Kaspar was as thin as a thread / He weighed at most a half a pound/ And on the fifth day he was dead.” The first to the third pictures show an ever-thinner Kaspar; the last picture features only a soup tureen with “soup” written on it and placed on a tomb with a cross that says “Kaspar.”
The story of Kaspar, who over four full days refuses to eat his soup and on the fifth day dies of hunger, is equally intriguing. From the cross in the cemetery with his name on it to the soup tureen placed prominently on his tomb, we know exactly what the misdemeanor was, but we are uncertain about the legitimacy of the punishment, which seems to be out of proportion with the crime. Moreover Kaspar, like Pauline and Konrad, doesn’t seem to suffer physically even though his body changes shape as he becomes thinner and thinner. The Struwwelpeter stories have horrified present-day educators as creepy and bizarre (e.g., Radeska Reference Radeska2018), and that story seems to be one of the more bizarre, if it is meant to encourage children to eat their food.
The Story of Fidgety Phil
With the story of Fidgety Phil, the intriguing nature of these stories becomes even more apparent. Philipp, a fidgety 4- or 5-year-old, is trained, like all children in well-to-do middle-class families at the time, to sit still at table and develop well-brought up table manners. In three graphic tableaux, we see that Philipp does not behave as expected. The first tableau sets the scene: At a time when the family was expected to dress up for dinner, we see a formally dressed mother, father and son sitting at a round dinner table, covered with a white tablecloth, having their evening meal. All three have white napkins; the parents have their napkins on their laps, Phillip’s is tied around his neck. On the table are a loaf of bread, a tureen of soup, a bottle of red wine, plates, silver, two glasses half-filled with wine. The Mother, wearing a fancy dress and a flowery hat on her head holds up a lorgnon and observes what is going on, deferring to her husband to reprimand the boy. On the left of the picture, the Father, in topcoat, high collar and silk cravat, is seen in profile holding a knife upright in his right hand. He appears to address the boy who faces him on the right of the picture, but in fact he addresses the reader:
The father’s opening statement, hurled at the misbehaving “pivot” in the third person, seems to refer to Philipp’s past misbehaviors, but as we can see on the picture, that statement must be understood as sarcastic or even offensive because it is obvious that Philipp is not sitting still at table. Indeed, he is shown in that first tableau as gripping the table and pushing his chair backwards and forwards, while the father reprimands him: “Philipp, I am most displeased!” This can only end badly. In the second tableau, we can see the results.
Philipp hangs on to the tablecloth, falls backwards, dragging with him plates, bottle, bread and soup bowl, which crash to the floor. Philipp “screams but to no avail.” Surprisingly for a modern reader, the mother still doesn’t say anything, and this tableau concludes only with: “Vater ist in grösster Not” [“Father is in dire need”]. Finally, the third tableau shows the full consequences of Philipp’s misbehavior. The Mother stands upright, still holding her lorgnon to survey the disaster; the father also stands, with arms raised in the air as he stomps the floor in anger. Philipp has disappeared under the tablecloth, buried under broken plates, scattered forks and knives, spilled soup and shattered wine bottle and soup bowl. The last lines of the story are the most surprising to the modern reader:
We understand the child’s bad behavior, but its effects are unclear. It seems that the parents are the ones being punished, as they no longer have anything to eat. Philipp has not suffered physically, he has only fallen under the table cloth. How are we to understand all this?
3.2 What Struwwelpeter is Really About
The stories in Struwwelpeter seem to be about physical violence and its potential to serve as a deterrent to children’s bad behaviors. Indeed, they have been called “morbid” and “scary” (Radeska Reference Radeska2018). It is difficult today to grasp the educational value of such outrageous forms of corporal punishment; they seem to elicit less fear than uneasy laughter − the same kind of laughter that seized Foucault upon reading Borges’ fictitious Chinese encyclopedia (Foucault Reference Foucault1970:xv). Surely our children can’t believe that! In our disbelief we tend to fall back on stereotypes: “antiquated child-rearing,” “child abuse,” or even “typically German authoritarian practices.”
If, however, we read these stories through a symbolic lens, their meaning becomes clearer and so do the forms of punishment they represent. In the same way as La Fontaine’s fable of the “Wolf and the lamb” was not about a wolf eating up a lamb, but about the exercise of symbolic power to legitimize political power (Chapter 2), so do the stories in Struwwelpeter represent the symbolic violence exercised by a society’s culture to inculcate in children its social and moral values. What these bad boys and girls lose through their transgression is not so much their physical lives than the perception by others of their symbolic worth, their social presence as respectable, legitimate members of a social group. A social symbolic analysis can illuminate the deeper meaning of these stories.
By playing with matches, Pauline is avowedly imitating what she has seen her mother do several times, but she fails to heed the warnings of her two cats who act here as surrogate parents and who, like a Greek chorus, urge her explicitly not to do so or else she will “go up in flames.” What happens to Pauline, however, is not just that she dies of physical death but that she is no longer visible as a social being and that her parents are nowhere to be seen (“Where oh where are the poor parents?”). The little pile of ashes represents her ultimate and definitive disappearance, that is, exclusion from the social community. In fact, Pauline’s name doesn’t even figure in the title of the story that seems to focus more on the matchbox than on the girl.
Konrad, who disobeys his mother’s injunctions, gets his thumbs cut off, but in the last picture the illustrator represents him standing there, like Struwwelpeter, his hands spread out for all to see, castrated and shamed. While he is represented in the very same posture as in the first picture, the two situations are radically different. In the first, he is recognized by name as a member of the family and addressed as such (“‘Konrad!’ spoke the Mother”); in the last, he is displayed alone to face the reader who becomes his judge. His mother is not there to comfort him. The point here is not to commiserate about the fate of the child, but to pillory his abnormality, brought about by his disobedience. Konrad’s punishment is to be publicly seen as abnormal and forced to carry this stigma for the rest of his life. In fact, even his name becomes changed in the title to the derogatory name “the Thumbsucker.”
If Pauline was punished through absence and Konrad through shame, Kaspar gets punished through the progressive loss of his identity as a full member of his family. His rapid and drastic reduction in size illustrates his growing irrelevance. While Pauline’s name will be forgotten, Kaspar’s name will be remembered by the inscription on the cross but only in conjunction with the soup bowl that is prominently placed on the tomb and will be forever associated with it. Indeed, the title of the story refers to Suppenkaspar [“Soupy Kaspar”], yet another derogatory nickname meant to tarnish his social identity, as it did to Daumenlutscher Konrad [“Thumbsucker Konrad”].
Philipp’s story picks up on the themes of punishment through exclusion, shame and loss of social identity. His punishment, which seems at first sight harmless enough, reveals upon closer inspection a more serious form of sanction. Philipp has not only dragged down with him the tablecloth with all the food, he has in fact “starved” his parents. Physically considered, such a statement is laughable, as one could say that the parents can always pick up the pieces or replace the spilled food. But the symbolic reality is anything but funny. By depriving his caregivers (“who now have nothing to eat any more”) of the means of exercising their homemakers’ role, Philipp has shattered the foundations of the family that provides for his very existence. His disappearance under the tablecloth echoes that of Pauline, Konrad and Kaspar who are also rendered socially invisible or differently visible. The name he is given in the title, der Zappel-Philipp [“Fidgety Phil”], is emblematic of this stigmatization.
The punishment in these four stories is therefore only superficially a physical one. What we see at work here is a symbolic power that strives to create in the minds of children a representation of the social reality they will grow up into. This reality is inculcated through do’s and don’ts that children have to internalize if they want to become legitimate members of a cultural community and representatives of this community’s values. Unruly children reflect badly not only on themselves as worthy group members, but also on their parents. In small tightknit communities of neighborhoods in small German towns around 1840, parents were held responsible for bringing up well-behaved offspring that would enhance the symbolic capital of their family. A boy who would not behave at the dinner table would shame his family in front of friends and neighbors (“What will the neighbors think?”). A girl who would do something forbidden would incriminate her mother (“What will people think of the way I brought you up?” and “How could you do this to me?”). The very reputation of the family would be at stake with their children’s misdemeanors and that meant that they might not be able to rely on the trust and support of their neighbors in times of need. Read in this light, the stories in Struwwelpeter don’t sound as outlandish as they seem. Shame and stigmatization are still practiced nowadays, even when they are no longer coupled with physical punishment (Riezler Reference Riezler1943).
The social values of docility, obedience, respect of norms and social conventions promoted by the Struwwelpeter stories correspond to a conservative period in German history, die Biedermeierzeit, ushered in by Metternich after the Vienna Congress of 1815 that put an end to the Napoleonic wars and to the French influence in Europe. The post-Napoleonic Restoration was a time when Germans discovered their rich folkloric heritage of folktales, collected by the Brothers Grimm across the German countryside, their folksongs and local dialects, at a time when the educated middle class was gaining in power. Family customs and traditions, such as Christmas trees and Christmas carols, were valued and promoted, and children’s education was part of a Protestant ethics of social stability and continuity.5 This would explain the main concern in Heinrich Hoffmann’s stories with inculcating in children a sense of community and warning them about the consequences of violating the norms of that community.6
Different times call for different stories. Let us examine now two children’s books that have been equally influential in shaping generations of children into an understanding of language as symbolic power, this time in the United States.
3.3 From The Little Engine That Could (1930) to The Cat in the Hat (1957)
Two classical American children’s books are equally reflective of the ideology of the period in which they were written: The little engine that could by Watty Piper, published in Reference Piper1930, and The cat in the hat by Dr Seuss published in Reference Seuss1957.
The Little engine that could opens on a familiar picture around Christmas time in the United States. A long freight train is making its way up the mountain, its cars filled with toys and dolls as Christmas gifts for children who live on the other side of the mountain, when all of a sudden its engine breaks down. The toy clown jumps off the train and flags down a shiny yellow passenger engine that comes along. The yellow engine says it has much more important business than helping carry toys over the mountain and refuses. He then asks a black freight engine that passes by, but that engine too has more important things to do. A big rusty engine comes along but says he is too old. In the end, a little blue switcher engine agrees to help. “I think I can” he says and hitches himself to the task. As he puffs up the mountain, he repeats “I think I can I think I can” and, as he triumphantly rolls down on the other side, he exclaims: “I thought I could I thought I could” and saves the day.
It is easy to see how this story captured the imagination of generations of American children raised on the notion that with determination and hard work “you can get it if you really want it,” and that the future belongs to the young entrepreneurial spirits who live up to the challenges that come their way. The refrain “I think I can” brings together the quintessential American faith in youthful individualism, ingenuity and resourcefulness, while remaining faithful to the older values of compassion and solidarity in times of need as well as to the Christian tradition of gift-giving at Christmas time. The book reflects the optimistic spirit of the New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt following the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The symbolic power of this story is evidenced by its enduring success in the United States and more recently in the strong resonance of American voters to Barack Obama’s campaign slogan “Yes, we can.”
The Cat in the Hat is one of the first of the many children’s books published by Theodore Seuss Geisel, under the pen name of Dr Seuss, in quite a different period in U.S. history. The late fifties and sixties were marked by a reaction against any form of authority. Its radical political agenda fought for civil rights, women’s rights, minority rights, reproductive rights and the right to civil disobedience and conscientious objection to the military draft. The spirit of anti-authoritarianism permeates Dr Seuss’s The cat in the hat.
Peter and Sally, two well-behaved 6- and 4-year-olds, are sitting at home and watching the snow fall outside while their parents are away. The story is narrated in the first person by Peter, the older of the two children.
As they are getting increasingly bored, in marches the cat with a big red and white hat. The cat both horrifies and seduces them by doing all the things their parents would disapprove of, for example: eating cake in the bathtub while the water is running, washing the walls with Mother’s best dress, messing up the kitchen. What will their parents say when they return? After a day of mischief, the cat says not to worry and proceeds to clean the house and put everything back in its proper place for when the Mother comes home. Peter and Sally can only marvel. The cat in the hat has shown them the power of mischievous creativity and imagination while ultimately respecting the values of cleanliness and orderliness of the middle-class world they live in.
Thus ends The cat in the hat. Turning to the readers and bringing them into the action is a subtle way of exercising the symbolic power of suggestion in the education of children in the late fifties/early sixties. It engages the children in contemplating various modes of action and in making moral choices. The cat in the hat offers a glimpse into a parallel world of unconventional and even illicit behaviors and activities in the margins of established norms – a child-centered world of fantasy and “fun” from which adults might be excluded. Unlike some Anti-Struwwelpeter variants that were published in the 1960’s and 1970’s in Germany and that featured children turning the tables on adults and taking their revenge against persons in authority (see note 1), The Cat in the Hat does not encourage children to subvert the norms of social discipline in the name of anti-authoritarian education, but instead it bypasses norms by proposing that children can find a space of their own in the realm of the imagination and in playing with language and crazy pictures.
This theme has been used since then to promote intercultural tolerance and understanding (e.g., Seuss Reference Seuss1953; Berenstain and Berenstain Reference Berenstain and Berenstain1994) and has been picked up again in recent years in books that reflect the multiethnic urban environments in which many American children live today. For example, in the award winning Last stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña (Reference De la Peña2015), a little boy and his grandma enjoy the pleasures of a bus ride in multicultural downtown San Francisco. Complaints by the child about the rain and the dirt in the streets are met by the grandmother with humor and creativity rather than with rebuffs.
Through all these books, children are socialized into recognizing the nature and function of symbolic power through engaging with its verbal and visual representation. They learn how to find their place in a social order that they will uphold, even as they sometimes seek to subvert it. And the stories they are told stake out the range of their own power in acting upon their environment and affecting the course of events.
3.4 Different Tribes, Different Scribes
We saw in the Introduction that symbolic power is the power of making people see and believe a certain view of the social world, by mobilizing their hearts and minds, and appealing to their belief in the legitimacy of words and those who utter them. The children’s narratives in this chapter have potentially that power. They seek to obtain through entertaining stories the child’s observance of social norms that would have been obtained in earlier days through force and corporal punishment. In the same manner as the House of young prisoners in Paris around 1837 reeducated young offenders through written regulations that modelled the orderly conduct of a normal citizen’s daily life, the Struwwelpeter stories educated young children in Germany around 1840 through entertaining negative models of behavior with which they could identify because they represented the reverse of a world they recognized as legitimate. Like the French regulations that represented an improvement over the more brutal forms of physical punishment depicted by Foucault in the execution of Damiens 80 years earlier (see Chapter 2), being read Struwwelpeter on the lap of a grandmother represented a more humane and literate form of child-rearing than in earlier historical periods where children would have been beaten into obedience. The disciplining processes represented in Struwwelpeter however had the desired effect only if their intended addressees were invested in them cognitively and emotionally, if they recognized themselves in them and accepted the worldview they represented as legitimate. With changing social conditions, the same children’s stories were likely to have a different effect.
The horrified reaction of many parents in the sixties to the Struwwelpeter stories is evidence of the changed socio-cultural conditions and values of urban communities at the time. By the 1960s’ in Germany, these stories were interpreted as an unacceptable authoritarian form of education; they elicited disgust or laughter, not fear. Today, they are read as cultural exotica. Similarly, in the United States, the stories of the 1930’s and 1960’s no longer transmit the values they illustrated at the time they were published. The Little Engine that Could has become a national myth and the anti-authoritarian The Cat in the Hat remains popular as a cultural icon of the educated middle class but has been mostly replaced by pixel videos and cartoon-like fantasies in the lives of children today. With regard to the effectiveness of these stories as instruments of socialization, not all teenagers today would find heavy-handed shaming preferable to a quick and honest corporal punishment for misdemeanors.7
We find a similar shift in the value of social and cultural diversity in children’s books since the fifties. While intercultural books like The Sneetches by Dr Seuss (Reference Seuss1953) and The Berenstain Bears’ New Neighbors by Stan and Jan Berenstain (Reference Berenstain and Berenstain1994) seek to promote tolerance to cultural diversity because “deep down we are all the same,” recent multicultural books like Last Stop on Market Street by de la Peña (Reference De la Peña2015) strive to celebrate diversity for its own sake and for the richness of experience it offers.
3.5 From Moral Prescriptivism to Ethical Perspectivism
The diversity of children’s books already discussed is a good opportunity to reflect on the moral worlds that children are being raised in through such books, and on the ethical responsibility of parents and educators. The moral values that were transmitted through Struwwelpeter in nineteenth-century Germany and through the various American children’s books in the twentieth century were meant to develop in young children a habitus that would conform to the morality of the time and to the child’s social class, and to endow children with the symbolic capital that would make them and their families legitimate and respected members of their communities. These values are, however, historically contingent and they vary from culture to culture. Should parents and other educators transmit unquestioningly the normative values of the institutions of which they are members: the Family, the School, the Church? To what extent can they deviate from the dominant discourse of their society and challenge the authority of custom and convention?
Questions of morality are generally posed in stark binary terms: either you obey the rule or you get punished; either you solve the problem or you are part of the problem; either you play the game or you are a social outcast. Morality in our day has often turned into political correctness or into moral relativism and expediency (anything goes as long as it “works”). Clear-cut rules of behavior, like clear-cut rules of grammar and stereotypical cultural conventions are convenient, but they cannot guide us any more in the complex encounters that now take place in multilingual, multicultural families, workplaces and classrooms (Kramsch Reference Kramsch2014). We realize in hindsight that the symbolic power of any institution is precisely to remain invisible, and to make people believe in its monolithic nature, its permanence and arbitrariness – to persuade people that it speaks with one voice; that it is consistent and predictable; and that it is natural, not historically constructed.
By contrast, a post-structural ethics of symbolic power is a dialogic process that takes paradoxes in stride and makes people aware that the sources of symbolic power are not singular but multiple, not unitary but diverse, not permanent but changing and conflictual. Nowadays children can grow up in a family with strict moral values, move to another city and attend a school with loose entrepreneurial values and end up in a workplace whose co-workers hold a diversity of ethical values that require tolerance and an historical and multidimensional perspective. How should language educators best prepare them for such a life trajectory?
Symbolic power theory calls for a theory of ethics that takes into account the diverse, historical and subjective nature of norms and the need to understand the world from the perspective of others – ethical perspectivism rather than moral prescriptivism. As we shall discuss in Chapter 9, this does not mean that all perspectives are equally valid for a particular time, place and historical reality. While members of institutions have to abide by the norms of the institution that tend to have the effect of uniting its members under one code of conduct, they also have to be aware of the historicity of those norms and to contribute to possible changes within their institution. For this, they have to become aware of the heterogenous nature of institutional structures and their inherently paradoxical or conflictual nature. For example, the Struwwelpeter stories are quite clear about children’s misbehaviors and are meant to promote compliance with social norms, but their attractive pictures and flowery illustrations, together with the rhymes and memorable lines, also encourage a spirit of mischief and poetic creativity that fires up the imagination and glorifies subversive behavior. Similarly, a strict educational system can at once spawn conformity and resistance – a paradox that might prompt students later on to turn against the system when the opportunity arises.8
But if one could argue that it is parents’ responsibility to inculcate in their children the moral values that they hold dear, what kind of moral values is it the responsibility of the language teacher to transmit? The question has become more acute in recent years with the increasingly multicultural composition of communities and classrooms. Several suggestions have been made. Many Anglo-American educators tend to favor social and political responsibility (Byram Reference Byram2008; Macedo Reference Macedo2019; Chun Reference Chunforthcoming). Their motto would be: Open up the classroom; engage students in service learning; encourage them to find examples of the relevance of the subject matter to real life; engage them in political action. Many French language educators, by contrast, tend to advocate an epistemological or scientific responsibility rather than social engagement, and if engagement, then in the form of social contestation or critique rather than political activism (see discussion in Beacco Reference Beacco2013; Coste Reference Coste and Beacco2013).9 Their motto would be: Sharpen your students’ social and historical consciousness; reflect with them on the power of the written word; spark their interest in language and their critical appreciation of texts.
The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who was steeped in both French and American educational traditions, promoted an ethics of personal responsibility rather than morals of conviction based on institutional rules (see Kerlan and Simard Reference Kerlan and Simard2012). His philosophy echoes in that respect the dialogic ethics of Mikhail Bakhtin and of Judith Butler that will be discussed in Chapter 9. In his essay “The task of the political educator” (Reference Ricoeur1991), Ricoeur argues that the educator has to mediate between the three different levels that we call “culture”: the techno-economic level – technical efficiency, economic profitability of learning languages; the political-ideological level of entrepreneurial neoliberalism, that is, human capital development and multilingualism as symbolic capital; and the ethical level of intercultural mediation. He clearly favored this last form of ethical responsibility. “Ricoeur’s reflection on the tasks of the political educator can remind language teachers how important it is not to let themselves become technocrats of the classroom, or promoters of an ideology of language commodification or professional expertise, but to draw instead on their personal experience as multilingual multicultural mediators.” (Kramsch Reference Kramsch2015:100)
3.6 The Political Power of Narrative
As we leave the politics of representation for the politics of action in the next chapter, narrative provides a bridge between representation and action through the way it constructs the space of the possible, and the way it serves to define the identity of the social group with which the adult will be identified.
The narrative genre is the quintessential tool of symbolic power. On the one hand, as Jerome Bruner stated eloquently in his canonical article “The narrative construction of reality,” “narrative is a form not only of representing but of constituting reality” (Bruner Reference Bruner, Mateas and Sengers2002:5). It does so in various ways:
– It presents us with a mental model of the patterned way events occur over time (the absence of parents leads children to mischief; one mischief leads to another). This patterning makes for outcomes that seem reasonable and thus legitimate.
– Its protagonists are endowed with intentions and reasons for acting the way they do, even if they are cats or steam engines. This engages the listener’s emotions, memories, fantasies.
– It encourages interpretation of actors’ motives and actions.
– Because of its breach component (e.g., transgression, disobedience, crisis), which makes the story worth telling, it has a problem-solving quality to it that creates suspense and captures the listener’s attention.
– Because a breach presupposes a norm, a narrative is necessarily normative, it has a moral dimension.
– Single narratives “accrue” (p.18), that is, they contribute to and eventually create larger cultural narratives or traditions, for example Struwwelpeter in the 1850’s fed into a German narrative of law and order. The Little Engine that Could in the 1930’s accrued into an American narrative of self-reliance and can-do spirit.
On the other hand, because narrative both “formulates and objectifies a constituted reality” (Feldman Reference Feldman, Bruner and Haste1987:135), it can make people “(mis)recognize” its constructed nature. Feldman writes: “Through its power to encode and clarify one stipulated version rather than another, [language] has the power to entrench one version rather than another. In addition, since language embodies conventional cultural categories, it can impose culturally shared (and shareable) meanings on its constructions” (p.135). The very features that enable the storyteller to draw people into the story can make people hostage to that story’s one perspective on events and its way of categorizing them. As Bruner has argued, the power of one mode of thought (the narrative or well-wrought story) needs to be accompanied by the power of the other (the paradigmatic or well-formed logical argument) (Bruner Reference Bruner1986:12).
This is particularly necessary given the accrual power of narrative into larger national narratives that give symbolic unity to a national community. We shall return in Chapter 8 to the search for unifying national stories at a time when globalization and worldwide migrations have complexified traditional understandings of history and are confronting nation-states with the need to invent a new shareable common narrative (Feldman Reference Feldman, Brockmeier and Carbaugh2001; Freadman Reference Freadman2014). As Freadman noted:
If we understand by culture the way intergenerational memories pervade present conversations, if we gloss “worldview” as resulting from narratives, and identity as the answer to the question “What story or stories am I a part of?”, then traditions of representation must be brought into clear focus.
While the Struwwelpeter mode of representation of German cultural values has been superseded today by a European narrative of “Unity in diversity,” in many countries today national narratives are in search of self (Brooks Reference Brooks2017a, Reference Brooks2018; Delbanco Reference Delbanco2018). In the United States, George Packer identified four rival American narratives:
– the libertarian narrative that free individuals are responsible for their own fate (see The Little Engine that Could) “The libertarian idea in its current shape regards Americans as consumers, entrepreneurs, workers, taxpayers – indeed everything except citizens” (Brooks Reference Brooks2017a).
– the Silicon Valley narrative of a globalized America, “an exhilarating ideology of flattening hierarchies, disrupting systems, discarding old elites and empowering individuals” (Brooks Reference Brooks2017a) (see The cat in the hat).
– the multicultural America narrative, that sees Americans as members of different racial, ethnic, gendered groups seeking to be included in the national identity (see Last Stop on Market Street)
– the Trump’s America First Narrative that strives to go back to national identity free of “the contamination of others, foreigners, immigrants, Muslims” and standing up to the globalized elite.10
Some cultural critics feel that none of these narratives provides an adequate basis for the United States of the twenty-first century. Brooks proposes two other narratives that will be competing for attention in the years to come: a “mercantilist” model of the United States in economic competition with rival powers, and a “talented community” model of the United States leading the world into an open and harmonious information age. These two models are indeed vying for symbolic power right now with the narratives of other nations, whether it is the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” or the European “Unity in Diversity.” But mostly he is calling for a return to common human myths “which offer templates of moral progress” and can fill the moral and spiritual void that he feels has invaded our lives today. Reflecting on the amounts of trauma experienced today around the world, he writes: “Trauma is a moral and spiritual issue as much as a psychological or chemical one. Wherever there is trauma, there has been betrayal, an abuse of authority, a moral injury” (Brooks Reference Brooks2018), in other words, a symbolic injury, not just a physical one. We return to these ethical aspects of symbolic power in the Conclusion.
Suggestions for Further Reading
The field of narrative inquiry is a tremendously rich field of research into the symbolic world that constitutes human culture and the power of language to construct social reality. Bruner (Reference Bruner1990) explores what he calls “narrative thinking” and the way it shapes our conception of ourselves and of the social world in which we live. For the value of narrative in language education, canonical readings include Bruner (Reference Bruner1986, Reference Bruner1990, Reference Bruner, Brockmeier and Carbaugh2001), Ricoeur (Reference Ricoeur and Mitchell1980), Mishler (Reference Mishler, de Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg2006) and White (Reference White and Mitchell1980). The edited volume by Brockmeier and Carbaugh (Reference Brockmeier and Carbaugh2001) offers a particularly illuminating use of narrative in the construction of identity and culture. Bruno Bettelheim (Reference Bettelheim1975) is a classic study of the beneficial use of fairytales in children’s education.
