Is Language a Battlefield?

It is old hat to emphasize that language is political. Nowadays we know that everything is political. Language is political, translation is political, and word choice is political. Indeed. But if, as General Carl von Clausewitz argued, “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” or, as Michel Foucault did, “politics is the continuation of war by other means,” what does that mean for language, translation, and vocabulary? What can battles over words tell us about the human conflicts and human relations we attempt to use language to describe? And what can such conflicts also tell us about the work of language and translation?

These are the questions that came to mind while reading M. Véronique Switzer’s fascinating article “Resisting Ideological English: Agency and Valuing Against Reified Abstractions and Erasures” (2021). In this article, Switzer argues that some practices of translation serve to erase agency and relationality, functioning to dehumanize the subjects of a text. She takes the common translation of the title of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre as The Wretched of the Earth as an example. She argues that when philosopher Lewis Gordon argues that the title ought to be translated as “The Damned of the Earth” he “makes a critical contribution” to our understanding of Fanon’s text by “resisting ideological language such as ‘the wretched’” by “preserv[ing]” the original connotation of “the damned”—that is, the “fact of active colonial damning as a historical process driven by culpable agents” (Switzer: 43). In other words, when “damnés”is translated as “wretched,” two meanings are lost: (1) that the condition and position of colonized people are not natural but are actively imposed and (2) that this act of damnation is done by “culpable agents” of European colonialism. The loss of these meanings works to “assum[e] away structural racial subordination, thereby taking it as natural” (ibid). The occlusion of these meanings is the work of what Switzer calls “ideological English.”

This raises the question of how the politics of language, and specifically “ideological English,” is related to the violence of colonialism. Through the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Switzer demonstrates that modern English is a noun-based language, which lends to practices of translation that erase human agency and relationality in the objectification implied by a vocabulary dominated by nouns. She suggests that there may be aspects of human reality that are better expressed as verbs, indeed, to be human, or human being, is an active process made object-like in modern English. Colonial ideologies erase the agency and relations of colonized people and make subjects appear as objects. As Switzer points out, colonial ideologies also erase the agency and activity of colonial agents in colonizing, bringing about what she calls “whitely” ways of knowing that naturalize racism (Switzer: 44). Identifying the strategies of “ideological English” is key to undoing “whitely” constraints on our thought. She follows Gordon in showing how the translation “wretched” erases “the agency of the verb ‘to damn’” (Switzer: 48). The effect of this translation is that the “wretchedness” of the colonized is “detached” from the colonizer and the “long process of damning a people” (ibid).

For Switzer, “ideological English” operates through a “strategy” of “containment,” “pacification,” and “neutralization” (45–6). Switzer borrows these metaphors from war and the military, suggesting that “ideological English” is a linguistic weapon—one that attacks threats to colonial “illusions” (45). “Ideological English” attacks cognition of what is essential about human society: that it is a human artifice that can be humanly remade. The political implications of “the damned” versus “the wretched” are dangerous because they violate the protocol of colonial language: make the status quo appear inevitable. What must be contained, pacified, and neutralized is the thought that structural racism is contingent on human action and that damning is an active process done by “culpable agents.”

Objectification closes thought; therefore, we cannot resist colonialism in the same manner it attacks. Switzer prompts us to a strategy of resistance that starts with “hearing” and “listening.” That is, “listening against ideological noise that erases being and agency” (47). “Hearing such resisting” moves to “taking great caution” with our use of words and language (47 and 52). We must, she argues, be more attentive, careful, intentional, and responsible with words. Taking responsibility for language, for Switzer, Gordon, and Fanon, means taking responsibility for meaning, history, the world, and ourselves. There are other important reasons Switzer turns to military metaphors to describe the operation of “ideological English.”

The first reason is that Switzer wants us to appreciate that language is a site of struggle and conflict. She wants us to realize that colonialism is a form of war, and that colonial warfare takes language and thought as sites to be conquered in the same way as it views bodies and land. Thus, language and thought are crucial sites of resistance to colonialism as well. The second is that she wants us to hear human agency in these processes: it is a choice to translate “damnés” as “wretched” according to the coordinates of “ideological English” as much as it is also a choice to resist “ideological English” and fight to keep human agency on the tip of our tongues.

Benjamin Stumpf

Benjamin Stumpfis a doctoral student of Political Theory and International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.