The importance of language in society, and how it controls, oppresses or liberates
It has now been confirmed it was a terrorist attack. Five were killed in a bow-andarrow attack by a Danish/Norwegian man, just south of Oslo. Police said it was a “brutal and gruesome act”. But police did not know whether it was an act of terrorism yet, the BBC reported in October. However, a few days later it was “confirmed” that it was “indeed a terrorist attack”. Reason? The attacker was linked to a radical Islamist group.
It is eyebrow-raising that, in this day and age, all things “terrorist” still collapse, or conflate, into radical Islam. This elision (process of merging things) contributes to, and deepens, the stereotypes to which media subscribe, which then get further perpetuated in society. Or to which conservatives subscribe, and then media perpetuate. Values, ideologies, beliefs (world views) are revealed when we talk, report, broadcast on social media, and write columns in newspapers. Ideology is revealed through discourse (Louis Althusser).
Michel Foucault, a leading theorist on power whose best-known works are Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, wrote on how people were jailed, straitjacketed, then strapped on to electric chairs (to straighten them out/become heterosexual, or less “hysterical”, depressed or anxious), as authorities didn’t know what to do with them and couldn’t accept difference.
We now have courses at universities called “queer studies”; many are on antidepressants and in therapy dealing with today’s discourse, “mental health issues”.
It’s a different world from when Foucault was writing. But it is also the same. There are still power structures, and discourses that reveal the ideology at play. Language plays a central role in constructing social reality, and if we accept this as a fact it means that, every time we speak, we draw on, repeat or challenge society’s established ideas about key issues of the day: race, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, ethnicity.
As media put out words, headlines, they contribute to the flow of human knowledge through time. The way we talk about reality and pictorially depict images shapes reality. In “those days”, for example, maps of the world showed Europe at the centre taking up a much larger space than Africa, yet Africa is the bigger continent. This has now changed; maps are becoming more accurate.
The infamous days in July 2021 of “looting”, “armed insurrection”, “failed armed insurrection”, “uprising” or “riots” show the different angles. Likewise, with “load shedding”, “power cuts” or “blackouts” too. Eskom and the government, unsurprisingly, use the euphemistic “load shedding”.
The DA’s election posters in Phoenix, on which the party backtracked after the furore that followed, revealed the ideology: “The ANC calls you racists. The DA calls you heroes.” The party’s former leader, Helen Zille, never backtracks – she digs her heels in, further revealing her bigotry. The latest, in an interview last week – “…some say we’ve had 300 years of colonialism, and this and that…” – depicts her obvious attempt at erasure with the “some say” and the “this and that”. It gets worse: humanities faculties at universities all over the world, she asserts, are “spawning” and are “gripped by this evil” called critical race theory. “Evil” says it all. Her “truth” is revealed.
The second-largest opposition party, the EFF, reveals its narrow Africanist nationalistic, racist exclusiveness, authoritarian ideology in its discourse: “If you are leaving the EFF because [the] EFF is fighting for blacks in Africa, the gate is open. You were never with us. We are with Africans. Anyone who joins us and hates Africans, you are in a wrong home… If you voted for us, yet you hate Africans, take your vote to self-hate organisations like the ANC, which has closed borders on Africans.”
The fact is, the ANC has not closed borders on Africans.
In the media I’ve read about “Somalian bandits” in Gqeberha, which reveals the othering of people living in SA who are not SA nationals. This “us” and “them” ideological discourse shows a pattern of how language is also a system of control.
Then there’s the ANC. Its leaders do this over and over again: the tedious pattern of thinking it owns the people of South Africa, when it talks of “our people”, as though it owns all of the people, conflating the ANC with all of SA. When ANC leaders say we need to stop gender-based violence against “our women” it is steeped in the ideology of men owning women; it’s infantilising.
Language evolves over time, such that, once no one thought that there would be another way to say “chairman”, we just say chair/chairperson now, indicating it’s a non-gendered position. To those who make statements such as: I see you kept your “maiden name” for “professional reasons”, a good riposte is: Yes, when we got married he kept his surname, and I kept mine. Not sure what “professional reasons” means. There is no need to justify or provide reasons for “keeping” your surname.
Discourse is the accumulated way, showing a pattern, in which something is portrayed, discussed, written and talked about, analysed. It is there in all forms of communication, revealing defensiveness. For instance, I recently heard chief colonisers being referred to as “affable rogues”. But what was affable about them? They were just rogues, some say “gangsters”.
As language changes, society progresses; as society progresses, language changes. Media is powerful and has a role to play. In media studies today, different types of journalism are being analysed, with new models being put forward from peace journalism, ubuntu journalism, listening journalism, developmental journalism to the watchdog variety. This last we are familiar with in South Africa, as it has revealed its might and mettle to expose corruption. But in all of these we should watch how stereotypes are perpetuated, or broken down, how language controls, oppresses or liberates.