My favorite quote from Alice Through the Looking Glass is a conversation between her and Humpty Dumpty:
“The question is, said Alice, whether words can mean so many different things.” “The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, who is in charge. That’s all.”
A few days ago, I was reminded of the Egg’s answer, that character that for Paul Auster is “the purest incarnation of the human condition,” and whose pragmatic realism often emerges in these times of crisis. I remembered it while listening to talk about power as the ability to make decisions; and about words as the only thing left to us, the “disempowered.”
That reasoning seems like common sense, so analyzing it sounds like splitting hairs in two, something for “philosophers” or “theorists” (bad words). In other words, a waste of time. Carrying that common sense like a backpack, we do not ask ourselves what purpose it serves or if it is really so.
The first thing would be: what are we talking about? What we call “words” turns out to be a bag where many different species fit. Sociologists and linguists call speech not only those that are given on certain formal occasions, but a variety of messages, the same as those said on television or at a ceremony, or a newspaper editorial or an official announcement, a class or a conversation, a Facebook post or a public debate.
What do these strings of “words” have in common? All speeches reflect a certain way of perceiving reality. And they do so not in any way, but according to certain norms, which are accepted by patterns of correctness. Both linguistic and political correctness; that is, following a grammatical and syntactical order, and a set of unwritten rules of a moral, social, and sometimes religious nature, culturally accepted.
Before you brand me as an academic (a bad word) or an abstract (even worse), what does knowing all this have to do with the relationship between power and discourse?
For example, when someone starts to speak deliberately breaking gender norms and, instead of writing or saying in Spanish “all” in a gender exercise,” or “allxs,” they are trying to challenge a syntactical order of correctness that reacts to a pattern of domination and exclusion, a certain structure of social power, which seems unfair to them.
I leave aside the arguments for sharing or not sharing this way of questioning the established order, considering it viable or assuming it as a new pattern of discourse in practical terms. I only note that this challenge, let us say, is radical because it tries to make it obvious that our way of speaking contains a social hierarchy, of which we are not aware. And that answering it requires exercising criticism and claiming an alternative, extending it to a way of doing and saying. Not only to state it at certain times and circumstances, in “time and form.”
It happens that, by restricting it to those statements, to discourses in which “equity,” “rights,” “freedoms” are agreed upon and accepted, their establishment in different concrete practices and other social relations is often overlooked or postponed. In short, a critique of the uses of language necessarily entails a critique of the social relations of which discourses are an integral and inseparable part. Social relations crossed, vertically and horizontally, by power structures, which are those of the established order. So all those expressions, those diverse species of discourse, reproduce that order and its legitimacy or question it.
In other words, the struggles to maintain an order, change it or subvert it go through the discourses that practice them.
If we want to find examples of these dynamics of change and of what we call empowerment today, we only have to look back.
The radical nature of the revolutionary transformation was not so much manifested in the expropriation of the means of production and their nationalization, but in ways of thinking and speaking that marked the emergence of other social relations, of new patterns of conduct that materialized another political consensus.
Literacy was not a cultural revolution because several million people were taught to read and write, but because it transformed the relations between city and countryside, those who had and those who did not, men and women, blacks and non-blacks, with new discourses and behaviors that restructured social hierarchies.
The Cuban revolution was not a social revolution because it passed a bunch of laws, but because it founded a new legitimacy. Of course it did not abolish the differences between social groups, but it did establish a common reference in the way of behaving and speaking, above and below.
By stopping saying “sir” and “madame” and imposing the practice of “compañera” and “compañero,” even among those who were not ideologically or belonging to the same social class, a dominant usage was legitimized. And that domination, naturally, was not because it was part of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or the government of a “Leninist party,” as a friend of mine says, but because it was rooted in a new political culture.
These flashbacks barely illustrate, by contrast, the complexity of our present.
The growing heterogeneity in our society is reflected today in other ways of thinking and speaking, in the accelerated delegitimization of established discourses, in the new political vocabulary in progress, in the vindication of expressions that were previously politically incorrect. Etc.
These phenomena in emerging discourses are not simple fashions and idioms, but symptoms of change in political consensus, in the effectiveness of communication, in the capacity for mobilization, which directly affect the exercise of power in terms of governability and viable decision-making, in promoting changes that generate greater participation and support.
Of course, the discourses in the heads of ordinary Cubans, on the one hand, and leaders, on the other, have not been identical in the past either. What happens now is that very often they do not intersect and, on many occasions, they contradict each other. Both correspond to the same political culture, but that mere belonging does not ensure political communication.
To what extent do Cuban social discourses reflect political changes? A study of the vocabulary used in these discourses could yield interesting data that would complement some of these ideas. Although I do not have time for such an inventory, it is verifiable that market, civil society, democracy, inequality, private, are no longer bad words, in the sense of raising instant suspicions everywhere, or banned in established official and media discourses. Others that, without being banned, are not so well received, continue to be transition, pluralism, loyal opposition, freedom of expression. In institutional documents and discourses, the word vulnerability replaces poverty, improvement replaces reform.
This sample of lexicon could be seen as a diaphragm of political correctness, which is often not so much ideological as cultural. If the construction of reality were represented as a wall of words, we would see that its consistency does not reside so much in political ideas as in a certain code. It is easy to see it at the top of society. But also below, especially in communities and physical or cultural enclaves that share beliefs and values. These codes reflect their identities, as groups that consider themselves marginalized, stigmatized, disadvantaged, discriminated against, “invisible.”
The frustration and anger in many of their discourses, their demanding and often cathartic tone, operates, to a certain extent, as an impediment to being recognized at a horizontal level in society as a whole. Vertically, it also hinders dialogue with institutionalized powers, which often perceive them as dividing national unity, politically out of tune, and even dangerous, because if they are not stopped in time, they are susceptible to being interpreted as calls to rebellion. Of course, the alarm derived from the situation of a besieged fortress and the syndrome that accompanies it is not new: “any spark can ignite a meadow of dry grass.” Prevention does not lie in abolishing the possibility of a spark or blocking the meadow, but in avoiding the danger of dry grass.
In practical terms, this poses certain political challenges to government institutions.
After the advance of digitalization and home Internet, it is clear that the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the government and its political capacity do not concern so much the modernity of communication techniques, but rather its ability to transmit new styles of thought and ideas that can compete with the various ideological resonators acting on Cuban society, inside and outside. To a great extent, it is not only a matter of implementing policies, but of going beyond a stereotyped discourse: either it is profoundly transformed; or it continues to reproduce itself indefinitely, thereby condemning itself to lose its course, its daily use, to be ignored or abandoned, because it has worn out to the point of becoming useless.
Generating a politically effective discourse requires the ability to reflect the multiplicity and differentiation of the social body, the ability to subsume the differences between different social segments and their specific discourses, as well as to minimize the antagonism with culturally excluding discourses that coexist in that social body. But not to ignore them, nor to stop interacting with them.
In short, having the power to make decisions and maintaining the power to convoke are two related, separate, but complementary dimensions.
Empowerment from civil society is not generated within groups that share common codes, but as a social relationship, because that’s what power is; horizontal for other groups and discourses, and in interaction with institutions, where it is completed as the power of consensus.
In the awareness of this relationship and its harmony lies the meaning of political action. And the key to a unity that is no longer given, otherwise it must be remade again and again.
Author
Rafael Hernández
