This essay investigates questions about the relationship between language, speech, and democratic institutions by bringing into conversation Hannah Arendt’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s distinctive views of the politics of language and speech. First, I explicate Arendt’s account of the connection between speech, action, and identity disclosure, as well as its role in her broad conception of political institutions. Next, I complicate this outlook by examining Bourdieu’s political sociology of language, focusing on the ways that linguistic competences valorized in particular institutional settings operate as mechanisms of silencing, domination, and exclusion. Finally, I bring these approaches together by investigating political events—AIDS activism in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s—that raise critical issues regarding the politics of language and speech within a specific institutional setting. By reading Arendt and Bourdieu together in the context of these events, one can develop a defensible account of the politics of speech in democratic theory and practice.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 3.
2.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 46e.
3.
I am not suggesting that Arendt addresses no questions regarding language as a source of domination and disempowerment. To take just two of many possible examples, in The Human Condition Arendt discusses the degradation of speech into "mere talk" (p. 180) under conditions of violence and warfare and how human communication in "a laboring society," where the exchange market becomes "a common public realm" to those who make and exchange products, contributes to "alienation" and "the atrophy of the space of appearance" (p. 209). What Arendt doesn’t discuss is how differential "linguistic competences" and modes of embodied speech (such as accent, diction, syntax, bearing, etc.) become markers of "distinctions" that often inconspicuously accord authority and legitimacy to some forms of speech while devaluing and delegitimating others.
4.
In the larger project of which this article constitutes a part, my discussion of Arendt’s thought is much more extensive.
5.
Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge ( Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
6.
Ibid., 18-19. As Epstein notes, his "conception of the ‘field’ of AIDS research and knowledge production" is indebted to Bourdieu’s theorization of the field concept. While my own deployment of Bourdieu’s work similarly emphasizes the importance of his field theory, it also accents dimensions of Bourdieu’s thought that likely inform Epstein’s analysis but receive little or no explicit discussion in Epstein’s work. Specifically, my analysis foregrounds the importance of Bourdieu’s concepts of linguistic competence and symbolic violence for understanding the political dimensions of language and speech.
7.
One might contend that this case-focusing as it does on the efforts of AIDS activists to attain entry into those committees, boards, and funding bodies that impacted the conduct and direction of scientific research into HIV and AIDS-is an inappropriate vehicle for exploring Arendt’s views of speech and action. It might be pointed out, for instance, that the issues that AIDS activists sought to politicize-issues of the body and of biological life-look strikingly like the kinds of social issues that Arendt categorically excludes from the sphere of politics. From this perspective, activists’ politicization of AIDS research might be understood as a distressing symptom of the modern tendency to blur, if not erase, critical distinctions between the private, the social and the political spheres. While such a view is not altogether unwarranted, it obscures important complexities and ambiguities in Arendt’s work and in the interventions of AIDS activists. As Bonnie Honig, Hannah Pitkin, Linda Zerilli, and others have argued, Arendt’s distinction between the social and the political is not necessarily intended to debar all social concerns from the precincts of politics, but to warn against the dangers of the instrumentalist outlook in political affairs. See Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3-4; Hanna Pitkin, "Justice: On Relating the Public and Private," Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981): 342; and Bonnie Honig, "Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity," in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 135-66. Viewed from this perspective, the key question regarding AIDS activism isn’t whether the issues activists sought to raise were inherently political or nonpolitical, but whether their attitudes, sensibilities, and modes of discourse were dominated by instrumental considerations, the criterion of expediency, and "ends" rather than "goals." On the important distinction between ends and goals, see Hannah Arendt, "Introduction into Politics," in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 193. In short, one danger to the vitality of political life, as Arendt understands it, consists in the atrophy of goals into ends and of action into execution. On the distinction between action and execution, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 264. As I will demonstrate below, AIDS activists’ attempts to democratize scientific institutions are animated largely by a concern with goals rather than ends.
8.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 180.
9.
Ibid, 176.
10.
Arendt, "What is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future (New York : Penguin Books, 1980), 146.
11.
See, e.g., the discussion of Thomas Jefferson’s ward system of government in Arendt, On Revolution, 253-55.
12.
This argument is developed in greater detail in Jeffrey C. Isaac, "Oases in the Desert: Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics," in Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 100-22.
13.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1990 ), 53.
14.
Axel Honneth , Hermann Kocyba, and Bernd Schwibs, "The Struggle for Symbolic Order: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu,"Theory, Culture & Society3, no. 1 ( 1986): 42.
15.
Pierre Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson ( New York: Greenwood, 1986), 243.
16.
Pierre Bourdieu , "The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges,"Social Science Information16, no. 6 (1977): 660.
17.
Bourdieu, "The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges," 656.
18.
Ibid., 664.
19.
Ibid., 663.
20.
Ibid., 655.
21.
Bourdieu holds "that each field draws the dividing line between the sayable and the unsayable (or unnameable), which defines its specificity. In other words, the form and content of discourse depend on the capacity to express the expressive interests attached to a position within the limits of the constraints of the censorship that is imposed on the occupant of the position, i.e., the required formality" (Ibid., p. 657).
22.
Pierre Bourdieu , Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 55.
23.
Ibid., 51.
24.
Pierre Bourdieu , Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1.
25.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 200.
26.
Pierre Bourdieu , "Understanding," in Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Susan Emanuel, Joe Johnson, and Shoggy T. Waryn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 608.
27.
Epstein, Impure Science, 285.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Ibid.
30.
Ibid. Elsewhere Epstein submits: "As activists saw it, the big names in AIDS antiviral research . . . dominated the committees that voted, predictably, to fund the kinds of studies that these researchers did" (p. 284).
31.
Ibid., 286.
32.
Ibid.
33.
Ibid.
34.
Ibid., 350.
35.
Steven Epstein , "The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials,"Science, Technology & Human Values20, no. 4 (1995): 410.
36.
Epstein, Impure Science, 231.
37.
Epstein, "The Construction of Lay Expertise," 417.
38.
Ibid.
39.
Epstein, Impure Science, p. 231.
40.
Ibid.
41.
James Bohman , "Democracy as Inquiry, Inquiry as Democratic: Pragmatism, Social Science, and the Cognitive Division of Labor,"American Journal of Political Science43, no. 2 (1999): 600.
42.
Epstein, Impure Science, ch. 7.
43.
Ibid., 228.
44.
Ibid., 228, 339.
45.
Ibid., 256-58.
46.
Ibid., 257.
47.
Ibid, 2, 235-64, 330-53.
48.
Epstein, "The Construction of Lay Expertise," 417.
49.
Epstein, Impure Science, 232. Epstein cites other examples as well: "Susan Ellenberg, the chief biostatistician assigned to the ACTG trials at NIAID, recalled seeking out the ACTUP/New York document in Montreal in response to her own curiosity: ‘I walked down to the courtyard and there was this group of guys, and they were wearing muscle shirts, with earrings and funny hair. I was almost afraid. I was really hesitant even to approach them’" (p. 247).
50.
Ibid., 232.
51.
For an interesting discussion of the changing "emotion culture" within the AIDS movement in the United States, see Deborah Gould, "Rock the Boat, Don’t Rock the Boat Baby: Ambivalence and the Emergence of Militant AIDS Activism," in Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, ed. Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 135-57.
52.
Epstein, Impure Science, 335.
53.
Ibid., 232.
54.
Ibid., 248-49.
55.
Ibid., 231.
56.
Ibid., 351.
57.
Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J.D. Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 146.
58.
Epstein, Impure Science, 12.
59.
Ibid., 229-30.
60.
Ibid., 293.
61.
Arendt, On Revolution, 268.
62.
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 43.
63.
Epstein, Impure Science, p. 235. As Epstein points out, researchers’ transformed view of activists is mirrored in activists’ own "transformed conception of the identity of the antagonist. In place of the charges of genocide that activists had used in the early days of ACT UP to frame their critiques of the research establishment, these activists were now often inclined to acknowledge the good intentions of researchers" (p. 328).
64.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 244.
65.
Ibid., 200.
66.
Hannah Arendt, "On Violence," in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 178.
67.
Gregg Gonsalves and Mark Harrington, "AIDS Research at the NIH: A Critical Review. Part I: Summary" (Treatment Action Group, New York, 1992, photocopy), 1-2, quoted in Epstein, Impure Science, 353.
68.
My remarks in the following two paragraphs and elsewhere have benefited greatly from comments provided by one of the reviewers of this essay, Steven Epstein, and by Mary Deitz.
