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ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
The Cultural Grounds
of Mass Harm
Large-scale projects that cause suffering, degrade, and destroy—war, massacre, state torture, slavery, lynching, pogroms, human trafficking, terrorism, counterterrorism, prostitution, criminal punishment, economic exploitation, political repression, environmental degradation, industrialized agriculture, meat eating, and so on—are commonly explained in terms of quests to win or maximize resources and power. These projects and the struggles and objectives they pursue are also always coded symbolically. That is to say, mass harm is enculturated. It is naturalized, normalized, trivialized, excused, justified, commended, and/or obfuscated. These and other processes of enculturation are discursive.1 They are bound to language, to the way people talk about them. To build a case for the discursive grounds of mass harm in this chapter, I first reflect on the nature of mass harm and address why mass harm in particular warrants a cultural analysis. Then I examine scholarship linking mass harm to cognition and processes that manipulate (1) cognitive processes, as well as discursive forms, which I distinguish as (2) wording or (3) narratives. This review leads me to suggest that narratives are uniquely effective vehicles for moral and thus emotional messaging. Yet, research on mass harm, highlighting narrative or anything else, has clarified processes of legitimation to the virtual neglect of emotional inspiration.
CONCEPTUALIZING MASS HARM
The special concern of this book is mass harm. It is crucial that we comprehend how devastation actually mounts up—against criminology’s traditional preoccupation with individual action in violation of some law. I define harm as trouble caused by another. Intent to harm is not essential to this definition, though actors “must have had some notion that their (in)action might result in harm” (Presser 2013, p. 7).
My definition depends on some agent naming some experience as “trouble.” Questions of who that agent should be and which alleged troubles necessitate concern are admittedly problematic, as demonstrated by competing claims of victimhood in the context of sexual misconduct (i.e., pointing to damaged souls and careers). Yet, as scores of critical criminologists have maintained, “crime” is no less problematic a concept. A focus on crime privileges the perspective of lawmakers and law enforcement agents, while “harm” takes seriously the felt consequences of action.2
What is mass harm, then? Its parameters are not transparent. Mass incarceration means large numbers of people incarcerated, mass murder means large numbers murdered, and so on. Logically, then, mass harm should mean masses harmed, and it does. I propose, furthermore, that mass harm entails mass involvement. If many are victimized, many are implicated. Mass harm requires multiple agents who may bear widely differing levels of responsibility, but nonetheless bear responsibility. Conceivably, one person could fly a drone that launches a missile or dump the toxins that annihilate an ocean’s marine life. However, the motivated agent needs others to manufacture and supply the tools to harm and to escape detection. Harms under fascism seem to emanate from a single leader, but the fascist ruler needs henchmen. Besides, today’s mass surveillance, instant communication, and global capital both check and facilitate our actions. Then there is the motivation to harm in the first place. If recent “lone wolf” terrorist attacks tell us anything, it is that the inspiration to do mass harm is usually communally sourced (Berntzen and Sandberg 2014). Of genocide Savelsberg (2010) observes: “Grave human rights violations can only be understood as the outcome of collective or organizational, especially state, action” (p. 51). Individual aggressors are heavily in debt to their social milieu (see also Bandura 1999).
To conceptualize mass harm as mass involvement in harm is to make a controversial move. Elites and the rest of us, it seems, would like to deflect and concentrate responsibility. A case in point is present-day denials of institutional complicity in sexual harassment and rape. Stewards of churches, schools, businesses, fraternities, the military, and other spaces from which survivors have come forward regularly reject the notion that their cultures are enabling, despite disproportionately high rates of victimization in those spaces. Such denials are no doubt meant to preserve power. But I believe they also stem from a failure to grasp the expansiveness of the enculturation of social life.
The commonplace harms just mentioned as well as the atrocities of the twentieth century make it painfully clear that mass harm requires “standing by” as much as it does actively inflicting the harm. Hence the lucidity of the statement attributed to Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Perpetration receives the lion’s share of attention, however, both in popular culture and, less defensibly, in the field of criminology (Manji, Presser, and Dickey 2014). A cultural approach to mass harm is able to account for both perpetration (from administration to manual involvement) and failure of intervention: cultural processes—ideas, figurative expressions (e.g., metaphors), and stories—are aimed at and influence both direct agents and bystanders. Complicity may be self-serving, in either survival or fiscal terms; still the enterprise in which one is complicit “goes down” a certain way. Enabling bystanders include persons who suffer from harmful structures, consistent with insights from Marx on false consciousness and ideology, and Bourdieu on symbolic violence. The fact that victims themselves often accept conditions of poverty, inequality, oppression and other injuries as natural and/or acceptable underscores the role of cultural signification in mass harm perhaps most vividly of all.
IDEAS OF HARM
It is axiomatic that our actions are guided by ideas, including all-encompassing worldviews, values, principles, norms, and codes. Our harmful actions are guided by ideas that concern who harm victims and agents are and what the nature of harmful practices is. Ideas about who and what is “trouble” guide school discipline, policing, criminal justice policy, and government generally. The impact of profiling or stereotyping on the lives and prospects of individuals and communities is well documented. An ethos of neoliberalism underpins various harm enterprises—overly stringent conditions on public assistance, austerity measures, and limits on global debt relief—to a large extent by assigning responsibility for suffering to victims. The logics of colonialism and gentrification render existing residents of a place invisible and occupation inevitable. The view of a natural moral hierarchy where humans have dominion over nature constructs ecological devastation as consistent with the right order of things.
Criminologists of various stripes explain offending behavior in terms of values and norms, though the behavior in question is usually individual infraction. Hirschi’s (1969) social bond theory depicts offenders as adhering more weakly than the rest of us to “beliefs in the moral validity of norms” (p. 26). Social learning theory proposes that we learn “orientations, rationalizations, definitions of the situation, and other attitudes that label the commission of an act as right or wrong, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, justified or unjustified” (Akers 1998, p. 78). Sutherland and Cressey’s (1974) formulation of differential association theory, precursor to Akers’s social learning theory, proposes that offenders hold “an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law” (p. 75). These theories sketch criminogenic beliefs broadly as those that legitimize lawbreaking. Anomie theories, inspired by Durkheim, are concerned with societal values that extol particular versions of success. According to Merton’s (1938) anomie (also called strain) theory, when economic success is taken to be a universal end goal but the normative means to achieving such success are not similarly emphasized, individuals who are structurally disadvantaged may turn to crime—to get what they are taught to strive for or to resist the dysfunctional system. Messner and Rosenfeld’s (1994) institutional anomie theory holds that the values of the economy, including unfettered competition and individual achievement, in the United States have come to colonize social life, weakening the erstwhile constraining effects of more communitarian and nonpecuniary logics.
Midcentury subcultural criminological theories posited that certain groups, disproportionately young, poor, and male, endorse crime and violence by embracing values such as maliciousness, hedonism, trouble, and excitement (A. Cohen 1955; Miller 1958). The subcultural theorists proposed that delinquents adopt these values after failing in the social mainstream. Matza (1964) and ethnographers such as Anderson (1999) and Bourgois (2003) provide more sophisticated formulations of the notion of group members negotiating, rather than simply holding, subcultural values. Due in part to these more complex explorations, today’s criminologists question whether any collective or individual embraces the idea that “harm” generically speaking is “good.” Critical criminologists have questioned the supposed normative consensus and prosocial bent of mainstream society, including the notion that “the values of the larger culture contain strong prescriptions for nonviolence” (Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967, p. 301). Their critiques are both theoretical and empirical—questioning the premise of social homogeneity and highlighting evidence (even celebration) of mainstream brutality and transgression.
In general, analysts of harm concerned with belief systems ask not only what beliefs promote or inhibit harm-doing but also what keeps actors from consistently acting upon those beliefs. In the words of the psychologist Albert Bandura (1999), we need to understand “the mechanisms by which people come to live in accordance with moral standards” (p. 193) and not simply the (abstract) standards themselves. Hence a body of work on how individuals deal with the “cognitive dissonance” of doing harm while opposing it (e.g., Hinton 1996; Lieberman 2006; Maikovich 2005). That those who do harm generally espouse anti-harm moral principles and accordingly must dislocate those principles for a time was the grounding idea of Sykes and Matza’s (1957) neutralization theory. According to the theory, juvenile delinquency is a function of accounting for it in a particular way prior to acting—by deploying techniques of neutralization, namely, denial of responsibility; denial of injury; denial of the victim; condemnation of the condemners; and appeal to higher loyalties. Connecting neutralization theory to social learning theory, Sykes and Matza propose that neutralizations are learned “‘definitions of the situation’ which represent tangential or glancing blows at the dominant normative system rather than the creation of an opposing ideology; and they are extensions of patterns of thought prevalent in society rather than something created de novo” (1957, p. 669; emphasis in original). The young person subscribes to mainstream edicts against delinquent action but temporarily suspends them.
Moral principles must be suspended because we are emotionally attached to them, and we are emotionally attached to them because our identities are riding on them. The basic point, from learning theory, is that misconduct “will bring self-condemnation” and thus guilt and shame (Bandura 1999, p. 194; see also Braithwaite 1989). That violating our principles has an affective dimension means that the work we do to reconcile our behavior with our principles is affective work, which I entertain further in addressing narrative’s exceptionalism (Frank 2010b).
Sykes and Matza (1957) were not especially concerned with mass action. They had in mind individuals, not groups. The individual “feels that his behavior does not really cause any great harm” or “moves himself into the position of avenger” (p. 668) or makes some other ideational adjustment. Although subsequent research framed by neutralization theory has taken heed of mass harm (e.g., Alvarez 1997; Box 1983; S. Cohen 2001), elsewhere neutralizations have been equated with individual-level thinking errors on the part of offenders (Ellis 1973; Yochelson and Samenow 1976). In contrast, a psychology-based literature concerning moral disengagement, a concept that is comparable to neutralization, has been amply applied to mass harm and has stressed that disengagement mechanisms are culturally conditioned, with the lead contribution being that of Bandura (1999; see also Aquina, Reed, Thau, and Freeman 2007; Bandura 1990; Obermann 2011; Petitta, Probst, and Barbaranelli 2015). The means of escaping self-condemnation are not invented by individual minds because we do not reason in isolation. We get our ideas from social sources or “thought communities,” which is also the way we learn how to ideologically contravene reigning standards of conduct (Zerubavel 1997). Institutions and institutional norms and laws may set and teach standards of conduct, but they also disseminate acceptable reasons for breaches, as Box (1983) notes concerning corporate crime: “It is not difficult for corporate officials to cover themselves in ‘purity’ even when they are breaking the law because the ‘structural immorality’ of their corporate environment provides a library of verbal technique for neutralizing the moral bind of laws against corporate behaviour” (p. 54). The pool of ideas we access has been established as common sense: it has achieved hegemony. The acceptability of those ideas has public sanction and furthermore sustains status quo power positions.
Bandura (1999) proposed four types of moral disengagement that vary by the target of cognitive adjustment:
(a) the reconstrual of the conduct itself so it is not viewed as immoral,
(b) the operation of the agency of action so that the perpetrators can minimize their role in causing harm,
(c) the consequences that flow from actions, or
(d) how the victims of maltreatment are regarded by devaluing them as human beings and blaming them for what is being done to them. (p. 194)
Bandura (1999, p. 204) contends that the mechanisms of moral disengagement work in conjunction with one another, which is well demonstrated in the case of rape myths (Burt 1980; Feild 1978; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974). Rape myths, or neutralizations concerning sexual violence, manipulate all four of the targets just mentioned. They are “prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists” (Burt 1980, p. 217), beliefs such as: many women want to be raped, women can resist rape, some women deserve to be raped, and women often falsely accuse men of rape to get back at them. Burt documented the prevalence of adherence to rape myths and correlated such adherence with more general attitudes about gender (pro-traditional sex roles) and violence (accepting of it) with survey responses to the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale. Of a random sample of nearly six hundred adults in Minnesota surveyed in 1977, for example, more than half agreed with statements such as “In the majority of rapes, the victim is promiscuous or has a bad reputation” (Burt 1980, p. 223). Sexual violence is also promoted by the idea that it does no harm. In this regard Moran (2015) discusses the myths that support prostitution through a powerful accounting of her own experience. These include myths of the prostitute achieving happiness, sexual pleasure, and control through the work. On the question of control Moran writes: “The belief that prostitutes are in control has no basis in reality, but it has two practicable functions, related but distinct: to sanitise and excuse the economic and sexual abuse of women by men, and to obscure the core of prostitution’s true nature: the commercialisation of sexual abuse” (pp. 171–72). Prevailing ideas about some system of exploitation disguise and rationalize, with the effect of upholding the power relations that pattern or system supports. It makes sense, then, that the powerful organize how we think and thereby what we think.
Herbert Kelman (1973) theorizes institutional sway over cognition in a morally extreme action context—that of massacring innocents. Kelman first refutes individual explanations. He notes that psychologically normal people are seen to perpetrate this kind of violence. Nor, in his view, do emotions such as frustration and hostility motivate such violence, though they often accompany it. For Kelman anger and sadism are not “major motivating forces in their own right” (p. 36) but at best facilitators and even outcomes of the actual causal factors, which are conditions that weaken erstwhile moral restraints against violence. Such weakening is the result of three social processes—authorization, routinization, and dehumanization: “Through processes of authorization, the situation becomes so defined that standard moral principles do not apply and the individual is absolved of responsibility to make personal moral choices. Through processes of routinization, the action becomes so organized that there is no opportunity for raising moral questions and making moral decisions. Through processes of dehumanization, the actor’s attitudes toward the target and toward himself become so structured that it is neither necessary nor possible for him to view the relationship in moral terms” (p. 38). Although Kelman scarcely refers to cognition per se, the three morality-attenuating processes that he identifies operate cognitively. Authorization and dehumanization lead us to invest in particular definitions of the situation, self and target, for example, a view of compulsion by (or paramount loyalty toward) authorities, and the idea that the victim is not part of the human community.3 Authorization can also work more subtly and more pervasively when authoritarian regimes cast doubt on facts and the media that disseminate them; in this way the government delegitimizes potentially contradictory ideas. Routinization, like bureaucratization, is a material process, “transforming the action into routine, mechanical, highly programmed operations” (Kelman 1973, p. 46). Kelman’s theory echoes Arendt’s (1963) “banality of evil thesis” according to which the Nazi regime transformed people carrying out the genocide into “functionaries and mere cogs” (p. 289). Routinization operates via ideas in the sense that it helps actors avoid contemplating what they are doing or the outcomes they are contributing to: “Routinization fulfills two functions. First, it reduces the necessity of making decisions, thus minimizing occasions in which moral questions may arise. Second, it makes it easier to avoid the implications of the action since the actor focuses on the details of his job rather than on its meaning” (Kelman 1973, p. 46). Kelman’s moral actor is situated to think certain things and, more important, not to think others. Not thinking about the ethics of one’s actions—or inactions—is highly consequential and wholly socialized. Thus, too, Bandura (1999) refers to “decisional arrangements of foggy nonresponsibility” where “authorities act in ways that keep themselves intentionally uninformed” (p. 197). These arrangements insulate actors from sanction in the event that harm is publicized, as well as self-sanction, for these actors “also have to live with themselves” (p. 197).
Not thinking about what one is doing brings us to habit and Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus, “a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (pp. 82–83; emphasis in original). Perception, appreciation, and action are enmeshed in this perspective. Habitus is embodied, something on the order of playbook moves, not necessarily thought of yet reciprocally related to ideas as well as other structures. Discursive forms are among the structures that inculcate and reflect habitus (see Fleetwood 2016).
DISCURSIVE FORMS
Ideas and mechanisms that manipulate ideas and thinking are made concrete and disseminated through semiotic processes. Messages of harm’s legitimacy are embodied in particular statements. For example, boys’ routine violence lends itself to a popular figure of speech called an epanelepsis: “Boys will be boys.” Is it significant that the normalization of boys’ violence is captured in discourse? In other words, does discursivity have a unique impact?
The answer from many quarters is yes. Philosophers and psychologists have advanced a variety of theses to the effect that language constitutes thought. Carruthers (2002) observes that the weakest of these, that “language makes some cognitive difference” (p. 659), enjoys broad support. Yet, he gathers evidence for the stronger claim that language is a necessary medium of thought across domains. Language both integrates and communicates ideas, whereas other “modules” such as the visual do not. That is, language “has both input and output functions” (p. 666). We make the world meaningful to ourselves and to others through language.
But texts do not merely clarify; they also make things happen (Austin 1962). Or, as Barthes (1957) says of myth, “It makes us understand something and it imposes it on us” (p. 117). Texts establish positions and institutions. Even where the ideas that inspired them are not consciously received or even accepted, discourses govern through the hierarchies they construct. Thus, van Dijk (1992) takes note of the discursive strategies with which racialized hierarchies are maintained. Where overtly racist expressions are inconsistent with prevailing norms, whites use strategies like reversal, where “anti-racists tend to be represented as the ones who are intolerant” (van Dijk 1992, p. 94). Van Dijk (1993) situates the role of language this way: “A discourse analytical approach does not imply that we reduce the problem of racism to a language or communication problem. Obviously, racism also manifests itself in many non-discursive practices and structures, such as discrimination in employment, housing, health care, and social services, or in physical aggression. Our major claim and interest, then, are twofold: (1) Racism also manifests itself in discourse and communication, often in relation with other social practices of oppression and exclusion, and (2) the social cognitions that underlie these practices are largely shaped through discursive communication within the dominant white group” (p. 13). Here, discourse both reflects and molds thought. The idea of that reciprocal relation is compatible with Foucault’s (2000) perspective on the political impact of ideas as discourses, which flow from particular “regimes of truth.” Among discourses I distinguish between what I call wording and narrative.
Wording
By wording I mean to demarcate linguistic processes that are more or less contained in a few words and whose use is relatively flexible across statements. They may amount to systems, but it is useful to focus attention on distinct devices—words or groups of words.4 For example, we find across harms the negative labeling of targets: “The use of labels helps to deprive the victims of identity and community. Terms like ‘gook’ help to define them as subhuman, despicable, and certainly incapable of evoking empathy. Terms like ‘Communist’ allow their total identity to be absorbed by a single category, and one that is identified by the perpetrators of the massacre as totally evil” (Kelman 1973, p. 50).
Not just labels, but labeling schemes—classifications, or “differentiations” (Lévi-Strauss 1966)—are a vital aspect of the enculturation of harm. A raft of studies has turned up classificatory systems that are essential to war, colonialism, slavery, prostitution, and more, distinguishing, for example, virgin and whore, ruler and subject, Occidental and Oriental, and master and slave. Abortion is opposed by reference to “killing babies” (Lakoff 2002). The sharp distinction between victims and offenders, however those roles are cast, is essential to punishment schemes. Yet, harm-promoting classifications are not necessarily binary, illustrated by Lombroso’s (1876) typology of criminals (e.g., the born criminal, criminaloids, the criminal by passion, and others) and South Africa’s rule of apartheid (black, white, Coloured, and Indian).
The harm-inducing effects of labels that pertain to deviance and criminality are central to the labeling perspective in sociology. The labeling perspective applies to mass harm to the extent that it concerns itself with groups and definitions of crime that criminalize them, following conflict theory (see, e.g., Quinney 1970). The labeling of target groups facilitates their mistreatment. Numerous studies have inventoried figurative expressions for victims of mass harm. In particular, much has been written about the dehumanizing terms that genocide perpetrators use to refer to their victims (e.g., Alvarez 1997; Bélanger-Vincent 2009; Fox and Levin 1998; Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2008; Huggins, Haritos-Fatouros, and Zimbardo 2002; cf. Williams and Neilsen 2016). Haslam (2006) usefully conceptualizes dehumanization as attributing to others either animalistic or object-like qualities, thus opening up the (latter) possibility of objective and equable dehumanization that takes “everyday forms” (p. 255). I have shown that harm projects in general rely on reductive but not necessarily animallike or debasing constructions of harm targets (Presser 2013).5
Discourse also permits concealment. “Defense of marriage” legislation in the United States shrouds discrimination against gay people, and “right to work” laws are designed to combat unionization. Communication scholar Walter Fisher (1987) finds “code words” in the speech of Ronald Reagan during his run for the U.S. presidency: “‘[F]amily’ means the nuclear family—dad, mom, son, and daughter; ‘neighborhood’ means no busing; ‘work’ means no welfare but ‘work-fare’; ‘peace’ means the United States must be the biggest, strongest country in the world in order that we preserve the peace and fulfill our manifest destiny to spread our way of life everywhere. ‘Freedom’ means freedom from governmental interference in the ‘free-enterprise’ system” (p. 151). Orwell (1968) said of political discourse generally that it is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable” (p. 139) and “largely the defence of the indefensible” (p. 136). Often, though not always, harm projects—or the harmful aspects of a practice—must be obscured if they are to meet with general tolerance, hence the use of euphemism as well as outright denial. Denial may be hard to render credible (and requires tampering with records, disappearing victims, and so forth), so euphemism would seem to be more common. Of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, Arendt (1963) explains: “All correspondence referring to [the mass killing of Jews] was subject to rigid ‘language rules,’ and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen [mobile units of shooters], it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as ‘extermination,’ ‘liquidation,’ or ‘killing’ occur. The prescribed code names for killing were ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation’ (Aussiedlung), and ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung); . . . Moreover, the very term ‘language rule’ (Sprachregelung) was itself a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie” (p. 85). Language rules facilitated the cloaking of reality such that harm agents were able to delude themselves and others as to what they were really doing. Even the delusions were represented euphemistically: speakers lied to themselves about the fact of lying. That they spoke in code meant a subterfuge for their actions, to the outside world and to themselves.
Coding is surely culturally and historically specific. “Final solution” was typical of the ethos of technocratic problem solving promoted by the Nazi regime. Today, neoliberalism frames many harmful actions and patterns as positive in part by constructing them as sites of choice in a marketplace of options. Hence, celebrations of “diversity” provide cover for social inequalities and even render racial difference “the source of brand value” (Gray 2013, p. 771). “School choice” (Douglas-Gabriel and Jan 2017) and “justice campuses” (Schept 2015) prompt notions of people with options and thereby efface oppression, inequality, and hardship.
Some of the most careful elaborations of the impact of linguistic figuration on mass harm are feminist works. These stress misrepresentation and obfuscation via prevailing expressions for gendered harming and harm victims. They also show that societal relations of power enable certain discourses to achieve hegemony and thereupon solidify those relations of power. For example, Beneke (1982) undertook a study of rape-enabling metaphors that reaffirms Burt’s (1980) study of rape myths, discussed previously, but attends more closely to discourse. What Beneke (1982) calls rape language, discerned through interviews with men, includes the following metaphors:
• Sex is achievement.
• Sex is a commodity.
• Sex is possession.
• Sex is madness.
• Women are objects.
• A woman’s appearance is a weapon.
• Rape is theft of a valued commodity.
• Rape is instruction.
These metaphors have impactful variants, such as sex is a particular kind of achievement like a game or a war.
Planning for harm is likewise configured through gendered metaphors. Cohn (1987) describes metaphors in use that link nuclear planning to sexuality (e.g., a weapon producing “an orgasmic whump”); virginity (e.g., a bomb “losing her virginity”); domesticity (e.g., “weapons systems can ‘marry up’”) and prosocial interaction more generally (e.g., “pat a B-1”), birth (e.g., “It’s a boy”); and godliness (e.g., “the nuclear priesthood”). Cohn (1987) summarizes:
Language that is abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use; paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the forces of mass destruction; imagery that reverses sentient and nonsentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation—all of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality of what one is talking about and from the realities one is creating through the discourse. Learning to speak the language reveals something about how thinking can become more abstract, more focused on parts disembedded from their context, more attentive to the survival of weapons than the survival of human beings. (p. 715; emphasis in original)
Language demarcates thought and speech, disallowing “certain questions to be asked or certain values to be expressed” (Cohn 1987, p. 708) and thus governing what can be contemplated and debated. The language of defense planning, Cohn discovered, precludes a holistic perspective on what people are truly up to: “The problem . . . is not only that the language is narrow but also that it is seen by its speakers as complete or whole unto itself—as representing a body of truths that exist independently of any other truth or knowledge” (p. 712). The “technostrategic discourse” Cohn was privy to acts “as an ideological curtain behind which the actual reasons for these (nuclear weapons development and deployment) decisions hide. . . . rather than informing and shaping decisions, it far more often functions as a legitimation for political outcomes that have occurred for utterly different reasons” (p. 716). The discourse obscures reality.
Similarly, in The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams (1990) emphasizes wording and the concealment it effects. She juxtaposes violence against nonhumans with violence against women in order to demonstrate that “patriarchal culture authorizes the eating of animals” (p. 13). She points out ways in which the oppression of women and nonhuman animals is conjointly accomplished, and feminist vegetarian resistance defused, through discourse. First, the experience, even the beingness, of nonhuman animals and women goes missing in the mainstream language of patriarchal societies (p. 40): “Just as dead bodies are absent from our language about meat, in descriptions of cultural violence women are also often the absent referent. Rape, in particular, carries such potent imagery that the term is transferred from the literal experience of women and applied metaphorically to other instances of violent devastation, such as the ‘rape’ of the earth in ecological writings of the early 1970s” (pp. 42–43). As such, language distances us from the “literal facts” (p. 75) of experiences of violence. Second, the relatedness of male to female and human to nonhuman is denied through various discursive means—by representing “man” as the universal human, using “animal” for nonhuman animal and thus denying that humans are animals as well, using the degendered “it” for nonhumans, and using metaphors that regularize violence toward nonhumans (e.g., “beating a dead horse”) (pp. 64–65). Third, animal bodies that are killed for meat are largely female or feminized bodies: “We oppress animals by associating them with women’s lesser status” (p. 72). Fourth, women and nonhumans are assigned to one of two mutually exclusive subject positions: “good or evil, emblems of divine perfection or diabolical incarnations, Mary or Eve, pet or beast” (p. 74). Adams refers to such classification in binary moral terms as “false naming” (p. 74). Overall, Adams exposes untruths about nonhuman animals and women, the telling of which linguistic representations facilitate.
Arran Stibbe (2001) covers some of the same ground as Adams, undertaking a critical discourse analysis of the syntaxes, idioms, metaphors, and other features of the language disseminated by meat industries concerning nonhuman animals and their treatment. For example, nonhuman animals are referred to in volume rather than count terms, thus erasing their individuality. Metaphors treat animals (e.g., breeding sows) as machinery and other things “to encourage the disregard of animal suffering” (Stibbe 2001, p. 156). Notably, Stibbe’s data are drawn from professional journals and industry publications, which have the reputation of conveying facts literally.
Generally speaking, figurativeness functions as a kind of subterfuge in the foregoing studies. The focus on language for deception hones a view of language as shaping perception to the exclusion of emotion. However, language shapes not just how we think but also what we feel. Further, the focus on language for deception implies strategy. It should be remembered, though, that bad faith is not a necessary aspect of the power of language to shape our view of things.6 No one need intend to manipulate or conceal.
The issue of manipulation brings us to ideology and propaganda, which lack the concreteness of ideas and wording (as well as narrative). They are essentially hybrid forms. Propaganda pertains to discourse but is centrally a matter of manipulating beliefs. Stanley (2015) defines political propaganda as “a kind of speech that fundamentally involves political, economic, aesthetic, or rational ideals, mobilized for a political purpose” (p. 52). The form that propaganda may take is open. Ideology is even less tangible. Eagleton (1991) points out that ideology has numerous definitions, including ones that are politics-neutral, such as “action-oriented sets of beliefs” (p. 2); ones that are less neutral, such as “the forms of thought motivated by social interests” (p. 1); and ones that highlight discourse over belief, such as “the points where power impacts upon certain utterances and inscribes itself tacitly within them” (p. 223). We can call ideas, wording, or narratives ideological if they construct or maintain hierarchies and harms. And we can think about the impact of propaganda or ideology that is structured narratively.
Narrative
