Analytical Perspective
The study of social movement rhetoric has been concerned with the ways in which social movement actors accomplish their persuasive goals, that is, with what activists accomplish with words - slogans flagged by demonstrators, speeches by protest leaders, songs and chants circulated by protest groups. There is another sense, however, in which students of social movement rhetoric have underscored the inseparable link between speech and action - by extending the notion of speech to the nonverbal modes of visual and embodied-corporeal expressions of the kind we have already encountered in discussions of social movement repertoires, which they labeled as symbolic speech. In Bosmajian’s (1972) words,
dissent may be exercised by the use of written and spoken words; by acts, such as picketing, which are sometimes referred to as “symbolic speech” because they are means of communicating ideas and of reaching the mind and the conscience of others; and by “peaceable” mass assembly and demonstration.
(p. 16)
In this semiotic view, not only is speech action-like as it is used to perform the social task of persuasion, embodied action is also speech-like in that it is used to convey symbolic meanings. Thus, from the perspective of the study of social movement rhetoric, defiant discourse collapses speech and action in performing its political work.
Speech act theory is also centrally concerned with the relationship between speech and action. It highlights the performative dimension of verbal utterances by analyzing the sense in which to say something is to do something, and explores the contextual conditions of the performance of conventionalized verbal activities, many of which are lexicalized in the form of speech-act verbs. Gasaway Hill (2018) applies an expanded version of the speech-act theory perspective to her study of the language of protest. Drawing on a wide range of examples of acts of protest associated with the history of nonviolent resistance around the globe, she analyzes several genres of protest language that perform the linguistic work of giving voice to dissent. These protest genres fall into the category of defiant discourse as I view it in this book, but they do not exhaust it. In particular, this speech-act perspective on the study of protest foregrounds the performative dimension of language use, but does not problematize the relationship between speech and action. Austin (1962) himself points to the need to do so in ways that resonate with the vernacular usage addressed in this book. He says:
Certainly the ways we talk about “action” are liable here, as elsewhere, to be confusing. For example, we may contrast men of words with men of action, we may say they did nothing, only talked or said things: yet again, we may contrast only thinking something with actually saying it (out loud), in which context saying it is doing something.
(p. 92)
In this passage, Austin locates saying in relation to doing in one instance, and in relation to thinking in another. “Only talk” dismisses speech as nonaction, while “only thinking” brings out the potential potency of public speech when contrasted with unarticulated thought. Men of words are devalued as non-doers as compared to men of action, but when speaking is contrasted to “only thinking,” it is assigned a higher position in an implicit cultural scale of efficacy that acknowledges the performative role of language as an externalized, publicly accessible gesture.
Speech act theory’s general assumption that language is action was directly challenged by Duranti (1997) in his review of the anthropological critique of the theory of speech acts, where he claimed that speech act theorists “start from the assumption that ‘language is action’ but do not question their own notion of ‘action’. They assume that ‘action’ itself is a universal dimension of human existence that does not need further analysis” (p. 236). The same can be said, of course, with regard to the notion of speech. What counts as speech in a particular context also deserves further analysis, as is indicated by the aforementioned discussion of the category of “symbolic speech” proposed by students of social movement rhetoric. Surely, in activist social arenas, the paramount question is what counts as action, what gets to be included in a group’s activist repertoire. In other social contexts, however, such as legal settings in countries where freedom of speech is protected by law, the paramount question may turn out to be what counts as speech. Do acts of protest such as flag burning or tearing up one’s identity card count as speech that is protected by freedom of speech legislation (Bosmajian, 1972)? Does incitement to act or refusal to participate in socially sanctioned action (as in draft refusal) constitute sanctionable action or is it to be considered protected speech? Answering these questions invites a move from the universalizing framework of speech act theory to a consideration of the ideological construction of language, including the ways in which the categories of speech and action relate to one another in local cultural settings.
This focus within the study of discourse has come under the heading of language ideology studies, a subfield of linguistic anthropology. In Silverstein’s (1979) influential formulation, “language ideology” refers to “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (p. 193). Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) speak of ideologies of language as a particular focus within language ideology studies (see also Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity, 1998), a focus I find particularly relevant to my discussion of activists’ self-reflexive commentary in which their beliefs about the relationship between speech and action are explicitly articulated in the form of “meta-talk” (Jaworski, Coupland & Galasinski, 2004) that makes visible speakers’ implicit cultural assumptions about the forms, uses, and value of verbal performances. In the case of the vignettes that opened this chapter, the focus of activists’ reflexive attention was on the potency of speech and on its potential efficacy as an instrument of social and political change, which is not surprising in a social arena dominated by the imperative to act.
Several anthropological studies have problematized the dualistic assumptions that have been identified with Western language ideologies (broadly defined) in studies that compare them to particular non-Western ones. Thus, Irvine (1989) claims that Western intellectual tradition involves “a radical separation of the denotational sign (qua sign) from the material world” (p. 248), which has led, inter alia, to the emergence of claims for an autonomous science of linguistics. Her study of the stylized utterances of praise employed by Wolof bards called griots challenges the universality of this intellectual assumption by pushing beyond the idealist/materialist dualism. She claims that the commodification of these praises, which are exchangeable for material goods in the form of monetary compensation, indicates that this dualism does not hold for the Wolof. She points out that the same actually holds for modern service economies in which language skills and verbal performances have been increasingly commodified, as has been persuasively demonstrated, for example, by Cameron’s (2000) work.
Another study that addresses Western dualism in discussing language ideology is Rumsey’s (1990) comparative study of reported speech and linguistic devices of textual cohesion in English and in the language of the Ngarinyin people of Northwestern Australia. He claimed that the dominant language ideology in the West involves a series of dualisms that are absent from the Australian aboriginal language ideology he studied - most notably, the dualism of words and things (discussed also by Irvine), and the dualism of speech and action. In his words, “Alongside the Western dualism of form and content...another tenet of our linguistic ideology is the dualism of words and things; talk versus action; real world events versus ways of speaking about them” (p. 352). Indeed, the talk vs action dualism mentioned in this quote has emerged as a central theme in my earlier work on Israeli speech culture (e.g., Katriel, 1986, 2004). My explorations of
Israeli ways of speaking have suggested that concerns about the potency of speech and the consequentiality of language are central to the dynamics of Israeli speech culture (as will be further elaborated in the next chapter). In this book, I take this line of research a step further, revisiting questions of language ideology in Israeli society via an exploration of contemporary performances of defiant discourse in the context of public organized dissent in the circumscribed field of anti-occupation activism, which is marked by participants’ efforts to produce and circulate oppositional knowledge through the performance of defiant discourse.
