Speech without Words

Movement Changes One's Shape (Huodong bian ren xing), a novel by Wang Meng, depicts an unusual character by the name of Jingyi.¹ Her daily morning exercise is to curse into the mirror while doing her hair and makeup. Her gleeful invective takes the form of shuochang (a lyrical art similar to rap). For this malicious woman, it is language that enables her success: fusing drama, rhyme, legend, history, personal affairs, and sexuality, "eight generations and five thousand years are strung together in one breath." This "Jingyian language" formed in one breath, this language of madness and femininity that "curses all morning long and continually renews itself," this blissful "voice of evil," leads me to wonder: What, after all, is the "creativity" of language, or "creative language"? Who is the real subject of "translingual practice"? What is the "violence of language" and how can we understand it?

More than a few writers have pointed out that, compared to other languages, Chinese boasts a rich vocabulary of curses and maledictions and, moreover, that the plurality of this vocabulary has something to do with violence and sexuality. The issue is not to deny this or to feel a kind of dishonor. My question is rather to ask why, in the history of the modern world, did this "nation whose language teems with violence," this mass of people whose articulation cannot move beyond the "scurrilous," why did this "community" fail to develop fully the violence of the modern nation-state in the form of imperialism? And, on the other hand, why is it precisely those modern languages most associated with civility and purity, the European languages and Japanese, that spawned the most violent and aggressive modern states?

This question is an interesting one. What first led me to think about it was the question of the modern nation-state's relationship with its common language (gongtongyu). The modern nation-state's push to standardize language takes the form of a constant literarization of speech and normalization of expression. Of course this involves a process of weeding out from colloquial language certain "uncivilized elements" such as sexuality, violence, and ribaldry. While this is well known, what must be highlighted is that this civilizing process itself is foremost a process of suppression and exclusion. Its very starting point is violence, a process of collective violence that proceeds by means of suppressing everyday, colloquial, colorful, heterogeneous violence, and which gives unprecedented legitimacy to suppression itself. It is on the basis of silencing colorful, heterogeneous violence that uniform, standardized, unprecedented "nonviolent" violence is established—this is the dialectic of violence in the modern state and modern civilization.

Sexuality and violence are the most common components of everyday life; they are continually produced and exchanged through human intercourse. By the same token, the colorful production of sexual and aggressive language in speech embodies the colorful heterogeneity of the living world. Of course, there is nothing shameful in such an admission. The problem I would like to raise is that always obscured one of the legitimation of violence, that disconcerting "naked truth"—that is, a problem that lies not in the continuous blossoming and metamorphosis of a Jingyian sexual, violent language of everyday discourse, but rather in the monopolization and obfuscation of such numberless, nameless malediction by a sort of common name. In other words, the problem lies not in the exchange and dissolution of difference and violence in everyday life, but in the very fact that sexuality and violence have been monopolized. It lies not in the various articulations that phrases such as "your mother's . . ." (ta ma de) might produce, but rather in the restriction of violence and sexuality to one "legitimate" expression. Whether it goes by the name of "class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat," or the juridical system of "liberté, egalité, fraternité," or the "war on terrorism," the same logic is at work.

Whether it is in terms of abstract communities (defined by population, borders, and language) or imagined communities, the European-style modern nation-state manifests itself foremost in the legitimation of violence...