Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force.

• Author: Brueggemann, Walter
• Position: Book review

LIVING SPEECH: RESISTING THE EMPIRE OF FORCE. By James Boyd White. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 236. $29.95.

INTRODUCTION

It will come as no surprise to readers of the Law Review that James Boyd White (1) is a daring and wise practitioner of what Clifford Geertz terms "blurred genres." (2) By appeal to Kenneth Burke, Victor Turner, and Paul Ricoeur, among others, Geertz envisions a broad interpretive venture that breaks out of the rigid regulations of a particular discipline to a larger constructive enterprise that entertains life and its meaning as a "game" of face-to-face engagement, or as a "drama" that presses on to the next scene. (3) White's work fits that vision precisely.

In Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force, White is rooted in his own proper study of the law, but he "blurs" his work over in many directions, notably to classical drama, poetry, and philosophy, even with indirect traces and hints of theology. The effect is to summon readers--especially, but by no means exclusively, students of law--beyond the conventional limits and procedures of their discipline or, alternatively, to depths in their discipline that touch human realities that technical reason can never probe. Thus his book is an exercise in the humanities of a wise and urgent kind.

In Part I, I lay out White's agenda in the book, and identify a key tension in speech upon which White focuses. Developing upon this, in Part II, I describe the sort of speech that White attributes to the empire of force, while in Part III, I describe what White defines as living speech. In Part IV, I apply White's speech framework to three concepts that have long preoccupied me, namely intention, imagination, and interpretation, and in Part V, I examine what White's thesis means in own my field, theology. Finally, I conclude the essay with my thoughts about what the book means to each of us, its readers both inside and outside of the field of law.

I

White takes his cue from three lines of Simone Weil in her cunning essay on the Iliad: "No one can love and be just who does not understand the empire of force and know how not to respect it." (4) Weil's study is an acknowledgement that the Iliad is not just an account of war, but also a critical expose of the way in which the dominant, even violent force that pervades the world might be resisted.

White rightly understands that Weil's dictum invites us to two tasks. The first task is to recognize and identify the "empire of force." That marvelous phrase, for White as for Weil, pertains not only to overt control made possible by a monopoly of violence; it pertains, more importantly, to ideological persuasion that justifies and rationalizes what may become overt violence. That is, the empire of force exists and controls through the willful, manipulative use of speech. Thus, the phrase alludes to the crisis of false speech that deceives, beguiles, and conjures reality in dishonest ways. That awareness of the lethal potential of speech is a recurring theme among many critics.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy exposited the way in which listening to well-wrought speech creates a society of freedom:

Speech puts man on a throne. For any man who has something to say, thereby acquires an office in society. And thrones are seats of office. Thought gives man a kingdom. Is this kingdom a constitutional state? Is the freedom to think the anarchy of despotism, or the government of due process of law? We now shall round out the freedom of the individual to master speech and thought, by considering the constitution, the law of freedom. (5) Jacques Ellul has observed widespread "contempt for language" among technicians and intellectuals. On the one hand, technicians reduce language to information that thins communication:

Technicians who love diagrams cannot do anything with language except to make it an annex (if it must be included) to explain a given point. Language can never hold the key to meaning or to a demonstration. For this reason we said above that the devaluation of language through subordination to computer needs is extremely important. The conversation with a computer is not limited to that situation; it becomes the model for all conversation. This was already the model, to a lesser degree, in all relationships that involved technicians. This covers an enormous proportion of language use, since it involves all sorts of technicians: administrators, jurists, economists, physicists, chemists, marketing experts, doctors, engineers, psychologists, publicity experts, film makers, programmers, etc. (6) On the other hand, intellectuals treat language with scorn by reducing it to scientific formulation:

As professionals, linguists and structuralists take language extremely seriously, yet they treat it as physicists and chemists have treated matter: with utter scorn. They treat it as a mere thing on which scientific discipline is supposed to exercise its rigor. Treating the language as a submissive object is like treating the word of God scientifically. Can anything escape from the triumphant imperialism of the scientific method? (7) What is lost is communication of address and response that makes genuine social relationships possible.

More popularly, Neil Postman has chronicled the ways in which "entertainment" has displaced communication. Postman is particularly acute on the way in which news has been styled as "entertainment," so that it is far from clear that the news reporters intend to be telling the truth. (8) We can only wonder, these many years later, what Postman might say about our loss of committed speech!

The second task proposed by Weil's aphorism is "not to respect" "the empire of force," that is, to engage in intentional resistance to the false reality of empire by alternative practice that refuses the artificial, "virtual" world proposed by the empire. It is much easier to expose false language than it is to model or characterize alternative language that makes genuine social relationships possible. But that is the work to which White has set himself.

The argument of the book takes up the two tasks proposed by Weil. The expose of "the empire of force" is, in White's rubric, surprisingly enough to be found in "free speech." White's perception of speech protected by the First Amendment is that it can, in principle, be vacuous and reflective of market assumptions that work against serious communication. The alternative--resistant, generative rhetoric--is placed under the rubric of "living speech." Thus the antithesis of "free speech" and "living speech" lines out Well's two tasks that constitute White's careful, patient, passionate argument. Before he finishes, the book culminates in a summons to join the debate, to be aware of and committed to such an engagement. The urgency of White's argument is due to his judgment, surely correct, that "free speech" leads to death and that life depends upon "living speech." The book is a compelling either/or in the contestation for the future of democratic society. That contestation, on the day I began to write this review, was made vivid and poignant by two happenstance events. On that day I saw the film Thank You for Smoking, (9) a comic and relentless assault on the tobacco industry. The same day I saw on TV (which I rarely watch) an ad for Philip Morris that offered, on its web page, information about how to teach children not to smoke. (10) Talk about "free speech" that serves "the empire of force"! A tobacco ad that postures family values and social well-being is precisely the sort of beguilement that causes us to take White's analysis so seriously. When such speech is offered by a tobacco company, we recognize how remote from reality it is. And that such speech is passed off without irony indicates the (speech) pathology that characterizes our society.

II

White works in detail to characterize "the empire of force" as the enemy of living speech and, consequently, the enemy of democratic humanity. That empire offers "a kind of speech that destroys real speech" (p. 28). Good constitutional scholar that he is, White focuses on the constitutional amendment concerning free speech, and particularly on Oliver Wendell Holmes's metaphor, the "marketplace of ideas," or more correctly, "the competition of the market" with respect to speech (p. 30). White describes how the image of the market offers a notion of speech and of social relationships that are "unregulated" and eventually vacuous, committed to the gratification of desire without the gravitas (and critical discipline and assessment) that makes real social relationships possible. White shows compellingly that "free speech" in and of itself is no great gift to a democratic society. He does not, of course, champion censorship or speech control, but insists that "real speech" must remain under critical discipline and reflect commitments that are beyond easy manipulation.

The book teems with pejorative adjectives and polemical phrases about unregulated free speech that diminishes human possibility: "Ideology," "dehumanization," "deny humanity," "propaganda," "reduce other people to objects," "erase reality and humanity," "boring," "thinness," "platitude," "easy," "authoritarian," "dead," "jargon," "chatter," "formulaic," "slogans," "advertising," "gratification of desire," "shallow," "empty," "the world of possibility dies," "seductive," "misleading," "confidence tricks," "mechanical," "suppress," "trivializing," "demeaning," "sentimental." Such speech is designed to suppress and mislead; it is intentionally trivializing, dehumanizing, and demeaning of human life and human persons.

When White focuses upon propaganda and advertising, the case is fairly easy and obvious, as we may imagine a loud car salesman on TV or a seductive preacher or a beguiling presidential press conference; all of that would be in the purview of a critique concerned with debasement of human inter...