Page 455 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

strategy aimed at providing appropriate aid to the societally and linguistically repressed; more on this in Sect. 4.6.
Summing up, then, the case of the medical interview is a clear example of institutionalized discourse in which the value of the individual's linguistic expression is measured strictly by the place that he or she has in the system. Only utterances which meet the criteria of the official discourse are allowed, and indeed registered; others are either rejected or con- strued as symptoms of (physical or mental) illness, lack of knowledge or even intelligence, and in general of dependent or inferior status. Erving Goffman remarks, much to the point (his observation has pri- marily to do with mental institutions, but applies to all sorts of institutional discourses):
Mental patients can find themselves in a special bind. To get out of the hospital, or to ease their life within it, they must show acceptance of the place accorded them, and the place accorded them is to support the occupational role of those who appear to force this bargain.
(Goffman 1961:386)
4.4 Language and Manipulation
Goffman's 'special bind' is a particularly clear case of what can be called manipulation, understood as mak- ing people behave in a certain way without their know- ing why, and perhaps even against their best interests and wishes. Most often, the instrument of manipu- lation is language— hence the notions of linguistic manipulation and manipulatory language. The latter can be defined as the successful hiding (also called 'veiling'; see Mey 1985) of societal oppression by means of language.
A case in point is the professional manipulation in psychiatric environments of schizophrenic patients' speech ('schizophrenese'; see Sect. 2.3.2) and its classi- fication as a 'nonlanguage,' that is, a symptom (so- called 'schizophasia') rather than a means of com- munication. To see this, consider the following two analogical cases.
Suppose that a political prisoner complains to his legal counsel about his letters being opened. Such a complaint makes sense in the context; the prisoner may not be successful in stopping the guards' practice of letter-opening, but his utterance They are opening my mail is at least taken seriously.
Not so with the psychiatric patient. The same utter- ance, in a psychiatric institutional context, is regis- tered as a schizophrenic symptom, proving that the person who utters the sentence is duly and properly a resident of the State Hospital. The patient, by com- plaining about his or her letters being opened, has furnished conclusive proof of the fact that he or she is not normal, hence has no right to complain. So, ironically, and in accordance with Goffman's obser- vation quoted above, the only correct way of com- plaining is not to complain; which of course is sheer
madness, and proves the point of the patient's being committed.
But it is not necessary to go as far as the psychiatric institutions to find examples of linguistic manipu- lation. Consider the following. Suppose I am looking for a job. I tell myself that I must make a good impression on my potential future employer; I put on my best suit and tie, and go to the interview in the hope that he will 'give me the job.' Now, I may not be so lucky: the employer may tell me that the job has been 'taken'; somebody else 'got it.' That means they 'have no work' for me, and so on and so forth. In this linguistic universe, employers give, and employees take: viz., jobs. Such is our language.
In real life, however, totally different picture emerges: it is the employer who takes the employee's labor and converts it to his own profit. The employee gives his or her labor power to the employer, in exch- ange for a salary offered; but there is one big catch: the wages, although they are called 'fair' and are arrived at in 'free' negotiation, represent a form of societal oppression: the employer knows that he must make the employee accept less than the value of his or her labor, or else there would not be any profits. The wages are not the equivalent of a certain amount of work: rather, they represent a period of time during which the employer is entitled to press all the labor out of the employee that he possibly can. Wages express the market relation between labor power as a commodity, and whatever else is bought and sold in the marketplace; hence the wages can be called 'fair' only in the sense that they reproduce the market laws, and not by their equitable representation of a certain amount of work.
In this case, too, the language that people use hides the real state of affairs: and thus people can be manipulated into doing whatever the powerful in society (such as employers and doctors) tell them to do. This is what the case of the medical/psychiatric consultation and the job interview have in common.
Somebody might object and say that the worker is not obliged to take the employment: an employee is a free agent, and can refuse the employer's offer, and also give notice at any time. However, the very expression of this idea is again a case of manipulatory language use: since a linguistic relation exists between the two nouns, employer and employee, being respec- tively active and passive, one is led to believe that the relation between the two 'bearers' of those names is equally symmetrical: the employer is at one end of the employment relation, the employee at the other; but basically it is the same relationship, only in inverse directions. The employer employs the employee, the employee is employed by the employer. Even the lan- guage shows us that this is a fair, symmetrical deal.
However, what the language does not tell, and this is the catch, is which of the two is the powerful one in the relationship. The employer is the one who has the
Pragmatics
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