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.