The pains of growing global:

English and the language of discomfort

Alin Cristian
Chang Jung Christian University
Linsen Rd., Sec.1, Lane 58, No.11, Tainan, Taiwan
cristianalin@hotmail.com

Keywords: linguistic hysteria, bilingual selective mutism, ethnic affirmation, holding

Abstract. Extended globally, the use of English can unleash local restive impulses into
various acts of ethnic affirmation, of which here I focus on speech-related conversion
disorders. I argue that the most helpful use of English in reducing these neurotic conflicts
promises to be the one least confined to medical purposes. To trivialize the foreignness of a
stressor a group merely needs to accommodate it as casually as possible. My approach to
conversion disorders adopts the standpoint of communicational theory re-elaborating some of
its ideas within the horizon of Winnicott’s developmental psychology and Heidegger’s
phenomenology. A more widespread and general (as opposed to specialized) use of English
would thus be the best prevention, if not cure, for a pathological fear of the Big Other.

Introduction

Globalization is dragging us kicking and screaming into its whirl and English happens to be
its language. As this linguistic symbol triumphantly announces its fast expansion across the
globe, less conspicuously yet hardly less effectively local resistances crystallize and position
themselves to confront it. Quite significantly, under pressure to learn it, non-English speakers
sometimes balk at the task in the even more universal language of disability and illness that
medicine professes to decipher. While everyone agrees that a common language helps
medical specialists worldwide join hands in their struggle against suffering, it tends to remain
less acknowledged that this latest lingua franca also serves as front rallying some of the
tramp forces of disorder. The medical use of English as instrument for controlling disease is
apt to unleash these impulses into a variegated restive behavior of ethnic affirmation (Yang
and Bond, 1986, p.260) with linguistic hysteria as one of its particular forms.

the expansion of
English challenges
the exclusivity of
monolingualism
codeswitching
forms of bilingual selective mutism
resistance
conversion disorders and/or
fantasies of helplessness

My approach to this phenomenon adopts the standpoint of communicational theory

elaborated by Szasz (1961, pp.115-163). At stake here is the social sanction or reprobation of
a firm individual desistance from change that, by rooting itself in bodily symptoms, invites to
be medically addressed and categorized. Rigidity of defenses hampers further growth and
disturbs one’s contact with an environment become increasingly cosmopolitan, and therefore
complex. Knowledge empowers, so a resistance that keeps its mechanism incognito at the
encounter with the ‘intruder’ sets the rules of the game. Conversely, public exposure of this
stratagem has good chances to diminish its effectiveness, thus providing the rationale for my
present discussion.
 As working hypothesis I posit the existence of a connection between the number of
languages one is willing to use and behavioral health. The perceived need for linguistic
sameness comes close to a behavioral fixation that however appears suspicious only when
other linguistic options likely to promote the speaker’s interests better are available but
discarded a priori. Up to a certain point an analogy with autism obtains, in which the self-
centeredness of the ‘auto’ gravitates around a linguistic medium. If our experience of the
world is always linguistically mediated, i.e. if our world is linguistic medium through and
through, the limitation to one medium alone constitutes a form of narrowing—albeit not,
strictly speaking, of centering.

The histrionics of helplessness

The production of incapacity symptoms that sabotage the expansion of English has a
semiclandestine status, i.e. largely neglected by the local cultural environment, although
admittedly incompatible with its rationally adopted goals. This linguistic helplessness often
succeeds in conjuring up a maternal social response (in the sense of Winnicott’s concept of
holding, which presupposes unbounded tolerance of and unconditional compliance with
unreasonable demands of the infant). For this reason, it seems to trigger a regressive
dynamics toward the irresponsibility and lack of social concern characteristic of infancy. By
taking in stride the histrionics of helplessness, the social group implicitly restates—possibly
overstates?—its own stability, resourcefulness and quasi-miraculous capacity to deal with
disorder (its indestructible health as a group).
This phantasm of freedom from contingency that the group indulges in is of divine
inspiration and as such threatens to amplify the individual alienation from reality that it
responds to. Arguably, the worst thing about tolerating the histrionics of helplessness is that it
casts society in the unrealistic role of almighty and indomitable protector, just as the baby
creates the mother through his/her expectations. In other words, playing helpless distracts the
player from the perhaps more primordial effort of seeking self-help.
Whether or not by reverting to infantile helplessness, the genuine or pretended speech
impairment by the learner of English aims to pass for an indexical sign of incapacity.
Indexical signs are linked to what they signify causally, as for instance redness of the skin
brings to mind a sunburn. Instead of verbal expression, mute symptoms are produced, such as
blushing, trembling, sweating, gasping, averting one’s gaze, wringing one’s hands, etc. In
linguistic hysteria, the urge to acquire a more inclusive identity, which pertains to growth,
gets perceived as a menace to proper bodily functioning, to physical health. Given a certain
penchant for dramatizing, ‘my communication skills need upgrading’ gets recast as ‘my
health is endangered.’ This translation implicitly identifies health with the exclusive use of
one’s mother tongue and dysfunction with the use of English.
But is the familiar ‘language’ of discomfort monosemantic, i.e. impervious to a
diversity of possible interpretations? Is the meaning of its messages apodictic, and as such
emancipated from the need of a (specialized) translation? Let us not forget that what has
become familiar to the point of passing for self-evident can best conceal strangeness; in this
‘last word’ that the symptom aspires to be, the stress falls on ‘last’ more than on ‘word.’
Producing symptoms bespeaks a desire to end the hermeneutic game at the level of the first
impressions; the urgency that the would-be suffering conveys precludes a competing
protracted pursuit of its multi-layered meanings. Clearly, the urgency of real suffering
constitutes its very essence, compared to which every other trait appears as more or less
accidental—in common parlance, as a ‘technicality.’
As resistance to the demands of a foreign language, mutism represents a refusal to
interrupt the speaker’s monolingual soliloquy, with its possible connotation of repetition
compulsion and the death drive subtending it. Heidegger called language ‘the house of
being,’ a metaphor for an ontological space dedicated to the protection and preservation of
our capacity to reinterpret the factually given. Selective mutism though seems to mark a limit
of one’s concern for safety: how healthy, after all, can this refusal of diversity be and how
analogous to a self-crippling, self-imposed house-arrest that brings to mind the protagonists
of The exterminating angel by Luis Buñuel?
Shipon-Blum (2010) proposes an useful distinction between additive and subtractive
bilingualisms; while the former expands one’s range of possibilities, the latter perceives the
adoption of a foreign language through the distorting lens of fear—that of having one’s
identity compromised, eroded, diminished by the otherness of a new language. In selective
mutism the interruption of one’s monolingualism gets experienced as a violation instead of an
enriching revision of the speaker’s identity. Does a break in continuity render our repertoire
of responses more comprehensive, or less so? It depends on the goal pursued: for that of
global player the acquisition of a new language means a gain, whereas for a local player
mindful of the threat of dissolution the loss outweighs the gain. In between interruptions that
violate and interruptions that revise Phillips (2007) places disruptions, which are breakers of
continuity with unpredictable consequences.

interruptions disruptions interruptions

that (consequences that
violate unpredictable) revise

Good enough vs. too good mothering

A residual trace of the mother’s presence can be said to accompany the linguistic
signs she introduces in the baby’s life. This medium of sounds and rhythms is very personal
to start with: not just metaphorically the mother’s voice replaces the umbilical cord and in so
doing alleviates part of the separation anxiety. Inseparable from the voice that carried it, the
mother’s tongue is the most rational moment of Winnicott’s concept of holding. It prolongs
the contact with the mother indefinitely by holding the adult in its grip from within, as it
were. Inasmuch as it reaches linguistic articulation, a sense of security gets acquired through
the mother’s voice and tongue. Little wonder then that a departure from one’s mother tongue
is capable of reactivating early experiences of deprivation and upsetting the subject’s
emotional balance. After all, this fragile equilibrium needs to be restored over and over again
throughout one’s lifetime.
The problem is that too little interruption of the holding runs the risk of courting the
onset of a solipsistic set of mind characterized by unchecked appetite for continuity and
sameness. The mother protects the infant by screening out the larger world, but if the latter
ceases to disrupt the infant’s self-absorption, phenomenologically it ‘disappears’ for him/her.
This ‘disappearance’ is marked, among others, by absence of the need to respond to it: for all
practical purposes, the world’s voice sinks somewhere between irrelevance and inaudibility,
as in autism. English is perceived as intruder against a background of inertial continuity, of
uninterrupted monolingual functionality reductively equated with health. It is all too often
forgotten that the more insightful definitions of health comprise, apart from integrity, the
capacity to cope with and change the environment. In this case, the environment is the more
distant and linguistically other world.
The systematic refusal to engage the world in a new language, which presupposes the
capacity to assume different roles in different language-games, can acquire the inflexibility of
a ritual. The crucial consideration in this context is that, in general, the motivation for
embarking upon a ritualized pattern of actions differs from the motivation for carrying on.
What may initially have been an understandable fatigue in dealing with the new tends to
become an automatic reflex in which the connection with the original impulse fades into
oblivion. For being gradual, this severance of a course of action from its original motive is
not less violent, though: repetition forcibly suppresses a possible change of heart, thus
preemptively stifling the voice of a new beginning.
A valuable point made about autism (Alvarez, 2007) is also valid in the case of
bilingual selective mutism: if an unacknowledged boredom is at the root of this peculiar
irresponsiveness to the world, helping its victims acknowledge their boredom does not
necessarily enable them to counter it. Put differently, getting out of our most cherished
routines—monolingualism included—might involve a form of apprenticeship and the training
of one’s capacity to listen to one’s presumed discomfort. Needless to reiterate that all sorts of
ideologies compete in drowning out with their din the fledgling inner voice of this discontent.
Addiction to the same language ignores and/or fears other, foreign forms of linguistic
stimulation; more important is perhaps is that these strands of fear and ignorance are induced
and maintained through a variety of social pressures that amount to ethnic affirmation.

The nurtured nature of incapacity

To speak the language of illness and health—of dysfunctional physiology as some

kind of ‘raw being’—is to conceal the personal behind the impersonal. The term
‘ventriloquism’ comes to mind: to speak from the belly [Lat. venter] is also to speak as the
belly—in lieu of the soma, lending a voice and meaning-bestowing function to the
inarticulate rumbling of the entrails. Paradoxically, it is this speechless part of oneself that
adamantly vies for the last ‘word’ in linguistic hysteria. Consciously or not, in his/her role-
playing the ‘patient’ aims to conceal any form of involvement in the construction of the
symptom(s): allegedly this is the ultimate evidence speaking unambiguously for itself, the
zero-degree of interpretation, as Barthes would call it.
This adoption of the universal ‘language’ of disability can also be regarded as the
user/abuser’s giving in to the seduction of a scientific discourse that boasts its own
universality. If science founds its power of persuasion on the much-touted immutability of
facts, the hysteric’s claim to power gets couched in the same inflexible ‘language’ of facts—
the genesis of which remains, however, muted. To the global aspirations of English perceived
as intrusive the hysteric responds in an idiom of absolute firmness that ethnic affirmation
rests on. The etymology of the term ‘affirmation’ corroborates this claim. ‘I am who I am,’ or
‘I speak what I speak’ are tautologies meant to curtly ban an uncertainty become perhaps
unbearable. Following the logic of ‘seeing is believing,’ incapacity is displayed with the
hasty assurance of a possessor of apodictic evidence. More prudent would be to approach the
perception of one’s own incapacity with the same suspicion as any first-blush appearance of
the outer world.
Linguistic hysteria with regard to English learning is a stratagem in what boils down
to a struggle for power: instead of changing him/herself, the hysteric would rather change the
agents of globalization starting with the linguistic medium in which they operate. Insofar as it
induces feeling and promotes action in those who witness the patient’s suffering, linguistic
hysteria resembles rhetoric, i.e. works by persuasion if not downright coercion. With the
production of bodily symptoms, communication reaches the limit of the discursive dimension
beyond which the realm of ‘naked’ impulses—the Freudian id—opens. To bring the latter
into dialog actually means to end the dialog, to have the final ‘say’ in it. But a non-discursive
message like the symptom remains endlessly interpretable; not to pass a further judgment on
it amounts to playing along by endorsing its alleged definitiveness.
Conclusions

Since this peremptory display of the subject’s would-be innermost and ownmost
‘truth’ is not unlike pornography, perhaps public taste could be cultivated to react
analogously. Considerations of decency might apply to this ostentation subtended by the
belief that incapacity exists somewhere in and of itself, independently of the subject’s
intention, and especially that it gives itself to perception self-evidently. For this problematic
objectivity to emerge, the subject’s intention is either surreptitiously withheld, or genuinely
ignored.
Yet genuine or not, coercive or coerced, linguistic hysteria can safely be assumed to
convey a certain degree of perceived distress. Too much rigor in judging the possible despair
of indecency threatens to become itself an intrusion of dubious taste. On the practical side,
transitional phenomena that partake in both sides of reality—subjective and objective—need
to be looked for and made available to the hysteric so as to reduce the tension responsible for
his/her condition. Nothing is more useful in this sense than people who have already made
the transition themselves and now comfortably straddle the divide without fear of alienation.
A more frequent, ubiquitous and general (as opposed to specialized) use of English would be
the best prevention of monolingual fixations, insofar as it would strip the stressor of its aura
of strangeness. Counter-intuitively, the most fruitful use of English in alleviating linguistic
hysteria promises to be the least confined to medical purposes.

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