PosterPDF Available

Physical Violence Against a Natural Language: What Is Logoclastic Violence?

March 2018

Conference: 13th Annual Doctoral Conference, CEU’s Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations
At: Budapest, Hungary
Affiliation: Central European University

Project: Linguistic Justice

Authors:

University of Pittsburgh

In her account of a decades-long controversy about bilingual town signs in Austria, Jennifer M. Gully speaks of the logoclastic violence unleashed in the 1972 political event known as Ortstafelsturm “storm on the town signs” as a remainder of the violence that surrounds the imposition of a national language in the proclamation of a nation-state (Gully, 2011, p. 5f). The Ortstafelsturm was a series of events in Carinthia, Austria, where 100 to 300 individuals tore down bilingual street signs that were put up the days before by the federal government in areas where a linguistic minority lives, thereby starting one of the most vexed, complex, and puzzling phenomena of post-war Austria (Gully, 2011, p. 4f). With “the proclamation of a nation-state” Gully refers to the formation of the Republic of German-Austria after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unfortunately Gully provides no definition of logoclastic “language-breaking” violence. However, the phenomenon thus dubbed is an interesting and difficult to classify case, not of violence by means of performative language, but – reversely – of physical and political violence apparently against a natural language as such. To answer the title question, which is the aim of my paper and my presentation, I will first briefly sketch the Carinthian setting, within which the first known instance of logoclastic violence emerged, and suggest how it could generalize to other cases of bilingual conflict, like Spanish in the United States or Thai in China. Next I will apply Ernest Gellner’s and Benedict Anderson’s theories of nationalism to the Ortstafelsturm. I claim that, while with Gellner we can explain how bilingualism can be seen as a threatening economic advantage in post-war Austria and with Anderson we can explain the ideological radicalization and shifting identities that came with the Ortstafelsturm, the linguistic diversity under threat in Carinthia is neither plausibly imagined nor invented in their technical use of these terms. Finally I will propose that logoclastic violence is violence defined not by its target, which can be as diverse as legal wordings, objects, people, …, but by its dynamic, which is a political struggle not between different nationalisms and languages, but between monolingualism and /or bilingualism and / or multilingualism within one community.