Review of Merilyn Moos's The Language of Silence

Merilyn Moos, The Language of Silence, Cressida Press in association with Writersworld, 2010, 288pp., £10.00 pb., 978 0 9566467 005

The ‘nation’s subconscious’ is figured by its secret services, Le Carre tells us. And one might  then  say that  this tells us  something about how culturally generic and interiorised processes of  state practice are, the constitutive role of state apparatuses in cultural formation of the individual, but more of this later. The Language of Silence is  inter alia a story about a key implication of this: the effects of state security, the culture of securitisation.

           This fictionalised biography, which covers three generations of a family, is concerned with loose ends- to do with place, relationships, commitments and rather than tying them up it shows them as irremediably riven. The plot is characterised by contingency as three generations are shaped by world historical events. During the search for past family members people appear and then just as suddenly vanish back into the general diasporic melee.  Relationships are thrown into doubt, distrust and damaged lives supervene, paranoia is evoked, but what is the source of the fear?  The Holocaust  and its ramifications for successive generations is the underlying theme but the story also raises wider questions about the nature of modern states and how they produce the  state of exile, both as structural processes of displacement and as an individual’s interiority. Hence contingency is  not  simply that-  contingent- but a structural feature of the text and the reality it purveys.  Whilst this might be an obvious concomitant of Nazism  and Stalinism, which the first generation experience, there are broader implications both on terms of how second and third generation deal with this history in the context of the way ‘liberal’ states function to securitise societies.

        The story tells us something important about the way the state is experienced in modern capitalism. Classical liberal theory, following on from Hobbes celebrates both the sovereignty of the individual and their security. The paradox of modern states however is that the claim  of individual freedom comes at the price of individual angst…securitisation of society is at the same  time the paralysis of the individual by fear that ‘security’ engenders. Here the state is seen is seen as separate from, external to the individual and so the individual then becomes the source of the problem of security

          In this way the citizen confronts themselves as sutured/disconnected from the social, generic basis of anxiety and  viewing the state as externality  on the one hand, whilst on the other its product, anxiety is seen as purely internal to the individual. This kind of bureaucratic disconnect is perhaps the flip side of commodity fetishism’s presentation of the individual as directly confronted as a ‘consumer’ by the  market where again mediations are displaced.

           These conundrums of the disconnect are explored in the story in the way that plot and character suggest a kind of  abyssal relationship with their cultural context. The question of exile is dealt with  via the first generation’s incomprehension of context, place, identifications and the sense of being a permanent refugee.  Attitudes are expressed rather than articulated and thus a whole world is conjured where experience cannot be related or identified as one’s own. i.e. the generic side of experience is  paradoxically received as exterior to the individual. The trajectory of the exile is characterised by dead ends, as temporal dislocations affect the ability to escape the mode of ‘living in the past’. It’s impossible to make sense of context and its directionality.

       Hence a permanent state of interpersonal othering is engendered but  the key implication is the othering of the state: that even in its more benign manifestations the nightmare of the modern state as ideal- typical Weberian construct, the iron cage, is  somehow inherent; its objective extremity is present in every detail, process. Processes of bureaucratic selection within the population connote something final whether in mass murder as in reactionary modernity (fascism) or the 11 Plus and benefits system in the liberal variant. The lived continuity of the everyday is displaced with  a sense of discontinuity, entrapment, isolation, absolutised categorisation.

         However, generally speaking such a classificatory power, a kind of taxonomic terror, functions as a bad reified everyday and simply passes below the radar: processes of othering simply don’t register, they’re not explicitly manifest, but routine. The language of classification here is purely indexical, a product of usure, where as Derrida notes, language acts behind our backs, carries on its communicative logic without saying so. Hence in the story  otherness/othering  is illustrated in the too explicit critical framing of Christianity in a classroom encounter which marks out the speaker as a stranger by virtue of transgressing the silent meanings.

         Othering then  in the story and ‘real life’ suggests a problem of representation: how do we move beyond the abyssal or exile state, the terminus of sense, the  suture?  Loss, detachment, mourning, dislocation, disorientation are features of the structural operations of the state seen in Gramsci’s terms as the integral state but as fetishistic representations they appear as problems of the individual confronting an external body. Jameson has aptly noted MacIntyre’s insight that the effect of bureaucratisation is to reduce us to individuals, the dissolution of commonality. Arguably this projects the fear which is in fact a structural feature of  the state’s own ‘fractured’ existence.

     How can these experiences be represented- maybe by othering the state as source of fear. Popular conceptions of officialdom demonstrate the everyday reversal of official taxonomy, state logic. In the story political articulations of this and ensuing  commitments provide a means of signifying and displacing, ameliorating  the disconnects, and the involvement of the third generation in anti-capitalism and environmental politics appears as a redemptive elaboration of the reversal. Functionaries of the modern capitalist state become in Merleau-Ponty’s expression L’On, or literally, ’the they’ .

Howard Feather

Link to Merilyn's website: www.merilynmoos.tumblr.com