On languages bodies and epistemic violence

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Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com Chapter 7 On languages, bodies and epistemic violence Joana Plaza Pinto his paper discusses the articulations between the diferentiations of bodies and the invention of languages. As post-colonial and decolonial authors and feminist authors point out, in spite of their central role in the construction and classiication of languages, bodies tend to become invisible in the scholarship. To explore this intersection between scholarship on language and bodies, this paper argues that (1) there are two ields of contemporary studies that can account for the junction of diferentiations of bodies and the diferentiations of languages, namely feminist studies on intersectionality and studies on metapragmatics and metadiscursive regimes about languages; and (2) epistemic violence is the best category to explain some perverse consequences of this junction, since appropriation and efacement work together to invent languageless diferences. It is all about reality; or, if you like, the million-dollar question as to what the ultimate reality is all about. (Kanavillil Rajagopalan 2010a: 536) It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? hose who are unreal have, in a sense, already sufered the violence of derealization. (Judith Butler 2004, 33) Introduction In this chapter, 1 I discuss the articulations between the diferentiations of bodies and the invention of languages. he term ‘invention’ has the meaning proposed by Makoni and Pennycook (2007, (1), which “starts with the premise that languages, conceptions of languageness and the metalanguages used to describe them are inventions.” heir work is a critical position on metadiscursive regimes (sets of discourses . I am thankful to my colleagues Dilys Karen Rees and Rosane Rocha Pessoa for proof-reading this paper in diferent moments. heir generosity is always an invitation to engaging dialogue. doi 10.1075/pbns.279.08pin © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company  Joana Plaza Pinto and epistemological devices) of the European colonial tradition, which organized and invented performatively, with its “discovery attitude”,” its history and the history of the people who were colonized. his tradition has mapped the world into categories that included group names, language names and everything that could be described. hese metadiscursive schemes joined the European project of world overseeing and governance. Makoni and Pennycook (2007, 8) remind us that invention is a dialectical process that involves (1) “the creation of a past into which the present is inserted”; (2) a linear and progressive view of time and change; (3) the co-construction processes of invention of history, languages and their ideological sets; (4) a simultaneous creation of the languages of the colonized and the colonizers as well. he invention of language as an abstract system and the languages as enumerable entities are articulated and were used in the violent processes of colonization, Christianization, and more recently globalization across the world (Makoni and Pennycook 2007). Both language as a theoretical category and languages as deinable analytical entities participated and still participate in the invention of Modern European history and the people who were colonized. his invention was efective to seal various cultural groups into a nation – ranking or making invisible diferent cultural practices – and to render language practices into ontological entities called languages and dialects. Many sociolinguistic analyses ofer insights on connections between languages and identities, but mostly based on the idea of nationality, gender, race, age, residential area, etc. as demographic variables. As Bucholtz and Hall (2016) argue, in many methodological and analytical decisions of sociolinguistic research, we can see the body placed in the background of the research and basically let as a problem to other ields of knowledge. Drawing on a postcolonial point of view in feminist studies (Brah 2006; Brah and Phoenix 2004; Butler 1992, 1997 and 2004; Haraway 1995; Hemmings 2009; Hooks 1994; Kulick 2005; Piscitelli 2008; Povinelli 2006) and in metapragmatic and metadiscursive regimes studies (Degraf 2005; Errington 2001; Fanon 1967; Grosfoguel 2007; Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Mariani 2004; Mignolo 2000; Mufwene 2002; Paiva 2008; Ramanathan and Pennycook 2007; Santos 2002 and 2008; Souza 2007), I consider the diferentiation of bodies as discursive and stylized performative acts. In this sense, it is central not to assume preigured identities chosen by the scholar’s decision on which variables are meaningful. As much as languages have been invented by a European colonial tradition, bodies are invented by the same tradition and marked in hierarchical diferentiations to control them and to govern them (Foucault 1979; Mignolo 2000). Standing on this theoretical and political frame, my main question is a twofold one: how do the markers used in the diferentiations of bodies apply to the invention of languages and how are the languages invented as a marker of bodies? © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 7. On languages, bodies and epistemic violence  he key-expression for the answer is epistemic violence. Something is violence-owned and efaced in the construction of knowledge about languages. Santos (2007, 3) calls epistemic violence a biased system of “abyssal thinking”: It is a system of visible and invisible distinctions, in which the invisible grounds the visible. he invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two spaces: the space of “this side of the line” and the space “across the line”. he bodies become invisible although they occupy a central role in the construction and classiication of languages. Is it a coincidence that the languages spoken by ex-enslaved Africans are classiied as “an exceptional class on phylogenetic and/ or typological grounds”, with “nonlinguistic (e.g., sociological) implications, such as the claim that Creole languages are a ‘handicap’ for their speakers” (Degraf 2005, 533)? Being suspicious would help. he linguistic practices of the ex-enslaved black bodies lose their status as languages in linguistic classiications, but the bodies that keep in existence this status of a “quasi-language” disappear from the discussions, leaving visible only the linguistic structural arguments. To call into question the way in which body markers and the metadiscursive regimes about languages are joined and able to move in relation to each other, I propose that (1) there are two ields of contemporary studies that can support this subject matter, the feminist studies on intersectionality and the studies on metapragmatics and metadiscursive regimes about languages, and (2) epistemic violence is the best category to explain some perverse consequences of this junction, since appropriation and efacement work together to invent languageless diferences. Feminist studies on intersectionality he body has been a battleield in feminist studies, and this is shown not only in this range of studies. Although we should say that feminist studies do not comprise a uniied whole (Hemming 2009; Piscitelli 2008), varying their subjects, approaches and political consequences, the body problem has always been central to the discussions of feminism. It could not be otherwise since the body was invoked to control women and also to release them. What status is given to the body in a body of theory? An unquestioned assumption? An object of analysis? An object of criticism? A category? hose questions were unavoidable for those who were attached to the limits of the body. Feminist studies oten gave priority to other explanatory concepts such as “woman” and “gender”, but in a sense these concepts proved to be dependent on the © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved  Joana Plaza Pinto notion of body. For what interests me here, I emphasize below some aspects of the current feminist points which can help me account for the multiple diferentiations of bodies that cross social life, i.e., the intersectional categories. 2 Most of the feminist interpretation of the body can be gathered in some version of constructionism. When it comes to the idea of construction, there are diferent ways to highlight issues of reality, summarized by Pennycook (2007) in four not mutually exclusive positions. I set out these four positions to organize some feminist arguments on the body. First, social constructionism questions whether the body has a non-social origin, dispelling foundationalist myths about the condition, workings, and social status of bodies. Much of feminist thought produced since the 1960s can be gathered together at this position, even those which recognized womanhood as a foundation of feminism; although these so called “essentialist feminists” accentuated the alleged biological unity of the body as a reason for the oppression of women in diferent times and cultures, they also moved into a more advanced and strong debate about the social conditions of oppression, and thus emphasized its political, i.e., socially constructed signiicance (Piscitelli 2002). A second position, ontological constructionism, argues that the body does not exist unless insofar as it is invented for its control. Judith Butler’s signiicant arguments can be organized in this position, when she says that “having or bearing ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ is an enormously powerful prerogative within the social world, one way in which power dissimulates as ontology” (Butler 2004, 215). Butler also argues: he body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signiied as prior. his signiication works through producing an efect of its own procedure, the body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes signiication. If the body signiied as prior to signiication is an efect of signiication, then the mimetic or representational status of language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is not mimetic at all; on the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might even argue performative, in as much as this signifying act produces the body that it then claims to ind prior to any and all signiication. (Butler 1992, 21) This same quote informs the third position, historical constructionism. As Pennycook (2007, 98) asserts, “the efects of repeated construction and reconstruction are very real”. Although the body is invented by a signifying act that pleads its true existence before any and all signiication, such invention has actual efects for . Lewis and Bastos, in this volume, draw implications of intersectionality to queer studies. Goldstein also entangles race, gender, and class in her analysis of literacy and structural violence in Brazil. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 7. On languages, bodies and epistemic violence  people who take action with the embodied life: “the diferential efect of ontological presuppositions on the embodied life of individuals has consequential efects” (Butler 2004, 214). he construction brings the body up and sets rules and norms of social life. Similarly, the fourth position, discursive constructionism, supports that the body is produced in diferent ways at diferent times under interwoven discursive regimes. Diferentiations already well discussed in feminist literature such as gender and sexuality but also race, class, nationality and others – as discursive categories, not as “demographic facts” – interact and interconnect in the production of the body, requiring markers of various discursive schemes for its construction at a junction of a speciic time/space. his position calls attention to the contingency of the body conigurations and rejects any hint of determination and causality pointed out carelessly in the other positions. Instead, by understanding the body as a contingent construction in a crossing of discourses at a particular time and place, this position highlights the complexity of the body construction and potential changes. Bodies are not inhabited as spatial givens. hey are, in their spatiality, also underway in time: aging, altering shape, altering signiication – depending on their interactions – and the web of visual, discursive, and tactile relations that become part of their historicity, their constitutive past, present, and future. (Butler 2004, 217) Considering this set of constructionist ideas, I would like to stress that the body has political, i.e., socially constructed signiicance, it does not exist unless insofar as it is invented for its control and its yielding, such an invention has actual efects on people who take action with the embodied life, and the markers of various discursive regimes articulate its construction at a junction of a speciic time/space. To explore the explanatory potential of this conception of the body, growing debates in feminist studies have pointed to the relevance of the intersectionality to shed new light on how we approach the issues of diferentiation and inequality of bodies (Brah 2006; Brah and Phoenix 2004; Piscitelli 2008). Since the late 1980s, feminist theorists, especially in and/or from post-colonial countries, have rethought the centrality of gender and debated the coexistence of multiple markers in the articulation of diference between bodies. he linking axis is power. he complex analytical task is to identify the speciic articulation of diferences and inequalities between bodies, understanding their interconnections with other systems of differentiation. In constructionist terms, diferential markers invent the political and social signiicance of bodies, in such a way to bring it forth and to control it in a speciic time/space in order that it has actual (diferential and/or unequal) efects for embodied individuals. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved  Joana Plaza Pinto Brah (2006, 353) argues that “articulation is not the mere combination of two or more discrete entities”, like gender, race, sexuality or class. It is about transformative relational conigurations. Intersectionality requires a focus on a given context and the not making of assumptions about their permanence or stability over time and space. As Brah and Phoenix (2004, 76) summarize: We regard the concept of ‘intersectionality’ as signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable efects which ensue when multiple axis of diferentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically speciic contexts. he concept emphasizes that diferent dimensions of social life cannot be separated out into discrete and pure strands. When one gives examples of multiple axis of diferentiation, gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation are the main categories. he critical reviews by Brah and Phoenix (2004) and by Piscitelli (2008) list these ive along with ethnicity. Although those categories have been privileged in feminist studies, the whole point is to leave new junctions open in contextual changes and/or analytical improvement. Piscitelli (2008, 272) ofers us an excellent analysis of diferentiation marks on the immigration of women from Brazil to northern countries. Based on her extensive research, Piscitelli argues that sexualized and racialized images associated with the tropics are foisted on Latin American women, but in the case of Brazilian women the intersection between nationality, gender, and sexuality permeates a particular style of racialization, an ethnical racism that is therefore diferent from that which afects those Latin American women taken as black and those whose nationality is associated with traits considered indigenous and hence less sensuous. Although the efects of these interconnections are mitigated when women are in a better position in terms of class, all immigrant Brazilian women are afected by these ideas. Given this relationship between sexualized racism and other differences (having or not a permanent visa, being legally given the right to work, having job opportunities, being married to male residents of host countries and having children in migratory contexts), immigrants women have both movements of resistance and rejection, and also assume positions of complicity to negotiate their unequal situations in migratory contexts, in a game that reinforces certain stereotypes while weakening others. he author concludes: In the migratory contexts mentioned above, thinking about the articulations between gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity/nationality contributes to understand the experiences of Brazilian immigrants. he intersections between these categories provide meaning to perception that one has of Brazilian women and the actions of these women, playing with the intersections of diferences that they embody. (Piscitelli 2008, 272) © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 7. On languages, bodies and epistemic violence  It is necessary to go further in this example. In immigrant contexts, the issue of language becomes more evident – even if not exclusively language but also other markers of diference such as race, gender, sexuality etc. Among other diferences, language practices should be taken into account, speciically in terms of metapragmatics and metadiscursive regimes of languages. In the next section, I would like to focus on this point. Metadiscursive regimes and metapragmatics of languages First, a paper by Blommaert (2001) brought my attention to the issue of linguistic practices in the immigrants’ context. he author underlines that the linguistic resources deined as “the complex of linguistic means and communicative skills” (Blommaert 2001, 21) also participate in the regulation of access to rights and beneits. Diferences in proiciency in writing or in reading various texts (in various genres as legal texts, narratives, formal requests etc.), or the performance of certain linguistic varieties (in diferent languages), “all these diferences – diferent degrees of proficiency ranging from ‘not at all’ to ‘full mastery’ of codes, language varieties and styles – are socially consequential” (Blommaert 2001, 21). Not only are these resources diferent, but also its hierarchy in terms of functional adequacy produces inequality. his holds true not only for immigration contexts. Following this clue given by Blommaert (2001), 3 I came to the metapragmatics and metadiscursive regimes studies. I share with these studies the position that languages are invented as part of colonial and nationalistic projects around the world, as I presented above. Language usages are resources that had and still have very real and material efects in the colonial and post-colonial bodies. he concepts of language and its related concepts (language, speech, writing, discourse, etc.) were performatively constructed as part of the modern/colonial world’s metalanguage, inventing and naming languages and thus building metadiscursive regimes (Degraf 2005; Errington 2001; Harris 1981; Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Mariani 2004; Ramanathan and Pennycook 2007; Souza 2007). hese regimes deine, for example, how to talk about language, where a language begins and ends, and where there is a language or where there is a dialect or variant. Its material efects are real and unequal in the speakers’ lives; language education policies that assign hierarchies to the speakers’ language practices are only one of the best-known consequences (Altenhofen 2004, Behares 2011, Blommaert, Creve and Willaert 2006, Busch and Schick 2007, Correa 2009, Maher 2010, Paiva 2008). . I am especially grateful to Daniel Silva, who showed me this article and others particularly important about this subject. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved  Joana Plaza Pinto In so far as metapragmatics evaluates, conditions and guides the usages of linguistic resources (idioms, variants, genres, styles, forms, etc.), it is a function of linguistic interaction (Silverstein 1993). 4 As has been extensively studied (see Signorini 2008), linguistic interaction is regulated by heterogeneous parameters, which dispute the meaning and the legitimacy of the use of language and establish hierarchies of linguistic resources. hese linguistic meanings and legitimacy operate a regular (albeit heterogeneous) web of permissions, imputations and resistance “performatively efectuated in-and-by its use” (Silverstein 2003, 194). As Silverstein (1993, 38) notes, “explicit metapragmatics discourse is a multiple phenomenon with respect to the metapragmatics-pragmatic functional relationship”. Authors such as Blommaert (2001), Cameron (1995), McEwan-Fujita (2011), Povinelli (2006), Signorini (2008) and Silverstein (1979, 1993, 2003, 2004) have studied both the internal regularities of metapragmatics, as linguistic correctness and appropriateness, and the linguistic ideologies, as “rationalizations, justiications and evaluations of moral and political structure and use of language” (Signorini 2008, 119). Other researchers have noted the role of metadiscursive regimes in linguistic hierarchies (Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Mignolo 2000). To describe a language, it is necessary to invent it beforehand, to get a “regime of truth” (Foucault, 1979) for this language, which irst of all airms that this predeined language exists. To do this, what is read and heard (on the street, radio, TV, the Internet, in books etc.) gets a name, dictionaries and grammars, a territory, and of course a ield of action. he “efects of language” are the ways languages are realized through the discourses that describe them (Pennycook, 2007), and Linguistics, as a science, has a key role in this embodiment (Errington 2001, Harris 1981, Makoni and Pennycook 2007). herefore, metapragmatics and metadiscursive regimes about languages and their users participate actively in the dynamic and relational construction of difference and the production of unequal subjectivities in the context of the history of colonialism and capitalism (Degraf 2005; Errington 2001; Harris 1981; Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Mignolo 2000; Mufwene 2002; Winford 2003). Changes in the contemporary world afect both bodily practices and linguistic practices (Pinto 2008) disrupting and rearticulating the ways groups mark, negotiate and resist bodily and linguistic regulations. Mignolo (2000) tells us that, depending on the set of bodily practices into play, a language can be both an object of resistance and an instrument of resistance. In each case, the unequal relations . In this volume, the chapters of Galdeano, Goldstein, Silva, and Leezenberg focus on the metapragmatic layer of signiication. hey mostly draw from Charles Briggs’ metapragmatic notion of communicability (see Silva in this volume for an overview). © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 7. On languages, bodies and epistemic violence  between languages, varieties, codes, styles, etc. need to be interpreted in the contexts in which they overlap with other diferences and inequalities. A Chicana woman on the border of the United States and Mexico, by insisting on writing and speaking Spanish – either its variants of prestige or not –, confronts the Anglophone hegemony (Anzaldúa 1999). On the other hand, a Peruvian writer (Mignolo 2000), by publishing in Quechua, confronts the naturalization of Spanish imposed on the colonized Latin America. In an exemplary way, the geopolitical context composes a hegemonic or subaltern relation between languages; this context cannot be understood but in the set of linguistic strategies that manage bodily and social (cultural, economic, political) contexts. he set of linguistic practices that is called Spanish in the Peruvian writer’s context and Spanish in Anzaldúa’s context cannot be addressed in the same way. As ritualized speech acts (Pennycook 2007, Pinto 2007), these sets need to be understood as local actions inserted in cultural power struggles, strategies for the production of linguistic consensus or resistance to coercion and violence of language, and therefore must be analyzed in relation to other linguistic and bodily practices that surround them. Spanish – or any other language – is therefore “an efect of language” (Pennycook 2007, 112), a strategic set of speech acts, linguistic practices articulated in the dynamics of bodily practices. hooks (1994, 168) supports these ideas by calling attention to the role of English for native people and enslaved blacks: Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear, the speech of the Gullah, Yiddish, and so many other unremembered tongues. Colonial languages are not neutral structural sets for communication between racialized native and enslaved peoples and their colonizers (Fanon 1967), now transformed into “oicial”, “trade” or “international” languages (Pennycook 2007). he languages were centrally part of steps toward colonization (Errington 2001; Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Mignolo 2000) and today they also take part in global hierarchization (Blommaert and Creve and Willaert 2006; Makoni and Brutt-Griler and Mashiri 2007; Mignolo 2000; Mufwene 2002; Souza 2007). From the violent imposition and inducement to the “naturalization” of its usage today, colonial languages provided what Salles Jr. (2006) calls “subordinate integration”, disguising and silencing the violent practices of linguistic inequality under the modernizing veil of communication for all (Cameron 2002; Pennycook 2002; Pennycook 2007; Rajagopalan 2010b; Rajagopalan 2010c). Cameron (2002,67) airms “that globalization had given new legitimacy, and a new twist, to the long-lived idea that linguistic diversity is a problem, while linguistic uniformity is a desirable ideal” (see © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved  Joana Plaza Pinto also Jacquemet 2005). She calls attention to an ethnocentrism that takes place in the dissemination of global communicative norms and genres which have normative and standardizing efects. So, not only languages, dialects and variants are put into a hierarchy, but also styles, genres and even communicative skills. herefore, the metapragmatics and metadiscursive regime studies comprise a range of issues on the manners in which linguistic resources (i.e., idioms, codes, variants, dialects, genres, styles, communicative skills, etc.) are evaluated and managed as strategies to regulate and manipulate the domains of social interaction. hese strategies, embedded in the historical modern context of colonial and post-colonial processes, are connecting to various hierarchical systems, in so far as they indexically construct the diferences and inequalities. here is another further point. his overview puts these studies into confrontation with other modalities of diferentiation. As Povinelli (2006, 194–195) aptly points out, Metapragmatic function is, therefore, critical to how textual and interlocutionary phenomena (including individuals, their gender, their culture) are rendered coherent, durable, and seemingly detachable from their local contexts. Metapragmatic function also creates a sense of a perduring temporal order out of the actual volatility and transience of sense-making. […] metapragmatic function ensures that most communicative exchanges, indeed “culture” itself and identities within it, say gender, are experienced as a perduring coherent-enough totality. Language is a key element in the processes of gendering, racialization, sexualization, and other diferentiations that bodies are exposed to, and these processes are articulated with the formation of identities. It is important to stress the subjectformation process in this discussion. Certainly it is well known the argument that one’s (non)linguistic abilities could be rendered into forms of hierarchy among humans. However, Povinelli’s position is not merely about certain identity categories being articulated with certain linguistic practices – which is quite sociolinguistic common sense – but rather about language participating, since the Modern colonial project and even in actual post-colonial world, in ensuring the inequality of bodies as coherent, durable, and detachable. From this point, we come to how the markers used on the diferentiations of bodies articulate to the metapragmatics and metadiscursive regimes and how languages are invented and regulated as a marker of bodies. he epistemic violence of this articulation is my inal issue. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 7. On languages, bodies and epistemic violence  Epistemic outcast Even today, for many, knowledge restlessness is truth. Many wonder how we can ensure true knowledge. I myself always feel uneasy about how we have got to true knowledge, which route we have walked through, what we have brought with us and what we have abandoned during the journey. Objects let on the road have always intrigued me. Why are certain events considered as evidence while others are rendered invisible? To answer this question, one can describe the diferent methods and logics that Western reason has taken to assert true knowledge. I will rather try to collect some elements let out on the road to Western reason and relect on the potential of the articulation between them based on the concept of epistemic violence (CastroGómez 2005, Grosfoguel 2007, Santos 2002, 2007, 2009). he items collected gather around the diferentiation of bodies and the metapragmatics and metadiscursive regimes of languages lying especially in the conceptions of languageness. First of all, “bodies are meaning-makers in their own right. he signiiers do the job by themselves. hey do this by contact, contiguity rather than substitution – by metonymy rather than metaphor” (Rajagopalan 2010a: 541). In this sense, we take into account two signiicant elements: languages and speaking bodies. However, as I argued previously, our contact with such elements was always mediated by “regimes of truth”. Such schemes have made visible certain aspects of languages and speaking bodies and rendered others invisible. his biased knowledge was not just a human yet unreliable way of knowing and/or not knowing, a lack or a casual epistemic slide. Visibility and invisibility were themselves forces and efects – a ield of action – of the colonial/modern world organization and its rationalizations. In Grosfoguel (2007, 213)’s words: his is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. he main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks. In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. he ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated ‘Ego’. Ethnic/racial/ gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved  Joana Plaza Pinto his myth of a non-situated ‘Ego’ is the foundation of all modern science, therefore of Linguistics. Donna Haraway (1995, 18) argues that, from the vision metaphor, this modern place of speech – science – claims to see without being seen, a vision of God, “the view that mythically inscribes all marked bodies, which enables to unmarked category claims the power to see without being seen, to represent escaping representation”. his allegedly unmarked place does nothing but disguise its point of view, dissolving its marks, the marks of diference that operate on the knowledge system that this vision claims to be previsionary. She taught us to be suspicious of the perversity of vision in modern science: he eyes have been used to signify a perverse ability – abraded to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interest of immeasurable power. (Haraway 1995, 19) his locus of enunciation disguised as super-vision performatively produces world map categories and invents what is allegedly discovered. he invention works with three interrelated processes of epistemic invisibility: (1) making invisible what certain bodies say, think, feel, wish, and how they classify the world and themselves, etc.; (2) making invisible these bodies themselves; and inally (3) making invisible the very processes of epistemic invisibility. As Mignolo (2002, 84–85) exempliies, “barbarians, primitives, underdeveloped people, and people of color are all categories that established epistemic dependencies under diferent global designs (Christianization, civilizing mission, modernization and development, consumerism).” I mentioned that this was no diferent for Linguistics. he extirpation of knowledge and beliefs about language among the colonized population has unfolded at three levels, namely discourse, representations and conceptualization (Makoni and Mashiri 2007). While in their own territory the colonizers disputed the outlines of their language practices as languages, dialects, variants, etc., they attempted to neutralize the language disputes in colonized territories and also monopolize representations and conceptualizations of language practices that they found there. It was not just about imposing some language; it was rather about the imposition and control of ways of thinking about language practices. his form of language control always entails epistemic control, a violent process which subsumes all forms of Western knowledge. In the construction of languageness, there is an asymmetry of knowledge superimposed on the asymmetry of power. Linguistics led to a maximum the ignorance about the other knowledge, i.e., declaring their absence; native speakers do not really know their language but linguists know. In this violent epistemological process, destruction or removal of other knowledge is that which makes it invisible. As perfectly deines Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2008, 28), “It is an assertion of epistemological force that hides the epistemology of force”. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 7. On languages, bodies and epistemic violence  his epistemicide – the more violent version of the forced conversion and the removal of non-Western knowledge carried out by European colonialism – continues today in not always subtle ways (Santos 2008, Santos 2009). he coloniality of power and knowing, the global and national/cultural/epistemic hierarchies that are articulated diferentially in time and space (Saldívar 2007), are an update on metadiscursive regimes and metapragmatics of languages. he European models of linguistic description and classiication are the ground of language hierarchies, that consist of wide-ranging considerations of how language are able to produce knowledge (Pennycook 2007) to the decision about which language structures will be considered and which will not (Degraf 2005; Jaspers 2011; Makoni and Pennycook 2007). From one extreme, the inhibition of critical vocabulary is perversely produced, in the degree that the descriptive categories of Western Linguistics are the only permitted as universal and totalizing. On the other extreme, violent linguistic hierarchies coordinate body diferentiations. Makoni and Mashiri (2007, 73), by proposing to disinvent ways of conceptualizing African languages, expose that he processes of invention, unlike most other language standardization situations, was NOT one of converting a linguistic continuum into discrete languages, but that of actively creating “ideal languages” (Eco, 1995) which relected more European epistemology than prevailing local social realities (Harries, 1995, 40). he creation resulted in a production of African languages that were not anybody else’s mother tongue. Yet being anybody else’s mother tongue, the invented language haunts their supposed speakers, who are evaluated and guided by parameters they never knew. Degraf (2005) draws attention to the colonial (and neo-colonial) bias of the description of languages spoken by Africans and their descendants in the diaspora and in the colonies. his bias is well summarized by the question of racist theories originating in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “How can the slave (a lesser human?) speak a language that sounds like the full-ledged language of his or her (fully human?) European master?” (Degraf 2005, 535). he bias produces the conclusion that the language practices of these groups were a “handicap” and their speakers would have the same intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Jaspers (2011) argues that ethnic minority students are aware of linguistic hierarchization processes and assertive about their own linguistic image or position in this hierarchy. hey are “identified as diferent from the mainstream, incompetent, or ‘zerolingual’” (Jaspers 2011, 1269), and they “bolster the forces of linguistic convention and stigmatization and take the existing linguistic hierarchy” (Jaspers 2011, 1277). Jacquemet (2005), by discussing a communicative asymmetry in the international division of intellectual labor, points out a class of semiotic operators (made up © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved  Joana Plaza Pinto of secretaries, computer technicians, interpreters, local politicians, and so on, or of transnational migrants forced to commodify their linguistic knowledge to enter the global workforce) which occupy the lowest step in the hierarchy of cognitive labor. hese workers ind their place in the labor hierarchy negotiating their place in the linguistic hierarchy – “what kind of transidiomatic practices are welcomed (such as those of Indian phone operators forced to speak the local English of the area they serve) and what are considered ‘broken English’ or gibberish” (Jacquemet 2005, 266). By studying the disqualiication of language resources for newly arrived minorities in Belgium, Blommaert and Creve and Willaert (2006) describe forms of disqualiication of language practices of so-called newcomer migrants. In Dutch literacy classes, demarcations are made and “some linguistic resources are recognized as language and others are disqualified as such” (Blommaert, Creve and Willaert 2006, 36). he indexical projection of teachers “do not only index (degrees of) knowledge of Dutch but serve as powerful indexes of immigrant identity and dynamics of cultural adaptation”, becoming “ethnic(ized) barriers for success in schools” (Blommaert, Creve and Willaert 2006, 36). As a Brazilian professor in a public university, I heard many times from my students that they cannot even speak Portuguese. When I ask then what they speak, the answer is oten accompanied by perplexing adjectives: “one thing”, “a real mess”, and “a more or less Portuguese”. Final remarks All those examples call attention to language resources as part of historicity of bodies, their colonial, national, racialized, gendered, sexualized past, present, future. he linguistic resources integrate, rearticulate, and create interconnections with systems of body diferentiations, producing diferences and inequalities. he cornerstone of these articulations is the linguistic vulnerability to the other (Butler 1997; Butler 2006; Fanon 1967). Epistemic violence, like all types of violence, “renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. he derealization of the ‘Other’ means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral” (Butler 2006, 33). Epistemic violence, as a system of annulment of local knowledge about language and languages, summarizes the unequal consequences of these articulations producing certain colonized, racialized, sexualized and gendered bodies as languageless subjectivities (a handicap, zerolingual, broken, gibberish, disqualiied, a mess). he markers of diferentiation of bodies cannot be separated out into hierarchies of linguistic resources, even if new junctions in global changes constrain and enable subjectivity and action (Kulick 2005). © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 7. On languages, bodies and epistemic violence  Purely synchronic and operational analyses of linguistic inequality therefore risk overlooking the deeper and very oten invisible levels at which inequality operates. It oten operates in the pre-textual phase in a literal way. It is there long before people embark on interactions and long before they deploy their communicative resources. In analysing power and its efects of inequality, context needs to include what is pre-inscribed in interactions. (Maryns and Blommaert 2002, 28) To understand how languages are invented as a marker of bodies, we must take into account the epistemic violence of the invention of language and articulate it with the historicity of speaking bodies. he pre-inscribed violent epistemological force of the metadiscursive regimes subject bodies to a regulation of perduring unequal identities. By evaluating, rationalizing, and justifying linguistic performances in articulation of body diferentiation, metapragmatic functions render coherent and durable well-knowing linguistic hierarchies, transiguring the epistemic asymmetry of colonial diference (Mignolo 2000) in a renewed linguistic “derealization” of languageless subjectivities. 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