9 - Engaging with Symbolic Power—Responding to Symbolic Violence

Summary

If digital technology requires us to completely rethink the fundamental axes of our human existence: time, space and causality, we have to ask the following questions: How are we to conceive of these three axes today when studying and teaching languages as a human activity? How can learning another language help us better understand the symbolic complexity of the human condition? And how can it enable us to engage with symbolic power and respond to symbolic violence? I discuss six scholars that have responded to these questions in recent decades: Judith Butler and her reflections on the time-bound political promise of the performative; Michel de Certeau and his thoughts on the space of strategies and tactics in everyday life; Mikhail Bakhtin on the time/space chronotope and the carnivalesque; Pierre Bourdieu and his Pascalian meditations on causality and the habitus; Alastair Pennycook and Bruno Latour on post-humanist thinking.