언어의 독재, 독재의 언어 - ‘언어의 문화사’를 위한 시론(試論)

Abstract

When I read the famous novel 1984, written by George Owell, this article was started to firstly framed into the actual idea. In his novel, one linguist, named Saim, considered the totalitarian English socialism as language revolution, but his linguistic revolution theory gave me reversely re-thinking of the nature of the totalitarian regime, expecially including the Nazi regime. Which could be the nature of the totalitarian dictatorship? Could its nature investigating work be remained not only on the political, economical, and social dimension, but be enlarged into the cultural one? If it is possible, the Nazi regime can be explained actually as the linguistic dictatorship, which had great tactics to utilize the language tools in order to rule over the people mass totally. In this meaning, a new methodological research is needed to reveal the cultural nature of the totalitarian language dictatorship. First, this article examined critically into the existing theoretical works, Roland Barthes, Kim Jong Yong, Victor Klemperer. Especially Victor Klemperer's words - LTI ist die Sprache des Massenfanatismus - became a cornerstone to shed lights on the real aspects of the language dictatorship under the Nazi regime. His theoretical position suggested that the research should be above all under the perspective of the oppressed people. A new method of a cultural history of language has to be founded on his outstanding insight. Second, while comparing to the concept history as a method, this article concluded that a new cultural historical method should be needed in order to investigate into not the surface, but the depth of the linguistic dictatorship. The limits of the concept history, which has tendencies to be slanted on the structural functions of the concept in the historical dimension, can be coped with this new method. This new method can make it possible to study the complex movements of the dictatorship languages in some social and cultural phases particularly under the perspective of the language consumers. In this meaning Hitler's Salute gave a good example to confirm new possibilities of the cultural history of the language dictatorship. Frankly speaking, this article is only a new beginning, but the value of this new methodological research depends on the concrete and successful cultural historical studies of the social mechanism of the power languages under the totalitarian dictatorship system. Then I hope that this work should give us a good chance to shift a viewpoint from spoken language to diverse political languages, from individual languages to its social contexts, from the upper-down to the bottom-up perspective.