There is something perplexing about the term monolingualism. In an academy increasingly oriented toward the injunction to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, the mention of monolingualism tends to be an occasion for virtue signaling. The term is usually brought up pejoratively as an example from a cluster of evils, which encompass terms such as man, whiteness, empire, English, heteronormativity, cissexism, and so forth, all of which connote exclusion, suppression of diversity, and inequity. Hence, with good reason and in the spirit of DEI, the literary theorist Yasemin Yildiz proposes the idea of a “postmonolingual condition,” a phrase intended to deconstruct once and for all the belief that having only one language is the norm. Unlike the other evils mentioned, however, monolingualism carries within it a mathematical indicator and thus a scene of calculation: it is a discourse, an ism, of oneness. What exactly does mono mean in this instance? How is this counting, enumeration, and rationalization of one—of treating a language as a discrete entity—accomplished? More important, for whom and under what circumstances does the use of a certain language become a de facto process of monolingualization, of oneness production?Footnote ¹

We may consider a few examples of the everyday occurrences of apparent monolingualism. A farmer in the Midwest of the United States, for instance, is likely to communicate only in American English. A British administrative officer living in the former British-occupied territory of Hong Kong, too, likely used English exclusively in his verbal transactions. At the other end of the spectrum, domestic helpers from the Philippines and Indonesia working in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, no matter what their native languages might be, typically know enough of their employers’ languages to function in their work environments. Latinx construction workers, housecleaners, gardeners, and janitors in the metropolitan United States typically speak English as well as Spanish. Workers from Eastern Europe typically must know some French, German, or English to be employed in various types of low-level services in the more affluent parts of the European Union and the United Kingdom. In these scenes of mundane social relations, the claim—that is, the accepted legitimacy—of the oneness of whatever language is in use is the result of historical, geopolitical, and socioeconomic power asymmetries. Knowledge of English, French, and German can be expected or assumed because of the dominance exerted by their respective cultures, creating in each context what Yildiz and others following her (see, for instance, Dembeck and Mein) call the “monolingual paradigm.”

Even so, and even in the midst of clearly evident economic unevenness, the plurality of actors involved suggests a considerably more complicated story, in which even those who can use only one language must engage at some point with those who are, unlike them, not monolingual. If language as such is not assumed as a bounded piece of property possessed by individual owners in the form of a silo but instead as a relation, a shared spatial temporality between humans, monolingualism would exist only when there is only one speaker involved who happens to speak only one language, or when all parties in a communicative situation can use only the same single language. As long as there are bilingual or multilingual speakers present—such as those being paid minimally to provide the labor that no one else wants to do—even a seemingly monolingual speaker is a participant in a de facto multilingual social relation. The farmer from the Midwest is likely surrounded by Spanish-speaking migrant farmworkers, and the British administrative officer in pre-1997 Hong Kong was living among millions of Cantonese-speaking subjects (who typically also knew English) and probably enjoyed the domestic service of a Filipina or Indonesian female servant at home (who, in addition to their native languages, usually also spoke some English). To this extent, the claim of monolingualism is perhaps just that—a claim, a surface effect of official linguistic hierarchization that nonetheless cannot erase an inherently multilingual situation with multilingual speakers in everyday interactions. For the occupied natives, migrant workers, domestic servants, manual laborers, and other comparable service providers, there is no such thing as monolingualism: their (subjective) experiences are always bi- or multilingual even when they must speak the dominant language of the occupying power, the employer, and the employing country.Footnote ² For the same reasons, it should be stressed, bi- or multilingualism is for them not necessarily a liberatory or democratizing virtue.

Because I have already addressed these more familiar issues of the disciplinary and sociocultural dynamics of languaging in previously published work (see Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker, Primitive Passions, and “Subject”), I will not repeat my discussions of theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Tejaswini Niranjana, Gianni Vattimo, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Tzvetan Todorov, Alenka Zupančič, and others in this brief essay. Instead, here I propose a somewhat different approach to monolingualism. Staying in tune with the quotidian realities of global lingual hierarchization, as mentioned above, but going beyond the academic expert parameters of linguistic and literary studies, this other approach defines monolingualism as jargon.

Perhaps more so than the dominance of specific national and colonial languages such as English, French, and German, in the era of the Internet the risk-averse (that is, socially approved and thus politically safe) recycling of the lexicon of a certain political ideology, liberal democracy, deserves attention as a monolingual phenomenon. Despite being manifest in language, this is a monolingualism that cannot be accounted for purely linguistically. Putting it plainly: a person may speak, write, and read multiple national languages and still channel this kind of monolingualism. As Judith Butler argues in the case of gender—that the concept is meaningful only in a global framework through translationFootnote ³—so too does political ideology assume signifying effects when it circulates, when it materializes through collective acts of dissemination. And yet, despite the need for translation, certain keywords of political ideology travel without translation at all. In ways more complex than Butler's well-intentioned advocacy of multilingualism and counsel of humility before other languages and cultures, we thus need to raise the following supplementary question: If an idea or principle can acquire meaning only through translatability—that is, in the interstices between languages, in the times and spaces beyond a single language, including the language in which such an idea or principle originates—how should we evaluate the recurrence of ideoléxicsFootnote ⁴ like freedom, democracy, and human rights in the global mainstream media's reports on cultures such as the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, which are typically described with terms such as threat, theft, repression, authoritarianism, dictatorship, stifling of dissent, violation of freedom, and abuse of human rights?Footnote ⁵ This recurrence intimates the hegemony of the liberal democratic ideals invoked, implicitly validating the ideoléxics’ indifference to the vicissitudes, the variant receptions (in Butler's terms, the translations) of these anglophone or francophone stock expressions among other audiences with vastly different histories. To borrow a phrase from David Gramling, for much of the postcolonial world the problem is “the affective predicament of living daily amid Western discursive exportations” (136). Such exportations often amount to a kind of discursive imperialism, whereby the terrain under occupation is the very terms of public discourse themselves. Given the intense awareness of and long-standing hostility to US imperialism in many parts of the Global South, which audiences, and where and when, remain susceptible to these exportations? What weight should be given to their receptions?

In his critique of the mid-twentieth-century vocabulary and habits of German existentialist thought influenced by Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno invokes the word jargon to describe the effects of an epistemological and emotional environment subject to commodification and fetishization. Adorno's meticulous and relentless unpacking of the discursive hegemony of a certain lingual form—both in terms of specific words used and in terms of their widespread currency—is instructive for what I would like to propose for a reevaluation of liberal democracy not merely as the legacy of the European Enlightenment, as an ideal of political governance or as a marker of sociopolitical progress, but also and primarily as jargon.

According to Adorno, an important characteristic of jargon is its capacity to mobilize a devaluation of thought in what, in tandem with him, we could term unreflective consensus:

Adorno's description of jargon as a matter of creating “effect connotations” resonates with the more recent discussion of “bullshit” offered by Harry G. Frankfurt. As Chris Lorenz, citing Frankfurt's work, describes it, the bullshitter “is only interested in effects and does not necessarily believe in what he states himself” (627). More important, to echo Adorno, such “effect connotations” assume the power of “the augurs,” as though the bullshit being channeled is “conspiring with whatever is sacred.” Jargon prevails, in other words, when something needs only to be posited, as though the mere act of positing is sufficient evidence—a kind of transubstantiation—of what is said. Given the disturbingly small number of news sources circulating around the contemporary world,Footnote ⁶ and given the predominance of the US propaganda machinery (the Pentagon, the White House, and the Central Intelligence Agency with its funding proxies such as the Committee for Free Asia, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Chinese Affairs Center), it is perhaps not surprising that the jargon of liberal democracy has acquired the lingual status of freewheeling dogma. The political upheavals in Hong Kong from 2019 to 2020—when the jargon was hailed in a global chorus of anti-Beijing news reports in print, on radio and television, and on social media, amid appeals by some Hong Kong militants to the United Kingdom (Hong Kong's former ruler),Footnote ⁷ Donald Trump, and US troops as saviors of freedom and democracyFootnote ⁸—were a spectacular recent example. (For qualitatively different and historically informed accounts, see Cho, “Chinese ‘Disinformation’” and “Western Media”; Litton; Vittachi; Vltchek; and Wat, among others. Unfortunately, these accounts are seldom accessed by the majority of subscribers to journalistic venues such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, CNN, NPR, Bloomberg News, The Economist, The Guardian, BBC World News, Le monde, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, and so forth.Footnote ⁹)

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it would help to remind ourselves of some of the known atrocities enmeshing these frequently posited jargony terms, which routinely advance the default ideological positions of the United States and its allies through language. Against each jargony term, let us juxtapose a well-recognized US or global situation that fundamentally (rather than accidentally) controverts the supposed meaning of that term.

The right to vote. In the twenty-first century, US citizens continue to find themselves contending with an electoral system—supposedly the foundation of their democracy, or plutocracy, rather—in which politicians are routinely lobbied by corporate interest groups ready to fund their campaign advertisements and airtime, and in which minority populations must fight against ballot restrictions, including partisan gerrymandering and redrawing of electoral maps, aimed at disenfranchising such voters in numerous states.

Freedom of speech and freedom of expression. These phrases have been used to defend sexist, racist, and other types of discriminatory hate speech, as well as to justify the debasement of adversary cultures’ leaders and the dismissal of their concerns for security and their claims to sovereignty and autonomy.

Personal liberties. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this phrase has been used to sanctify refusals to comply with public health advisories to wear face masks, maintain social distancing, and receive vaccinations, even when such refusals pose dangers to others. (See Stovall for a historical discussion of freedom as white freedom.)

Democracy. In its name the US has been aerial bombing non-US territories, demolishing entire cultures’ lifeworlds, and killing uncountable numbers of innocent civilians; a look at the hundreds of US military bases around the world, supported by the globally peerless expenditures of the US military-industrial complex, suffices to demonstrate this point. At the end of 2021, Joe Biden organized a so-called global “Summit for Democracy” that excluded major countries.

Human rights. Advocacy of this supposedly universal property is anything but universal: little is typically said (and reiterated) in the dominant news channels about human rights in cases of Palestinians being bombed by Israeli airstrikes, prisoners detained and tortured in Guantánamo without legal representation, Mexican refugee children removed from their families by force at the US-Mexican border, and people in the majority of low-income countries around the world who must wait their turns to receive the coronavirus vaccines. Within the United States itself, as the pandemic death toll hurtles past one million in the second half of 2022, it is hard not to wonder: Shouldn't advocating human rights mean valuing and protecting human lives? (See Yong for a sobering analysis.)

Against the occurrences of incidents that directly controvert them, this list of terms (and their numerous associated vocabularies) amount to a compulsory and empty monolingual refrain. By “monolingual,” I don't mean the exclusionary use of languages such as English and French but rather the preemptive sloganeering of a particular type of lexicon. As already mentioned, such monolingualism can be aligned with the performativity of what some have called bullshit, but it is Adorno's diagnosis of jargon that, in my view, more pronouncedly points to the spiritual implications at stake: this is a language with a magical capacity for transcendence, for transfiguring bad empirical realities into necessary passages toward glorified destinations. Monolingualism in this instance is akin to advertising in its function of mystifying actual relations of social domination. As Trent Schroyer puts it, “the jargon shares with modern advertising the ideological circularity of pretending to make present, in pure expressivity, an idealized form that is devoid of content” (xiv). In the case of the jargon of liberal democracy, no matter how frequently atrocities are committed and destructions unleashed, the advertising impetus typically obfuscates them with a double standard when the perpetrator happens to be the United States or one of its allies. Thus, for instance, we seldom read about the French government's brutal crackdown on protests by the gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”), even as we were regularly apprised of Beijing's “authoritarian” and “repressive” squelching of democracy in Hong Kong. In the case of India's disastrous handling of COVID-19, we seldom heard charges against the Modi regime's “violation of human rights.” As some commentators on the Chinese-language media have suggested, had pandemic corpses been floating down the Yellow River rather than the Ganges, the accounts would have been decidedly demonizing. And in Israel's airstrikes against Palestinians in the spring of 2021, we hardly ever heard denunciations of Israel's “violation of Muslims’ (Palestinians’) human rights,” the way we kept hearing about China's violation of Muslims’ (Uighurs’) human rights in the Chinese Province of Xinjiang. The capacity for transcendence means that such jargon, instead of being torn asunder, typically survives intact in the midst of the bloodiest of contradictions. Like the resurrection of Jesus, the sound bites of the sanctity of the right to vote, freedom of speech, personal liberties, democracy, human rights, and their likes keep returning to life even as empirical events nail them out of existence.

This is then also the point at which to reconsider the resounding charge against white supremacy, a charge that is often made on the basis of the material horrors perpetrated by white people. Black Lives Matter is perhaps the most visible case in point of a political movement that seeks to confront histories of the unspeakable violence committed against black people around the world by those who consider themselves racially superior.Footnote ¹⁰ A more nuanced articulation of white supremacy, I contend, must also take into account liberal democracy's jargonistic capacity for transcendence, a capacity that undergirds its hold on rhetorical power. In the words of the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this is a power that manifests in the repeated telling of “a single story.” That is to say, a more precise definition of white supremacy will need to confront it as language: What are the forces that enable this language to move like a vector in a single direction with the assumption that everyone else is aspiring to reach the same destination, when tens of millions of bodies, voices, and events have long exposed its jargonistic pretenses as a mere cover story? Clearly, this one-way language and the pervasive dissemination of its monolingualizing effect connotations should be made part of any debate about monolingualism.