What message does ‘send a message’ send?

Abstract

The violent acts of post-modern war are sometimes represented as long-distance communication. This paper examines the phrasesend a messageand others like it when used to refer to bombings, firing missiles, shooting civilians, etc. The metonymic reduction of killing and destroying to communication promotes message-sending as the single goal of a military enterprise. We provide relevant historical, cultural and political contexts that account for this increasingly prevalent framing: the imperatives of justifying aggressive war in a Post-Nuremburg international legal order; the emergence and intensification of message culture; and the increased strategic importance of perception management and information warfare. The paper includes a richly illustrated analysis of the metonymic structure ofsend a messageand its relationship to the common, well-studied metaphor for communication, the conduit. We argue that the use ofsend a messageto describe acts of violence does more than simply euphemize: it positions the message-senders as rational agents engaged in communicative action; and it displaces responsibility for suffering onto those who fail to get the message.