Page 110 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

―Your Words Against Mine‖: States of Exception… 101

resignation from her post as Chairman of SSU. In her letter, the very same
formulations occur again, but this time with a different twist:

Excerpt 5

For me the court‘s decision did not prove that I said or did anything.
On the contrary, in a situation where words stand against words, the
court has chosen to completely accept the story by the doorkeeper and his
colleagues. It makes me miserable. It is unbelievably humiliating. (För
mig handlade inte domen om att det är bevisat att jag sagt eller gjort
något. Däremot har rätten i en situation där ord står mot ord valt att
fullständigt köpa vaktens och hans kollegors berättelse. Det känns
bedrövligt. Där ligger en sådan ofattbar förnedring.) [Dagens Nyheter,
December 16, 2006] (emphasis added)

2
Situations including the expression ―your words against mine‖ are
paradoxical and multifaceted. The very expression ―your words against mine‖
does not belong to any formal juridical vocabulary. Juridical theories about
testimonies and epistemological status, however, can explain similar standstills
in social relations as well as explore relations between discursive actions such
as claiming, presenting evidence and passing judgment (Walton 2008). The
expression is an example of quasi juridical discourse, a discourse that relates
legal matters outside of the formal legal institutions, in the realm of what we,
following Friedman (1989), think of as popular legal culture. ―Your words
against mine‖ situations include many contradictions and dilemmas. The
expression is, in itself, puzzling in many ways and raises a host of questions:

• What can this expression mean?
• When, where and by whom can this expression be used?

2
‖Ord står mot ord‖: In Swedish this expression conveys a situation with contested accounts.
The quality of disagreement in the accounts is reduced to a matter of words; the very words
that are used are the content of the disagreement. The expression in Swedish becomes
neutral, not just in the sense that by using the expression one assumes no stance in a
conflict, but also in the sense that agency is unspecified in terms of pronouns, gender or any
other socio-cultural category. This may be contrasted to the English usage in expressions
such as ―his words against hers‖ or ―he said, she said‖. In English, however, there are other
similar expressions that describe a state of disagreement in a gender neutral, yet pronoun
specific way, e.g. ―One person‘s word against another‘s‖ or ―your words against mine‖
where the persons involved are a bit more specified (you and me) yet not socially identified
in detail. In this analysis, I will use the English expression ―your words against mine‖ as the
translation of the Swedish expressions ―words vs. words‖ or ―words stand against words‖.