Blair and Bartleby: The Conditional as Enemy

[cross-posted from Infinite Thought. Apologise for the perhaps overly regional  nature of the piece, but I thought it might be interesting to resurrect Bartleby after discussions on LS last year]

1. One Gigantic Empty Vessel

The world is of course full of people saying nothing at all, at great length. In fact, some jobs explicitly require the ability to keep on speaking, no matter what, whilst keeping the import and meaning of language to an absolute minimum. Academic bureaucracy is full of deliberately weightless waffle. The 1700 page 1997 Dearing Report is a case in point. The report could have simply read: proposal 1: 'We want to charge students fees and increase the links between universities and business, as well as giving lecturers so much bureaucracy they won't have enough time to do anything as recherché as teach'. But perhaps that might have upset people with its bluntness. But let us be clear: the kind of waffle on show in the Dearing Report is dangerous, and serves a very real purpose, whether in academia, politics or business.

By not quite saying what you mean, you can smuggle through almost anything you want. It is easier to tire a room full of people out with junk syntax than it is to deliberately mislead. Many people have ruefully noted that at least with Thatcher 'you know where you stood', whereas Nu-Labour's oleaginous waffle manages both to extend and complete Thatcher's 'revolution' without being particularly rhetorically abrasive about it. The myth of Labour's 'ethical foreign policy', a tagline invented by the media and then taken back by Labour once they'd realised it had a certain talismanic power among the compassionate (if gullible) middle-classes, is a good example of this. The phrase 'ethical foreign policy' is non-specific, open-ended and vaguely comforting. Ultimately it means that Labour can sell arms to whoever they want provided they are also seen to say something faintly humanitarian. The hallmark of this kind of language is its inability to be refuted. If someone says something that doesn't really make sense, it is impossible to oppose it, except to criticise the terms of the language itself. And how often can we turn round and say 'I do not accept the very terms of your debate. Your language is all wrong!' Nu-language is ideology without a counterpart, a battle waged at the level of the generic capacity to speak itself, a kind of amniotic fluid in which everyone exists and no one can get out of.

2. Nu-language

Paolo Virno has come closest to posing the problem of this fundamental abuse of linguistic capacity in Grammar of the Multitude, where he writes the following:

'As far as capital is concerned, what really counts is the original sharing of linguistic-cognitive talents, since it is this sharing which guarantees readiness, adaptability, etc., in reacting to innovation. So, it is evident that this sharing of generic cognitive and linguistic talents within the process of real production does not become a public sphere, does not become a political community or a constitutional principle. So then, what happens?'

What happens, indeed. The peculiar power of Nu-language to insinuate itself across politics, academic and business, as a pure kind of formal currency, has lead, amongst other things to a 'verbisation' of nouns, a vapid abstraction that turns words like consolidate, reconstellate, reconfigure, enhance, articulate, into processes  to be endlessly 'negotiated' or 'mapped out'. The distance between a boardroom and a classroom is getting ever narrower. When people talk about how much education has to learn from industry, it is this hollow linguistic grease they envisage, smoothing the 'interactions' between staff and students, institutions and funding bodies.

Orwell was wrong about Newspeak - language doesn't need to 'shrink' in order to prevent the expression of thought. On the contrary, the more hollow and baroque the prose, the more likely you are to have a Nu-job, which consists entirely in poking language with the random paragraph generator of your linguistic capacity.

3. Nu-jobs, an aside

There are, of course, an increasing number of baroque jobs, specialising in precisely the promulgation of gabble: the consultants of the world may have the pay accorded to one whose speciality is the manipulation of generic edicts (with seriously damaging effects, as anyone who's ever been fired on the basis of a 'recommendation' from a consultant will know). There exist, too, the immaterial labourers of the art-world, the conceptual 'curators' and 'networkers' who flit about the margins (sorry, the 'non-centres') of galleries and production spaces, gorging on faddish terms and churning out meaningless reams of turgidity in catalogues, conferences and magazines. Jobs devoted to this kind of rhetorical production produce the affective equivalent of 'Taste the Difference' lard: poshly packaged crap for the 'cultured' classes.

4. Blair, Bartleby Rex

In the wake of Blair's departure (funny how the seemingly endless transforms itself into the finite in the blink of eye), I have been thinking about one of his favourite rhetorical formulations. The phrase 'I would say to you' prefaced so many of Blair's claims, it's hard to imagine that it wasn't a deliberate linguistic strategy ('well, he didn't say he was actually saying so, only that he would say'!). The conditional here plays an ambivalent role. On the one hand, it implies a context in which what Blair says might have a meaning, so the silent half-sentence before would read: '[If I had any power]...I would say to you', as if Blair is just another bloke down the pub speculating on what he would do 'if he were Prime Minister'. On the other, 'I would say to you' is also oddly haughty, implying that '[if you were important or worth discussing this with]...I would say to you.' The vague hint of religious pomposity is hardly coincidental, either.    

The curious thing about Blair's favoured sentence formulation is its lack of counterpart. The conditional often makes explicit the circumstances (which is what makes Bartleby's blanket statement so startling - 'I would prefer not to', yes, but why, Bartleby?). So, if Blair might have said instead, 'If we had more time, I would say to you' or 'If I had that information to hand, I would say to you'. But he doesn't, so he leaves his sentences hanging, at once formally authoritative and yet completely depthless. Here are some examples:

i. In response to a question after a major foreign policy speech on the Middle East to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, in which he called for a "complete renaissance" on foreign policy to combat "Reactionary Islam", August 2006.

'Actually I would say to you that I think the United Nations can, in certain circumstances, be absolutely essential to solving the world's problems, and there are situations that have arisen in which the United Nations has come together and made a real difference, and indeed some of the things that we were talking about earlier in relation to some of the disputes in Africa and so on indicate that very, very clearly too.'

The 'I would say to you here' is redundant. He is of course precisely saying that he thinks the United Nations 'can...be absolutely essential' (notice the conflict between the 'would' and the 'can', where 'could' would have made more sense). The half-conditional here tempers the otherwise assertive terminology ('absolutely essential', 'real difference', 'very, very clearly'). Blair is attempting to have his commitment-free cake and eat it. Did Blair say that he thought the UN was necessary? No, only that he would have said that it was...this is linguistic frictionless spinning in the void.

ii. British Prime Minister and Pakistani President Press Conference, Aired October 5, 2001.

'Now, the second thing I would say to you, however, is that it is absolutely clear that if the Taliban, the current Taliban regime does fall, then it is important that any successive regime is broadbased, involves all ethnic groups, obviously has to include the Pushtun, which is very important, indeed, and has to take account of the fact that Pakistan has a valid interest in close involvement with the arrangements for any such successor regime.'

Just as in the first example, Blair launches in with an authoritative word: 'Now', 'actually', before shielding himself from the accusation that he has said anything at all. And again the 'I would say to you' (in a hundred years time, when everyone has died, when Martians take the planet over) contrasts heavily with the affirmative 'absolutely clear' in the same sentence.

iii. Parliament Questions, 22 November 2005

'What I would say to you is that, for example in respect of schools reform, this is building on reform that is already there, in respect of the National Health Service likewise and the idea is to get to a situation where people feel that the money that is going into the additional public services, because we have uplifted the investment very significantly, is matched by change and reform.'

Here the phrase is used as a kind of fait accompli; 'I would say to you...oh, but hang on! The reform is already there. Nothing to do but keep on keeping on...'

5. Conclusion

Blair's repeated conditional was malevolent where Bartleby's was persistent, opaque and enigmatic. Blair's language both internalised the force of political speech whilst disavowing that power, perversely allowing his government to in practice do more damage than a more verbally explicit leader would have been. The infiltration of Nu-language into the increasingly blurry world of business-academia-politics must be resisted - neither in the name of a fusty preservationist impulse, nor in the name of a 'pure language' - but because all this junk prose is dangerously close to destroying our capacity to think at all.