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Unspeak
Posted by Kevin

Unspeak by Steven Poole is a fascinating book that I don’t think I can recommend highly enough. The basic premise is simple: that the language of today is not Orwellian — meaning designed to destroy all meaning — but rather designed to shift meaning and thus shift the perceptions of reality. It is a subtle difference, but one that is important. From the book:

Indeed, this book is intended as a corrective to the common idea that politicians do nothing but spout hot air: that their speech, when it is not frankly misleading, is just empty and meaningless. In an excellent anatomy of the logical fallacies in the rhetoric of Tony Blair, for example, philosopher Jamie White nevertheless claimed: ‘most politicians waste our time with platitudinous, visionary waffle.’ The most celebrated statement of such an opinion, meanwhile, was written by George Orwell himself, in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, published in 1946:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. […] The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. […] Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

‘Cloudy vagueness?’ ‘Pure wind?’ On the contrary, we can often learn a great deal about what politicians’ ‘real aims’ are from taking seriously, and closely studying, their ‘declared aims’. Take the time to unravel the assumptions packed up in a piece of Unspeak, and you will be better able to attack that chain of reasoning at its base. Forewarned is forearmed. Even the most brutal kind of euphemism teaches us valuable things about the mindset of the people who employ it…

Modern rhetoric is not in the business of obscuring meaning, it is in the business of changing meaning. And that, as the book demonstrates, is a much more dangerous proposition. Changing meanings, “reframing” in the Lackoffian sense, Poole argues, does damage to democracy and society by cutting off avenues of discussion and by preventing the honest discussion in honest terms of the world around us. The book is structured simply as a series of case studies centered around the terminology of one issue. Those studies demonstrate clearly that this new political rhetoric does severe damage to political discourse wherever it happens to be deployed. If this sounds dry, it is not. Poole, a British journalist, does nothing to hide his anger and contempt for the practitioners of “unspeak” and his style is often caustic, dry, and viscous. Even when Poole is skewering causes and people I approve of, that style made the book very readable. Poole is above all fair in his assessments and evenhanded with his evidence; those looking for hatchet jobs will be disappointed.

But the fact that Poole can find examples of this new rhetorical style on all sides of the spectrum is disturbing. As reading Poole’s piece will show, the right wing is very good at this trick and has years of practice. On the left, it is common to speak of “reframing” and “Lackofian frames”. But if that process leads to unspeak, as Poole shows that it often does, then it does as much damage to the foundations of honest society as unspeak in the hands of the right. I don’t know what the solution to this dilemma is — the party of Nixon is not about to give up one of its most effective tools, and the media we are saddled with today is structured in such a fashion as to make unspeak easy to perpetuate and hard to combat. Doing nothing, or doing what we have been doing, is obviously not the solution. But I am not sure what is; destroying democratic society to save it is not something I would recommend. Unfortunately, and this is the one weak area of the book, Poole doesn’t have much of answer beyond a 21st. century version of “I’m mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!”.

But I am probably being too harsh to cll that lack of solution a “flaw”. The problem must be defined before it can be corrected, and Poole does a masterful job defining the problem. If you want to understand the political and rhetorical climate of the day, Poole’s book is simply the best guide produced in the last decade. I strongly recommend it.

May 24th, 2006 Politics, Reviews, Media, Books | 4 comments