Political English: Language and the Decay of Politics

247 Pages·2019·1.589 MB·

by  Thomas Docherty

POLITICAL ENGLISH
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POLITICAL ENGLISH
Language and the Decay of Politics
Thomas Docherty
Bloomsbury Academic
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published in Great Britain 2019
Copyright © Thomas Docherty, 2019
Thomas Docherty has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
Cover design: Eleanor Rose
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Docherty, Thomas, 1955- author.
Title: Political English: Language and the Decay of Politics / Thomas Docherty.
Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, [2019] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018055637 | ISBN 9781350101395 (hb) | ISBN 9781350101388 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages–Political aspects. | English language–
Political aspects. | Communication in politics.
Classification: LCC P119.3.D63 2019 | DDC 320.01/4–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055637
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0139-5
PB: 978-1-3501-0138-8
ePDF: 978-1-3501-0141-8
eBook: 978-1-3501-0140-1
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For Bridie May Sullivan and Hamish Docherty
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 On pluck: English and money 13
2 English nativism and linguistic xenophobia 33
3 Fundamentalist English: The stiff upper lip 67
4 On truth and lying in a political sense 95
5 Words, deeds and democracy 137
6 Profanity and free speech 165
7 Remnants of dissent: Free speech, political
silence and guilt 191
Select bibliography 229
Index 234
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POLITICAL ENGLISH INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Prospero: I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known.
Caliban: You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
(SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST, ACT 1; SCENE 2)
‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Adorno made this claim first
in 1949, in an essay on ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’.1 The statement
invites at least two ostensibly mutually incompatible questions. Can there
be a language that is adequate to atrocity? And, even if there is, how dare
we minimize atrocity by finding a language that adequately respects the
extent of a political atrocity such as Auschwitz? The question posed in the
book you are about to read is related to this. What happens when political
language itself becomes so vicious and degraded that it itself becomes an
occasion of atrocity? What happens when the condition of our political
debates is such that the language itself damages the lives of those citizens
who are subjected to it, and even subjected by it?
When Adorno reiterated his argument again, in 1968, he wrote
that ‘I do not want to soften my statement that it is barbaric to continue
1Theodor Adorno, Prisms (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber; MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,
1983), 34.