Language and Control

Roger Fowler,Bob Hodge,Gunther Kress,Tony Trew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429790287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Originally published in 1979. This book studies language variation as a part of social practice - how language expresses and helps regulate social relationships of all kinds. Different groups, classes, institutions and situations have their special modes of language and these varieties are not just stylistic reflections of social differences; speaking or writing in a certain manner entails articulating certain social meanings, however implicit. This book focuses on the repressive and falsifying side of linguistic practice but not without recognising the power of language to reveal and communicate. It analyses the language used in a variety of situations, including news reporting, interviews, rules and regulations, even such apparently innocuous language as the rhymes on greetings cards. It argues for a critical linguistics capable of exposing distortion and mystification in language, and introduces some basic tools for a do-it-yourself analysis of language, ideology and control.

1. Orwellian linguistics

BOB HODGE and ROGER FOWLER

The Government have concluded that this section (section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911) should be replaced by an Official Information Act.

(Merlyn Rees, British Home Secretary, Statement in House of Commons, 22 November 1976)

Our response to this statement contains simultaneously outrage and a sense of its ordinariness. We habitually accept such perversions of language from government officers and agencies, yet there is still a sense of shock at the precision and openness of the lie, the naked insanity of its logic. There is a word in English for this sort of thing: Orwell’s ‘doublethink’, from his great political novel 1984. Short, blunt and unerring, the word gives a liberating sense of control over the phenomenon. Rees’s Act, of course, recalls 1984 unusually closely. The ‘Official Information Act’ is designed to suppress rather than publish information, just as Oceania’s Ministry of Truth in 1984 is devoted to the falsification of historical records. Orwell’s novel is now part of our culture’s understanding of itself, and even people who have not read it can project its terms onto the Westminster and Whitehall of the decade before 1984. But like Winston Smith, the hero of the novel, we find the term is not so simple after all. We think we know that Merlyn Rees must know it is a lie to call ‘secrets’ ‘information’, and we know that, even knowing this, we will adopt the usage when the Act becomes law. We are sure – almost -that Mr Rees must realize that the whole process conjures up the world of 1984, yet he can still get away with it, and like Winston Smith we continue to accept an Oceanic regime.

But for a novel which has had such an impact on our general consciousness about the language of politics, 1984’s analysis of this topic is curiously underestimated. It is as if the talismanic words ‘Newspeak’, ‘reality control’ and ‘doublethink’ have passed too quickly into the English language. They have been so memorable that they make the novel seem redundant. As Orwell said of New speak, the extreme compression of the language eliminates the complex of ideas in the full concept, which is neutralized and replaced by something much simpler. But there are other reasons why Orwell has proved difficult to interpret. One is the confusedly partisan criticism that his work has received, and invites by its own partisanship and contradictions. So Animal Farm, as a satire on Soviet Russia, was seized on with delight by cold-war intellectuals of the right, but Orwell claimed he really meant it to expose the betrayers of the revolution, which would make it ultra-left rather than reactionary. 1984 has a similar ambiguity. Was he really predicting a horrific totalitarian society growing out of the rule of the post-war Labour government (‘Ingsoc’ from ‘English socialism’)? But the terms of his materialist analysis of the language and society of Oceania come from a lifelong, if ambivalent, involvement in left-wing politics and thought.

Another difficulty in interpreting Orwell’s significance as a thinker on language comes from the fact that his major contribution has the form of a novel. He wrote a number of essays on the subject, but these are brief, informal and insubstantial. On the basis of these essays Orwell might seem like just another product of Eton, denouncing the decay of the English language from the columns of the Daily Telegraph. In his essays ‘Politics and the English Language’ (Collected Essays, vol. IV, pp. 156–70)¹ and ‘The English Language’ (Collected Essays, vol. III, pp. 40–6) he complains that English is ‘in a bad way’ and in a state of ‘temporary decadence’, and protests against such ‘abuses’ as dead metaphors, pretentious and foreign diction, vacuous words, euphemisms, ready-made phrases, etc.:

modern writing … consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug (‘Politics and the English Language’, ed. cit., p. 163).

Except for the useful abbreviations ‘i.e.’, ‘e.g.’, and ‘etc.’ there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English (ibid., pp. 160–1)

American is a bad influence and has already had a debasing effect (‘The English Language’, ed. cit., p. 45).

Such statements as these, articulated with Orwell’s usual unrelenting anger, sound as if they belong to a familiar conservative, purist and chauvinistic tradition which stretches back to Sir John Cheke’s condemnation of ‘inkhorn terms’ in the sixteenth century. Orwell’s patriotism and his pessimism lead to these negative and apparently reactionary judgments. But his real affiliation is with a line of sceptical, critical thinking about the misuses of language which overlaps confusingly with the reactionary, conservationist line in that both share a similar list of alleged abuses. For the conservationist, the threat is that the cultural values impregnated in English will be superseded, weakened or obscured by misuse or tainting of the language. For the critical thinker, the danger is that slovenly language will inhibit thought and turn us into helpless victims of the manipulators who currently hold power. On this point, Orwell’s ideas have affinities with, and in some cases are influenced by, the arguments of such people as C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards, Count Korzybski and Stuart Chase.² Chase, for instance, passionately warns us that words are not things, that a great deal of the language to which we are exposed delivers no content but mere valueless abstractions: political and commercial language is often mendacious, pretending to deliver the goods but actually just giving vent to noise (cf. ‘Duckspeak’, below). One reason Ogden used to justify basic English is that it

gives us a chance of getting free from the strange power which words have had over us from the earliest times; a chance of getting clear about the processes by which our ideas become fixed forms of behaviour before we ourselves are conscious of what history and society are making us say.³

Orwell’s list of linguistic abuses given in ‘Politics and the English Language’ contains examples of most of the misuses of language that have become the favourites of indignant letter-writers of any persuasion. Of dead metaphors like ‘ring the changes on’, ‘take up the cudgels for’, he says ‘many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning’. Pretentious words – his examples include ‘phenomenon’, ‘categorical’, ‘virtual’ – ‘are used to dress up simple statements and given an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments’ and to ‘dignify the sordid processes of international polities’. He cites ‘strictly meaningless’ words in art criticism, and worse still, political words like ‘democracy’, ‘socialism’, ‘freedom’ which are ‘often used in a consciously dishonest way’ and ‘with intent to deceive’. Summing up, he refers to ‘this catalogue of swindles and perversions’. This seems a vague and emotive judgment. However, Orwell means what he says, and what he is saying is not essentially conservative. His main targets are not Stalinists or long-haired adolescents, but the leaders of English political and intellectual life, who he believes are guilty of large-scale perversion of language, and calculated acts of deception.

However, 1984 is Orwell’s major work on language. The fact that this work is a novel and not an essay or treatise raises special difficulties of interpretation. A novel’s content is refracted through its form. It is an elementary kind of misreading to regard every opinion in a novel as the author’s, yet the majority of commentators on 1984 have done just that. The result has been to make him seem more definite and more simple-minded than he was. But the ideas in 1984 always have a source in the novel itself, which is clearly distinguished from the author’s consciousness. The world of the novel is seen mostly through the eyes of Winston Smith, whose experience is totally contaminated by the manipulative techniques of Ingsoc. Into the narrative is.inserted a treatise by Goldstein, arch-heretic against Big Brother, or probably another fiction from high up in Minitrue, the Ministry of Propaganda. Attached to the work is an Appendix on ‘Newspeak’, the language programme of Oceania. Whose voice speaks in the Appendix- Orwell’s? Hardly. These are the opinions of an orthodox worker from the middle levels of Minitrue, someone like Syme but less critical. Orwell himself is everywhere but nowhere. The novel presents deliberately limited ideas, along with some of the means for understanding and criticizing these limitations, tracing them to sources in a particular social and political order. How far Orwell consciously worked through this critique we can never know, and this novelistic method of presenting ideas encourages such uncertainty. When does Orwell’s understanding end, and his readers’ own speculation begin? It is often impossible to say. In this situation the critic can only try to avoid two extremes, one is to claim Orwell’s critical activity as his own, the other is in effect to rewrite Orwell’s novel so that it confirms a new orthodoxy. Both perversions would find a happy home somewhere in Minitrue -another illustration of how relevant Orwell’s satire is to the conditions of intellectual production in our society. But Orwell leaves us no single choice. By writing in this form, he has produced something that is tailor-made to be appropriated by contrary interests. Qualities that are admired in works of art, like irony, ambiguity, and multiple levels of meaning, are kinds of doublethink.

The action of 1984 takes place in London, chief city of ‘Airstrip I’, a province of Oceania. The world seems to be dominated by three large blocs, Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia, in a permanent state of war, always two in alliance against the third in a war that may not exist, whose function according to Goldstein is largely economic and political, ensuring full employment, and justifying an austere and repressive regime. Oceania itself is said to consist of three groups, Inner Party (2 per cent), Outer Party (13 per cent), and Proles (85 per cent), or high, middle and low to use Goldstein’s categories. The Inner Party are a ruling caste. The Outer Party see themselves as part of the governing class, but have no real power.

This unreliable account of the basic structure of Oceanic society is none the less the key to understanding the structure and function of the languages of Oceania. The Appendix refers to two languages, Oldspeak and Newspeak, with Newspeak destined to replace Old-speak entirely by 2050, after which time Oceania will once again be a single linguistic community. However, what we are shown has a different structure and significance. The Proles speak a form of Old-speak, and clearly will continue to do so. Newspeak is an artificial language, spoken by no one as a first language, probably understood only by Party members. However, Party members habitually use Oldspeak amongst themselves, and Goldstein writes in Oldspeak. This form of Oldspeak is very different from Proles’ Oldspeak. The difference can be clarified through two terms associated with the modern sociolinguist, Basil Bernstein, ‘elaborated code’ and ‘restricted code’.⁴ For Bernstein, a restricted code, or use of language, is characterized by simple sentence-structures, limited reference and lack of abstract concepts and self-reflective operations. Elaborated code has the opposite qualities. Bernstein argues a correlation between restricted-code use and working-class speech in England, leading to working-class disadvantage in the educational system. He claims that the professional middle class have mastery of the two kinds of language, both restricted and elaborated codes. The middle-class speakers, in this view, have all the advantages of a restricted code, and also have access to a more powerful mode of language and thought.

Orwell’s 1984 suggests an interesting variation on this scheme. Newspeak has many features of a restricted code: complexity is severely reduced, abstracts are limited, evaluation and criticism almost eliminated. So Newspeak turns out to be a particular kind of restricted code, one specifically designed for the ruling class. Proles seem unable to transcend their restricted code in 1984, but party members are similarly limited by their own highly prestigious restricted code. Orwell here seems to have anticipated Bernstein’s categories and Bernstein’s emphasis on language and class, and language as an instrument of control, and he has added a devastating judgment on middle-class language and on the flexible options Bernstein saw as open to the middle-class speaker. The prestige language developed by the middle classes may be just another restricted code.

Orwell’s account of language was based firmly on his understanding of forms of consciousness which he saw as growing directly out of prevailing modes of social and political organization. For Orwell, the rulers in a stratified society like post-Empire Britain or Stalinist Russia needed systematically to deceive the populace about their society’s relationship to material reality. But plausible and systematic lying requires self-deception too, a willingness to entertain conviction about what one knows to be untrue. Since this self-delusion is voluntarily induced, it is doubly duplicitous. It is a kind of willed schizophrenia, to which Orwell in 1984 gave the definitive name ‘doublethink’.

In the earlier essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell described the typical forms of the language of doublethink he found in contemporary discourse, in terms that are still applicable today.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them (‘Politics and the English Language’, ed. cit., p. 166).

In the essay the political function of this kind of language is clear, but Orwell makes no attempt to understand the subtleties of the associated state of mind. This is the advance to be found in 1984. Here is the memorable evocation of Winston Smith’s experience of doublethink in the novel:

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. Thatwas the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink (1894, ed.cit., pp.31–2).

Orwell in 1984 was fascinated with doublethink and the role of language in the processes of reality-control, but he did not lose his strongly commonsense and materialist convictions. Minitrue uses massive censorship and lies as well as language reform, and Minitrue is complemented by Miniluv and the Thought Police, who use physical torture on dissidents like Winston. It is against this background that the seemingly quaint devices of Newspeak gain a sinister power and significance. In the Appendix we are shown Newspeak as an ingenious experiment in the mutilation of language. In the novel we see Newspeak in action. The action is the curious kind of censorship that is Winston’s job: rewriting past issues of The Times to falsify the records on which history is based. So the forms of Newspeak are intimately involved in the processes of censorship, or more generally the processes of ‘reality control’, as it is called in the novel.

The example Orwell explores at length in the novel is not in fact pure Newspeak, but a form of telegraphese, which is revealed as the target of the satire at this point. This is the instruction sent to Winston from some anonymous source:

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

He gives a translation of this into Oldspeak:

The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes reference to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.

In the expanded form the message seems clear enough. It’s an instruction to Winston to perform the immoral act of falsifying records again. Though it is Winston’s job to perform this act every day, day after day, he is still troubled by it when he is at home or alone and able to reflect. But at the moment of performing it, he is filled, with excitement. He especially enjoys difficult problems,

jobs so difficult andintricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem – delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guideyou except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say (ibid., p. 38).

This gives us a clue about the function of the form itself. It is an instruction to rewrite which itself has to be rewritten to be understood. It is a curious kind of censorship, one that is designed to be seen through, or decoded. The problem of decoding is probably not difficult for even a small problem ...