Language and Neoliberalism

Marnie Holborow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415744560
• eBook ISBN: 9781317512165
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Language and Neoliberalism examines the ways in which neoliberalism, or the ideology of market rule, finds expression in language. In this groundbreaking original study, Holborow shows at once the misleading character of ideological meaning and the underlying social reality from which that meaning emerges.

In universities, it is now the norm to use terms like entrepreneurial and business partnerships. How have these terms become a core component of education and gained such force? Markets have become, metaphorically, a power in their own right. They now tell governments how to act and warn them against too much public spending. Post-crash, the capitalist market continues to be crisis-prone, and in that context the neoliberal ideology remains contested.

Free of jargon and assuming no specialist knowledge, this book will strike a chord internationally by showing how neoliberal ideology has, literally, gone global in language. Drawing on Vološinov and Bakhtin, Williams and Gramsci, and introducing concepts from Marxist political economy, Language and Neoliberalism is essential reading for all interested in the intersection of linguistics/applied linguistics and politics.

1 Introduction

Language and neoliberalism – issues and framework

Optimizing the customer footprint across geographies was how one very large financial services multinational described, in a press release, how it was axing over a thousand people across its branches. Such language hardly surprises us as we have become only too aware of company buzzwords, PR language, management speak, corporate phrases all around us. Value added transparency and customer-centric may be what fills strategic plans and brochures in private companies and increasingly the public sector, but this corporate-speak now figures strongly across society as a whole. Mission has replaced policy, entrepreneurial has become the most prized social trait, valued customers are what we are and competitive and market efficient what we could be. The widespread use of financial language, as in leveraging, and of management speak as in deliverables, has permeated many areas of our lives (Kellaway 2007; Seacombe 2011; Beckwith 2006). The existence of Brand Me portals to help students prepare themselves for the employment market is an indication of the depth of penetration of the market into the way we speak.

Why has such pervasive use of corporate jargon arisen? The ‘marketization of language’ (Cameron 2001; Hasan 2003; Kelly-Holmes and Mautner 2010; Fairclough 2010) may have been evident across much of the English-speaking world for a generation, but does its presence now – paradoxically more pervasive since the market crash of 2008 – indicate that it has irrevocably become part of our social world? Is it symptomatic of a deeper ideological shift which reflects the apparent unassailable position of neoliberalism? The sweeping presence of what one writer calls ‘creeping linguistic neoliberalism’ (Mirowski 2013: 117) certainly raises forcefully the relationship between language and ideology. This is the subject of this book.

‘Vocabularies of the economy’, Doreen Massey claims, have altered our everyday encounters. A T-shirt worn by an attendant in an art gallery bearing the words ‘customer liaison’ converts a spontaneous discussion about a picture into a commercial transaction. Being described as ‘customers’ on trains, buses and in hospitals means that ‘a specific activity is erased by a general relationship of buying and selling that is given precedence over it’ (Massey 2013: 3). ‘The vocabulary of customer, consumer choice, of markets moulds both our conception or ourselves and our understanding of and relationship to the world’ (2013: 5). She describes the use of this language, in a Gramscian framework, as ‘crucial to the formation of the ideological scaffolding of the hegemonic common sense’ and to ‘the establishment of neoliberal hegemony’ (2013: 4).

Her claim is that this new dominant ideology, ‘inculcated through prevailing names and descriptions, steers us towards being “enrolled in a self-identification” process’, just as strong as any ‘material entanglement in debt, pensions and mortgages’ (2013: 5). These vocabularies, which reclassify our roles, identities and relationships, ‘embody and enforce the ideology of neoliberalism’ (2013: 6). She identifies various bundles of economic words, such as wealth, output, and growth, which reinforce in their terms the dominant conception of the well-being of both individuals and societies. The widespread use of investment, expenditure and speculation, and also earned and unearned income, contribute to the financialization and marketization of our society. These ‘vocabularies of the economy’ and the attendant neoliberal ideology they imply is the stronger for their being accepted by all mainstream political currents, including social democracy, which ‘accept the dominant architecture of the system in place’ (2013: 6). ‘The assumption that markets are natural is so deeply rooted in the structure of thought that even the fact that it is an assumption seems to have been lost to view’; ‘this is “real hegemony”’ indeed, she claims (2013: 16). Her call is for the current ‘common sense’ of language to be challenged root and branch (2013: 17).

Massey’s observations touch on the central theme of this book: how language and ideology intersect and how neoliberalism has deeply influenced the language of today. This introductory chapter will first present some theoretical issues concerning the interplay between language and ideology, and then outline how the term ‘neoliberalism’ will be used in the chapters that follow.

Ideology, ‘common sense’ and language

The inclusion of Gramsci’s terms in Massey’s discussion of language and ideology is apt. Gramsci developed a distinctive interpretation of the dynamic and tensions of ideology and how these were reproduced in language. Gramsci’s discussion of language and ideology provides a useful starting point to examine the articulation of neoliberal ideology in language. His writings have been recently reinterpreted, highlighting his sensitivity to the social and political importance of language (Ives 2004; Thomas 2009) and re-translations of his work (Gramsci 2011) have opened new avenues of understanding of his sometimes densely expressed ideas.¹ The brief section which follows makes no pretensions to capture fully his understanding of ideology and hegemony; rather it aims to identify the strands of Gramsci’s thought which serve as an entry point into a discussion of the presence of ideology in language and which, interwoven with other Marxist interpretations of language, underpin the approach taken in this book.

First, Gramsci identified metaphor as being crucial to the articulation of ideology in language. For Gramsci ‘language is always metaphorical’ (Gramsci 1971: 450) and ideology often lies metaphorically embedded in language. Identifying the ideological role of metaphor involves a ‘critical and historicist conception’ of language (1971: 451) which locates the metaphorical–ideological significance of a word in its accumulated social history. One example he gives is the word disgrace, whose metaphorical origins are woven so deeply into its structure that the religious connotation has faded from view (1971: 452). Gramsci described how a ‘new metaphorical meaning spreads with the spread of the new culture which gives a precise meaning to words acquired from other languages’ (2011: 187). Words can mutate over different societies and historical periods, absorbing ‘in metaphorical form’ (1971: 451) meanings from the past but they can also be infused with new ideological meanings by new ruling orders. He gave as an example the metaphorical language of religion, which is given different ideological inflections by different social classes. The ‘popular turns of phrase’ (1971: 328) are cultivated within ‘the whole mass of the faithful’ who adopt a conception which is not their own, but is ‘borrowed from another group’ yet which they affirm ‘verbally’ because this is ‘the conception which it follows in normal times’ (1971: 326–28). The historical residues within language, as Peter Ives notes, are ‘fundamental in operations of power prestige and hegemony’ (Ives 2004: 88). Gramsci also implies in parts of his writings that he sees language as metaphorical in the broader sense that it can be used as a metaphor for social and political relations.² However understood, metaphor, by drawing together unlike things and declaring that they have something in common, provides a linguistic mechanism for the articulation of ideology in language. As I show in Chapters 3 and 4, the personification of the market and the market as metaphor, in different forms and guises, carries deep ideological significance and serves as reinforcement of the neoliberal message.

Gramsci’s historico-ideological understanding of metaphor flows naturally from his dialectical appreciation of language and social change, a view more fully outlined (contemporaneously) by Vološinov, who speaks of the ‘social life’ of the verbal sign (Vološinov 1973: 21). This theme is also repeated in historical approaches, which have seen the metaphorical dimension to the meaning of words as a complex expression of changing political consciousness. Words both inherit meanings from the past but also incorporate new meanings reflecting the political priorities of social classes in the present. Christopher Hill’s study of the changing significance of the word ‘revolution’ in the seventeenth century is a case in point (Hill 1990).³ The appropriation of words from the past for the neoliberal lexicon – such as entrepreneur, as we see in Chapters 5 and 6 – and used in different contexts with different meanings, adds the authority of tradition to new ideological turns.

Second, both ideology and language are linked for Gramsci to the question of social consciousness. Language represents our potential to form a general view of the world which means, as Gramsci puts it, ‘everyone is a philosopher, though in his own way unconsciously, since even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in “language”, there is contained a specific conception of the world’ (Gramsci 1971: 323; 2011: 352).⁴ (Gramsci often writes language in inverted commas, indicating his awareness of the conventional and the new meaning of words, and how ideology can take shape through marking the different semantic layers of a word).⁵ Insofar as both language and ideology involve the ability to generalize beyond the particular and the present, to make abstractions about the world in which we live, they overlap and are interconnected. Gramsci writes ‘language is essentially a collective term which does not presuppose any single thing existing in time and space’ (1971: 349). Without having read The German Ideology, he arrives at a remarkably similar view to that held by Marx of language and ideology. Marx saw language as the mode of being of thoughts, as a form of ‘practical consciousness’ (1974: 51).⁶ Similarly, language for Gramsci is a concrete social activity in which everyone is engaged and, in so far as it forms how we see the world and interpret it, it is also effectively ideological. This coming together of language and ideology for the individual, Gramsci stresses, takes place in response and reaction to socially dominant ideological conceptions of the world ‘mechanically imposed by the external environment’ (1971: 323) by the dominant social class, which attempts to shape social consciousness within the confines of existing social relations.

Third, Gramsci’s well-known concept of common sense also has a linguistic dimension. Gramsci alludes repeatedly to the role of language in the legitimization of common sense. Common sense, for Gramsci, consists of a spontaneous set of beliefs which together express a conception of the world which takes the social order as ‘the way things are’.⁷ It is apparently the ‘spontaneous feelings’ that people have, ‘the traditional popular conception of the world – what is unimaginatively called “instinct” although it too is in fact a primitive and elementary historical acquisition’ (1971: 199). Common sense gains currency through language. Gramsci describes it as ‘a conception of the world “in whatever language”’ (1971: 323), and ‘superficially explicit or verbal’, ‘inherited form the past and uncritically absorbed’ (1971: 333).

Because we use language as it already circulates in society, because we socially inherit linguistic use, our ‘unthinking’ engagement in language can often appear to accept uncritically its ideological meanings. For example, when we are told that our local health centre has a customer care policy, it may appeal in an immediate sense in that it tells us we are being looked after but, at a deeper layer of meaning, it draws us into a world in which all services are seen in market terms. Or when we are told that we are living in an information or a knowledge society these phrases may seem, on the face of it, to reflect accurately the changes brought about by the digital revolution. Yet they also subtly detach human capacities from the humans that possess them, and make society appear to be driven by ‘things’, not people. The apparent immediate acceptance of such meanings represents, for Gramsci, a way of thinking that is ‘fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential’ (1971: 419) in that it places us in a passive position vis-à-vis the social world. Common sense as propagated by ruling orders is often, as he puts it, ‘neophobe or conservative’ (1971: 423), representing a view of the world which reinforces the existing social order. Gramsci’s common sense, as Kate Crehan (2011) notes, encompasses its ‘givenness’ in that it confronts us as an external reality. But this does not mean that it does not contain contradictions and the potential for change.

Common sense is linked to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the economic order and this connection is particularly important in matters of ideology and language. Hegemony is often loosely understood as consensual power or, following Raymond Williams, the ‘structures of feeling’ (Simpson and Mayr 2010; Woolard 1998: 238). However, it is important to understand that Gramsci sees hegemony primarily as a socially imposed and historically specific method of rule. Though hegemony is manifest at many different levels of society – economic, institutional, cultural and linguistic – it derives its force from those who, in Gramsci’s well-chosen words, have material forces as their ‘content’ and ideologies as their ‘form’ (1971: 377). Gramsci’s writings were very much grounded in Marx, and following Antonio Labriola (upon whose translations of Marx Gramsci relied) he considered that the ultimate shaping forces in human history were a society’s basic economic structures and social class system (Gramsci 1971: 459; Labriola 2005; see also Crehan 2011). In some places in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci makes the source of hegemony in capitalist society very clear: ‘the “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group … is historically caused by the prestige and consequent confidence that the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production’ (1971: 12).⁸ Meanings in language are also subject, albeit more diffusely and not straightforwardly, to the same social pressures from the ruling class, involving the manufacture of consent. The apparently agentless workings of the market (which I explore in Chapter 4) or the representation of society as a collection of individual entrepreneurs or human capitals (described in Chapter 5) are verbal attempts to linguistically ‘manufacture’ neoliberal consent, and its articulation through powerful public channels, as I show, disperses this ‘common sense’ far and wide. Through oft-repeated phrases, used in set contexts, specific ideologies are asserted on behalf of specific social interests. Exhorting everyone and society as a whole to live within their means may seem like a logical statement for survival, but when uttered by a politician addressing the population at large it represents a conscious erasure of differences of wealth, a dimension which actually affects the feasibility of the proposition. Austerity may sound like a sensible response to an economic crisis but, as I will show in Chapter 6, it subtly covers over the reasons why it is supposedly needed and the fact that it hits the poorest hardest. The ideological theme takes shape from the class interests of its speakers, and gives it what Vološinov calls a ‘uni-accentual’ character.

Fourth, ideological hegemony is not a settled question, neither from the point of view of those who promote it nor for those at its receiving end. Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony was understood as an overall strategy which included consent but also included force, and was deployed throughout society in a homogeneous politico-economic bloc. Peter Thomas emphasizes that hegemony in Gramsci is ‘a theory of class power’ (2009: 224, emphasis in the original) – a social strategy which runs in two directions, most weightily from above in terms of existing capitalist ruling class power but also, and a characteristic often omitted from cultural commentaries, from below in the struggle of the masses of ordinary people to envisage and establish a different social order. Hegemony, as Mayr notes, is only ever achieved partially and temporarily as ‘an unstable equilibrium’ and one that requires constant remaking (Mayr 2008: 14). This changing dynamic of ideological hegemony is not captured in static notions, such as ‘inculcation’ (Massey 2013), or ‘internalisation’ (Mesthrie et al. 2009: 316). The power of Gramsci’s common sense was that it was neither fixed nor guaranteed, but constantly tempered by people’s actual experience of the social world. Common sense ‘inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed’ can under certain conditions move ‘beyond common sense’ and become ‘a critical conception’ or ‘good sense’ (Gramsci 1971: 423, see also 333–34; 2011: 369). In other words, our daily experience of the social world seems both to confirm and to run counter to many of the truisms of established common sense. This can jolt us abruptly into new ways of thinking and speaking about the world – what Gramsci called ‘good sense’. The articulation of this new awareness, informed by practical social experience, can only prevail and supplant traditional forms of common sense, Gramsci was at pains to point out, if it is given collective organization and political expression.

The same tensions and contradictions are present in the articulation of ideology in language. A dominant ideology may say one thing about people’s lives which their immediate life experience contradicts and leads them to say something different. Despite the apparent weight and overwhelming diffusion of neoliberal ideology, social consciousness is never smooth and singular; it is fractured and contradictory. A verbal and ideological rupture is most evident in the emergence of new collectively articulated language in mass social movements. Against a backdrop of the official neoliberal language of trickle-down economics, or the need for austerity, deepening social deprivation and greater social inequality can give rise to alternative representations. One such representation was the verbal labelling of ‘the one per cent’ for the top wealthy few who were profiting from the crisis, a designation which rapidly caught on across the world. It struck a blow against neoliberal common sense and became what one might call ‘good sense’. As Noam Chomsky put it at the time of the US Occupy Movement, ‘there were things that were sort of known, but in the margins, hidden,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: language and neoliberalism – issues and framework
• 2. Neoliberalism and language as a commodity
• 3. Markets, metaphors and neoliberal ideology
• 4. Language and the market metaphor
• 5. The neoliberal reinvention of entrepreneur
• 6. Austerity and the entrepreneurial university
• 7. Conclusion: implications for understanding ideology in language
• References
• Index