the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent

This post is to be read in conjunction with the one on Rumsfeld. The following is from Fredric Jameson’s 2002 book Singular Modernity:

In Oskar Lafontaine’s recent memoir of his fate under the new Schroeder administration in Germany, he complains of the widespread description of his market adversaries in that government as ‘modernizers’:

The words ‘modernization’ and ‘modernity’ have been degraded to fashionable concepts under which you can think anything at all. If you try to figure out what the people called ‘modernizers’ today understand under the term ‘modernity’, you find that it is little else than economic and social adaptation to the supposed constraints of the global market. [..] Thus, the Anglo-Saxons have no legal protection against layoffs, so if we want to be modern we have get rid of our protection in that area as well. In many countries the social safety net is being seriously reduced, so if we want to be modern we have to reduce it drastically as well [..] Modernity has simply become a word for the conformity to such economic constraints. The question of how we want to live together and what kind of society we want has become a completely unmodern question and is no longer posed at all.

So, once again, we have the confiscation of certain key words, their transformation into mere signals, the replacement of meaningful speech by vague noises of approbation or vilification, and this in the service of a political agenda. Jameson continues:

If free-market positions can be systematically identified with modernity and habitually grasped as representing what is modern, then the free market people have won a fundamental victory.. The point is that the holders of the opposite position have nowhere to go terminologically. The adversaries of the free market, such as the socialists, can only be classed in the negative or privative category of the unmodern, the traditionalist, or even, since they clearly resist progress and modernity, of the hardliners.

So, it is not just that words are turned into boo-hoorah terms. In each case, the ‘hoorah’ term is used to naturalise a particular line of capitalism’s development, to equate the development of the 'free-market' (itself a significant terminological victory) with development per se, to render inevitable what is only contingent, to insist, effectively, that ‘the economy’ is ultimately not a matter for democratic decision, any more than the weather is. Indeed, the placing of the economy outside democratic ‘interference’ has long been equated with ‘freedom’ as such.

It’s a familiar notion – that political struggle is partly a discursive struggle over the ‘ownership’ and the right to use certain words. It would seem from the above that the emptier the words are of meaning the greater their political usefulness – so that, for example, it is only because ‘modernity’ has been turned into a mere signifier that it can then be attached to such things as ‘no legal protection against lay-offs’ and so on. It is this perversion of language by the powerful that radicals must ceaselessly contest, not by insisting on equally arbitrary meanings but by restoring to words their forgotten potentials, by renaming the world in such a way that it becomes newly intelligible and open to transformation.