Capitalist Mass Media and Tempo
Scholars have long argued that the language of political discourse, among other factors, is a key influence on the bounds and nature of politics. George Orwell, originally in Politics And The English Language and later in 1984, suggested that political discourse -- the language of politics -- requires careful thought and that the increasing “decay” of English in modernity ultimately has political consequences (Politics and the English Language 1). Capitalist mass media is, perhaps, the most easily observable and grave instance of the decay of political discourse -- and, moving from modernity to postmodernity and the Information Era, capitalist mass media moves to the eminently documented and documentable internet. As the primary frame for the decay of political language, Hartmut Rosa’s essential text, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, offers a view of capitalist modernity that argues that institutions are caught in a “feedback system,” largely fueled by the capitalist mandate to increase the frequency of cycles of production and consumption in order to generate ever more profit (Rosa 157). Applied to media, capitalist mass media increases tempo with production cycles, or otherwise experiences what Rosa calls “desynchronization” -- literally, being out of time with societal structures (Rosa 17). Thus, media manifests in more and more accelerated forms, with the viral clickbait website, BuzzFeed, being the current apex of this phenomenon. Mass media under capitalism, then, serves in its own feedback system; political systems and actions in late modernity are complex and demand careful discourse. However, accelerated production and consumption precludes the ability of media to decelerate, thus mainstream political discourse reduces political action to a minimum in order to keep pace with modern society. This contributes to the acceleration of the pace of life and the phenomenon which presupposes the reduction of political discourse itself.
Orwell’s Politics And The English Language addresses a number of Rosa’s concerns about social acceleration, without specifically naming acceleration as the root cause as Rosa does. Orwell begins Politics And The English Language with a self-conscious lament about the state of the English language, especially in regards to political discourse,
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes[...]Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely” (Politics and the English Language 1).
What Orwell describes as a “sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light” reflects a similar passage in Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (Politics and the English Language 1). Rosa has a number of terms that reflect Orwell’s sentimentality, ranging from “the emergency brake” to “a radical and revolutionary exit from history” to, most importantly, “a revolution against progress” (Rosa 321-22). The sentimentality that Orwell expresses in Politics And The English Language is in some senses a desire for Rosa’s revolution against progress.
What Orwell misconstrues in his theories across both Politics and 1984 (in the invented Newspeak) is the ideological dimension of the shape of language, and the point in the feedback cycle that ultimately causes the phenomenon of language decay (1984). While Orwell correctly identifies that the English language has an ideological dimension, “the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes,” he fails to identify that speed itself can and is an ideological dimension of capitalist modernity, and a major one (Politics and the English Language 1).
What Orwell calls the decay of language can, in relation to democracy, capitalism, and political discourse, be formulated as a desynchronization of language. This is to say, the language of capitalism and the language of democracy are not compatible, are unable to achieve synergy. Rosa argues that democratic political steering is essentially too slow for capitalist modernity:
This is particularly true for aspirations of democratic control: as will be shown, democratic will formation and decision-making processes are not only time consuming per se, but even develop an increasing need for time because of late modern transformations of associational structures and the public sphere. As a result of this temporal desynchronization, the relation between political steering and social acceleration in developed industrial states has almost completely reversed[...]holding on to such aspirations of steering and regulation proves to be primarily an economic brake (Rosa 205).
The language of capitalism, then, puts extreme pressure on the language of democratic discourse to accelerate. On the other hand, the language of democracy requires a long time to develop, and theoretically pressures capitalist structure to decelerate. The question arises, then, which pressure is greater and which system “wins” this desynchronous conflict.
Accelerated cycles of capitalist consumption make a number of demands on mainstream discourse. The first and most visible of these demands is the demand for consumption. The Propaganda Model Revisited suggests that, “[media] performance is incompatible with a truly democratic political culture” (Herman). In Chomsky’s and Herman’s formulation, this is because of the number of ideological filters that news media must pass through before the public is exposed to stories considered newsworthy. Chomsky and Herman identify five filters. Two of these filters are especially relevant to the acceleration of mass media in capitalism. They are: the need for an environment supportive of capitalism, so that advertising can take place without critical analysis (incidentally, the constant interruption of advertising in mass media is an additional hindrance to focused democratic discourse, to be discussed later); the dominant ideology, again one of capitalism but also one of anti-ism (at various times anti-communism, anti-terrorism, and so on) (Herman).
The structure of mass media alone gives the answer to the question of time-competition between democracy and capitalism, ultimately. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman outline the function of mass media in their influential concept of the Propaganda Model. Because “the mainstream media, as elite institutions, commonly frame news and allow debate only within the parameters of elite interests,” it is then safe to assume that the dominating voices in public discourse are that of mainstream media (Herman). Herman adds that “the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market structure[...]They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people[...]they are largely funded by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment” (Herman). Taking these two points into account -- the dominance of mass media and the ownership of mass media by elite capitalist forces -- implies a foregone conclusion. There is, in essence, no direct conflict between democracy and capitalism, because capitalism has, in late modernity, already hijacked the dominant vehicle of potential democratic discourse. Thus, democracy and capitalist discourse remain desynchronized but further take place in different spheres, as capitalism has already always won the competition for time.
The struggle for time resources in capitalism is, in fact, a long struggle with an important history. Rosa asserts that time in capitalist modernity there is,
A threefold decoupling of industrial work time from traditional time patterns of everyday life. 1. In the first place, the time of wage labor was bound to the standards of the mechanical clock and thus completely separated from the rhythms of nature that had structured social life[...]The decoupling is visible in a particularly drastic form in shift work, which is, as Marx underscored in Capital, a[n][...]natural consequence of the fact that time remains without qualities in the capitalist economy; in runs during the day and at night, in summers as in winters, at the same pace and in a linear fashion (Rosa 165).
So much so does capitalism inhabit the temporal spheres of modernity, that capitalism attempts to appropriate the force of labor for all twenty-four hours, each day. This has a number of effects on the sphere of democratic discourse, all contrary to the time-consuming and collective nature of democracy at a fundamental level.
First, no time is safe from capitalist language-intrusions. Between the time spent at work (which differs based on shifts for most workers) and the time-space allotted for political discourse, that is, capitalist discourse through the mass media, there is scarcely an hour of the day that citizens, even individuals who put forth a cursory effort to be informed and involved politically, are not exposed to mainstream consumerist and capitalist discourse.
Second, shift work appropriates labor for all twenty-four hours of each day, fragmenting the available opportunities to participate collectively in democracy. With shift work ensuring that production, and by extension consumption, can occur during any of the qualityless hours of a day cycle, work is necessarily done in a time-environment where collective patterns are, in Rosa’s words, “dissolved in favor of a ‘qualityless,’ perpetual time of simultaneity” (Rosa 165). With capitalist production occurring simultaneously to the temporal space for democratic action, it becomes impossible for workers to collectively synchronize their temporal spheres of lifetime (work, leisure, political, rest) in a way that allows them to effectively participate in the greater discourse of democracy.
There is another aspect to the twenty-four hour society, another quality to capitalism’s time without time, time without quality, and that aspect returns, at last, directly to the media sphere, ironically a major threat to democratic discourse. Mugdha Rai and Simon Cottle, in their essay Global mediations: On the changing ecology of satellite television news, argue that,
In reality a ‘CNNization’ of television news is taking place: networks such as CNN and the BBC remain the agenda setters in the global news market with smaller, regional players monitoring their content and adopting their models of production [emphasis added]. Rather than a diversified ‘global public sphere’, then, these regional channels represent a universalization of ‘US-style’ journalism and an increasing homogenization of news structures and content around the world (Thussu, 2003) (Rai, Cottle 4).
The so called rise of twenty-four hour news coverage has a number of effects, ranging from factual errors on the simplistic end to a major force for social acceleration on the other (Rosenburg). Ultimately, what this means for the temporal-space of democratic discourse is that, in addition to twenty-four hour production and consumption, in addition to conflicting spheres of rest, work, and leisure, the political sphere is continually dominated by the discourse of mass media with an inherent embedding in capitalist ideology. Here, it is important to recognize the conclusion that twenty four hour media does not offer options, but homogeneous corporate mass media sources steeped inherently in capitalist interest, as discussed with Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model. Coupled with the conclusion, already established, that capitalism is not compatible with democracy, and the chronopolitics of capitalism are inherent domination by accelerated capitalist discourse, twenty-four hours per day.
Now that the ubiquity of capitalist discourse has been established, along with the lifeworld of workers and democratic movements in accelerated capitalist modernity, it is pertinent to move on and examine the language of accelerated capitalist modernity. This discourse, as this essay will illustrate, results in the decay of language and a loss of nuance -- these factors then preclude the ability to effectively analyse the state of modernity, already established to be complex, and increasingly so.
Speed and acceleration are ultimately the motors of the decay of language, and, according to Rosa, they operate through the capitalist economic mode (Rosa 74). Marx identified this cause as well, suggesting that the capitalist class, in order to continue existing, needs to “constantly revolutioniz[ing] the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the relations of society as a whole[...]uninterrupted disturbance[...]everlasting uncertainty and movement distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones” (Marx). Marx comes very close to identifying acceleration as ideology (Marx’s “everlasting[...]movement” recognizes the kinesis that the elite classes espouse), as Rosa does, and Marx’s formulation is essential to Rosa’s. According to Rosa,
In the capitalist economic system, however, the continually rising speed of production necessarily goes hand in hand with the escalation of speeds in distribution and consumption, which are in turn driven by technological innovations and thus share responsibility for the fact that the material structures of modern society are reproduced and altered in ever shorter periods of time….simultaneously characterized by an acceleration of processes of organization, decision, administration, and control” (Rosa 74).
Thus, in Rosa’s formulation, the ideology of speed is inherently a capitalist ideology. Technological advancement, promoted with a religious zealotry by all manner of mainstream political parties, including conservative parties, though more selectively, is an underlying ideological and social given. Because of this nearly unquestioned support for speed in mainstream discourse, speed, often under the propagandistic moniker of progress, has a social equality with morality. Indeed, numerous fascists subscribed explicitly to this new ideology, this, in the words of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurist and Mussolini supporter, “New Religion-Morality of Speed.”
Returning to Orwell, whose writing on the decay of English political discourse is important though carries flaws, no vessel for the acceleration of language is more potent than that of the cliché. Though Orwell does not name the cliché as such, he does assert that,
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like sections of a prefabricated hen-house (Politics and the English Language 2).
It is not the intent of this essay to contend that all political writing is incompetent; however, the authors cited up to this point (including Rosa, Marx, Chomsky and Herman) are unusually erudite. In the late modern context relevant to this essay, mass media, often claiming to lack ideology but dominating the ideological discourse of late modernity, is the prime perpetrator of incompetent political writing.
The “prefabricated hen-house” Orwell refers to is the essence of cliché and its effect on English political discourse (Politics and the English Language 2). From the perspective of sentence construction, writing word-to-word, rather than the phrase-to-phrase writing Orwell designates as characteristic of modern English prose, slows down the writing process. One must understand the intricacies and precision of each word when writing word-to-word; phrase-to-phrase writing, by contrast, requires only that the writer understand the gist of a prefabricated sequence of words -- the cliché. This allows writers to construct discourse much more quickly and, as yet to be proved, palatable to a much greater audience. Additionally, as a cousin to Rosenberg’s discussion of journalistic ineptitude in an accelerated, twenty-four hour media environment in No Time To Think, the cliché precludes the writer’s ability to think critically about their own writing. Their writing emerges from a place of uncritical acceptance (the essence of the cliché), and, if it undergoes editorial inspection at all, appears to the editor as vague-enough-to-be-true -- lacking in any sort of authoritative meaning, but, to the editor’s perception, not explicitly false either.
The “prefabricated hen-house” adopts another meaning, though it is unclear if Orwell intended this meaning -- the stagnant nature of capitalist discourse. The hen-house, interestingly attached to the word prefabricated implying both speed as well as connoting capitalist production, allows for only certain ideological discourses. Prefabricated by the mass media elite in capitalism, clichéd discourse, in the words of Herman, “commonly frame[s] news and allow[s] debate only within the parameters of elite interests[...]where ordinary citizens are not aware of their own stake in an issue or are immobilized by effective propaganda, the media will serve elite interests uncompromisingly (Herman).
The cliché is the continued reconstruction of the vaguest and most palatable elements of capitalist discourse in late modernity. As already discussed, Rosa declares that the time in capitalism has monetary value (to engage in a bit of hypocrisy: time is money) and is without quality. The idea that “material structures of modern society are reproduced and altered in ever shorter periods of time,” the appropriation of not just labor but language into the twenty-four hour cycle, the experience of time Rosa refers to as the “short-short pattern,” is highly relevant here (Rosa 142).
In mass media, the viral clickbait website BuzzFeed epitomizes the short-short pattern of time as it applies to political language. On February 4, 2014, BuzzFeed published its internal style guide -- the guidelines BuzzFeed writers must adhere to when writing their articles. In BuzzFeed’s own words, “BuzzFeed publishes news and entertainment in the language of the web, and in our work we rely on a style guide to govern everything from hard-hitting journalism to fun quizzes….This style guide will be updated regularly to ensure it remains relevant and responds accordingly to changes in language and common, casual usage (Favilla, Paolone). Though an online news source, and with frequent articles appealing to the moderately liberal white populace, BuzzFeed nonetheless adheres to the propaganda model. BuzzFeed always conducts discourse in the prefabricated hen-house and often represents a relatively liberal viewpoint within that paradigm, but only on issues “where the elites are divided” (Herman).
At any rate, BuzzFeed’s own writing manifesto is illustrative of its role in the decay of the English language. In a review of BuzzFeed’s style guide published in TIME, Steinmetz says that, “News organizations’ style guides, along with fusty cousins like dictionaries and encyclopedias, don’t have a reputation for being super-casual or quick to adapt….But the situation is different over at BuzzFeed” (Steinmetz). Indeed, BuzzFeed’s abuse of language stems from its speed, following cultural trends and ensuring that BuzzFeed keeps pace with the breakneck speed of internet culture -- a microcosm of the feedback system where BuzzFeed itself feeds viral elements of language which propagate, alter, and return to BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed’s Word List (part of their internal style guide) is a litany of these whiplash adaptations to internet culture; while Steinmetz refers to them as “zeitgeist-y language trends,” it remains that BuzzFeed’s attempt to stay synchronized with accelerated media culture has malevolent effects on political discourse. BuzzFeed and mass media like it undermine democratic discourse, and facilitates a consumer capitalist culture that is highly desynchronized due to frenetic media production, consumption, and lack of consistency or language capable of building identity -- BuzzFeed is synchronic (Steinmetz).
BuzzFeed, as a representative of accelerated capitalist mass media, thus poses an identity-threat to the discourse of democracy. On the formation of identity, Rosa says,
If one defines identity as that which lends a subject coherence and continuity across varying contexts, then the concept of situational identity seems to become a sort of contradictio in adjecto. Yet if one understands identity as a sense of who one is that provides an ability to orient oneself and to act, then situational identities are quite conceivable as, so to speak, logical vanishing points of heightened individualization and acceleration[...]Ultimately the concept simply indicates that there are no longer any definitions of identity that are per se temporally stable (Rosa 239).
Applied to the abuse of discourse by capitalist mass media, this ultimately robs the democratic discourse of both substance and form. Orwell’s prefabricated hen-house (the cliché) limits political discourse to the substance of accelerated capitalism; incompatible with democracy. Media outlets like BuzzFeed, following the ideology of breakneck speed, limits the form, the identity of potential democratic action. In Rosa’s formulation, this constitutive lack of substance and form means that democratic movements face a double dilemma of identity. Unable to form an identity and thus unable to “orient oneself and to act,” democratic movements must inherently be subversive to capitalism and accelerated capitalist time-structure, or else become ineffectual and relegate themselves to facilitating the domination of speed.
Orwell’s Politics And The English Language addresses a number of Rosa’s concerns about social acceleration, without specifically naming acceleration as the root cause as Rosa does. Orwell begins Politics And The English Language with a self-conscious lament about the state of the English language, especially in regards to political discourse,
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes[...]Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely” (Politics and the English Language 1).
What Orwell describes as a “sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light” reflects a similar passage in Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (Politics and the English Language 1). Rosa has a number of terms that reflect Orwell’s sentimentality, ranging from “the emergency brake” to “a radical and revolutionary exit from history” to, most importantly, “a revolution against progress” (Rosa 321-22). The sentimentality that Orwell expresses in Politics And The English Language is in some senses a desire for Rosa’s revolution against progress.
What Orwell misconstrues in his theories across both Politics and 1984 (in the invented Newspeak) is the ideological dimension of the shape of language, and the point in the feedback cycle that ultimately causes the phenomenon of language decay (1984). While Orwell correctly identifies that the English language has an ideological dimension, “the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes,” he fails to identify that speed itself can and is an ideological dimension of capitalist modernity, and a major one (Politics and the English Language 1).
What Orwell calls the decay of language can, in relation to democracy, capitalism, and political discourse, be formulated as a desynchronization of language. This is to say, the language of capitalism and the language of democracy are not compatible, are unable to achieve synergy. Rosa argues that democratic political steering is essentially too slow for capitalist modernity:
This is particularly true for aspirations of democratic control: as will be shown, democratic will formation and decision-making processes are not only time consuming per se, but even develop an increasing need for time because of late modern transformations of associational structures and the public sphere. As a result of this temporal desynchronization, the relation between political steering and social acceleration in developed industrial states has almost completely reversed[...]holding on to such aspirations of steering and regulation proves to be primarily an economic brake (Rosa 205).
The language of capitalism, then, puts extreme pressure on the language of democratic discourse to accelerate. On the other hand, the language of democracy requires a long time to develop, and theoretically pressures capitalist structure to decelerate. The question arises, then, which pressure is greater and which system “wins” this desynchronous conflict.
Accelerated cycles of capitalist consumption make a number of demands on mainstream discourse. The first and most visible of these demands is the demand for consumption. The Propaganda Model Revisited suggests that, “[media] performance is incompatible with a truly democratic political culture” (Herman). In Chomsky’s and Herman’s formulation, this is because of the number of ideological filters that news media must pass through before the public is exposed to stories considered newsworthy. Chomsky and Herman identify five filters. Two of these filters are especially relevant to the acceleration of mass media in capitalism. They are: the need for an environment supportive of capitalism, so that advertising can take place without critical analysis (incidentally, the constant interruption of advertising in mass media is an additional hindrance to focused democratic discourse, to be discussed later); the dominant ideology, again one of capitalism but also one of anti-ism (at various times anti-communism, anti-terrorism, and so on) (Herman).
The structure of mass media alone gives the answer to the question of time-competition between democracy and capitalism, ultimately. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman outline the function of mass media in their influential concept of the Propaganda Model. Because “the mainstream media, as elite institutions, commonly frame news and allow debate only within the parameters of elite interests,” it is then safe to assume that the dominating voices in public discourse are that of mainstream media (Herman). Herman adds that “the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market structure[...]They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people[...]they are largely funded by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment” (Herman). Taking these two points into account -- the dominance of mass media and the ownership of mass media by elite capitalist forces -- implies a foregone conclusion. There is, in essence, no direct conflict between democracy and capitalism, because capitalism has, in late modernity, already hijacked the dominant vehicle of potential democratic discourse. Thus, democracy and capitalist discourse remain desynchronized but further take place in different spheres, as capitalism has already always won the competition for time.
The struggle for time resources in capitalism is, in fact, a long struggle with an important history. Rosa asserts that time in capitalist modernity there is,
A threefold decoupling of industrial work time from traditional time patterns of everyday life. 1. In the first place, the time of wage labor was bound to the standards of the mechanical clock and thus completely separated from the rhythms of nature that had structured social life[...]The decoupling is visible in a particularly drastic form in shift work, which is, as Marx underscored in Capital, a[n][...]natural consequence of the fact that time remains without qualities in the capitalist economy; in runs during the day and at night, in summers as in winters, at the same pace and in a linear fashion (Rosa 165).
So much so does capitalism inhabit the temporal spheres of modernity, that capitalism attempts to appropriate the force of labor for all twenty-four hours, each day. This has a number of effects on the sphere of democratic discourse, all contrary to the time-consuming and collective nature of democracy at a fundamental level.
First, no time is safe from capitalist language-intrusions. Between the time spent at work (which differs based on shifts for most workers) and the time-space allotted for political discourse, that is, capitalist discourse through the mass media, there is scarcely an hour of the day that citizens, even individuals who put forth a cursory effort to be informed and involved politically, are not exposed to mainstream consumerist and capitalist discourse.
Second, shift work appropriates labor for all twenty-four hours of each day, fragmenting the available opportunities to participate collectively in democracy. With shift work ensuring that production, and by extension consumption, can occur during any of the qualityless hours of a day cycle, work is necessarily done in a time-environment where collective patterns are, in Rosa’s words, “dissolved in favor of a ‘qualityless,’ perpetual time of simultaneity” (Rosa 165). With capitalist production occurring simultaneously to the temporal space for democratic action, it becomes impossible for workers to collectively synchronize their temporal spheres of lifetime (work, leisure, political, rest) in a way that allows them to effectively participate in the greater discourse of democracy.
There is another aspect to the twenty-four hour society, another quality to capitalism’s time without time, time without quality, and that aspect returns, at last, directly to the media sphere, ironically a major threat to democratic discourse. Mugdha Rai and Simon Cottle, in their essay Global mediations: On the changing ecology of satellite television news, argue that,
In reality a ‘CNNization’ of television news is taking place: networks such as CNN and the BBC remain the agenda setters in the global news market with smaller, regional players monitoring their content and adopting their models of production [emphasis added]. Rather than a diversified ‘global public sphere’, then, these regional channels represent a universalization of ‘US-style’ journalism and an increasing homogenization of news structures and content around the world (Thussu, 2003) (Rai, Cottle 4).
The so called rise of twenty-four hour news coverage has a number of effects, ranging from factual errors on the simplistic end to a major force for social acceleration on the other (Rosenburg). Ultimately, what this means for the temporal-space of democratic discourse is that, in addition to twenty-four hour production and consumption, in addition to conflicting spheres of rest, work, and leisure, the political sphere is continually dominated by the discourse of mass media with an inherent embedding in capitalist ideology. Here, it is important to recognize the conclusion that twenty four hour media does not offer options, but homogeneous corporate mass media sources steeped inherently in capitalist interest, as discussed with Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model. Coupled with the conclusion, already established, that capitalism is not compatible with democracy, and the chronopolitics of capitalism are inherent domination by accelerated capitalist discourse, twenty-four hours per day.
Now that the ubiquity of capitalist discourse has been established, along with the lifeworld of workers and democratic movements in accelerated capitalist modernity, it is pertinent to move on and examine the language of accelerated capitalist modernity. This discourse, as this essay will illustrate, results in the decay of language and a loss of nuance -- these factors then preclude the ability to effectively analyse the state of modernity, already established to be complex, and increasingly so.
Speed and acceleration are ultimately the motors of the decay of language, and, according to Rosa, they operate through the capitalist economic mode (Rosa 74). Marx identified this cause as well, suggesting that the capitalist class, in order to continue existing, needs to “constantly revolutioniz[ing] the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the relations of society as a whole[...]uninterrupted disturbance[...]everlasting uncertainty and movement distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones” (Marx). Marx comes very close to identifying acceleration as ideology (Marx’s “everlasting[...]movement” recognizes the kinesis that the elite classes espouse), as Rosa does, and Marx’s formulation is essential to Rosa’s. According to Rosa,
In the capitalist economic system, however, the continually rising speed of production necessarily goes hand in hand with the escalation of speeds in distribution and consumption, which are in turn driven by technological innovations and thus share responsibility for the fact that the material structures of modern society are reproduced and altered in ever shorter periods of time….simultaneously characterized by an acceleration of processes of organization, decision, administration, and control” (Rosa 74).
Thus, in Rosa’s formulation, the ideology of speed is inherently a capitalist ideology. Technological advancement, promoted with a religious zealotry by all manner of mainstream political parties, including conservative parties, though more selectively, is an underlying ideological and social given. Because of this nearly unquestioned support for speed in mainstream discourse, speed, often under the propagandistic moniker of progress, has a social equality with morality. Indeed, numerous fascists subscribed explicitly to this new ideology, this, in the words of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurist and Mussolini supporter, “New Religion-Morality of Speed.”
Returning to Orwell, whose writing on the decay of English political discourse is important though carries flaws, no vessel for the acceleration of language is more potent than that of the cliché. Though Orwell does not name the cliché as such, he does assert that,
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like sections of a prefabricated hen-house (Politics and the English Language 2).
It is not the intent of this essay to contend that all political writing is incompetent; however, the authors cited up to this point (including Rosa, Marx, Chomsky and Herman) are unusually erudite. In the late modern context relevant to this essay, mass media, often claiming to lack ideology but dominating the ideological discourse of late modernity, is the prime perpetrator of incompetent political writing.
The “prefabricated hen-house” Orwell refers to is the essence of cliché and its effect on English political discourse (Politics and the English Language 2). From the perspective of sentence construction, writing word-to-word, rather than the phrase-to-phrase writing Orwell designates as characteristic of modern English prose, slows down the writing process. One must understand the intricacies and precision of each word when writing word-to-word; phrase-to-phrase writing, by contrast, requires only that the writer understand the gist of a prefabricated sequence of words -- the cliché. This allows writers to construct discourse much more quickly and, as yet to be proved, palatable to a much greater audience. Additionally, as a cousin to Rosenberg’s discussion of journalistic ineptitude in an accelerated, twenty-four hour media environment in No Time To Think, the cliché precludes the writer’s ability to think critically about their own writing. Their writing emerges from a place of uncritical acceptance (the essence of the cliché), and, if it undergoes editorial inspection at all, appears to the editor as vague-enough-to-be-true -- lacking in any sort of authoritative meaning, but, to the editor’s perception, not explicitly false either.
The “prefabricated hen-house” adopts another meaning, though it is unclear if Orwell intended this meaning -- the stagnant nature of capitalist discourse. The hen-house, interestingly attached to the word prefabricated implying both speed as well as connoting capitalist production, allows for only certain ideological discourses. Prefabricated by the mass media elite in capitalism, clichéd discourse, in the words of Herman, “commonly frame[s] news and allow[s] debate only within the parameters of elite interests[...]where ordinary citizens are not aware of their own stake in an issue or are immobilized by effective propaganda, the media will serve elite interests uncompromisingly (Herman).
The cliché is the continued reconstruction of the vaguest and most palatable elements of capitalist discourse in late modernity. As already discussed, Rosa declares that the time in capitalism has monetary value (to engage in a bit of hypocrisy: time is money) and is without quality. The idea that “material structures of modern society are reproduced and altered in ever shorter periods of time,” the appropriation of not just labor but language into the twenty-four hour cycle, the experience of time Rosa refers to as the “short-short pattern,” is highly relevant here (Rosa 142).
In mass media, the viral clickbait website BuzzFeed epitomizes the short-short pattern of time as it applies to political language. On February 4, 2014, BuzzFeed published its internal style guide -- the guidelines BuzzFeed writers must adhere to when writing their articles. In BuzzFeed’s own words, “BuzzFeed publishes news and entertainment in the language of the web, and in our work we rely on a style guide to govern everything from hard-hitting journalism to fun quizzes….This style guide will be updated regularly to ensure it remains relevant and responds accordingly to changes in language and common, casual usage (Favilla, Paolone). Though an online news source, and with frequent articles appealing to the moderately liberal white populace, BuzzFeed nonetheless adheres to the propaganda model. BuzzFeed always conducts discourse in the prefabricated hen-house and often represents a relatively liberal viewpoint within that paradigm, but only on issues “where the elites are divided” (Herman).
At any rate, BuzzFeed’s own writing manifesto is illustrative of its role in the decay of the English language. In a review of BuzzFeed’s style guide published in TIME, Steinmetz says that, “News organizations’ style guides, along with fusty cousins like dictionaries and encyclopedias, don’t have a reputation for being super-casual or quick to adapt….But the situation is different over at BuzzFeed” (Steinmetz). Indeed, BuzzFeed’s abuse of language stems from its speed, following cultural trends and ensuring that BuzzFeed keeps pace with the breakneck speed of internet culture -- a microcosm of the feedback system where BuzzFeed itself feeds viral elements of language which propagate, alter, and return to BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed’s Word List (part of their internal style guide) is a litany of these whiplash adaptations to internet culture; while Steinmetz refers to them as “zeitgeist-y language trends,” it remains that BuzzFeed’s attempt to stay synchronized with accelerated media culture has malevolent effects on political discourse. BuzzFeed and mass media like it undermine democratic discourse, and facilitates a consumer capitalist culture that is highly desynchronized due to frenetic media production, consumption, and lack of consistency or language capable of building identity -- BuzzFeed is synchronic (Steinmetz).
BuzzFeed, as a representative of accelerated capitalist mass media, thus poses an identity-threat to the discourse of democracy. On the formation of identity, Rosa says,
If one defines identity as that which lends a subject coherence and continuity across varying contexts, then the concept of situational identity seems to become a sort of contradictio in adjecto. Yet if one understands identity as a sense of who one is that provides an ability to orient oneself and to act, then situational identities are quite conceivable as, so to speak, logical vanishing points of heightened individualization and acceleration[...]Ultimately the concept simply indicates that there are no longer any definitions of identity that are per se temporally stable (Rosa 239).
Applied to the abuse of discourse by capitalist mass media, this ultimately robs the democratic discourse of both substance and form. Orwell’s prefabricated hen-house (the cliché) limits political discourse to the substance of accelerated capitalism; incompatible with democracy. Media outlets like BuzzFeed, following the ideology of breakneck speed, limits the form, the identity of potential democratic action. In Rosa’s formulation, this constitutive lack of substance and form means that democratic movements face a double dilemma of identity. Unable to form an identity and thus unable to “orient oneself and to act,” democratic movements must inherently be subversive to capitalism and accelerated capitalist time-structure, or else become ineffectual and relegate themselves to facilitating the domination of speed.