(PDF) Stay on Message: Poetry and Truthfulness in Political Speech

Political speech is a type of performance poetry. That may seem unlikely to those who struggle with its clichés and platitudes, but understanding the links between political speech and oral traditions of poetry allows us to appreciate its strengths alongside its weaknesses, the creativity alongside the banality. Applying ethical standards appropriate to oral performance, rather than the literary default mode of critics like George Orwell and Don Watson, gives us a stronger moral critique of all those anti-intellectual dishonesties cloaked in boredom we know so well. Making the case, Stay on Message explores the poetics of political speeches in Australia, the USA, and elsewhere—with examples of both the good and the delightfully appalling.

STAY ON MESSAGE POE TRY AND TRUTHFULNESS IN POLITICAL SPEECH TOM CLARK A U S T R A L I A N S C H O L A R LY © main text Tom Clark  First published , Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd  Lt Lothian St Nth, North Melbourne, Vic  :    :    : aspic@ozemail.com.au : scholarly.info  ----    This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. The moral right of the author has been asserted. Design and typesetting Art Rowlands Printing and binding Tenderprint Australia Pty Ltd The main chapters of this book are typeset in Fairfield LH 45 Light ./pt Contents Acknowledgments 0vi 1 Public language is poetry 001 2 Uses of poetry in public language and in politics 014 3 The once and future poet 031 4 Speech, script, and performance 046 5. Memory and formula 064 6. Framing 089 7. Staying on message 103 8. Truthfulness in political speech 116 9. Poetic public life 127 References 135 Acknowledgments This book now feels like a rather natural consequence of the idiosyncrasies of one person’s life and experiences. If I flatter myself that means only I would have written such a thing, it also offers the threat that only I might want to read it. Needless to mention, one hopes that is not quite the case... In any case, the opinions herein contained have had some development over recent years. Chapter 4 substantially comprises a 2011 article I contributed to PRism (Clark 2011). Chapter 5 in large part comprises material covered in a 2009 article I contributed to AUMLA (Clark 2009); its analysis of John Howard’s rhetoric is largely drawn from an article published in Overland (Clark 2008). Chapter 7’s discussion of the Australian and Canadian national apologies to their respective Indigenous populations during 2008 is the topic of more detailed research I have conducted with Ravi de Costa at York University, Toronto. An accessible overview is available (Clark & de Costa 2009), while a more detailed scholarly version is now under review. I owe a great debt of thanks thanks to several people for their involvement in the production of this book, and in the research work behind it. First among equals is Alison Clark, whose counsel as a writer and reader of poetry and theory has been with me as I have drafted each chapter. Very significant conceptual guidance has also come from Alex Jones, Ravi de Costa, Nick Melchior, and Anna Clark. Numerous others have made critically valuable interventions, some without any knowledge that this book was where the work would end up. Some have been the reviewers of work in progress, but I can specifically nominate the constructive influences of Stephanie Trigg, Tarrin Wills, Julie Connolly, Jacob Varghese, Simon Booth, Chris Raab, Simon Kent, Collette O’Neill, Julian Yaxley, Kylie Shanahan, Martin Bush, Nicole Oke, Jane Landman, Michele Grossman, Robert Pascoe, and John McLaren. In the business of writing this book, I have been extremely fortunate to work for the School of Communication and the Arts at Acknowledgments Victoria University, Melbourne. No employer could have been more supportive or encouraging. Great thanks must go to Sasha HenrissAnderssen, whose research assistance has kept the work on track at innumerable critical junctures. I have also greatly enjoyed working with Australian Scholarly Publishing to produce it. Not least of the thanks, in a life that constantly spills into work, Becky Batagol and more recently our daughter Blazey have been constant inspirations. The family that wordplays together, stays together, as I am sure all readers are aware. Their takes on the ridiculous and the sublime inform all these pages. Finally, I want to acknowledge two people, to both of whom I have dedicated this work. One is my brother, Sol, whose life has been a constant lesson in the ‘constant struggle for pattern’ that underpins the theory I seek to explain in this book. Another is the late Rose Batagol, dear and formidable grandmother-in-law, whose kindness to me – around and through and even because of our disagreements on political ideology – taught me so much about the integrity that should motivate both what we say and how we say it. vii 1. Public language is poetry In a world full of instances, we live a constant and often desperate search for pattern. Thus we rely on the connections dreams can draw to make meaning out of haphazard experiences. Thus we rely on phonic resonance to make music out of sounds, on principles of shape and colour to make visual form out of changes in the light, on grammar to make language out of signs, voices, and writing. In these senses and others, we are hopelessly reliant on our ideologies because each of these patterning rules is itself a type of ideology. Another, of course, is the political manifestation we understand as ‘ideology’ in the classic sense of the word. Political life is just as complex as these other aesthetic realms of experience. It is equally prone to chaos and to chaotic interpretation. Using our personal political ideologies, we somehow manage to make some sense of the noise that buffets and swirls through public affairs. And just like rules of grammar, or musical tastes, or principles of visual form, political ideology is inherently as diverse as people and their lives are diverse. This book explores politics and language together, so it is doubly invested in the complexity and diversity of ideology. The complexity, diversity, and ideological character of political language are express focuses of this book. That is because they form a context for extensive public debates about its aesthetic and ethical qualities. The vehicle for that exploration is a version of the widely discussed theory that the aesthetic and ethical qualities of public language are mutually influential; the aesthetics are critical factors in determining the ethics and vice versa. As this Introduction explains, however, my argument intentionally stretches that proposition in a particular direction. Here we begin our discussion with the proposition that, when we discuss political speech, we are discussing a species of poetry. Stay on Message Some of the aesthetic questions we easily associate with music and visual art are never so far from the frame of political speech. A songsmith’s chorus is one particularly clear illustration of the search for pattern. For the vast group of songs that rely on a refrain of some description, the chorus line is structured to be the most memorable element of the song. Thus, for example, this early modern English ballad with interpolating refrains, ‘The Three Ravens’ (Child 1965): There were three rauens sat on a tree, Downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe, There were three rauens sat on a tree, With a downe, There were three rauens sat on a tree, They were as blacke as they might be. With a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe. 2 To ensure we remember the chorus, a song repeats it, usually several times. Knowing this, composers who work with refrain-style songs push their chorus lines to the front and centre of the invention process, often composing them first. Similarly, performing artists push them to the front and centre of listener attention through a range of musical, textual, and (where relevant) dramatic or cinematic techniques. Picking up on this centrality, it is the chorus lines that audiences are most inclined to sing along to when they listen to a song. It is the chorus lines that people are most likely to quote when they import song poetics into other forms of language. It is chorus lines they most rely upon when trying to identify the titles of songs. Capturing this relationship between compositional structure, performer emphasis, and audience expectations, the bloggersongsmith Irene Jackson advises would-be songwriters (Jackson 1996–2010), ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!’ Stay on message, the slogan that Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign cemented and Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing popularised, is a media advisor’s translation of this same principle into the discourse of politics. Political speech entails a highly performative and improvisatory set of practices, so the compositional techniques of political speakers tend to bear particular affinity to such unscripted Public language is poetry (or only partially scripted) performance styles of artistic expression as freestyle hip-hop, epic verse, and live sports commentary. Like those genres, political discourse is heavily reliant on formulas of expression which its speakers can then stitch together into longer remarks. As ... the aesthetics are critical factors in determining the ethics and vice versa. Chapters 5 and 7 discuss, these language formulas are necessary in any improvised poetic art, yet they are also the phrases and themes that George Orwell famously decried as ‘prefabricated’ in his essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’ (Orwell 1957). Like countless balladeers down the centuries have found with their refrains, politicians, their advisors, and the media who replay and report their remarks have found that this stitching-together can be particularly effective when it is highly repetitive, when the outstanding phrases get plenty of reiteration. By ‘outstanding,’ I mean phrases whose reference and texture combine to make them noticeable, memorable, and strategically valuable. If a speaker picks just one of these formulas and says it often enough, it becomes the message of her or his speech: the point that audience members take home or take out with them; the frame for a topic or issue that they remember; the commitment or change they may sign up to. Stay on message invokes the professional discipline of public communicators who know their strategy must combine the intellectual and the aesthetic. Political speech is always strategic, of course. The point of a poetic approach is to go further than just the referential (or ‘literal’) meaning as we seek to appreciate and interpret political strategies. This book springs from a confidence in the grounding proposition, or hypothesis, that public language is rightly treated as a class of poetry. It means we cannot properly analyse the one without also considering the other. As Terry Eagleton (2007) says, ‘A poem is a 3 Stay on Message 4 statement released into the public world for us to make of it what we may.’ The inverse is simultaneously true, of course: we have to understand how poetry works in order to understand how public language works, and vice versa. The leading aim of this book is to justify that view, explaining its meaning and its consequences for the study of both aspects. It is a proposition the following chapters demonstrate conclusively, I trust. It is also a proposition that has struck me constantly in working as a critic, a poet, and a political advisor – and in observing how peers and mentors in those fields characterise the work they do. In one way and another, they consciously regard political speech as a poetic phenomenon, for better and for worse. So what does it mean, this claim that public language is poetry? We can take the three phrases one by one. The first is principally a question of definition. For the purposes of this book, public language means the language that public speakers and writers such as sports stars, business leaders, politicians, and others use to audiences and through the mass media. Within the realm of the media, it includes media-generated language (such as ‘opinion,’ entertainment, and advertising), as well as replayed or reported language. It is a polymorphous phenomenon, then, which we define more by the relationship between speakers or writers and their audiences or readers than by the specificities of its content and styling – as significant as those latter factors must be. By is, I mean something more substantial than a heuristic metaphor. The relationship between public language and poetry is one we can discuss in the concrete. They both share elements or qualities that are important to their operations. Alike shifts in context produce alike changes in both of them. While their teleologies, their strategic outlooks, the purposes for which they are deployed may diverge significantly – this is a reason why their separateness is usually taken for granted – they share a common relationship to the situational constraints upon them. That relationship is one of subjection: public language and poetry are both subject to the rules (ideologies) of their situations, which manifest in rules of semantics, syntax, and aesthetics. For conventional poetry, such rules often include metrical principles of rhythm and phonic repetition: they define the forms into which we categorise different styles of poetry Public language is poetry (e.g. the ‘sonnet form’). Versions of such rules also apply to public language, meaning we can apply a technical term from the study of poetics to conventional poetry and public language alike. ‘Prosody’ means the aesthetic patterns or rules that govern the arrangement of language – in whatever field it occurs. Thirdly, by poetry I mean a mode of language whose manifest forms are extremely diverse. Even its subjection to form is frequently contested. Poetry valourises the aesthetics of language, including the aesthetics of its syntax and semantics, although the reasons why it does so and the aesthetic elements valourised can vary greatly from situation to situation. Whether it is a memory-aid for oral genealogies, or a pictorial problematic in concrete poems, to name it poetry means the form of its language is noticed and exploited by speakers, writers, audiences, and readers. That a version of this observation can potentially be applied to any language act goes not so much to dilute the definition as to show how any language act can be within, or slip into, the poetic mode. Public language is always necessarily in the poetic mode. These pages about language are also partly a response to what others have said and written about language. Talking about language – analysing and criticising it – is presumably as old as language itself; certainly, rhetoric has attracted public and scholarly comment since the earliest written records. What Aristotle (2007) understood as the ‘art of public speaking’ we may characterise more generally as the boundless campaign to influence one another. It extends into the private sphere, and beyond speech and writing, to include any medium of expressive (organic) communication – since all expressive communication involves the effort to influence. Thus performers may talk about the rhetoric of a dance, designers may talk about visual rhetoric, some anarchist traditions have prioritised ‘propaganda of the deed,’ and so on. We recognise the presence of rhetoric when we recognise the agenda for influence in a given moment of discourse. That means it is an umbrella term for all the manifestations of strategy in expressive communication. Rhetoric is often understood more narrowly, to describe a purposive manipulation of language forms to achieve public communications goals, especially within the political field. There is the cliché of 5 Stay on Message 6 ‘just rhetoric,’ an inherently absurd concept meaning style without substance, but there is also a widespread and strategically engaged cynicism towards public rhetoric on the grounds that it inherently constitutes public manipulation. During a period in which public communicators have increasingly professionalised the methods and standards of their fields, the putatively amateur publics they work into have increasingly learned to distrust the very professionalism that prioritises winning public trust. There is a wealth of comment at the front lines of this conflict: on the one hand, a rapidly evolving moral critique of the objectives, styles, and techniques that characterise professional public communications; on the other, a rapidly evolving literature that educates the profession on how to achieve its objectives in the face of public contempt for those objectives, and which constantly reprises a professional ethics of trustworthiness in the face of public distrust. This book aims to create a meaningful negotiation between those perspectives, which have often been at crossed purposes as much as they have seemed at loggerheads throughout the evolution of their debate. Calling public language a class of poetry is counterintuitive, and I admit it may seem rather self-indulgent. I would justify it in three ways. The first is that professional public communicators demonstrably care about the aesthetics of their pronouncements. They are heavily concerned with saying and writing things the right way, not just with saying and writing the right things, because they know the two are inseparable. This book covers evidence which leaves us in no doubt that professionals work to exacting aesthetic standards in their public communications. And just as they hold themselves accountable for styling their pronouncements adequately, if perhaps not always elegantly, they know that the publics who receive and respond to their discourses hold them accountable to similar standards: audiences and readers also care that communications be expressed the right way. That is the second reason. Although it is more difficult to get direct evidence of audience and reader responses, evidence covered in this book shows audiences both care about and actively respond to the texture of public communications as well as the referential meaning. A third reason is the way the proposition that public language is a type of poetry affects our understanding of public communication Public language is poetry and poetry alike. As speakers and writers, we compose much better when we can address ourselves to both tasks simultaneously. As listeners and readers, we are much more attuned to the range of meanings and modes of language when we know both paradigms are in effect. As reporters and critics, we can do much greater justice to either nominal category when we consciously understand it as both There is the cliché of ‘just rhetoric,’ an inherently absurd concept meaning style without substance, but there is also a widespread and strategically engaged cynicism towards public rhetoric on the grounds that it inherently constitutes public manipulation. categories. By considering as united two phenomena that people would normally categorise as separate, then, we are alive to aspects of both that normally attract less attention. This book traverses evidence of how deeply that unity influences the composition and reception of public language. Chapters 2–5 of this book set out this understanding of public poetics in essentially technical terms. Beginning with a consideration of moments when public language utilises verse poetry, Chapter 2 extends to show how all public language necessarily and inherently is poetry. At several points, this requires us to be mindful of a distinction between poetry or poems as such and the ‘poetic qualities’ that people often attribute to aesthetically pleasing or whimsical rhetoric. My argument is expressly for the former, such that we need to redefine the latter and incorporate it explicitly on these redefined terms. Thus we can get past the exceptionalist cliché that a nice turn of phrase makes a speech sound ‘poetic,’ because we can see that dreadful and 7 Stay on Message 8 boring speeches are poetic too (in the same sorry way that dreadful and boring poems are). Chapter 3 takes a number of theorists who have characterised poetry as a phenomenological experience of language ‘becoming,’ especially Eagleton (2007) and Nicolas Abraham (1995). Abraham particularly allows us to understand the relationships between past and future events as dynamically present in the rhythmised moment of a poem. Comparing examples of these phenomena from poems and from political speeches, Chapter 3 finds political strategy is naturally given towards poetic modes of consciousness, relying as it does on a contingent (revisable) past and a clear (predictable) future. Chapter 4 is particularly influenced by the work of Walter Ong (1982). It explores the peculiar roles of speechwriters and of the speech scripts they write in relation to the speakers, their audiences, and critics who form a context for speechwriting. Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech is especially illustrative of that relationship, due to the changing role that the script played during the performance of the speech itself. Meanwhile, other less consummate speeches show very clearly how the political speech’s problem is the poem’s problem: a desperate need to bring meaning into being, combined with our lack of control over the meanings of our words once we have uttered them. Chapter 5, the longest in the book, uses a concept that Milman Parry (1971) dubbed the ‘poetic formula’ to explore ways in which cliché and platitude are necessities – akin to grammatical requirements – of political speech situations. Parry defined the formula as ‘a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’ (p. 272). He showed how formulas manifested in typical themes or topics (such as the typical ‘council of war’ scene) and in typical phrases (such as Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’). Chapter 5 of this book seeks to define the concept of poetic formula in some detail, as well as explaining how we may apply it to the field of political speech. It explores how contemporary political speech demonstrates the formulaic techniques characteristic of poetry in oral traditions. In order to grasp the dimensions of this concept, it is important to appreciate how poetic techniques are implicit in public language performance and reception. Public language is poetry Chapters 6–9 explore how this book’s poetic theory of rhetoric must radically redefine our understanding of truthfulness in public communication. Truth is a long-standing word in the English language, but its meanings have evolved over time. It comes from the same root as ‘trust,’ another darkly moral term. In the Middle English romances, a knight was trewe, his trawth could be believed, if he withstood adventures that challenged (and thus proved) his credibility. That sense now comes closer to adjectives like genuine, trustworthy, or unshakeable, to nouns like fidelity, constancy, or integrity. Instead, most people now understand the word ‘truth’ to signify a concept less personal, more informational. It is a measure of the verisimilitude between what people say, write, or otherwise express and the corresponding reality that their communications purport to represent. The Macquarie Dictionary defines it as a judgment on ‘conformity with fact or reality.’ Alan Atkinson observes, ‘A clear sense of the strengths and weaknesses of writing as a medium for truth makes a difference for many important aspects of life’ (Atkinson 2002). By this he means to draw an equivalent distinction about the strengths and weaknesses of spoken language as a medium for truth: writing tends to last in time and cohere across space, whereas speech is evanescent and acutely local in its character (even in those instances where it is recorded and broadcast). As this book discusses, the modern understanding of the word ‘truth,’ hence of the morality it indexes, reflects the highly literary values that have informed the evolution of the English language (like many other languages) over five centuries and more since the first movable-type printing presses began work. This is an important caveat, because the qualities of truthfulness in written discourse are not identical to those in speech. As Walter Ong showed, in his study of Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, the different means by which people communicate have their peculiar and distinctive ‘psychodynamics’ (1982). That means, for example, that people both express and remember information very differently in print contexts, compared to what they do in conversations. It also means that a speech in a non-literate community has a very different social purpose and importance from, say, an interview on television in a society where reading and writing 9 Stay on Message are normal. The medium does not merely become the message, then; it influences our understanding of what messages can be in the first place. That includes our moral compass for messages, in all their varieties of types, and our standards for honesty or integrity in those public communicators who generate messages. Truthfulness, then, is significantly defined by the media through which we communicate. It reflects a moral dimension that audiences and readers normally bring to their appraisals of public Truth is a long-standing word in the English language, but its meanings have evolved over time. It comes from the same root as ‘trust,’ another darkly moral term. 10 communications, but which they apply differently to each instance, depending on the medium and style used, and on innumerable aspects of the context in which they appraise it. One such contextual factor of particular importance is the question of how a given communication may be regarded as public. Refining and interpreting this complex of problems is the focus of Chapters 6–9. Chapter 6 begins this discussion with an exploration of discourse frames. The frame is a concept with a lengthy past, however it was Erving Goffman (1974) who first developed it systematically. Chapter 6 takes his understanding of the term, and in a more critical sense that of George Lakoff too, as approaches to the widely remarked problems of spin and jargon in political speech. Against this, it is vital to consider the view from within – do spin-doctors believe it is right to spin? Do bureaucrats endorse the use of jargon? If so, why? Spin, jargon, and other forms of circumlocution are the main complaints of George Orwell, especially in his short polemic on ‘Politics and the English Language’ (Orwell 1957) and in his novel 1984 (Orwell 2000). While his justification is ostensibly based on Public language is poetry referential logic – Orwell maintains that loose expression leads to loose thought – the main criticisms he draws are more textural and stylistic in nature. In particular, he expresses a profound and thoroughgoing distrust of ‘prefabricated’ language – in other words, formulas. As Chapter 7 explores, this amounts to applying literary standards of expression to the radically different medium of spoken The medium does not merely become the message... it influences our understanding of what messages can be in the first place. language, and expecting that truthfulness would present identically across the different media of expression. As Chapter 4 shows, though, that assumption is untenable. If Marshall McLuhan was anywhere near correct to say ‘the medium is the message,’ then truth must be a function of the medium as much as it is a function of the referential content a given message purports to express. Chapter 8 takes this discussion further, using Hannah Arendt’s views on public truth, lying, and cliché as a vehicle to explore the ways in which speech as a medium predisposes politics towards some versions of truthfulness at the expense of others, and therefore must be a factor in the ethical standards by which we appraise the truth value of political speech. To do this, we have to understand how the communicative techniques in use precondition the sorts of truths it is possible to express, the sorts of truths audiences and readers are capable of perceiving, and the tactics that both public communicators and their receiving publics can use to maximise 11 Stay on Message (or minimise) the honesty and integrity of their communicative exchanges. As we shall see, these tactics are similar to grammar in the way they prescribe norms and standards. Like grammars, we know when communications are compliant or non-compliant by their conformity to established patterns in the arrangement of language, or prosodies. That is to say, truthfulness is always subject to checks for aesthetic compliance. Concluding this second part and the book, Chapter 9 seeks to integrate the arguments of both parts in this book. The poetics of political speech redefine its ethics, because they extend and refine our sense of its capabilities – of the manipulative powers that political speech has and of the scope for using them. Informed by Victor Klemperer (1947), a Jewish philologist who survived the Nazi holocaust, it argues for the moral urgency of focusing on the stylistic texture of political speech at least as much as its referential ‘content.’ This must be a constant reference point for those who would develop or apply ethical codes in public language, including the field of political speech. It means a thorough education in poetic criticism is itself critical to the preparation of democratic citizens. 12 ... politicians, their advisors, the talking heads from think tanks and universities, the industry and community representatives, and (of course) the media ... they are among the most eminent performance poets of our times. Finally, although this Introduction sets out the rather general proposition that all public language, both written and spoken, is necessarily and inherently poetry, of course the main focus of this book is on political speech. This focus is informed by a body of evidence showing that political leaders, their advisors, and the critics Public language is poetry who respond to them are setting the tone for public speaking in other fields or walks of public life. (Some would argue they always have done.) The same body of evidence suggests that political communicative practice is becoming more integrated and coordinated as it becomes increasingly professionalised, that leaders within the field of political communication – especially in the United States – are increasingly developing the operational templates for others in the public sphere to adopt and adapt, and that, in important ways, the communicative enterprise in politics increasingly subordinates written communication to the performative politics of a leader who speaks. These politicians, their advisors, the talking heads from think tanks and universities, the industry and community representatives, and (of course) the media pundits: they are among the most eminent performance poets of our times. For their receiving publics, there is the joy of good words well spoken and the rapturous censure of speakers who transgress public prosody, but there is also a civic duty to appreciate verses – and a pedagogical onus on the democratic state to teach its citizens skills for auditing poetry. 13 2. Uses of poetry in public language and in politics A piece of music is played on a brass instrument by a lone man at dawn. It is a trace of rhythmic energy, an almost perfect sine-wave emerging from a body and entering every sympathetic, permeable body in the listening host, which, in its life-movement, alternates inside and outside, self and Other, sound and the whisper of breath. The sound swells, other forces come together and intensify into something that might be called an event, perhaps a ritual. Its performance is designed to ensure cultural growth, or at least instill a structure of feeling. And as the final tone of the ‘Last Post’ fades on the breeze, there is hardly a dry eye at the Shrine of Remembrance. This description (Muecke 2004) of the ANZAC Day dawn service is unmistakably academic in its syntax and vocabulary, but nobody would call it a dry or unfeeling account of Australia’s most widely and deeply felt secular holiday. The metaphors (e.g. ‘an almost perfect sine-wave emerging,’ ‘its life-movement’) and the selections of facts to report (e.g. ‘a piece of music is played on a brass instrument by a lone man at dawn,’ ‘hardly a dry eye at the Shrine of Remembrance’) capture a moment and a use of space which re-emerge as nationally important in every place that this ceremony occurs, and every year in which it has occurred. We can frame that another way, asking which Shrine of Remembrance does this passage mean? Which year’s dawn service? To both questions it means any of them and all of them. Such elements mark the three classical dramatic unities: the time, place, and characters of this scene remain constant even as the ceremony spans years, specific Uses of poetry in public language and in politics sites, and the individuals involved. To those three unities, Burke (1962) might add a fourth. Every ANZAC Day dawn service taps into – more precisely, it recalls, recreates, and sustains – a unity of motive that binds its performers and audiences across the years and yawning miles: ‘lest we forget.’ This chapter focuses on one aspect of public communicative performance, namely the use of poems and extracts from poems for ceremonial or ritual purposes. It shows that we can read in these appropriations of poetry a desire for validation or embodiment of the aesthetic qualities of public and political agendas. But to the extent that poems validate and embody political aesthetics, they also reveal the inherently aesthetic nature of all political language. Poetry as public language reveals how public language is poetry. Just like the solemn and solitary trumpeter at dawn, all public speakers perform orally to audiences who evaluate their efforts according to aesthetic standards. They do this according to stage ... to the extent that poems validate and embody political aesthetics, they also reveal the inherently aesthetic nature of all political language. or broadcast norms of performance and reception, yet modern traditions of journalism and scholarship about rhetoric have generally appraised public speaking as though it comprises written texts answerable to literary standards of logic and coherence. This marks a rupture in the praxis of public communications, 15 Stay on Message a disconnection between what practitioners do and how critics analyse it. For there is no doubt that the professional advisors who develop and complement public speakers’ knowledge of the craft – the press secretaries, strategic advisors, media skills trainers, and so on – are themselves extremely conscious of the performative challenges and opportunities that confront the speakers they work for. This is conspicuously evident throughout the commentary from practitioners in the United States, people such as James Carville and Mary Matalin (Matalin, Carville & Knobler 1994), Dick Wirthlin (Wirthlin & Hall 2004), Frank Luntz (2007), and Luntz’s academic bête noire George Lakoff (2005). These practitioners tend to be unequivocal about the importance of aesthetic features as a determiner for communicative success. As Luntz says, ‘It’s not what you say; it’s what people hear.’ We could include in that doctrine all the paralinguistic information that audiences see, feel, and smell as well. Likewise, the public speakers who know their craft are keenly aware of the performative dimension and its demands. Witness this journalist’s rare theoretical quote from that most consummate of orators, Barack Obama (Davies 2009): 16 ‘When you have a successful presidential speech of any sort, it’s because that president is able to put their finger on the moment we’re in,’ Mr Obama said. In other words, the success of political speech depends on a capacity to create momentous performances, performances whose audiences are carried by the power of the moment, thoroughly attuned to the speaker and her or his message. Obama’s sometime mentor, Jeremiah Wright, once gave a sermon penned by the jazz writer Stanley Crouch, whose phrases poetically embodied this aesthetic principle of political performance in the same moment as they explained it (Crouch & Wright Jr. 1999): When a majestic sound takes the field, when it parts the waters of silence and noise with the power of song, when this majestic concatenation of rhythm, harmony, and Uses of poetry in public language and in politics melody assembles itself in the invisible world of music, ears begin to change and lives begin to change and those who were musically lame begin to walk with a charismatic sophistication to their steps. You see, when something is pure, when it has the noblest reasons as its fundamental purpose, then it will become a candle of sound in the dark cave of silence. Crouch’s phrasing is staggeringly ambitious, but the transcript fades almost to blandness when compared with the sermon as Wright performed it. Not only does the choice of words change as it gets spoken (for example, when pronouncing the passage just quoted, Wright uses the word ‘regions,’ not the ‘reasons’ that Crouch scripted for him), but additionally the musicality of voice – Wright’s timing, intonation, dynamics, and texture – is so heightened that a transcript cannot possibly do it justice. And that is not even taking into account the ‘musicality’ of its backing music, through which the Wynton Marsalis Trio underscores, explores, and embellishes the spoken rhetoric. How far must the writing-bound memories of many other transcribed orators from days prior to voice recording also fall short of the mark their live performances set? And how many transcripts must we over-invest with rhetorical significance, not recognising the flatness of spirit that accompanied their initial delivery? Eyewitness accounts can help to some extent with these dilemmas – but what of the many cases where the witnesses are in disagreement? Was Socrates’ Apology actually dignified? Did hearts of stone melt to hear Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount? Such questions haunt the vast sweep of rhetorical history before sound recording. The ANZAC Day dawn service raises many questions of interpretation, including the questions of poetic interpretation that animate this book. The best known of these is a verse, the so-called ‘Ode of Remembrance,’ whose recitation features in the annual ANZAC commemoration (and in several other military remembrance ceremonies in many countries): They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. 17 Stay on Message At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. This verse is an extract from a poem, ‘For the Fallen,’ that the English poet Laurence Binyon published in 1914 (Binyon 2008). Most Australian children grow up hearing these words from time to time, never realising their link to a parent text. I can distinctly remember my shock when I first learned of it: the complete version of Binyon’s Was Socrates’ Apology actually dignified? Did hearts of stone melt to hear Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount? Such questions haunt the vast sweep of rhetorical history before sound recording. 18 poem is so trite, so derivative and parochial in its melancholy, so politically complicit in the horrors of war it purports to lament. This ill-remembered talisman of imperial attitudes past jars like that second verse of our national anthem, as originally scripted, which most Australians conveniently do not know and most Australian institutions are in no hurry to remember (McCormick 1879): When gallant Cook from Albion sail’d, To trace wide oceans o’er, True British courage bore him on, Till he landed on our shore. Then here he raised Old England’s flag, The standard of the brave; With all her faults we love her still, ‘Brittannia rules the wave!’ In joyful strains then let us sing ‘Advance Australia fair!’ Uses of poetry in public language and in politics A very revealing comparison is with the Elizabethan poem, ‘There is a lady sweet and kind,’ by Thomas Ford (1968). In 1963, the recently retired Australian prime minister Robert Menzies famously quoted its third and fourth lines in the remarks he gave at an official reception for Queen Elizabeth II (Menzies 1963). The original is a classic example of courtly love poetry in its period, three four-line stanzas in rhymed couplets that range from romantic idealism to light-hearted irony and self-deprecation. Menzies managed to pluck two lines, out of context, and deploy them so sycophantically that he may have forever overshadowed any hope future Australians might have had to enjoy the original on its own terms: I did but see her passing by, And yet I love her till I die. By contrast with the sanitised official anthem (which remains direly tepid at best) and with Menzies’ epochal schlurp-effort, what Australia’s Returned Services League has achieved by quoting Binyon’s four lines out of context, as it were, sheds so much of the unfortunate baggage. Used in their excerpted form for the ANZAC tradition, these are words wholly proportionate to the sorrow-motive they invoke; they aspire to channel as much of the poignancy in the recollection of war as each audience member will permit them to. While they clearly do reflect a political fealty (as all language must), it is the fealty of participants in the ceremony to the ceremony itself, ahead of any politically alloyed concerns. As a result, the political implications of ANZAC Day are much more hotly contested than its legitimacy as an event or its ceremonial content. That such a valourising of the ceremony itself is a function wellsuited to the aesthetically heightened language of metrical verse hardly needs pointing out, although it is as well to be aware of the grounds for such an obvious proposition. The prosody of this verse vignette is such that it is extremely hard for a fluent English speaker to stuff up the recitation. Even without the aid of a script, that same prosody and the contrastive syntax help to make its phrasing memorable enough that the designated performers can recall it on cue, more or less verbatim. Additionally, most Australian residents 19 Stay on Message have heard it often enough that the audience is also cued to respond, both to listen and to emote. That we have experienced the emotions before is no obstacle to repeating them. It is particularly this link between ritual performance and ritual emotion that attracts comparisons between the ANZAC commemorative tradition – which has been intentionally secular in the design of its rituals, as of its architecture – and many religious ceremonies. It is conventional to regard both as types of public observance, or a ‘sacrament’ as Dening (1996) describes it: The [ANZAC Day] march never ended in any assembly or parade. The different units simply marched to the Shrine, turned left and quickly dispersed to their various reunion places. This was the occasion for which the organising committee had spent so many hours planning. Sometimes they prepared special entertainment, bagpipes, or had a special guest. Always at some stage they broke off into the formal procedures of a parade-ground or a quarterdeck to listen to some words from their officers, or have a message 20 mediated by a sergeant major. There would be reminiscences and banter. There would be a reminder of already known histories. In another rhythm, with another lilt, these histories could have been a chanted legend or a mythic genealogy. These formulaic narratives had their cultural operators, too, not blunted by repetition. None of it was blunted by repetition. Repetition of set forms liberated the group to make sacramental sense of the occasion. For the most part, it was sacramental of a sort of military common sense. There was not much rhetoric, but much realpolitik about how the world really works. Public observance entails public purpose. The RSL uses and sustains the ‘Ode of Remembrance’ not simply to recreate a communal aesthetics of emotion; it also aims to sustain public awareness and acceptance of the importance of war-sorrow, in order to valourise its place in Australian public life. Indeed, even that ‘its’ invites further Uses of poetry in public language and in politics deconstruction, because what gets valourised is both the putatively important emotion and the putatively important institution (the RSL) that exists largely for the purpose of sustaining the valourisation. This is an outstanding example of the recursive praxis that guides both Public observance entails public purpose. ideology and organisation in politics (e.g. Crozier 2008, Crozier 2007). Since the vehicle for this strategy is a verse – since the public purpose of the dawn service ritual is demonstrably better-served by using verse than by some verse-free alternative – it is clear that public language has a public purpose for the using of verse, at least in this instance. When we survey the quotations and recitations of verse in public language throughout the world’s majority-literate cultures, we find many similarities with the ANZAC Day example. Poems and, moreso, excerpts from poems tend to feature in explicitly ritualised events. In this guise, their functions generally include either or both of two uses: As set-piece moments of the event – in other words, epitomising the event’s ritual nature. As self-consciously deployed invitations to engage with heightened language aesthetics. We can explore an example that displays both these purposes, turning to another flourish associated with Barack Obama’s remarkable career in rhetoric: the poem that Elizabeth Alexander composed and performed for the 20 January 2009 ceremony to inaugurate Obama as 44th president of the United States of America (Alexander 2009): Praise Song for the Day Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. 21 Stay on Message All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair. Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice. A woman and her son wait for the bus. A farmer considers the changing sky. A teacher says, ‘Take out your pencils. Begin.’ We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider. We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, ‘I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.’ We need to find a place where we are safe; we walk into that which we cannot yet see. Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train 22 tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of. Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; the figuring it out at kitchen tables. Some live by ‘Love thy neighbor as thy self.’ Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need. What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance. In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp – praise song for walking forward in that light. Uses of poetry in public language and in politics It is becoming customary for the inaugurations of USA presidents from the Democratic Party to incorporate a verse element like this. First was John F. Kennedy, then Bill Clinton (for both his investitures), and then Obama. In other words, the last three oath of office ceremonies for presidents from the Democratic Party have adopted Kennedy’s example. It is a fair bet that Republicans will begin to follow suit. In this nascent tradition-of-ceremony, the president-elect chooses a poet who will compose a poem that befits the swearing in of her or his presidential patron. We may call such commissioned poems ‘set pieces’ because of this regularity. That is, the inauguration poem is becoming a quasi-grammatical requirement of the ceremony, for one party at least, and so it serves to define and amplify that ceremony’s ritual nature. Such a poem demarcates itself as language outside the mundane realm of conversational exchange. It is very clearly a moment of language that steps outside of routine political transaction. What is more, its aspirations to communicative finesse imply that this stepping-outside, however institutionally driven it may be, is an aesthetic improvement on the everyday. Some contend that Alexander’s poem was ‘forced,’ and similar claims have been made against other inauguration poems down the years. In describing this critical response to Alexander’s poem, I summarise discussion across a range of news websites and blogs, views held and refuted by large numbers of contributors (so I have not selected individual examples for quotation). Whether the criticism of Alexander’s performance style is fair or not, to some extent it too must constitute an inherent function of the institutionalised process for commissioning the piece, and of the institutional environment into which it was delivered. The partisan nature of American presidential politics means some people will always be inclined to give the ‘disbenefit’ of any doubt. Alexander’s performative moment cannot be completely devoid of significance, though. Microsoft Corporation offered her an endorsement contract after the inauguration, citing the recognisability this moment had given to her face and voice, and implicitly buying into her public association with Obama’s political agenda. That is notwithstanding an extreme division of opinions, judging by commentary across the blogosphere, on whether she ‘read it well.’ Importantly, the existence of such a debate goes some way 23 Stay on Message 24 to proving that audiences are every bit as motivated by the aesthetic properties of these moments as the performers are. Writing and then performing a poem without meter, whose rhythm traverses between essayists’ prose and mundane conversation, Alexander begins by talking up the haphazard and ad hoc nature of human and material circumstances. She says that ‘all around us is noise,’ then notes that ‘someone is trying to make music somewhere’ out of the noise-making detritus that surrounds American (and, more generally, human) lives. Making music is this poem’s representative, its synecdoche, of that pursuit of form, clarity, pattern, which takes place at the root of ideology. Because America elected a fine-sounding president in Obama, it is particularly apposite to the moment of his inauguration: Obama embodies the hopes of Americans that, in him, they may have found a music to tame all the noise (of climate change, of economic crisis, of worldwide blowback from years of steadily escalating military adventurism, et cetera). Alexander then switches the focus from sound-music to writinggrammar with a teacher urging students to take out their pencils and begin, and the ‘words spiny or smooth’ that permeate and govern the rest of this poem. While there are two reprises of the ‘sing’/’song’ concept and a command to ‘say’ words, from the teacher’s command onwards these are clearly words within a documentary culture, hence of legacy value. That is true of the poem overall, for while the ceremonial moment required oral performance, Alexander read it from a script – rather obviously at points, reminding us that there was nothing abnormal about relying on written words to guide the spoken words. Indeed, the absence of any counterexample within the American tradition of presidential inauguration ceremonies suggests that an unwritten poem would be quite extraordinary, perhaps even contrary to the rules that govern this situation. Continuing this speculation, it seems likely that a president elect and her or his minders would be nervous about associating their inauguration with a poem they could not vet prior to the event. That Robert Frost in effect recited the first inauguration poem from memory serves perversely to reinforce the standing of this rule. The poem Frost recited from memory, ‘The Gift Outright’ (Frost 1961b), was the one Kennedy had previously seen and discussed with him, Uses of poetry in public language and in politics whereas prevailing weather conditions forced him to abandon the script of the poem he especially wrote for the occasion, ‘Dedication’ (Frost 1961a). On another level, ‘words’ govern more than just the poem; they govern the entire event in which it transpired, for words were the medium through which government occurred in this situation, as in so many. The second paragraph of Obama’s speech, which he delivered immediately after his swearing-in, is a very straightforward exposition of this governmentality of language, as he understands it (Obama 2009): Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents. 25 Obama’s logic revolved precisely around the powers that ‘words’ have. A president commences office by the speaking of oath-words – a scripted oral performance – which are predicated on ‘founding documents’ – a written canon of law-words. Reprising the wordswords relationship of the oath it follows, the speech itself is a scripted performance of words that set an agenda for four years of government to come, and which will themselves govern the words of lawmakers and government officials throughout that period. Thus a scripted oral performance, which is crafted and delivered once, amplifies a scripted oral performance that aspires to eternal repetition – and this timeless performance (the oath) always entails amplification through a president’s swearing-in speech, more recently through a commemorative poem as well. We may ask: how do governors govern the governed? In America, as in all human society, it is principally through words. This reminds us of one of the great fallacies of politics: the distinction between words and deeds. What actions are available to politicians, aside from Stay on Message symbolic actions? Turning the first sod on a building site, or cutting the ribbon to open a bridge? Donning a bomber jacket to stand among the troops under a victory banner? Signing in a new law? Or a treaty? These are all symbolic actions, first and foremost, even if they promise or require concrete actions by others subsequently. Political deeds are inherently stuck at the level of symbolic performance, of acting, which means such ‘real actions’ as politicians bring about are only ever enacted by others – or by themselves acting in a capacity other than political. Obama’s inauguration speech acknowledges the dangers and responsibilities that accrue to the wielders of word-power. In that, his speech amplifies the president’s oath ‘to preserve, protect and defend,’ as well as amplifying other similar oaths of custodianship – certain marriage vows spring to mind. Alexander’s poem likewise amplifies the custodial obligations of Obama’s oath, reminding listeners of debts to generations past, as well as rehearsing three versions of political ethics: Some live by ‘Love thy neighbor as thy self.’ Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need. 26 In a word, the oath, the speech, and the poem are all an effort to emulate one another. Each aspires to embody and amplify the values of the other. Alexander seeks to capture the political moment of her patron in the last two sentences of her poem, while at the same time trying to do justice to the ceremony’s aspirations towards timelessness. Obama’s speech seeks to capture the poem’s epic perspective on political history, while at the same time trying to do justice to the oath’s solemnities about power and responsibility. The oath is forever seeking to capture the political validity of each newly elected president’s agenda, while on four occasions, so far, also trying to do justice to each poet’s (institutionally guaranteed) devotion to the written-spoken word that gives it currency. From this, we might argue that the presidential oath of office aspires to a ‘poetic’ quality, just as Obama’s speech does. Certainly it has many of the qualities we associate with the sorts of poems that opinion poll respondents say they enjoy. If Alexander’s poem is Uses of poetry in public language and in politics a template, then the oath of office (United States of America 2009) seems to be a prose-poem that shares important stylistic and thematic concerns with hers: I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. The leading purpose of Alexander’s poem, as with all presidential inauguration poems, rests with its commissioner rather than its author. The main functions of ‘Praise Song for the Day’ are praise of Obama and validation of his authority. This is where we begin to see the difficulty of separating the categories of ‘poem’ and ‘political speech.’ Some portion of Alexander’s poetic praise and some portion of her validation are aesthetic values, as we know, rather than analytic, Political deeds are inherently stuck at the level of symbolic performance, of acting, which means such ‘real actions’ as politicians bring about are only ever enacted by others — or by themselves acting in a capacity other than political. but they are expressly intended to reflect on aesthetics critical to the success of the politician. Obama’s campaign for election was successful in identifying his policy agenda (‘change’) with stylistic qualities of his phrasing (sophisticated) and of his performative delivery (unflappable). Arguably, this sense of connection between policy, phrasing, and performance was equally true of his predecessor, George W Bush, whose 2000 and 2004 presidential election campaigns prevailed by emphasising his brevity and quickness as a 27 Stay on Message 28 favourable contrast with the wordy indecisiveness of his opponents, particularly Al Gore and John Kerry (Luntz 2007). Additionally, Obama stands apart from most of his peers because it is so common to celebrate precisely his aesthetic qualities. Indeed, from the outset of his career, people professed admiration for Obama’s stylistics to such an extent that contrasts between his rhetoric and his policy achievements had become a cliché of the commentary about his presidency long before the inauguration occurred. That they revolve around the discredited distinction between words and deeds is a function of style, a formula for criticism of his performance – which itself is rhetorically important, as Chapter 5 explains. What Obama generally does well is what all professional politicians do, though, whether well or otherwise. Like any speaker, he crafts ‘messages’ and he ‘stays on message’ in response to situations that merit public communication. A message, taken in the broadest sense of the word, is always inherently in response to the situation that prompts it. That is to say, the imperatives of a situation govern what a speaker may or may not say, and how or how not. Occasionally they recommend the quotation of verse, most often for ritual purposes. Invariably, though, they recommend the uses of particular phrases, particular themes, particular media – and even more, they recommend particular uses of those phrases, themes, media. That is to say, even where there is no ‘recognisable’ (i.e. conventional) verseform – an argument that the more conservative literary and political critics have mounted against ‘Praise Song for the Day’ – there still recognisably is a prosody that governs each political speech, each public communication. It governs in the sense that a form of poetry governs conventional verse: imposing norms on what may or may not be said, and on how or how not – and arguably intensifying the creative impetus behind the speaking voice accordingly. For those who have not worked in and with professional politics, this claim to heightened creativity may seem incredible, but aesthetic norms of language are aesthetic norms of language, no matter whether we call the output ‘poem’ or ‘politics.’ A standard business letter might follow the so-called SCRAP format, whose stanzas should broadly address the situation at hand, any complications, a strategy for resolution, suggest concrete action to implement that strategy, and conclude with Uses of poetry in public language and in politics politeness. Or the textbook sandwich structure for a letter delivering bad or unpleasant news: say something nice, then say the bad, then conclude with another piece of nice. From media writing we get the punning practices sub-editors use to write their headlines. Or the so-called inverted pyramid structure of the news story, in which the material must be arranged from most newsworthy to least, using One of the stereotypes about Obama is that his speeches are ‘poetic’ – some more so than others. It is the qualification after the dash that gives the lie to this analysis. short sentences and paragraphs, and capturing the essential storyline in its lead paragraph. Some of the strongest examples of this prosody are to be found in media releases, where the need to capture news interest in a story is paramount – and the stylistic dimension of that challenge is clearly acknowledged. We can recognise speaking genres in a similar fashion, for example the annual budget speech a treasurer or finance minister gives to a Westminster parliament. Its performative parameters are determined by broadcast media requirements, which have imposed a strikingly uniform style on these speeches. An American example is the quadrennial speech a president makes after taking the oath of office. Again, these speeches conform to recognisable stylistic templates which are heavily influenced by the business at hand, especially its scheduling. Chapters 3 and 4 explore how these governing norms of situation can intensify the creative experience of language, both for speakers and for listeners, in ways that make the claim of creativity seem less an illustrative comparison, more a demonstration that public language is poetry. One of the stereotypes about Obama is that his speeches are ‘poetic’ – some more so than others. It is the qualification after the 29 Stay on Message 30 dash that gives the lie to this analysis. Situations create rituals, which demand certain verses and certain styles or forms of verse. That is self-evidently true for the ANZAC Day dawn service, as discussed. The point of comparison between Obama’s inauguration speech, the American president’s oath of office, and Alexander’s ‘Praise Song for the Day’ is to recognise that situations are themselves verse-forms, replete with rules (or prosodies) about what should (and should not) be said and how (or how not) to style it. These include rules of timing, of phrasing, of topic selection and arrangement, of written layout, of spoken delivery, and so forth. In this respect, Obama is the rule; not the exception. A speech, even if it is weak or counterproductive in the use it makes of its aesthetic qualities, is as much a performance poem as a sung ballad whose syllable-counts breach the meter or a freestyle diss that misses its punchline. Where Obama is poetically exceptional is his fluency as a public speaker, both off the cuff and especially working from a script. Chapter 3 compares some more of his speeches with, shall we say, less consummate examples, to explore how poetic prosodies are essential to the conception and communication of political strategy. It examines some of the ways that political speakers navigate this dynamic, as well as noting some exemplary moments when they show their awareness of it. 3. The once and future poet Perpetuation is clearly central to ANZAC commemorations. The ‘Ode of Remembrance’ explicitly declares an act of perpetuation, but it also instantiates it. Just as the Ode literally avows that, ‘at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember’ those Australians and New Zealanders who have died in war, its highly mnemonic style ensures both that ‘they shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,’ and that ‘age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.’ In looking back on the fallen of Australasian military history, this verse excerpt looks forward to a future that commemorates them, still, in generations to come. While the refusal to let a certain history slip out of currency is rather nostalgic – hence, I suspect, something we need to reappraise carefully each time that one day of the year comes around, and not just take for granted – for the purposes of this chapter we should be more interested in the link between past and future, in the way an attitude to the past leads a given public to anticipate a particular form of future, with particular links to that past. Similarly, Alexander’s inauguration poem explicitly sets her present moment of words and arrangement in between a past that is to be commemorated in ‘song’ and a future that we are ‘on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp’ of ‘walking forward’ into – whose anticipation also happens through ‘song.’ Her ‘Praise Song for the Day’ is a song of and for Obama’s presidential ‘moment,’ a past and a future held together by words we experience now. We can see that common link between past, present and future playing out in all public language, all political speech, because it is inherent in the nature of all poetry. We can often see this in the conscious structuring of speeches. For example Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire (2004), enjoins all speakers to ‘Tell ’em Stay on Message 32 what you’re going to tell ’em; then tell ’em; then tell ’em what you told ’em’. Theorising more broadly, Nicholas Abraham (1995) argues that poetry is grounded in rhythm, that the moment when we appreciate language rhythm is when a poem becomes apparent to us. In that moment, we find ourselves on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp of both the future and the past. That is to say, the moment we enter into poetic appreciation, into a rhythmised consciousness, we become alive to versions of the past and the future that pay heed to their given nature and to their creative potential. Both are functions of and both are creators of the present, which takes place as a dynamic and recursive product of the negotiations between them. In that sense, we may call this theory a phenomenology of the present tense. That is an idea I hope to explain presently. Abraham illustrates his proposition through the metaphor of sounds during a train journey. When the train starts out, a passenger hears (assuming the faculty of hearing) individual noises of the machine, the frame of the carriage, other people on board, perhaps luggage or random objects moving around, and the rolling stock. As the train gathers speed, and as our passenger hears that many of these noises repeat in more or less regular phrases and intervals, he or she begins to regard those sounds of the train and the track which are regular in a different category from those other noises which are sporadic or random. Those in the latter category are still distinct sounds, but those in the former begin to run together, presenting themselves more as the pattern that unites them in a rhythm than as the individual instances of sound. It is not that our passenger cannot hear the individual sounds; it is that the pattern is more audible. The passenger has learned to infer a rhythm from sounds that have occurred (in the remembered past), but he or she has also learned to infer a rhythm of sounds that will occur (in the anticipated future). In this present moment, memory and anticipation are interchangeable: our passenger can predict the past and recall the future to the extent that this rhythm gives her or him a sense of them. Implicit in Abraham’s account is an idea of recursion. The present continues for as long as we live in it, and so the same is true for this rhythmised poetic present under consideration here. That is to say, The once and future poet we are continuously bringing experiences back into consideration, and realigning our understandings of their patterning as we do so. The process of inferring a rhythm from past sound continues as long as that train journey, our metaphor for a poem, continues. So too does Nicholas Abraham (1995) argues that poetry is grounded in rhythm, that the moment when we appreciate language rhythm is when a poem becomes apparent to us. In that moment, we ﬁnd ourselves on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp of both the future and the past. the process of inferring a rhythm of future sound. As the present in which we live continues to unfold, we continuously re-infer rhythms from and of experience, and we continuously renew and redefine the patterns that we recall and anticipate accordingly. This is less abstract than I suspect it appears. The application to poetry can be made in simple terms. A spoken poem uses rhythms of reiterated sounds and of intervals between those reiterations so that we hear the patterns that hold utterances together as much as we hear the distinctive qualities of each syllable, each pause, each phrase. Where a phrase is repeated, as with the songster’s refrain, we may easily perceive a rhythm behind the arrangement. But of course the same goes for rhyme, for alliteration, for metrical patterns of syllable counting and stressing. If ‘gallant Cook from Albion sail’d, to trace wide oceans o’er,’ then we can anticipate his ‘courage bore him on, till he landed on our shore’ easily enough – and without too much taxing of the brain, as I suspect Peter Dodds McCormick, the composer, was relieved to discover (McCormick 1879). We just know gallant Cook was going to get there eventually, and the poetics 33 Stay on Message help us to experience that historic anticipation over again each time we relive this verse that governments choose to forget. That it is poor – no, appalling – poetry (a thoroughly derivative story, a lack of effective imagery, and a relentlessly unvarying rhythm) does not detract from its public significance at all, and certainly does not make it forgettable – if anything, the clumsy styling is a critical reason why anyone continues to remember this verse many years after the withdrawal of state endorsement. Another idea implicit in Abraham’s account is that poetry gives us a particular view of the creative and volatile potential of language. Because the poetic present has us simultaneously conscious of where a discourse is coming from and where it is headed, the whence and the whither, it leaves us particularly open to an awareness of change as it is happening, we can sense words and phrases in the act or process of becoming a meaning they have not yet become. The point of that sense is not that words we hear will eventually arrive at a meaning; it is that they are in the act of becoming. Terry Eagleton (2007) also describes poetry as a language of becoming: 34 It is as though poetry grants us the actual experience of seeing meaning take shape as a practice, rather than handling it simply as a finished object. … Poetry is an image of the truth that language is not what shuts us off from reality, but what yields us the deepest access to it. … It is the very essence of words to point beyond themselves; so that to grasp them as precious in themselves is also to move more deeply into the world they refer to. He argues that ‘the meaning of its words is closely bound up with the experience of them.’ In an echo of Heidegger (1971), Eagleton uses the phrase ‘phenomenology of language’ to describe the way a poem becomes its meaning while we experience it – but, like the ANZAC Day dawn service, it becomes its meaning only within the experience. Re-reading a poem is rediscovering that meaning-becoming. The once and future poet For a more nuanced application of Abraham’s theory, we might return to the ballad of the ‘Three Ravens’ (Child 1965). Notice, in particular, the movement between past, present, and future tenses: There were three rauens sat on a tree, Downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe, There were three rauens sat on a tree, With a downe, There were three rauens sat on a tree, They were as blacke as they might be. With a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe. Then one of them said to his mate, Downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe, etc. Where shall we our breakfast take? With a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe. Downe in yonder greene field, There lies a Knight slain under his shield. 35 His hounds they lie downe at his feete, So well they can their Master keepe. His Hawkes they flie so eagerly, There’s no fowle dare him come nie. Downe there comes a fallow Doe, As great with yong as she might goe. She lift up his bloudy head, And kist his wounds that were so red She got him up upon her backe, And carried him to earthen lake. She buried him before the prime, Stay on Message She was dead her self ere euen-song time. God send euery gentleman, Such haukes, such hounds, and such a Leman, With a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe. Notes: nie means ‘nigh;’ an earthen lake is a ‘ditch’ or ‘pit;’ prime refers to the first hour of daylight; Leman means a ‘sweetheart’ or ‘mistress.’ 36 The principle of distinction between past and present here is not entirely clear – what is more, it varies from one version of this ballad to another. In Child’s version, ‘There were three rauens,’ they ‘sat on a tree,’ ‘they were blacke as they might be,’ ‘then one of them said to his mate’ – all of these are past tense. The next four verses are in the present: ‘there lies a knight slain under his shield,’ ‘his hounds they lie downe at his feete,’ ‘his hawkes they flie so eagerly,’ and ‘downe there comes a fallow doe.’ Then the story reverts to past, humanising the ‘doe’ from this point on, as though to indicate that the quotation from the conversation of the ravens is over: it is the ravens who describe the pregnant doe’s approach to the body of her knight – their desired breakfast – but at that moment the narrator’s voice reasserts itself through a renewed past tense, describing the romantic tragedy that unfolds as the ‘woman-leman’ caresses, removes, and buries her paramour’s body, and then herself perishes in labour with their child. The closest this ballad gets to a simple future tense is the first raven’s question to his mate: ‘Where shall we our breakfast take?’ But we can also read his use of ‘shall’ as similar to the other modal verbs the ravens use, also with a sense of continuation and futurity: ‘can’ to describe the hounds (‘well they can their master keep’) and ‘dare’ to describe the influence of the hawks (‘no fowle dare come him nie’). In other words, the grammar shows the animals of the piece have an outlook for events to come – even though the narrative disappoints all three groups of them: the ravens get no breakfast, while the hounds and the hawks protect the knight in vain, since he is already dead – whereas human motives are stuck in the present, if we might discount the narrator from this statement. The once and future poet After all, the future for humans is so bleak. Here we get the final future aspect in the ballad, which is carried by the verb ‘send.’ It is most appropriate to translate this subjunctive form theologically, with a sense of ‘let God send’ or ‘God may send.’ We find versions of this grammar echoed in theistically inspired modern-day national anthems, starting with Britain’s (e.g. ‘send her victorious / happy and glorious,’ but its chorus-line uses the same subjunctive mood); ‘God defend New Zealand’ is another. We also find this grammar in some secular anthems, such as Australia’s forlorn example (Kelen 2003) – of which, more below. We know that the God of this ballad will send all knights, all their loyal hawks and hounds, and all the women who love them. Send them where? The chorus, classically enough, has the final word: these ravens so black-down, the breakfast take-down, the knight slain-down, the hounds who keep their master-down, the hawks who guard him from fowls’ approach-down, the pregnant lover who comes down and then goes down, the earthen lake-down she carries the knight’s body to, she who buries him down and then herself is that same day dead-down. God send all of them down, and with a derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe. Down may be somewhere we all shall reach in due course, but we humans are fixed in a present state of flux, for which down is an abstract and unattainable notion: as Roxy Music’s fay-medieval Avalon puts it, ‘Your destination, you don’t know it’ (Ferry 1982 tr. 3). The poem, which is to say the ballad, is our vehicle for understanding the human perspective – the present moment within which people are able to live and love a while, poised, as only non-human creatures can recognise, between so traumatic a past and so desolate a future. Downe is the name of our becoming. The same essential analysis holds good for examples of contemporary political discourse. When we remember that Obama seeks to put his listeners ‘in the moment’ of a speech, we can understand something about the deeply attractive nature of his rhetoric. Obama’s 2008 election campaign promised ‘change we can believe in,’ but there is a huge body of skeptical commentary asking just what he means by ‘change.’ If we compare Obama’s magisterial election victory speech (Obama 2008b) with John McCain’s very 37 Stay on Message impressive concession speech (McCain 2008) the same night, we can see they are fundamentally about similar topics: defining moments in a national history, a decision made, racial prejudice overcome, and the similarity-invoking idea that it is time to pull together as a nation. These topics are not simply a mark of quality: we can compare weaker speeches in the same essential situations and find similar topics, for example Kevin Rudd’s election victory speech just under a year earlier (Rudd 2007, stanzas 1–6): A short time ago, Mr Howard called me to offer his congratulations. I thank him for that and the dignity with which he extended those congratulations. We should celebrate and honour the way in which we conduct this great Australian democracy of ours, and it’s been on display again tonight. I want to acknowledge now for the entire Australian nation and publicly recognise Mr Howard’s extensive contribution to public service in Australia. There are big differences between us but we share a common pride in this 38 great nation of ours, Australia. And I want to wish Mr and Mrs Howard and their family all the very best for the future. Today Australia has looked to the future. Today the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward to plan for the future, to prepare for the future, to embrace the future and together, as Australians, to unite and write a new page in our nation’s history to make this great country of ours, Australia, even greater. Today many people across Australia have voted Labor for the very first time. Today many people across Australia have voted Labor for the first time in a long, long time and I want to thank all those people in Australia who have placed their trust in me and my team. And I say tonight to the nation, I will never take their sacred trust for granted. I understand that this is a great privilege and I will do everything to honour the trust which has been extended to me. The once and future poet This is dreadful rhetoric, really. Citing a ‘sacred trust’ is something that such ostentatiously religious politicians need to be a bit more circumspect about. But the later stanzas of Rudd’s speech are even more contrived and unconvincing in their clichés than the opening remarks (stanzas 38–40): Friends, history has given our generation the opportunity to shape a new future for this nation of ours, Australia. Let us be the generation that seizes the opportunities of today to invest in the Australia of tomorrow. That’s the mission statement we have as the next Government of this country. But I want to do it by us all working together as one. Tomorrow, and I say this to the team, we roll up our sleeves, we’re ready for hard work. We’re ready for the long haul. You can have a strong cup of tea if you want in the meantime; even an iced Vo Vo on the way through, for the celebrations should stop there. We have a job of work to do. It’s time, friends, for us, together as a nation, to bind together to write this new page in our great nation’s history. I thank the nation. Stylistically, Rudd’s example typifies the much smaller view of rhetoric in Australia than in the USA, but topically it reveals a great similarity of purpose. Political leaders tend to discuss the same topics as one another. Accordingly, the policy agendas that underlie their rhetoric tend to have much in common. For a structurally skeptical electorate, cleaving to well-worn themes and topics is the rhetoric ‘we can believe in.’ To put this in more literary terms, Obama uses the recognisability and respectability of his topics to achieve a suspension of disbelief among his listeners, freeing them from rational and analytical constraints on their readiness to follow his dynamic and creative appeal in other respects, namely his style. If style marks the significant point of difference, that is not only because Australian political culture is more tolerant of poorly trained speakers; it is also because Obama is so consummate. In his victory speech, Obama fluently uses linguistic and performative techniques 39 Stay on Message that most capable political speakers would avoid. For starters, as David Crystal (2008) points out, his syntax is often remarkably extensive. The first five sentences, each laid out as a separate stanza in the officially released transcript, easily tame a level of clause complexity that would be likely to humiliate the rhetorical capacities of most of his colleagues: If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference. It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, 40 Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of red states and blue states; we are, and always will be, the United States of America. It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America. The sequenced coordinating clauses Obama uses in the second paragraph are reminiscent of some virtuoso gospel church sermonising, notably including some artistic appropriations of the style (e.g. the Wright sermon discussed in Chapter 2). It is quite unlike the political rhetoric tradition in America, or elsewhere, The once and future poet whose norms usually emphasise short sentences, active voice, and simple syntax. As conservative political and marketing consultant Frank Luntz (2007) says, ‘This isn’t dumbing down: brevity, clarity, Obama uses the recognisability and respectability of his topics to achieve a suspension of disbelief among his listeners, freeing them from rational and analytical constraints on their readiness to follow his dynamic and creative appeal in other respects, namely his style. and simplicity are simply the hallmarks of good communication’. But Obama’s hallmarks of good communication, his sentences, stretch around commas and clauses the way his voters queue around schools and churches. Or, alternately, they keep recurring, a refrain that the electorate takes up in chorus: This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election, except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old. She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin. 41 Stay on Message And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America – the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can. At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes, we can. When there was despair in the Dust Bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes, we can. When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes, we can. She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Yes, we can. A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down 42 in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes, we can. America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves: If our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made? This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth that out of many, The once and future poet we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. As Crystal describes it, it is in response to the third uttering of ‘Yes, we can’ that the audience response becomes audible. From that moment, audience members join in the putative ‘sense of common purpose’ that Obama enjoins, and then all the remaining ‘Yes, we can’ exclamations are echoed by the audience as well. What is more, ‘Yes we can’ are words this audience – the audience in the room and the greater media audience to the speech – has heard before. After Obama had run second in the Democratic Party’s New Hampshire primary behind Hilary Clinton, which caused many to believe she would surge to victory in the party’s nomination contest, he made these three words his rallying cry in adversity. Admittedly, Obama uttered them with slightly different cadence then, a difference marked by the absence or presence of the comma after ‘Yes.’ This comma was present in an online video ‘smash’ of Obama’s Nashua speech (will.i.am 2008 – see below), which decided to include it in the on-screen transcription. It seems the Obama campaign team then incorporated this punctuation into its own typography before the Victory Speech. Orthography aside, New Hampshire was Obama’s call to trust him, to continue to ‘hope’ for his success. Further still, ‘Yes, we can’ is a line Obama’s listeners have heard others speak before him, too. The children’s animé series Bob the Builder springs to mind, but it is a bit misleading to pick out any one. The point is, this is a ubiquitous phrase, a tried-and-tested phrase, a cliché. To be maximally inclusive and minimally offensive is a virtue in political rhetoric. This phrase achieves those strategic objectives very convincingly. For all the lack of offense, though, its poetics are remarkably dynamic. As a clause, it has the two stresses of a normal Germanic half-line or verse: ‘Yés we cán.’ Printed (and performed) with three full stops, as in that last line of the Nashua concession speech, it becomes hypermetric, a stress trimeter that stands out from the regular run of pairs: ‘Yés. Wé. Cán.’ 43 Stay on Message 44 These elements of versification remind us of other ways in which Obama’s 2008 election victory speech echoes phrasing that people have heard before. I mentioned its intentional inhabitation of the gospel church oratorical tradition above. That is itself a style of echoes and reprises (Higgins 2009). Obama cites Martin Luther King Jr (‘a preacher from Atlanta who told people that “We shall overcome”’) as a source of the tradition, but he also cites the sources cited in King’s most famous speech, ‘I Have a Dream’ (King Jr. 1963) – the end of slavery, the experience of segregation, and the seminal role of that Republican White Male President, Abraham Lincoln. Obama conspicuously reprises King’s mythical universe, just as he purposively echoes King’s rhetorical flourishes. An illustrative example of how far this extends into popular representation comes from the Obama merchandising phenomenon: my father in law gave me a quartz-powered wristwatch that commemorates Obama’s inauguration as President of the USA. With an angle-of-perspective rather reminiscent of the presidential busts at Mt Rushmore, it features a colour photograph of Obama’s face in the foreground, while a black-and-white photograph of King’s face hovers just behind Obama’s left shoulder. Clearly the Obama campaign’s designers saw much reason to amplify such associations between the two. Obama’s Nashua speech clearly avows a desire to fulfill that Mosaic destiny which King appointed to himself in his final speech at Memphis (King Jr. 1967): ‘a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.’ And so we can see the emergence of an epic Obama: epiphany of racial equality, overthrower of Halliburton’s profiteers and warmongers, liberator of Guantánamo, cooler of climates and rebuker of rising tides, comfort to the jobless and protector of the homeless, scourge of oligopoly wealth and privilege. His name itself scans, rhythmically and alliteratively, a metrical epithet such as we might find in the oldest English poetries. It is a verse pointer to the hero he has demonstrably become, the hero in an epic sequence of poems that he himself composed. Obama’s ‘change,’ therefore, is a change in style. Because Obama’s moment of a speech is the same as Abraham’s poetic present, it is a change his audience views from the inside. We experience it within Obama’s poetry. The excitement of experiencing Obama’s speeches The once and future poet is that we experience that ‘change as it is happening’ which marks the poetic becoming that Eagleton discussed. It is not believability that makes Obama’s change so exciting – to believe in this sense is a counterpoint, offsetting the excitement – rather we are excited by our own capacities to imagine the change, to sense it unfolding. Obama’s rhetoric about change is the change itself. Abraham’s theory of poetic rhythm strikes me as a theory of political ideology more generally. For strategic reasons, as Orwell’s novel 1984 explores (Orwell 2000), politicians always need to communicate a contingent (revisable) past and a clear (predictable) future, meaning they always need poetic resources. The same goes for their audiences; if we are interested in it at all, our need for meaning – for pattern – means we want to know where a political strategy has come from and where it is going to. The most capable political speaker is that well trained and creative type who can bring the two together for us within ‘the moment’ of her or his speech – the proof of charisma being how communication affects its audience. It is a dimension we need to problematise further, as Chapter 4 pursues, by considering a division between composition and performance, between writing and speech, that is implied by the relationship between a speechwriter and her or his patron-speaker. 45 4. Speech, script, and performance This chapter examines a feature very common in politics as in the performative arts, grounded in a distinction between political speakers-as-performers and the advisors who script many of their performances for them. Often, that means writing entire speeches – which the politician may or may not deliver as scripted. Often, also, it involves coming up with ‘talking points,’ or with topics, phrases, or rhetorical flourishes the speaker can use under the right circumstances. A speechwriter has all the target publics of a speaker to inform and persuade, plus that superordinate target public which is the speaker herself or himself. The dynamics of this relationship are critical influences on the more publicly explicit relationship between speakers and their audiences. Consequently, these dynamics are critical to our understanding of political discourse more broadly. The poetics of speechwriting reveal fundamental aesthetic characteristics of public language in general. The speechwriting relationship is a function of specific economic circumstances. It requires a public figure sufficiently wealthy in money and/or volunteer goodwill that he or she can afford to take on a speechwriter – and whose responsibilities mean he or she cannot afford to go without a speechwriter. That is, capital buys time and expertise – from people who have them – to develop scripts of speeches that their patrons – who do not – may then deliver. It is a classic advisory role. While the relationships between particular speakers and particular speechwriters are individual and dynamic, each one is informed by an understanding that the written and the spoken word have their own respective strengths and weaknesses, and that a speech well-written and well-performed optimises the strengths and circumvents the weaknesses of both. Speech, script, and performance Speechwriters write as poem-writers write. They have a voice to scribe for, and a situation into which to project that voice. That situation sets down requirements: a time limit, specific topics to raise and others to avoid, set phrases to mention and reiterate, courtesies to perform, a certain register to maintain. Often, a speaker will dictate the leading themes of the speech, which the writer must take as a structuring principle to compose around. When the speech is likely to attract media coverage, the speechwriter must script phrases topical enough and sufficiently charismatic that journalists will pick them to become the grabs and soundbites they feature in their news reporting – rather than focusing on topics and phrases of their own choosing. All these and other requirements govern the work of the professional speechwriter. He or she writes to those requirements, running lines of entertainment, information, polemic, and story through them to the greatest effect that her or his imagination can achieve. What is more, as Chapter 5 explores, a speech must draw on a repertoire of phrase and theme formulas to meet the specific demands of the situation while conforming to the general style of Speechwriters write as poem-writers write. They have a voice to scribe for, and a situation into which to project that voice. the speaker. It is the same process that confronts someone who sets out to write a sonnet, villanelle, rondeau redouble, or what have you: navigating through rules about words with the words themselves. The speechwriter is a poet of letters, then, not of voice. And yet a speechwriter’s worth is only realised once her or his script moves into the remit of the performer who declaims it. Speeches belong 47 Stay on Message to their speakers, the professional consensus runs, not their writers. Of course, many public speakers cannot or will not make use of speechwriting staff. Some choose to write their own speeches, as Robert Menzies usually did, and as Obama has done for some of his most strategically important attempts at mass persuasion (e.g. his widely celebrated speech on race: Obama 2008a). Some speakers have the support of volunteer activists, and others are amateurs with professional writing support. Some rely on stock speeches written for multiple performers, or on reusing speeches written specifically for someone else. A rather small number prefer to speak off the cuff altogether, as John Howard often did – confronting his accusers armed only with a cup of tea. Hansen (2003) quotes Martin Luther King expressing a similar preference: I started out in high school oratorical contests and one of the things that I developed then was a means of speaking without being tied down to a manuscript, which means that I’m usually free when I’m speaking to communicate with my audience, communicate by actually looking at the audience. 48 As we shall see in Chapter 5, even this approach shares fundamental properties with the speechwriting relationship, including its reliance on designated advisors and on the mnemonic properties of discourse. As Walter Ong (1982) has explained, the differences between orality and literacy run much deeper than institutional practice in literate societies tends to acknowledge. At the relatively superficial, consciously pragmatic level of political tactics, the purposes of speechwriting are almost exclusively instrumental. The written word brings means of control that the unscripted word can only loosely approximate. In preparation, it enables a power of fact-checking and phrase-testing that is extremely useful in managing the pressures of public accountability. In composition, it enables a greater sophistication and clarity of structuring and arrangement than most improvising speakers can achieve. In delivery, critically, it enables the speaker to stick to the pre-agreed strategy for the speech – to stay on message – without adding the responsibilities of memorisation to the stresses of public performance. The absence of these crutches is Speech, script, and performance most noticeable in politicians who are used to leaning on them, as we can see with these remarks from Australia’s one-time minister for vocational and technical education, Gary Hardgrave (2006), opening the 2006 International Education Forum in Brisbane: Well thanks very much Geraldine. To colleagues and all of the international visitors to Australia, I am glad you are here today and I am glad to be able to speak with you. I guess quality in a lot of ways, is a commodity that, is difficult to define and it’s a bit like from wherever you happen to sit is probably where you stand on the issue. But with the 21st century education must be absolutely relevant, it has to be flexible, has to offer, obviously, continue to offer, high quality. The business world is a borderless entity, worldwide businesses operate in so many different places and I can’t see for instance why education can’t have exactly the same set of circumstances. Technology, through the marvelous internet, is of course driving so much of the possibilities and so I suspect in so many ways this really does challenge our thinking, it probably therefore challenges our comfort zones. Educationalists naturally enough want to maintain control to maintain integrity. Yet of course, for many people, their greatest sources of knowledge are those which are sought from very non-classical sources – the media, the internet, the experience of life, young people and the way they are seeking to find out about things for themselves, so challenging the established paradigm. From the perspective of skills, which is my responsibility in the Australian Government, we measure quality in a number of ways. We measure by how it delivers the skills which industry wants, but predominantly we’ve ensured there’s quality by supply side comfort zone measures such as focusing in on how institutes themselves operate, how the teaching staff and the courses and content are relevant to requirements. 49 Stay on Message 50 Hardgrave’s example reveals poetic elements that a good speech conceals. Because he lacked skills in improvised public speaking, his speech lacks the rhythmic, dramatic, or semantic control that, for example, his government’s leader John Howard often showed. Individual sentences do not form paragraphs with much coherence or command. We may be inclined to disregard Hardgrave’s intelligence altogether if we make too much of stanzas 3-5. Here, in the first substantive remarks of his speech, is a remarkable concentration of oxymoron and redundancy, as well as appreciable denigration of large sections of his audience. We can vividly imagine audience members’ discomfort as they sat through it: they knew it would offend them, and it began so clumsily. What happened along the way, though, is that Hardgrave figured out how to say what he wanted to. His search for fluency was at least partially successful. During these introductory paragraphs, we can see how he was fumbling for the right way to couch his story of policy reform. His second mention of ‘comfort zone,’ in stanza 5, seems to indicate he had found what he needed, contriving to equate this formula with ‘supply-side’ policy measures. He used the ‘comfort zone’ formula three more times in the rest of the speech – or five uses all up. So now Hardgrave the champion of reform had named his quest: to cultivate and champion ‘demand-side’ policy measures – and now he appeared to find his stride. A reading of the entire transcript shows that the frequencies of tautology and oxymoron began to fall off significantly and the policy logic of the speech began to emerge from this point on. This reminds us of a central element in the theory: that a poet’s techniques of composition are tools for getting her or his message across. A hard-worked message strategy justifies many a cliché and platitude. Still, Hardgrave must have felt much less the fool once he figured out what he was trying to say. The performative strengths of voice are more immediately appreciated than those of scripting, because the performance occurs in voice rather than in script. Vocalisation entails a control of tone, volume, and timing that no written script can achieve – and many written languages are considerably better at approximating intonation than English. The dramatic value of performance is not limited to voice, of course. Even on radio, a speaker has access to other elements Speech, script, and performance of communication – for example, the sounds of the audience. On video screens we can add to this the more noticeable elements of clothing, gesture, and facial expression. Live at the lectern or on a stage, the power for paralinguistic communication increases again. A script can allow for these values only in very limited ways. In fairly literal ways, it can guide certain symbolic behaviours with hypertext, such as instructions to open a significant envelope to announce the prize, setting out the correct pronunciations of foreign names, or prompting remarks in sign language for a speech acknowledging deaf people. When there is a demand for rich or nuanced paralanguage, though, a script often has to refrain from guidance, quite simply getting out of the way of the performance. An acutely revealing example is one of the most famous speeches in modern history, Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ (1963). Most of the words of this speech were performed from a script, but the most memorable elements are from that latter part of the speech King delivered without following the scripted lines (Hansen 2003). In the eleventh stanza, King enjoins: Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. Like so much of the rhetoric in the gospel preaching tradition that claims him as its paragon, King makes this speech become what it says. For the speech itself ‘can and will be changed’ from this point forward. In the ensuing stanzas, King begins to outline the ‘dream’ for which this speech is named. The anaphoric exhortations of stanza 11 – ‘go back to’ – lead into his most famous anaphora, the chorus that commences each of stanzas 13-20: ‘I have a dream.’ As Hansen describes it (p. 58), when King began to describe his dream in stanza 12, Mahalia Jackson called from the crowd: ‘Tell them about the dream, Martin!’ As though in response, King began to depart radically from his script. After stanza 11, as recordings make plain, his voice both rose and keened its pitch, losing richness 51 Stay on Message but gaining melody. What is more, from this point on the transcript of the speech begins to reflect the natural rhythm of his delivery in its punctuation much more closely than the clear and sophisticated sentences of its early stanzas. These shorter phrases and stanzas lead a more unmistakably versified rhetorical arrangement. It is as though King looked at his script and thought, ‘good so far, but I want to do even better than this,’ and then looked up at his audience again, ready to improvise the most important stanzas of his most important speech. Such strengths of expression as the script had brought him were valuable enough, but he now sought to communicate at a level they could not help him attain. 52 Vocalisation entails a control of tone, volume, and timing that no written script can achieve — and many written languages are considerably better at approximating intonation than English. Not many speakers have the courage and capacity to carry off an act like this: to begin with a sparkling script, performing it consummately, then wander away from it, performing even more brilliantly. Far more common is to make a good show on one side or the other of this divide, and stick to it. More common still in countries where few people learn public speaking systematically – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom being salient examples – is for a speaker to perform a speech poorly, no matter whether it is scripted or not. Even in the USA, King’s virtuosity was and is most certainly atypical. At the same time, though, it reveals how dynamic the relationship between script and performance is, how important the negotiation between orality and literacy is, in the preparation and performance of public address. No speech is better known among speechwriters in the English language, in part because no performance better illustrates the fragile balance between what a speech script can and cannot achieve. Speech, script, and performance This dynamic relationship extends beyond ‘set piece’ speeches, of course. The speechwriter Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002) describes how the office of Australia’s prime minister Paul Keating would labour in the development of epithets about his opponents. The performance of these primed phrases was critical to Keating’s leadership when he campaigned for the 1993 election – which he won, against most expectations. As Watson describes it, the moment Keating labeled then opposition leader John Hewson a ‘feral abacus,’ a phrase Bob Ellis coined for him (p. 259), was a symbolic turning point in the campaign against Hewson’s economic rationalist agenda because it remoralised a Labor Party caucus that had lost hope. The rhetoric of Australian politics should be best known for its generation of such epithets. Like the Beowulf poet, pouring sexual innuendo over the Danes, or like the ‘dozens’ contenders who prefigure rap music, this discursive genre or tradition produces many of its most memorable, resonant, and conceptually vivid expressions when coining phrases that ridicule opponents as they name and characterise them. Hansard constantly throws up examples (Tanner 2009): I thought I told you to stay in the car and bark at strangers! In parliaments as in the classics, such remarks are usually prepared and rehearsed before their performance, though only occasionally written out in full beforehand. Watson (1995) elsewhere insists that a speech is judged by its performance, not by its script: There are no rules or guidelines, except the unwritten one: ownership resides in the speaker. There are no inviolable criteria either, save the one which demands that the message be delivered. Professional approaches to public communication revolve around this ‘message’: it is a meaning we select for its strategic value; it entails a set of tactics for ensuring strategically selected publics will notice, remember, and appreciate that meaning enough to act on it in the strategically desired way. For commercial advertising the doctrine of 53 Stay on Message 54 the message is easily applied: creatives develop messages in order to prompt targeted categories of people to consume the advertised goods. The purposes of poetry as a whole – a larger category, but it certainly includes advertising – are more diverse than that. What is more, they are often less amenable to clear enunciation, meaning it is harder to distil an applicable doctrine of the message for creative writing. Asked by a journalist for the message of his novel Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov famously replied, ‘I am a writer. I am not a postman’ (Coe 1965). Still, we can generalise about elements that the message of a poem contains. One generalisation is that it contains something. Another is that poets intend their target publics to respond to the aesthetic form of the message, its sensory details, along with its ideational meaning – the two are mutually inextricable. Political discourse sits somewhere between the simpler and more complex ends of the picture. Its situational imperatives are inherently complex, but the professional culture of politics imposes simplifying strictures upon its range of acceptable purposes. Political operations are subject to professional paradigms of situational analysis and strategic action, which participants experience as a kind of grammar: political actors infer norms of analysis and action, and they themselves recreate and consolidate those norms – for others to infer – by emulating the analytic approaches and the actions of their peers. This intellectual and behavioural isomorphism is an understandable common response to the situational pressures and opportunities that all political actors work with. It is a fundamental cause of those similarities between all parties which electorates apprehend at an aesthetic level, and which political actors vainly try to overcome by resort to claims about policy – pitched at the analytic level. In this sense, perhaps the stylistic ‘change’ that Obama has lead is the only significant kind of political change: a change in signification. In any case, the imposition of simplifying strictures onto the complexity of situations and purposes that characterise professional politics makes for a highly convention-bound grammar of political speech, and a highly normative array of strategic purposes admitted to motivate it. Its conventions are observable at all levels of expression: word choice, syntax, phrasing, tone of voice, timings, deportment, Speech, script, and performance interpersonal gesture, clothing, furniture arrangement, camera positions, and so on are all highly circumscribed. We can be more specific here by noting that these elements of public address are expected to conform to aesthetically defined norms of expression. Importantly, that expectation of conformity includes putatively The rhetoric of Australian politics should be best known for its generation of ... epithets. Like the Beowulf poet, pouring sexual innuendo over the Danes, or like the ‘dozens’ contenders who preﬁgure rap music, this discursive genre or tradition produces many of its most memorable, resonant, and conceptually vivid expressions when coining phrases that ridicule opponents as they name and characterise them. analytic categories, such as theme and topic selection. That is because speakers, audiences, and critics appraise the conformity and non-conformity of the themes and topics in a speech by reference to their fit, or lack of it, with the speech situation (as conventionally understood) ahead of any intellectual merit inherent to them. An illustrative example comes from this 2008 Australian Broadcasting Commission television current affairs report on the political fortunes of Australia’s then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd (McKechnie 2008): 55 Stay on Message KIRRIN MCKECHNIE, REPORTER: It’s been his toughest week in power, yet Kevin Rudd today shrugged off the leak controversy. KEVIN RUDD, PRIME MINISTER: Always a challenging day in politics. You sort of rock ’n’ roll with the punches. 56 We might ask: where does ‘rock ’n’ roll with the punches’ come from? A hint lies in an article the Age journalist, Michael Gawenda (2007), published a week before Rudd’s election victory. Gawenda noted that Rudd consistently begins his press conferences by exhorting, ‘Let’s rock ’n’ roll!’ In other words, concepts of rocking and rolling are apparently a patterned ideation for this public figure whenever he fronts a press conference. Thus, on a day when conventional wisdom suggests his stock/formulaic expression should be to ‘roll with the punches,’ those well-rehearsed poetics of conceding lost ground are easily melded with an also-rehearsed rock ’n’ roll poetics of energy. Of course, the product of this melding is an innovation – itself an over-rehearsed topic in contemporary political discourse. When the ostensible purport of such phrasing is to cleave to the familiar, that might rate as something of a failure. And yet it does not often play out that way in practice. In cases such as this, when the anchoring in formula is strong enough – which we measure by asking whether the relationship to formulaic precedent is obvious enough – the speaker’s neologism may produce some knowing snickers (as Rudd’s malapropism assuredly did), but rarely any heavier censure. That is because, at a fundamental level of the ideology, speakers, listeners, and reporters alike accept that such a manifest relation to formulaic precedent confers a certain legitimacy on the utterance. We may deduce that it complies with the grammar of its generic discourse. What is more, adapting a distinction from Jean Piaget (1959), ‘rock ’n’ roll’ may be analytically inelegant, but on a syncretic level it retains those folksy norms of purpose and enthusiasm. Its connotations dignify Rudd while he is in the business of conceding lost ground; they remind us of his electorally positive (energetic, folksy) qualities in the same breath as they acknowledge the politically negative mood around his situation. When Kevin Rudd Speech, script, and performance sets out to ‘rock ’n’ roll with the punches,’ his grammar of public language performance is normalising a new and volatile situation. Cliché marks the safe ground to which he wants to take his discourse, although he does not quite make it to that sanctuary. Instead, he gets caught between two clichés – ‘rock ’n’ roll’ on the one hand and ‘roll with the punches’ on the other. In short, to ‘rock ’n’ roll with the punches’ is quite legitimate in the Rudd tradition, or genre, of press conference remarks. More than that, it is normatively encouraged by the situation in which he finds himself. And this leads us to the proposition that the form of a public language act is a function of its context-of-enactment. Much as verse-forms govern poets – albeit imperfectly, incompletely, irregularly, arbitrarily, and so on – so public situations govern public speakers. Eagleton (2007) captures the same idea, viewed from the opposite perspective: To write the history of poetic forms is a way of writing the history of political cultures. Looking back on his expression, Rudd may feel that his phrasing was clumsy – although that is pure speculation – but the poetic norms he has conformed to necessarily outweigh such reflexive analysis in two critically important senses. First, they conform to an oral performer’s priority on that which is said. The aesthetics of the utterance and its reception come before the analysis of them. In other words, analysis is an after-effect, something developed in the wake of performance, not the leading force. To this end, note that much political and journalistic criticism of Rudd’s rhetoric as prime minister was in response to his use of prepared (i.e. scripted) remarks, where there was a view that he often entered a room to a standing ovation, but left it to polite applause (e.g. Jean 2008): this performative flaw is viewed as unprofessional in a way that impromptu malapropism is not. Secondly, those ‘folksy norms’ illustrate that Rudd’s phrasing and topical reference were produced within an intertextual, or traditional, context-of-interpretation. Politicians and their audiences span numerous genres of communication, and are adept at recognising which genre frames a given remark in a given situation. These are 57 Stay on Message normative judgements, meaning there is scope for error, but the nature of error is determined by the dynamics of each generic frame; it is not determined by absolute standards. What is more, the framing norms of public discourse tend to enforce aesthetic standards – and tend not to enforce analytical standards – to an extent that disturbs many language critics. Any instance of malapropism in contemporary public language can be deconstructed to similar ends. As Fiore and McLuhan (1967) rather coolly explained, the clash of aesthetic norms and analytical standards is decisively resolved in favour of the former among those public communication industries that emphasise the effectiveness of affect. Contemporary Australian politics is certainly one such industry. We can extend this analysis by looking at a case of malapropism whose point ends up being closer to tautology than the oxymoron that marks Rudd’s utterance. In April 2008, leading up to the Beijing Olympics, a champion runner told reporters that she intended to shut out inconsequential distractions and focus on the core business of her sport (Lockyer 2008): 58 JANA RAWLINSON: I will make a pact to my fellow-fans, that I’ll use my legs to run and not to talk. Two malapropisms in one sound-bite makes for entertaining media, of course, so it is no fluke that this sentence survived the editing suite. The first, ‘my fellow-fans,’ is a dramatic irony: it rather neatly plays into a caricature of Rawlinson as narcissistic, which has been a constant theme in public criticisms of comments she has made over the years. The second, a genuine catachresis, may be more revealing for the purposes of this paper, in that it embeds malapropism within the purposive strategy of Rawlinson’s remarks. It is here that she expresses the essential idea she wanted to convey, here that she creates the news value of her utterance. To run and not to talk means to choose athletics ahead of celebrity. It is something that active legs do. For a runner, it rhymes conspicuously with the commitment to run and not to walk. It is life for action and life for speed, not life for reflection or perambulation. These Speech, script, and performance are matters of platitude for a professional sprinter. In Rawlinson’s case, this avowal was a newsworthy utterance because she had made many headlines with things she had said off the track. And of course the malapropism is that legs do not talk. To use her legs to run is manifestly commensurate with the properties of legs; the alternative, to use her legs to talk, is absurd. Just to use the word, ‘absurd,’ is to analyse and not to syncretise. It is the clearest possible indicator that aesthetic standards have been usurped by analytic standards. In other words, it is a criterion profoundly at odds with the grammatical system we have already discussed, in which a saying with well-precedented form is permitted great license in its intellectual content. Rawlinson’s ‘pact to’ (sic) her fans is that she will continue to speak in formulas they can appreciate, in formulas that respect the grammar of the discourse they share with her. In this respect, they are indeed her fellows at the same time as they are her fans. In any case, speakers more highly trained than Rawlinson have tripped on their uses of legs. Speaking as Australia’s deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard (2009) offered the following advice about banks that refused to pass on successive decreases in the Reserve Bank’s official rate of interest to their mortgage customers: JULIA GILLARD: They should put the acid on their banks, to offer them the best possible deal, and if their banks don’t, then they should walk with their feet to another bank. Here the tautology is almost stifling: how might customers walk other than with their feet? But this question, to which the Insiders anchor Barry Cassidy drew attention by repeating the utterance on his program, downplays the leading feature of the grammar, namely that Gillard’s metaphor fits into a genre that includes the formula ‘vote with their feet.’ Her performance is legitimate in the same way as Rudd’s malapropism was legitimate, because it so clearly references a familiar theme in contemporary political discourse, itself already legitimate. In overview, political speech is judged by the inevitably aesthetic standards of success or failure that apply to all public performers. 59 Stay on Message 60 We might imagine those standards as infinitely diverse and complex, but the culture of professional politics does not allow it. Within the profession, both the performances themselves and the critical appraisals of them are heavily guided by convention, which is to say that the body of political speech clearly constitutes a discourse genre, more specifically a poetic tradition. Every political speech is informed by – recalls and anticipates – every other political speech, in the sense that all political professionals belong to the one community of practice, a ‘public’ (Warner 2002) that sustains and recreates itself throughout the history of human society. Across that impossibly ambitious span of the imagination, I think we may reliably ascribe to the politicians a constant concern with fashioning ‘messages’ for ‘target publics’ to ‘notice, remember, and appreciate.’ Certainly, the written and, more recently, audio and video records of speeches given down the ages allow us to infer a constant focus on how to prompt those responses in audiences. The important distinction for a speechwriter is that he or she must first manage the attention, memory, and imaginative engagement of the speaker. The speechwriter develops messages and presents them in an effort to persuade the speaker, just as (and because) he or she hopes the speaker will use them to persuade the audience. Does a speechwriter aim for the moment, or for posterity? With most known speeches, a transcript or eyewitness report is our only surviving evidence of the words spoken. Thus for Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address (Lincoln 2004), we can only reconstruct his performance from the journalists’ written accounts of his spoken words, plus their written discourses about the performance and its context. What accent do you hear in your head when you read those phrases? I wonder even who you are, if you imagine the same performance as I do, yet you imagine it so differently. Transcribing debates in the Westminster parliamentary system, we find the written notation, Hansard, is intentionally different from a verbatim record of the spoken word. It is different because its compilers regard their role as ‘editing’ rather than ‘transcription’ – they aim to capture the referential sense of parliamentary remarks, more than the precise texture (Hardman 2009), meaning they put at least as much effort into interpreting and normalising parliamentary Speech, script, and performance speakers’ utterances as they do into recording them. It is also different because parliamentary speakers in the Westminster tradition are invited to read and edit a draft record of their remarks before the Hansard editors publish a final version (Hansard Association of Canada 2007). Although they are invited only to correct the superficial form of their remarks, with a view to ironing out ambiguities or unintended infelicities of nuance, this is an inherently tenuous distinction. It assumes a separation between reference and texture that seems to The speechwriter develops messages and presents them in an effort to persuade the speaker, just as (and because) he or she hopes the speaker will use them to persuade the audience. valourise the former, but in fact accords all its extra privileges to those who would attend to the latter. The end result is that speakers themselves are complicit in this final stage of a process that takes the published record of their remarks even further away from a verbatim account of what they said. If that reads like a censure of parliamentary institutions, I really mean to describe and not to judge. In any case, it would be a criticism that parliamentarians clearly reject through their practice. One more distinction is fundamental to the speechwriting relationship. Whereas much critical discussion canvasses problems with transcript – the written record of performance – a speechwriter’s script is always in prospect, not retrospect. A script anticipates deeds by the performer whom its writer serves, to whose performance the writing service is necessarily subordinate. Thus the cover page on a publicly released script for a political speech in English is typically marked with some version of the caveat ‘check against delivery,’ 61 Stay on Message 62 meaning the remarks of the speaker may depart from the script, and so the script will be redundant as a record of discourse to the extent that they do. Roland Barthes might dub it a speakerly text: not the finished speech-product itself, but rather a moment in the process of producing speech (Barthes & Balzac, 1990). Whereas a transcript of a speech is a written record – however accurately or inaccurately compiled – of the phrasing of the speech itself, a script can never record more than intentions about things to say. Even read long after the speech has been delivered, a script can only ever look forward in contingency to the things a speaker might say. This is a striking example of Eagleton’s phenomenological theory of poetry (Eagleton, 2007): a speechwriter’s script is always in the act of becoming a speech, but it can never complete that action, can never achieve that status, without ceasing to be a script. The creative tension that lies at the heart of speechwriting work is one between the situation of a speech, with its pragmatic requirements for style and content, and the opportunities to introduce new meanings which that situation represents. This tension between requirements and opportunities, which we are accustomed to view through the lens of public relations, is also familiar throughout the literature of poetic composition – across cultures ancient and modern. A speech situation sets aesthetic requirements for performance that are, in effect, the verse-form or poetic genre a given speech attempts simultaneously to comply with and to harness. It is a speechwriter’s job to recognise the qualities that a given situation requires, the opportunities it affords, and to compose a script that navigates these dynamics to the greatest strategic advantage for the speaker. On a concluding point concerning creativity, the suggestion that a speech situation sets out the ideological norms or grammar for a speech performance to navigate does not mean they are immovable. As the grand example of King’s ‘I have a dream’ shows for writers and performers alike, there is scope for innovation. Done effectively, such innovation changes the norms for future speakers. Poets worthy of note are forever experimenting with form, stretching the boundaries, enabling audiences and readers to understand new truths by creating new ways of presenting them. As we see throughout this book, the Speech, script, and performance poetic faculty for language is one that public communicators need to tap into constantly – and so, ubiquitously, speechwriters are employed to fulfill the same purpose. 63 5. Memory and formula Throughout the preceding discussion, the frequency and importance of one word has been growing steadily. That word is ‘formula.’ As this chapter explores, the poetic formula names a concept that links the performance-oriented and somewhat improvisatory poetics of political speech with performance-oriented and somewhat improvisatory genres of poetry, including the Greek and Dalmatian epic traditions it was originally developed to analyse. In this chapter, the longest in the book, I seek to define the concept of poetic formula in some detail, as well as explaining how we may apply it to the field of political speech. It explores how contemporary political speech demonstrates the formulaic techniques characteristic of poetry in oral traditions. In order to grasp the dimensions of this concept, it is important to appreciate how poetic techniques are implicit in public language performance and reception. Consequently, the six subheading-marked sections that comprise the bulk of this chapter each take an aspect of the concept, explaining both the poetic theory and its rhetorical application. The twentieth century saw theories of composition in improvised oral poetry coalesce broadly around an approach first developed by Milman Parry. In 1928, his twin doctoral dissertations on Homer (Parry 1971) revolutionised understandings of ‘traditional’ oral poetry with his theory of the formula: ‘a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’ (p. 272). Parry showed how formulas manifested in typical themes or topics (such as the typical ‘council of war’ scene) and in typical phrases (such as Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’). As this chapter shows, we can see much evidence of both aspects in the language of politics – which commentators often call ‘formulaic’ without considering how deeply and necessarily true that description is. Memory and formula Parry’s approach has been extended and refined by many others, adapting it to verbal art traditions around the world. It has become a research discipline in its own right, as well as profoundly affecting approaches to the poetic across the scholarly humanities. For our purposes here, it is worth comparing some of the key elements of the formulaic approach to oral poetry with elements from political speech – although it is important to acknowledge that these concepts and their applications in poetry research are more contested than this chapter can reflect. Essentially, though, oral-traditional poems involve the application of traditional composition methods to a (typically limited) range of topics. Therefore the manifestations in text are noticeably governed by repetitive and/or arbitrary phrases and themes. These are the formulas out of which, by definition, an oraltraditional poem is largely built. We may compare the caricatured stock phrases and themes of improvised public comment by our politicians, sports stars, and business leaders. Belonging to craft traditions as they do, aspiring poets learn, and receive training in, the techniques of composition and performance which are the common resource of all poets working in their language groups and in their styles. We may observe how that is analogous to the media skills training received by politicians, sports stars, business leaders, and other public figures as a part of their professional inductions. Much of the literature that underpins this chapter has been surveyed in three earlier, more specialised articles. One explores how public speakers are both constrained and empowered by the dynamics of the situations into which they speak, and how these dynamics may reasonably be regarded as prosodies – formal rules of poetic arrangement (Clark 2006). Just as functionalist linguistics claimed that ‘context is everything’ in communication (Firth 1957), so we find that the situation is sovereign in public communications: it dictates the tasks that a given speech has to fulfill and the aesthetic rules it has to comply with. That article characterises public speakers as heavily relying on formulaic language to comply with their situational imperatives, much as Parry found that the epic poets of numerous folkloric traditions rely on formulas to compose or improvise their verses. It suggests that, for public speakers as for epic poets, formulas perform at least five functions: 65 Stay on Message 1 2 3 4 5 66 As an organising device – helping compositional arrangement; As a mnemonic device – a technology to recall information; As a rhetoric-disciplining device – helping speakers and poets stick to topics and phrases that do not get them into trouble (e.g. through self-contradiction, or through uncontrolled nuance); As a ‘verbomotor’ (a term popularised by Peabody 1975) – enabling speakers and poets to generate words that fill out texts and performances (for contemporary public language, this also means filling out newsprint space, broadcast time, and online content); and As a headlining and summarising device – enabling speakers and poets to name the themes of their texts and performances in ways that make explicit the lines of interest for their audiences. The second and third articles argue that formulas must be present in the interpretative practices of listeners, as well as speakers, if the speeches that employ them are to communicate effectively. They each pursue a different way of proving that point. One way is to look for evidence that formulaic language plays a significant role in reported speech – to ask whether listeners fasten onto the stock phrases and topics of public speeches when they go on to describe them to others. This is the approach of the second article (Clark 2007b). It investigates reportage of the comments of sports stars, and finds that journalists give priority to platitudes and clichés when deciding which comments to quote verbatim in their news stories. The third article (Clark 2007a) instead adapts the work of Max Atkinson (1984), investigating whether formulaic language has a noticeable effect on the responses of live audiences listening to speeches. In a weak sense, it finds that stock phrases and themes clearly do register with audiences. More significantly, Atkinson’s study identifies two generic situations during a speech when an amiably disposed audience is likely to show its approval. One is a series of set-piece moments, especially introductions of speakers, acknowledgement of audience members, and the conclusions of speeches. The other is when speakers use techniques of rhetorical arrangement that Atkinson dubs ‘claptraps.’ Effective speakers will Memory and formula tend to arrange the content of their speeches into clearly signposted ‘lists of three’ and ‘contrastive pairs’ (and brilliant speaking often involves running these techniques together, or embedding them in each other). Atkinson offers a pithy and consummate example from Winston Churchill (p. 128): It is revealing that Atkinson (pp. 162-163) is clearly struck by the mnemonic power of claptraps. When audiences recognise the culmination of one or other of these situations in a speech they agree with, they will tend to demonstrate their approval. Successful demagoguery consists in large part of making sure the audience can pick up ‘cues’ to the use (and especially the completion) of these claptraps. These, too, are poetic formulas, although the experts who have studied oral epic and related traditions of verbal art have understandably been more focused on other types. In short, claptraps are formulas specifically developed to meet the aesthetic requirements of speeches given to live audiences. That they regularly comply with situational imperatives is evident both in their repeated use by speakers and in their repeated success with audiences. It is also evident in the disjointed, unenthusiastic, and even antagonistic responses that audiences give to speakers who do not use these formulas properly – a failing for which Atkinson happily offers numerous examples and much criticism. These aspects of regularity support the argument that the situational imperatives are themselves a type of prosody, strikingly comparable to the rules that structure formal verse. While the arguments reported above show the relevance of the formulaic poetics approach to the topic of public language, and although they prove its validity as a method for analysing wholly or partially improvised rhetorical performance, they do not explain 67 Stay on Message 68 what a poetic formula is, when viewed from the perspective of public language. Similarly, by demonstrating prosodies at work in public language, we can translate a basic sense of the poetic formula at work, but this does not supply a coherent explanation of what it is or how it works in the field of public language. For that, it is important to flesh out Parry’s definition of the formula, quoted above – and the advances that many of his successors have made upon that definition – asking whether we are able to translate its key concepts into this new field of discourse. This chapter sets out six defining characteristics of poetic formulas and examines the extent to which those characteristics manifest as a coherent group in the field of contemporary politics. The aspects I propose to look at are a synthesis of observations from scholarship around oral-formulaic traditions of poetry and other verbal arts (Ong 1982, e.g. Parry 1971, Peabody 1975, Lord 2000, Foley 1990, Finnegan 1992). It is worth noting that these observations themselves mark out a tradition. While there are points of disagreement between each of their authors, they are more at the level of nuance and minor detail than at the level of the model per se. That is to say, it is a relatively plausible group to synthesise. Key aspects we can derive from that tradition have determined the subheadings for the following six sections of this chapter. A. The formula is a tool to compose or improvise utterances that meet standards of semantics, syntax, and aesthetics all at once. Explicit in Parry’s definition of the formula are its aesthetic and semantic dimensions. Read in its context, however, Parry’s account is also very strong on syntax. The ‘group of words’ gets its coherence from the fashion in which it is bound together, the relations between the words in it, and the relations between those words and the contexts into which they are inserted. Importantly, the formula is a ‘verbomotor,’ a generator of meaningful sounds that fit the requirements of the poetic situations in which they are composed or improvised. A poet’s stock of formulas is a repertoire of set phrases and techniques for building phrases. It empowers the poet routinely to generate meanings that are situationally appropriate, couched in Memory and formula acceptable syntax, and patterned in ways that satisfy the requirements of the verse-form (prosody). We can often hear the machinations of this generative process during improvised public speaking performance – not least in ourselves, when we are the performers in question. The effort to establish satisfactory interpersonal register, topical scope, and argument or storyline typically begins with the effort to identify and pronounce a satisfactory sequence of stock phrases. Thus, in searching for performative fluency, a speaker will often begin by cycling through a range of formulas: topical formulas (for example, the numerous platitudes that index a ubiquitous time anxiety, such as ‘at the end of the day’ or ‘going forwards’); syntactic formulas (for example, the frequent use of syntactic devices as substitutes for relevance, such as A poet’s stock of formulas is a repertoire of set phrases and techniques for building phrases. It empowers the poet routinely to generate meanings that are situationally appropriate, couched in acceptable syntax, and patterned in ways that satisfy the requirements of the verse-form. ‘in terms of [X]’ or ‘with regards to [X]’); and ornamenting formulas (for example, the clichéd metaphorisations of narrative structure that support moments of biography, such as the ‘journey’ or ‘story’). It is a commonplace that semantics, syntax, and aesthetics are all significant factors in poetic phrasing. In assessing this book’s position that public language is a species of poetry, we must assess the claim that semantics, syntax, and aesthetics are all significant factors in the phrasing of public language. In looking for public language 69 Stay on Message formulas, it is important to observe the lessons of those adaptors who brought formulaic poetics methods of analysis across from northeast Mediterranean epic to other traditions of verbal arts. As Foley reminds us, each new prosodic system, each new language or dialect, and each new narrative genre requires a new repertoire of formulas to realise it. It is natural that public language formulas would diverge from, say, the rhyme formulas of freestyle hip-hop artists. This is not to rule out the potential for overlap between different traditions, but it does require us to accord each tradition a certain independence of values and style. B. Our understanding of poetic formulas begins with phrasing. 70 I have a vivid memory of a very good guitar teacher in my midtwenties, a political refugee from San Salvador, whose accent revealed how far into adulthood his exile had required him to become fluent in English. As I struggled to stroke notes of correct pitch, timing, volume, and colouring, he would insist that ‘It is phrasing, Thomas!’ So often did he say it that I can hear him even as I write this, and I imagine I am back in his music room in Leichardt, Sydney, striving to make my fingers behave. His point, of course, was that we recognise expression in sequences. What binds sound-symbols together, their syntax, is as integral to our understanding of them as the sounds themselves. It is also critical to our recognition – and hence our memory – of them, because phrasing is what gives these words their shape or ‘form’ – from which comes the diminutive word at the heart of this chapter, the ‘formula.’ In language as in music: C.S. Lewis observed how the words and phrases that we notice in popular discourse often ‘have a certain race and resonance in isolation’ (1939). Lewis was talking about modern vernacular echoes of Old English verse, but his point is fundamentally one about poetic formulas. Where generations of previous critics had noticed cliché and oxymoron in the phrasing of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Parry noticed how repeated phrases repeatedly met the referential and especially the metrical requirements of the lines of poetry into which they were inserted. This for him was proof that the poems were works of improvisation to a significant extent. He went Memory and formula on to show how we could observe a like process in the Dalmatian epic tradition (that was still observable as a vital phenomenon, rather than as an antiquarian curio). Oral epic poets remember their stories, to some extent, and make up the verse songs that bespeak those stories each time they perform them. Reusing or only slightly adapting established phrasing is an important tool for narrative recall, as well as a guide for making the story fit the meter. Using the same groups of words in the same syntactic aspects, every time the same frames of reference become relevant to the same metrical contexts naturally emerges as a formal property of verse in its own right. English-language approaches to prosodic analysis scan poems for formal resonance patterns in meter (especially patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables), consonance (especially alliteration), and assonance (especially rhyme), but the formula shows how metrical grammars need to reach more broadly than that conventional practice if we are to understand the formal properties of these oral verse traditions. Formulaic poetry means that any property of phrasing which has resonance is a candidate for formalisation. That includes well-known rhetorical properties such as symmetry, allegory, or irony. It also includes expressive phenomena for which we do not have such well-developed descriptive categories to draw on or adapt, such as forms of obfuscation, obscurantism, and facetiousness. In communications metatheory, ‘form’ is like the line drawing in a ‘join the dots’ picture. It is how we link together units of information into a coherent thread of discourse. It is descriptive, in that it makes sense of observed phenomena. It is also normative, in that it tells us how phenomena should seem: what symbols should be present, and in which order. Within the context of public language, functionalist linguists have made extensive use of these dimensions to explain a number of aspects of the grammar of news (Lukin 2005). We can extend more broadly into the poetics of discourse if we wish. For example, of direct relevance to this investigation is the tendency for public figures to use intonation and non-verbal gesture in formularised ways to maintain a semiotic consistency as they attempt to ‘stay on message.’ Mark Latham, then federal leader of the Australian Labor Party, found his rhetoric around the 71 Stay on Message ‘ladder of opportunity’ throughout 2004 was more efficacious when accompanied by caricatured climbing actions, after the style of children’s television. (That journalists were more responsive to the infantile gestures than to words alone reminds us that it is as much a question of reception and interpretation as of performance.) Such para-linguistic communications need not be intended, either: the breathlessness of a sports star, interrogated by journalists as he or she leaves the field after a contest, is a critical aspect of these setpiece interviews, communicating at least as much as any words uttered. For public language, phrasing is critical to our sense of authorship, as well as of symbolic meaning. It is one of the salient aspects of indirect speech, as Voloshinov reminds us (1929): Rhetoric requires a distinct cognizance of the boundaries of reported speech. It is marked by acute awareness of property rights to words and by a fastidiousness in matters of authenticity. 72 Satirical television reveals this particularly clearly. A strong recent example was Tina Fey’s impersonations of the USA vicepresidential candidate, Sarah Palin. Satire redeploys public figures’ characteristic techniques of verbal and non-verbal phrasing against them to dramatic effect. Where this means using a speaker’s routine patterns of blunder or malapropism, as it often does, it reveals how the acts of listening and interpreting often involve the active inference of formulas. Words and groups of words that recur in recurring prosodic contexts are poetic formulas – simply by dint of that consistency in their presentation. In that sense, a formulaic poetics inherently turns on an aesthetics of resonance, but it does not always mean recurrence as such. An important corollary of formulas and their prosodic contexts is the way they come to embody poetic styles. If a style of poetry is marked by particular styles of formulaic phrasing, that necessarily involves a style of phrasing which is affectively formulaic. Phrases that conform to the stylistic properties of their poetic traditions’ established formulas – including the property of conforming to Memory and formula prosodic requirements – may well seem formulaic, even if they do not recur in that poem, or elsewhere in the tradition. In public language, as in poetry, this ‘affectively formulaic’ aesthetic allows speakers to treat neologism as precedent: anything a public speaker says in a certain style suggests the likelihood of its own recurrence. When a speaker coins a phrase, then, often her or his intention is to engender a buzzword. Of course, often, too, it is a blunder – but note that the two options are not mutually exclusive. C. Poetic formulas are also significant in topic selection. Whether it is naming or describing things a particular way, or talking about particular things and attributes, the poet’s repertoire of formulas is a naturally significant factor in determining which topics or themes get mentioned, and how. Additionally, this creates a feedback loop in the relationship between performance and a poet’s professional development: poets will tend to develop more formulas for the topics to which their performative repertoires incline them to give greater prominence. Meter and syntax exert a very significant influence on what a poet can talk about and how. Formulas, when sufficiently welldeveloped, empower poets to manipulate this logic to some extent – expanding the range of available formulas for a given situation grants a poet a wider range of choices for what he or she can say and how. The converse of this is still true, however, that a poet is limited to talking about those topics, and to discussing them in those ways, that he or she has the repertoire to cover. This logic of poetic limitations rather naturally lends itself to platitude and cliché. In fact, we find that formulaic traditions of poetry tend to celebrate the hyper-determined and conceptually familiar, mentioning them repeatedly, setting all drama within them, casting them as heroes, and so forth. So-called ‘type-scenes,’ spanning many heroic traditions, are a classic example, if you will excuse the pun: thus so many heroes (repeatedly) land on the beach, their arms and armour glinting in the sun; thus many audacious pledges are made at feasting, but all true warriors match their words with deeds; and thus many anxious kings give their daughters in marriage to the 73 Stay on Message 74 enemy, seeking in vain to bring an end to feuding, although these ‘peace-weavers’ invariably prove unable to mend relations between their genetic and marital families. Both these observations may be readily applied to contemporary political speech. On the one hand, the laws of situation debar public speakers from talking about topics for which they lack appropriate formulas – indeed, we see countless instances every day where failure to obey this constraint leads to public sanction against the offender. On the other, we also see evidence that public speakers actively cleave to discussing topics for which they are better prepared with formulas – both deliberately, as a tactical ploy to reframe the semantics of a situation, and unconsciously, as a product of performative habit. Both these observations constitute an academic’s paraphrase of a technique that communications professionals have practiced and taught for some time. This is staying on message. For our purposes, it is often most revealing to observe the more amateurish efforts. The point is not to notice how successful public speakers control the terms of a conversation so much as to see that improvised public speaking tends to stay on familiar territory, rehearsing concepts already discussed rather than filling out newly developing ideas. A clear example is the Hardgrave speech quoted in Chapter 4. One of the features that initially attracted me to this speech is the way it cycles through a series of stated topics without advancing any understanding of them. The first substantive stanza in the transcript (§3) exemplifies this, by touching on themes of ‘quality,’ political perspective, ‘21st century education,’ ‘the business world’ (which is ‘a borderless entity’), ‘technology’ (‘through the marvelous internet’), ‘the possibilities,’ challenging ‘our thinking,’ and ‘comfort zones.’ As discussed in Chapter 4, Hardgrave was cycling his way through a list of ready-made phrases and concepts, looking for a motif around which he could organise his remarks. When he struck upon the ‘comfort zones’ he was looking for – a pejorative metaphor, which he conflated with the hostility to his own economic policies that ‘supply-side’ interest groups express – Hardgrave found his stride, and began to speak with relatively more coherence. Memory and formula D. The role played by epithets is particularly revealing. Initially, Parry’s most compelling research – the Eureka moment for formulaic poetics – was his detailed investigation of the epithets in Homer’s epics. An epithet is a term ‘added’ to another term. This can take many typical forms. One typical form is an expression added to a name as a formal acknowledgment of reputation, such as ‘Vlad the Impaler.’ A typical form in some traditions of poetry is the regular use of a phrase combining a descriptive adjective and a denominative noun, such as ‘brave Ulysses.’ A third form is a word or phrase that substitutes for another, where the substitute term is typically more illustrative than the term substituted, such as the kenning ‘ship of the desert’ in place of the simpler ‘camel.’ A well-known form is the abusive, derogatory, or sarcastic phrase, such as the wealth of purple insults in Shakespeare’s plays. Perhaps less remarked upon is its inverse, the phrase that delivers or amplifies praise of the referent – as in calling Donald Bradman ‘the Don.’ Often an adjective, participle, or other descriptive term alone may be read as an epithet, if it attributes certain qualities to a given referent, such as Clint Eastwood’s movie title, Unforgiven. By ‘epithet’ we essentially mean an identification that is also a characterisation, a denotation that also carries connotative and descriptive meaning. It is not just a descriptive term, in other words. We are looking at all words or phrases in which certain qualities are ascribed to identified characters or objects through a combined process of referencing (naming or mentioning, including through figurative language such as metonymy) and attribution (description or association). The first of these functions, referencing, is perhaps the most mundane function of language. In the case of the poetic formula it takes on a particular quality, however. That which is named or mentioned is inherently a function of the poetic context in which the reference occurs. References arise because they suit the situations in which they arise. If the narrative calls for a hero, and the meter calls for a name that stresses <B> once, then Beowulf may well be your mark, or else it could be Obama, or a daughter called Blazey. Likewise, if the meter requires that a referencing phrase fill out many syllables, then it is likely the poet will opt for an ornamented version of the character or object in question. 75 Stay on Message 76 Once we know the prosody and thematics that govern a particular language situation, the aesthetically determined nature of reference becomes apparent. For a rather obvious example, at the beginning of the Hardgrave excerpt quoted above, it is no surprise that the speaker addressed the chair of his plenary session by her given name, whereas she was expected to welcome him more formally. The situation of a keynote speaker at such a conference in the year 2006 imposes protocols of naming different from that of a chair at the same conference. We may note a similar discrepancy in television and radio interviews that journalists conduct, typically addressing their interviewees formally, while the interviewees respond with a familiar name. Fitzgerald and Housley (2007) discuss how the protocols for introducing and naming in talkback radio vary from country to country. Meanwhile, at a conference on quality in education, it was natural that Hardgrave should mention ‘quality’ at an early stage of his address – even though, as it happened, he had nothing particularly meaningful to say about it. In other words, ‘quality’ would be a required referent at the opening stages of such a speech, not a volunteered highlight of the performance. In like vein, Hardgrave’s mention of ‘the 21st century’ should be read as a response to the pressure to stake a claim to contemporary relevance in his speech, more than any programmatic intention to set out an epochal shift in educational philosophy or policy. This pressure came from a range of sources within both the conference audience and the political environment more generally. While we may be very familiar with such pressures, viewed as influences on political strategy, the sense that they manifest as pressures on poetic disposition has not been properly explained in the contemporary literature around public culture. We are familiar with these ‘required referents’ under the rubric of platitude, but that we also need to understand the semantic, syntactic, and aesthetic laws that produce them. Those laws are more clearly revealed when we consider the nature of attributive phrases. For the present discussion, attribution means ascribing qualities to a referent that has been indexed or implied: typically characters and objects possess qualities and are associated with qualities (which may mean an association with other characters or objects to which those qualities have been attributed). Just as Memory and formula norms of naming and mentioning lead to stock referencing – platitude – norms of description and association lead to stock attribution – which is to say, cliché. Clichés enable us to reveal the normative function of poetic formulas in attributive phrasing: dawns in Homer’s epics tend to be rosy-fingered, for example. This can extend from the sublime to the ridiculous fairly readily. In the epics, fleeing warriors are often called ‘brave,’ grounded ships are often called ‘fast,’ because these attributive properties of the epithets are essential to their names. Once we are accustomed to the idea that an identity and a ... the irony that makes epic poems so dramatic, so intellectually quick, rests in their incessant contrast between the qualities that epithetic phrases attribute and their poetic amplification through the narrative context. In his final hour, mighty Hector was terrified. quality belong together, poetic improvisation takes that collocation for granted. Indeed, arguably, the irony that makes epic poems so dramatic, so intellectually quick, rests in their incessant contrast between the qualities that epithetic phrases attribute and their poetic amplification through the narrative context. In his final hour, mighty Hector was terrified. One way we recognise famous characters or objects from a given literature is that there is a proliferation of such clichés about them – an extended repertoire of attributions for poets to draw upon when referring to them. That is because a famous referent – one about 77 Stay on Message 78 whom there are many stories known – is likely to crop up in a wide range of prosodic and syntactic situations, therefore the poet needs a wider range of phrases to accommodate it. For example, in the Old Norse Edda of Snorri Sturluson (1988), we find the list of epithets that Old Norse poets have used for the chief of the gods, Odinn, is remarkably long, in order to accommodate the many different tales known about him. Implicit in the extent of that list is the utility of having metonyms that alliterate on diverse sounds and that consist of different numbers of stressed and unstressed syllables, allowing poets to introduce this most illustrious of the Aesir into a very broad range of metrical situations. By ‘cliché,’ I mean more a quantity than a quality: for the formulaic-poetic approach, cliché is the extent to which an attribution is redundant. To argue that something is or is not cliché is in effect to debate whether its redundancy merits attention. That is, of course, an entirely relevant debate in a discussion of language aesthetics. If we already know that a given referent possesses or is associated with a particular quality, restating it is likely to serve some function other than informing us. An obvious alternate function might be to remind us of the attribution, but then why is that of value unless we are liable to forget it? The formulaic poetics approach takes memory as a starting-point for poetic arrangement: poets fashion words into patterns in order to remember both the words and the ways they come together. Thus Odinn comes together with a wide range of other words, but repeatedly so, and in more or less repetitive ways. Making the translation to public language requires that we listen for a sense that X belongs with Y. Can a ‘union boss’ ever be anything other than a thug in contemporary debate? Can a reasonable fiscal policy be anything other than ‘conservative’? Well, yes, in a sense they can – but you try to arrange sustained news media coverage for the alternatives. These rules of correct attribution are a clear insight into the structuring of what has been called both ‘politically correct’ and ‘ideologically correct’ language: both phrases remind us that grammar is a form of ideology, that politics manifest in poetic structures. As with Shakespeare, the language of insults demonstrates so much of the life that public language’s epithets sustain. Any day of Memory and formula Hansard provides hundreds of examples – as from this Question Time in Australia’s House of Representatives, shortly before the 2007 federal election was called (Australia House of Representatives 2007): Workplace Relations Ms GILLARD (2.47 pm)—My question is again to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. Minister, how many of the approximately 200 temps who are not employed by the Workplace Authority but who are applying the misnamed ‘fairness test’ are temporary residents of Australia with no background in industrial relations let alone in Australian industrial relations? Minister, what would a foreign backpacker know about an Aussie fair go or fair compensation? Mr HOCKEY—About as much as a Scottish trade union leader. Here we have the then deputy leader of the opposition, whose policy portfolio was employment and workplace relations, questioning the minister then responsible, and his response to that question. The heart of the question relates to the nationality of people employed As with Shakespeare, the language of insults demonstrates so much of the life that public language’s epithets sustain. 79 Stay on Message 80 by a contractor for the Workplace Authority to check the details of every Australian Workplace Agreement – a statutory and secretive individual contract of employment, since abolished, that superseded any collective agreement, industry-wide award, or common law agreement – forwarded to that office. Under law, every such agreement had to be submitted to the Authority, to verify that it did not breach the so-called fairness test. Hockey intended his phrase ‘Scottish trade union leader’ as an epithet to portray the outsider status of a certain Doug Cameron, then leader of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union. ‘Temp’ and ‘foreign backpacker,’ too, were slanted for their pejorative connotations. All three are eminently unpraiseworthy as works of verbal art. But it would not be right to take the literary cliché, that this makes them forgettable. ‘Scottish trade union leader,’ clearly, was a formulaic response for Hockey and his Liberal Party colleagues to questions from the labour movement about migrants in the workplace. Easily recalled and reused whenever the topic was right, Hockey must have seen it as acutely apposite to this situation, where the question was about migrants working at a workplace dedicated to workplace relations. To hold that Hockey’s answer was a glib and shallow response to Gillard’s glib and shallow question, as I do, is a fundamentally different order of criticism – with severe limits to its political relevance. Chapters 6–9 take up this problem in greater depth. E. Formulaic language is charismatic. Atkinson suggests three outstanding reasons why ‘claptraps’ are so effective in drawing both audience applause and news media reportage: they make a speaker’s language more noticeable, more memorable, and more authoritative. This resonates strongly with the experience of formulas in oral traditions of verbal art. As Ong notes (pp. 110–111), it is precisely the clichéd texture of formulaic language that bestows its forcefulness in oral discourse. Its affect of recurrence is deeply linked to the distinctive epistemology of oral culture. Ong explains this in detail during his discussion of the ‘psychodynamics of orality.’ Formulas have an aura of knowingness, of truth value, because they present themselves as things people have said – and Memory and formula therefore known – previously, and are likely to say and know again. It goes without saying that this profoundly affects the moral questions of truthfulness this book explores in coming chapters. Formulaic phrasing often fails literary (prose) standards of authenticity for the very reasons why it is often vital and trusted in oral contexts: heightened or distinctive sound quality aids recognition and recall; syntactic self-closure enables ready reuse across a wide range of grammatical contexts; and the semantic arbitrariness that we may infer from many usages of formulas merely highlights the clash between performative dynamics and analytical standards. A ubiquitous cultural requirement for knowledge is that claims must not simply be true in content – as spurious as that may sound – but they must also have the styling of truth. Knowledge presented as maxims and lists is extremely common material for oral-traditional poetry. Witness Homer’s lists of ships in the Iliad (2008), for example. In the Old Norse creation story, Völuspá, there are 7 stanzas simply listing the names of dwarves (Neckel & Kuhn 1983) – later to prove so useful to Tolkien as he filled out character names in his The Hobbit (2007). In Old English, we can observe the tradition of ‘maxim poems,’ which ostensibly serve only to recall gobbets of general knowledge – the proper wielding of a javelin, the relationship between river and sea, the dwelling-places of dragons, and so on – (Shippey 1976). While the mnemonic function is central to each of these examples, we should not lose sight of a concomitant quality: poetic formulas are normal vessels for the investment of knowledge. If poetic formulation is an appropriate form for knowledge, then information invested in a poetic formula assumes the affective value of knowledge. In other words, at an aesthetic level a formula presents as an episteme, a unit of knowledge. That this is true even in fictional narratives reflects the literary specificity of the truth/fiction dichotomy, but it also hints at the aesthetic aspect to epistemological distinctions: we recognise a known truth by its style, its phrasing. We may find a temptation here to describe the poetic formula as a version of the meme – after Richard Dawkins (1976) – in order to suspend judgments on the question of truthfulness. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that, within contexts of oral 81 Stay on Message discourse, including those contexts that Ong has called ‘secondary orality,’ the poetic formula has an aesthetic or affective value of accuracy that cannot easily be deconstructed. When we turn to political speech, once again, we can observe the workings of affective accuracy more clearly in less consummate examples. The Hardgrave speech quoted earlier reveals the charismatic importance of the proper use of formulas through this spontaneous correction in stanza 3: But with the 21st century education must be absolutely relevant, it has to be flexible, has to offer, obviously, continue to offer, high quality. 82 It is a property of politically charged situations that they tend to require stock attributions – clichés – which is why Hardgrave feels obliged to link ‘21st century education’ to ‘high quality’ in the first place. Then he catches himself most of the way through the formulation. We see Hardgrave sense the need to recast his remarks to ensure that a particular inference be ruled out. Without the correction, it might be taken that education needs to begin to offer high quality (education). That would suggest something inadequate about the status quo, which is precisely not what a minister wants to impute 10 years into his government’s time in office. The interpolated ‘obviously’ asks his listeners to accept that ‘continue to offer’ is simply an elaboration upon ‘offer,’ not a change in meaning. If the above discussion sounds like an analysis of spin techniques, that is not the primary aim here – we shall turn to it in the coming chapters. Hardgrave’s need to retro-fit a sense of ‘continuation’ into a sentence that has already run most of its course is as much a function of the speech situation (in his understanding of it) as is the need, governing that sentence from its outset, to attribute ‘high quality’ to what education ‘has to offer.’ Hardgrave’s ‘obviously’ is not a poetically subtle technique for rescuing his attribution from the potentially infelicitous inferences that always lurk in the words of public speakers, but that is why it is helpful for our purposes – it lays the rescue procedure bare to us, and in the same action reveals his need for a rescue. Memory and formula F. The idea of a well-used formula depends on a view of performance as craft. The charismatic sense of a ‘proper use of formulas’ leads us to consider the highly normative standards of appraisal for performers in oral-formulaic traditions of verbal art. As we see in Parry’s definition, a poetic formula presents as ‘a group of words.’ That makes it seem like an analytic afterthought, but his disciple Albert Lord (2000) explains at length how this works in practice. Based on years of fieldwork in the Balkans, Lord observed the quasi-apprenticeship system through which aspiring oral-traditional poets develop their ability. They learn to insert compounds and phrases into various syntactic and metrical requirements, thereby learning to sing their stories in verse. In so doing, they are learning the art of phrasing and topic selection that keeps their poetic tradition alive. This, both Parry and Lord deduced, must have been the way Homer learned his art, his delivery, his composition and arrangement. As is evident in the discussion above, it is also the phenomenon that Orwell and his successors react to when they decry the ‘prefabricated’ nature of much public language. Extrapolating from Lord’s description, mastery in a tradition of formulaic poetry means possessing a large repertoire of formulas and an ability to use them well in verse. It manifests as a versatility in the performer, who is able to traverse a wide range of narrative situations without compromising the syntax that binds them, and who is yet able to maintain appreciably high aesthetic standards throughout. In the case of an agonistic tradition such as freestyle hip hop, say, this means maintaining the contestatory register, the rhythm, and the rhyme – all three are prosodic requirements. Austin (1975) wrote that performance is the fulfillment of an action imperative; he discussed ‘how to do things with words’. In a sense, then, mastery in a verbal art means the ability to do a wide range of ‘things’ – that is, to fulfill a diversity of action imperatives, or to be poetically adequate to a wide range of situations. Indeed, when we look closely at improvised performance across a range of these verbal art traditions, we find that formulas not only enable the performance itself, they are also critical to audience and peer appraisals of performance. As Chapter 4 discussed, those appraisals incorporate judgments about aesthetic properties: the extent to which a given 83 Stay on Message utterance provokes audiences to notice, remember, and appreciate it. These mnemonic functions realise their political power most fully through the phenomenon of the sound-bite, a phrase designed to be quoted without the support of context, which can stand in its own right as an epithet for the policy agenda it represents. The benefits of success in promulgating formulas through the media’s dissemination of sound-bites can be radical and transformative. A very consummate practitioner was former Australian prime minister John Howard, who moved just such a bite to the centre of his successful 2001 re-election campaign. In a campaign overshadowed by Al Qaeda’s 11 September attack on the USA, Howard sought to overcome his economically based unpopularity by focusing the election campaign on issues of national security. To that end, he contrasted his government’s military activism with a Labor opposition ‘soft on border security’ – and by inference ‘soft on terror,’ since it proved remarkably easy to portray people escaping from wartorn countries as ‘likely terror suspects.’ The phrasing that cemented the contrast was a slogan in a sound-bite, and immediately broadcast around the world (Howard 2001): 84 We will decide who comes to this country – and the circumstances in which they come. For a hint as to the memorability of Howard’s phrasing, it is worth focusing closely on the rhythm. It is simple but varied, strident yet organic. It springs from a family of poetic styles that once connected all the Germanic peoples, commonly called Alliterative Verse, most brilliantly described by Eduard Sievers (1893). If we lay it out as verse (see below), there are two lines, each of them containing two verses, and each verse contains two lifts, or beats – below marked with an accent and in bold type. The distribution of unstressed (quieter) syllables around those beats determines the rhythm of each verse, and the Sievers approach tells us this is an E-type verse followed by three B-type verses. The juxtaposition of rhythmically varying verses sustains listener interest in, and engagement with, the rhythm of the poem. In true alliterative meter, such as most of the examples that Sievers describes, there would be a requirement that Memory and formula the initial sounds of the beat syllables follow one of a limited number of patterns. Clearly that element of versification is not operative here, not that one would expect it to be in a prime ministerial utterance in Australia in the year 2001. Nevertheless, the rhythm patterns of Germanic versification do prevail: Wé will decíde / who cómes to this cóuntry – and the círcumstánces / in whích they cóme. What can we make of the stressed syllables? Quite a lot, if we explore deeply enough. First, they are clearly among the more memorable words in this maxim. Interested citizens remembered Howard’s slogan quite faithfully, according to an illustrative study I conducted (Clark 2008), even six years after the uttering. Eliminating those words that the study’s respondents disagreed about, the key political ideas of Howard’s sentence still held up very strongly: We decide who comes this country and the circumstances which they come. 85 Secondly, note that half (that is, four) of the stressed syllables fall in Latinate words: “decíde,” “cóuntry,” and “círcumstánces.” Moreover, none of the Latinate words in Howard’s maxim are without stress. In the history of Anglophone politics since the Norman invasion, the Latinate vocabulary has typically been privileged over the mundane Germanic vocabulary around it. Church Latin (as well as churchimported Greek) and Norman French have provided the bulk of the English language’s words for abstract thought, religious devotion, legal title, parliament, the judiciary, the military, the prison system, high culture, trade and commerce, and so forth. In this example we can hear the stress patterns of the phrases chiming with their underlying hierarchies of power. Orwell (1957) objects strenuously to the use of Latinate words when there are adequate Anglo-Saxon equivalents – an objection that many of his followers chime in to support – but his test of ‘adequacy’ is only referential; it overlooks the power dimension almost willfully. This is an aspect Martin Luther King recognised in his childhood, when he promised his mother, ‘You just wait and see. Stay on Message I’m going to get me some big words’ (Hansen 2003). Describing the preaching tradition that King belonged to, Johnson (1927) focuses on the aesthetics of polysyllables: Gross exaggeration of the use of big words by these preachers, in fact by Negroes in general, has been commonly made; the laugh being at the exhibition of ignorance involved. What is the basis of this fondness for big words? Is the predilection due, as is supposed, to ignorance desiring to parade itself as knowledge? Not at all. The old-time Negro preacher loved the sonorous, mouth-filling, ear-filling phrase because it gratified a highly developed sense of sound and rhythm in himself and his hearers. 86 Thirdly, although the stressed words comprise seven of the total fifteen words in Howard’s utterance, note how they coincide with the majority of poetic resonance achieved through consonance and assonance: we, decide, comes, country, circumstances, which, come. In particular, note how the action becomes increasingly focused on the concept of arrival or invasion as the sentence develops, resonating on syllables with the structure <ku[n/m]>. That is to say, these syllables both alliterate and rhyme: “comes,” “coun-,” “-cum-,” and “come.” The cultural defensiveness of the first verse (Sievers’ E-type rhythm) is thus amplified through a repeated panic-note in the last three (Sievers’ B-type rhythm). Its echoes of pornography remind us that a vital narrative here is the trajectory towards imminent release. This topic of unruliness, of the spillage that is wrought by people who do not understand ‘mainstream’ (white, Christian, conservative) laws, makes for an extremely strong example of Howard’s widely discussed rhetoric of fear. At the same time, its internal logic is a call to denial of that release, to containment. Their freedom is imminent: arrest them! Fourthly, note how different orders or levels of stress collide, merge, and compete with one another. A stressed syllable stresses the importance of a word. Thus Howard calculated to stress the importance and the stressfulness of his topic. But in stressing ‘our’ stresses, Howard thwarted any view of the asylum seekers’ di-stress. The white, Christian, conservative, and other publics at which his Memory and formula comments were aimed were vaunted by those comments, and made acutely mindful of them. Could Howard have achieved similar ends with more prosaic language? This ‘rhetorical’ question misses the point: that his ends were thoroughly poetic. Howard’s slogan, maxim, proclamation serves as a key Orwell (1957) objects strenuously to the use of Latinate words when there are adequate Anglo-Saxon equivalents – an objection that many of his followers chime in to support – but his test of ‘adequacy’ is only referential; it overlooks the power dimension almost willfully. This is an aspect Martin Luther King recognised 87 in his childhood, when he promised his mother, ‘You just wait and see. I’m going to get me some big words’ text in the history of his political ascendancy. Australians voted for him in sufficient numbers to wreck the credibility and political capital of his main opponent in the 2001 election, Kim Beazley. It was a turning-point for wealthy countries around the world, whose immigration policies took a sharp turn towards deterrence – away from humanitarian values – from 2001. The alternative story of Peter Andren, an independent MP who returned with an increased majority at the same election, in his inherently conservative electorate, and despite standing out publicly against the Howard government’s approach to refugees, provides an instructive example of the Labor Party’s relative failure. Stay on Message 88 The connections between poetics and rhetoric are not difficult to identify at this stage of the argument. Public language is taught, learned, prepared, performed, and evaluated in the ultra-normative terms of success and failure. Increasing professionalisation of the roles of communications advisers and media skills trainers leads to an increasingly sophisticated professional discourse about public language, its situations, and the suitable responses to them. This has both imaginatively inventive and imaginatively reductive consequences. On the inventive side, assuming other poetic traditions are a reliable guide, the incremental building of a tradition involves cultivating the performative fluency and the situational versatility of public figures using formulaic phrases and formulaic phrase-building techniques (Mayhew 1997). On the reductive side, the process of reflecting on a tradition has a tendency to circumscribe that tradition’s potential, promoting cynical responses towards creativity or innovation within the field. We can see abundant evidence of this latter phenomenon in news media discussions of contemporary public language. We can also see it in many of the morally analytical criticisms that Orwell and his successors have mounted. Their strategic purpose is to fight for truthfulness as they understand it. It is often a hearing-impaired account of truthfulness, though, one that sees the printed word and assumes a relation to the spoken. The present argument requires us to distinguish more finely: appreciating the poetics of public language entails understanding that truthfulness presents differently in different situations, and must be measured by standards that are appropriate to the context in which we encounter a given proclamation. The remaining chapters of this book seek to explain that caveat. 6. Framing The previous chapter’s discussion of the constituent elements and working dynamics of a sound-bite shows how Austin’s account can be stretched further than he anticipated. For every case of ‘doing things with words,’ there is a complementary case of doing words with things. If a situation governs a prosody, and if using a formula-driven style is a typical response to any oral prosody-of-situation, then the action imperative requiring fulfillment ‘does’ the words as much as they ‘do’ it. As previously discussed, a situation or context is as important as the techniques that respond to it – and which, in ascribing a specific set of words to it, define it. Artistic mastery in rhetoric is as much a question of ability to manipulate the situational or contextual frame as it is of ability to deploy rhetorical techniques. The present chapter explores and develops this concept of the frame, which is central to the professionalised models of public communication that dominate contemporary politics. As this chapter explores, it is also relevant to our understanding of two much-maligned phenomena in contemporary public language: spin and jargon. By frame, in this sense, people generally mean a theoretical metaphor that Erving Goffman (1974) first systematically developed. A frame is the conceptual boundary we apply to any given idea or phenomenon in order to differentiate it from the infinity of context that it belongs to. In a way, a frame is a cognitive convenience: it allows us to talk and think about a specific aspect of experience without being lost in the morass of talking and thinking about the entirety of experience. As a metaphor, it derives from the idea of a picture frame, which both defines the boundaries of and draws focus towards the picture it encloses. The notion of enclosure might imply a frame is for the display and consideration of static phenomena, but Goffman shows how it can contain a dynamic ‘strip’ of action as well – a frame can outline a screen, a stage, a meetingroom, a family home, a telephone conversation, any container of Stay on Message experience (simple or complex), you name it. And when you name it, you frame it. It is especially in the naming of a phenomenon that we identify and delimit it. That is, what we call something heavily prejudices how we understand it. More than that, a name entails A frame is the conceptual boundary we apply to any given idea or phenomenon in order to differentiate it from the infinity of context that it belongs to. 90 an entity: giving something a name in the first place prejudices all judgments about whether it is, indeed, something. That includes the names we give to frames. It includes the decision to call them frames in the first place. I hope the potential value of epithets is clear in this discussion. By combining the functions of reference and attribution, an epithet embeds value judgments in the name of something. Because epithets are so integral to oral-formulaic poetics, including political speech, the formulaic techniques of political speakers offer constant examples of framing. Recall the ‘temp,’ ‘foreign backpacker,’ and ‘Scottish trade union leader’ examined in Chapter 5, for example. Many commentators have observed that the main field of contestation in political debate is the contest to name a given phenomenon in strategically advantageous terms. This is typically called ‘framing the debate.’ Effective tactics are the poetic techniques of identification and attribution that make particular formulas, along with the frames they entail, more likely to enter the public discourse and to remain in circulation. Framing George Lakoff has done the most to popularise the relevance of framing to questions of political discourse (Lakoff 2006, Lakoff 2005, Lakoff & Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1996), and is widely regarded as a leading authority on political debate-framing tactics. His most valuable contribution, from a scholarly perspective, is that he has applied basic concepts in the theory of language and communication to explaining the ideological structures, the strategic and tactical insights, and the historical success of Republican Party rhetoric in the United States since the rise of Ronald Reagan, especially Goffman’s concept of the frame. In doing so, he has shown the relevance and utility of frame theory for political discourse. When a political actor wants to persuade people of a particular view on a given topic, tactics that can prompt the target publics to delimit, define, relate, and hence understand the topic in terms conducive to the desired view are indispensable. For example, a debate – in the classically framed sense of two or more people arguing about issues more to persuade an audience than to persuade each other – is rarely won or lost during the transacted minutes of the debate itself; instead, audiences decide success and failure through a process of relating the terms exchanged ‘during’ the debate and the history of those terms’ development beforehand and afterwards. The debate is a poetic present that exists in express relation to the origins and the potential of its discourse. It is also comparable to the functioning of epithets, as discussed in Chapter 5, involving both the phrases the debaters use and the broader contexts of those phrases. Lakoff shows how the Republican party and its allies in think tanks, universities, and other institutional lobbying positions have turned an understanding of this developmental function in political discourse into a methodical approach to its rhetoric. Much more effectively than the Democratic Party or its allies, at least until 2008, the Republicans have focused their attentions on framing the issues they prioritise. That is to say, they take a systematic approach to the terms in which they discuss issues of strategic importance to them, including the very effective political discipline of ensuring that all fellow-travelers use the same terms to discuss such issues. 91 Stay on Message 92 Lakoff goes into some detail explaining how conservative communications experts, especially the freelance consultant Frank Luntz, have developed an unprecedented machinery of rhetoriccoordination, using large systems of email and fax communications to ensure that their spokespeople receive daily briefings on important issues – not so much to understand them analytically as to know the tactically advantageous terms in which to discuss them. Using rhetorical formulas current in the United Kingdom, North America, and Australasia, the aim here is to be on the same page, to sing from the same songsheet. Lakoff gives the example of ‘death taxes’ – which would be called ‘estate duties’ but for Republican campaigning. Clearly the connotations of ‘death taxes’ are different from those of ‘estate duties.’ A comparable tussle might be between the labels ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘illegals’ to describe the increasingly resented waves of refugee migration that have sought relocation to wealthy countries since the Vietnam War. And yet, though most people who deplore these desperate arrivals seem more willing to use ‘asylum seekers,’ it is not clear that humane policies will flow from the apparent tactical victory for humanitarian phrasing. This brings us to some of the limits of Lakoff ’s approach. There is no quantifiable link between success or failure in framing a debate by setting the terms for its salient issues and strategic success or failure in the outcomes of that debate. Against this, Lakoff might reasonably claim that strategic framing predisposes debates towards particular outcomes; it does not guarantee those outcomes. Indeed, since words are themselves so often the principal outcome of political processes, strategic framing recognises the inherent affinity between political inputs and outcomes. A more troubling shortcoming is the way Lakoff reduces his theoretical analysis of popular political understandings to one lead concept: a highly elaborated model of the (late capitalist, American, middle class, nuclear, united) family. He argues that people project their thoughts about family power-structures, economics, policies, and decision-making onto their impressions of political formations and processes. Essentially, he argues that is because republican politics are too complex to grasp, but people feel they understand the family as a template for other forms of social organisation. Lakoff Framing then posits two competing conceptions of the family: the ‘strict father’ family and the ‘nurturant [sic] parent’ family. These are the two poles of a meta-debate spanning America and beyond over several generations, and people align themselves at various individual points along the continuum between them. Someone who subscribes to the strict father model will tend to endorse socially conservative, and environmentally and economically liberal politics, while subscribers to the nurturing parent model will tend to support socially liberal, environmentally conservationist, and economically redistributive policies. The link to framing is that we are naturally predisposed to use phrases that conform to our underpinning assumptions about situations, but in return the phrases we hear and utter influence our underpinning assumptions. Lakoff believes that, at root, any political formula may be evaluated by gauging how effectively it promotes the family model to which it bears affinity and the extent to which it effaces the alternative family model, to which it is necessarily opposed. Lakoff ’s mistake is one I sincerely hope this book does not also make. He takes a heuristic metaphor, quite justifiably adopting it as a lead concept in his analysis, but then uncritically treats the metaphor as though it has independent substance. While there is no doubt that family experience informs powerful metaphors we individually each and collectively all bring to our understandings of life beyond the family, many other realms of experience do likewise. There is no reason why it is qualitatively different from all the other metaphors. To propose that a given ideology of in-family discipline and reward might affect responses to taxation, say, is not preposterous, but the assertion that it outranks all other sources of popular attitudes toward taxation or all other models for political organisation in response to taxation concerns does much to discredit other elements of Lakoff ’s work. Thus Stephen Pinker (2006) has systematically pulled apart the ‘family dichotomy’ model at the heart of Lakoff ’s political analysis, while at the same time genuinely struggling not to indict the linguistic methods he uses in building that model. Although Pinker’s attempt at quarantine is not entirely successful, he shows how there is real value elsewhere in Lakoff ’s approach. Lakoff has explained, more clearly than others before him, that any 93 Stay on Message theory of how political speakers and listeners ‘frame’ issues relies on a theory of how people understand the situations in which political speech occurs, and that our understanding of any given situation is dynamic and contestable – we are able to ‘reframe’ it for strategic purposes, given a fluent command of the poetic resources at our disposal. And so we come to the vexed issue of spin as it applies to the field of public communications. Definitions of this word diverge widely, but generally centre around the practice of selectively reframing public communications in order to maximise the positional advantage of one party in a debate. Most would understand it to describe approaches to public phrasing that either expressly entail intentional dishonesty, or that are morally blind to standards of honesty – but note that some would overturn this moralising sense (Carville & Begala 2002): People think that spin is lying. If that was true, anyone could do it, and we wouldn’t be paid the kind of money we’re paid. Far from lying, spin – effective, credible, successful spin – requires a gut level of honesty. 94 Here, James Carville seems to be aligning spin with advocacy more generally. There is some justification: for example, defense lawyers tend to provoke public lamentation when they successfully reframe prosecutors’ cases against their clients, but at the same time, those lamenters who deplore the acquittals of alleged criminals are usually also aware a successful defense may reflect positively on the ethical integrity of the legal system as a whole. The worth to Carville of the advocacy frame is that it expressly validates a pursuit of victory in its own right. Spin doctors are employed to use language and its contexts in ways that win, so their professional ethics are predicated on an assumption that the pursuit of victory is morally sound. It does not take much imagination to stretch the same contest-oriented approach to the fields of sport and of warfare, so it is little surprise that many spin doctors make extensive use of imagery from both those domains when they discuss their work. This is a version of ‘gut honesty’ that many outside the field of public relations are unwilling to accept. Framing Even if we concede Carville’s apology for a widely distrusted profession, a consensus on the meaning of spin clearly links its poetic tactics to frames and framing: by substituting the terms in which we discuss issues, spin is a strategically motivated effort to transform the issues under discussion. That is to say, the grammatically distinctive feature of spin is metonymy, the principle that we can call one thing And so we come to the vexed issue of spin ... Definitions of this word diverge widely, but generally centre around the practice of selectively reframing public communications in order to maximise the positional advantage of one party in a debate. 95 by another name – and that there are often strong poetic reasons to do so. Its practitioners, the ‘spin-doctors,’ are employed to optimise the tactical advantage for their employers by regulating the issues that receive public airing, the priority or salience they receive, and their alignment with constellations of other issues and with the defined interests of political institutions. Its tactics generally orient it towards short-term ‘issues management,’ and so its target publics typically include news journalists – at times exclusively. Well-known examples of spin are certainly legion, some greatly celebrated in their infamy. Often they involve trying to replace one frame of reference or evaluation with another. After invading Iraq in 2003, putatively in order to prevent Saddam Hussein using his ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ and finding there were none, the governments of the USA and its allies spent several weeks claiming they had found what they were looking for: ‘weapons of mass destruction programs.’ It was not the most compelling argument they Stay on Message presented to justify illegally invading a country, and so they soon moved on to pursue other more fertile confusions. These are perhaps best exemplified by former British premier Tony Blair’s ongoing efforts to rehabilitate his public reputation. In this online news report, note Blair’s pointedly blasé conflation of, on the one hand, an illegal attack against the USA and, on the other, a non-attack by a country the USA itself illegally invaded (Blades 2010): Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair invoked the terror of 9/11 as he defended his support for the invasion of Iraq during an appearance Friday at Britain’s inquiry into the war. With his legacy overshadowed by the 2003 intervention, Mr. Blair argued that while the 2001 attacks on the US had not changed the threat from Iraq, they completely shifted his perception of the risk posed from terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction. ‘The crucial thing after Sept. 11 is that the calculus of risk changed,’ he said in an inquiry broadcast live on British television and on British news websites. ‘The point about 96 this act in New York was that, had they been able to kill even more people than those 3,000, they would have. And so after that time, my view was, you could not take risks with this issue at all.’ A second noteworthy type is the blurring of scale or importance. This may involve the substitution of a euphemism for a categorical term, as with the ‘estate duties’ discussed above. When three detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, at the USA’s Camp X-Ray, committed suicide in 2006, the most obvious connotations of the incident were a blatant and strategically dangerous embarrassment to America and its allies in the so-called ‘war on terror.’ Rear admiral Harry Harris, then camp commander, transparently led the world media through his spin-logic of substituting one victim (the USA) for another (the dead prisoners), citing the doctrine of ‘asymmetrical warfare’ (BBC 2006): Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair. Framing ‘They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,’ he said. ‘They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.’ It may also involve the substitution of an alarm for a clearly unfearsome term, for example the largely successful effort to rebadge above-quota refugee arrivals, a question of immigration control, as a threat to border security. Note that there is no sense in which unwanted asylum seekers have compromised the integrity of national borders in first-world nations since 1951 – when the United Nations adopted its Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees – nor have they posed a threat to the personnel employed to secure such borders. A third type is the substitution of a precise-sounding term for a nonexistent phenomenon, or the invention of a new term which bears no categorical relation to actual lived experience. In political discourse, this is remarkably common. One outstanding recent example has been the Australian Labor Party’s invention of a demographic sector, the so-called ‘working families’ who supposedly entrusted it with government in the 2007 federal election. Treasurer Wayne Swan (2008) gestured the new government’s gratitude to these people in his first budget speech: This Budget is designed to meet the big challenges of the future. It is a Budget that strengthens Australia’s economic foundations, and delivers for working families under pressure. It is the responsible Budget our nation needs at this time of international turbulence, and high inflation at home. A Budget carefully designed to fight inflation, and ensure we meet the uncertainties of the future from a position of strength. A Budget with a $55 billion Working Families Support Package at its very core. 97 Stay on Message But just who are these ‘working families,’ the celebrated beneficiaries of ‘the commitments the government gave to the Australian people’? Questioned by journalist Barry Cassidy nine days before his budget speech, Swan rather glibly implied that everyone is supposed to assume they belong to this group (Swan & Cassidy 2008): CASSIDY: You make constant references to working families, that they have to be protected. But what are couples without kids supposed to think? What about singles, pensioners, the unemployed? You never say that you’re setting out to protect them. SWAN: Well, we certainly do. We not only protect them, we support them. When I talk about low and middle income families, I talk about people across the income range… CASSIDY: No you don’t. You talk about ‘working families.’ You talk about ‘working families.’ 98 SWAN: Well I talk about pensioners as well. I talk about singles on low incomes. They’re all part of the Australian family, Barry. The above examples of spin are all arguably for dishonest purposes. Examples of spin for the good take more explaining, but there are cases that support Carville’s view. Often these revolve around the management of danger or trauma, especially the management of public responses to them. One example, as clear a case of substitution as you can find, is the British government’s use of an actor to perform some of Winston Churchill’s motivational speeches for radio audiences during World War Two. But however you evaluate them in moral terms, the above examples all bear out the point that spin is an effort to transform the issues under discussion by substituting the terms in which we discuss them. It expresses a spin-doctor’s quintessentially political drive to change the situation in which he or she operates, in order to make it more amenable to the strategic outlook of her or his faction. Framing In earlier chapters we have seen how a situation governs political speech, much as a verse-form governs a poem – each situation has its language rules, which are fundamentally prosodic in character. We have also seen how producing apposite themes and phrasing for political speech is like producing themes and phrases for verse: it is an exercise in the use of formulas. Spin is difficult because, even though it takes place as political discourse, it reveals a usurpation of that governing dynamic. Spin tries to manipulate the requirements of a situation so that they are conducive to the remarks a given protagonist wants to deliver. It is the attempt from within a poem to switch the form that poem is expected to comply with, much like Keats’ sonnet ‘On the Sonnet.’ No coincidence, then, that one of the most commonly observed forms of spin is so called ‘expectations management,’ where a public relations flack tries to pre-empt public expectations of what her or his patron will achieve by suggesting performance standards her or his campaign is certain to exceed. Spin is related in two important ways to the widely lamented and rarely defended phenomenon of jargon. One is its alienation of all the people it does not actively reaffirm. Jargon means a reliance on the technical language of a specific social group or institution, even where it is not clearly the most expressive, efficient, or respectful vocabulary for the issue or audience at hand. It manifests as an arbitrariness between the topic under discussion, the audience listening, and the terms used to discuss it. We are all guilty of it to some extent, but perhaps few moreso than communications academics who try to write books explaining their theories! This arbitrariness is the alienating factor: people who are not of the in-group to which the technical terminology belongs perceive that a speaker is talking to them using words whose relation to the topic they do not understand, words intended for someone other than them to listen to. The second similarity is its reliance on metonymy: like spin, jargon is a system of strategic substitutions. Instead of saying something using accessible and vernacular terms, jargon is the use of rarefied terms, perhaps very expressive and efficient within a specific context of relevance, but not more broadly. Often, the use of terms whose meaning is highly circumscribed by official practice underpins the discipline of a group of people needing to ensure that certain issues 99 Stay on Message are transacted in replicable and accountable ways. For example, the grammar and vocabulary around criminal punishment are highly jargonised in jurisdictions around the world. This may come across as clumsy – for instance when prison guards, police, or politicians address press conferences on matters of law and order – but listeners will typically allow for that, understanding that there is a higher value on governmental discipline than on approachability or familiarity, and adjusting their aesthetic standards accordingly. Australia’s recent prime minister, Kevin Rudd, is often cited as an exemplary speaker of ‘bureaucratese,’ especially for these remarks acknowledging the environment policy outlook of Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel during a 2009 visit to Berlin (Rudd 2009): As the Chancellor has just indicated, it is highly unlikely that you will have anything emerge from the MEF by way of detailed programmatic specificity. That is what Copenhagen is about. 100 Orwell makes much out of the jargon problem in his essay on ‘Politics and the English Language,’ as do many of his avowed disciples – including Frank Luntz in the USA, Don Watson in Australia, and the international Plain English movement. With the exception of Luntz, they morally equate jargon with spin, because they believe that both tools are often used to confuse and that they are rarely the choice of speakers who wish to engender an open understanding of their position. However, just as we can see instances where spin aims to elucidate – where, arguably, it is the most effective tactic for enriching a public’s understanding of an issue of importance, especially if that needs to be achieved quickly and on a large scale – so we can see cases where the choice of jargon is demonstrably ethical, even public-minded. In Chapter 5 we saw that the use of Latinate vocabulary has carried strong connotations of established authority in English since 1066. Since these collections of words, along with acronyms, comprise the vast bulk of distinctive jargon terms in English, that power analysis remains important here. People will often use jargon because their purpose, if you credit it, dictates that they should. That is to say, there are contexts in which listeners Framing expect jargon from speakers, contexts in which listeners expect spin. The prosodies of those situations, like any others, demand that certain things be said in certain ways. The more impressive poets generally do it elegantly. One form of substitution is not exactly jargon or spin, although it may be used in the service of either. It is the extremely common tendency to use stock metaphors when discussing complex Spin tries to manipulate the requirements of a situation so that they are conducive to the remarks a given protagonist wants to deliver. It is the attempt from within a poem to switch the form that poem is expected to comply with, much like Keats’ sonnet ‘On the Sonnet.’ phenomena, substituting a recognisable poetic form for an inchoate referent, or stylistic clarity for analytic vagueness. That is, people use platitudes and clichés as substitutes for categories they are unable to name or characterise precisely. Often this springs from noble intentions. A standout example is the discourse around national ‘reconciliation’ movements, such as Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission pursues. Starting with the name itself (reconciling whom or what to whom or what?), the stock metaphors also include phrases such as ‘the healing process,’ ‘the journey together,’ ‘writing a new chapter,’ and so on. Some experiences are beyond people’s intellectual and emotional capacities to describe them. Lest we conclude that this renders reconciliation an inherently shallow agenda, it is worth asking whether we would prefer that people not discuss great and complex grievances unless or until they have the linguistic resources to do so precisely. That 101 Stay on Message they persevere in spite of their own limitations is a grace. Sometimes the hackneyed option is more moral, even more elegant, than the available alternatives, if they are silence or dissimulation. For all that defense, though, the Orwellian critique of jargon, spin, and vagueness is important. That is partly because the factionally disciplined nature of much political discourse is very powerful within its spheres of influence. As Chapter 7 further discusses, the poetic consequences of staying on message are often very disempowering for anyone outside the political elites. Additionally, as Chapter 8 explores, the intersection between a highly mechanised poetics of public speech and the highly mechanised modes of state governance is amenable to a ‘banality’ critique along similar lines to that which Hannah Arendt used in judging the record of Adolf Eichmann. Debate framing, spin, and jargon are ethically problematic, but not because they are inherently evil tools, and not because they are only ever the refuge of scoundrels. 102 7. Staying on message Be our metonyms for fair reasons our foul, they always reveal clues about what we are up to. Recall Klemperer’s words (1947): ‘What a man says may be a pack of lies – but his true self is laid bare for all to see in the style of his utterances.’ How a speaker frames her or his discourse often indicates its agenda more deeply than the stated declarations of agenda do. Indeed, our discursive frames give off clues about our unconscious agendas, the strategies we pursue without acknowledging them explicitly to ourselves. This is an insight that cartoonists and satirists constantly afford us. It most strenuously captures what Klemperer meant, because he was describing his sense from very early in their government that the Nazis wanted principally to wreak violence, and to murder people like himself, even as they persuaded themselves and most electors that they were a party of peace. Related to this property of revealing a hidden agenda, framing is always an effort to set and control the explicit agenda. As discussed in Chapter 6, someone frames a discourse in particular ways because he or she wishes to control what people discuss and the terms in which they discuss it. When former USA Vice-President Dick Cheney labeled prisoners at Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, ‘the worst of the worst,’ he meant to draw attention away from questions about the legality of their detention and towards the dangers that their release would occasion. That is a transparent political purpose, of course, but it also draws attention to a purpose Cheney never articulated clearly, presumably even to himself: the illegitimacy of Camp X-Ray’s extrajudicial imprisonment and torture was a moral voice he felt unable to answer to the satisfaction of his critics, and so he tried to drown it with a moral indignation of his own. Framing is highly manipulative and deeply strategic. It carries agendas behind agendas, Stay on Message 104 strategies within strategies. They include the agendas and strategies we may not be aware that we pursue. It is the principal language tool for taking control of a situation, including those controls and those takings we do not recognise in ourselves. Knowing this is what people use framing for allows insight into how it uses them. The rhetoric of unannounced intentions is extremely revealing, speaking through the styling of remarks and through other aspects of context. A leader who keeps people waiting for hours to meet her or him is invariably framing the relationship with them in particularly hierarchical terms – and thus invariably expressing an attitude towards them. The same goes for a handshake that looks and feels like Beowulf ripping off Grendel’s arm – an event the original poem sardonically characterises as a ‘meeting’ ordained to ‘discuss business’ – or for a conspicuous lack of eye contact on the way down the corridor. A stage with a lectern makes a statement about the situation in which a speaker will deliver remarks – including the statement that we can expect to hear a speaker delivering remarks. Just as paralinguistic framing elements communicate truths about the situation a speaker may not even have considered, so do framing elements within language. A classic example is choice of personal pronouns, especially the uses of ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘our’ alongside ‘they,’ ‘them,’ and ‘their.’ Around the world, the so-called history wars involve constant debate about what ‘they’ (typically meaning unionised school teachers) are teaching ‘our children,’ but little unpacking of the assumptions that underpin this grammar. And yet, as Anna Clark has shown, paying attention to these categories – spelling out which entities they refer to – reveals their inherently partisan character (Macintyre & Clark 2003). Who teaches ‘their children’? Or do ‘they’ even have children? Used within the frame of this debate, these ostensibly simple, mundane pronouns have become epithets. The poetics of framing become most apparent through repetition (Billig 1995). Political agendas are rarely limited to an instant, even if their short-term nature is itself a cliché of the commentary. Once a speaker has launched a given frame into currency, we can be confident of hearing it again, whenever he or she has reason to discuss the same issues in earshot of the same target publics. Moreover, the increasingly coordinated discursive practices of political parties and Staying on message other public activists mean we can expect to hear these same frames from similar people discussing similar issues in earshot of similar target publics. By way of a case study, we may compare the national apologies that the governments of Australia and Canada gave to the Indigenous peoples of their respective countries in 2008, in each case acknowledging over a century of the large-scale forcible separation of Indigenous children from their families, we find speakers supporting Political agendas are rarely limited to an instant, even if their short-term nature is itself a cliché of the commentary. Once a speaker has launched a given frame into currency, we can be confident of hearing it again ... 105 those apologies in both parliaments using very similar language. The parliamentary speakers who supported these apologies used a very similar set of phrases to acknowledge the significance of the postcolonial legacy, describing a ‘sad/dreadful/dark/blemished chapter of our history.’ They used similar terms to reiterate the importance of national unity during the historic moment of the debates, talking of the need to ‘go/move forwards together,’ and asking for unanimous parliamentary support of the apology to make this concrete. Particularly revealing was the way all speakers supporting the apologies in both countries conformed with language that kept future prospects and policy options vague and metaphoric, with commitments to ‘turn a new page (in our nation’s/country’s history),’ to ‘healing,’ and to look to ‘a new future.’ Australia’s then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, sought to blur this vagueness with an extended discussion of ‘practical’ reconciliation, but the detail of his putative practicality was limited to helping the Stolen Generations locate surviving members of their Stay on Message 106 families more readily – that is, a policy focused on specifics of the past, not of the future. The rest of his practical turn was just listing statistical measures of social wellbeing that need to improve for Indigenous Australians ‘if we are to close the gap.’ These parliamentary apology ‘debates’ make revealing material. As is often true with parliamentary discourse (Summers 2007), very few speakers mentioned or explicitly quoted from their colleagues. There is no mention of the Australian experience during the Canadian debate and only one senator mentioned the Canadian experience during the Australian debate – Andrew Murray, of the now-defunct Australian Democrats (Australian federal parliament Senate 2008). Nevertheless, all contributors, across partisan divides and across immense distances, were clearly demonstrating their affiliation to a shared conceptual frame for the issues in hand; they were clearly opting to construe those issues in like terms; and they were clearly endeavouring to sustain the public understandings of those issues which that frame entailed by reiterating its key terms (past wrong, current unity, and prospective vagueness) – frequently and for the most part unambiguously. We may call these entailed key terms the formulaic themes of this discourse. Their repetition alone is a suggestion that they perform this role, but so are their consistently figurative phrasing and their typically epithetic function. Speakers regularly use them for at least five identifiable purposes: 1. To mark out their affiliation to the discursive tradition – that is, the poetic genre. 2. To assert a conceptual frame’s validity in the debate, and thus to influence public understandings of the speech in its context. 3. To compose remarks which reduce the risk of unintended meanings by conforming to the established thematic and phraseological expectations – that is, the prosody – of the situation. 4. To highlight the relevance of their remarks to others made within the same discursive tradition – effectively treating the formulas as headlines for the poetic concordances that observers mentally Staying on message compile as they consider one remark in the light of other remarks. 5. To help them find something to say as they fill out the allotted time – that is, as a verbomotor. I have not come across a convincing origin for the phrase ‘stay on message,’ although basic online searching shows its widespread takeup among political commentators and activists, especially the ever-growing armies of advisers, from the late 1970s, and accelerating exponentially over the decades since 1990s. By 2011 its circulation had become extremely broad, so that it is now itself a formula, a catchphrase of public relations methods extending well beyond professional politics. This formula is an injunction to cleave to formulas. ‘Message’ means the theme a speaker is adequate to discuss, using (and thanks to) the phrasing he or she has prepared to frame it with. Staying on message means a speaker subscribes to those five values outlined above in the faith that they will maximise the strategic success of her or his remarks. It is a discipline in the rather particular sense that a particular genre of creative art constitutes a discipline for the creative artists who work in it: a praxis that demands focused learning and ongoing development. It is also a discipline in the more commonly understood sense of the word, since upholding it can often require great self-control, even denial. An echo might be the 1977 film Star Wars, where one X-wing pilot enjoins his squadron leader to ignore the tailfire of Imperial Tifighters as the Rebels pursue a strategic knockout shot on the Death Star. From the perspective of this book, it is interesting to note that George Lucas’ original screenplay (1976) does not draw out these lines with nearly the same tension as the finished film (Lucas 2004 [1977], 1:45:49–1:46:33): Gold Two: [the Y-wings are running the gauntlet toward the Death Star reactor-port] The guns – they’ve stopped! Gold Five: [realizes why.] Stabilize your rear deflectors... Watch for enemy fighters. 107 Stay on Message Gold Leader: They’re coming in! Three marks at 2–10! [Gold Two is slain by Darth Vader and his wingmen; Gold Leader starts to panic.] Gold Leader: It’s no good, I can’t maneuver! Gold Five: Stay on target. Gold Leader: *We’re too close!* Gold Five: Stay on target! Gold Leader: [shouts] Loosen up! [He too is picked off by Vader and Company; Gold Five tries to escape but is fatally winged.] Gold Five: Gold Five to Red leader, lost Tiree, lost Dutch. Red Leader: I copy, Gold Leader. Gold Five: 108 It came from... behind! [Crashes.] Staying on message is a tense compromise between action and passivity, like refusing to scratch a sandfly bite, or ignoring a heckler in the front row. It means only saying what your side agreed you should say, no matter how the situation unfolds around you. For journalists, it means asking the one question or one set of questions relentlessly and repeatedly, no matter how arbitrary they may seem towards the matters under consideration. A strong example is the ease with which political journalism in Westminster democracies reverts to questions of party leadership – as though just in case the issue is of relevance. Staying on message is predicated on assumptions that you can count on your supporters to help you anticipate and prepare for situations before you encounter them, and to help in managing the public reception of comments you make in response to those situations. However foolish these assumptions make a speaker look from time to time, there is also an assumption that any such embarrassment is less strategically harmful than the alternative scenario, in which somebody gives public comment without a pre-agreed ‘messaging strategy.’ Note that the alternative scenario can only ever be a question of degree: it is not possible or even conceivable to make public comment without the guidance of strategy. Arguably, though, often the people who do not consciously rehearse what they want to Staying on message say and how they want to say it prior to the situation are the most strategically adept in it. This gives rise to a romantic ideal of naïve eloquence (the Walter Mitty scenario) but it also allows room for some wonderfully unreflective manipulators to work in – such as the long-time premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen (AAP 2005): The greatest thing that could happen to the state and nation is when we get rid of all the media ... then we could live in peace and tranquility and no one would know anything. Staying on message is a tense compromise between action and passivity, like refusing to scratch a sandfly bite, or ignoring a heckler in the front row. George Orwell’s famous essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’ is a manifesto directed against stay-on-message disciplinarians and opportunists of oxymoron alike. Beginning with a denunciation of ‘staleness of imagery’ and ‘lack of precision,’ both of which he found prevalent in published texts of the 1940s, Orwell trains his fire on ‘dying metaphors,’ ‘operators or verbal false limbs,’ ‘pretentious diction,’ and ‘meaningless words.’ These are analytic categories of language criticism, but he identifies their offending examples principally by their ‘prefabricated’ quality – by the primarily aesthetic phenomenon of their repetition. In other words, Orwell’s chief object of criticism is the formula. He expressly proscribes it with the first and fifth of his six proposed rules, and implicitly proscribes it with the second, third, and fourth as well (Orwell 1957): 109 Stay on Message 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. 110 In his novel 1984 (Orwell 2000) – and in Animal Farm (Orwell 1945) also, to a milder extent – Orwell imagined totalitarian political systems whose preferred and valourised forms of language were in breach of all these rules. All totalitarianisms share a distinctive language aesthetic, in this view, a typical approach to grammar. The Newspeak of 1984 is a dialect in which all language is epithetic, purposively combining attribution with reference in every remark, as well as metonymic, substituting a politically acceptable form of expression for each organic form. More than that, the dialect itself is styled as an epithet, in that it seeks to circumscribe all its speakers may say and especially how they may say it, and styled as a metonym, in that it effaces the organic language alternative. And yet, ‘say’ is not quite right. Orwell was a writer; his imaginary Newspeak is a language of the written word. Note that no characters in 1984 speak it in dialogue, not even the government figure of O’Brien in his most repressive moments. One of the main problems with Orwell’s critique of public language is that he devised it in analysis of the written word he had so demonstrably mastered, but did not distinguish between the poetics of print and those of speech when he applied it. Moreover, those who have used the Orwellian critique after him have omitted to distinguish in like fashion. There is a vast literature, especially journalistic and scholarly, that criticises the language techniques of spin-doctors, whose authors acknowledge Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ and 1984 as leading sources of inspiration. All partisan language frames, all obvious metonyms, are Newspeak in this tradition, because Newspeak also hyperdetermines and substitutes. It is a system for wanton Staying on message misrepresentation. All jargon is Newspeak, because Newspeak is a totalising system of jargon. It is the one jargon to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie. All harm conveyed in inoffensive words is Newspeak, because Newspeak is a dialect designed to make greater harm more achievable. It represents all the banality of state evil in words. The problem, for present purposes, is not that people see evil where none is. Often I agree with the moral judgments of spin’s critics. For example, I despair that John Howard will ever acknowledge the harm done to refugees he talked himself into both perpetrating and ignoring while Australia’s prime minister. But that does not make the Orwellian metaphor appropriate. His remarks were the more toxic because they utilised poetics far more powerful in speech than in writing. ‘We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come’ was calculated to become a slogan, something people could say to affiliate themselves to a policy of re-traumatising refugees who reach Australia by boat. It is a much less memorable and compelling proposition on the page than it is in the ear, combining rhythm and resonance with reference, attribution, and connotation. We can only hint at this by using marked-up text, as demonstrated in Chapter 5, using a format that no written news reportage and very few speaking scripts ever would. Perhaps the most charismatic bearer of Orwell’s torch has been Don Watson. Watson’s background is of direct theoretical influence here, because he has worked both as a political speechwriter (to Victorian premier John Cain, then to Australian prime minister Paul Keating) and as a scriptwriter for political satire on television. This makes him more alive than most to the dynamics of speech as distinct from writing, as well as to the aesthetic dimensions of political speech as performance. Additionally, Watson is ever keen to shrug the curmudgeonly and pedantic values that attach to public language critics; he overtly steps away from questions of proper usage and shows genuine affection for slang. Instead, he trains his critical guns on what Orwell called ‘anaesthetic’ language: the ‘staleness of imagery’ and ‘lack of precision.’ It is noteworthy, though, that most of the examples Watson cites in his books on this topic (2009, 2005, 2003) are examples from writing, not speech. That is partly because 111 Stay on Message it is significantly easier for a writer to collect written examples than to transcribe spoken examples, but it also reflects Orwell’s original conflation. Unpacking that conflation is important, because staleness and imprecision are both critically different phenomena in writing and in speech. To be stale or imprecise in writing is a failing of invention and of editing. A writer who plans before composing, and who revises carefully afterwards, may be expected to say just what he or she means and not more than that. We may expect her or him to present it in fresh words and in fresh combinations of words, or at least in words and phrases specifically calculated to convey her or his specific meaning. We may expect repetitions of phrases and full words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) to be limited, conscious that One of the main problems with Orwell’s critique of public language is that he devised it in analysis of the written word 112 he had so demonstrably mastered, but did not distinguish between the poetics of print and those of speech when he applied it. Moreover, those who have used the Orwellian critique after him have omitted to distinguish in like fashion. any such repetition is rhetorically significant. The words ‘platitude,’ ‘cliché,’ and ‘stereotype’ are terms taken from the printing process – all originally as metaphors for prefabricated or formulaic blocks of text and/or images – and it shows in the pejorative connotations that literary culture associates with formula and prefabrication in text. Staying on message Staleness aside, to be imprecise in unscripted speech is only to be expected. Empty words proliferate, padding out the phrases and full words, which are frequently repeated. Rhetorical analysis needs to note where the repetitions tend to fall, but not automatically on the assumption that repetition is pointed. The more specific phrasing tends to stand out as jargon, its intellectual styling in contrast with the more emotive register of regular spoken language. Indeed, Orwell’s ‘stale’ and ‘imprecise’ are conspicuously literary categories of analysis, passing more or less undifferentiated judgment on the output of a medium for which more sensitive categories are both needed and available. That is not to reject a critique of anaesthetic rhetoric, though. There is no doubt that being boring is a common strategy in political speech, but tellingly, its most common variant is to make spoken language conform to literary prosodies – grammatically complex sentences, a minimal reliance on vocal inflection or paralinguistic features generally, themes not arranged for easy recall. Television and radio news interviews with politicians make the point many times every day, as with this 1999 example (Vincent 1999): MICHAEL VINCENT: The Minister has defended his actions over dealing with illegal immigrants, saying he’s recently been to Indonesia to discuss the problem with their relevant authorities. But he says for the Indonesian Government, it is not always as easy to locate illegal immigrants and remove them as it is in Australia. PHILIP RUDDOCK: We will continue to engage Indonesia as productively as we can in relation to these matters but it needs to be understood that Indonesia is not necessarily going to find it all that easy to deal with these sorts of issues in relation to people who make it there and then seek to want to buy passage onto Australia. MICHAEL VINCENT: So, Minister, what do you plan to do with the 1,600 that still remain in Indonesia? What do you plan to do? 113 Stay on Message PHILIP RUDDOCK: Those people who are on their way are going to be fairly hard to deter, I suspect. MICHAEL VINCENT: You can’t make any representations to Jakarta to stop them? PHILIP RUDDOCK: We will continue to make representations to Jakarta, but I think you have to be realistic about what are likely to be the outcomes, and that’s why we need to deal with the major issues here. The incentives that are in the system which are likely to draw people. 114 Ruddock’s interest was not in informing or interesting people about the issue of boat people, but in framing the issue and disinteresting people in its nuances. We may argue that this transcript shows staleness and imprecision, but at its least benign it is least like that. The cool precision is much more ethically problematic – much more ‘anaesthetic,’ in fact, certainly more ‘barbarous’ – than the stylistic infelicities and self-corrections that attend these unscripted remarks as they would most others. The particularity of Ruddock’s rhetoric is against truth, because it was calculated to block public interest in the truth. Some would argue that the significant moral problem here is not the communication but rather the cruel reality it negotiates. As the next chapter argues, that, too, is a simplification. Cruel practices are undoubtedly a moral problem, but so are their attendant communications. Partly, that is because much public cruelty comes precisely in the form of harmful communications: defamation, harassment, a failure to show respect. As many commentators have noted, it is also because public language can enable, legitimate, and conceal wrongdoing, and because publics rely on ideas and standards of honesty or truthfulness to guard against a peril we are all too prone to. And yet there is a problem with many of these observations. If listeners and readers apply those safeguards quite differently from each other, much of the critical literature and a weight of classroom pedagogy teaches that the mark of intellectual clarity in speech is Staying on message precisely the literariness of its style (e.g. Burnside 2004). It is a misconception that will take many generations to undo, if indeed that is ever achievable. Staying on message is especially challenging to understandings of ethics in public language because it sits in an indeterminate position between the spoken and something else. It plays to the attentions and cognitive processes of listeners through its reliance on repetition of formulas in appropriate situations, maximising the recall of predetermined phrases and themes and hence of the conceptual frames they impute. It reaffirms and renews the prosodies of public language that its practitioners conform to. Staying on message is itself a clear acknowledgment that there is a public quality to a situation, which speakers respect by communicating methodically. And yet it has all the alienation of method, too: equipped with an organic medium, language, political speakers respond with something mechanised, using themes and phrases that claim a higher authority than the conversations into which they emerge. It is the sound of the alienation of public life from life-life. Little wonder people are given to distrust it. 115 8. Truthfulness in political speech The subject of these reflections is a commonplace. No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues. Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade. Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and dignity of the political realm, on one side, and for the nature and the dignity of truth and truthfulness on the other? Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be deceitful? And what kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm, which more than any other sphere of human life guarantees reality of existence to natal and mortal men – that is, to beings who know they have appeared out of nonbeing and will, after a short while, again disappear into it? Finally, is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth? These are uncomfortable questions, but they necessarily arise out of our current convictions in this matter. With this paragraph, Hannah Arendt opens her ‘Truth and Politics’ (Arendt 1993 [1954]). It is an imperious opening to a powerful essay, using Arendt’s strength in the rhetoric of philosophy to stand outside of, interrogate, and ultimately pass judgment on the rhetoric of political life. Like this chapter, it explores various understandings of the relationship between truth and politics, a relationship between two entities that, notwithstanding their clearly abstract natures, are of Truthfulness in political speech guiding importance to modern experiences of public communication. Unlike this chapter, however, Arendt assumes that the modern relationship between truth and politics is eternal, because ‘lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools’ in this field. But a lie is not a fixed opposite of the truth, although the word ‘lie’ has remained essentially true to its medieval roots (in English as in other Germanic languages). The relationship of lie to truth has evolved, because the meaning of ‘truth’ has developed over the centuries. Recall that Chapter 1 mentioned how it has evolved from a term that indexes values of personal conduct into one that indexes objective values of accuracy in communications. That means Arendt’s argument traverses a more historically specific relationship between truth and politics than she seems to recognise – specific to the dynamics of modern communications, with their tacit valourising of the written word over the spoken. As this book has already discussed, it is an assumption greatly vitiated by the types of orality that have emerged as prominent in contemporary or postmodern public discourse, especially unscripted or partially scripted performances for broadcast and online media audiences. Secondly, also unlike this chapter, Arendt’s first focus is that of the moral philosopher, not the philologist. She asks about truth and lies as questions about the validity and the experience of human life itself: ‘What kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm, which more than any other sphere of human life guarantees reality of existence to natal and mortal men – that is, to beings who know they have appeared out of non-being and will, after a short while, again disappear into it?’ Elsewhere in the essay she says she observes politics from the position of a ‘professional truth-teller,’ and acknowledges this focus must necessarily be different from that of a professional politician who observes the ‘truth industry.’ Truth is an absolute value for Arendt, however ironically she may couch that view. She holds that facts are always radical, always transgressive, because political discourse cannot stand their non-negotiability. Politics prefers to treat all assertions as matters of opinion. By contrast, political actors have long been fascinated by the discursive arbitration of truth: how a public both discusses and decides what a given truth may be from among the various contesting 117 Stay on Message accounts of it. This tension seems to be at the heart of codes of ethics for actors in the public realm. From the sketchy, precedentbased precepts of parliamentary privilege to the elaborate published codes of journalism, marketing, and public relations, professional ethics pragmatically defer the theoretical question of what truth is. Instead they focus on openness and honesty, words closer to the medieval understanding of ‘truth’ because they do not separate the attitude of the protagonist from the effects of her or his deeds and words. These codes are predicated on a public’s assumed right to hear truthful speech – to hear from speakers who have taken reasonable precautions to eliminate untruth from their remarks. That is, they assume the steady circulation of untruths around and through our lives but proscribe any willful or wanton exacerbation of them. In most cases, the bogey of lying is not seen to require a mention. The Public Relations Society of America comes as close as any, insisting on ‘accuracy and truth’ while still prescribing that professionals should withhold ‘confidential and private information’ from people it might directly concern (The Public Relations Society of America 2010). Many would agree with these principles, and yet they are clearly in a mutual conflict: 118 Translating values into principles of ethical practice, the Code advises professionals to: ฀฀ ฀฀ ฀฀ ฀฀ ฀฀ ฀฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ truthful information. ฀ ฀ ฀ communication. ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀฀ ฀฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ In reaction against the dishonesty that can and does creep through such a conflicted ethical platform, Harry Frankfurt published his short polemic On Bullshit (Frankfurt 2005). He distinguishes between outright lying – the knowing promulgation of untruths – and the subtler form he calls ‘bullshit:’ a knowing Truthfulness in political speech ... political actors have long been fascinated by the discursive arbitration of truth: how a public both discusses and decides what a given truth may be from among the various contesting accounts of it. promulgation of information that may be technically accurate, but which is intended more to confuse and mislead than to enlighten or inform. We may automatically decide this is unethical, assuming we can accurately deduce its purpose, but bear in mind that it is often in tension with the tactics needed to preserve confidences. Most public relations practitioners believe in a public duty to transgress Frankfurt’s proscriptions on bullshit from time to time and to some extent – and on broader reflection, do not all parents feel a private duty to do likewise? Arendt’s most famous contribution to debates around public communication is stylistic. She coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the attitude of Adolf Eichmann and other, similar bureaucrats in administering Germany’s ‘final solution’ against the Jewish people, as well as Roma, communists, homosexuals, and others targeted for state hatred. The phrase gets its context from her description of Eichmann’s approach to the gallows, where Arendt becomes morbidly fascinated with the formulaic quality of his last words (1963): Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister, the Reverend William Hull, who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live, and therefore ‘no time to waste.’ He walked the fifty yards from his cell 119 Stay on Message to the execution chamber calm and erect, with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees, he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. ‘I don’t need that,’ he said when the hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottläubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: ‘After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was ‘elated’ and he forgot that this was his own funeral. 120 Such a preponderance of the prefabricated is clearly of moral significance here. Eichmann was apparently able to use it not merely to convince himself that his own miserable end was somehow ennobled, but also, more importantly, to inoculate himself against the horror of his own deeds during the time he was doing them. That connection goes a long way to substantiating Orwell’s critique. The distinction I want to draw, though, is the importance of its aesthetic dimension. Arendt’s account has drawn attention to an effect (and an affect) of political life: the communication style of those who would govern, which invariably declares their will to power first and foremost. If that aspect is immoral, as many believe it is (see Jay 2010 for a survey of this field), that is because it pays no heed to the public’s right to hear other truths more clearly acknowledged. The immorality is less a question of what they say than what they leave out. To the extent that it is also moral, as it must be on some level, it is because publics have a right to know who is shaping up for power, and typically it is the style of a public figure’s remarks that make this most clear. Eichmann was faithful to his own bullshit to the last, Truthfulness in political speech defending it in court and letting the Israelis keep him alive until they hanged him for it; many have been less honest than that. As Arendt or Billig (1995) might remind, the word ‘banality’ reminds us how everyday the essential problem is. Witness an Australian vice-chancellor speaking recently; it is no surprise that this putative leader of intellectuals abolished the study of most languages at the university she ran, given an evidently slender love for the grammar of her own language: The challenge for all of us is not just learning and teaching outcomes in the traditional sense. It’s about pathwaying, capturing, and opportunitying. All language is manipulation. The effort to influence someone is utterly mundane, because it is what all language has always been for: I accuse, I command, I convey, I defend, I entertain, I impress, I inform, I inquire, I request, I suggest, et cetera. When we think about political language, the significant distinction is that we are thinking about public manipulation: manipulation of a public, by a public figure, for a public purpose, or what have you. Much like the contestatory frame of legal discourse that Carville alludes to, and which Arendt actively deconstructs, political discourse frames facts as necessarily contestable, even where claims made against their accuracy may be preposterous, because public truth is a quality achieved only through agreement or arbitration. This affects the moral and ethical outlook appreciably, not least because the membership of a public realm tends to be larger than that of a private, so a public remark typically has the potential to influence more people than a private remark does. That is one reason why formal codes of ethical conduct tend to cover the public sphere more than the private; another is that the professions regard themselves as publics, and certainly publish their codes of ethics with a view to having public influence through them. The codes of ethics themselves constitute a manipulation of publics by public figures for public purposes. When moral philosophy tries to evaluate conduct, it typically does so by reference to one or both of two grounding methods: the formal and the material. Formal conditions for good and evil are 121 Stay on Message 122 moral codes that prescribe and proscribe what is right and wrong. Religiously grounded moralities tend to stick close to this shore, citing divine pronouncements as their yardsticks for human behaviour. A relatively well-known example is the ten commandments Moses received on Mt Sinai. By contrast, material conditions for good and evil are expressly pragmatic judgments about the benefit or harm that particular behaviour will cause. Many of the so-called harmminimisation approaches to highly moralised public policy issues such as abortion, drug laws, and voluntary euthanasia are motivated by moral materialism, just as many of the more conservative approaches to the same issues cite formal moral codes as their inspirations. Notably, these tend to be issues that Westminster-style parliaments treat with a ‘free vote’ or ‘conscience vote,’ releasing their members from binding party platforms. For many currentday purposes, pragmatic materialist approaches seem to tolerate cultural difference more readily than the formal alternatives, but the reciprocal criticism is that this secular attitude is ‘relativist’ – that is, insufficiently normative. For the purposes of this book, though, the formal-material dichotomy still leaves us in something of a bind. Formal codes are only useful to the extent that they provide ethical guidance for resolving questions of truth and untruth. Many do not concern themselves directly with this question, or not clearly. Note that, as Arendt points out, the ten commandments don’t proscribe all lying, only a public version of it: ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour,’ according to Exodus 20:16 (King James I 1900). In the formal codes that argue it is always wrong to lie, as remarkably few do, there is the faintly laughable air of presumption about a precept decoupled from its context. Codes of ethics must necessarily work on the level of praxis, which aligns theory with practice, seeing precepts and their contexts as inseparable from one another. On the other hand, materialist codes bear their own taint of presumption, since any ethics of manipulation judged by its ends or ‘outcomes’ is prone to extreme vagueness – not least because of the regressive problem that ends themselves are open to moral appraisal, but also because of the importance of unintended outcomes, and thirdly because each mean, each tactic employed, is its own end with its own moral Truthfulness in political speech consequences. An ethics of public language, which is necessarily an ethics of public manipulation-through-language, calls for guidance at each of these conceptual stages. Think of this from another angle. Is there any sense in which a blanket prohibition on lying could be made workable, whether formally or materially, even at the level of the individual? Let us assume the individual in question is a political advisor, a press secretary to a low- All language is manipulation. The eﬀort to inﬂuence someone is utterly mundane, because it is what all language has always been for: I accuse, I command, I convey, I defend, I entertain, I impress, I inform, I inquire, I request, I suggest, et cetera. When we think about political 123 language, the signiﬁcant distinction is that we are thinking about public manipulation: manipulation of a public, by a public ﬁgure, for a public purpose, or what have you. to-middle-ranking member of a state or provincial cabinet: how might he or she make useful meaning out of the commandment never to lie? Of such people, it is my experience that those most respected by their colleagues for their standards of ethical conduct are the ones most inclined to repudiate the very possibility. Stay on Message 124 And yet, as we saw with the codes of conduct discussed above, the public sphere is filled with a consciousness of these very issues. More than that, to the extent that public realms are able to govern themselves, standards of honesty in public communication are either a leading concern or the leading concern for all of them. Habermas might say this devolves to the modern conception of what the professions are (Habermas 1989): they themselves constitute public spheres whose chief collective responsibility is to safeguard their integrity and the outward appearance of their integrity. That entails an ethical appreciation of both ends and means in public communication. Just saying that does not mean we have the template, though. Professional praxis is the need to keep evaluating both our tactics and our strategies to ensure that they meet our moral standards. And that includes evaluating the poetic tactics and poetic strategies. There is no doubt that spoken language responds to ethical criteria that are different from written language, and that improvised language responds to criteria different from prepared language. Ironically, this difference becomes truer as it becomes more visible, more open to the rebuke of double standards. Ong’s principle of ‘secondary orality’ implies that public figures in highly literate cultures can shirk many of the formal standards for written language when they speak, precisely because there is a written language alternative. In May 2010, Australia’s federal opposition leader, Tony Abbott, was trying as hard as he could to claim this morally problematic distinction during one of the most entertaining interviews of Kerry O’Brien’s long career in journalism (O’Brien 2010): KERRY O’BRIEN: But what you haven’t explained is how you can make one promise in one month and then completely change it the next. What happened in that month where you had this sudden explosion of vision? TONY ABBOTT: Well, again, Kerry, people will make their own judgments about me and if they ... KERRY O’BRIEN: No, but I’d like you to explain it. Tony Abbott feels with conviction we will not have a new tax in any Truthfulness in political speech way, shape or form, we won’t have a new tax; a month later, you do. TONY ABBOTT: Well, again Kerry, I know politicians are gonna be judged on everything they say, but sometimes, in the heat of discussion, you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark, which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth is those carefully prepared scripted remarks. KERRY O’BRIEN: So every time you make a statement, we have to ask you whether it’s carefully prepared and scripted or whether it’s just something on the fly? No, seriously; this is a very serious question. TONY ABBOTT: But all of us, Kerry, all of us when we’re in the heat of verbal combat, so to speak, will sometimes say things that go a little bit further. 125 Abbott’s dilemma is easy to enjoy, but a large part of the entertainment is a sense that he got caught in a double standard all are guilty of. Our tongues do run away with us from time to time, whereas prepared language is also edited language. It entails lower risk – but risk of what exactly? Of lying? Of saying things that we really mean, but would rather obscure? Of saying harmful things that become harmful truths because we have said them? If, as with Eichmann, we find ourselves saying things, subscribing to doctrines, that enable and predispose us to work evil, there is no moral alternative but to desist and repair. That is a reminder of Orwell’s sixth rule: ‘Break any of [the other five] rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.’ But ‘barbarism,’ as Fowler (1926) noted earlier than Orwell, is typically a heavy-handed judgment on style, assuming that ugly language is the mark of ugly intentions. It is essentially a warning against the seduction into evil that Orwell knows can be a publicpoetic effect – but which he is unable to name, since it contradicts Stay on Message 126 his premise. Orwell makes it automatic that formulaic language is barbarous. This assumption that formulaic language is ugly as well as immoral makes Orwell unable to explain its allure, its poetic power. Concerned not to emulate the great evildoers? Concentrated moral self-appraisal should help a reflective communicator with diagnosis here, as should professional codes of ethical conduct, but there are no guarantees of it. At its simplest, this book’s moral point is to reflect on how the poetic dimension of political speech may be its greatest enabling agent for both evil and good effects – not that this is a particularly new revelation. More useful, I trust – more original, I hope – is the clear sense that we can listen to a political utterance within its context, as a product of the poetic traditions and circumstantial factors that have brought these remarks together at this time and in this place; in doing so, we can confidently point to the manipulations it attempts, whether purposive or incidental, intended or unconscious. An awareness of the poetic dimension greatly enables us as critics to appraise whether a given utterance upholds standards of honesty: does it bear out an acknowledgment that its publics are entitled to the important facts, shared in good faith? Does it seek to help listeners come to their own considered judgments on questions? Does it invite negotiation with alternate points of view, rather than effacing or obliterating them? Does it bore? These questions cannot be answered in any thorough sense without considering the texture, the style, the poetics of the utterance. And this I understand as a beginning for moral criticism, rather than an end of it; it is a methodological suggestion that the moral criticism of a political speech can begin with and flow from the poetic criticism of it. 9. Poetic public life Poetry is power. Need to mobilise hundreds of millions against the ideological ossification that has trapped the world’s richest country? As Obama showed, yes we can – but not without a sense of rhythm. Want to persuade your employees that resistance is futile, that your ‘reform agenda’ will prevail no matter how bitterly they oppose it? Couch your statements in the phrases and cadences of passionless authority, match them with your clothing and body language, and your odds will be greatly improved. Such ideas we know generally, but of course their use requires a more specific knowledge, the knowledge in each situation, for each strategy, that there is a specifically appropriate language style, a style that entails a specific tradition of relevant poetic forms. In the rhetorical strategies of politicians, their advisors, and the journalists and other commentators who respond to them, we can see that public language practitioners generally are aware of this nexus, that some are able to explain it clearly, and that its most consummate exponents, known for their rhetorical fluency, are held up as examples of it. The poetics of public language require us to redefine its ethics, because they extend and refine our sense of its capabilities – of the manipulative powers that political speech has and of the scope for using them. One consequence of the ground we have covered in this book is that those powers and that scope are doubly intense: language is always manipulation and political action is always public manipulation. Another consequence is that they are inherently variable. Their specific details are always related to the situations in which they take place, and to those situations’ relevant poetic forms. That means, ultimately, the powers and scope of public language vary from situation to situation, from poetic tradition to poetic tradition. It is often remarked that an American orator would struggle to Stay on Message succeed in the Australian context, for example, because of Australian audiences’ overt preference for modesty and distrust of unbridled optimism. We have already discussed Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory speech (Obama 2008b). It opens with this stanza: If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. Now compare Obama’s words with these from Kevin Rudd’s election victory speech, just a year earlier. Note the relative lack of aspiration expected of, and delivered in, this Australian counterpart (Rudd 2007): Today Australia has looked to the future. Today the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward – to plan for the future, to prepare for the future, to 128 embrace the future. And together to unite and write a new page in our nation’s history. To make this great country of ours, Australia, even greater. These are both transcripts of speeches, so of course we must make some allowance for the drama that is lost in their translation to the page. Given the self-consciously flat style of composition in most Australian political speech, comparing transcripts rather than performances may accentuate the differences. On the other hand, they are transcripts of speech that Obama and Rudd delivered from speaking scripts, meaning they were composed as we hear them, in the mind’s ear. More importantly, it is arguable that Rudd’s speech looks more impressive on the page than it sounded in the ear because his style of delivery did so little to lift it. For example, the last sentence of the first stanza should carry echoes of Australia’s national anthem. Scanned for rhythm, Rudd beats out a balladeer’s heptameter: Poetic public life To máke | this gréat | cóuntry | of óurs |/ Austrá-|-lia / é-|ven gréater.1 In doing so, Rudd echoed the song’s aspirations to conformity along with its underlying grammatical structure: To máke | this có-|-mmonwéalth | of óurs |/ renówned | of áll | the lánds. Rudd, ostensibly a greater fan of this song than some, proved his deafness to its counts of syllable and pause by ending on an unstressed syllable (the ‘weak line-end’) where his prototype sticks strictly to the ‘strong’ ending on that line – and in fact on all the song’s lines: whether you take the original version or the coyly censored official version, McCormick composed verses that stuck tenaciously to the meter. Banal phrases present particular opportunities to people with a feel for their poetic qualities. In one sense, John Howard’s genius was to work his poetics so hard whilst affecting disregard for linguistic ornamentation. By contrast with Rudd, Howard’s self-conscious aesthetics of modesty and the everyday were utterly compelling. It is not entirely fair to single out Rudd in this way, even if his career makes him a salient example. Muffing a chance to chime with even the world’s most boring anthem is not a uniquely missed opportunity in the anti-glamorous history of Australian oratory. Howard may have kept power longer than most Australian prime ministers because he communicated more effectively, but he was toppled by a one-election wonder who could not convince audiences even when he was trying to put on his ‘sincere’ voice. We could make a similar comparison between Margaret Thatcher in Britain, whose extensive training in elocution is well known, and her Conservative Party successor John Major. It is a lesson that Tony Blair learned but Gordon Brown did not. Likewise for Stephen Harper in Canada: after defeating the publicly awkward Stephane Dion in 2006, Harper’s most effective electoral strategy was to keep 1 Again this quotation indicates stressed syllables with an acute accent and in bold type. Here | marks a rhythmic unit or ‘foot,’ while / marks a pause or ‘caesura.’ 129 Stay on Message 130 the opposition leader Michael Ignatieff speaking as often and for as long as possible. We could say the same for George W. Bush, who kept winning elections – even after Americans clearly knew how disastrous his government was – because he spoke more sharply and to the point than the series of windbags who lined up against him. The victory of Bush’s spin machine motivated the Democrats to nominate Barack Obama, its most rhetorically consummate candidate for president ever, whose 2008 election victory was a crowning study in the power of public poetics. One theme little remarked in this book has been technological change. How does an increasing reliance on electronic communications – first broadcast, then interactive – transform the dynamics of political speech? Clearly radio had begun to supersede Orwell’s critique of ‘Politics and the English Language’ even before he wrote it, because his was a critique of the written public word that presumed its capacity for translation into the spoken. At the same time, the presumption is not entirely wrong. Speeches on television or YouTube are no less given to manipulation than articles in the newspaper – or, for that matter, private conversations. Using speech to manipulate others at the level of texture remains less ‘accountable’ – the action is harder to demarcate, harder to categorise, harder to define – than it remains at the level of reference. To remedy this deficit requires a more sophisticated rubric for discussing the poetic textures of political speech, along with electorate-populations educated to use it. Michael Warner (1990) cautions against the ‘techno-determinist’ fallacy that experience is completely different from one language medium to another. And yet, if we argue that public manipulation through language is poetic – as Warner himself does – the use of a different medium clearly does change the nature of manipulation to some extent. As concrete poets and sound poets have each shown, the poetic potentials of page and voice are remarkably divergent, in keeping with the profound differences in their suggestive and rhythmic properties. Understanding the poetic dynamics of a given medium is essential for effective public manipulation through it – a point that seems almost too obvious to state, but for its bearing on theories of political speech. Poetic public life Warner’s most theoretically valuable contribution to this field of inquiry has been his effort to analyse and define the properties of publics (Warner 2002). Like Orwell, he effects this analysis principally through the prism of letters. In Warner’s view, a public is a self-organising group of people who come together in response to a text they commonly notice and discuss amongst themselves. ‘A public is poetic world-making,’ he argues, in that its members share an understanding of themselves, and of their collective place and purpose in the world, which has both referential and textural definition. Importantly, Warner believes a public is fundamentally a relationship between strangers. This does not mean two friends cannot be in a public, or enter into one, together. It means their membership of the same public is a relationship to each other through the public, whereas their friendship is also un-public in its nature. Lauren Berlant (2008) takes issue with Warner’s emphasis on estrangement. In her view, publics are heavily characterised by a sense of intimacy. Public behaviour is imbued with intimate forms, whether genuine or otherwise, and public language often makes affectations of familiarity almost a grammatical requirement. As Heather-Lynne Meacock has argued in a very insightful unpublished essay, the evidence for intimacy is especially rich in the spoken forms of broadcast and online media, such as the television show of Oprah Winfrey. The Oprah format – primarily interviews recorded in front of a live studio audience – is built around intimate themes of conversation, conversation whose terms of address are almost invariably pitched in a familiar register. That Berlant’s theory of intimacy should apply so strongly to the media of talk rather than of script lends support to Walter Ong’s earlier observation that public speaking in societies with literate and literary traditions is radically different from that in societies without a cultural residue of the written word. Stylistically, Ong noted that speech in the secondary orality of the electronic media, tends to avoid the formalities that cultures of so-called primary orality accord to public speech. Ong completed his classic study of Orality and Literacy before the rise of talk shows, but Oprah’s stellar career suggests a compelling case for his observations. 131 Stay on Message When we attempt the quintessentially ethical task of judging the honesty of another’s remarks, it is never a decision made purely on the rational-referential merits of the utterance – aesthetic-textural concerns such as phrasing, connotation, and fit-to-context always come into consideration. Generally, much journalism picks this up directly. Political journalists and ‘expert comment’ suppliers (that is, the politicians, advisors, and lobbyists who moonlight as journalists) are often very forthcoming in discussion of texture – indeed, sometimes this is quite to the exclusion of referential analysis. Simon Hoggart’s ‘Sketch’ column in The Guardian (2010) is almost entirely predicated on his readers’ interest in the performance styles of political speakers. Likewise, witness New York Times journalist Tim Egan (2010): If ever there was a place in need of more comedy, and less comity, it’s the U.S. Senate. Cobwebbed by senseless rituals, speeches which no one listens to and rules that make it all but impossible to act on the will of the people, the Senate cries for more ridicule, decorum breaches and old-fashioned wit. 132 Yes, they should be lauded for pulling off two of the most significant reforms of modern times, in health care and financial regulation. But those rare legislative triumphs almost didn’t happen, and probably will not be repeated – by either party on any major issue – for a generation. The default mode in the Senate, less by design than by institutional arteriosclerosis, is insulated decay. Or Australia’s Fairfax journalist, Michelle Grattan (2010): It’s mostly not the government’s fault that the [Emissions Trading Scheme] has bogged. An intransigent Senate, an opposition that switched positions, the failure of the Copenhagen conference and the impasse over the American legislation all helped drag the government into quicksand. But Rudd’s failure to ‘sell’ the scheme publicly is being increasingly highlighted. Poetic public life Rudd’s political style, whether his prolixity or his obsession for control, was always destined to be viewed more harshly when the politics became tougher. High-quality poetic criticism means paying attention to both aspects simultaneously. That makes it profoundly compatible with the moral criticism of utterances. When we set out criteria of truthfulness for political speech, both for listeners and for speakers, we presume to comment on the texture and connotation as well as the reference and logic. It is a necessary presumption, as Klemperer attested, because style says so much. The texture of speech often talks more truthfully than its reference. Those who wish to lead well must learn to deploy fluently the poetic traditions they work into – a truth today’s political right generally appreciates more readily than the left does, across the English-speaking world at least. The texture of speech often talks more truthfully than its reference. And so this book returns to its origin. Each political situation is linguistically patterned and language-patterning; a good public speaker is a good performance poet; a good speechwriter is a good writer of poems; a good citizen-elector is good in criticising the political poems he or she hears and reads. These uses of ‘good’ apply equally to judgments of ethics and of proficiency. Learning to compose poetry is the crucial education for political speakers and speechwriters, even if that learning is often framed as other-than-poetic. 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Wirthlin, R & Hall, W 2004, The greatest communicator: what Ronald Reagan taught me about politics, leadership, and life, John Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. 141 Index Abbott, Tony 124–5 Abraham, Nicolas 8, 32–3, 34, 35, 44, 45 ‘affective accuracy’ 82 Alexander, Elizabeth 21–2, 23, 24, 26–7, 30, 31 ‘Praise Song for the Day’ 21–2, 27, 28, 30, 31 alienation 99, 115 alliterative verse 33, 78, 84–5, 86 stressed syllables 78, 84, 85, 86 unstressed syllables 78, 84, 85 Andren, Peter 87 ANZAC Day dawn service 14, 15, 17–18, 19, 20, 21, 30, 31, 34 Arendt, Hannah 11, 102, 116–17, 119–20, 121, 122 banality 102, 119, 121 ‘Truth and Politics’ 116–17 Aristotle 5 ‘asymmetrical warfare’ 96–7 Atkinson, Alan 9 Atkinson, Max 66–7, 80 claptraps 66–7, 80 Austin, JL 83, 89 How to Do Things with Words 83, 89 ‘an Australian vice-chancellor’ 121 barbarism (of expression) 110, 125, 126 Barthes, Roland 62 Beazley Jr, Kim 87 Beowulf 53, 75, 104 Berlant, Lauren 131 Billig, Michael 104, 121 Binyon, Laurence 17–18, 19 ‘For the Fallen’ 18 ‘Ode of Remembrance’ 17–18, 20, 31 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh 109 Blair, Tony 96, 129 Bob the Builder 43 Brown, Gordon 129 budget speech to parliament 29, 97, 98 bullshit 118–19, 120–1 bureaucratese 10, 100, 119 Burke, Kenneth 15 Burnside, Julian 114–15 Bush, George W 27–8, 130 Cain Jr, John 111 Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission 101, 105 Carville, James 16, 94, 95, 98, 121 Cassidy, Barry 59, 98 Cheney, Dick 103 Churchill, Winston 67, 98 Clark, Anna 104 classical dramatic unities 14–15 cliché 11, 66, 69, 70, 73, 77–8, 80, 82, 101, 104, 112 Clinton, Bill 2, 23 communicational genre 2–3, 29, 53, 57–8, 59, 60, 62, 64, 70, 106, 107 community of practice 13, 60 Crouch, Stanley 16–17 Crozier, Michael 21 ‘recursion’ in political communication 21 Crystal, David 40, 43 Dawkins, Richard 81 meme 81 debate 91 (see also frame) defamation 114 Dening, Greg 20 Dion, Stephane 129 discipline 3, 91, 107 ‘dozens’ 53 Eagleton, Terry 3–4, 8, 34, 45, 57, 62, 133 Eichmann, Adolf 102, 119–21, 125 Ellis, Bob 53 episteme 81 epithets 53, 75–7, 78–9, 80, 84, 90, 91, 104, 106, 110 referencing and attribution 75–7 ethics 1, 6, 11, 12, 26, 94, 100, 102, 114, 115, 118–19, 121, 122–3, 124, 126, 127, 132, 133 codes of ethics 12, 118, 121, 122–3, 124, 126 Exodus 122 Index fealty of language 19 Fey, Tina 72 Firth, Raymond 65 Fitzgerald, R and W Housley 76 Ford, Thomas 19 ‘There is a lady sweet and kind’ 19 frame 3, 10, 57–8, 71, 74, 89–91, 95, 106 framing 58, 90, 91, 92, 93–4, 95, 103–5, 106, 107, 110–11, 114, 115, 121, 133 ‘framing the debate’ 74, 90–1, 92, 102 name, naming 89–90 ‘strip of action’ 89–90 Frankfurt, Harry 118–19 Frost, Robert 24–5 ‘Dedication’ 25 ‘The Gift Outright’ 24 functionalist linguistics 65, 71 Gawenda, Michael 56 Germanic vocabulary 85 Gillard, Julia 59, 79, 80 ‘God Defend New Zealand’ 37 ‘God Save the Queen’ 37 Goffman, Erving 10, 89–90, 91 Gore, Al 28 grammar 1, 24, 36–7, 59, 78, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 113, 121 grammar of news 71–2 metrical grammar 71 political grammar 1, 11–12, 23, 54–5, 56–7, 59, 62, 78, 110, 129, 131 Grattan, Michelle 132–3 Guantanamo Bay (Camp X-Ray) 96, 103 Habermas, Jürgen 124 Hansard 53, 60–1, 78–9 harassment 114 Hardgrave, Gary 49–50, 74, 76, 82 Harper, Stephen 129–30 Harris, Rear Admiral Harry 96–7 Heidegger, Martin 34 Hewson, John 53 ‘feral abacus’ 53 history wars 104 Hockey, Joe 79–80 Hoggart, Simon 132 Homer 8, 64, 70, 75, 77, 81, 83 Iliad 70, 81 Howard, John 48, 50, 84–5, 86–7, 111, 129 ideology 1, 4, 21, 24, 45, 56, 78, 91, 93 Ignatieff, Michael 129–30 improvised performance 2–3, 50, 52, 64, 65, 67–8, 69, 70, 74, 77, 83, 124 inauguration ceremony 21, 23, 24–5, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 44 innovation (in approach or practice) 56, 62, 88 intonation 17, 50, 71 inverted pyramid structure of news 29 isomorphism 54 Jackson, Mahalia 51 jargon 10–11, 89, 99–101, 102, 110, 111, 113 Jesus Christ 17 The Sermon on the Mount 17 Keating, Paul 53, 111 Keats, John 99 ‘On the Sonnet’ 99 Kelen, Christopher 37 Kennedy, John F 23, 24 Kerry, John 28 King Jr, Rev. Martin Luther 8, 44, 48, 51–2, 62, 85–6 ‘I have a dream’ 8, 44, 51–2, 62 final speech at Memphis 44 Klemperer, Victor 12, 103, 133 Lakoff, George 10, 16, 91, 92–4 two competing conceptions of the family 92–3 Latham, Mark 71–2 ‘ladder of opportunity’ 71–2 Latinate vocabulary 85, 100 Lewis, CS 70–1 lies 116, 117 Lincoln, Abraham 44, 60 Gettysburg address 60 Lord, Albert 68, 83 quasi-apprenticeship system 83 Lucas, George 107 Star Wars 107–8 Luntz, Frank 16, 28, 41, 92, 100 Major, John 129 malapropism 56, 57, 58–9, 72 143 Stay on Message 144 manipulation through language 5, 6, 12, 73, 89, 99, 103–4, 109, 121, 123, 126, 127, 130, 134 Matalin, Mary 16 McCain, John 37–8 election concession speech (2008) 37–8 McCormick, Peter Dodds 18–19, 33–4, 129 ‘Advance Australia Fair’ 18–19, 33–4 McKechnie, Kirrin 55–6 McLuhan, Marshal 11, 58 media releases 29, 40, 61–2 Menzies, Robert 19, 48 message 2, 3, 10, 11, 16, 28, 48, 50, 53–4, 60, 71–2, 74, 102, 107, 108, 109, 115 message of a poem 54, 102 messaging strategy 3, 16, 28, 48, 50, 53–4, 60, 71–2, 102 ‘stay on message’ 2, 3, 28, 48, 71, 74, 102, 107, 108, 109, 115 metaphor 14, 32, 59, 69, 74, 89, 93, 101, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112 stock metaphors 101 metonymy 95, 99 Microsoft Corporation 23 moment of a speech 5, 7, 14, 16, 21, 23–4, 30, 31, 32, 37, 38, 43, 44, 45, 60, 66, 69, 105 set-piece 21, 23, 53, 66, 72 moral philosophy 117, 121–2 formal and material conditions of morality 121–2 Muecke, Stephen 14 Murray, Andrew 106 music 1, 2, 16–17, 24, 53, 70, 134 Nabokov, Vladimir 54 naïve eloquence 109 national reconciliation 101–2, 105–6 national apology 105–6 O’Brien, Kerry 124–5 Obama, Barack 16, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29–30, 31, 37–8, 39–40, 41–5, 48, 54, 127, 128, 130 election victory speech (2008) 37–8, 39–40, 41–4, 127, 128 inauguration ceremony 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31 Nashua speech 43, 44 will.i.am video smash 43 Odinn 78 Ong, Walter 8, 9, 48, 68, 80–2, 124, 131 orality and literacy 9, 48, 52, 131 ‘primary orality’ 131 ‘psychodynamics of orality’ 9, 80–1 ‘secondary orality’ 81–2, 124, 131 Orwell, George 3, 10–11, 45, 83, 85, 88, 100, 102, 109–11, 112, 113, 120, 125–6, 130, 131 Animal Farm 110 Newspeak 110–11 1984 10, 45, 110 ‘Politics and the English Language’ 3, 10, 100, 109–10, 125–6, 130 ‘prefabricated’ language 3, 11, 83, 109, 112 oxymoron 50, 58, 70, 109 Palin, Sarah 72 paralinguistic communication 16, 51, 104, 113 Parry, Milman 8, 64, 65, 68, 70–1, 75, 83 party leadership 108 personal pronouns 104 phenomenology 8, 32, 34, 62 phrasing 19, 27, 30, 44, 54–5, 56, 57, 62, 69, 70–1, 72–3, 77, 81, 83, 84, 92, 94, 99, 107, 113, 132 Piaget, Jean 56 analytic and syncretic modes 56 Plain English movement 100 platitude 8, 50, 58–9, 66, 69, 73, 76–7, 101, 112 poetic formula 8, 64–88, 101, 127 ‘affectively formulaic’ phrasing 72–3 charismatic quality 80–2, 83 five functions of a poetic formula (for speakers and poets alike) 65–6 formulaic 8, 64, 65 formulaic precedent 56 mnemonic function 66, 67, 81, 84 ornamenting formulas 69, 75 repertoire 47, 68–9, 70, 73, 77, 83 six defining characteristics of poetics formulas 64, 68, 70, 73, 75, 80, 83 syntactic formulas 69, 71, 76, 77–8, 81, 83 Index theory of the formula 64 topical formulas 69 ‘type-scenes’ 73–4 typical phrases 8, 64 typical themes 8, 64 verbomotor 66, 68 poetry 1–13, 15–31, 32, 33, 34, 54, 62, 54, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 81, 83, 127, 133 chorus 2 epic 3, 77 message of a poem 54 meter 30, 71, 73, 75, 84–5 Old English ‘maxim poems’ 81 poems for ceremonial or ritual purposes 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30 the poetic moment 8, 31, 32 verse form 7, 13, 17–18, 19, 21, 23, 28 political aesthetics 1, 4, 5, 6, 15, 57, 69, 73, 78, 129 political change 37, 44–5, 51, 54 polysyllabic vocabulary 86 postmodern public discourse 117 presidential oath of office 23, 25, 26–7, 29, 30 professionalisation 6, 13, 88, 89 professions 121, 124 prosodic analysis (scansion) 71 prosody 5, 12, 13, 19, 28, 29, 30, 65, 67, 68, 76, 89, 101, 106, 113, 115 public 46, 121, 124, 131 public language 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12–13, 15, 21, 29, 31, 46, 57, 58, 64, 66, 67–8, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 78–9, 83, 88, 89, 110, 114, 115, 123, 127, 131, 133 Public Relations Society of America 118 Rawlinson, Jana 58–9 Reagan, Ronald 91 redundancy 50, 78 respect 115, 123 Returned Services League (RSL) 19, 20–1 rhetoric 5–6, 7, 9, 15, 17, 39, 43, 46, 53, 64, 66, 71, 88, 89, 104, 112, 113, 127 Roxy Music 37 ‘Avalon’ 37 Rudd, Kevin 38–9, 55–7, 58, 59, 100, 105–6, 128–9 election victory speech (2007) 38–9, 128–9 ‘rock ’n’ roll with the punches’ 55–7, 58, 59 Ruddock, Philip 113–14 Safire, William 31–2 satire 72 SCRAP format 28–9 semantics 4, 5, 68, 69, 74, 76 Sievers, Eduard 84–5, 86 situation 28, 29, 30, 47, 54, 55, 57, 62, 65, 68–9, 74, 75, 76, 82, 88, 89, 93–4, 98, 99, 101, 104, 106, 108–9, 115, 127, 133 Socrates 17 The Apology 17 sound-bites 47, 84, 89 speechwriter 8, 31–2, 45, 46–8, 52, 60, 61, 62–3, 111, 133 speechwriter’s script 8, 46, 47, 52, 61–2 spin 10, 82, 89, 94–8, 99, 100, 101, 102, 110, 111 definition 94 advocacy frame 94 blurring of scale or importance 96 invention of a new term 97–8 issues management 95 pursuit of victory replacement of frames of reference 92, 94, 95–6 substitution of a precise-sounding term for a non-existent phenomenon 97 substitution of an alarm for a clearly unfearsome term 97 standards of honesty 10, 94, 114–15, 118, 124, 126, 132 literary (prose) standards 114–15 oral (performative) standards 114, 126 stock expressions 56, 65, 66, 68, 69, 77, 82, 101 Sturluson, Snorri 78 Edda 78 Swan, Wayne 97–8 symbolic action 25–6, 51 syntax 4, 5, 41, 54, 68–9, 70, 73, 83 145 Stay on Message Tanner, Lindsay 53 technological change 130 Ten Commandments, the 122 Thatcher, Margaret 129 ‘The Three Ravens’ 2, 35–7 Tolkien, JRR 81 The Hobbit 81 truth 9, 11, 62–3, 80, 81, 104, 114, 116–18, 121, 122, 125 truthfulness 9, 10, 11, 12, 81, 88, 114, 116, 133 unconscious agendas 74, 103, 126 USA Democratic Party 23, 43, 91, 130 USA Republican Party 23, 44, 91, 92 Vincent, Michael 113–14 Voloshinov, VN 72 Völuspá 81 146 Warner, Michael 60, 130–1 ‘a public is poetic world-making’ 131 ‘techno-determinist’ fallacy 130 Watson, Don 53, 100, 111–12 ‘weapons of mass destruction (programs)’ 95–6 The West Wing 2 Winfrey, Oprah 131 Wirthlin, Dick 16 words and deeds 25–6, 28, 61, 73, 118, 120 ‘working families’ 97–8 Wright Jr, Rev. Jeremiah 16–17, 40 The Wynton Marsalis Trio 17

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