On Don Watson's death sentence.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Sharp, Geoff
• Date: 01 January 2003

A few months ago a press reference to Don Watson's recent book Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language, (1) had it 'selling like hot cakes'. At least among many of those with a special interest in public language, Watson has tapped into a deep-seated sense of exasperation.

Back then, Watson's concern was not to target spin. It was as if he took for granted that this particular corruption of public language had been corralled by politicians. Death Sentence turns more directly to the deadening of language in the public voice. It is directed both to the corporation and its clones in the entire sphere of public administration. By Watson's account, this language is now a characteristic of the underlying or economic framework of contemporary government. While politics as such certainly draws on it, corporate language, however unappealing it may be, is not of itself deceptive. Politics complements it with its own special additive. The spin and hollowness of the packaged response have become its hallmark--the measure of the decline of democratic representation and of any genuine appeal of what a polity has to offer.

As is wont to happen with topical comment, in the few months that have passed since the publication of his book, Don Watson has drawn breath. In a short essay in the Age newspaper he has broadened the scope of his polemic to take in both the 'death sentences' inspired by corporations and the spin of political declamation. Quoting Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, he refers to the 'dead language' common among 'infantile heads of state and power merchants' which leaves them with ' ... no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey'. Watson then goes on to assert that 'In describing the language of tyrants, ideologues, megalomaniacs and bullies Morrison offered a near-perfect definition of the contagion that now reaches into every nook of our lives'. (2)

Tyrants and megalomaniacs spreading contagion; this is certainly heated language. And although Watson is ostensibly talking about language alone, he implicitly conjures up a sense of a neo-totalitarian social form in which the controllers of a new public language actually corrupt thought as such. As their new-speak pervades the educational institutions, they damp down the creativity of language and prepare the way into a culture of managed compliance.

While ready to ascribe this overwhelming role to language, Don Watson is not in any conventional sense a 'discourse theorist'. His sense of a basic reality in which the genuineness of private language and life can prevail is too strong for that. Nevertheless, by way of method, he has severed the word from the thing. While he rages against the 'sludge' words of corporatization, which have broken the bond between words and the forms of social practicality with which others see them as integral, his argument is confined to language. He leaves himself with nowhere else to turn. His only option is to seek to renew a different version of public language, one marked by creativity and imagination, and in his view inseparable from a viable way of living. This of course is to raise a philosophical dilemma--one upon which Watson himself is quite explicit. In the mode of repeating 'In the beginning was the word', he does not add that in lived experience it was integral with the world of things, with its 'object', where objects in the course of social life are likely to be a person, group, institution or state.

While a basic distinction between private language and public languages is at the heart of Watson's approach, he is reluctant to recognize the degree to which they are interdependent. His very first paragraph notes that, 'Public language confronts most of us every day of our lives, but rarely when we are with friends or family. Not yet at least. It is not the language in which we address lovers, postmen, children or pets. So far'. He goes on to add, 'There is seepage from the public to the private. But that's all it is. At this point in time'. (3)

One can readily go some way with Watson's broad distinction but it is very clear that he is saying or implying other things as well. There is certainly a distinction in the emphasis of the words, the tone and even the level of abstraction of the way language is tied to these two settings, but...