nu-language

'By saying nothing at all, repeatedly and forcefully, you can wear your audience down much easier than by outright lying. It is easier to tire a room full of people out with junk syntax than it is to deliberately mislead. The opposition between lies and truth, between meaning and nonsense has been transcended. As Adorno puts it: ‘now nothing seems precisely the opposite of anything else’. Battles, political, artistic or philosophical, are no longer waged within language, which is precisely why we have so few meaningful debates. The hallmark of Nu-language is its inability to be refuted. If someone says something that doesn’t really make sense, it is impossible to oppose it, except to criticise the terms of the language itself. And how often can we turn round and say ‘I do not accept the very terms of your debate. Your language is all wrong!’ Nu-language is ideology without a counterpart, a battle waged at the level of the generic capacity to speak itself, a kind of amniotic fluid in which everyone exists and no one can escape. This kind of language without referent, this endless demand to keep speaking without making sense is characteristic not only of the contemporary artworld, but of businesses, academia and politics, all of whom learn something from each other (if the freelance curator is the artworld’s paradigmatic immaterial labourer, then the management consultant is surely the business equivalent). But it is in the artworld that we perhaps most often see the ill-digested consequence of the non-positions of nu-language. To take just one example: a recent conference on the idea of ‘Art after Aesthetic Distance’ states as its remit the following: Their projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships. Art historian Miwon Kwon stated that such work “no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process”. To ‘mediate’ ‘frameworks’ as ‘relationships’...one could switch the terms around with similar effect: to ‘framework mediations as relationship’, or perhaps to ‘relate mediations as frameworks’. The art historian quoted above is quite right to state that ‘such work’ likes to think of itself as a process rather than an object – if it stood still for more than five minutes someone might just notice that it makes absolutely no sense at all. The peculiar power of Nu-language, as a kind of pure formal currency, has precisely lead to a vapid never-ending abstraction that uses words like ‘consolidate’, ‘reconstellate’, ‘reconfigure’, ‘enhance’, ‘articulate’, as descriptors of some mythical ‘process’, like Hegel’s absolute spirit in a particularly insomniac phase. Nouns, like material products, appear to be out of fashion. This is not simply a claim about the superficial faddishness of individual terms, but a more serious point about the necessity of agrammaticism for forms of immaterial labour, of the constitutive need for language that no longer needs to ‘make sense’, just so long as communication itself keeps taking place. The proximity of the artworld to Blairism (whose use of ‘spin’ has been noted on many occasions) is not coincidental. The very cringe-worthy superficiality of ‘Cool Britannia’ and of Nu-Labour’s constant promotion of Britain’s ‘creative industries’ attest to the clinch between those that manipulate the language and those that orbit the rhetoric. The government’s own definition of such industries is itself a justification for the economical and cultural abuse of creativity, written in the very terms of Nu-language itself: [T]hose industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. Immaterial Labour indeed! This ‘exploitation of intellectual property’ that is at the same time based on ‘individual creativity’ is a frank admission that we do indeed possess all the signs of publicness, but no public to speak of (or out of). Whether we’ll ever find one in the depthless prose of the artworld is an open – but increasingly depressing – question. Of all the many stupid, irritating pieces of nu-language in the academy, the phrase 'speak to' (or, sometimes, 'talk to'), as in, 'I'll speak to this document in a moment' is enjoying a particular prominence at the moment. You can speak to a piece of paper all you like, but it's unlikely to ever give you a useful response.' http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2008/03/artworld-is-not-world.asp