Daily Blague

Be sure not to miss Malcolm Gladwell's summary of Charles Tilly's Why? in the current New Yorker. In "Here's Why," Mr Gladwell enumerates the four modes of explanation that Professor Tilly has distinguished. Each is as valuable in its own way as the others, and we make use of them according to the relationship that binds us (or not) to those to whom we're explaining something. First, there's convention, which is a form of dismissal. Second, there's story, which is just the opposite. Third, there's code; legal explanations are in code, which is why they're so frustrating to the parties involved in a lawsuit. Finally, there's expert analysis, which is pre-emptive and final, at least to the extent that the explainers are respected.

Corporations employ all four modes of explanation. Slogans quickly become conventions; warranties and "terms and conditions" are codes; instruction manuals appear to offer technical expertise. Corporate stories - ranging from advertisements to human resources - are not like normal stories, however, because everybody knows that they're not true. They can't be! How can an artificial person bind with a real one? How can an artificial person care about anything but itself? The only true story that corporations can tell is the one that they never do: "We're in this for the money."

Do the spokespersons who actually tell the stories on behalf of corporations expect to be believed? I don't think they really care. What a well-crafted corporate story does best is jamming the discourse. Creating an unanswerable position in the form of a story means that the time for explanations has passed, but without finality. When a corporation attributes an oil spill to a negligent ship's captain but insists that it is tightening its training and surveillance of ship's captains, that's that. Maybe it will follow through and maybe it won't. After enough oil spills, the time of explanation will be over in earnest, but meanwhile the corporation has bought time, time for the public's attention to drift on to something else.

It's the damage that corporate stories do to our language that bothers me.