it: dare to communicate, know how to communicate – such is the watchword
of our liberal modernity. The promises held out are enticing: communication
is the surest means for the individual subject to flourish; she realises her
freedom to the utmost in it, assumes her responsibility in it, enjoys control
over her existence and her thought in it. To service such noble needs, a
communications industry and institutions of communication have developed:
they are regarded as the cutting edge of technological progress and stock-
market enrichment (as long as the speculative bubbles do not burst). In one
hand, modern man holds his steering wheel and in the other (to the great
displeasure of the pedestrian who dares to venture onto a zebra crossing)
his mobile, on which he is constantly communicating. For modern man
is never alone and the most trivial and babbling thoughts must be
communicated forthwith.
I shall stop, for I am lapsing into a jeremiad. But I observe that this eulogy
of communication has its dark side and that communication ends up having
a bad press – especially in the domain of politics. Who has not read or heard
this ringing declaration, ‘the government doesn’t govern, it communicates!’.
This tension is the index of the operation of an ideology in the pejorative
sense – that is, an inverted image of reality. This does not preclude also
regarding the ideology of communication as an ideology in the positive sense,
as allusion as much as illusion – that is, as the expression of the contemporary
form of interpellation of subjects in the framework of the division of labour,
where language and interlocution play a novel and essential role (these are
the theses of Negri and Hardt, Virno, and Marazzi).
The ideology of communication in the pejorative sense rests on the idea
that communication serves the optimal development of the individual who
knows how to use it: it conduces to social and even – why not? – amorous
success. English expresses the point in a nice verb: communication empowers
the subject. It increases, if not her power, than at least her potential in the
Aristotelian sense – that is, her capacity to act. What is important about the
work of Deborah Cameron, a British feminist linguist interested in what she
calls ‘verbal hygiene’,^12 is that it puts this ideology to the test of the facts –
that is, social relations in the world of work. In Good to Talk?, she studies the
correspondence courses and other manuals that claim to enable everyone to
214 • Conclusion
(^12) See Cameron 1985 and 1995.