democratic athleticism, as Deleuze and Guattari put it; woollen language is
so irenic that it suffocates meaning.
Spin
The word is American in origin and this meaning emerged around 1978. It
is a metaphor borrowed from baseball, where the term refers to the effect that
the pitcher imparts to the ball in order to induce an error in the batter. In
politics, it designates the ‘effect’ that the presentation of information impresses
on the ‘facts’ related. This manipulation of language, in which we hear an
echo of an older English metaphor (‘to spin a yarn’), has become one of the
essential stakes of neoliberal politics, where the main thing is to ‘communicate’.
The reality of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the
threat they were supposed to represent, is of little moment: all that counted
was the authority of the dossiers that asserted their existence and the seeming
sincerity of those who claimed to believe in them. Spin is, therefore, a homage
paid by vice to virtue: to demonstrable lies (which are nevertheless inevitably
resorted to), it prefers the manipulative packaging of information, the ‘spin’
it gives to it.
In Great Britain, the development of spin is associated with the incumbency
of Tony Blair. He did not invent the phenomenon, but it is agreed that he has
made it one of the key aspects of his politics. The crisis in the summer of
2003, at the centre of which was to be found his ‘director of communications’,
proved the crucial importance of spin, but also of its political dangers. For it
can happen (as Lenin used to say) that the facts are stubborn.
Norman Fairclough, an English linguist influenced by Marxism, has devoted
a work to Tony Blair ’s language.^24 In it, we find a detailed analysis of spin as
a form of discourse. Fairclough bases himself on the study of a ‘green paper ’
(a draft law reform submitted for public discussion before being proposed
to Parliament) on welfare. He shows that this consultation was only apparent
(we are ourselves used to this kind of thing in France); that the conclusions
arrived are already inscribed in the premises; and that this operation is effected
by the spin imposed on language in its lexical, grammatical and pragmatic
aspects. We can draw a certain number of characteristics of spin from his
analysis. Here is the list.
220 • Conclusion
(^24) See Fairclough 2000 and, more generally, Fairclough 1989 and 1992.