I would like to draw your attention to what’s happened to The Times’s Law section in the noughties. Once upon a time this was a lively mini-newspaper on a Tuesday, aimed at lawyers, with two or three substantial comment pieces, news, Law Reports and lots of job ads. Now it is a single sheet of newsprint, and found buried inside a growing section entitled Public Agenda.
From an advertisement in last week’s Economist:
Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a Pakistan based non-governmental organisation funded by a consortium of donors through UNDP, is plannning to undertake a social audit in 110 districts across the country compatible with baseline social audit established in 2001/02 and first annual follow-up application undertaken in 2004/05. The objective of the exercise is to obtain policy feedback on citizens’ views and experience in relation to key public services sectors like health, education, water and sanitation, police, access to justice and engagement in local governance arrangements. The study design should consider the comparison overtime [sic] with the baseline and follow-up applicaions in citizens’ views, use and experience of public services under the devolved local government system in Pakistan with a strong element of institutionalization of the social audit process.
Meanwhile, working the other way round, a flyer reaches me from De Havilland information services [no relation] for a conference on “Embedding the Third Sector in Public Services”:
Third Sector public service delivery is a new, effective and exciting avenue to further revolutionise and modernise service provision as we know it. However, this is no longer an innovation, it is a reality and public money already funds multiple public services through third sector organisations. It is acknowledged that the opportunities, expertise and fresh, grass-roots approach the third sector brings will bring improvement and better value to public services.
Major efforts to reinforce this through building an infrastructure and action planning to rationalize and embed this are underway in te Third Sector Review, recently conducted by the Office of the Third Sector. The final report is due in March [and?] will culminate in summarising the sector’s contribution and propose how this will work in a better, stronger, more resilient infrastructure.
[all sic]
The Office of the Third Sector is very pleased with what has happened to the role of charities, and will be colonising more of British civil society presently..
“Metaphors furnish clues to transformation, but they are not the powers that resist or engender such new realities,” a literary theorist once wrote.
The advertisements cited in italics are complete gibberish. Cannot these berks write clear English? It would seem not.
(sorry, this is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine).
They aren’t trying to. It is a new language, expressing the relevant categories of thought and instantiating the hegemony (if not, quite, immanentising the aeschaton). Changing the language is a way of changing the possibilities of thought:
… Or at least unconsciousness of alternative universes of discourse.
Of course Orwell suggested (a glance at I.A. Richards) this might be (being) achieved by simplifying vocabulary and stripping it of connotation. That might have happened in txt and international yoofspeak. Cool.
But the language of governmentality has buried meaning in polysyllables to disguise the change of terms as penetrating insight. Misdirection is most effective when used on those with more education than brains. Education, education, education, would have everyone in the intelligentsia an occult initiate able to see beyond the testable concepts framed in plain words.
Guy,
It is not so much instantiating the hegemony as actualising and embedding it, concretising it, as it were.
As far as immanentising the aeschaton is concerned, that is more an attribute of Ahmadinejast ideotheology than occidentalist politicosophy. Sinisterous or dexterous as the case may be.
Jonathon, in relation to clear English (amongst other things), I have been much heartened by this site http://www.rules-of-the-game.com/index.htm. You may know of him already.
Office of the Third Sector?
If it were not by government it would be “Office of the Fifth Column”.
I detect the oleagenous slime-trail of Milibland on this.
The Statists cannot bear the thought of non-government bodies achieving things. Shows them up. At first glance it appears they wish to embed the State in the Voluntary Sector, not the Voluntary Sector in the Nation. Infiltration, borg like. Once they get the voluntary sector on their fiscal hook, then all is lost for those that succumb to the temptation. I suspect they will engineer “laws”§ to force groups to submit and obey.
I am going to have to read their reports…
§ as in Acts of Parliament or legislation. Not a real law, as in one that has any moral or rational basis.
I took advantage of the “Enter Query” box in the top right of the Cabinet Office web page.
Not much joy
At least they didn’t suggest leveraging synergies to actualize a new paradigm. You take what you can get.
This third sector concept is nonsense anyway. Charities are part of the private sector, by definition.