In Exchange for the Language of Pleasantry

Abstract

In Exchange For The Language Of Pleasantry Niloofar Sarlati One once asked an agitated vagabond (shourideh ayyam), "What would you like?"—"Just insults," he replied, For I'll be made indebted for anything else I ask for (Farīd ud-Dīn Aṭṭār, Asrar Nameh) This line from Farīd ud-Dīn Aṭṭār, a Persian mystic poet, Sufi, and hagiographer of the twelfth century, can resonate quite literally today in our age of debt. It well grasps how "anything" can be used to create and breed "indebtedness." From this broad category of "anything," however, the "agitated vagabond" (Shourideh1) locates a getaway: a specific usage of language, i.e. insults, as that which might fabricate an escape from creating further debts. Departing from this line, I would like to move to a different context—from the twelfth century Persian mystic poetry to our very own familiar context of western capitalism and its decent. I will also shift the spotlight away from insults to focus instead on the very opposite usage of language, namely, cordiality, affability, or more broadly, language of pleasantry, and the forms of bonds they create. If we admit our vagabond's quip on how insults, and only insults, are debt-free, then attending to the kind of bond, obligation, or debt that is produced in the opposite linguistic realm—in the labor of pleasing through language—would be timely now as the economic value of such language is increasingly under scrutiny. In this essay I trace a point at which the linguistic and the economic met under the shadow of exchange and calculation in nineteenth century Britain. Looking at how the task of pleasing in conversation became counted among those tasks which can produce surplus value, this essay in turn addresses the growing conscription of all "surplus" languages of cordiality in the service industry and information economy under contemporary regimes of capitalism. The rising role of language in contemporary labor and its economic value has been addressed in different fields. Attending to the value of linguistic labor in contemporary economy, sociolinguist Norman Fairclough, for [End Page 439] instance, observes that with the shift from manufacturing to service industries in advanced capitalist economies a new responsibility has surfaced for the field of applied linguistics. As large numbers of workers who once were treated simply as "hands" are now redefined as linguistic actors with trainings in communication skills, applied linguistics need to attend to the ongoing "language-related consequences for people's lives" (Fairclough 1996, 6). With restaurant staffs being appointed because they possess the right "cultural capital," and particular communicative styles, language is in fact "clustering with the restaurant curtains, wallpaper and table decorations" (1996, 7). Fairclough thus concludes "language is now an important part of the goods, and is therefore subject to economic calculations, controls and intervention" (6). Fairclough's observation at the sociolinguistic forum is echoed with more economic nuance in the works of Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, and Maurizio Lazzarato who unanimously along with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri locate a rupture in the form of labor as we move form what they have called Fordism to post-Fordism. With the emergence of what they have termed "immaterial labor," producing affects such as "feelings of ease, well-being, or satisfaction," have gained increasing economic significance. In fact, Hardt and Negri argue that immaterial and affective labor have gained qualitative hegemony2 in the last decades of the twentieth century insofar as the production of such feelings designate "a general tendency of the economic system" (2006, 107). Language is thus now central to the means of labor. Christian Marazzi observes that if during the so-called Fordist era communication in the working space was considered a destabilizing disruption in the process of production, in the post-Fordist economy the inclusion of communication has a direct productive value. In this sense, Marazzi maintains, communication and production have overlapped, becoming almost "one and the same thing" (2011, 23). More anecdotally, Paolo Virno writes that in the contemporary workplace one can well replace the timeworn sign in the factories, saying "Silence! Men at Work," with new signs declaring, "Men at work here. Talk!" (2010. 91). But...