Three Meditations on Our "Millennihilisms": Accents, Racism, Anti-Semitism

I. Language and Workplace

I will begin via some thoughts on language in the workplace. In a statement found in the 4 April 1997 edition of the Binghamton Sun-Times, Frank Pennella, a spokesperson for Telespectrum, a marketing firm located near the State University of New York in Binghamton, announced that Telespectrum would create 550 new jobs. In the depressed, decaying area of Binghamton, this was good news for many. Pennella, in an article entitled “Want to Apply? Be Assertive, but Polite,” describes Telespectrum’s ideal worker: “We are looking for people who are articulate—who are assertive to a point, but not pushy. And work ethic is very important. We also like people who have a professional bearing, and—this may sound silly—a neutral accent.”

Speaking well, one might assume from this citation, is part of the foundation of the ideal Telespectrum worker. This is not unreasonable; effective marketing demands a certain articulateness. But on closer examination we see that the issue at hand, for Pennella, is not actually this “speaking well.” In fact, many relatively well-spoken people—including the conservative President George W. Bush, the middle-ground former president Bill Clinton, and the liberal/radical Reverend Jesse Jackson—possess rather nonneutral accents. Indeed, nobody speaks with a “neutral accent”; an accent is by definition not neutral. A particular inflection may be characterized as ideal, mainstream, or perfect (we may even hold that someone possesses “no accent”); but this is hardly the same as “neutral.”

The undesirable accent, it is important to emphasize, is not an allusion either to a “foreign” language/individual or an immigrant. Nor can we say that the demand for a “neutral accent” necessarily points up Telespectrum’s covert effort to exclude certain minority groups. An Episcopalian Long Islander, an individual from southern Texas or northern Minnesota, a straight man from the country—all of these could have as “nonneutral” an accent as an immigrant or minority person. In fact, anybody could: “neutral accent,” if we recall Pennella’s statement, is related not only to a way of pronouncing words but also to too much and too little assertiveness. Directly opposed to both pushiness and nonaggressivity—these are deemed undesirable qualities while the “neutral accent” is presented as a desirable one—Pennella’s “neutral accent” is also about neutrality as such. For Pennella, anyone who speaks too loudly or softly, shoves too hard or too easy, asserts him- or herself beyond a certain point or not enough—such a person is nonneutral, and would therefore not properly “fit into” the Telespectrum mix.

The (non)neutral accent, in fact, is nothing less than the sign of language itself: the linguisticality of language. The accent is language displaying itself as language. This, indeed, is what a nonneutral accent does. Like a trope or “literariness,” it exposes the “nonnaturalness” of language. It reveals that a person is speaking and not simply using language easily, naturally, mindlessly, articulately. When one encounters or uses a “nonneutral accent,” language is not functioning as an epiphenomenal vehicle that immediately accomplishes acts, obtains and refuses goods, spreads information, communicates messages, and dissipates into “the things that matter.” It surfaces as matter and as the matter. No longer merely an articulation within a given habitus or field of representation, the nonneutral accent is language emerging as itself, as language.

Of course, “neutral accent” seems to be only a metaphor. Literally, Telespectrum desires workers who speak transparently. The ideal language is one that pretty clearly “displays” or represents objects (products) without itself appearing. The marketer who sells via the product, without too much accent, force, rhetoric, or persuasion, without allowing language to interfere, is the most productive. The proper language for the late capitalist market, that is, is one that vanishes into the commodity, thus making it seem as if the goods were speaking for themselves, as if their value were intrinsic and natural, not fabricated or imposed. A...