The Thread: Doublespeak
Seph Rodney, Roger Orwell, Milly Getachew and Ken Livingstone discuss how language is used to manipulate others and conceal the machinations of power.
Listen to this recording.
Lower Gallery, 22 May 2009, 3pm
The Thread is a radio show regularly broadcast on Resonance FM, and is a collaboration between Resonance and The London Consortium aiming to present informed discussion of contemporary society and culture in an accessible audio format.
This discussion held in the ICA's Lower Gallery centres on the notion of 'doublespeak', in which language is used to conceal and manipulate. The conversation took place between Seph Rodney, host of The Thread, Roger Orwell, a language theorist at University of the Arts, Milly Getachew, a member of the Index on Censorship, and Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London. The terms of the debate were set as a question of how to understand political euphemism in its mediation of top-down relationships between citizenry and government, versus more horizontal relations among people of relatively equal status. Orwell, Getachew and Livingstone presented differing positions on how euphemism within language can be a way to both mitigate and enact social conflict.