Page 87 - Literacy in the New Media Age

76 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

represented by a noun-like linguistic entity (nouns being the linguistic category
for entities, objects, phenomena, outside time).
A more event-like representation might be something like this: ‘The
successful applicant will supervise those staff who work in the office, who
provide services (services in which staff administer certain areas) to the
academic staff’. This description is not particularly elegant (I have not aimed for
elegance but rather for getting all the actions drawn out overtly again), but nor is
it very much longer than the original nominal form.
I mention that because ‘efficiency’ of space, a reason usually given, seems not
plausible here. However, the nominal form has much more authority, because it
is the name of something which exists as a thing (rather than in the more verb-
like form which is a description of events that happen and which may, therefore
also not happen). But, above all, as a stable thing it can be administered,
something which is difficult to do with events.
Here the productive potential of the resources of writing lies in being able to
turn event-in-time into object-out-of-time; to turn events with human participants
into entities with no overt trace of human presence; to turn the world of human
social endeavour into the world of general categories. We might feel that the
word ‘productive’ is somewhat misapplied here, but the point is that that would
not be the bureaucrat’s view of it. This is the technology that enables the
bureaucrat (and many others – the scientist, the policy-maker as much as the law-
maker) to turn the messy world of events and actions into the stable, unchanging,
orderly world of entities. It is and has been an essential technology in the era of
the industrialised economies and of their social and political structures. The
applicant for the job has a difficult task; she recognises, from the language of the
PD, how this institution represents itself, and feels that she needs to approximate
to that language in her application – to show that she understands and is in
sympathy with this institution. At the same time she needs to show some signs of
‘individuality’, which is, on the face of it at any rate, one of the characteristics
looked for: nobody wants (nobody wants to admit that they want) an employee
who is merely a clone of the institutional structure. She must therefore show some
signs of this individuality while giving the impression that she will fit in without
causing a ripple.
Her strategy is to move a little way back from the heavily nominalised forms
towards the more event-like structure. She uses the resources of the language
innovatively, even in this difficult situation of what must seem, to her, extreme
constraint. She uses transformational means to unmake and move away from,
some of the heaviest of the bureaucratic language. So ‘supervision of all office
staff’ becomes ‘supervisory skills have been developed’. She does not name
herself directly – either, as here, by deleting the subject/agent of the passive, or
by eliding the subject nouns of verbs; nor does she make herself the agent of any
action. She suggests her own agency by the use of the possessive pronoun my, as
in the first sentence of the second paragraph, ‘skills have been developed over
my career’ (rather than ‘I developed skills for my …’), and by the use of the