File under “things you sort of always knew, but only properly realised recently”: the copy on business websites, and particularly on those of businesses that are a vehicle for one or two freelances looking to navigate the high seas of corporate commerce, are written in what we might call the aspirational present tense. When they say “we help X with Y”, what they mean is “we are hoping to help X with Y”–or, more accurately still, “we would like X to trust that we can make a good job of Y”.
Yeah, yeah—big revelation, huh? If you wanted to be uncharitable, you could label this as a form of fake-it-till-you-make-it, though in most cases there’s probably no actual fakery going on when it comes to the capabilities being proclaimed; the essence of the thing is to imply that the firm already does Y, as opposed to looking urgently for a paid gig doing Y.
This finally clicked for me after a friend and colleague recommended that I concentrate more on trying to position my own firm in the marketplace (ugh) than on trying to position myself; they explained that somehow it’s easier to make these sort of claims about the vehicle than the driver, so to speak. And it feels very much like they’re right on that point… but of course, me being me, I started wondering why that might be. My conclusion thus far is that it’s just easier to make pure claims of purpose about a legal entity than it is about a person, particularly when that person is oneself. People are complicated; businesses are complicated too, of course, but in a different way, and are much more one-dimensional in a teleological sense.
But it’s the tense thing that interests me most: the move whereby you, speaking as the firm, say that you do that which you want or hope or expect to be doing. In English, there’s a subtle difference between saying “we do Y” and “we are doing Y”; the latter’s use of the participle/gerund form specifies that we are currently doing Y, while the former implies that, while Y-ing may or may not be occurring right now, Y-ing nonetheless definitely takes place from time to time, and perhaps quite often. However, unless there are grammatical nuances in Swedish which I have yet to encounter—and that may very well be the case—that present-participle construction as used in English either doesn’t exist or is extremely rare; in Swedish, “vi gör Y” covers both of those meanings, and as such makes them weirdly equivalent, in a way that regularly warps my brain.
(One of these days I really need to sit down with a linguist who specialises in languages from the Germanic root, because it seems to me that this feature of English suggests a nuance of temporality in thought that has great relevance to cultural relationships with time and identity—and not necessarily an advantageous nuance.)
Linguistics aside, though, there’s something else about that aspirational present tense thing that interests me. It’s a commonplace to laugh at people who are “manifesting”, but in truth they’re just imitating, consciously or otherwise, the sort of linguistic hacks that business communications use as a matter of course. Indeed, if you really want to search out a cause for the observed effect of magical thinking in contemporary popular culture, particularly (but not at all exclusively) online, then the omnipresent rhetorics of business should be your first port of call.
To many people, however begrudgingly, successful businesspersons are the wizards of our era, seemingly able to summon power, resources and allies merely by speaking or writing in the right ways in front of the right audiences; it is a corollary less acknowledged of the “new orality” hypothesis—which I personally hold strongly in its weaker form, if you see what I mean—is that such a culture necessarily comes to conceive of advanced language skills and their effects as something pretty much like magic.
Ironically, perhaps, the power of that magic is in no small part due to their believing in its power; framed in a less charitable way, the success of the con depends on the credulity of the mark, and while there are many discussions to be had about declines in literacy and what we mean when we use that term, I make no apologies for observing that even clearly intelligent and well-qualified people seem these days to be astonishingly easily duped, particularly by the written word.
(Yes, I am very much subtweeting LLMs, here—but this is a buckshot sort of claim with a wide spread. At the very least, the ad industry should also end up with a few lead pellets in its arse.)
I’d be willing to entertain the rebuttal that this has always been the case, but my counter would be to point at the literally geometric increase in the volume of text (let alone other forms of “content”), and the cheapness (in both sense of that term) of its production; sure, maybe most people are no worse at parsing text than they ever were, but that level of comprehension is now trying to mop up a tidal surge with a kitchen towel.
For someone who takes magick to be something more than mere metaphor (even as they also believe magick to be primarily a sort of operationalisation of metaphor), this presents a sort of moral dilemma. If one has a facility for language, can one use it in a way that isn’t essentially exploitative of the relative illiteracy of others? If one deploys the aspirational present tense to talk about one’s business, is one wandering onto the left-hand path? Can the master’s tools ever dismantle the master’s house?
Trains of thought like this—and the impulse to scribble them down and type them up and publish them—are exactly the sort of displacement activity that ensures the website of my firm still has a “site under construction” notice, despite said firm having been a going concern for over two and a half years.
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