I wanted to use this space to start clarifying what i have meant when i have talked about WePrime, because a couple of people who have asked me about it, seem to think i meant something different and more direct than I intended, when i used the term.
The word WePrime started as a play on E-Prime. I just found this piece by Robert Anton Wilson that describes E-Prime more fully than i want to here. In short, E-prime, a form of English that does not use the word ‘is’ in a definitive way, works at demonstrating that one can indeed write and speak without using any form of “to be”. I find it hard to talk about E-Prime or We-Prime while staying E-Prime without sounding prim or verbose, so i’m not going to attmept that here.
In PS’s lovely phrase regarding something completely different, E-Prime works for me as a kind of mental foundation garment. In those terms, it feels nice to be able to take the foundation garment off and relax sometimes. For me, E-Prime works as a nice way of keeping in check a tendency that i sometimes have to be super-judgemental, especially about the aesthetics of the written word and about other peoples’ books.
WePrime also works as a kind of rhetorical foundation garment. But WePrime is not intended to be a flavour of English which doesn’t use the word ‘we’ at all; though i found a short experiment with the technique of avoiding any reference to we, to be interesting and useful to me when i first started thinking about what WePrime is, how it works.
WePrime is a way of looking harder at what We are doing when We talk about what We need to do, how We must act, what Our priorities should be. It can be very easy to make these kinds of blanket statements; It can be very easy to talk about ourselves, within ourselves, without feeling the need to make explicit references to who We are.
Yet when We move outwards and try to connect to more people, to find others who share ideas that look like ours, or to find others receptive to having our ideas; We can’t rely on that assumption any more. If We talk about who We are, what We believe in, how We define ourselves, in public, it becomes easier for others who want to share in our ideas to find us. But to do that, we have to make internal agreements about who We are. If We spontaneously arise between ourselves, We make statements that can seem exclusive, divisive, to people who don’t identify as We.
If someone is making statements about the We that they are part of, but i do not know them well, or know them at all, and i that person is not providing a clear means for me to look up the referent of We; i become suspicious. In this context, We looks like a rather old-fashioned rhetorical trick, used to help compel a mass of people to belong to or support a cause, without revealing how the organisers of that cause are motivated, without talking about how they describe themselves internally.
But that internal, ongoing group discussion about principles, identities, can quickly turn into ontological soup. My referent here is the classic of the feminist consensus organising tradition, The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Groups that attempt to organise by a rigorous process of total consensus in every decision, come to slow down, suffer groupthink, because people end up working around consensus informally and out-of-band, in subgroups formed by friendship groups. The formal consensus process becomes little more than a ritual of people who either know about a subtextual conversation or don’t, shouting about What We Need Now at each other. So WePrime for me is a strategy for being more circumspect about what is being assumed inside a decision making process, which hopefully helps to throw it off recursive, repeitive tracks which become much more about semantics than about goals and dreams.
Yet We can also be terribly useful. If a clear referent is provided, and maintained as something current over time, then it is convenient shorthand for spelling out peoples’ names.
People who’ve read Soren Kierkegaard and run across WePrime have said, “ah – click – Kierkegaard”. Among the many things that Kierkegaard said during his life was this (although, presumably, he said it in Danish; and on sight I distrust Victorian era English translations):
“What rules the world is not exactly the fear of God but fear of
Man. Hence this dread of being a single individual and this proneness
to hide beneath one or other abstraction, hence the anonymity, hence
the editorial ‘we’ etc.”
I sense that We is falling out of fashion in the discourse of power, of control, of contracts. When i first “got” WePrime, it really drew my attention to certain kinds of political statements. Now i seem to see those kinds of political statements less in the world: what i hear coming from those quarters is a new kind of emphasis on You.
This is an interesting factoid that S found out while attempting to bring a new kind of sophistication to the spam filtering on our email system, playing around with different linguistic analysis techniques:
Spam messages are almost identifiable simply by their relative overuse of the word ‘you’, in comparison with messages that are actually communicating.
When i am in a WePrime quandary it helps me to write terrible zen poetry. I notice that We, like suspicion itself, is a powerful dual device in English. One can refer to two kinds of We, in the same terms, appearing to have the same sense, looking the same in their actions, but with a very different quality of intention in the different qualities of We, and the ways in which We are used to induce an impetus to action in people around us.
Kierkegaard’s Fear of Man also seems to be falling out of fashion, as We regain some balance. The sense in which We can be used as a control instrument starts to recede, as We get the monkey off our backs. A different kind of integral We, that was always hidden underneath the dialectical We, starts to re-emerge. To notice a new kind of We emerging can be wonderful. To me this is another core topic that can’t be fruitfully examined, or understood, by staring at it directly. Then i think of that wonderful line from the Bruce Lee movie, Enter the Dragon:
“It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory”
