"In one of his magisterial explorations of German politics between the wars, the historian Ian Kershaw mused that 'there are times -- they mark the danger point for a political system -- when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing.'
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I went off on a cog-sci linguistics trip the other day with Lakoff, then rediscovered some dust-up between Lakoff and Steven Pinker. I watch some equal time with Pinker and recalled some of the studies covered in The First Word, Kenneally. Google Lakoff v. Pinker. Whatever the intellectual merits one way or the other, both are doing political speech analysis.
This bares on what I think is at the root of public discontent. Everybody who tries to follow US political life has to engage in some form of disambiguation in order to make political speech meaningful---and usually that effort fails. Below is a quote from Marcuse, written in the early 60s:
``The ritual-authoritarian language spreads over the contemporary world, through democratic and non-democratic, capitalist and non-capitalist countries. According to Roland Barthes, it is the language "propre á tous les régimes d'autorité," and is there today, in the orbit of advanced industrial civilization, a society which is not under an authoritarian regime? As the substance of the various regimes no longer appears in alternative modes of life, it comes to rest in alternative techniques of manipulation and control. Language not only reflects these controls but becomes itself an instrument of control even where it does not transmit orders but information; where it demands, not obedience but choice, not submission but freedom.
This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood. But this kind of discourse is not terroristic. It seems unwarranted to assume that the recipients believe, or are made to believe, what they are being told. The new touch of the magic-ritual language is that people don't believe it, or don't care, and yet act accordingly. One does not "believe" the statement of an operational concept but it justifies itself in action--in getting the job done, in selling and buying, in refusing to listen to others, etc.'' (Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 102-3p)
The pull quote is, `The new touch of the magic-ritual language is that people don't believe it, or don't care, and yet act accordingly.'
The new touch was not new, but was always present. The difference between some prior incarnation of magic-ritual language is that newer additions have been technically fabricated, industrially produced, and distributed en mass. This production system is integral to mass communication systems for institutions of modern states and their economic regimes.
That isn't really news. What is probably less well known are the roles that mass media played in the pre-WWI and Weimar period. Just about every writer I've read noted it. People lived by their newspaper and later radio and they attended large political rallies with famous speakers. The basic function of the radio was to bring these rallies to an ever broader mass, a sort of political convenience machine. This is from Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right on the inside jacket:
``During the 1890s in Germany, pressure groups increasingly provided a field of involvement for nationalist activists who found it difficult to gain entry to the exclusive circles of the `notables' through which constituency politics were traditionally conducted. These nationalist groups also had specific political conflicts with the government and the established right-wing parties over colonial policy, the pace of naval expansion, treatment of the national minorities, anti-socialism and other issues. The advances made by the Socialists at this time gave an increased urgency to the debate on the right, which focused on ways of devising an adequate popular politics and on how to counter the socialist threat...''
Once these social communication systems were taken over by the Third Reich, they became known as a propaganda machine. But similar mass communication systems and nationalist rallies were used by all the industrial powers of the period---specifically to generate the moral equivalent to war, i.e. national unity. They became necessary adjuncts of the modern state apparatus. The radio made this even easier.
So the mass media became the material base of the shift of substituting images for concepts that Marcus noted. Here `images' simply stands for a whole array of forms of ritualistic-emotive significance and little rational content.
``They mark the danger point for a political system -- when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people...''
The problem isn't that politicians have stopped understanding the language of the people. The problem is most of their communications are fabrications, outright lies, or have no content at all. They sort of emote. As Marcuse noted, that doesn't matter as long as public speech can use the ritual-magic to get people to act whether they believe anything said or not.
I've been having some fun tracking George Lakoff who became a consultant to the Democratic party in their attempt to `re-frame' issues and debates against the right. The farce was that whole re-frame effort devolved with health care drama (via insurance lobbies) to gain public support for various contentless caucus positions within the Democratic majority and had little to do with the right. The right made its opposition on the principled ground of zero content. Just say No. Hence it could not be re-framed.
Steven Pinker a fellow psycholinguist wrote a review of Lakoff's Whose Freedom? The Battle Over Americas's Most Important Idea.
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2006_09_30_thenewrepublic.html
``...George Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphor is a lollapalooza. If Lakoff is right, his theory can do everything from overturning millennia of misguided thinking in the Western intellectual tradition to putting a Democrat in the White House.'' (Pinker, The New Republic, October 2006)
All of which is pretty funny, since that is essentially what Lakoff helped accomplish.
CG