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The Poetics of Politics: "Theirs" and "Ours" Author(s): Michael
Silverstein Source: Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 61,
No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 1-24Published by: University of New
MexicoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3631295Accessed:
23-04-2015 13:40 UTC
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JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH
(Formerly Southwestern Journal of Anthropology)
VOLUME 61 * NUMBER 1 * SPRING * 2005
THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS"
Michael Silverstein Department of Anthropology, University of
Chicago,
1126 East 59" St., Chicago, IL 60637-1580
Events of political communication define issues and create
spaces of action that position people with respect to them. How?
Political talk is not effective in these ways just because it
describes the world-as it is or as it might be. In various ways,
effective talk in political events forms a diagrammatic microcosm
of its targeted field of action, linking events of political
process in which it thrives with varying degrees of compelling
effectiveness. Political talk of the "factional" politics of
Indo-Fijians draws on principles we can see-and discerning
participants can hear!--as well in our own agonistic electoral
politics of recognition.
I WANT TO FOCUS ON THE EVENT-QUALITY of political social action,
to show that we can study political events as the dynamic
arrangement and rearrangement of people as subjects within
structures of actual and potential action of all sorts. I want to
illustrate how this is constituted by the "poetics," as we now
analyze it, of such political events, seen in their larger cultural
frameworks. That is how people participate in the exercise and
diffusion of what some call "power" in human groups. That is what
people pay attention to, what they try to discern, as their very
acts of participation in the political. Thus, far from being
something different from "politics," poetics, this paper argues, is
the key to our understanding what people are doing in the way of
the political.
OVERCOMING THE SENSE THAT "POLITICS" IS NOT "POETIC"
Thirty years ago, self-styled "symbolic anthropology" (cf. Basso
and Selby 1976, based on a 1974 conference in New Mexico) was at
its height of influence, but there
Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 61, 2005 Copyright ?
by The University of New Mexico
1
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2 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH were already rumblings of
a kind of revisionary--or perhaps post-McCarthyite
reversionary!-discontent among the young, especially among the
younger political left in anthropology in the wake of the practical
politics of the era of Vietnam. Who could be interested in
"symbols"-especially the way some of the leading lights presented
them, far removed from life itself-when there was so much of a
practical sort, so much going on in events-practices--of one or
another sort that was, and is, the lived reality of sociocultural
life, getting things done, moving matters along, sometimes even to
resolution. Is that not, to be sure, the essence of politics?
So a generation of writers and more in anthropology, now
themselves occupying seniormost grades of our professional
hierarchy of age-grading, produced volume after volume with the
catchy title (at least catchy for the first time): "The poetics and
politics of ... " (A quick title-keyword search in my library
catalog brings up 69 such currently catalogued in our University of
Chicago collection!) You name it; it was discovered that there is
both a "poetics" and a "politics" of it, both an aspect fit for
symbolic anthropology (in which so many young scholars of that time
were trained and to which they-symbolically !-made a gesture of
obeisance) and a let' s-get-down-and-dirty, politicoeconomic or
other seemingly more "real" aspect involving the application of
that universal social solvent, so-called "power."
If "poetics," in such a view, is to be understood by the
analysis of symbols, especially when they are analytically taken
out of the event-contexts where they are experienced, then we have
to add on-hence, the "and" of the titles-some different kind of
understanding, one that people interacting in those very contexts
did by at least implicit appeal to other kinds of frameworks:
frameworks of a "politics" of, for example, use and exchange value,
domination and resistance, implicitly coerced though seemingly
voluntary compliance with hegemonies, etc. "Poetics," in other
words, must have been thought to deal with cultural expression
outside of the realms of the practical, of the "political." And
perhaps, given anthropological theorizing of the period, that is no
wonder.
Think for example of Clifford Geertz's notion of culture as "an
ensemble of texts . . . which the anthropologist strains to read,"
knowing that each such text "renders ordinary, everyday experience
comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which
have had their practical consequences removed and reduced ... to
the level of sheer appearances" (1973:452, 443). That hardly seems
reason enough to kill all the poets in the ideal Republic, even if
they afford us the occasions for emotional catharsis! (But who
would experience catharsis from "sheer appearances," we might
ask!)'
It is precisely this palpably inert representational quality of
Geertzian or other conceptualizations of the cultural that seemed
to me in 1974 [Silverstein 1976], and still seems to me to invite
the counterproposal that there is also a "politics" of culture--or
a politics beyond anthropology's onetime notion of culture-that we
must take account of. This is what Sherry Ortner's (1984) practical
practice theoreticians longed to discover in their various
materials. This is what gave Bourdieu, the Frankfurt School,
Foucault and the post-structuralist, Nietszchean,
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 3 or at least
neo-Hegelian conjuncture its influence and oomph-their "power,"
dare we say?-in the pages of journals and in jillions if not
zillions of meeting symposia and collections entitled "The Poetics
and Politics of Whatchatmacallit." We anthropologists, as political
actors in our own society, intuit, even conceptualize the way the
world really works from our experiences in the various institutions
of our own society. This same sense of the practical politics of
things ought to be accorded to others, whom we purportedly study,
as actors in their own respective societies. And, to the variously
focused political consciousnesses, it looks like power, perhaps
even economic in some broad sense, all the way down.
But as I have been observing for thirty years, "politics" has a
"poetics": What is experienced as appropriate and effective
"practice" is literally formed semiotically-through signs-though
not in the ways understood by representational approaches such as
the one Geertz was then understood to advocate. If we really knew
how to study social action, events of how people interact one with
another, we would see that "politics" is "poetics," inscribed in
relation to interpersonal, intersubjective spaces of mutual
adjustment of people. Political events, that is, events that can be
analyzed in relation to a political order, reach whatever
effectiveness they have only in a semiotic-a sign-mediated- order
or they don't reach any effectiveness at all qua sociocultural
fact.
Even terrorist acts considered as part of a meaningful
politics-explosions, killings, maimings, and other such horrors-are
semiotic in this sense, effective at startling and terrorizing not
(in the worst scenario of their effectiveness) the actual victims
so much as the spectators, summoned to the event as interested
onlookers of the spectacular at lesser and greater remove and
through less and more report- mediated, relayed consciousness of
the acts: as Althusser (1971) might have it, the spectators are
interpellated as political subjects by the awful occurrences. Such
acts are both, as we term them, indexically appropriate to their
preexisting contexts- calibrated as forms interpretable only in
relation to contexts structured in certain ways-and indexically
effective in bringing about new contextual conditions simply by
virtue of having occurred in such-and-such form, mediated by
such-and- such signs.
Such acts are never indexically "random." Indeed, "randomness"
of terrorist occurrences can be harnessed as a very dimension of
semiosis or meaning, because in this way they are spatiotemporally
inscribed in-interpretable, for example, by calendar and map-a
delimited and homogeneous, Andersonian social space-time (Anderson
1983; cf. Silverstein 2000), the image of a polity-on-the-ground,
targeted for such activity. Event "randomness" as a semiotic or
signal characteristic is frame-creating no differently from any
other kind of effective signal of any other political event. It is
pictorial of the space-time in which it occurs and is inscribed so
as to point to that space-time of the politically targeted
population group; understanding this involves the same
interpretative act as making something of the stars, which look
like dots that have to be connected with imaginary lines so as to
form constellations. Terrorist acts mediate-map between-an
understood social context for which they are frequently
exquisitely-and devastatingly-calibrated and a projectively
transformed
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4 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH context that their very
qualities, as horrific sight, sound, smell, touch, pain, death,
numerosity, intensity, etc., pictorially project into a frame of
now transformed understanding. "Ah! We [surviving victims and
spectatorial survivors] can be targets of this anywhere within our
group's spatiotemporal envelope of activities!" Or even,
"anywhere!"
I don't mean to dwell on the grisly-alas, a grisly too much with
us in the contemporary political world, where such acts drive the
political imaginary of perpetrators and, unfortunately, of
electorates. My point in using this example is to assert that there
is nothing in the political, not even violence, that does not need
a semiotic analysis, an analysis of what, broadly speaking, is the
poetics of political action. Such analysis sees that there are
certain privileged sites of politically effective action (even if,
as feminist theorists like Rosaldo and Lamphere and their
colleagues [1974] so trenchantly and correctly observed, all social
action is shot through with the political). Such analysis
understands how appropriate and effective action at such sites
takes its particular event-contoured forms. Such analysis sees how
such events register their effectiveness as a kind of abstractly
pictorial microcosm of the larger world they inevitably seek to
reorder around the fact of their occurrence.
I advocate an explanation of this through examples, so I turn to
them to give you a sense of what an analysis of the poetics of
politics involves. First, "theirs"; then, "ours." Of course,
"theirs" works in many respects like "ours," and "ours" like
"theirs."
INDO-FIJIAN FACTIONALISM IN AN "OCCASIONALLY EGALITARIAN"
SOCIETY
Don Brenneis (1974, 1978, 1984a, 1984b, 1987, 1988, 1990)
provides us with material that is extremely useful for
conceptualizing the political realm of Hindi- speaking Fiji,
specifically the village of Bhatgaon in Fiji, populated by
descendents of people recruited to overseas indentured labor in the
former English colony. This is what Brenneis (1987) terms an
"occasionally egalitarian community," where a mutual respect for
independence is coupled with few mechanisms for direct, coercive
political control. In such an environment, it is interesting that
conflicts of interests do, in fact, get resolved by a kind of
oscillating or dialectical mechanism of what we might call a
negative and a positive ritual form of political action.
The positive ritual site is easy to discern: it is the pancayat,
or council of formal presentation of grievances for one or another
side of disputes, of clashing interests, of construals of issues
that find themselves in radical conflict. The pancayat is a
formally organized oratorical occasion convened by those called
bada admi, the "big men," at which formal speeches on behalf of
interests are delivered, in a rhetorically fashioned register of
Fijian Hindi, termed shudh hindi, "sweet Hindi," which is, as
Brenneis reports, the language of religion, oratory and public
events. Everything here leads us to understand the pancayat as an
orderly "poetic" of community politics, at which oratorical
eloquence is supposed to work its effective magic. Poetic eloquence
is locally expected to be appropriate to this use.
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 5 But how do
political conflicts ripen, as it were, to the point where they must
be
savored through oratorical eloquence in this positive, highly
valued ritual site? There is another kind of event, negatively
valued-in fact a kind of anti-ritual form in which and through
which issues are defined in a way by gaining adherents to a side.
Brenneis describes this kind of event, the talanoa or men's "gossip
session," in a charming discussion of "grog and gossip" in
Bhatgaon, the community where he did his ethnographic study.
Small groups of related men gather in early evening in someone's
belo, a thatch-roofed sitting house on someone's property, and
"have a few," as we would say in our culture. They drink yaqona,
locally termed "grog," the mildly narcotic drink that Polynesians
term kava in their ceremonial life. Pleasantly relaxed, though not
drunk in any sense as the drinking proceeds, such a men's group
addresses local issues-news of the day or week, as it were-in a
multi-party conversation. (Talking politics in a neighborhood bar
should come to mind as the nearest urban equivalent in contemporary
America; see Lindquist 2002.)
Now none of this would be remarkable beyond the sociality of the
occasion, except that the form-the "poetics," if you will-of the
conversational activity and the medium in which it occurs draw our
interest. Talanoa, male gossip, is rendered in the extreme opposite
register of Fijian Hindi from the one used in the pancayat, the
ritual occasion of resolution of issues. It is called jangli bat,
"jungle talk," in essence, and it is specifically negatively viewed
in the community, a kind of embarrassment of vernacular
masculinity.2
But further. As opposed to the officially prized shudh Hindi of
the speechmaker, valued for "display[ing] a good knowledge of
standard Fiji Hindi, a large Sanskritic vocabulary, and a knack for
apposite parables," jangli bat and its use in talanoa have a clear
negative cachet: "men who excel in it are much appreciated" even
though-or should we say because?-it "focus[es] on stigmatized
subjects, using a[n officially] low prestige variety of Hindi"-"at
the same time a source of shame and of rural pride" (Brenneis
1984a:492-93). Real men get down!
In the course of their conversation over grog, men move in and
out of episodes of talanoa. It is scandal, potentially embarrassing
and to the detriment of someone or some interests, that forms the
content of such talk. Who wants to have been responsible for
telling such tales? Indeed, in a surface egalitarian community,
pointed and explicit accusation against particular others would be
very unwise, even in an intimate group of friends and
relatives.
So what we find in the transcripts of talanoa sessions that
Brenneis has provided is this. First, there is a low degree of
explicit, orderly, and complete descriptive information valued in
our culture's expository communication.3 Half- propositions,
suggestive allusions, and so forth, abound: Claims made about
doings and sayings, but not attributed to anyone as agent or actor,
are the dominant content. We would call this property depleted
referentiality of gossip discourse. Note on the one hand how this
depletion figurates plausible deniability for whoever is uttering
it, dishing the dirt, as it were. Note on the other hand more
importantly that this means the addressees of such discourse must
already be considerably "in
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6 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH the know" about the
scandalous doings and happenings. (See the adjacency pairs, linked
turns, 2.4 and 2.5 on Brenneis's [1984a:501] transcript, reproduced
here as Figure 1, as well as 2.8 and 2.9.)
There is a threshold of knowledge that is presupposed as an
"opportunity cost" of participation: a good ritual player, even as
addressee, is someone who dominates the news. As Brenneis observes,
"The most striking feature of these [talanoa] transcripts is how
difficult it would be to reconstruct the underlying events on the
basis of the talanoa texts themselves. . . . [G]enerally
participants in talanoa sessions must come to them with some
understanding of what is being discussed" (Brenneis 1984a:494).
So if these sessions are not really informative, what are they?
Here, a second aspect of the form of conversation emerges. Talanoa
is marked by "rhythmic and rapid delivery," the discourse divided
"into syntactic and rhythmic chunks" of stress units, "giving a
pulsing feel to the talanoa as a whole .... Assonance and
alliteration are quite marked, and exaggerated intonation contours
and volume variation frequently occur." As well, "repetition and
near repetition of words and phrases are common, as are plays with
word order" and lots of reduplicative forms (e.g., polis-ulis =
"police"), exaggerating a tendency of jangli Hindi (Brenneis
1984:494-95). The language is, in short, a poetry like our American
English rap or hip-hop, in which, even across speaking turns,
people have to jump into the rhythm of the talk, exercising a
facility for artistically shaping their own contribution to it.
The time-marker of the verbal beat of this rhythmic delivery is
the form bole, structurally (grammatically) the third person
singular present of the verb "to say:" thus, "he/she says." In
talanoa this form occurs so often it no longer actually means
"he/she says"; it has become what from the perspective of textual
organization we call a discourse marker, punctuating breath-group
and other segments of utterance as do like, ya know, ain' it, and
so forth in vernacular American English. Frequently stressed and
lengthened vis-h-vis the rest of the text-which is rapidly
delivered in oral performance-it is a kind of phrasal measuring
device that occurs not only in the middle of turns at talk, but
especially at the beginnings of turns and at the ends of turns when
its utterance shows that the floor has now become available for
another speaker to jump in. This is shown very well in 2.12,
2.18-2.19, and 2.20- 2.21 in the transcript reproduced from
Brenneis (1984a:502).
From the perspective of its meaning, bole is what we term a
quotative particle; we might translate it "they sdy, [pause] (that
...)" (extra stress and perhaps rising- falling intonation on
say-), with generalized they that has no actual denotational
antecedent, or "one he'drs [pause] (that .. .)," putting the onus
for the stench being uttered about someone on the generalized
community, as though indeed Kant' s (cf. Habermas 1989:89-140)
"public opinion" has informed of the bad tidings.
I like to think of this rap or word-jazz game in the image of a
jump-rope round, where children have to jump out of and into the
rhythm of the turning rope without getting fouled up by stepping on
it or by getting hit by it. It requires some skill.
So it is rhythmically co-constructed stylized gab or talk that
is occurring in talanoa, not a good, complete, orderly,
co-constructed story, but a co-construction of what is not said, a
co-construction of what is mutually presupposable and hence
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 7 2.4 DD: NAU BAJE
LACBAG HOI NA?
Nine o'clock approximately is no? About nine o'clock. wasn't
it?
2.5 HN: NAU BAJE LAGBAG. Nine o'clock approximately. About nine
o'clock.
2.6 DD: DUNU KAT PIN. Both totally drunk.
2.7 HN: BOLEDUNU PIN KAT OLE BAS DONO LARAIN Says both drunk
fully says enough both fought says Says both were quite drunk; says
they fought with each other; PRAYA RAM BHAG JAO KADERIS BOL GAYE
RASI LEKE Praya Ram says away go chased says went rope taking says
Praya Ram says scram and chased them; they went taking CHADKE JAMUN
PED PE FASI LAGAO. CHOTU BOLE SAB CHARAWE went jamun tree on noose
fastened. Chotu says all house in a rope and tied a noose on the
jamun tree. Chotu says all were CHOTKANA JAI B BAPA LOTIO JAB
CHOTKANA little fellow go says father returned when little fellow
at home, and the little guy says father is back; the little
GAI B LEKE CHURI RAPETIS CHOTKANA TO BHAGA CHAR went says taking
knife chased little fellow so fled house guy left; says he took a
knife and chased the little guy so E. CHOTKANA RAPETIS TO BHAGA
CHAR E. from. Little fellow chased so fled house from. he fled the
house. He chased the little guy so he fled. U DARWAWAT RAHA. BAS
SAB RONA PITNA BOL EK He terrified was. Enough all crying drinking
says one He was terrified. So everyone was crying, drinking. Says
TARAF SE CHILAI ROWAI KALI YAHA BIKARI CHAR LE ROYE side from shout
cry only there Bikari house at crying from that side there was
nothing but crying and shouting; SUNA1. was heard. they heard it as
far away as Bikari's.
2.8 DD: LONDE B TIS )ANNE HAMLOG GAWA. Children says thirty
people we went. The children said more than thirty people went
there.
2.9 HN: HA BAHUTBOLE TIS IANNE KOI GAYE TIS RAHA-BOLE Yes many
says thirty people who went thirty were says Yes, many people,
says, says thirty, says thirty or TIS BATIS JANNE KE BOLAT RAHA
GAYEBOLE. thirty thirty-two people of said had went says.
thirty-two people, he said, went there, says.
2.10 SN: B GAYE HUAN KUCH PONC GAYEN KUCH DEVIDINLOG Says gone
had some arrived went some Devidin's folks Says some had arrived as
far as Devidin's house. KE GHAR LE. KUCH NARA TALAK GAYE BIKAR1 KE
GHAR KE of house to. Some ditch to went Bikari of house of Some got
as far as the ditch, some only as KO1 DUI LADKE GAYE RAHA TALAK
KAL1. KUCH FIR LOTAIN. some two boys gone had to only. Some again
returned. far as Bikari's house. Some went back home.
2.11 DD: BOLE HUWA JATIAT BATI KALAS BHUT GAYE. SAB Says there
going lanterns finished off went. Says all Says that as they were
going there the lights went out. SOYGAYA KALAS. PONCAT PONCAT. gone
to sleep finished. Arriving arriving. Says all had gone to sleep.
Just as they were arriving.
Figure la. Transcript of a segment of talanoa featuring linked
turns of participants, and dense use and rhythmic, end-line
positioning preference for punctuating marker bole
Reprinted from American Ethnologist 11:501-2. Used by permission
of American Anthropological Association, 01984.
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-
8 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH 2.12 HN: HA.BOLEEKDUM GHAR
ME SAKIT
Yes. Says immediately house at arrived says Yes. Says that just
as soon as they got to the house, says VAJRA DEO NIKALGAYA. BOLE
PRAYA RAM POLIS ME GAYA RAHA Vaira Deo came out. Says Praya Ram
police to gone had Vajra Deo came out. Says Praya Ram had gone to
the police POLE OLIS. says police....
2.13 DD: HA, TO.... EYes, then.... 2.14 HN: AYA RAHIN DIN ME
IBOLEADMILOG SOCIN BOLE PRAYA RAM
Come had day in says men thought says Praya Ram The police came
today. Says people thought, says Praya Ram NAHI RAHIT TO AUR
JANNELOG SOCE RAHIN KI KAHE not was so and people thought had says
that told wasn't there, and people thought, says, that he'd ETNA
GAON KE NI ETNA DOR KE GAYE RAHIN JANTA. such village of in such
run of gone had know. never heard of such running around in a
village.
2.15 DD: KON KON MAMALA RAHA? KAHE OLE.... What what trouble
was? Told says... What was it all about? I've hearn...
2.16 HN: HA. BO ILOG KE U KAR Yes. Says they of says he done
Yes. Says of them, says he did
DIN ILOG DOR KI GAYIN TO DEKHIN PRAYA RAM APNE GAYA. had they
run of went so saw Praya Ram self went. something. They fled
running so he saw Praya Ram himself go.
2.17 DD: PRAYA RAM BATIS.... BOLE... Praya Ram said..
says....
2,18 HN: BIKARI BOLET RAHA. Bikari said had. LBikari had
said.
2.19 DD: B BAHUT GUSSAN BOLAT RAHA TUMLOG CELLE IAOBOLE Says
very angry said had you(pl) leave go says. Says he said, very
angrily, for them to leave at once.
FIR ROHIT RAHA PRAYA RAM OLEKA KARl... U says again cried had
Praya Ram says what doing.
...
He Says they cried again; Praya Ram says what are you doing?
BATAWAT RAHA BESWA GAYA RAHA BOLE LATCHMI UDHAR SE AWE said had
Beswa gone had says Latchmi there from came He said Beswa had gone;
says Latchmi had not come from NAHI. not. over there.
2.20 HN: HA. Yes.
2.21 DD: B CELLE JAO NAHI TO CHURI-URI MAR DIBOLE EKDUM Says
leave go not then knife hit give says totally Says leave at once or
I'll hit you with my knife. Says PAGALEN HEI NAHI? crazy are not?
they're totally mad, aren't they?
2.22 HN: HA. Yes.
Figure lb. Transcript of a segment of talanoa featuring linked
turns of participants, and dense use and rhythmic, end-line
positioning preference for punctuating marker bole
Reprinted from American Ethnologist 11:501-2. Used by permission
of American Anthropological Association, 01984.
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-
THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 9 not in need of
actual elaboration. That is the discourse form, whatever the
empirical actuality of some participant's knowing or not knowing.
To participate you must be able to indicate by your own
co-construction that you are already in the know; to participate is
to register a mutual alignment with the guy who has already spoken,
taking up the story to-hand from the perspective emerging in the
intersubjective space of co-construction.
Participation is, in short, a figuration or trope of
likeness-of-alignment to the way some scandal is being formulated.
In short, one's collusion-to use the negative word for
collaboration-in fashioning an emergently group-based account is a
sign that points to (the technical language is: indexes) the very
coming into being of a potential political faction in respect of
some issue or situation. Talanoa is the negative ritual among small
groups of men where political interests about particular issues
come into being, necessitating, as they persist and ripen- or
fester, to use a disease image-the eventual constitution of a
pancayat, the ritual event for airing the social wound and
cleansing it.
Small-scale egalitarian politics--even "occasionally
egalitarian" politics-is factional politics, the spectral
coming-into-being of which causes official anxiety and the search
for remedies.4 Talanoa analyzed as an event of social action, with
its characteristic poetic form of participation, gives us the key
to how faction about particular issues comes discursively into
being. It may be officially negatively valued and hence denied as
part of the political process-in our own society, the notion that
"men don't gossip," for example-but it is the very first
engine-stroke in the reciprocating system that is the mechanism in
place for the politics of Bhatgaon and other such communities.
Talanoa as an event is a ritual microcosm of the macro-social form
of political faction, which can come into being as men are drawn
into co-constructing a far-from-disinterested account of something
indexically bespeaking strong community interest.
THE ELECTORAL POLITICS OF "MESSAGE" IN OUR MASS DEMOCRACY
So much for "their" politics. Is it possible to see that our
politics, too, is a poetics of social action, partly mediated by
language and similar communicative modalities?
Our own political institutions are ideologically centered on a
mass electoral process, recently humming away in high gear (as of
late October, 2004). Electoral politics at the center of mass
democracy is not all of politics by any means. In fact, to judge by
participation rates, electoral politics may be decreasingly central
to the totality of politics operating in this country, as
elsewhere. For the enfranchised electorate even in the United
States increasingly recognizes that other forms of politics may be
of more overall significance in the total political process. To
many, for example, politics is just business carried on by other
means, to paraphrase Clausewitz (or am I thinking of Calvin
Coolidge?). Politics in such a model is just a business tolerated
and legitimated by an otherwise indifferent public, who mind-and
who tend to-their own business, knowing that there's an official
top
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10 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH business in the capital
that works just like theirs.5 But electoral politics is the most
interesting part of our politics; it's public spectacle in what we
call the public sphere, sometimes indeed perhaps intended to
distract from the business that seems actually to be at hand. And
so electoral politics centrally commands our attention, as scholars
interested in the anthropology of communication in the public
sphere, though a proper treatment of all of the different phases
and components of the political is, of course, necessary, just as
for Bhatgaon.
Our particular kind of electoral politics operates through a
spectacular poetics of "message," as I see it. Here, I want to
elaborate on what I mean by "message," and why I think that as
anthropological analysts of American political communication we
ought to be concerned with it. More importantly, I think we must
account for why politicians are concerned with it. I would contend
that "message" drives electoral politics in our country in the
minutiae, the actualities, of its day-to-day process, which can be
followed at any stage of an electoral campaign, such as that for
U.S. president in 2004.
And it is not just political candidates who become enculturated
to "message": The very addressees of their communication-we, the
potential electorate in the public sphere-also learn how to listen
to and look at political communication, and thus we learn what to
hear and see, always over the shoulders of media commentators and
shapers of "message." We have to appreciate, then, how political
speech in the multi-layered jumble of the mass media is like
articulate noise shouted into a chasm, a canyon. If it doesn't just
dissipate and disappear, it echoes in particular ways as it is
picked up and selectively repeated and interpretatively reshaped by
a mediating press and other institutions in the public sphere.
Political discourse is interdiscursive; it engages other discourse
and images circulating among a public that, every once in a while,
will stop its distracted non- interest and will want to "know," Who
was that who said that?6
Navigating oneself or being piloted into a position where a
public wants to know-where the public pays attention to-the
sociological "whom" doing the talking has a technical term among
the professionals, it turns out. It is called getting "on message."
Of course, if one does get "on message," there is also the problem
of staying there as well so long as it is doing wonderful things in
opinion polls and at the ballot box, or its touch-screen
equivalent. What this means is that we must analyze the phenomenon
that the professionals refer to with their term "message." Trying
to see how the insider's, indeed connoisseur's view of how
political discourse counts-and can be shaped so that it
counts-gives us some insight into the nature of our own political
process. This I have tried to do in a little, nontechnical book,
Talking Politics (Silverstein 2003). In it, I take Abraham Lincoln
and George W. Bush as exemplary and contrasting presidential
instances of being "on message," each in their respective eras of
political communication.
SEMIOTICS AND THE HISTORY OF OUR BRAND OF POLITICS
"Message" turns out to be the kind of social fact that can be
studied in the field of semiotics, the systematic study of how all
phenomena can be understood as signs
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 11 of and for
things in implicit as well as explicit events of communication. For
example, with all due allowance for the difference of how at first
one might think of political personae and consumer
goods-and-services, we must see that in our own days, "message" is
being professionally shaped as an analogue to "brand," however
"message" was shaped in an earlier period.
"Brand," remember, is not a physical, psychophysical
(perceptual), or other concrete fact about products circulating as
commodities on the franker markets of consumerism. It is that
abstract, yet organized set of meaning-images that implicitly
surrounds the product or service because of stimulated
associations- perhaps what Raymond Williams (the twentieth-century
British Marxist literary critic) might well have been gesturing at
with the phrase "structures of feeling." "Brand" implies potential
stories, the most important being how people, as potential and
actual consumers, project cultural values onto the commodity so as
to organize their relationship of use of that commodity. How does
this happen? By shaping and contextualizing the product or service
in a complex of signs designed to induce that potential
story-eventually automatically-once one sees or thinks of the
product or service. Message, just like brand, is dynamic and
differential, always changing in relation to its field of
competition, yet at any moment it is a structured fact of
associations with a degree of coherence, changing as new construals
of the product/candidate re-construct the product/candidate.
"Brand" is, as the professionals say, "value added" to the mere
physical, psychophysical, etc., "stuff"' or "service" that
packaging, advertising, and distribution professionals try to shape
by all kinds of semiotic design. What color should the product be?
What color should the packaging feature, or the background be
against which the product is displayed, or on which an image of it
is displayed? What typeface should appear on the package? Such
matters are endlessly thought about in the way of shaping "brand"
semiotics, even more spectacularly in coordinated branding rollout
campaigns and other mass-marketing developments.
In fact, the more one starts thinking about it, the more one
realizes that "message" early on became the real organizing
principle of this kind of electoral politics in which we live.7 It
is not the official political history of this country- remember,
the one told to us from the time we had an elementary school civics
class-but the history of communication that needs yet to be
understood. Communicative reality constituted and still constitutes
the only real experience of electoral political process anyone has.
Our polity, our way of people's organizing themselves and
reorganizing themselves into social groups with power over
property, money, people, services, beliefs, etc.-and people's
access to them-all this emerges from this amazing semiotic power to
communicate.
Think of what you may have learned of American political
campaigns of 50, 100, 150, even 200 years ago, and of how much is
now submerged in retrospected interpretative reconstructions,
labelings-"readings" is the fancy literary term-of them as
occasions when "America" (catch the anthropomorphic projection!)
decided on a certain policy issue, or endorsed a certain moral
principle, as a collectivity that has "spoken" through the medium
of electoral politics. Then zoom down to the more microscopic level
and discover how nonsensical are such
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12 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH interpretations, how
completely a function of ideological blinders one uses for looking
from afar. When we look closely and comprehensively, we find that
politics way-back-when was a free-for-all of local political clubs
that put on drink- lubricated spectacles of one or another
sort-"infotainments" of their day?- galvanizing very local,
socioeconomic identity and interest groups to the work of causing
ballot boxes to be filled in one or another way, with all the
consequences that has for governing and being governed. Floating
among all this activity are emergent political slogans, catchwords,
and other poetic extractions from discourse by a candidate and by
people who, narrating about a candidate, construe a candidate's
persona, making it projectible into the public's sensibilities, or
perhaps anxieties.
For an electoral candidate these particular semiotic flotsam
become what we term emblems of identity that can be deployed to
remind the folks of who-that is, of course, sociologically
speaking, what-the political figure is. What are the figure's
defining qualitative dimensionalities? It is strategically
essential to inhabit the semiotic space defined by these emblems of
one's own making, and constantly to use them as the building blocks
of one's spectacular availability, that is, availability through
spectacle, all the while evading the constructions prepared and put
forth by one's opponents.
What matters to any candidate's "message" is the way one manages
and controls, i.e., dominates, the agdn, the sometimes unpleasant
primary competitions and general elections that set competitors one
against another in a pyramidical trajectory through a regular
season, then playoffs or quarter-finals, then semi- finals, and
finally the championship. Note the trickle-down effects here,
evidenced by the recent intensification of the significance of the
early stages of the process in contemporary times. Even local
primaries have taken on the character of increasingly vicious
competitions, requiring competitors to show their stuff
early--especially to attract funders/investors-so as to impress
(scare off?) would- be competitors at the next level.
But what impresses? It is not analytic claims about what is true
and false. This would require merely expository subtlety in factual
and declarative representational uses of language to describe what
has been, what is, and what might be. It is not candidates'
positions on issues, the clear "oughts" and "must be's" of a plan
of action, in and for their own sake. It is about whose emblems-of-
identity will come to be used to wrap around each of the agonistoi,
the competitors, as the process moves forward to something like a
presidential or similarly structured election. That is what
impresses. Emblems of identity are potent signs of who-and-what one
is. In the agbn they work relationally by contrast; hence, they
differentiate characters whom an electorate really does want to
identify by contrast. Such emblems position people, allowing a
public to identify them in a structural space of relative possible
social identities. Such a space provides relative places for them
to stand in our-the electorate's-imaginations, defined thus
publicly as personalities by processes either they or their
opponents have controlled (note in such control the figuration of
winning and losing).
"Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!" for example: A memorial or mnemonic
from
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 13
1840, because the Whigs had just learned how to use Jacksonian
Democratic sloganeering, a watershed of "message" politics, to
their own candidate's "message" advantage in drunken rally after
drunken rally. Place, as in Tippecanoe, near present-day Lafayette,
Indiana, where United States troops defeated some desperate Native
Americans in the push West, became a part of William Henry
Harrison's persona on the political stage, as it had been for "Old
Hickory," General Jackson, the Democrat whose emblem from battle
was a Southern hardwood of defined geographical locality. (Too bad
for the party that Harrison was in such fragile health that he died
within a month of his inauguration.)
The ways people have circulated such messages directly and by
creating artifacts like handbills, direct-mail letters, or e-mails,
are ever changing. We must be sensitive to the particular
communicative and inscriptional technologies of the time as we
study these matters; they have rhythms of circulation and
consumption that interact in interesting ways. What we would call
the social sites at which and through which political
communication-the real work of electoral politics-takes place are
ever-changing. But the necessity remains to understand the
processes that lead a public and an electorate to be able to
identify political figures' "messages" at the heart of the
democratic process in ways that are relevant to that politics. We
would see that very historically specific dimensions of identity
have been made to count in politicians' coming to visibility and
audibility-and survival-in the political process.
This is what I have written about using two starkly distinct
figures in very different eras of political semiotics of message,
Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Bush the Younger. Mr. Lincoln's message moved
over time from a folksy civil religion of righteous
Constitutionalism come-what-may to a chastened and preacherly faith
in the mystical work of the Almighty. (Talk about separation of
church and state!) In his own biography of image, he recapitulated
the cultural movement of the mass of frontier and Middle America's
evangelical folk-Protestant denominationalists. Mr. Bush's 2000
message of trusted-and trustworthy-businesslike CEO Christian
practicality (reformed and recovered after a youth of boozy and
druggy high jinks) has been sorely put to an unexpected test by the
terrorist incidents that have necessitated becoming
Commander-in-Chief-the "message"-targeted self- descriptor these
days is "a war President"-on a world stage more sophisticated and
unforgivingly combative than anything I am sure he was led to
believe he would have to face when he was being persuaded to run.
One almost feels sorry for the guy, whose "message" in the 2004
round has come down to the stand-tall sheriff on the lawless
terrain, the only thing between terrorist chaos and your child's
nursery. You know, the terrorism from Eye-Wrack (WINK! WINK!).
In this kind of politics of "message," in short, biographical
illusion is destiny, rather than mere anatomy, as the good Dr.
Freud suggested. The biographical illusion-a plotline moving the
politician as character through situations with respect to a whole
cast of others-attracts (or avoids) issues as it attracts-or
repels-voters, who can imagine a transaction with the illusion and
thus can identify with it, can place it with respect to their own
interests in issues. The chief way we come to "know" our political
figures is through the art of their words and
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14 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH framing contexts that
create and maintain a biographical world in which the personae can
seem to exist. In which, so seeming, they do, in fact, exist.
Political figures have to emerge on the horizon of a tableau, and
to continue adding to that tableau in ways that are consistent and
coherent, or at least not inconsistent or incoherent.
Change of heart on this or that issue-the 2004 political
season's captioned "flip-flop"--is not what is at issue here; it is
perfectly understandable that people grow and develop, just as do
characters in the best Bildungsromane, novels of individual
character. (Mr. Lincoln's jaw-dropping transformation in 1863-1865
to the identity of racial liberator is a case in point, fixing him
in American memory forever. Closer to our time, who can forget how
Mr. Nixon's perceived bold move in traveling personally to the
People's Republic of China was milked for message- worthiness even
as part of his semiotic self-redemption after being forced from
office in disgrace.) But is the change of heart consistent with the
biographical construction of one's "message?" That's the difference
between trust and distrust.
The precise methods for building and maintaining this kind of
image, and for keeping it in circulation, have changed over time,
as I said. Today, for example, it is rare to feel that we live, as
in Mr. Lincoln's day, in an era of the dynamite speech on a
carefully, thematically constructed occasion, which relied on
verbatim quotation in newspaper circulation and then many further
echoes in popular phraseology for a certain image-building
half-life. Today, as in contemporary branding, a multi- or
cross-modal strategy is necessary to reinforce all the components
of a message in which the political persona-note, to emphasize, not
necessarily the actual individual politician concerned-is to exist
in the communicational interface with the public.8
The professionals in the press corps certainly understand the
nature of the contributory partials of message, as we might term
them. This is the stuff of political reporting, operating
completely within the envelope of trade professionals. (That is why
we pay attention to such things as the time-sensitive trajectory of
adjectives that political reporters and analysts use--or even the
themes of their cartoons!-to help track a sometimes continuously
morphing "message" in both its positive and negative aspects.) The
political press plays its role in a mutually negotiated
institutional form-"politics-as-usual," let's call it- as its
continued insider status compels it to, lest reporters find
themselves outside the profession with its access, privileges, and,
of course, personal value to their employers by virtue only of that
access and those privileges. (Look at the wonderfully compelling
social system here of checks and balances, like cops-and-
criminals, or professors-and-customers--oops, students!) The press
learns to live in the parameters that the current system of
"message"-ing offers to them.
THE "MESSAGE" IN THE BOTTLE: 2004 VINTAGE
Verbally, what is offered are calculated bundles of pungent,
eye- (or ear-)catching phrases that go back and forth across
political camps like the shuttlecock in a badminton game. These are
"message" partials that become the design elements of campaigns of
personal identity and identifiability. Remember, "message" is
both
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 15
positive-what you want for yourself-and negative-how you want to
brand your opponent. For example, as Senator Kerry got closer to
being the Democratic presidential candidate, his quiverful of
negative "message"ing arrows about President Bush was at the ready:
deceptive (as on WMD and Iraq, as well as military service, his own
and that of reservists drafted "through the back door"; as in
ideologically full but fiscally empty federal programs), divisive
(cynically pushing the hardest-right Christian agenda of so-called
social issues like piety, prayer, parenthood, and the Patriot Act),
dystopic, or dystopia-inducing (losing industry as well as jobs,
losing medical care, losing the fiscal surplus, losing friends in
the world, losing us our "middle class" hope). Not quite a
presidential Nero fiddling as Rome--or Baghdad--or lower
Manhattan!--burns, but clearly someone either cynically devious or
just somewhat out-of-it.
Poor judgment. No judgment. Judgment exercised with disastrous
results. Worse, a judgment that is corrupted.
In fact, that "little Nero" message has matured and become the
negative relational counterpart to Mr. Kerry's own propensity
toward policy-wonkishness, as I believe the message phrase was when
it was used by opponents during the Clinton-Gore administration.
(This means a kind of academically, if not Senatorially,
deliberative public rhetorical style; very middle-management, not
the above-it-all boss of silent, or unwordy, power.) Both Mr. Kerry
and Mr. Edwards stressed poor judgment on the part of the
administration, clouded by lack of, or active brushing aside of,
dispassionate fact in favor of wishful ideology. (And note how,
therefore, Mr. Bush visibly tried to demonstrate "command of fact"
that he cited and re-cited in his debate appearances-even if
perhaps piped into his ear by Mr. Rove via radio frequency-though
he really kept losing it in the first debate and seemed out there
in "cloud cuckooland" a couple of times. Therefore, too, Mr.
Cheney, summoning privileged access, admonished-no, laced into-Mr.
Edwards, belittling and demeaning him for purportedly incorrect
facts brought to bear in the vice-presidential confrontation-"I
wouldn't even know where to begin!" he said time and again, asking
for the audience's-the voter's- commiserating empathy with his
exasperation at the snotty kid.)
Even in the primaries, Kerry's positive, self-focused "message"
became one of genuine-as opposed to ersatz-(and what's more,
heroic!) service in the Vietnam War, with its obvious projection
into who is likely to be the heroic gun- boat commander in the
so-called war on terrorism. Of course, immediately after Super
Tuesday, the Republican National Committee rolled out a huge,
negative "message" campaign about him, true to Karl Rove's
signature style, hitting Mr. Kerry in his supposed strengths:
suddenly we saw pictures-then even a made-for-
the-Sinclair-TV-conglomerate movie--of his anti-Vietnam War
testimony in 1971, and of his participation in rallies
with-gasp!--Jane Fonda (still a negative poster girl for the
Republican hard-right "base"). During summer and early autumn, when
earlier negatives were not working, weeks of the campaign were
taken up by the attempt to render Mr. Kerry's Vietnam service as
ersatz as the President's was said to be, courtesy of the
all-volunteer, spontaneously organized "Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth" (Figure 2)
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16 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH
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Figure 2. Swift Boat Veterans' negative "message" taking its
toll on Senator Kerry and his negative "message"
Cartoon by Rick McKee, Augusta [GA] Chronicle; reproduced by
permission of the artist, @2004.
From March 2004 on we heard that Mr. Kerry voted early and often
against some weapons system or other (that the Department of
Defense under Mr. Cheney, it turns out, did not want, either); that
he voted to raise taxes again and again and again (were there 660
distinct tax-hike votes in 20 years? That's 33 per year!). We not
only heard that the Senator changed his mind on what Mr. Bush
considers is the "war on terror," his Iraqi campaign, we actually
heard Mr. Kerry himself say that he had-when he discovered he had
been deceived. Sing-song: "Flip-flopper! Flip-flopper!" Notice that
the suggestion of deviousness in the Kerry anti-Bush message gets
turned back in this form of anti-Kerry message which the candidate
and his record seem to substantiate! (Figure 3).
It worked: The repeated refrain of quoted voters, of
commentators, et al., about Mr. Kerry was that "I don't know what
he stands for"-that is, people want his "message" articulated not
in complex sentences of argumentative prose about findings and
issues and programs, but in the poetry of ad copy for identity. So
much for a real success of negatives against Kerry.
By contrast, the positive White House "message" about Mr. Bush
is a mdlange of images of September 1 th/Iraq (Osama =
Saddam[a])-for they have blended together in the White House's
message machine-which is the looming bogeyman from which/whom
Messrs. Bush and Cheney are protecting us, even if the economy,
just like (in "message"ese, "like" = "because of") the World Trade
Center, took a hit from which we have not yet recovered. The
campaign played itself out on these terms: Who will "win" the
so-called war on terror? Curiously, on
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 17
A o F
NO"brl' ON- LEFT- IEHI N P
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Figure 3. Senator Kerry unable to articulate consistent
positions on issues and thus sustaining the negative "message" of
"flip-flop"
Cartoon by Dana Summers, Orlando [FL] Sentinel; reproduced by
permission of the artist and Tribune Media Services, @2004.
so-called domestic issues, both "economic" and "social," the
Republican campaign was just a recycling of all the "message"
slogans of the 2000 campaign, since, in a sense, the appeal for
four more years was to finish that very agenda. We heard yet again
"the soft bigotry of low expectations," "ownership society,"
"activist [Massachusetts] judges," "Massachusetts liberal"
(referencing at once Ted Kennedy and Michael Dukakis, as well
as-could the judicial timing have been more politically
unfortunate?-gay marriage and related social "values" issues
in-and-of the Bay State), and, of course, "compassionate
conservatism" taken up again without apology. Note then that no
matter how Mr. Kerry emphasized domestic policy, it never became
relational "message" material on his, Kerry's, terms, since the
President's people declined to engage it as such.
What is most telling, it seems to me, in showing that we are
dealing not with issues as such but with "messages" that draw
certain issues to them is the more rapid-fire way in which this
overall theme of commander-in-chief toughness was played in the
final weeks-that is, in relation to any issue in the vague
conceptual region of Iraq/War on Terror as a site of
message-construction. Recall that in early October Mr. Kerry used
the word sensitive, as in "sensitive to [something or other],"
i.e., adjusted or calibrated to it. (The context was that the role
of the United States should be sensitive to world opinion, to
national interests of other states, to the UN, etc.) As a
linguistic form, of course, "sensitive" with this meaning is
synonymous with another, principally characterological term,
perfect for "message"ing. Sensitive applied to a person summons up
everything from quiche-
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18 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH
eating liberals to "girlie men" (to break into Schwarzeneggerish
for a moment), and that is precisely how the White House played the
term back as a negative "message" operator (Figure 4).
To some, here and especially abroad, Mr. Bush's policies bespeak
a United States-and its emblematic president, importantly!--that is
the bully on the playground, not,-frankly,-my-dear,-giving-a-damn
masculine ("in Texas we call [a swagger] walkin'!"). Being
"sensitive," the negative messaging wanted to suggest, comes out of
the femiNazi (sensu Rush Limbaugh) era of the Coalition of the
Emasculated, of course.
Same with "[meet the] global test:" it began as a modifier for
the rhetoric that justifies and rationalizes actions like
wars-which ought to be transparently and plausibly truthful,
according to Mr. Kerry's somewhat complex sentence-structure in one
of his debate appearances on national television. It was shifted to
seeming to have modified the action of war itself, and hence, to be
denying to a commander- in-chief the very possibility for
unilateral decisiveness. (As we all know, in the current era the
Constitutional stipulation that Congress "declare" war in explicit
primary performative formality has long since been forgotten; that
bunch have settled for resolutions "authorizing the use of force to
'defend' us" and then have wrung their collective hands when things
have imploded.) So: what "global test?"
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Figure 4. The two "message"-worthy senses of "sensitivity" in
the "War on Terror" Cartoon by Scott Santis, Birmingham [AL] News;
reproduced by permission of the artist, @2004.
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 19 You mean a
President, in Mr. Kerry' s view, has to pass a "global test" of
consensus in order to act strategically (Figure 5)? Aren't you man
enough to act to defend your wife and young 'uns yourself? (The
other negative message theme here summons up Mr. Kerry's marital
and other connections to hated France and Germany and other
non-"willing" foreign states, who are, by the
logic-of-associations, tantamount to "rogue nations" and
"terrorist-sponsoring states"; sensitive internationalists were, of
course, last seen in public when Mr. Stevenson ran for the
presidency in 1956, I believe.)
Occasionally, for reasons of pique or whatever, members of the
press reveal their sense of how politicians' doings are-can you
believe it?-"message"- driven. Who would have ever imagined? These
are priceless occasions, when the tacit social agreement gets
revealed precisely as it is called into question. Whistle- blowers
of message: At such times they remind me of the great film scene in
which Toto, Dorothy's dog, lifts the curtain on the real Wizard of
Oz, revealed as a mere humbug in the W. C. Fields-playing-P. T.
Barnum mold who is running the machine. One suspects that this
pique has been at work on more than one occasion with respect to
the current administration; such eruptions have become increasingly
familiar precisely as a function of falling poll numbers among the
public. Remember Mr. Bush's "Top Gun" caper in the presidential
flight-suit? The print press took it apart for its
lights-action-camera falseness as they perhaps hadn't done since
Mr. Clinton's "Shampoo"-remember the Warren Beatty movie?-
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Figure 5. A plea for a more consultative internationalism
becoming a negative "message" image for Senator Kerry
Cartoon by Dana Summers, Orlando [FL] Sentinel; reproduced by
permission of the artist and Tribune Media Services, @2004.
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20 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH and haircut on the LAX
tarmac-"You're so vain!"-while Air Force One held up all passenger
travel in and out of Los Angeles.
In this same vein of seeing through the constructedness and
frequent sham quality of negative as well as of positive "message,"
note that even the press eventually had had enough, by early
September 2004, of the weeks of attacks on Mr. Kerry's service
record in the Vietnam War (Figure 6).
I thus question the whole tradition of interpreting American
politics as though it actualizes the deliberative, rational
experiment in self-government that Madisonian Constitutionalists
retrodict-read into the past-as how "the people" have spoken in
answer to the great issues that our political figures have put
forth in electoral debate. Such views reconstruct a history in
which each election is supposed to have been "about" such policy
matters, as though a check-list of issues were in play. Instead, I
have taken an approach to our electoral politics that focuses on
the communicate events of the larger process. I suggest that if we
analyze occasions of communication both individually and as they
fit together within whole stylistic systems of communicative
semiosis (symbolism), we get a much better sense of how things in
our own popular politics have worked and do work.
Since, in our form of electoral politics, "message" will not
perish from the earth, we need to understand its poetics in order
to understand how it constitutes whatever of our politics still
works in the light.
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Figure 6. Early 1970s planning by airman George W. Bush
reconstructed for President Bush's 2004 negative "message"
campaigning against Senator Kerry.
Cartoon by Pat Oliphant, Universal Press Syndicate; reproduced
by permission of Universal Press Syndicate, 02004.
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 21
NOTES
This text is slightly revised from the 19~ JAR Distinguished
Lecture of the same title, delivered 21 October 2004 (two weeks
before the U.S. general election) at the University of New Mexico.
I am grateful to the Editor, Lawrence G. Straus, for the invitation
and for including it in the Journal; to the audience for lively
discussion after the formal lecture; and to my Albuquerque
colleagues for gracious hospitality during my visit. Published
material is reproduced, with thanks, by permission of the holders
of copyright.
1. Note my sly allusion to Plato and Aristotle, please! At this
point in the poetic organization of discussions of poetics, it is
poetic custom, as well as politic, to invoke these topoi so as to
ground the discussion in Hellenophilic cosmic thought. But really,
for me Plato and Aristotle are at best data, not analysis.
2. Note parallels in class- and ethnicity-distributed variants
of English and other European languages, too, where peak
non-standard form of pronunciation, lexicon, grammar, and so on, is
stereotypically associated with men and masculinity, while
hyper-elegant fluency is associated with femininity and therefore,
among men, with decreased masculinity. Such cultural stereotypes
bias usage as something that is statistically measurable in
contexts of communication, though the interaction of factors is
complex. See Romaine 2003.
3. Those familiar with philosopher H. Paul Grice's (1989:26-37
[1967]) notion of "conversational cooperation" will see here how
interlocutors cooperate in violating his "maxims" for fluent,
optimized talk as these maxims enjoin each communicator to proper
"quantity, quality, relation, and manner" of information coded in
discourse.
4. Indeed, James Madison worried mightily about Constitutional
representation and language in terms taken both allegorically and
literally from Locke. In Federalist X, Madison (1953:50-57)
addresses "faction" and argues that only the republican
representative--electorally delegated-form of democratic
self-government solves the problem of overspecific interests that
otherwise would directly clash. "By a faction," Madison writes, "I
understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or
a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common
impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other
citizens, or to the permanent and aggregated interests of the
community." Madison notes that faction is a result of people's
liberty to exercise their "fallible" reason, and of the fundamental
"rights of property" which it is "the first object of government"
to protect. "From the protection of different and unequal faculties
of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and
kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of
these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors,
ensues a division of the society into different interests and
parties." Since "the causes of faction cannot be removed," the
Constitution, with its principles of representation rather than
direct, confrontational democracy, is proposed as "the means of
controlling its effects."
Brenneis (personal communication, 2004), responding to a draft
of this paragraph (now rewritten with grateful thanks), notes "that
egalitarian politics in Bhatgaon at least is shaped in large part
by the anticipatory fear of factional politics (or 'parti-walla
kam,' as it is locally known). My consultants saw factions (partis)
as ongoing and problematic in those villages where they had
flourished (and at a few times in the Bhatgaon past). It was, I
think, one of the reasons that a goal in conflict was not so much
to recruit adherents as to find third-party audiences who could
provide the events in which a conflict would not so much be
resolved as the commensurate social worth and reputation of its
parties (in our sense) publicly displayed and vindicated. In any
case, in local commentary, parti-walla kam is very much something
to be avoided. A second reason was that much of the then
contemporary literature
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22 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH on post-plantation south
Asian diasporic communities recurrently centered on the notion of
'pervasive [and implicitly perduring] factionalism.' In part this
may have indeed been what investigators like Chandra Jayawardena
(1963) saw on the ground in Guyana; in part it might also come from
a late social structural attempt to find something like groups at
work. Factionalism was always a possibility but, during my own
fieldwork at least, not an ongoing feature of local social
organization (it rather, I would say, haunted the social scene
through the fact of its possibility)."
5. Note that this consciousness, invoking political philosopher
Karl Schmidt and economist Joseph Schumpeter, underlies the
self-styled "pragmatic" view of government espoused by Richard A.
Posner (2003) in relation to state-level polities. The low-level of
citizen participation and high level of citizenly tolerance of
governing as (others') insider elite business on behalf of the
polity is a kind of optimization model in this view, that
rationalizes complacency in the face of generally falling voter
turnouts in all of the advanced (post-) industrial democracies
(that of 2004 in the United States being only a slight upward blip
perhaps as a function of incredibly costly mobilization of
"message" on both sides of the contest).
6. The dominant American mass narrative genre, soap opera, is to
the point here, it should be remarked. American media audiences are
well socialized at this time to consume a very great fraction of
their mass narrative communication, whatever the medium, under this
broad schematization of plot and character development. As
political communication itself is drawn into the space of such
interdiscursive semiosis, the reaction to political figures will
itself take on the character of a popular criticism informed by
concepts such as "favorite characters" and their chronotopes
(Bakhtin 1981), their movements through the space-time of
emplotment in the audience's media experience. In this connection,
it should be remarked that characters in classic soap opera are
grotesques, as literary critics were once wont to term the
larger-than-life character, whether morally loaded as good or bad.
Being understood by an electoral public to be just such a grotesque
may increasingly be a communicational opportunity cost of being
electably political at the higher realms of our current "message"
politics. We might, in point of fact, have seen this on the
political horizon as exemplified in the special California
gubernatorial recall election of 2003.
7. See, for example, the history of communication in and around
electoral politics in Great Britain and the United States revealed
in Robertson 1995, and for the history of language in the public
sphere see Cmiel 1990 and especially Gustafson 1992.
8. Pop semioticians like the reporter Joe McGinniss were able to
shock the public in 1969 with the explicit comparison of Mr. Nixon
to a branded political product made available by advertising
professionals for full-press marketing techniques. It was like the
first instance of reporting what was just a public secret in the
realm of presidential pornography. "Hey! That's my electoral
democracy you're talking about! I know what the Constitution says!"
the offended Whiggish intellectuals sniffed in reviewing Mr.
McGinniss. (It is amusing to think that he positioned his own book,
The Selling of the President 1968 [New York: Trident Press], in
relation to a brand already established, the series of best-selling
pop-PoliSci or pop-History books by Theodore H. White entitled The
Making of the President 1960, ... 1964, ... 1968 from Athenaeum.
Preach what you practice, I guess!) But of course the involvement
of national, even international advertising in U.S. presidential
campaigns hardly began with Mr. Nixon! The heads of the most
clout-heavy advertising agencies called upon General Eisenhower in
1950 or thereabouts, offering their full array of packaging,
marketing, and distributing services gratis if only he would run as
a Republican in 1952, not as a Democrat; recall also that the very
popular movie star Robert Montgomery had an office in the West Wing
to advise Ike and shape his media appearances.
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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: "THEIRS" AND "OURS" 23
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Article Contentsp. 1p. 2p. 3p. 4p. 5p. 6p. 7p. 8p. 9p. 10p. 11p.
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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Anthropological Research, Vol.
61, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 1-128Front Matter [pp. 95-95]The
Poetics of Politics: "Theirs" and "Ours" [pp. 1-24]Historical
Contingency and the Prehistoric Foundations of Moiety Organization
among the Eastern Pueblos [pp. 25-52]Where Do You Go When You Die?
A Cross-Cultural Test of the Hypothesis That Infrastructure
Predicts Individual Eschatology [pp. 53-79]Review ArticleReview:
Who Is This Really about Anyway? Ishi, Kroeber, and the
Intertwining of California Indian and Anthropological Histories
[pp. 81-93]
Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 96-98]Review: untitled [pp.
98-100]Review: untitled [pp. 100-102]Review: untitled [pp.
102-103]Review: untitled [pp. 103-105]Review: untitled [pp.
105-107]Review: untitled [pp. 107-109]Review: untitled [pp.
109-110]Review: untitled [pp. 111-113]Review: untitled [pp.
113-114]Review: untitled [pp. 114-116]Review: untitled [pp.
116-118]Review: untitled [pp. 118-119]Review: untitled [pp.
120-121]Review: untitled [pp. 121-123]Review: untitled [pp.
123-124]Review: untitled [pp. 125-126]
Editor's Note [p. 127]Correction: Victoria Cabrera Valdes, July
29, 1951-October, 29, 2004, Q.E.P.D. [p. 127]Correction: Six
Decades of Publishing "In the Interest of General Anthropology" [p.
127]Back Matter