Aesthetic Ideology: The Politics of Language
Leading neocons exress despair at the Bush Administration's incompetence in Neo Culpa: Politics & Power.
As a literary critic with a keen interest in the relationship between affect and meaning, I'm intrigued by the implicit understanding of how language works in this quote by David Frum:
"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."
Notice how Frum avoids talking about trying to convince Bush to believe in a particular position. Instead of referring to reasons and arguments, he imagines a sort of understanding via osmosis. In this fantasy, ideas are objectified as the foundational substance of words, and these ideas, once spoken, get absorbed by the body, like lotion. Indeed, it's not even clear that "understanding" is the right term here, since Frum talks about a feeling - a committed feeling - towards ideas rather than a belief in them.
Thank you, Mr. Frum, for providing a textbook example of how a neo-Platonic, logocentric model of language can prove to be disastrous.
As a literary critic with a keen interest in the relationship between affect and meaning, I'm intrigued by the implicit understanding of how language works in this quote by David Frum:
"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."
Notice how Frum avoids talking about trying to convince Bush to believe in a particular position. Instead of referring to reasons and arguments, he imagines a sort of understanding via osmosis. In this fantasy, ideas are objectified as the foundational substance of words, and these ideas, once spoken, get absorbed by the body, like lotion. Indeed, it's not even clear that "understanding" is the right term here, since Frum talks about a feeling - a committed feeling - towards ideas rather than a belief in them.
Thank you, Mr. Frum, for providing a textbook example of how a neo-Platonic, logocentric model of language can prove to be disastrous.
Labels: communication, ideology, language, materiality of communication, politics, rhetoric
1 Comments:
onkel eric,
very interesting. but david frum is off his rocker. read his commentary on how reverand "i hired the gay prostitute but got a massage, not sex (just kidding) and i bought the meth but didn't smoke it i swear" haggard is more moral than any openly gay man: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1733324/posts
it's interesting how he imagines that words CAN be transformative as if haggard's words negate his actions. (and clearly requires an assumption that gay sex is in and of itself a sin). that one cannot be a hypocrite if one's deeds do not match one's actions because the words are more important.
i think he misunderstands "there is nothing outside the text."
wally.
By wally, At 07 November, 2006 17:57
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