Hermeneutic Heretic

Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign | Salon News
Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note of my gender or suggested that I would be a more pleasant woman if I wasn’t so “angry.” Bluntly put, I find it hard to believe that many men would end up being denounced on TV for using words like “fuck” or “cunt” on their blog and expect to receive piles of e-mail offering an opportunity to suck the sender’s dick.

A Hard Right Punch - washingtonpost.com
“They’ve attacked my husband relentlessly. There’s a strong sexist strain among my liberal critics, who think it isn’t possible I could have gotten anywhere without my Svengali husband, or some white man, embedding ideas in my head.”
…

“Particularly when you’re a minority conservative,” she says, “you get a lot of ugly, hysterical, unhinged attacks, because you’re challenging so many liberal myths about what people of color should think.” [quoting Michelle Malkin]

It may not be too outlandish to say that I’m I’m obsessed with the idea of the ’surface of discourse’ (title of a book by Michael Hoey). But encountering these two exchanges my obsession seems justified. Both women describe a situation that is very common. Because of their controversial public stances on contentious issues, they receive not just criticism but also abuse that references their gender. This is fairly common (people from any group with a marked feature are exposed to similar reactions) as is the next step.They both reflect that this kind abuse stems from their attacker’s broader stance and point of view that is opposed to theirs. But this can hardly be the case (as much as my liberal self would like to believe the opposite) - or at least on the case to the extent claimed. Obviously, abusive communications come from both camps even from the one that is, at least in part, explicitly opposed to gender- or race-based slurs.
Linguistically or psychologically, this is not particularly puzzling. An angry person is likely to reach for the most derogatory linguistic device possible and for representatives of disenfranchised groups usually stem from negative stereotypes. The speaker is merely using the strongest possible terms for emphasis. Emphasis in language can sometimes take very surprising turns. My favorite example is the English tense system. The present simple, despite its name, is used to express repeated actions (”He often reads books.”) and the primary function of the present continuous (progressive) is to describe actions happening at the moment of speech (The water’s boiling over.) However, to express repeated action with a negative emphasis, the continuous present is your best choice (”He’s always coming round here and asking stupid questions.”) as is the present simple to emphasize ongoing action (for instance in sports commentary: “He passes, he shoots, he scooooores.”)

Is it possible that racial and gender-based epithet are used the same way for emphasis? Perhaps, it is the rules of ‘civilized’ conversation that stops them from coming out rather than a natural instinct of the ‘civilized’ person not to use them. Women, for instance, often use derogatory language about other women that draws on male-constructed stereotypes. The ‘Uncle Tom’ insult in the African community is not dissimilar.

Would it then be possible to say that a person can seriously use racist or sexist language and not ‘really’ be sexist or racist? Michael Richards or Jade Goody would certainly like to think so. That may indeed be one of the problems with racism. Its really pernicious forms (assymetric perception, incremental and cumulative discrimination, race-based frames) can and do exist independent of the racial slurs often associated with them. So it is conceivable that the degree of a person’s political inclination cannot be reliably measured by the language they use in emphatic contexts.

However, when these expressions are publicly negotiated (hypostesized) their underlying frames are profiled and linked directly to a supposed deeper level of a person’s psyche (one for which there are ample folk but few good expert theories).
To return to Michael Hoey. We can reconstruct much of a text’s cohesion and even coherence based purely on surface features (he looked simply at repetition) but what does this newly-discovered unity tell us about the intellectual and conceptual unity that we suppose is what the surface was generated from?

Two more concepts might be helpful here: 1. logistics and transactional costs: to get your text/discourse from A to B certain things have to happen (such as time has to pass and energy has to be expended). And the creation of cohesive harmony is one of them. And often the conceptual devolves from the logistical. 2. Construction/cognitive grammar’s destruction of levels (and dynamic hypostasis): Instead of language being generated from underlying meanings, both meanings and form are simply two sides of the coin of constructions of different degrees of complexity and schematicity. In some constructions (or more accurately in the process of integration/blending), conceptual meaning is the primary integrator and others it is the formal meaning. (And usually it is some combination of the two.) So, in the case of an insult being uttered, it is possible to view the formal meaning as primary and propositional meaning as secondary. However, in the process of the insult being reported, the propositional meaning becomes much more prominent and it is impossible not to conclude that the given speaker was expressing a racist/sexist/etc. sentiment.

To conclude, discourse analysis (whether done by experts or naturally during the process of frame negotiation [or psychoanalysis]) is a wonderful tool for discovering trends in populations of texts but extremely unreliable for determining the conceptual underpinning of an individual text, particularly if it is intended for use as a tool for the discovery of ‘hidden meanings’.

OBAMA: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.

Michelle Malkin: Obama: Soldier deaths = “Wasted” lives
I could go on, but it would be a waste of breath trying to get Sen. Obama to acknowledge the existence of countless soldiers and their families who reject his patronizing, infantilizing, and insulting view of all American troops as dupes/victims who have squandered their lives.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Video: Obama says lives of troops killed in Iraq were “wasted�
Of course he thinks their lives were wasted. Everyone on the anti-war side does; that’s one of the reasons they want to end the war. But they can’t say that because it dishonors the dead so they’re forced into rhetorical pretzels like the one Pelosi tied herself into a few weeks ago with Diane Sawyer. Army Lawyer summed up her position at the time thusly: “They didn’t die for nothing, they died for something stupid.�

Semantic prosody is a great concept introduced to provide a new perspective on what is otherwise known as connotation of words. All semantic prosody does is color the surrounding text with whatever affective charge the word carries. (Stubbs writes about this extensively.) However, what does that charge look like and how does it behave in actual discourse (that may be a bit difficult to find in a corpus). Framing and conceptual integration to the rescue. One of the strengths of the concept of ‘prosody’ (itself a case of blending) is that it carries with it notion of suprasegmentality, i.e. not applying to any particular segment of the text (words, endings, sentences). Conceptual integration, however, has an interesting ambivalence on segmentality. On the one hand, it is usually looked at in segmental ways but on the other hand it has many of these suprasegmental (neuralnet-like) features that are talked about in the context of semantic prosody.

What does that have to do with poor misunderstood Obama? Well, semantic prosody basically makes it impossible to say what he wants to say. The Hot Air blog was describing the underlying propositional structure: the Iraq war is a misguided venture, investing any resources into it is waste, money is resources so it is wasted, people can also be thought of as resources so their lives can be wasted. However, using the word wasted anywhere near the word soldier is ill-advised in the American political context. Michelle Malking shows that by (mis)paraphrasing Obama as meaning that the dead soldiers are “dupes/victims who have squandered their lives”.

Now, it is possible to say that any person with an spoonful of brain cells in their head can see that that’s not what Obama meant. That, however, brings the problem of further prosodies. Because accusing conservatives of weak mindedness is a trope frequently employed by liberals, so that defense would only dig Obama deeper. (The strangely unaware condescension behind this Top Gear clip is an example of that)
But there is even the more legitimate question. Is it really that wrong-minded or even illogical to refuse to accept the interpretation of Obama’s sentence stripped of its prosody or at least where the propositional (logical) content is profiled (brought to the fore) in a such a way that the effect of prosody is dissipated? And furthermore, is there a difference between an individual speaker’s ability to make this distinction and the possibility of maintaining this distinction across a large body of texts that constitutes the related discourse.

This is a fascinating theoretical question that, as far as I know, had not been addressed. Mostly, the assumption is that these things happen unconsciously (outside our volition) [Lakoff] and that individual utterances have a cumulative effect [van Dijk - explicitly, Fauconnier on entrenchment implicitly]. While this is probably broadly correct (or at least it is intuitively very appealing) it glosses over the complex interplay between automatic and negotiated frame integration and what role it plays in the cumulative effects of entrenchment.

PS: Here’s an example of how intelligence is invoked in the context of negotiating irony:

YouTube comment on Randy Newman - A Few Words in Defense of Our Country
“Great stuff. Only a dummy wouldn’t get this song.”

Eugene Robinson - An Inarticulate Kickoff - washingtonpost.com
What is it, exactly, that white people mean when they call a black person “articulate”?
…
Biden explained Obama’s appeal as a presidential candidate by calling him “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
…
It’s interesting that Obama’s reaction dealt solely with the A-word. “I didn’t take Senator Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate,” he said in a statement. “African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”

I was about to explain what the real issues were when Eugene Robinson did it for me. Articulating (as it were) the very essence of much disagreement between a symbolically powerful group (often but not always the majority) and a symbolically less powerful group who the first one is trying to treat as equal. The same column could have been written by a feminist about many condescending compliments paid to women by men. Here it is:

I realize the word is intended as a compliment, but it’s being used to connote a lot more than the ability to express one’s thoughts clearly. It’s being used to say more, even, than “here’s a black person who speaks standard English without a trace of Ebonics.”
…
The word articulate is being used to encompass not just speech but a whole range of cultural cues — dress, bearing, education, golf handicap. It’s being used to describe a black person around whom white people can be comfortable, a black person who not only speaks white America’s language but is fluent in its body language as well.
…
Articulate is really a shorthand way of describing a black person who isn’t too black — or, rather, who comports with white America’s notion of how a black person should come across.

Whatever the intention, expressing one’s astonishment that such individuals exist is no compliment. Just come out and say it: Gee, he doesn’t sound black at all.

Robinson does a really good job of explaining all the associated conceptualizations (frames) and in this case his supposition that these frames are unconscious and reflect the causes of discrimination is probably correct. Being articulate has to do not with just stringing together a complete sentence, however, but also with the cadences (maybe primarily with the cadences) of speech. A good comparison may be between a black and white evangelical preachers. They are both perfectly articulate (and probably rely on the same surface syntax, morphology, vocabulary and by and large also phonology). However, the surprasegmental and paralinguistic nature of their presentation makes their discourses as unalike as if they were speaking a different language (and indeed they are not as easy to comprehend to the other group). They certainly don’t have the same effect. These and other patterns of public discourse are what matters in identifying somebody as being able to articulate in a manner that is comprehensible to me. Now, Obama has the “advantage” that he can articulate in a manner that is comprehensible to the white audience and luckily the minority black audience can find him comprehensible (because minorities are usually better at negotiating the language of the majority than vice versa - see Czechs and Slovaks) and as long as they don’t identify him as someone trying to be not like them, he is OK. So Robbinson is perfectly correct when he says that Biden’s unconscious conclusion was “he doesn’t sound black at all”.

Now, the question is. Does a candidate sounding like Al Sharpton have ever a chance of seeming articulate to the white majority? (Or more generally what does it take for a person who does not sound like belonging to another group be accepted as the group’s representative or leader.) Yes (but only under certain conditions). Let’s take the example of Martin Luther King who certainly had a huge white as well as black following while not sounding like Obama. However, he was a spiritual rather than a political leader (in the sense of holding a political office not articulating political ideas). And in that case paralinguistic differences can be a definite advantages. A much more illustrative example is Arnold Swartzenegger who doesn’t sound anything like a typical Californian and yet is now California’s leader and public representative. Two factors made this possible. First, his other attributes, such as being famous for acting, made his speech patterns not as important and also he made his speech symbolic of what he stood for, i.e. change (see Jay Leno’s sanctioned lampooning of it). But much more importantly, his speech patterns are not associated with a discriminated minority.

And that is the real problem for black candidates. Any serious contenders Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell or Barak Obama (or Tiger Woods) are in no way associated with the “stigma” of being black (in the way Chris Rock is black). And the fact that the word “stigma” can even be used, goes to the very nub of the issue of racism. Unfortunately and paradoxically, traditional KKK style racists give racism a bad name. So it is much more difficult for your usual white voter to admit to tinges of racism which is inevitably a part of their conceptual make up (just like it is such as common in the African American community). It isn’t the full-on “they’re not as human as we are” racism or even the subtle “I think there might be something to this ‘Bell Curve’ thing, they are very good at athletics, after all” kind of racism. It is the accidental cumulative racism that leads to the reality of the “driving white black offense” and that Eddie Murphy so brilliantly demonstrated in his Mr. White sketch. (Or Chris Rock who when asked what it’s like to be rich, responded “It’s almost like being white.”) It is committed through the small acts of asymmetric perceptions that we all engage in. Namely, seeing the same fact as typical of one group and an exception of the other. And what is seen as typical of the black community are all the things that are associated with “ebonics” - lack of economic and political power, lack of education, lack of self-control and most importantly lack of being like anyone I know. As a result a black candidate speaking with the cadences typically associated with ebonics (but probably not the grammar) will only acceptable to the white majority if they have changed their frame of reference or if they can somehow subvert that frame and make it salient in such as way that it stands for things that are desirable (in the same way that presidents speaking with Southern accents that have similar associations of diminished competence were able to do). And neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton have been able or even tried to do that. They evoke in their white audiences guilt (with its associated fear) not desire. And their appeal to their black audiences rests at least in part in their ability to evoke that guilt.

Of course, the ideal situation would be where these differential frames for the black and white community would be dissociated from their implications of power and competence. But that will most likely be a slow process in which the election or at least a significant success of a black candidate not typical of his or her group may play a role. (But it is not guaranteed, see Margaret Thatcher and her lack of influence on numbers of women in politics). Obama has a very good chance of becoming that candidate and I for one would like to see him a ‘leader of the free world’ if only because he makes speeches that are a pleasure to listen to.

Media Matters - Conservatives continue to use Fox’s 24 to support hawkish policies
conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host Bill O’Reilly: “The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that’s close to a national referendum that it’s OK to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.”
…
On the November 30, 2006, edition of his CNN Headline News program, Beck responded to an email that asked about the “ill treatment of our prisoners in Guantanamo” and asserted: “Now me, I’m for more Jack Bauers. The Jack Bauer that has to extract information.”

The late lamented Buffy series was a gold mine of popular culture frame hypostases. My favorites are: “We must Clark Kent our way through life.” from a conversation of two demon fighters complaining they must keep their identity secret from easily impressed girls and “I King Arthured it out of a stone.” said by Buffy about her pulling a scythe from a rock in a cellar.

What is “frame hypostasis”? Let’s answer the question ‘what is “hypostasis”?’, first. It was first (I think) used by Bloomfield to describe uses of otherwise purely grammatical words to refer to their function and thus bringing it to light where it otherwise might be used automatically without reflection. His examples are “I’m tired of your buts and ifs.” Notice that all of a sudden you can use conjunctions and adverbs as nouns, or even verbs or adjectives (”Quit your iffing and butting” and “It’s a bit iffy”). Frame hypostasis is exactly the same thing only done to evoke a broader conceptual frame including its associated scenarios, metaphors, folk theories, etc. Some of these are more schematic than others and depend on the speakers/hearers ‘encyclopedic’ knowledge of the world. That’s why they are often further elaborated in subsequent clauses (like above “Now me, I’m for more Jack Bauers. The Jack Bauer that has to extract information.” where the speaker is drawing attention of the hearer on which part of the frame should be profiled for conceptual integration).

The quotations above also illustrate how powerful frame hypostasis and its negotiation are for public debate and public consciousness. It is not clear exactly how this works cumulatively (and it shouldn’t be overestimated) but it’s clearly an important and ubiquitous process that is simply a part of our socio-linguistic competence. (It is possible that some people are more competent at the creation and comprehension of frame hypostases than others and they may thus be more likely to become information and opinion brokers in their communities/groupings.)

Finally, it would be interesting to survey more languages to see how frame hypostasis is encoded in them. For instance, in Slavonic languages (and many others) it is not nearly as easy or common to convert any part of speech to a noun or verb. But still, these languages have ways of hypostasizing conceptual frames through clauses or discourse prefacing. In fact, I cannot imagine a language where it would not be possible to hypostasize a frame. Simply because that would mean that story-telling and mythology would also cease to be possible.