Words/concepts are defined through the context of their usage and their relation to/interaction with other words/concepts.  According to H.L. Goodall in Writing the New Ethnography (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) our “textual positions,” the “language choices you make to represent what you see,” provide clues to the way in which you “see” the world and how you act in it (134). The selection and arrangement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs; the usage of humor, sarcasm, irony, and inventive analogies/metaphors; and your level of emotional intensity are all signs of what you have lived through (experiences) and helps others to relate to you and your positions (or not). This is the position that making meaning is always a dialogic process. Allan Irving and Ken Moffatt state that:

“Dialogue in Bakhtin’s view is more than just two people talking; the more a word is used in our speech the more contexts and nuances it gathers and the word’s meanings proliferate with each encounter. Our utterances (another of Bakhtin’s words) do not forget but rather carry fragments from all our previous speech acts as well as the significance from the current context and this includes even forms of intonation. All utterances are double-voiced, bringing meanings with them, perhaps trailing them, but spoken into the here and now into the ongoing dialogues of our lives. ‘Every word,’ Bakhtin wrote, ‘gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life.’”

Words/concepts go through a process of social accretion in which the more they are used, the more meanings attach themselves to our usage of these words/concepts. As these words become weighted down with multiple meanings, a paradoxical effect takes place that causes language-users to assume that these words are stable in their meaning, and these assumptions can easily lead to misunderstandings or manipulation. The poet Gary Snyder in “The Etiquette of Freedom” (The Practice of the Wild. North Point Press, 1990) reminds us that:

“Words are used as signs, as stand-ins, arbitrary and temporary, even as language reflects (and informs) the shifting values of the peoples whose minds it inhabits and glides through. We have faith in ‘meaning’ the way we might believe in wolverines — putting trust in the occasional reports of others or on the authority of once seeing a pelt. But it is sometimes worth tracking these tricksters back.” (8)

Of course, as we all know, a word like community, democracy, terrorist, home, love, place, freedom, identity, etc., does not have just ‘one’ meaning, and there are continuous struggles over what they do mean. It’s obvious, or is it … how can we sift through the noble lies?

Bill at Thoughts on the Eve of the Apocalypse points out a well-reasoned, passionate and reconstructive look at the language of the War on Terror:

It reminds me of the series of essays by the linguist George Lakoff at Alternet that looks at the metaphors of the War on Terror.

Dion Dennis over at CTheory has been similarly examining the imagistic language of the current regime.

Bill, after an earlier version of this musing, also suggested that the interested reader consult a pair of essays by Renana Brooks, PhD, who according to a Nation bio, is a “clinical psychologist practicing in Washington, D.C. She heads the Sommet Institute for the Study of Power and Persuasion and is completing a book on the virtue myth and the conservative culture of domination.” The essays, The Character Myth and A Nation of Victims, examine the carefully constructed myth of George Bush as the “moral” hero and Bush’s mastery of “emotional language as a political tool.”

This gross manipulation of language and symbols for political ends has become so blatant that many staunch defenders of America have abandoned the Bush cause because they realize that this position only further radicalizes groups of people to oppose the U.S.

Maybe we need to become poets in order to understand the political play of language and images. In an earlier dialogue with my wife, Melissa, she reminded me of a poem by Julia Alvarez.  It was written after the Bushes canceled a post-9/11 poetry reading at the White House because the poets were ‘political’ … with Laura Bush, the supposedly model teacher, mumbling something about poetry and art not being political. Immediately when I heard Laura Bush’s dismissal of these poets, two artistic statements popped into my head:

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
— Bertolt Brecht

“I’m just looking for one divine hammer … I’ll bang it all day long.”
— Breeders, “Divine Hammer” (1993)

Then, still reflecting about Laura Bush’s own willfull ignorance, I returned to two major statements of meaning-making, the first reminding us about the the politics of writing and the second of reading:

“Writing is [or can be] a transgression of boundaries, an exploration of new territory. It involves making public the events of our lives, wriggling free of the constraints of purely private and individual experiences. From a state of modest insignificance we enter a space in which we can take ourselves seriously. As an alternative to accepting everyday events mindlessly, we recall them in writing.”
— Frigga Haug, “Memory Work as Social Science Writing” (1987)

“The disobedient reader as writer is no longer a shadow on the text, but rather makes the text a shadow of her own.”
— Nancy Walker The Disobedient Writer (1995)

Once again, I returned to the poem by Julia Alvarez … for me, it has become a resounding questioning of the Bushes’ own politics in ignoring poetic thinking while abusing language for political ends and knowing that all meaning- making is political:

The White House Has Disinvited the Poets by Julia Alvarez

thivai