The Republicans -- unwittingly or not -- seem to have a much greater grasp of how language works than Democrats do, how willfully untrue statements can function like so much debris thrown out the back of a truck to clog the road. Through instinct or desperation they realize that by the time the road gets cleared -- BY US -- they will have already achieved their destination.
I want to continue the premise of a diary I wrote the other day about the relative value of facts and telling the 'truth' in this election, and my belief that the facts alone will not carry the day. Was it David Byrne who sang that Facts / Get the best of us?
Such uses of language that are not bound by fact were described by the British Linguist J. L. Austin as 'performative' speech acts, which he defined as a statement that operates outside of the usual dichotomy of true and false.
How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In it he attacks . . . the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, truth-evaluable sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances.
A simple example of an utterance that is not 'truth evaluable' would be to say 'I promise to end the war.' There is nothing within this statement that is true or false because its meaning needs to be 'performed' in order to become true. True, at least, to the extent that we can say that one person, the president, accomplishes something that literally requires the action of millions of people.
But, according to Austin, even if the war does not end the statement 'I promise to end the war' is not false, is not a lie. One might still be promising to end the war -- and continue to promise to do so in the future -- all the while that the war rages on. Sound familiar?
What Austin offers that is useful to us now over the next 52 days is a different understanding of how language works, and better still, a more effective strategy for combating such 'performative' utterances as those coming from McCain / Palin for the past two weeks. Rather than running around screaming "That's not true!" "That's not true!", we should be doing things with words ourselves.
The simplest way would be to start performing daily jujitsu on the most prominent McCain / Palin memes. Obama did this indavertently with his Lipstick on a Pig remark and then regrettably clarified it to erase precisely what was so cunning and ambiguous about it: that it caused the Republicans to interpret the remark in an even broader sense than his original meaning. The Repbublicans, through their indignation, PERFORMED the possibility that Palin is a pig without Obama having to say so.
What if he next stole Palin's most famous meme? What if all of us started saying 'Thanks, but no Thanks' to four more years of failed policies?