SILVERSTEIN, Michael - The Poetics of Politics

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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

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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,


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


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.


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


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


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.


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.


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


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


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


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


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


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



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)


16 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

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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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Figure 3. Senator Kerry unable to articulate consistent positions on issues and thus sustaining the negative "message" of "flip-flop"

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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-


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.


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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Cartoon by Dana Summers, Orlando [FL] Sentinel; reproduced by permission of the artist and Tribune Media Services, @2004.


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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Cartoon by Pat Oliphant, Universal Press Syndicate; reproduced by permission of Universal Press Syndicate, 02004.



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


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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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

SILVERSTEIN, Michael - The Poetics of Politics

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