I have a paper coming out in a journal that is somewhat critical of Lakoff, and the main point I was making is that Lakoff talks about how certain political frames always aim to appeal toward pathos but inevitably he focuses on the logos at work. It's a classical conception of how communication works, and I'm afraid he does not delve very far into technology, preferring rhetorical considerations over media analysis.
Lakoff is really good in at least constructing a critical method for unraveling the build of political narratives. But his frequent use of the term narratives always seems to conflate narration with fiction, "spin," or even lies. A more finely honed distinction between a concept of narrative in political discourse and narrative in other fields would go a long way to showcasing why transparently biased political narratives are so difficult to pick apart.
Lakoff excels when he carefully reconstructs the formation of powerful political myths as a means of locating the origins of those myths, to determine who is actually creating and disseminating political narratives. For instance, he traces the use of the term "tax relief" to a cadre of anti-tax political operatives who coalesced around Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in 1964. His concerns with political narratives often take on the dimension of an investigation into the original author political ideas. In other words, concerns with the formation of political narratives tend to foreground the problem of authorship. Who orchestrated a particular political narrative? But relatively little examination takes place of the life of those narrations as they are filtered through the media. That's my big problem with the politics of the so-called mind. There are multiple narrators out there, and almost always, the media filter is dominant. I tend to emphasize the role of the medium over the frame. I mean, Glenn Beck can babble about anything endlessly--I can't even bring myself to call what he does a frame or a narrative. Sarah Palin can do anything, read off her palm even, but if you're going to treat her narrative as anything of substance at all--you're missing the point. Sarah Palin is resentful and hateful--and that's all that matters. That's what she communicates through the media. Her words, her ideas, are practically irrelevant.
Upstate NY:
Glenn Beck can babble about anything endlessly--I can't even bring myself to call what he does a frame or a narrative. Sarah Palin can do anything, read off her palm even, but if you're going to treat her narrative as anything of substance at all--you're missing the point. Sarah Palin is resentful and hateful--and that's all that matters. That's what she communicates through the media.
you got that right. beck and palin are dogwhistle politics at its purest, and coalesce brilliantly on their main common theme:
liberals are teh evil.
they both exist to fail humanity and exalt a reactionary mindset that is vicious and paranoid, and do so while enacting prototypical cartoon segments of the american id.
chubby baby face manic narcissism, and assault rifle heli-huntress protosuperheroine, straight from central casting, beck the alogical next step out into extreme dementia from hannity, and palin a rightwing barbie-rella timewarped in from rural 1955. the klan in modern, safe-for-primetime drag.
both will skewer themselves on their own lack of irony, after their trajectories peak, soon please!
beck has a brain, it has been squelched and distorted beyond redemption into something plasmatically self-referential and subcontradictory. watching him is like watching some psychocomedy, think the league of gentlemen on cheap stimulants and bad religion. beck is the incarnation of all that is pretentiously idiotic in the smug subconscious, a george bush airhead with added turbo bullshit power, just as lost, just as cocksurely, spectacularly wrong while being childishly, delusionally sure of being right.
palin is trying to model a world before feminism, a cozy, shallow, chirpy realm of idiotically immature statements, squirting with resounding conviction and fixed hypnotic stare, and that beauty pageant, (equally fixed smile), laura bush on steroids.
her biggest problem is almost complete lack of any operating intellect, but not to worry, her fans will see that as evidence of reassuringly cornpone sincerity, as they stroke their hatred of liberals to a redmisted rage. she doesn't try to lead her followers through labyrinths of neohistorical revisionism, she bypasses the maze of the mind and grabs on to murderous madness that lurks in every rebel teabaggin' heart against anyone who doesn't want to take a trip down memory lane to stay in lalaland with her for eternity.
beck's new affectation is a pipe, as he struts and strides the poopdeck of his own megalomania, dressed in the imaginary velvet and satin of his smoking, with a cummerbund of jelly donuts, a maudlin sherlock holmes on the scent of revolutionary fervor to sniff out and whip up to a lathering froth. (or is it frothing lather? you decide!)
watching his studio audience trying to follow his mobius meanderings is how i imagine that they imagine the rapture...
swept away by the sheer awesomeness of his courage to go nowhere so boldly and so fast.
a right pair, and a warning to the world as to what happens when you dismiss critical thinking as pointy-headedness. two carney icons in a barnum'n'bailey world.
as for lakoff, he makes good points, but by reducing communication to questions of technique, it lowers the level to the one taken by the opposition, and assumes it will reverse engineer.
without good presentation, good content can wither and die on the vine, but without good content, all the clever presentation in the world is just proverbial lipstick on the porker. i admire his efforts to try and cat-herd coherent lefty political philosophy and predigest it for the low info masses into pulpy nuggets they can swallow, but it smells a bit of fixing the dead fish by wrapping it in fresher newspaper. if you can't take the public up then limbo lower... modern offshoot of mcluhan. there's nothing wrong with kansas that turning the messaging upside down won't cure. it's a tantalising concept, i admit...
people want straight talk, the kind palin instinctively fumbles for (and fails with, because there's no there there). same with beck affecting to be the one who dares tell the truth, though he can't help pirouetting around looking poncey, which confuses his audience. if he walked and looked like charlton heston he would be president by now.
whew...
it's all disposable, but remember one thing: hate those liberals!! they wanna take your guns and goo-book away, and how much fun would bunker life be then?
~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
The point, which I've made TO the great man himself, is that democracy doesn't work with humans, and that there is nothing he can do to tune up the great engine of equality, because humans aren't equal, and most people feel about politics as they do about a malfunctioning washing machine: it's necessary, but they don't know how it works, and they don't intend to fix it, but want it fixed conveniently, and on the cheap.
A formula inviting parasites that really works. There's no evil in it, it's just evolution in action.
And that's why people hate evolution as a scary concept.
And that's why George hates me. Align culture with our nature.
off to read some DFW!
who's the great man, btw? and george who? ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
which I've made TO the great man himself
thanks, btw! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Even name-dropping.
