| Even before Obama began running for President, cognitive linguist George Lakoff had proclaimed him both a natural master of framing and a progressive. While I deeply respect Lakoff's work, not just in regard to politics or his pathbreaking work as one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, but also for his collaborations with philosopher Mark Johnson, particularly Philosophy in the Flesh, I think his reading of Obama-while accurate in some respects-has been dangerously off the mark. In this diary, I try to explain why. And to frame that explanation, I want to begin with the work of a couple of other cognitive scientists-- Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, which I first learned about directly from Turner's own lips when I was helping to produce a public lecture series on cognitive linguistics at the late lamented Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica back around 1994 or so.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson virtually invented the field of cognitive linguistics with their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By. Their fundamental insight was simple: metaphors are not a decorative addendum to language, they are a central feature of it, that structures our shared understanding of the world in myriad ways. The basic structure of the metaphor is the mapping of a structure of entailments from what's known as the "source domain" to the "target domain". One example is "Love Is A Journey". An examples of entailments are that it could be a journey by land ("we've hit a rough patch"), air ("fly me to the moon"), or sea ("love on the rocks").
I could say a whole lot more about cognitive metaphor, but that's just stage setting for where I'm going with this. What I learned from Turner was that he and Gilles Fauconnier-who had also been a part of the same series-had come up with a new model of cognitive mapping that involved not one source domain, but two. This would become known as the model or theory of conceptual blends. At my request he later sent me the first paper they wrote on the subject, "Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces" (pdf) (Goggle-generated HTML version, in case of loading problems). In their model, there are actually four spaces-the two input spaces, an abstract generic space and a richer blended middle space that inherits structure from both input spaces, as well as adding structure of its own. They argued that this model was broadly applicable to a wide range of cognitive processes at virtually every level of abstraction. While the work they were doing was up-to-date in connecting with then-current research, they were quite straightforward in connecting with earlier work making similar arguments, most notably Arthur Koestler's Act of Creation, which argued that creativity (as well as humor) was largely based on the bringing together of two different frameworks of thought.
A very simple example of a blended space cited in that paper is that of an imaginary race between two ships ages apart in time:
Consider the following excerpt from a report in the sailing magazine Latitude 38:As we went to press, Rich Wilson and Bill Biewenga were barely maintaining a 4.5 day lead over the ghost of the clipper Northern Light, whose record run from San Francisco to Boston they're trying to beat. In 1853, the clipper made the passage in 76 days, 8 hours. -"Great America II," Latitude 38, volume 190, April 1993, page 100 |
Three situations, two real and one imaginary, are available to the reader: the actual passage of the clipper back in 1853, the current run by Great America II in 1993, and the imaginary race between Great America II and the ghost of Northern Light. The excerpt refers only to the third: the imaginary situation. And yet there is of course no confusion about what is said: readers do not assume that the writers believe in ghost ships, or that if Great America II should capsize, Northern Light's ghost will come along and rescue the crew. To understand the excerpt and to draw the proper inferences, we construct three spaces: one for the 1853 passage, one for the current 1993 run, and a blended space into which both ships are projected, yielding the additional conceptual structure of a race.
By giving the relative positions of the ships in the blended space, the writer provides information which can be exported to the target, the 1993 space: whether Great America II is doing well, is going fast enough, is accomplishing its goal, and so forth. Although positions in the 1853 and 1993 spaces could be compared to each other in an abstract way, the blended space does more, by fitting the comparison into a preexisting cultural frame, the RACE, which not only has the required structure, but brings with it emotions and intentions of the sailors, which can then be transferred globally to the target, with reduced cognitive effort and increased efficiency and content. Notice how the blend works: it does not merely superpose the two initial spaces; it projects structure from each one into a larger structure adapted to a preexisting cultural frame (racing), which appears in neither of the initial spaces. Notice also that the blend is perfectly consistent and straightforward-two boats in a race. Its "impossibility" is purely pragmatic, and of no consequence to the efficient exported inferences and emotions.
Returning to Lakoff's endorsement of Obama, it's possible to think of it like this: Lakoff sees Obama's intuitive grasp of framing, narrative and the importance of values in politics, he also sees how Obama's discourse meshes rather deeply with his own ongoing work on the nature of liberalism vs. conservatism in terms of cognitive science (not just Moral Politics and Don't Think of An Elephant, but also Whose Freedom?) This is all in rather stark contrast to the virtual ignorance of such matters by most other Democratic politicians, or the selective and generally superficial appropriation of his work by those who have at least listened to him, but still don't seem to have gotten the central points he has been driving at.
Some have said-somewhat plausibly-that Lakoff is simply projecting his desires and thought process onto Obama, and that he's utterly mistaken. (A similar claim was advanced about Robert Fuller in discussions here last weekend.) But what if we take a step back and think in terms of blended spaces. Lakoff has also written repeatedly, if briefly, and as a non-expert, about the need for building progressive infrastructure. What if we consider these as two separate input spaces-one dealing with Obama's articulation of progressive politics as Lakoff sees it, the other dealing with progressive infrastructure (or lack thereof). Because Lakoff is an expert in one space, but not the other, his natural tendency has been to focus on it almost exclusively, and because others generally fail to recognize its significance, he has written about repeatedly without seeming to modify his analysis in terms of readily perceived shortcomings in terms of Obama's performance.
While it's impossible to get inside of Obama's head, one can get inside of his rhetoric, and one can observe that the progressive features that Lakoff observes there are real-as is the response he elicits from many. Lakoff is not projecting any more than we all project what we know onto the world in order to understand it. But he is failing to adequately account for the ways in which Obama's rhetoric fails to match up with his actions, and here the issue of progressive infrastructure surely plays a role-although we cannot say for sure how much of a role and in what manner. However, we clearly saw something in the relentlessly conventional nature of his top-level appointments-most notably to defense & intelligence posts and to economic posts, where there was incredible-and to some quite surprising, if not shocking-continuity. And, of course, that was only the beginning. But for clarity's sake, let's stick with it for a while.
Several things stand out about those appointments:
(1) Obama clearly could have made much more progressive appointments.
(2) Progressives clearly lacked the clout to force him to make such appointments.
(3) Many progressives mistakenly assumed that clout was not needed, since the Bush failures-and failures of conservatism more generally-were so clearly manifest, as were the failures of Democratic insiders who failed to adequately critique and foresee what was wrong with the Bush Agenda.
(4) Other progressives (perhaps "progressives" would be more accurate) insisted that it didn't matter who Obama appointed, since they would just be doing what he told them to do.
(5) These appointments were clearly consistent with one stream of Obama's pre-election rhetoric, the desire to "reach out" and set a bipartisan tone, even as they contradicted another stream, that of the promise of change. Obama clearly didn't see it that way however, as he subscribed to a political analysis that identified "partisan gridlock" as the obstacle to change. This will be the subject of further analysis below.
(6) There were clear hints during the campaign-and even before-that Obama's understanding of progressive politics is not nearly as deeply rooted as one might expect from someone touting his roots as a community organizer, and often owed more than a little to conservative misrepresentations-itself a direct result of conservative success in waging hegemonic warfare. This has become increasingly obvious as his presidency has unfolded.
(6a) Perhaps the most striking and fundamental example of (6) is Obama's individualist infatuation, which not only cuts against the old-fashioned progressive traditions of solidarity, but also against the very nature of the social networks on which his campaign success was largely built. Indeed, it was arguably the widespread youth desire to counter their individualist fragmentation and to come together as a larger community that fueled his candidacy.
Let's look more closely at the Obama's "partisan gridlock" analysis identified in (5) above.
First off, this analysis, however, is itself (a) utterly ahistorical and without foundation, and (b) the product of two quite different discourses. Taking (a) first, as Mike has shown in his book, The Progressive Revolution, major problems do not get solved by bipartisan consensus, they get solved by progressive supermajorities during brief windows of historical opportunity. There are exceptions, of course: the Great Depression was finally ended when World War II virtually eliminated conservative opposition to the sort of massive government spending that was needed to restore full employment. But conservatives did not agree to that massive spending for the purpose of restoring full employment, so this rare example of a "bipartisan solution" must be counted as entirely accidental-the exact opposite of the narrative that casts bipartisan legislation as the product of superior deliberative processes.
Turning to (b), one source of the "partisan gridlock" narrative is Versailles itself, which employs this narrative quite selectively and disingenuously, ignoring how frequently Democrats have given Republican Presidents-large chunks of what they wanted with very little real opposition. (A point Glenn Greenwald made very well by compiling a list of extremist Bush initiatives that passed with substantial Democratic support.) The Versailles narrative, thus, sees "partisan gridlock" primarily in terms of the Democratic Party threatening to heed its base, and acting to thwart the will of elite special interests.
The popular narrative of "partisan gridlock" is almost the exact opposite-it sees "partisan gridlock" in terms of elite DC politics blocking measures that would benefit the vast majority of the American people. This popular narrative is not always accurate in its grasp of details-the desire for term limits, for example, would actually vastly increase the power of lobbyists and the other unelected power-brokers, making Congress even less responsive to the popular will--but the populist narrative around "partisan gridlock" is clearly not the same as Versailles, even when it does inadvertently play into what Versailles wants.
And here's where Obama comes in, "big time," as America's #2 war criminal would say. For Obama has proven himself masterful at articulating the popular opposition to "partisan gridlock" (aka "politics as usual") while actually providing enormous cover for the very special interests he is posturing against. There have been a few revealing moments when this has leaked out into public. (As when Politico reported him meeting with bank CEOs: "'My administration,' the president added, 'is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.'")
There is, I think, a very good argument to be made that Obama should be seen as similar to Tony Blair. Blair's argument was that Labor could do a better job of implementing the Tory agenda than the Tories could themselves. This was actually the same argument that Eisenhower made regarding the New Deal. And while Obama's political ideology makes him almost Blair's doppelganger, it's the example of Eisenhower that is most revealing, because Eisenhower was a Republican President in a Democratic era, who was elected as a war hero, not for his politics. Indeed, when people first spoke of his running, no one knew which party's nomination he might seek. Everything about Eisenhower's situation spoke to the logic of what he did.
The exact opposite is true of Obama. He is the first Democratic President of what promises to be a new Democratic era-unless he blows it, which he very well could do if he fails to deliver some of the very needed change that the nation has been clamoring for. He was elected specifically on the premise of a need for change, and specifically in opposition to the politics of George W. Bush. So everything he does to accommodate, ala Blair or Eisenhower, is an undermining of his mandate.
Why does he do it? The reasons are no doubt multiple and complex. But one over-riding factor is that he has come of age politically during a period dominated by conservatives waging hegemonic warfare, while progressives have not even woken up to what is happening. And one result of that is that Obama accepts as given the way that conservatives have framed a great many issues. Locked into their ideological framework, he then tries to do some warm-and-fuzzy things within the confines of that framework. But their framework necessarily limits those warm-and-fuzzy things to mere gestures at best, if not deceptive packaging for genuinely evil policies.
My point here is simple: One does not have to buy into Obama's worldview at all to see some truth in him having progressive instincts. What's lacking is a progressive intellect--or even just an independent critical one. Instincts are important, of course. But they're not enough. Especially when you're talking abuot the President of the United States. We already learned that with George W. Bush.
Didn't we? |
