What’s in a Wall?
Consider the following incident of the Trump presidency that divided the country and partially paralyzed the U.S. government in December 2018 and January 2019. One of the major promises of candidate Trump on the campaign trail for the U.S. presidency was that he was going to build a wall on the southern border of the United States to keep out what he called: “Mexican rapists, drug dealers, criminals” and other illegal immigrants.1 The idea of a border wall was the brainchild of his political advisers who were looking for a mnemonic device to make sure that their candidate – who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about his talents as a builder – would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was to be a signature issue in his nascent campaign. “How do we get him to continue to talk about immigration?” they said. “We’re going to get him to talk about how he’s going to build a wall (Gunderman, Reference Gunderman2016).”
During his presidential campaign, Trump made his plans to build a “beautiful solid border wall” a central part of his platform: “I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them [sic] very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall” (ibidem).
A feature of Trump’s rallies in 2016 and 2017 were crowds chanting “Build that wall!” After his party’s defeat in the midterm elections of November 2018, the president appeared to back away from his promise, alternately referring to the planned wall as a “steel fence” or a “steel slat barrier.” Indeed, the debate in which Trump and the Republican leadership engaged with congressional Democrats and which led to the longest government shutdown in history seemed to be an argument about language. In his morning tweets, Trump sought to blame the media for the discrepancy and said he still envisioned an “all concrete” wall in some areas but that a “see through” barrier at the U.S.–Mexico border would be more appropriate in other areas based on what he had been told by “experts at Border Patrol.” In mid-December, Trump further shifted his stance, arguing in a tweet: “we are not building a Concrete Wall, we are building artistically designed steel slats.” Then, in a Christmas Day appearance in which he blamed Democrats for the government shutdown, Trump described the border barrier as “a wall or fence, whatever they’d like to call it.” Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump’s close confidants, said that the president is seeking “a physical barrier along the border in places that make sense,” asserting that “the wall has become a metaphor for border security.”
By January, as the government shutdown was already in its fifth week, the new speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi “quietly but directly called Mr. Trump out on his lying and ‘fearmongering’ about immigration … and mocked his planned border wall as a ‘beaded curtain’ and ‘a manhood thing for him.’” But more importantly, Donald Trump’s linguistic waverings on how to name the wall became a symptom of political waffling that got both parties angry. For the Democrats, a wall was “immoral, un-American, and ineffective.” For Trump’s supporters, Donald Trump was breaking his campaign promise.2
Trump’s semantic wavering also gave rise to multiple speculations as to the meaning of his obsession with the wall. Democrat columnist Frank Bruni wrote:
It’s funny that we are still talking about the physical features of what President Trump wants or will settle for on our country’s southern border – about whether it will be concrete or steel, solid or slatted, a fancied-up fence or, in Nancy Pelosi’s hilariously acerbic dig, a “beaded curtain.” Because it’s not really a wall that Trump is after, if indeed it ever was. It’s a victory for victory’s sake. It’s a show of his might. It’s proof of his potency.3
Republicans interpreted all this renaming of the wall as a negotiation opening. Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, said that while he thought the shutdown was “going to drag on a lot longer,” Mr. Trump’s shift in wall materials could provide a semantic opening to advance the talks. “If he has to give up a concrete wall, replace it with a steel fence in order to do that so that Democrats can say, ‘See? He’s not building a wall anymore’, that should help us move in the right direction,” Mr. Mulvaney said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “If that’s not evidence of the president’s desire to try and resolve this, I don’t know what is.”4
In the end, some voices started to emerge that interpreted the debate about the wall as a symptom of something much bigger.
The wall has become a metaphor to Mr. Trump and his millions of supporters. It represents a divide between “us” and “them”, a physical demarcation for those who refuse to accept that in just a few decades, a majority of the country will be people of color. Mr. Trump promised it in 2015, in the same speech in which he announced his candidacy and called Mexican immigrants rapists, criminals and drug traffickers. His goal was to exploit the anxiety of voters in an increasingly multicultural, multiethnic society. Mr. Trump’s wall is a symbol for those who want to make America white again.
Three months later, after the president declared a national state of emergency but did not get from Congress the money he needed to build this wall, he backed off his threat to “close the entire border with Mexico” and announced: “We’re really making progress at letting people know this is an emergency” and the Secretary of Homeland Security conceded that the focus on the wall was, partly, a stunt.
Well, I think part of that is just a – it’s an optic. To have the president stand in front of the wall indicates immediately to any viewer that he’s at the border. But I think his message is about the dual crisis [security and humanitarian] and how we need Congress to act, to give us the authority to address [it].5
If I have dwelled rather extensively on this incident, it is because it illustrates many of the aspects of symbolic power that we will be dealing with in this chapter. Only a recognition of the symbolic nature of the wall can explain the intensity of the current debate and the virulence of the sentiments expressed. Will the United States be a monolingual and monocultural white nation or a multilingual multicultural society? What is at stake is not only the very identity of the nation but what the critic Abrahamian calls “the coming of the global citizen” (Abrahamian Reference Abrahamian2015). The very idea of national borders has been made complicated by technology and globalization. The real walls, Abrahamian argues, are not at a border, but in the digital, commercial, political forces that control us.
The term “symbolic” can have four meanings in its relation to language and power. The first is that language, like music or painting, is called a symbolic system because it is composed of signs and symbols that combine together in a rule-governed, systematic way to make meaning. The four letters of the sign w-a-l-l combined with the two other words in the string “build-that-wall” evoke in the minds of the listeners the concept of a prototypical structure erected to protect some people in and keep other people out. But symbolic systems not only refer to the real world, they structure things in people’s minds by categorizing them (category: wall), making distinctions (wall vs. fence) and evaluating them (a beautiful wall). Thus, symbolic systems are at once structured (by syntactic, lexical, discourse rules), and they themselves structure our representations of the world. In this chapter, we first examine how this symbolic relation to things is what gives humans a power to represent reality that other living species do not have.
The wall incident also gives us a glimpse into a second meaning of the term “symbolic,” namely the power of symbols to create semiotic relations of similarity, contiguity or conventionality with other symbols, that listeners interpret as such. For example, a wall can be imagined as “tall” because /tall/ sounds like or rhymes with /wall/ (iconic relation of similarity); it can be envisaged as solid and sturdy because of its close association with the sturdy walls of a house and with their function to protect and defend a family (indexical relation of contiguity); but a wall can also be seen as just an arbitrary word out of the dictionary, that might be called mur in French or Mauer in German (symbolic relation of conventionality). How the utterance “Build that wall” will be interpreted – whether iconically, indexically or symbolically – will depend on the relations the speakers and listeners create between the words uttered and other words or signs produced in that particular context, and in past or imagined ones.6
There is a third meaning of the term “symbolic” to be gleaned from this incident. The meanings given to the wall by the various actors are more or less conventional/arbitrary, more or less nonarbitrary or motivated by the actors’ desire to pursue their own political interests. The power to manipulate the meaning of signs and to impose those meanings on others and make them “stick” is a symbolic power, because it acts not through physical force but through our mental representations as mediated by symbolic forms. As we shall see in the rest of this chapter and in Chapter 4 these representations will become embodied in the rituals of everyday life, including such rituals as electoral rallies at which the rhythmical “Build that wall!” slogan is chanted in unison by the crowds and reproduced by the media. The power of suggestion of these words does not come from such utterances alone, but from the indirect institutional legitimacy of the people who utter them as supporters of a legitimately elected president of the United States.
Finally, there is a fourth meaning to this incident that is rather puzzling. For all the hoopla about how to name the wall, Donald Trump does not seem to care how it is called, provided he can declare that he will “build-a-wall” and declare the mission accomplished once it is “done.” But what will be done? He recently admitted that words don’t matter: “Wall or fence, whatever they’d like to call it” and “Never mind how you call it: a wall, a barrier, a fence, sleet slats. These are only words. What counts is action. I am a man of action.” We have the uneasy feeling that his words are becoming unmoored from their conventional referents, so it becomes difficult to know how to interpret what he really means. Is it all symbolic posturing? Metaphoric spectacle? Display of potency? Reality TV?7 We will need to examine the term “symbolic” as applied to the construction of meaning, and to its relationship to truth.
I discuss each of these four aspects of symbolic power – the power to signify, the power to interpret, the power to manipulate, the power to construct meaning – in the remainder of this chapter.
1.1 The Power to Signify and Categorize
Signification, Value, Indexicality
The challenge of meaning-making has been captured by linguists who study the structure of the linguistic system and cognitive linguists who study the relation between speaking and thinking. Most language-teaching textbooks take a Saussurean view of language. The linguistic sign, we are told, is formed of two parts like the two sides of a sheet of paper – the signifier or sound-image and the signified or concept. As “a two-sided psychological entity,” it links together not “the material sound, a purely physical thing” and a specific object in the world, but “the psychological imprint of a sound, the impression it makes on our senses” and “an abstract concept” (Saussure Reference Saussure and Baskin1959 p.66). So, if the teacher holds up a piece of chalk and says “This is a chalk,” she is not quite correct. The sound /’tʃɔ:k/ does not denote this particular piece of chalk, but rather it evokes in the minds of the learners the concept of a chalk that is in this case long, round and white, but might be in other classrooms thick, square and yellow and still be called “chalk.” The combination of the sound /’tʃɔ:k/ and its concept constitutes its signification. Linguists point out the important fact that the meaning of a sign lies not only in its signification (the relation between signifier and signified) but also in its value, that is, in its difference from other signs (e.g., it is similar in function, say, to a pen or a magic marker, but different from an eraser).
In addition to the structural aspect of signification and value, semioticians distinguish between two kinds of signification – denotative and connotative – to account for meanings that are referential and associative respectively. One might think that a piece of chalk has only a straightforward denotative meaning as “device for writing on blackboards” until someone says: “You want some chalk? Don’t you have a laptop?” and you realize that using chalk to write on a blackboard might connote old-fashioned teaching practices. As Saussure says: “In language there are only differences” (Saussure Reference Saussure and Baskin1959, p.120). Chalk, ballpoint pen, typewriter and computer denote different writing technologies, but they connote different degrees of technological sophistication.
If connotation is a term used by semioticians, indexicality is a term used by linguistic anthropologists to refer not just to conventional semantic associations of the Saussurean kind, or loose connotations, but to whole ways of talking that mirror the social stratifications found in society and the social, cultural and political views that speakers and writers hold. The phrase “order of indexicality” coined by Michael Silverstein (Reference Silverstein2003) refers to “stratified patterns of social meanings to which people orient when communicating” (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2005a:253). For example, the word “invasion” at the southern border indexes on one rational level the entry of large numbers of people seeking asylum in the United States; on another, more emotional level, the word can index the take-over of territory, a hostile and illegitimate entry, or even an attack on our country by foreign armies out to kill us. The way people talk indexes much about who they are and which position they hold in the increasingly stratified American society.
Categories of the Embodied Mind
If words have the power to evoke abstract concepts like “chalks” and “blackboards” in someone’s head, it is because these concepts are organized into cognitive categories that orient our thoughts according to the specific logic of a given language, for instance instruments vs. surfaces (writing on a blackboard), walls vs. screens that we have experienced through our minds and bodies. Anthropologists like Edward Sapir argued that “language is a guide to social reality,” that it even “conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes” and that “the worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”(Sapir Reference Sapir1949:69). Others went further and suggested that the language we speak not only guides, but determines the way we think, indeed makes us prisoners of the concepts it evokes in the mind (Whorf 1956).8 This is without taking into account the work of interpretation and translation that we consider in the next section. As cognitive linguists like George Lakoff (Reference Lakoff1987, chapters 4 and 18) or Dan Slobin (Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996) have argued, it is not that the way we speak determines the way we think, but that in order to speak at all, we need to think in categories that are (unconsciously) recognized and accepted by the members of a speech community. These categories are both linguistic (the way we speak) and cognitive (the way our mind works) and they are deeply embedded in our bodily experience (Johnson Reference Johnson1987; Varela et al. Reference Varela, Thompson and Rosch1991).
Lakoff’s Idealized Cognitive Models
For example, Trump’s use of the sign /’wɔ:l/ in “I will build a great wall” was available to him from the English language, but it came already organized into cognitive categories that went beyond just “support/protection.” The idealized cognitive model evoked by the word “wall” encompasses experiential categories like “inside/outside,” “container/contained,” “inclusion/exclusion,” “Self/Other.” It elicits images of the Great Wall of China, Israel’s border wall with the Palestinian territories, the Berlin Wall, all built to prevent invaders from coming in or, in the latter cases, residents from going out. The president started talking back his characterization of the wall (“I never proposed 2000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shining sea”) and started proposing alternative names such as steel wall, steel fence, steel slats, see-through-barrier, in the hope that by changing the signifier he could change the signified in people’s minds. But that did not take into account the power of the cognitive categories associated with these signifiers. They all evoked an idealized cognitive model of a prototypical barrier meant to keep out strangers, foreigners, outsiders, in short, people not like us, to protect Us against Them. Not only did this model contradict the model evoked by the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to the shores of the New World, but, given the context in which Trump used the term, it seemed to restrict the Us vs. Them to white U.S.-born Americans vs. brown-skinned Latinos. It was perceived by many as a xenophobic and racist cognitive model.9
1.2 The Power to Interpret
As Saussure sought to delineate the domain of linguistics, he distinguished between langue, the abstract linguistic system found in grammar books and dictionaries, and parole, the living language used by speakers and writers in everyday life. Because of the rule-governed nature of langue and the idiosyncratic nature of parole, he restricted the domain of linguistics to the study of langue. But if we consider language not just as linguistic system, but as communicative practice, we have to recognize that in practice langue and parole are inseparable. The symbolic forms or linguistic signs that constitute language as a symbolic system can be viewed by speakers and hearers either as type-level forms that are part of langue, that is, an abstract system, or as token-level relations that are part of parole, that is, actual utterances in context (Hanks Reference Hanks1996:45). As abstract types these signs are arbitrary, that is, they have no natural relation to what they designate, and their meaning depends entirely on social convention. Saussurean linguists study types and their structure. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists study tokens and their use. As tokens of language use, these signs are non-arbitrary; they have iconic, indexical or symbolic relations to their objects (p.84).
Peirce’s Interpretants
Whether an object is read as an icon, an index or a symbol depends on what the semiotician C.S. Peirce called “the interpretant,” namely a second sign that enables a person to interpret the first (Van Lier Reference Van Lier2004:68). For example, the sign “wall” might create in the minds of listeners another simple sign, for example, “STOP,” or a larger signifying discourse, for example, “anti-immigration policies.” This other sign, or interpretant, constitutes an “ideological horizon” (Hanks Reference Hanks1996:43) that helps the person make sense of what s/he hears. As the first sign stands for a concept or ideal type of object, the relation of that type to its specific token in the real world will be interpreted as being more or less similar to other tokens (or iconic), more or less contiguous to others (or indexical), or more or less conform to the type (or conventional). For example, upon hearing “I will build a wall,” some people might imagine this wall to be iconically similar to the Great Wall of China keeping hordes of enemies at bay, and they might feel a sense of patriotic pride. Others might associate it indexically with caravans of poor asylum-seeking families and feel outraged. Yet others will remain on the conventional level of the dictionary or of conventional wisdom and take the utterance as an objective statement of fact. As we shall see in Chapter 4, one of the political strategies for negating the effects of symbolic power is taking words for their literal meaning alone and ignoring their indexical value. By trying to change the type-level form of the sign “wall” to make it more acceptable, rather than considering the token-level form of the sign’s ideological horizon, Trump chose to remain on the symbolic conventional aspect of the sign and deliberately ignored its more contextual – iconic and indexical – aspects. In any case, as a token of the English language, the utterance “I will build a wall” will be interpreted by the listeners against the ideological horizon of their experience and knowledge of the world. It will therefore inevitably elicit a personal reaction (fear and hatred of immigrants or outrage at the one who uttered those words).10
Semiotic vs. Symbolic Relations
It is important here to distinguish between semiotic and symbolic relations. First, these three kinds of semiosis (meaning making process) are in a hierarchical relation to one another, the symbolic relation being the highest and including the indexical and the iconic. For example, the symbol “wall” can refer to an object made of brick-and-mortar but it cannot avoid evoking lower semiotic levels, such as an image in the mind, or association with other symbols like “exclusion” or “protection” depending on one’s political views.
Second, while all three semiotic relations need to be interpreted, symbols are addressed to someone and require that addressee’s interpretation. While icons have an immediate and direct impact on the viewer, symbols have more complex meanings precisely because they can also be read iconically and indexically. Hence the need for a relational thinking and interpretive power that chimpanzees, for example, do not have. People might disagree on how to interpret the indexical relations evoked by the word “wall,” but the symbolic power of an utterance such as “build that wall!” repeated in unison at a campaign rally depends on the supporters recognizing the legitimacy of the author of these words in a democratic society. This legitimacy is also supported by the crowd’s belief in what the philosopher Paul Grice (Reference Grice, Cole and Morgan1975) has called “the cooperative principle” in conversation understood as exchange of information. At first glance, it seems as if Donald Trump consistently flouts Grice’s four basic maxims of quantity (don’t say more than required), quality (be clear), sincerity (be sincere) and relevance (be relevant), in the same manner as he revels in breaking all expectations of normal social behavior. He repeats himself and says much more than is required to convey his message, his use of words is vague and obfuscating, his sincerity is questionable and so is the relevance of his utterances to the good of anyone else than Donald J. Trump. But upon second thought, Trump’s very disregard for Gricean maxims is a sign that his discourse is not meant to inform his supporters, but to appeal to their emotions, fuel their outrage and present himself as a savior above the norms of civil discourse.
Third, symbols function in combination with other symbols (Saussure’s combinatory or syntagmatic principle) to form symbolic systems or codes. When combined with the indexical meanings of these other symbols, they are likely to develop not only idealized cognitive models of concepts, but “metapragmatic” or “metacultural” models of social reality as well, that is, recognizable types of persons or objects in recognizable situations (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Basso and Selby1976; Wortham Reference Wortham2006:32).11 A wall to keep “Mexican rapists, drug dealers and criminals” out of the United States is one such metacultural model that Trump supporters adopt and with which they frame any news they hear about the wall. It has also, as we know, prompted some to take violent action against Latino immigrants and other minority groups in the United States.12 Thus, while all three semiotic relations make meaning, they make it in different ways and with different effects.
Sapir’s Condensation Symbols
Saying that symbols are conventional systems of reference is not to say that their meaning is arbitrary. As mentioned in the last section, a symbol at the type level is arbitrary, but the same symbol at the token level is not arbitrary at all. The word “wall” might be arbitrary as a symbol of the English linguistic system, but in Trump’s mouth that same word carries with it all the iconicity and the indexicality of its context, and it is the result of the speaker’s deliberate choice of words. Trump knew what reaction he would elicit from his supporters by having them repeat the phrase: “Build a wall.” That phrase became more than a conventional linguistic symbol. It became what Edward Sapir called a “condensation symbol, whose actual significance is out of all proportion to the apparent triviality of meaning suggested by its mere form” (Sapir Reference Sapir1934:493). Sapir explains the two different kinds of symbolism. The first is referential symbolism, manifested in “oral speech, writing, the telegraph code, national flags and other organizations of symbols which are agreed upon as economical devices for purposes of reference” (Sapir Reference Sapir1934:493). The second type of symbolism is condensation symbolism “a highly condensed form of substitutive behavior for direct expression, allowing for the ready release of emotional tension in conscious or unconscious form.” He adds: “In actual behavior both types are generally blended” (Sapir Reference Sapir1934:493).
Any symbol can become a condensation symbol. Even seemingly purely referential educational practices as conventionalized spelling and standard pronunciation, can easily become the object of violent debates and substitutive forms of emotional expression among educators and the public at large. In the case of Trump’s wall, it is interesting to see how a simple phrase, “build a wall,” scribbled on a notepad by his advisers as a purely mnemonic device to remind the presidential candidate to talk about immigration at his rallies, could be turned into a condensation symbol so potent that it caused the government to shut down for more than a month, taking hostage in its symbolic grip both the president and the nation at large.
Condensation symbols can emerge especially in times of danger and threat. For example, before September 11, 2001, wearing an American flag pin on your lapel meant nothing more than that you were an American. The flag referred to a nation called “the U.S.A.” and that was the nation you belonged to. After the attacks on the World Trade Center, the lapel pin ceased to be simply a sign, it became a condensation symbol for patriotism and even national loyalty. The fact that Barack Obama did not wear an American flag lapel pin when he campaigned for the presidency in 2007 raised eyebrows and Republicans started putting into question his loyalty to the United States. Some, like Donald Trump, insisted on seeing his birth certificate. Obama relented and started wearing the pin again, but it is interesting to read what his reasons had been for not doing so.
WATERLOO, Iowa – Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, D-Ill., said he will no longer wear an American flag lapel pin because it has become a substitute for “true patriotism” since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “My attitude is that I’m less concerned about what you’re wearing on your lapel than what’s in your heart,” he told the campaign crowd Thursday. “You show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who serve. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and ideals. That’s what we have to lead with is our values and our ideals, [...] The truth is that right after 9/11 I had a pin. But shortly after 9/11, particularly because we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.”13
Here we have the clash between two symbolic systems: on the one hand, pins, flags and other symbolic devices that can quickly become shibboleths, that is, words or objects used to test your legitimacy and exert control over you as a member of a social group; on the other hand, symbolic action such as speaking out on important issues and leading with values and ideals. In a sense, Obama is discarding the use of concrete objects like flags and words and prefers to focus on verbal action as a sign of “true patriotism.” This is the opposite of what Trump does when he insists on seeing Obama’s lapel pin and birth certificate in order to give him legitimacy. The controversies over lapel pins and border walls are part of larger symbolic political struggles that are increasingly consuming the public sphere as people and nations are trying to accommodate to the new global realities that threaten the integrity of nation states.
1.3 The Power to Manipulate
We have seen how a populist politician, backed by the power of the presidency, has the power to transform a string of conventionally accepted linguistic signs like “to build a wall” into a powerful condensation symbol that won him the election in 2016. The fundamental ambiguity of symbolic reference that can be interpreted in different ways, as type or token, and as iconic, indexical or symbolic relation, enabled him to switch in and out of levels of interpretation, and eventually impose onto others the meaning that best suited his interests – in this case, the liberty to flout linguistic expectations and to make words irrelevant.
Barthes’ Myth
The French semiologist and literary critic Roland Barthes conceptualized the way that a referential symbol becomes a condensation symbol, which he called “myth” (Barthes Reference Barthes and Cape1972). Myth, he said, is a linguistic sign whose meaning has been slightly displaced from a first semiological chain consisting of: signifier + signified = (arbitrary) sign, to a second semiological chain composed of the first sign, that now becomes the signifier of this second chain, combined with a totally non-arbitrary, highly motivated signified to form a non-arbitrary second sign. Consider, for example, Barthes’ famous example of the cover of the June/July 1955 issue of the French weekly Paris-Match featuring a Black African youngster saluting the French flag at a big military show in Paris. The first semiological chain links a signifier s1 (a photograph) with a signified s2 (West African youngster, called Diouf from Ouagadougou (Burkina-Faso), shown saluting the flag) to form a sign S (saluting Black African youngster). The second semiological chain empties S of its historicity; it makes S into a new signifier s’1 (saluting Black African youngster) linked to a new signified s’2 (subject of the French colonial empire showing allegiance to the French flag) to construct a new S’ (French imperiality).14 Barthes called this new S’ “myth,” in order to underscore its dubious relationship to historical reality and factual truth. With his promise to “build on the southwest border a ‘great, beautiful’ wall that ‘Mexico will pay for’ in the name of ‘border security,’” Trump plays with two semiological chains: the first referential chain of facts (building a wall jointly with Mexico to ensure security at the border) and the second symbolic chain of myths (a “Wall” that “Mexico” will “pay for” for greater “border security”). It is that second chain that indexes for Democrats an unacceptable manifestation of xenophobia, vengeance and nationalism.
Myth, Barthes says, is “speech stolen and restored,” that is, speech emptied of its historicity and of the fundamental ambiguity of its many connotations. Indeed, it transforms connotation into denotation and imposes on the addressees only one denotational meaning. Trump’s reference to his addressees as “the-American-people” mythifies the sign “people” by deliberately ignoring its many other meanings such as “national community,” “U.S. citizenry,” “multilingual/multicultural society,” and imposing only one meaning or myth, namely “America- first populists.” But of course such a symbolic transformation by a single actor may become part of public meaning or standardized interpretation only if the “semantic manipulator has sufficient power, authority, prestige or legitimacy to make his interpretation stick” (Turner Reference Turner1975:154). As we know, such a legitimacy is often contested and not only in the higher echelons of political power. Whether between parents and children, teachers and students, native and non-native speakers, bosses and employees, and even among children in the playground, meaning is constantly being negotiated. But, unlike what many language educators may think, the negotiability of symbolic forms is due not so much to the imperfect fit between the form and the content of an utterance, but mainly to the multiplicity of alternatives and the range of interpretations, manipulations and choices available to social actors.
Semiological Manipulation
As a semiologist, Barthes’ was fascinated and angered by the increased use of publicity for marketing purposes that was slowly taking hold in the Europe of the 1950’s. Having attended the Steichen photograph exhibition “The Family of Man” that was showing in Paris at the time, he was angry at seeing human beings, who had slaughtered each other across the globe during World War II only a few years back, now depicted as a “family.” The exhibition, which featured human beings in all walks of life, born and dying, playing and working, laughing and crying, was technically superb and the desire for peace that its title conveyed was admirable, but for a Frenchman, who had just lived through five years of fascist Vichy ideology under the motto “Travail, famille, patrie” [Work, Family, Fatherland], the family metaphor was tainted. He felt that it had become a conservative “myth” designed by the American exhibit producers to counter the socialist myth of international brotherhood and was thus part of the symbolic warfare that the United States was waging against the Soviet Union. In the same manner that this exhibit projected a politically conservative message, the young African on the cover of Paris Match projected a colonialist message, meant to reinforce the symbolic power of the French colonial system, and the PANZANI ad for Italian pasta reinforced the power of free market capitalism (Barthes Reference Barthes and Heath1977:33). All three images were part of a system of domination that used symbolic representation to further its political and ideological agenda.
Of course, myths as manipulative symbols are not only used for nefarious purposes. At the end of his essay “Myth Today,” Barthes acknowledges that the mythical imagination is one of the essential characteristics of the human species. The power to create myths is the basis not only of obfuscating propaganda and murderous ideologies, but also the source of religious faith, poetic beauty and literary truths. In fact, says Barthes, myth can only be countered with other myths, not with objective facts. As a literary critic, Barthes felt that verbal art had a responsibility to “say the world” as it saw it, rather than persuading the world how it should be or how people should see it. Hence his quest for non-instrumental, non-interested uses of language. He believed that there could be in certain literary forms a “zero degree” instrumentality (Barthes Reference Barthes and Howard1982). His dream of a language that would just express the world, not try to manipulate, persuade or seduce it has been shared by many poets and artists. It has produced some of the most moving poetry, precisely because, as Auden wrote about the death of W. B. Yeats,
1.4 The Power to Construct Meaning
Indeed, what is then the difference between a PANZANI pasta ad, which makes us see tomatoes, cheese and nutmeg in a different way and makes us dream of Italian beaches, sun and dolce vita while we are eating our spaghetti, and a beautiful poem that moves us to tears? Don’t both appeal to our senses and our imagination, one through visual, the other through verbal symbolic forms?
Jakobson’s Poetic Power
It was around the time of Barthes’ Mythologies that the linguist and semiologist Roman Jakobson started searching for the stylistic principle that myths and literature had in common (Jakobson Reference Jakobson and Sebeok1960). What makes a text “literary?”, he asked; what is this literariness (literaturnost’) that is common to poems, advertisements and political slogans and gives them the power to touch people and move them to action? After identifying six components of the communicative situation – the addresser, the addressee, the message, the contact, the channel, and the content, he came to the conclusion that it was the focus on the message itself, its self-referentiality, that distinguished the literary text from other forms of text. The literary quality of a poem, ad or slogan appeals to both the perceptual and the symbolic self by drawing attention to its symbolic structure. Consider, for example, the following short poem by Emily Dickinson (Reference Dickinson1993:13):
This poem refers to a familiar content (words spoken, people speaking) and to an addresser (the lyrical I) making contact with an addressee reader/listener (some say, I say) through the channel of the printed page. But what makes this poem particularly striking is the way it draws attention to its style: the way the words are arranged on the page, the carefully crafted parallelisms, the rhymes, the choice of simple vocabulary. There is nothing arbitrary about the signs on the page. The choice and alignment of the words obey the principle of equivalence of any linguistic utterance, that is, the slots in the first sentence are filled by linguistic structures that fit into the syntax of the English language, that is, subject (a word), verb (is), predicate (dead). But there is one major difference: the word “said” in the second line (instead of “uttered” or “written”) does not depend only on an idea the poet had in her head, but was deliberately chosen to rhyme with “dead” in the first line and to contrast with “say” in the third. The word “dead” itself at the end of line 1 anticipates the antonym “live” at the end of line 5, thus creating a dynamic tension within the poem that is both stylistic and ideational. It is through this poetic structure that we understand the poem to be about the life and death of language as used by speakers in everyday life. What makes this text a poem is not exclusively its referential content, but the dynamic style of its message. Indeed, Jakobson notes that while “dead” (a predicate) and “said”(a verb) are not equivalent paradigms in linguistic terms, they are equivalent in sound, position and shape (four letters), in the same way that the words “dead/said” that start the poem are the (negative) equivalent of the words “to live/that day” that close the poem. Because it is a poem, we tend to interpret these signs as symbols with a deeper metaphorical meaning than just their referential truth. For instance, we may attribute significance to the simplicity of its vocabulary as a metaphor for the simplicity of truth.
The Power of the Political Slogan
To what extent is the symbolic power of this poem any different from that of advertisements, slogans or political pronouncements? Consider, for example, the following slogan chanted by Trump and his supporters at the many rallies he has conducted as president:
TRUMP: And who is going to pay for the wall?
CROWD (ON CUE): Mexico!
TRUMP (CUPPING HIS EARS): Again. WHO is going to pay for the wall?
CROWD: MEXICO!
TRUMP: Yeah! We are going make MEXICO pay for that wall!
The rhythmic repetition of the rhetorical question and the chorus response of the crowd provide an additional meaning to what originally might have been heard as a statement of fact. Making Mexico “pay for the wall” is no longer just meant as having Mexico foot the bill, but as a way of punishing Mexico for supposedly sending its drug dealers, rapists and criminals across our borders and making Mexicans “pay for their crimes.” The effect is not achieved through its truth value but through its incantatory resonances. As Jakobson (Reference Jakobson and Sebeok1960) noted, in poetry the principle of equivalence is projected from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination, that is, the choice of words and their sequence on the syntagmatic axis is not determined by their paradigmatic referential content (their dictionary definitions), but by the formal properties of the exchange (rhythmic chanting and repetition building up to a crescendo of popular frenzy) similar to an audiolingual sentence completion drill. What Trump is doing by using such a rhetorical strategy is to turn “Mexico” into a myth (a country of criminals). “Pay” no longer denotes a monetary procedure but gets turned into a metaphor that indexes revenge and punishment. Indeed, Mexico never agreed to foot the bill and the U.S. Congress never appropriated the funds. But the rhythmical to and fro of the mob’s slogan enacts the ritual beating that Trump vows to administer Mexico at its southern border and is of one piece with the physical abuses of asylum seekers that are happening there.
The Power of Genre
What’s the difference, then, between Trump’s and Dickinson’s discourses? It is useful to remember that symbols, myths and poetry are not symbolic in themselves, but are interpreted as such. We are moved by the poem because we read it as a poem, and do not expect it to report on facts and objective truths. We expect poems to put us in a certain mood, to reveal truths that cannot be expressed directly in so many words. By contrast, we don’t usually read a presidential statement for its poetic qualities, unless we are discourse analysts or communication scholars. In marketing publicity, we are ready to be persuaded, even seduced by the product an ad is selling and to go and buy it, but its mythic quality had better be concealed (as in Packard Reference Packard1957) or else we might not buy the product.
That is where we go back to the expectations of the speech community we started with in the Saussurean model of language. We have seen that the meaning of a word is to be found not only in the link between the sound-image and the concept it represents, but also in its value as compared to other words within the same speech system. Furthermore, when seen as communication, these words are not just labels but cognitive categories that index other words that people use to interpret what they hear. This is why a speech community is necessary not only to create a linguistic system called English or French, but also to interpret the use of this linguistic system in communicative practice. When Saussure wrote that “The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up, by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value” (Saussure Reference Saussure and Baskin1959:113), he suggested that the individual cannot fix the meaning of any given word without knowing what the context, that is, the situation, the genre, the participants, expects it to be.
In the case of Dickinson’s poem and Trump’s political statement, it is the genre that embodies the expectations of their respective speech communities and that determines how these two texts will be interpreted. Hence the uncertainty about the speech genres of some of Trump’s pronouncements and the dismay of the media at the president not speaking the truth. By conflating the genres of the business deal, the religious exhortatory, the political stump speech, and the TV show, Trump is disrupting the very basis of his speech community and its common interpretation of events.15
1.5 “Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch.” Really?
In each of the sections so far we have seen that the power to signify, interpret, manipulate and construct meaning through signs does not come from just referring to objects in the world. It comes from being aware of the relation between the two parts of a sign and of its relation to the other signs that it evokes in people’s minds. But most of all it comes from having the power to have those signs recognized and accepted by members of a speech community. It is ultimately the community of language users that is the only social guarantor of a linguistic system, even if scientists, marketing strategists and poets constantly try to push the boundaries of language to make it say new things.16
The story by the Swiss author Peter Bichsel “Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch” [A table is a table] (Bichsel Reference Bichsel1969) is a humorous illustration of what it means to push those boundaries. An old man in a gray coat, gray hat and gray trousers leading a lonely life in some furnished room in a little gray town decides one day to bring about some change in his life by renaming all the furniture in his room. After all, he thinks, the French call a bed “lit,” a picture “tableau” and a chair “chaise,” so why can’t I? So he starts calling his bed “picture,” the chair “alarm clock,” the table “carpet,” and the newspaper “bed.” In the morning he stays longer in the picture, sits on the alarm clock and eats his breakfast on the carpet while reading the bed. This discovery made him all excited. At last life was becoming interesting! Soon he had invented a whole new language that gave him so much pleasure that he hardly went out anymore. After a while, he did go out, but he had to laugh when people said “Nice weather today” or “Are you going to the football game?” for he no longer understood what they were talking about. Not only could he not understand other people, but he could not share his excitement about his new discovery for they couldn’t understand him. So he stopped talking. In the end, he only talked to himself and didn’t even greet people anymore.
This story, written in 1969, was a staple text in beginning German language textbooks in the U.S. before the advent of communicative language teaching because of the simplicity of its language. It was meant also to counter the belief of many beginning learners that words are just a bunch of labels for the familiar furniture of the universe. It would be viewed today as a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to learn how to communicate in a foreign language. However, it raises a more complex question that language teachers have avoided asking: What prevented the Swiss people from learning the old man’s language? After all, they were willing to learn French or English in school, so why couldn’t the old man teach them his language? What does it take to change the linguistic habits of a speech community? Chapter 2 attempts to respond to these questions by further discussing the power of social actors to represent social reality.
Suggestions for Further Reading
As the father of structuralism, Saussure (1916, chapter 1 and chapters 4–5) is essential for understanding the linguistic sign and the post-structuralist critics of Saussure in the 1970’s and 19’80s. Deacon (Reference Deacon1997, part I) offers a necessary semiotic supplement to Saussure that helps understand how symbolic power comes into the picture. C. S. Peirce (Reference Peirce, Houser and Kloesel1992, 1998) is a notoriously difficult read, but van Lier (Reference Van Lier2004) offers an accessible overview of Peircean semiotics. The classical essay on language by Sapir (Reference Sapir1949) adds the anthropological perspective. Together these four readings provide the foundation for a discussion of the symbolic in symbolic power. Sapir’s essay on the status of linguistics as a science (Reference Sapir1949) and Whorf (Reference Whorf and Caroll1991) are crucial to understanding the relation of language, thought and our embodied self. Lakoff (Reference Lakoff1987, chapter 18), Kramsch (Reference Kramsch, Davies and Elder2004), Slobin (Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996) and the papers in Gumperz and Levinson (Reference Gumperz and Levinson1996) show that language relativity is today a well-accepted phenomenon that adds to the complexity of communication across cultures. For a good discussion of orders of indexicality and the metapragmatic organization principle, see Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2010, chapter 2). Voloshinov (Reference Voloshinov, Matejka and Titunik1973) is not an easy read, but he provides a crucial backdrop to Bakhtin, discussed in Chapter 9, and so does Schultz (Reference Schultz1990). Those interested in myth and how it remains at work in the present day should read Barthes (Reference Barthes and Cape1972, Reference Barthes and Heath1977), Ricoeur (Reference Ricoeur and Pellauer2016), as well as Basso (Reference Basso1990) and Hyde (Reference Hyde1998).
