Watching ABC’s Democratic debate (transcript) last night, I was struck by the degree to which Sen. Obama was being defined by his associations, a process that has been taking place ever since the Jeremiah Wright story broke a few weeks ago. Last night, Obama had already become frustrated with this when George Stephanopoulos brought up Obama’s slight acquaintance with William Ayers, a former Weatherman:
SEN. OBAMA: George, but this is an example of what I’m talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.
And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.
The fact is, is that I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions.
Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn’s statements? Because I certainly don’t agree with those either.
So this kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, is somehow — somehow their ideas could be attributed to me — I think the American people are smarter than that. They’re not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn’t.
Under a microscope, the analogy falls apart. William Ayers is being characterized by acts, while Sen. Coburn is being characterized by statements. I should say that I don’t think that Obama is beyond the pale on this, because in political contexts the word often is the deed, and it is not surprising to see a politician confuse two activities that are usually separate in most other circumstances. Besides, I’ve read Obama’s writing and I’ve met him once or twice; I just don’t buy the notion that he’s underhanded in his rhetorical choices.
In any case, I think that it is a useful exercise to parse this issue because there are at least two important questions – both linked by a common variable – that we can tease out of Obama’s response. The first question is: to what extent are we bound up in the actions of our associates, and how close does the associate have to be so that we share his or her culpability ? The second question is: to what extent are we answerable for the words of our associates, and, again, how close does the associate have to be for us to have responsibility? Obviously, both of these questions have a lot of moving parts. We can’t answer them without knowing how laudable or despicable the acts in question are, what we mean by “closeness,” what sorts of punishments or apologies are appropriate if the test for culpability is met, et cetera.
Because this is a blog on language, I’d like to focus the second question and propose a few ideas about how we might establish a standard by which a person might be responsible for the words of others. My idea is that we need to pay attention to both the extent and also the manner in which a speaker appears to have assimilated the words of others, in order to figure out how implicated that speaker might be those words.
My starting point for this exploration is critic M. M. Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse and the Novel” in Dialogic Imagination. In the essay, Bakhtin calls attention to a widespread phenomenon:
The transmission and assessment of the speech of others, the discourse of another, is one of the most widespread and fundamental topics of human speech. In all areas of life and ideological activity, our speech is filled to overflowing with other people’s words, which are transmitted with highly varied degrees of accuracy and impartiality.
Bakhtin sounds lofty. But he’s talking about something that anyone can recognize:
In real life people talk most of all about what other talk about – they transmit, recall, weigh and pass judgment on other people’s words, opinions, assertions, information; people are upset by other’s words, or agree with them, contest them, refer to them, and so forth. Were we to eavesdrop on snatches of raw dialog in in the street [...] we would hear how often the words “he says” “people say,”“he said .. “ are repeated [...] Everyday conversation is full of transmissions and interpretations of other peoples’ words. At every step one meets a “quotation” or a “reference” to something that a particular person said, a reference to “people say” or “everyone says”to the words of the person one is talking with, or to one’s own previous words, to a newspaper, an official decree, a document, a book and so forth.
Bahtin explains that people decide to “own” some of the word that they transmit. The claim is quite striking: “The process of selectively assimilating the words of others,” he writes, is the very “ideological becoming of a human being.” There are at least two ways to do this. The words of others can either become an “authoritative discourse” that demands that we acknowledge it and make it our own (think of national anthems, oaths), or the can become “internally persuasive discourses,” one that we choose to affirm through assimilation, and becomes “tightly interwoven with ‘one’s own word’” (think of professional terminologies, precepts, the rationalizations that we use frequently). These two categories are not hard and fast; it is necessarily the case that some people will define “authoritative discourses” more expansively than others.
So let’s bring this back to politics in general and Obama in particular. My idea is that if we want to know how implicated a candidate is in the words of others – a friend, colleague, pastor, neighbor – all we need is to discover the extent and manner in which words have been assimilated. By this metric, we have no evidence to prove that Obama has assimilated the words of Ayers (or Coburn for that matter). To my knowledge, he hasn’t quoted Ayers or drawn on his writing; more broadly, Obama does not speak in the platitudes and idioms associated with Ayers’ generation of radicals. Because of the extent of Obama’s assimilation of Ayers is nil, Stephanopoulos had little justification for his question, and there is a legitimate reason to feel that he was being unfair.
Of course, the more interesting case is Wright. We know that Obama assimilated Wrights “Audacity to Hope” sermon into his own books. The difficult question is: in what manner? Were Wright’s words “authoritative” or “internally persuasive?” Were they even Wright’s to begin with? Here is the passage from Obama’s book:
The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.” He began with a passage from the Book of Samuel—the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her God. The story reminded him, he said, of a sermon a fellow pastor had preached at a conference some years before, in which the pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting titled Hope.
“The painting depicts a harpist,” Reverend Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.
“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!”
And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountaintop, worrying about paying the light bill…
Here I think that the manner of assimilation really matters. Those opposed to Obama argue that he received this sermon uncritically, as an “authoritative discourse” that became part of his being. Moreover, for Obama’s detractors, the entire content of the sermon is contained only in the most piquant phrase available (“white folks’ greed”), rather than on a reading of the context.
But I think that the passage proves something quite different. In the first place, Wright’s sermon is itself an amalgam of three different discourses: the book of Samuel, another sermon, and a painting described by that sermon. It is not so much a fully formed discourse as a complex of a number of “words of others.” Moreover, Obama clearly does not incorporate the sermon without modification. Notice that the Reverend’s words are no more than a “meditation” until Obama himself begins to take ownership of them by breaking out of the direct quotation and moving into a descriptive mode in which he fuses Wright’s words to his own voice and observations.
The most interesting idea in this quote is the image of boys doodling on the church bulletin, because, in an a sense, Obama is doing the same thing.
So at the very moment of assimilation, Wright was always more than simply Wright, and Obama did not accept him uncritically, but only inasmuch he could apprehend and transform the discourses that Wright related from other sources. This doesn’t make Obama a hero or a genius. I actually think that this is a perfectly normal thing that just about everyone does when they assimilate the words of others – they change those words, and adapt them.
To sum up: I believe that there are in fact circumstances in which we are answerable for the words of our associates. But those circumstances depend on the extent to which we have assimilated the words of those associated, and the manner in which that assimilation takes place. Analyses that provide no information on these contextual issues are inevitably flimsy, and they are probably trying to fool you.
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April 19, 2008 at 2:51 am
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[...] I meditated a little on the degree to which a speaker is implicated in the words of another person. I argued that to [...]