“Ties”

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Yesterday, I meditated a little on the degree to which a speaker is implicated in the words of another person. I argued that to ascertain this implication, it is helpful to measure the extent to which the words of others appear in the speaker’s voice, and to make some effort to learn the manner in which those words got in.

Bakhtin is helpful on this because he offers one way to figure out the manner in which words are assimilated – as “authoritative discourses” or “internally persuasive discourses.” If the assimilation is the former, then we can expect that the absorbed discourse carries with it the beliefs of its original author. If the assimilation is the latter, then odds are the speaker has rewritten the words to the degree that it diminishes any strong ideological implication with the beliefs of the original writer.

The model is surely imperfect, but it is useful because even if we bicker about what counts as “authoritative” or “persuasive,” we will in any event be bickering over the right issue.

Anyway, in the discussion, I ignored an important aspect of the question as I framed it in the post,

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 ?

I skipped the emphasized portion because it’s a bit beyond the ambit of this blog. However, in the last few days a lot of commentary has taken place that makes it worthwhile to revisit the issue of how to describe the closeness of an association.

Specifically, my interest has to do with the noun “Ties.” As the news cycle continues, more and more writers use this word to frame relationships, asking about Barack Obama’s “ties” to William Ayers. We hear this word a lot in political journalism, because it has curious problems and powers.

First of all, it is extraordinarly vague. People have ties to their hometowns, their neighbors, their spouses, their coworkers, and not all of these relationships are identical or politically meaningful in every context. The plural form of the noun helps add to this vagueness: you’ll notice that in nine out of ten usages, a NFL hero has “Ties” to the local high school, just as a disgraced councilman has “Ties” to an indicted businessman. This conveys the impression that even if one tie is clear, there may be others that are tantalizingly vague.

This leads me to the second property: the word really plays on the imagination. That’s what makes it sexy. A few months ago, when The New York Times and The Washington Post published stories about Sen. John McCain’s professional meetings with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, the term “Ties” was used with a pretty obvious double meaning, especially by the Post. Indeed, in the context of discussions of lobbying, notice how conventionally the suggestive adjective “cozy” slides next to the word “Ties,” thereby enhancing the insinuation so that the allegation easily seems more lurid than the evidence behind it.

But the word “Ties” is not only nettlesome because it is vague and tends to play on the imagination. The term also exploits asymmetries of information. In the months building up to the war, there was much discussion of the “Ties” between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Of course, any collaboration has been thoroughly discredited. The trouble is that even though the term “Ties” really has little inherent meaning, it sometimes seems like it has a specific definition as a technical word. Some people might have imagined that our intelligence experts had some test that must be met before an association counts as a “Tie.” Unfortunately, we learned there there is no such test, or rather, that the test was so absurdly minimal as to be useless. It is indeed true that Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was physically in Iraq. But that’s about all. This coincidence seems to be the only specificity needed to claim a “Tie” by analysts. By this weak standard, billions of people have ties to terrorists, since terrorists walk the same streets and breathe the same air as politicians, dog-groomers, duchesses, waitresses and goat-herders in nations all around the globe. More deeply, the problem is that the existence of a test is not just unknown, but unknowable, and so “Ties” becomes a means to deny us the information necessary to make sound judgments.

Vague, seductive to the imagination, disguising asymmetrical information: it sure sounds as if “Ties” are pretty crummy. But this analysis is mere snobbery until we acknowledge that writers have all kinds of pretty good reasons to use the word. Here are a few:

1) Like all vague words, “Ties” helps people avoid mistakes. It is useful if you can’t remember who William Ayers is, if you think that there is more to the Iseman story that hasn’t come out yet, if you took bad notes and you can’t figure out whether A is B’s best friend or neighbor. “Ties” is a good word for writers who are more worried about making a mistake than they are about perfection – this is the state of a journalist and editor as they rush to publish. Vagueness can at least provide some weak accuracy where precision is impossible and time is short.

2) Like all words that play on the imagination, “Ties” allows even prestigious news organizations to publish lurid material that they cannot say explicitly if they hope to maintain their credibility. Although this is often unethical and silly, it is not a type of writing that we ought to ban completely if we truly have the public interest – broadly construed – in mind.

3) In reality, had the intelligence services been working with a clear and meaningful set of categories, then there would be no problem with their use of the word “Ties.” So long as the term has technical properties that make it useful in the professional conversation, then the intelligence services could still maintain the asymmetries of information that make their work possible. The problem in the Saddam example is that there needs to be a way to mark technical designations off from nontechnical ones for the public. Although this is not what happened in 2002, that is not to say that it could not happen in future instances.

So if (when) you read that Obama has “Ties” to Ayers, the odds are that the writer is not a scumbag. Instead, it is probably because the writer: 1) doesn’t really know what the relationship is, and is on deadline 2) feels like something fishy is going on, but wants you to fill in the blanks until more of the story breaks 3) is parroting a designation that some other group has already made, a designation that may or may not derive from an identifiable set of criteria.

As a matter of contextualized rhetoric, the most remarkable thing about “Ties,” (or rather its common usage) is that the very properties that make the word suspicious to a reader are identical with the properties that make it useful to a writer. This situation is not unique, but it is uncommon.

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Filed under Language, Politics

Tags: Barack Obama, John McCain, M. M. Bakhtin, Rhetorical Problems, Saddam Hussein, Vicki Iseman, William Ayers, Word Usage