Jason Stanley and the woke theory of language
Oliver Traldi
Sometimes when we talk about politics we communicate information: the tax rate, the retirement age, the size of the national debt. But sometimes we seem to be doing something else. We express ourselves through words, but what we’re really offering is a combination of purrs, growls, and waving flags: positive or negative sentiments and wishes of affiliation or disaffiliation with movements or individuals. In their new book The Politics of Language, Texas linguist David Beaver and Yale philosopher Jason Stanley (also a popular pundit and theorist of the alleged rise of fascism in America) claim that this aspect of our expressions, which they call resonance, is the essence not just of political language, but of all language — that “meaning” simply is a matter of resonance. Our words and sentences are not boxes that contain “contents” but tools we use to connect to others, to gain their support, or push them around, or hurt them. The Politics of Language is a truly impressive offering which synthesizes an enormous breadth of research to develop this ambitious new theory. And, in doing so, it preserves as though in amber a short, already-fading “vibe” of academic and cultural politics: the vibe of woke.
At over 500 pages, The Politics of Language is an almost heroic attempt to provide robust academic scaffolding for a strange cultural moment which seems to have already passed, the moment when “You’re using an offensive trope” or “That sort of argument has an unpleasant history” seemed like politically and intellectually important conversational moves. Though the writing is sometimes uneven, moving between technical, metaphorical, polemical, and pop-scientific modes, it also features some great phrases, such as “A dictionary clings to language by the tail.” Ambitious and thorough, it goes wrong in part because it goes right, accepting something that’s often denied: that this moment was indeed a radical departure from the normal way we think about politics, language, and human psychology.
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But it is badly wrong about language, and political language. The meaning of words and phrases is their resonance, according to Beaver and Stanley. But what is resonance? Colloquially, something “resonates” with you when it moves you or strikes you in a thought-provoking way. But this isn’t how the authors define it. For them, “resonance,” and hence meaning, has to do with how frequently some type of utterance is correlated with some type of event in the world. So if people tend to say “it’s raining” when it’s raining, “it’s raining” means that it’s raining. But if people instead tended to say “it’s raining” when milk was on sale, then it would mean that milk was on sale. That would be its resonance. This theory can help formalize things like the “dog whistle,” a charge leveled at speakers accused of using the same words to say different things to different groups, usually something offensive to one group and something inoffensive to another. Such charges have been omnipresent in the cottage industry of the analysis of political language which emerged during Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.
For Beaver and Stanley, the real import of what we say and do is largely unconscious. We’re getting little messages from ideologies, public relations campaigns, and other “practices” beamed into our heads constantly. When we participate in these practices, we might not even really understand what we’re doing, just as someone working on one part of a task might not understand the whole project. Hence we might not know what we ourselves mean when we speak. Perhaps the job of knowing what I’m saying should therefore fall not to me, the speaker, but to some expert who understands our society (maybe an academic from an Ivy League school).
Through their clever uses of language practices, political leaders seem, in the authors’ view, to be able to direct the actions of an irrational mass public like nightmare marionettes. People ultimately don’t have much agency, and their internal thoughts don’t matter. To me, this seems like a mistake. Political language, especially in a democracy, just as often involves leaders bowing to the preferences of the people about how to talk, either by grandstandingly telling constituents what they want to hear or just caving to a popular demand to, say, describe someone negatively as a “fascist” or “racist,” for instance, among people whose opinions are already settled.
Throughout the book, Beaver and Stanley draw on a wide range of real-world examples. Drawing on these examples means giving their interpretations of actual political speech, and such interpretations will of course always be contested along political lines. For instance, they quote Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas, ranting about a plan to rid Texas schools of critical race theory. In their interpretation, this rant invokes a “narrative” about a “savior” who cures a society’s “poison.” I didn’t sense any of those shades of meaning there. In fact, his meaning was very plain and overt: he didn’t like critical race theory and didn’t want it taught. The book also includes some applications of Beaver and Stanley’s ideas, and they are similarly unconvincing. An argument against neutrality seems premised on the notion that neutrality is black and white, but neutrality seems to come in degrees. Things can be more or less neutral without being either perfectly neutral or completely biased. They argue that their theory weighs against absolutist free speech norms, because it makes speech look more like an action capable of having effects in the world. But their work also seems to suggest that whenever speech is censored, people will find code words to get around the censorship.
The biggest problem with the authors’ resonance theory of the meanings of words is that it virtually ignores the words themselves. It’s perfectly sensible to distinguish between the meaning of someone’s act of speaking and the meaning of the words they actually speak. If I’m having lunch with a potential employer and nervous about the outcome, I might talk too much. There’s a sense in which my talking means that I’m nervous. But the words that I say don’t mean that I’m nervous. They mean whatever happens to come out of my mouth about sports, the weather, what have you. It’s not clear that Beaver and Stanley’s theory makes room for this kind of distinction. Similarly, while their theory makes ample room for metaphor (and they use plenty of great metaphors themselves), it fails to maintain the gap between metaphorical and literal uses of language. The authors could have spent some time explaining how their theory deals with other standard concepts in the theory of language, too, like truth, translation, homonymy, compositionality, and meaningless statements.
The “resonances” Beaver and Stanley discuss as a sort of correlation between word usage and action are best explained in terms of people forming beliefs about the world by just observing other people’s actions and inferring their beliefs from them. Of course, it’s good to be cynical and suspicious, especially in a political context. Someone’s beliefs might not straightforwardly be expressed in their words and actions. An outspoken supporter of public schooling might send their own children to private school, letting you know just what they think about the relative quality of public and private schools. A critic of the regime might act just like a supporter to avoid punishment. But these, too, are actions based on larger sets of beliefs. Beaver and Stanley find it important that we think of speech as a kind of action. That’s fine; me too. The problem isn’t just with how they think about speech. It’s with how they think about action, too. It’s common sense to say that actions speak louder than words precisely because we can make inferences about what people believe based on their actions.
The reader of The Politics of Language is implicitly in the position of being a target of speech — debate, propaganda, slurs — rather than being a speaker themselves. And the political goal is almost therapeutic: to understand and perhaps validate the feelings of offense and harm that speech sometimes produces. It’s interesting how the goal here contrasts with that of other left-wing writing on the politics of language. Almost 20 years ago, when I was in college spending time in Democratic Party political circles, people were reading a different book about politics and language, George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant. This was a very practical rhetorical analysis book, concretely political, about how Republicans were winning by framing issues in certain ways and how Democrats could fight back by doing the same thing. Though Beaver and Stanley seem to take the politics of language to be among the most important parts of politics proper, they don’t draw out many materially useful lessons for political actors.
While its view of language is novel and even a little wild, the view of politics that emerges in The Politics of Language seems therefore a bit too familiar, and rather toothless as well. Little is said about winning elections, passing laws, or starting wars. Language itself — who is allowed to speak, what they’re allowed to say, how it makes us feel, what people do in response — is the political battleground at issue. No wonder, then, that language seems so political to the authors. They are the ones who seem to want it that way.
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Oliver Traldi is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.