Re: Response to Paul Chilton’s “Notes”

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Hello again.

At 09:44 2001-09-14 -0400, Kerim Friedman wrote:

>It made me wonder if such symbolism might not work in America - allowing
>people to express their horror and outrage at the same time as refraining
>from showing support for the military-industrial complex. Because, as we
>have already seen on this list - anything critical can be portrayed as
>heartless and cruel unless you simultaneously (and publicly) express your
>outrage.

If by any chance you are referring to my message, let me kindly tell you
that you miss the point. Let us not confuse critique with verbosity. I
never suggested that analyses per se are "heartless". My reaction was (and
continues to be) against a type of academic discourse that very materially
glorifies words, and thus talks just about itself -- not about the serious
events at hand. It is not a matter of each particular argument, with which
we may agree or not -- it is a matter of an overall, self-conscious
discursive tone which rubs me wrong. In revealing personalizations and
metaphors, these discourses personalize words and metaphors, and they
equally metaphorize (excuse me) peoples, social subjects, events. In this
sense, the respective tones of Chilton's first and second texts are quite
different. He states it very clearly in his reply:

>Let's not have any illusions that a few discourse analysts can influence
>either state policymakers or those who plot attacks like those of last week.

I totally agree. Thus, if policy making precedes discourse, what was the
purpose of his self-indulgent commentaries such as:

>If the premise is the metonymic mapping of perpetrator onto person(s)
>harbouring the perpetrator (the latter notion awkwardly lexicalised during
>the discourse as "harborer"), then the entailments are very serious. Given
>the militarization, the container, and other scripts likely to work
>together, "harbourers" can be targeted because they are identified with
>the perpetrators.

In other words: The USA army is going to bomb the hell out of whatever
people the USA government geo-strategically considers it to be convenient
to smash for whatever economic interests they have. And this will be so
whether Bush calls their human targets "harborers" or not. War rhetoric is
so transparent because war is evident. If a few misspunched ballots
wouldn't have given petropresident Bush the victory, now-ecopresident Gore
could be framing the retaliation slightly differently while bombing the
hell out of the people just the same, as Clinton's and Blair's armies have
been doing in Iraq for so many years. So, what is the  chain of actions
between "harborer" and the bomb? We never know, (Critical) Discourse
Analysis (or others) never tells us.

Or what about this interpretation?:

>Less obvious is the possibility of other psychological levels of
>symbolisation involved. The Tower as an ancient symbol of power and
>arrogance. Five-sided forts are militarily ancient; five-pointed stars
>have supposedly magical properties in certain semiotic systems. (M.
>Casaubon Credulity & Incred. (1672) 71 By certain pentacula, and seals and
>characters to fence themselves and to make themselves invisible against
>all kinds of arms and musquet bullets.  W. G. S. Excurs. Vill. Curate 128
>Had I but shown him the pentangle of Solomon
, how the fiend would have
>howled at me in vain.) This is risky territory. But consider: the
>pentangle of Solomon, the state of Israel and the metonymy, surely at work
>in this crisis, whereby Israel is linked to the United States.
>
>Note also that "The Pentagon did so and so, says so and so" involves a
>common metonymy in which the building stands for the people and the
>organisation that work there. Of course, bombing the building will kill
>the people in it and damage the organisation, but is there some mental
>process by which harm can be denied because you can think "I am just
>attacking a symbol" (metonymy)?

Sure. The murderers don't mind slitting passengers' throats or pulverizing
their own bodies, but they must internally "deny harm" to humans who work
in the Symbol, including Muslim janitors or clerks. The murderers wouldn't
have attacked the USA military building if it were a hexagon. Or would've
they attacked it more viciously because it would resemble David's star? Who
knows.

Please excuse my sarcasm. I promise to shut up or to be excommunicated. But
I hope this way I've made myself a little more clear. It's no good to make
a symbolic profit out of a couple academic shibboleths while sidestepping
human tragedy. It all started ten years ago, in the same war, under the
same president George Bush, with George Lakoff's famous paper "Metaphors
can kill", which can't. Now, if we want to talk about the actual role of
language in directed misery and planned destruction, I would honestly love
to hear.

Cordially,