Tag: framing

A signed statement on the failure of language

~ Michael A. Innes

I’ve stayed away from commenting publicly on the new US administration. There’s so much fodder, so much grist, that it could easily overwhelm. It does overwhelm. Daily news feeds are prefaced and filled with coverage of Trump, his family, his appointments, his interests. My instinct is to stay completely away from it, for at least three reasons:

  • First, there is paranoia: we have yet to fully understand and appreciate the consequences of speaking ill or in any way that might be construed negatively. Trump is self-admittedly and famously vindictive, so paranoia in this case is more  a matter of healthy circumspection.
  • Second, there is the usual historian’s caution about offering premature commentary: let’s wait and witness the full unfolding of events, and allow the time needed for all the primary source materials about them to be made available, before crafting an account of events that might help make sense of it all.
  • Third, there are other things going on in the world, which is one of the larger points of the current D.C. diorama – in which it should be apparent to anyone with their peripherals fully engaged and calibrated: every spectacularly dissonant media event  obscures or distracts from an equally disturbing series of events elsewhere in the world.

But today’s meme, which focuses on Donald Trump’s handshake, is full of  the sort of communicative content that will delight symbolic interactionists, frame theorists, specialists in broadcast and rhetorical dominance, and anyone else who thinks about such things. Trump’s physical presence and its role in his political theatre has come up before. One prominent example arose during his campaign debates with Hilary Clinton. There have been others, including Trump’s 19 second long handshake with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his awkward handholding with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

It is precisely Trump’s violent handshake style that has caught the media eye over the last 24 hours, after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, apparely very well prepared  for the event, visibly countered Trump’s grasp. The ensuing commentary has been full of snapshot hilarity. One of the more literary pieces I’ve seen is Vice’s semi-satirical analysis  of the meaning of Trump’s handshake:

This is a handshake buried under the weight of its own meaninglessness, a black hole of metacommentary in a world where sense sloshes chaotically across a flat surface of signifiers unmoored from any attachment to truth or reason or even an orderly presentation of images. Donald Trump’s handshake is a signed statement on the failure of language here at the end of the world.

The Vice piece is worth reading in full.

Missiles of Outrage and Anger

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

In the early pages of his memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld described boyhood memories of an America struggling to come to grips with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One of those recollections was of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reassuring voice, its “formal, almost aristocratic tone” cutting across the airwaves. “Outlining the indictment against the Japanese Empire, he spoke slowly and deliberately,” Rumsfeld wrote. “Every syllable was carefully enunciated, as if the words themselves were missiles of outrage and anger. That gave him a singular quality as America heard for the first time the words that have now become so familiar to history: ‘Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy…’.”*

Rumsfeld’s biographers have noted his preoccupation with Pearl Harbor. As Secretary of Defense, he repeatedly summoned the ghosts of that day in his efforts to promote US defense preparedness and ruthlessly assess the intelligence community’s performance. We don’t have to take Rumsfeld’s word for it, either, or that of his biographers. There’s a thick public record of the things he’s said, written, authorized and championed. His public output makes for a good baseline for understanding what he said, to whom it was said, and what it meant for the policy processes of the time. But the public record is only part of the picture.  Investigative journalism like James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (Viking Penguin 2004), helps to fill in the gaps with much needed detail on closed door discussions and private deliberations.

Researchers take their chances when they look to memoirs for accurate information about historical events. The New Yorker writer George Packer, in a hydrochloric 2010 review of another political memoir, George W. Bush’s Decision Points, made the somewhat obvious but nonetheless key point that “Every memoir is a tissue of omission and evasion; memoirs by public figures are especially unreliable.” The second Bush White House generated what must be a record number of tell-alls and insider accounts. Even speechwriters got in on the act, publicly staking claims to the carefully enunciated syllables and missiles of outrage and anger that are supposed to be exclusively Presidential, not claimable intellectual property.

I’ve been using memoirs to help reconstruct some of the things that were said and done before and after 9/11. I approach most of them with a degree of cynicism and distrust of authorial motive. Two of them, Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown and Douglas Feith’s War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, stand out, for the simple reason that both books enable readers to critically evaluate the claims their authors make.  They do this by providing access to declassified papers and documents – the original source materials that, one assumes, corroborate what Rumsfeld and Feith were trying to convey in their respective accounts. Needless to say these will have been carefully selected, so it’s up to the reader to consider both source and context when reviewing the primary sources.

Both books came equipped with supporting websites stocked with digitized documents. Feith’s, at http://www.waranddecision.com/,  appears to have died of neglect at some point in early 2014. Some of those documents are reproduced in the pages of War and Decision, and readers can still get a sense of what the website contained if they know how to retrieve cached material on the web. Rumsfeld’s sources are in an entirely different category. The “Rumsfeld Papers”, at http://papers.rumsfeld.com/, contain thousands of digitized document spanning his entire career in government service, and more besides. In a video posted on the website, Rumsfeld speaks directly to visitors and encourages them to make up their own minds.

As an exercise in digital history, the Rumsfeld Papers website is superb. As an artefact of Rumsfeld’s time in governement, the collection is remarkably transparent. It’s an ironic oddity that won’t be lost on those who remember Rumsfeld’s caustic style or the level of effort he put into bureaucratic turf wars and “controlling the narrative”.  That irony is recursive, too. I’ve found the Rumsfeld Papers less useful as a window into Rumsfeld’s  thinking or that of the people around him – there’s that cynicism again – but quite good as narrative nuts and bolts. Some of the sources in the Rumsfeld Papers – the infamous “snowflakes” come to mind – are as invidual documents often sparsely detailed, and only provide new insights on an aggregate basis. But there are some real gems that provide a glimpse into the stuff of internal discussions and behind-the-scenes bureaucratic labors, and they make it possible to trace the paths of ideas as they worked their way through the policy process.

*Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (Sentinel, 2011), p. 39.

Framing Forensics

~ Michael A. Innes

For the last few months, I’ve been thinking about how  “forensics”, “forensic research” or “forensic practice” are commonly understood. The interest is driven in part by long familiarity with the uses of historical methods and research to support very contemporary preoccupations, and the somewhat unusual conjoining of “forensic” and “history” as a single discipline. I write “unusual” here only in the sense that “forensic” and “forensics” are usually associated with lab coats, applied science and crime scenes, and much less so with the stereotypical image of historians rifling through boxes of records in musty archives. These are popular images of very specific and limited elements of disciplinary practice, of course. They hardly do justice, so to speak, to the substance that each of those representations draws from.

The association between historical practice and “forensics” is much less unusual  – in the sense that it should resonate quite strongly and intuitively – among postgraduate students and historians indoctrinated into the arcane mysteries of the profession. In their readings on philosophies and approaches to history, they learn that its early development (in the West) was grounded in a legalistic pursuit of evidence and scholarly rigor. It is also much less unusual, in the same sense, for anyone familiar with “public history”, a more recent though now well-established type of professionalisation within the field. So historians have a robust professional understanding of such issues by virtue of their training, and at least in some cases they will sense an affinity between what historians do and the requirements of a more general (or specific) forensic practice. 

Resonance is a tricky beast, however. Different things resonate in different ways with different people. In frame theory, one way of making sense of resonance is to understand the “cognitive script” or “schema of interpretation” (the raw collection of data and details that makes up  our subconscious) from which we draw various conceptual apparatus (analogies, metaphors, and other devices that function as a kind of shorthand for the complex reality that surrounds us). One of the challenges associated with framing  – particularly for anyone using it to understand human communication – is frame alignment (and by extension, misalignment) between “source” (the cognitive script) and “target” (the thing being framed). Get the alignment right when framing an idea or a policy, and the idea or policy will resonate with an audience, thereby increasing the chance that the idea or policy will be accepted. Get the alignment wrong, misalign the frame, and any hope that it will resonate with its intended audience becomes a much more tenuous proposition.

This is a gross over-simplification of a fairly sophisticated field, but I wanted to push through the essentials quickly in order to get to the idea of “original meaning”. Remember that framing uses devices like metaphors and analogies as conceptual shorthand. The range of framing devices is actually quite broad, but metaphors and analogies are among the most powerful. In order for the putative analyst to map instances and frequency of metaphorical discourse (whether that discourse is purely textual or a more holistic collection of actions, texts, and the like), its component parts have to be identified and understood. This requires knowledge of the “original meaning” of metaphorical terms, and differentiation between original meaning and later meanings that have accrued to those same terms over time. That differentiation allows us to pinpoint when a term is actually being used metaphorically, and when it is being used in its original form.

In some cases, an analogical or metaphorical cascade can be observed, wherein multiple layers of metaphorical meaning accrue to the same term in successive stages over time. The result is a word or an expression or a turn of phrase that carries multiple possible meanings, some of which may be obvious and easily discernible, while others only reveal themselves under certain circumstances, in certain contexts, or through more esoteric and prolonged forms of inquiry. Which brings me back to the idea of “forensic” research, and forensic historical research in particular. The term “forensic” is from the latin forensis, which refers to early Roman legal practice in which victim and accused presented their respective cases to an audience in a forum. In this original meaning, “forensic” meant something that was both “public” and “legal” in its orientation. Over time, it came to denote something more narrowly of a legal nature, acted out in a specifically legal setting like a courtroom or before a judge. More recently, it narrowed again, “forensic” and “forensics” becoming descriptors for the collection and processing of evidence in criminal policing, typically using hard science tools and processes that are highly amenable to fine-grained identification of relevant physical minutiae.

The point I’m trying to make with this dime-store genealogy is that “forensic” has a number of meanings, all of them connected in interesting and relevant ways. That some of those meanings are anchored in historical context makes them even more rather than less relevant to current issues. In a sense, I’m advocating a cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary recovery of the term. No research discipline is more or less inherently “forensic”; research is not inherently “forensic” because it relies on genetic testing or applied chemistry; hard sciences are not more inherently “forensic” than social sciences, and social sciences are not more inherently “forensic” than, say, historical research (or vice versa). Rather, research is inherently “forensic” when it is being conducted for legal purposes, to support legal arguments and processes, to build a criminal case; research is “forensic”,  in the classic sense, when its findings are discussed, presented, or argued openly or publicly.

Research might even be considered “forensic”, in a metaphorical sense, simply for paying attention to the little things, for being “highly amenable to fine-grained identification of relevant minutiae.” Words and phrases can be appropriated and twisted to suit just about any purpose, of course. That’s not what I’m suggesting. What I am arguing for is a sensible return to basics, and a sensible application of those basics to contemporary interests, issues, and sensibilities. I am arguing for an understanding of research as a “forensic” undertaking when it is conducted or presented for purposes that lie somewhere along a continuum of the public and legal elements of its original meaning; when it is the work of public intellectuals engaging policy-relevant issues, for example, or when it is policy-relevant research conducted at the behest of public bodies such as government ministries and the like.

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This is a rough draft of first thoughts on a wide variety of interconnected issues. It is informed in part by my own experiences as an institutionally-embedded analyst, professional research consultant, and academic. It is inspired in part by recent discussion of public intellectuals and alleged academic disengagement from the issues that matter to mainstream life.  It is articulated largely in ignorance of both public history and forensic science, and of what these two important fields have to say on the matter of forensic research. And it is offered here with the promise of more thoughtful and better supported inquiry to follow.