Political discourse provides an interesting example of a culturally codified signifying network in action.  Everything we read, everything we believe about politics and process is in some way mediated through a socially negotiated set of linguistic principles.  American political language is, above all else, flexible, mythical, and dualistic.  Metaphor is rampant, and among the most deceptive elements of political language: we believe that we are under control of what we say; however, in adopting and using metaphors, naturally limited terms, we are in turn controlled by the social forces that created them (see Hart et al, 2005).

News - whether through television, print, or web media, continually constructs and reconstructs the issues of the day, shaping our political process through a cycle of threat and amelioration.  The limits of mediation and the needs of society turn political actors into synechdochal representations of ideological movements (see Edelman, 1988).  These representations are, as I noted above, frequently dualistic: the means by which we define our politics through media are established by longstanding practices of journalism schools.  Schudson notes that journalism is made up of two parts, “a set of concrete social institutions,” the signifying network of the social lexicon through which we communicate, and a “repertoire of historically fashioned literary practices,” focusing on the conflict in every story.  This conflict is - as it must be, focused in a dualistic/binary of good/bad, team one/team two.

Political problems are also linguistic or communicative in origin: Edelman (1988) states - accurately - that “Problems come into discourse and therefore into existence as reinforcements of ideologies, not simply because they are there” (p. 12).  In other words, political problems are representative of adverse conditions as perceived by individuals subscribing to a particular ideology.  Occasionally, this problem will be opportunistically proposed: emerging problems presented as more threatening will divert public attention from existing ones that may cause greater long term harm.  As Paul Virilio states in Speed and Politics (1987), “The government’s deliberately terroristic manipulation of the need for security is the perfect answer to all the new questions now being put to democracies . . . they are trying to recreate Union through a new unanimity of need, just as the mass media phantasmatically created a need for cars, refrigerators . . . We will see the creation of a common feeling of insecurity that will lead to a new kind of consumption, the consumption of protection” (p. 139).

More later...