Expel the Pretender. Eve Wiederhold
democratic life demands a kind of vigilance that will unmask charlatans has been deemed so vital to maintaining social order that punishments have been devised within Western philosophical traditions for those who fail to demonstrate a commitment to establishing resemblances between speech and Truth. Durham’s observations about this dynamic are worth quoting at length:
In the metaphysical and theological traditions, the appeal to narrative is made by the philosopher or ‘truthful man,’ whose attempt to grasp the ‘beyond’ of the image is formulated as a problem of passing judgment on the image as a truthful or deceptive representation, which either reaffirms or subverts the founding truths of the prevailing order of things. Does the lineage of the image participate in the essence of the original or is it merely a sophistic counterfeit or a demonic usurper? Does it lead us back to our foundation in the Good and the True or does it cause us to lose ourselves in error and perversity? (19).
Media reports circulating in 1998 often expressed exactly the concerns outlined by Durham, including the following op-ed that ran in the Philadelphia Enquirer:
Doublespeak, particularly of the political and legal kind, of the Clinton kind, is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t. It is the product of clear, calculated thought, intended from the outset to control and pervert reality. It is language that avoids or shifts responsibility and undermines honest public debate. It is an oppressive form of communication that ultimately confines our thought and suffocates our ability to express ourselves freely. It breeds suspicion, distrust, cynicism and ultimately hostility.10
The remedy to the threat of perversion: expulsion. Expel the pretender—the one who promises to speak truly but instead steers listeners away from truth’s domain (Durham 19). Expel those who fail to adopt proper purposes and banish the desire to engage in language practices that forsake the honorable and principled. “Most officers of my acquaintance would have resigned their commission had they been discovered violating their oath,” declared Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) during the Senate debate that followed the House impeachment. “The President did not choose this course of action. . . . As much as I would like to, I cannot join in his acquittal.”11
The act of expulsion attempts to make the problem of representational indeterminacy disappear by doling out punishments to those who fail to demonstrate that they have endeavored to secure the “lineage of the copy” (Durham 19) and through that process, take part in a ruling interpretive order that guarantees that distinctions between meritorious and abusive speech will be unambiguously maintained. But while GOP arguments rested upon the idea that an a priori representational order (or self-evident logic) prefigures any cultural production and should govern how language is used, in the wake of poststructuralist challenges to the metaphysics of presence, questions arise about how to distinguish the existent a priori from the cultural signifiers people invent to describe representational action. Interpretive technologies are also representations and the processes they delineate are linguistic descriptions that function like any other discourse that is historically situated and socially sanctioned. And because discourse cannot escape the social, meanings are not conveyed via a straightforward lineage but when words are positioned within rhetorical contexts and in relationship to other socially sanctioned terms. The technologies we use to enact interpretive processes are fully mired in these complex acts of positioning, unable to stage an act of independence that would separate representational forms from their meanings. This principle applies to all of those words that seem to have self-evident content—logic, reason, straight talk. The content of such terms cannot be categorically distinguished from the signifiers that would give that content expression.
With no ability to escape narrative, all methods of interpretation engage acts of translation. Indeed, as Jean Baudrillard has observed, a problem of translation will be raised whenever we communicate because the attempt to delineate what a given representation has conveyed will not encounter a question about truth’s appearance but a question about how to perceive where we think a given representation aims. Is the representation attempting to re-present truth or only pretending to or perhaps aiming somewhere else entirely? Baudrillard’s attention to perpetual translation underscores a critical caveat within the narratives that engage metaphors of vision to describe interpretive labor. Even Plato maintained that language is incapable of displaying truth’s raw essence. True visions of truth are only available to the gods. Since humans cannot discern whether truth’s essence is present, when they judge, they assess whether it seems that an interlocutor’s language use has attempted to mimic a priori forms. (On this point, see Panagia and Durham.) In other words, when we assess a representational aim, we “look at” that which remains stubbornly invisible—an attempt at a kind of participation that would align with the divine realm that is unavailable for human review. We’re at least three steps removed from any straightforward vision of truth’s presentation. Hence, when gauging ethical comportment, we can only evaluate what cannot be seen: whether a rhetor harbors a goal of being true to the idea that one should attempt to convey what is genuine and authentic.
Baudrillard’s use of simulacra calls attention to this knotted but crucial caveat. Because interpretive methodologies cannot definitively locate truth’s presence, procedures overseeing judgments about whose speech aims in the right direction are based upon speculations, not facts. “Simulacra” confound orders of representation by introducing the possibility that pretense—the fake show of obedience to an order of representation—will be mistaken for a genuine act. And they introduce the further possibility that the lineage of the copy should not be automatically esteemed. The term simulacrum identifies symbolic constructs/representational modes that forego the demands of Platonic mimesis by making no claims to a domain beyond interpretive mediation. The simulating action that produces linguistic signs and visual artifacts need not ascribe value or ethics to the endeavor to mirror truth. Simulacra implicate style because the putative abandonment of any attempt to retrieve the “true referent” would seem to empty the signifier of content, leaving only a formal appearance that does not engage with the ideal but offers only an imitation of bona fide act of engagement. Simulacra could potentially mean anything.
When cultures embrace simulacra as valid linguistic signs, they reorder the value system that would determine which language practices matter. In contexts in which simulacra circulate, no premium is placed on the attempted act to re-present reality and the referent is not given priority over the signifier that would represent it. The speech that heads back to truth is not preferred to the one that spins. Rather, all representational endeavors are equally regarded no matter what direction they take. Baudrillard maintains that a problem of translation arises when people fail to see the difference between the evaluative equity implicated by the production of simulacra and the order of evaluation imposed by the conventional work of distinguishing categorical differences between the true, the false, the real, the imaginary. Further, because simulacra look like genuine signs of truth, they can fool us. They will feign the requisite work of mimicking a higher order but offer a mere appearance, a thin surface rather than a core essence.
Baudrillard advises caution: Through the power of simulacra, we risk privileging artificiality over reality. We live at a cultural moment that has been influenced by the lessons of postmodernism and that embraces hyperreality as a component part of any communicative context. He argues that we are in danger of preferring representations that are pure contrivances, relying upon them as points of reference informing conceptions of what has value and significance. Letting go of the ability to make truth claims threatens to render systems of interpretation “weightless” (Simulations 10).
The GOP’s fear about the nation’s “soul” veering away from truth could be characterized as expressing a similar concern. On the other hand, to many of us watching the impeachment spectacle, the endeavor to punish the President for an illicit speech act enacted the very problem of pretense that GOP leaders claimed to fear, leaving us once again spinning in textuality.
The Reality and the Charade
I have been arguing that GOP arguments about the need to trust in the absolute authority of the law conflated a culturally produced social practice with a transcendent order that presumably oversees and guides how human beings respond to representations of ideas and events. On one level, such arguments remain persuasive because the idea that all should abide by the law is, after all, critically significant