Base and Superstructure

Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Category: Language (Page 4 of 9)

These are posts on language from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include political terminology, language use among politicians and political analysts, and the terminology of social movements.

elevator words space elevator

Elevator Words and the Left

December 7, 2020 /

We’ve seen a flurry of activity on the left. Yes, this includes activism on a wide range of issues. But I’m not talking about that here. Here, I’m talking about a flurry of new ways to label or describe our actions. The left increasingly uses elevator words to do these things.

What does that mean? The left uses loftier words for its actions than those actions warrant. It inflates the language. During the early months of COVID-19, activists proposed modest, temporary rent subsidies. But they called those subsidies ‘cancel rent.’ Even though the subsidies would do no such thing. I’ll post plenty more examples below. For now, I’ll note that things like this happen a lot these days.

I want to ask why. And not only why, but is it a bad thing? If so, how bad is it?

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intersectionality

Intersectionality and the Left

September 21, 2020 /

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality‘ in 1989 as she used the central metaphor in a paper in a law journal. Crenshaw used the term to pick out the idea that people’s identities overlap to create novel experiences. As a legal scholar, she drew attention to experiences of discrimination. For example, black women may face novel issues neither black men nor white women face.

Since then, the term – and perhaps also the idea it picks out – took on a life of its own. It’s a rallying cry for some social justice movements. People routinely assert things like ‘the future is intersectional.’ Politicians run (usually unsuccessful) campaigns around it. But as leftists, what does intersectionality mean for us? Is it a tool for getting things done? A theory we should accept or reject? How should we handle it?

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The Tyranny of Virtue

The Tyranny of Virtue or the Virtue of Tyranny?

July 20, 2020 /

Robert Boyers – Skidmore College academic and veteran professor – wrote The Tyranny of Virtue to collect his thoughts on social justice movements among college students. I can imagine many of you rolling your eyes. Your worry is clear enough. Is Boyers just an old white man who can’t change with the times, comfortable at his privileged liberal arts college and reluctant to embrace the change that’s reached even his ivory tower?

Maybe.

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looping effects making up people ian hacking

The Looping Effects of ‘Bisexual’

February 10, 2020 /

After the 2004 US election, pundits – and college students like myself – went looking for answers. How could Americans re-elect a buffoonish warmonger like George W. Bush? Over the course of a decade, this search guided me from pundit-generated pablum like ‘NASCAR Dad‘ to the philosophically compelling ‘looping effects of human kinds’, as Ian Hacking put it. Let’s trace that journey.

What struck me about the punditry is their attribution of an ordinary event – the re-election of a president – to hidden, mysterious forces. Who were these NASCAR Dads riding to Dubya’s rescue? As it happens, they’re no one new. Lifting up the hood reveals the same white, mostly male, non-college educated voters who elected Reagan in 1980 and Trump in 2016. They vote Republican in every election. ‘NASCAR Dad’ is only a seemingly fresh take on an old story, loaded this time with cultural references.

But I drew lessons from getting burned by bad punditry and bad political science. Through works like ‘Making Up People‘ and The Social Construction of What?, I found philosophers doing great work on classifications of people and how people react – the ‘looping effects’ of my title! And so, I’ll start there. What are ‘looping effects’, and how do they apply to the term ‘bisexual’? Does it mean people aren’t really bisexual, just as people aren’t really NASCAR Dads? Or are NASCAR Dads real after all? Is there some ‘authentic self’ prior to how we’re grouped?

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political currency various pieces of US political propaganda

Using Identity as Political Currency

January 20, 2020 /

There’s a certain line of thought out there in the political ether. The idea goes something like this. People use their identity to take political action, win offices, pass legislation, steer conversations, or direct movements. Or, to put it more simply, they use identity as political currency.

Now, when people say this, they often speak ominously or conspiratorially. By ‘people’ here, they have in mind members of marginalized groups. They think those sorts of people (i.e., others) use their identity as political currency. That’s something we should keep at the back of our minds, because people (and here I mean ‘white people, usually white men’) tend to overlook cases where members of their own group do things like this.

So…what is it to use identity as political currency? How’s it done? Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or both/neither?

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