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Specialists have been debating exactly what he mean by that ever since, and I don't propose to trespass on such dangerous territory myself.
I think, nonetheless, that his Proposition provides a useful point of departure for discussing the relationship between the language that is available to political leaders today, usually inherited or even imposed on them, and the consequent limits on what they can think, and for that matter how they can act.
Like a lot of similarly important issues in practical international politics, I get the impression that its existence has hardly even been acknowledged, let alone studied.
Professionals don't really think about it; linguists and analytical philosophers don't seem interested.
Let's have a go at it then, noting in passing
that I am not going to deal with
Linguistic Relativism or the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, for all that, in its weaker form it will
seem common sense to anyone who has had to live and work in at least
two language systems, especially non-European ones.
Others have compared his Presidency to the reign of an organized crime family, which perhaps gives us a clue, but traditionally, such families were led by grey, low-profile figures who, in the Italian tradition, were often stern patriarchs and assiduous church-goers.
No,
These values include self-glorification and self-promotion, conspicuous displays of power and money, and the banalization and glorification of violence.
They are not limited to gangster rappers of
course, since they are probably as old as history, but that example
can stand for many others.
It also implies that an individual and a group used to speaking like this to the outside world (heaven alone knows how they express themselves privately) are limited in the options they can consider, or at the very least limited in the ways they can put them into effect.
Just imagine Mr. Trump spontaneously saying,
You can't...
The words themselves are not especially difficult or Mandarin, but Mr. Trump is incapable of expressing himself in those terms, which rules out, effectively, any practical developments except escalation, violence, and capitulation by the other side.
Yes, this is obviously in part
personality-related, yes, it has to do with his origins and career,
but it's mostly about the limits of his world, which are themselves
determined by the limits of his language. (Perhaps we could
translate Sprache here by "way of speaking" or "discourse.")
This speech implicitly divides the world into friends and enemies:
In neither cases do any adverse consequences flow from this way of thinking and speaking:
In effect, US politicians have inherited an entire discourse which excludes all subtlety and nuance, and which is almost entirely domestic, in the sense that it is overwhelmingly intended to impress other players in Washington with how tough and extreme you are.
The practical effect on countries you may be threatening or giving instructions to is not considered relevant:
The question of which is the cart and which is the horse has become largely theoretical:
Moreover, if part of the only discourse you have
available is that the US military is the most wonderfulness in
history, and can easily defeat any opponent, then that helps to
determine the limits of your world, and the limits of what you think
is possible. Which is a problem when things start to go badly wrong,
and you encounter events for which your discourse has no words.
Other parts of the system, often with a more direct investment in reality, have inherited different discourses, and therefore different and more extensive possibilities for acting.
The State Department - as professional as any foreign service in the world in my experience - largely adopts the traditional discourse of diplomacy, and if you read its recent output, it can make even Mr. Trump's outbursts sound reasonable.
But this is what the traditional discourse of diplomacy actually is actually for:
Where these solutions are not possible, it allows the parties to each present their points of view in a reasonable fashion, and so preserve the possibility of a resolution later.
Here, it's interesting to see the contrast with the public rhetoric used by the IRGC, which has generally been the arm of the state involved in deniable activities such as assassinations and assistance to foreign terrorist groups.
The IRGC has traditionally kept a low
international profile, and its current inflammatory public rhetoric,
and the higher-profile role it is now playing, are good indications
of how actual Iranian behavior is likely to develop over the next
few months, since generally discourse comes before deeds.
Now it could be argued, I suppose, that there is nothing sacred about such norms:
It's not obvious that a model of discourse, and
thus action, which recalls threats and violence by rival gangs
linked to football teams is necessarily superior.
It also tends to be very precise when that is helpful ("building on the provisions of paragraph 5(a) of the agreement reached by the G34 in New York on 25 February") and very vague when it is not ("we will seek to continue bilateral exchanges with the aim of resolving outstanding points of difficulty.")
Because so much of the actual work of
international politics revolves round the preparation of agreed
documents, its dynamic pretty much obliges people to work together,
and look for areas of agreement.
In particular, the search for consensus may mean blurring or disguising disagreements, or under certain circumstances just leaving problematic issues out altogether:
This can give the impression that a problem has been solved when in fact it has just been put to one side. And in many cases, because diplomats notoriously tend to regard any agreement as better than none, fundamental differences can be disguised by carefully-drafted but meaningless language, covering them with the equivalent of a thick coat of snow.
So it's not uncommon for states to interpret
agreed texts in sharply different ways when decisions actually have
to be taken.
(You may remember that Wittgenstein declared, at the very start of the Tractatus that,
A fact is a proposition in logical space that is
true, and the totality of such facts is also a complete description
of the world. I'll come back to this point later.)
Much of that diplomatic language has its origin in French (the language of diplomacy until 1919) and in some cases French terms are still used. A démarche, for example, is a formal process by which a representative of one government calls on another with a specific request to do or not do something. It often involves leaving an accompanying written document of some kind.
Contrariwise, a bout de papier is an entirely informal document without heading or attribution, handed over as an indication without commitment of what a government thinks or would like to say. In certain cases, states may also hand over "non-papers," which are unofficial documents, often written out of personal initiative, intended to test the water and evoke reaction to certain points of view or possibilities.
There are even, if you can believe it,
"non-maps," which are informal ideas for territorial boundaries, for
example, designed to test reactions. (I sometimes think that much of
the media, and especially the alt-media, would benefit from an
afternoon leafing through the kind of dictionary I have linked to.
It would certainly help them to make fools of themselves less
frequently.)
It has to be better, surely, than a discourse derived from business negotiations, involving bullying phone calls and inflammatory and often mendacious public statements. (The word "deal" has come from nowhere in the last few years to be the default term for an agreement of any kind. "Dealing" of course, is what drug vendors do. There's a thought.)
It's not an accident that the increasing violence
and arrogance of western security policy since the end of the Cold
War has been preceded at each stage by a vulgarization of language
and discourse, which has made previously dubious behavior seem
progressively more acceptable, to the point where western leaders
can now threaten foreign countries in the discourse of mafia bosses.
To give just one example, it's common to describe the relationship between the US and China as one of "competition" or even "rivalry."
Indeed, it's become so common, in the West at least, that governments act as though this is actually the case. Following this way of thinking, competition and rivalry are automatically assumed to become progressively more serious, and lead ultimately to the threat of open warfare, although there is actually no reason for the two countries to fight each other.
This is largely a feature of the discourse
employed, not the underlying realities of the situation, and as far
as I know, the Chinese express themselves differently.
For every winner there is necessarily a loser,
and the loser has to do what the winner wants. The idea that a
situation or an agreement can suit both sides in different ways is
only found in real life.
This has reached caricatural form in attempts to describe the relationship between the United States and Israel. Since only the vocabulary of dominance and submission is available, it requires one side to argue that Israel completely dominates the US, and the other side to argue that Israel is no more than a puppet of Washington.
This is intellectually crude and silly (the world is not like that) and it simply ignores the enormous complexity of the relationship, and its historical development. (Saudi Arabia seems to be shuffled from one category to another and back again, by journalistic agreement, in the same news cycle.)
Likewise, traditional and alt-media compete with each other to find the most sneering and dismissive terms possible to characterize those countries who cooperate with the US to any degree. It clearly does not cross their minds that Saudi Arabia, for example, or most European states, could see their objective security interests as at least partly aligned with those of the US, and indeed may even have originated the policies the US is pursuing.
The result is confusion and ignorance, and a
world that stubbornly refuses to behave according to the limits
that language has imposed on it, and so to obey the arid
assumptions of purely materialist and realist concepts of
international politics.
Countries compete for influence internationally and within organizations, they try to put their nationals in high-profile positions, they try to get themselves elected to various UN bodies, notably the Security Council, and to host important negotiations and play important roles.
But this is a game, not a set of preparations for war.
There are also genuine attempts to overthrow existing relationships, such as the recent Russian effort to evict France from its traditional influential role in Africa, and of course the Iranian attempt to establish themselves as the dominant power in the Gulf. But these are relatively special, and nothing is more misleading than the widely-shared assumption that international politics consists of endless conflicts, attempted coups, "color revolutions", proxy wars and what have you.
As I've pointed out many times, there's a large measure of pragmatic cooperation in international relations, and if there were not the system would fall apart.
Of course, nations will nonetheless quietly support opposition parties or discreetly fund dissident movements if they think they can thereby increase their influence in a region.
(The somewhat obscure relationship between
Algeria and the Tuareg separatists in Northern Mali is an example.
Here, it may be that the Algerians are simply trying to keep other
states from having influence there themselves.)
This increasing influence is not always managed with tact and delicacy, and in any event the Chinese system is just too big and too complex to be controlled by any master-plan. But looking at translations, at least, of Chinese statements and speeches, it is clear that the discourse that controls their view of the world and their consequent behavior is essentially a multilateral one.
It is clear that they resent their historic weaknesses, but equally clear that their language, and so their world, doesn't include the kind of dominant-submissive demands now common in the West. As is often the case in Asia and with Asian languages, much is not said, much can be interpreted in different ways, and much is for the weaker or disadvantaged power to work out for itself.
This has historically created obvious problems
for Asian countries with the United States, where a punch in the
face is regarded as an example of subtlety. But it remains true that
there is no reason for a conflict between China and the US unless
the latter actually sets out to provoke one.
But of course such dealings are not free of content:
Sometimes this is highly formalized and historians can study the results from published documents:
We can see the same problems more recently in the
documents published about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan,
for example.
This changed with the rise of the foreign policy wing of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) which we have to be careful to distinguish from those who are actually involved professionally in managing foreign policy issues of different kinds.
Here, I include rather politicians, journalists, pundits, NGO workers, "community leaders" and the like.
Let me take three examples, in each of which the PMC maneuvers with great difficulty in the very limited reality which its vocabulary and discourse enable it to inhabit. And here, I have in mind primarily the PMC in its international, and especially European, manifestation.
The creation of this international,
intellectually monolithic class, strong on ideology but weak on
practical experience, has been a feature of the last generation or
so, and it has increasingly taken control of the elite discourse on
all international issues, and thus helped to imprison this elite in
a little world of its own creation.
That's it...
Now if you recall, Wittgenstein said that a world consisting only of facts was made up of propositions that had been tested against reality, and he assumed that reality meant, well, reality.
Thus,
Which is fine so long as your definition of
reality is limited to those things that can be empirically proved.
Facts, as Althusser said, are concepts of an ideological nature, and, though few of the PMC have fought their way through his turgid prose, the idea that normative theory comes before banal reality is widely, if mostly unconsciously, accepted today.
Thus, international PMC thinking on a subject like immigration consists of a set of normative ethical propositions within which it is necessary to remain to find an answer to any question, because the three propositions above represent the limits of their world. ("You're a fascist" is often regarded as a satisfactory answer, for this value of "answer.")
You can compare their situation to that of a composer obliged to write a new piece of music every week, using only the same three randomly chosen notes from the chromatic scale. Even Bach might have found that a challenge.
It follows that any real-life problems linked to immigration - housing, crime, education - cannot be taken account of, because they exceed the limits of PMC language and thus the limits of their world. In a very real sense, they do not exist. This is why conventional politicians are caught like deer in the headlights of an oncoming car when practical immigration issues arise.
Whilst it's fine to use their impoverished
language to condemn others, it's more difficult when a problem
arises that cannot simply be wished away and requires a real answer,
as has been the case in the last few days with Spain and Morocco.
The term "Empire" seems to have originated in popular culture with the Jefferson Airplane/Starship in 1970, and was taken up in a rather different form by Philip K Dick in his novel VALIS published in 1981.
As appropriated by the nascent PMC of the time, it can also be reduced to three propositions:
These statements represent the limits of the PMC world, and every international issue, no matter how complex, must be Procrusteaned into them somehow.
It's worth pointing out that the alt-media operates in a similarly bounded world consisting of three slightly different propositions:
In either case, non-adherence to these
propositions will mean the end of your career, even if they are
contradicted by observable reality.
But both supporters and critics of Mr. Trump are nevertheless constrained by the limits of their language into more and more tortured and distorted versions of these propositions, simply because they constitute the limits of their world.
Thus, critics of Mr. Trump claimed that the US/Iran MoU Iran was just to gain time to prepare an overwhelming attack to destroy Iran, whereas Mr. Trump himself seems to have assumed that an overwhelming attack to destroy Iran was indeed possible. But of course there was never going to be an overwhelming attack, because the means to conduct it did not exist.
Indeed - terrifying thought - they never did exist outside Hollywood movies...
You and I know that, but those whose world is
bounded by the kind of propositions set out above are incapable ever
of understanding it. And so perhaps the biggest obstacle to a
resolution of
the Iran crisis is that both the
PMC and their critics have first to escape from their mental
prisons, without sustaining unbearable psychic damage in the
process.
From the beginning of the crisis, I have stressed that it is impossible to explain western, and especially European, behavior through conventional materialist and realist interpretations.
And as time has passed, my impression is that even those without intellectual alternatives to fall back on, have largely given up the attempt to do so.
Well, some cling, out of nostalgia and desperation, to the interpretation of the world I have just discussed:
But since the beginning, I have pointed to the ideological nature of the conflict, to the idea of Russia as the Anti-Europe or at least the Anti-Brussels, ostentatiously turning its back on the PMC ideology and stubbornly clinging to culture, history, society, patriotism and even religion.
As time has passed, this has become more and more evident:
This kind of thinking, of course, is inevitable if your world is essentially limited to three normative ideological propositions:
As always with such arguments, reality, in the form of economic and military strength, is not counted as a factor. And for as long as Europe (and to some extent the US) is condemned to maneuver within these three ideological propositions that constitute its world, it is by definition impossible for the conflict to be resolved.
By extension, anyone who suggests that the
solution might lie outside this rigid logical space must be a
Russian agent.
How else, for example, to explain the refusal of people to wear masks during the Covid 'pandemic' to avoid infecting their families, friends and colleagues?
There are no doubt sociopaths for whom personal comfort and convenience come before the lives of others, but one hopes there are not that many of them. In fact, the majority seemed to themselves be prisoners of a private world incorporating elements of fear and distrust of government, a willingness to embrace exciting conspiracy theories, and an undue fetishization of "my freedom" in all contexts, and over everything else.
Thus, it's OK for me to breath germs over other people, because anything contrary to that cannot be made coherent with the self-imposed propositions that make up my world.
For the sake of completeness, we should also mention examples of the opposite delusion, such as that some all-powerful international conspiracy wanted to kill as large a proportion of the world as possible, to enable its resources to last longer, and so both originated the disease and funded and promoted anti-masking movements.
Either way, there's nothing worse than being a
prisoner of abstract, normative propositions.
It's an interesting, if depressing, exercise to subject political speech and political writing to the same kind of analytical process : much of it simply vanishes on examination, like the froth from a Chai Tea Ginseng Soy Skinny Latte.
But unfortunately, empty phrases, confused thinking, non-sequiturs, simple mistakes and downright lies continue to dominate our political culture.
We take from them different ideas and propositions that we find emotionally satisfying, and then,
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