I’ve long been a skeptic about simplistic attempts to talk about “framing” in political and social rhetoric. The basic concept has some sociolinguistic soundness to it, going back to Erving Goffman’s work but also ultimately to any kind of humanistic interpretation of texts that sees the choice of particular words, phrases, forms and genres as having a meaningful impact on readers beyond the communicative content of spoken or written language. At its deepest level, this is what “rhetoric” means, and why rhetoric itself has been a subject of philosophical and ethical debate for thousands of years, why some people desperately search for language that is unadorned, reduced to nothing more than communication of information while others delight in the way the protean nature of language, in how it can encompass the visible and invisible of social relations, cognition, history, emotion, all that being human can entail.
So yes, of course how politicians and judges and activists speak is consequential, and a shift in the rhetorical and metaphorical framings they use can make a difference in how they mobilize people and create outcomes within various systems and institutions. My problem is with folks like George Lakoff and the appeal they have to a particular constituency of technocrats, Democratic Party leaders, consultants and so on. Lakoff has long argued that the choice of metaphorical frames is the singular determinative political act, and that the Democrats keep being rocked back on their political heels because they are too ready to accept right-wing frames.
There’s something to this point, surely, but it has the same problem as “nudging” and other kinds of neo-behavioralist temptations that invite elites to think of themselves as masterfully detached from history and materiality, able to make selections of strategies and tactics from a menu of options that will permit them to move everyone else to the proper squares on the chessboard.
Lakoff’s concept of “embodied mind”, like other neo-behavioralist ideas, proposes that frames and metaphors work for reasons that are rooted in the essential or material properties of the brain, body and world. (As opposed, say, to the proposition that language appeals to some higher faculty of reasoning.) But metaphors are also historical. That is to say, they are about accumulated intertextuality (writing referencing writing referencing writing to create densely repeated tropes, motifs, phrases, etc.), about accumulated experiences that layer into individual and collective life to create referents and understandings that few people can consciously attribute to a specific historical moment or event. This layering isn’t adaptive in the evolutionary sense, determined by some underlying cognitive fitness landscape or some kind of discriminate reason. It’s arbitrary: some words, metaphors, narratives, events seep into shared frames of reference in accidental or serendipitous ways; some get there because huge commercial enterprises spend massive resources getting them there; some because there’s constant low-level social labor expended on forming shared references.
Which is why it’s not as easy as “pick the right frame off a menu and achieve the political outcomes you’re seeking”. If it were that easy, it would be equally easy to write a best-selling novel at will or write the #1 song. Even people intensely interested in words and language and intensely practiced in their use don’t get to step out of the tumultuous floods of meaning and experience that shape how we communicate and how we are heard or interpreted in our communications.
Trump may or may not be masterfully intentional in his use of language or framing devices as an individual, but consciously or otherwise, he’s tuned into a powerful communicative channel. That power precedes him, however, and even if his framing has changed the shape and contours of that channel, the histories and subjectivities that flow through it constrain what can be said or done within that space. (Witness how Trump himself has been shouted down on occasion since 2020 when he’s tried to tell his crowds that they should consider being vaccinated.)
The role played by a choice of words and metaphors is easiest to grasp in highly constrained, specific, language-centered contexts. An example is in the news this week: Bruce Schroeder, the judge overseeing Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial for homicide, has ruled that prosecutors cannot call the men that Rittenhouse is accused of killing “victims”, but that the defense attorneys may refer to those men as “looters”, “rioters” or “arsonists”.
It is right to be both astonished and infuriated by this nonsensical intervention. The judge’s reasoning is that to call the dead and wounded “victims” is to presume Rittenhouse’s guilt in advance of the trial intended to determine that. But the dead and wounded have had no judicial determination that they were guilty of looting, rioting or arson.
It’s true that in the previous nights of demonstrations in Kenosha, there was damage to property and fires were set. But the point of insisting that you have to have a judicial finding in order to use particular words to characterize individuals surely ought to go in all directions if it is a constraint on the language that attorneys in the courtroom can use.
There are things that can be said about the two dead men and the wounded man that are neither “victim” nor “looter, rioter and arsonist”. Protester seems apt: everyone agrees they were there to protest. That might be a word for Rittenhouse, too: he was there to protest the protesters. If the people shot by Rittenhouse were rioters simply by their presence, then surely Rittenhouse was also a rioter: an unauthorized armed man acting to create even more public disorder.
There are actions that seem relatively concrete: the first dead man threw a plastic bag at Rittenhouse and tried to disarm him. At which point Rittenhouse killed him. The second man tried to swing a skateboard at Rittenhouse. At which point Rittenhouse killed him. The third man, a trained paramedic who brought medical supplies to help if anyone was injured and who also brought his gun (as a licensed concealed-carry gun owner is allowed) was seriously wounded by the second man was killed. Rittenhouse and his lawyers concede also that Rittenhouse did not have a legal right to carry the gun he was carrying, as he was only 17 at the time. There are some words for that, too.
The skirmishing between two legal teams—and the judge’s transparently gross favoritism towards one side—are a good example of an attempt to mobilize two competing rhetorical frames to secure a concrete deliberative outcome (a verdict from the jury). In the wider culture war over the case, those frames reverberate further: the three men (I at least will choose “victims” as a reasonable word) are being described as citizens exercising their democratic rights to protest injustice and police violence by one side and as antifa madmen by the other. Rittenhouse is being described as a murderous, sectarian extremist by one side and as a patriot acting in defense of liberty and order by the other. And off to the margins of both campaigns, there are likely other interpretative frames entirely, where Rittenhouse’s main attributes are simply his youthful stupidity and gullibility, where the protests and the trial alike have been distractions from the real business of changing Kenosha, or where the whole wretched thing is about American masculinity and its gun obsession.
In the court, there are a small number of parties struggling over the framing rhetoric—and even in this microsociology, the jury are going to be active participants in unpacking and interpreting the rhetorical moves being made—they are not unaware masses who get pushed simplistically one way or the other by cunning masters of language. The crudity of the judge’s moves may end up perversely securing an outcome other than the one he’s trying to create. That’s the problem with frames at the smallest scale up to the largest: language and meaning are slippery things. Maybe if you get Kyle Rittenhouse off the hook by remaking his victims into rioters (framing them in a very different sense of the word) you end up verifying and intensifying what is already said about the judicial system’s inability to produce justice. You win a small struggle over words and lose a bigger one; you block one metaphor and create a completely new one. Maybe you make “Kyle Rittenhouse” a memorable key to a moment, a meaning, a change that’s got to come.
Think of the way other trials and their struggles over language now provide metaphorical foundations for current reference and meaning: John Scopes, Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, the Black Sox, Sacco-Vanzetti, Lizzie Borden. No one gets to build those houses of meaning and metaphor according to a master blueprint of their own drafting—and often they are not the exclusive property of any cause, purpose or instrumental aim. Or if they are, it’s often not what the principal participants in a trial or other event might have thought they were saying and doing. We are all of us carpenters, not architects: we build with the lumber and materials on-site, extending vast and sprawling structures that long precede us to uncertain and ungainly ends.
Image credit: "George Lakoff" by B.G. Johnson is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0