But he downplayed the impact of the magazine’s illustration.

“It’s a cartoon … and that’s why we’ve got the First Amendment,” Obama said. “And I think the American people are probably spending a little more time worrying about what’s happening with the banking system and the housing market, and what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a cartoon. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it.”

“I’ve seen and heard worse,” he said. “I do think that in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions about me instead. But that was their editorial judgment.”
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/15/lkl.obama/index.html#cnnSTCText

You’re right. I never meant this in a post-structuralist sense. As you know, I deal with clients all the time who don’t get the fact, on a gut level, that communication is not conveyance. The person who wants to share meaning must do with the interpreters in mind, and encode that meaning in such a way that the interpreters are likely to get it. I’ve had clients insist on spending a great deal of money on fancy media when I have been told by their employees that the semantic weight they put on fancy media is something close to “lie.”

Education, when done well, provides a cultural framework in which certain messages become better categorized, true, so I think you’re right about education.

Until you try to communicate with, say, a group of Tajiiks.

I’ve dealt elsewhere with the corrosive effect that everything since Structuralism has exerted on our ability to make meaning and I don’t have the time (or energy) to repeat all that here. And even if I did, I’d only put people to sleep.

But let me say this much. I certainly get how communication and the meaning-making process works. I’m aware that when I say or write something, what I intend isn’t always what people hear (or what their brains might make of what they hear). These are the realities of comm and I don’t think there’s any real argument about the process.

So in one sense, what I mean isn’t everything. However, what the speaker intends damned well matters, and it HAS to matter in a culture that has any interest whatsoever in making sense of itself. If I take the post-structuralists at their word and play the theory out to its logical conclusion, then I can literally take your reply to me and “interpret” it to mean this: “Wow, the Chicago Bears desperately need a quarterback this year. It’s a shame Madonna is fritzing the spanarkel.”

Let me repeat – I can do that LITERALLY. And you have nothing to say about it because what you think you meant hinges on your subjectivity which is a MYTH. The part of you that thinks you know what you said is a self-delusion.

This is theoretical backdrop. I doubt you mean your analysis here in anything like this radical a sense, but the critical underpinnings come from the same place.

Here, though, is the practical upshot. On one level you’re not only right, you’re incredibly right – it does me no good to be intellectually correct if I’m being flogged by my opponents, who are more concerned with the receiver end of the communication process. I’m worried about what I mean, dammit, while they’re more adept at leaving the audience in possession of what they want them to believe. Bad guys win, good lose, to put it mildly.

And again, I GET that. Further, I’m not suggesting that the forces of light, such as they are, should abandon the pursuit of victory (and all that it requires). Fight fire with flamethrowers, as I said before.

But this isn’t an either/or. Just as I’m not saying that what I mean is ALL that matters, it’s equally toxic to suggest that what the speaker intends doesn’t matter at all. If I buy that and live accordingly, then it all becomes a cynical, filthy race to the bottom. The only meaning that results is a lowest common denominator measure – how many people voted for A, how many people chose buy B.

Yeah, that’s the direction we’re headed, and it won’t come as any surprise to you when I argue that the solution is a long-term commitment to education. Solid critical skills make us better at interpreting what the speaker meant, which makes us better at replying productively. From every trip around the communication loop emerges a higher order understanding and the cumulative effect is smarter speakers, more adept listeners and a stronger culture.

Not everybody thinks about this issue in the macro, of course, but I suspect that everyone who’s in a successful marriage or relationship has seen it in the micro. When your partner says something, what happens when you willfully interpret it in a way that’s at odds with his or her intent?

The issue I’m skirting around has to do with interpretation. What I think you’re saying is that what you mean matters. I don’t believe that. I feel that what people interpret matters, since interpretation is what people will act on or not act on. What you mean is relevant only in your ability, or inability, to create the interpretation you want to create.

Hey, if you want to just convey your thoughts to a tiny sliver of the American population, then that’s fine with me. But don’t expect to get much done against those who are conveying their thoughts, effectively to a much larger population.

And don’t get bent out of shape when that much larger population occasionally misinterprets, or badly misinterprets, what you mean. After all, you’re not writing for them.

Brian: All I can say is that you had to have been very distracted. I know you, and if you’re paying attention there’s no way in hell that cover buffaloed you for even a microsecond.

If we had a genuinely educated population in the US about 99% of what makes the evening news right now would never make it into the news at all…..

I don’t subscribe to the New Yorker, nor do I read it, therefor I haven’t seen ANY cover in months. Only because of todays electronic media is this a national topic. Once it gets into a greater arena it can be described or used in any way the “new author” chooses. These “new authors” are often targeting a much different audience.

On my blog (shameless self promotion) I take the tact that Obama should simply play along with it. Lashing out like this will do little to help his standing with working class voters who already see him as an elitist. And the neo-cons who really believe he is The Manchurian Muslim will never be convinced otherwise –or at least they won’t stop slandering him with it.

Oh, and J.S.: learned everything by eight? I thought it was by kindergarten. Then again, we are learnt in the American educational system, ain’t we?

Bobby

Having lived in fly-over country pretty much all of my life, I would say that you have hit on something. While there are many intellectuals in fly-over country, I think it’s quite true that to be learned, thoughtful, intelligent, curious, skeptical but not cynical, open but not gullible, is to be thought (as you say) “unbalanced” by many. To many I have met, the only balanced people are those who know the truth of everything by the age of eight and never change their minds about anything.

Praise Jesus.