Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1977-1979.
Quick Thought(s) on (Political) Speech Today:
“The common sort of men,” wrote Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, “seldom speak insignificantly” (I.viii.27). Perhaps among Donald Trump’s more surprising achievements is proving Hobbes wrong. Today, the “common sort of men” often speak insignificantly.
By insignificant speech, Hobbes means a train of words without clear definitions or with contradictory definitions. Such are the words of “schoolmen”—especially Christian theologians (I.v.3). “Incorporeal body . . . , hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-now” are, for Hobbes, a train of insignificant words (I.v.14).
This “stuff,” the speech of academics, is an expression of madness, “too much appearing passion,” or drunk speech (I.vii.23). The speech of a drunkard is noise.
It is hardly controversial to assert that Trump’s repertoire includes speaking insignificantly. So, his manifest hostility toward prestigious universities (e.g., Harvard) may be an expression of envy. He wants to own insignificant speech.
The original objects of Hobbes’s critique, those we know nowadays as the “liberal elite,” surely agree with my analysis: Trump’s speech is all too often insignificant. What the liberal elite may find inconvenient is the idea that “common men” enjoy Trump’s meaningless speech. Jealousy?
What’s the contemporary appeal of meaningless speech? Three ideas:
- Academics/the elite have enjoyed the privilege of meaningless speech for decades—and they have looked down upon “common men” for just being too stupid to get it. Well, now it is the turn of “common men” to enjoy the privileges of speech sans the mathematics of reason. Revenge! Populism!
- Insignificant speech is just everyday life. Contemporary social experience is filled with drunken speech, meaningless trains of words: “Hi, how are you?” “Well, thank you.” “And you?” “I’m fine.” Think also of “bandwidth,” “circle back,” “deep dive,” “pivot,” etc. And I have not even touched upon the au courant language of faith. Such speech keeps things moving–like elevator music.
- It is also possible that Trump’s insignificant speech is a form of free association, a train of words without apparent or widely accepted meanings. So, it is unconscious speech: a welling-up of nature, the very thing from which the State was, according to Hobbes, created to save us. It is armor-piercing speech. In that case, Trump’s insignificant speech is our speech, too: another inconvenient truth.