Language, legitimacy and Louise Mensch

One of the issues that comes across when reading about the practical use of language, or its use in social settings, is how much relies on the legitimacy of the speaker, compared to the actual words spoken (or written, tweeted etc). The idea of performativity, which I've written about before, has some of its roots in Austin's How To Do Things With Words. Austin was interested in the way that some speech act achieve something through their being spoken. For example saying "I'll promise I'll be there at 6.00pm" achieves the act of making a promise.

He explored the question of when speech acts like this were successful and when they were not. Austin gave the example of naming a ship. I could smash a bottle of champagne on the side of a ship and say "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth" but because I don't meet some of the 'rules of the game' for ship-naming (I'm not a member of the royal family or whatever) the act would not be performed. This is even though, on the surface of it, I have met the requirements of performing the act.

As I understand it, Bourdieu, whose book I am reading currently, says that Austin gets things wrong by looking for what allows words to perform actions in language itself (and its use). Instead he argues that the words only work because we have bought into the institutions that allow Act X to be performed by Representative Y, and thus make the ship-naming, or whatever, a successful act. (He also writes a lot of good about how the rules of the game in different types of speaking as undertaken by people from different social classes work, and how this leads people from one group to be silent or clumsy when speaking in a situation governed by the rules of another group. But that's for another day).

I find Bourdieu's take on things pretty convincing, which leads me on, obviously, to Louise Mensch on Twitter. There's something a bit jarring about her tweeting about UK politics, and I think that this is bound up with the issue of legitimacy. A UK MP tweeting about UK politics is entirely normal. Because they are the specialist in that particular field their tweets are entirely legitimate, and what's more they are invested with more power because we consider that they know the rules of their game better than we do. (Note that a lot of political commentary is concerned with what a particular form of words really means, or what impact it will really have, and this is divined by those who 'know the rules'.) 

Of course politics is also participative. Sometimes an ordinary punter can say/tweet something that transcends the rules of the game in the political field, and appears very powerful through doing so. We are reminded, briefly, that politics isn't all about who's up/who's down and 'what does X mean for Y', it's also about politicians taking our views into account and shaping policy accordingly.

But what about Louise Mensch? She has been an MP, but for a very brief period. She did not have a political career before, and may not have one in future, and she no longer resides in the country about which she makes her political commentary. I think these factors combine to corrode her legitimacy to speak as a political expert. Yet equally she is not an ordinary member of the public. She cannot, as it were, 'speak truth to power' as only recently she has been one of the faces of power. What's more, as an employee of News International she has a public voice in our media which is not available to ordinary citizens who reside in the UK. So it what capacity does she now speak?

I think that we must consider that whatever legitimacy she has now comes from celebrity, rather than politics. She was quite well known as an author before becoming an MP (and spent more time in that field), and her public recognition increased once she was elected and, in particular, sat on the DCMS committee investigating phone-hacking undertaken by the company which now pays her as a columnist. So, in a way, she has benefited from the circular nature of modern celebrity whereby one can be famous, and feature in the media, by nature of having been in the media previously and therefore considered famous. In addition, her husband is well-known in the music industry. In combination, then, I wonder if the legitimacy she now has to speak is comparable to someone like, say, Sharon Osborne? And perhaps we should assess her contributions to UK politics taking account of this.


NB. I am taking the p***           

I'm feeling brain dead

So in lieu of writing summink myself, here's a nice bit from the preface to a short primer (so really the most basic, simpleton's précised version of his ideas possible!) on Pierre Bourdieu that I bought because of this post.

[L]inguistic and cultural production, despite what they might claim to be, are not concerned with truth or reason (or the sublime, or beauty) . What is at stake is primarily belief, the consecration of utterances as legitimate and/or true. The criterian of argumentation of proof that are invoked during this process are arbitrary - defined within and by the field in question - and only apparently disinterested. The legitimation of utterances is a product of the power, authority and reputation of their author(s) in the field in question. This epistemic power is both means and end in the competitive struggles - analogised by Bourdieu as games - which characterise any field, and is constructed using a range of capitals: economic, cultural, linguistic, symbolic and social. These varied forms of capital are similarly means and ends in strategies that carry forward the pursuit of distinction within the field.

I'm only about a third of the way through this, but it clearly looks like it will get into the issue that I briefly blogged very briefly about (a bit more here) last year - the legitimation of ideas.

Brace yourself, cos this goes deep

Googling around for info on the legitimation of ideas, I came across a paper on the Challenger shuttle disaster which looks like it might be an interesting read. Here's a chunk of text from the paper about how ideas come to be accepted -

"Analogy in combination with the social mechanisms identified here—professional legitimacy, conversation, technologies, time, networks, social support—seem to be ingredients fundamental to the diffusion of expert knowledge. Scholars interested in the production of knowledge and the diffusion of ideas have tended to approached the problem one of two ways: reputation or content fit (Camic 1992; McLaughlin 1998). The reputational perspective accounts for the rise and fall of ideas based on historical and cultural context, geography and national traditions, institutional, organizational, and network arrangements, or individual characteristics of the author and scholarly life. This case affirms the reputational model’s findings about institutional arrangements and networks, adding to it by emphasizing the actor-network association (Latour 1987, 1988) and by suggesting that technologies of dissemination might be usefully incorporated into the study of knowledge production, regardless of type of knowledge or historic period. The second approach has explained the acceptance or failure of an idea by its content. Camic, discussing the role of the content-fit model in a theorist’s selection of intellectual predecessors, implicitly suggests analogy: “The relationship exists chiefly because of the fit between the arguments, concepts, themes, materials, orientations, or methods of certain earlier figures and some aspect(s) of the work of the thinker under study” (1992, p. 423). The fit with the content of an idea is affirmed by the empirical analogies that enabled the theory of the Challenger accident to travel to the Columbia tragedy. These analogies and the structural equivalences between the two problems suggest that the form of an idea or theory in relation to its application to other empirical situations may also be significant in the legitimation of ideas, their acceptance or rejection and dissemination."

The paper is NASA Revisited: Theory, Analogy, and Public Sociology by Diane Vaughan.

Title hat-tip: Mike Skinner

Legitimation

This is a random request for info. Has anyone read anything anywhere about the process of legitimation of ideas? It is something that a) I find really interesting and b) think the Left could have a look at in terms of being more effective in getting it's arguments across.

Reading and Googling around I've come across some stuff by Jurgen Habermas, but this seems primarily about the legitimation of power - and potential crisis in its legitimation, rather than the legitimation of ideas (though obviously the two are linked).

Any ideas?