Is anyone buying the slogans? Flickr/Matt. Some rights reserved.Today, across the western world, politicians are widely distrusted and even despised. The distance between people and their representatives in government is broad and many are simply turning away. Much ink has been spilt in trying to explain this phenomenon, but one issue that is greatly under-studied is the role of language. Many regard language and communication as little more than a veneer on the true substance of politics: the realms of policy and ideology. I want to argue here, however, that language lies alongside these two as part of the fundamentals of politics and, more urgently, to the functioning of democracy.
In the late nineteenth century, the academic Ferdinand de Saussure revolutionised the study of linguistics, giving it a central role in our understanding of the social world. He suggested that language is characterised by an important schismatic relationship between the “signifier”, the collection of sounds or characters which form a word or sign and the “signified”, the concept or object which appears in the mind as a result. Saussure claimed that this relationship is not fixed, but formed as the result of social interaction. As an everyday example, mentioning the word “football” would conjure up different concepts depending on one’s cultural surroundings, say in Europe versus the United States. The arbitrary and potentially contestable nature of “signs”, in this sense, makes the formation of language and meaning itself something that is political.
Theorists have taken this insight in interesting directions since. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have argued that politics is frequently shaped by language. Here, “free-floating signifiers”, or words that can be imbued with a different meanings, are the site of political contest, crucial for asserting ideological dominance. Thus, the term “freedom” was employed in the 20th century in a wide range of emancipatory struggles like the civil rights movement, but later became a clarion call for conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, who preached individual self-realisation in the face of government interference.
