What’s in a word?

My friend jono left a comment against an earlier post that demands attention. It relates to a question that puzzles me too. From my point of view the question is ‘Does the work of ‘intellectuals’ has any relevance in the real world?’ For example, does the outcome of a debate over the meaning of a word, in the end, have any impact on matters of war, peace and human suffering. He seems to say that the suffering is real, the theorising is not; and therefore, and therefore…

Anyhoo this is what jono said...

“Someone ought to comment...or perhaps there's some sort of analytical take on the pressure of blogs to react comments out of people being a form of violence itself - well if the re-defining of words can be seen as violence then the path is already greased up as hazardous.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the people who seem to discuss exactly what violence is etc seem to be the people most separated, at least in a physical sense, from it. Whilst the are huge personal psychological connections that are 'acted out' through the medium of academia its still very distant from actual violence.

The point of this is perhaps made best by example, take Rwanda. The quantity of print (and audio and celluloid) taken up on the matter (most of it remarkably misinformed or at best uninformed about the complex politics of the region) does seem incredibly distant from the actual acts of violence at a local level. For instance someone wounded or killed someone else - it happened at a point in time at a particular location and had personal consequences on the person (victim and perpetrator) their friends and relatives. Yet the vast bulk of the analysis is to do with international political analysis and policy not with real lives.

Thus you get these amusing but nevertheless pointless discussions about what violence actually is etc. Slap them on the face good and hard that should bring them round to their senses!”

Ok, point taken. But where does it leave us?

Let me quote Edward Said who, when asked “What has emboldened the imperialists today?” replied, inter alia, “I think it is also a failure of the intellectual class, with few exceptions here and there. There’s so much factionalism, so much sectarianism, so much petty squabbling over definitions and identities that people have lost sight of the important goal, as Aime Cesaire described it, the Rendezvous of Victory, where all peoples in search of freedom and emancipation and enlightenment gather.” (Culture and Resistance, 2003, p190)

I like this, I REALLY like this. He isn’t saying academia doesn’t matter, he’s saying it is BETRAYING THE ENLIGHTENMENT and all that that founding movement represented. For good or bad, intellectuals are influential. Every political doctrine has intellectual godfathers and pet theorists, doesn’t it? Nazism & Nietzsche. Marxism & Hegel. Neo-conservatism & Leo Strauss (who he? Ed). Don’t bad ideas feed bad policies and breed bad outcomes, if not challenged and fought against?

On the other point WORDS DO MATTER. The US Supreme Court is an arena for fighting over the meaning of words. The Geneva Conventions (which now look like the high water mark of civilization rather than its base line) was avoided for a long time because of an interpretation of the word ‘international’ perpetuated by Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington, until it reached the Supreme Court. Now don’t say that doesn’t matter.

See here for discussion of the implications of the Hamdan / Geneva Convention case at Scotusblog.
See here for discussion about David Addington at Opinio Juris.

Class again tomorrow.