Context and the Discourse of Discourse: UPenn and Harvard Presidents Re-Imagine the Meaning of their Speech-Acts as the Relevant Context Changes

 

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I have written a little about the most remarkable testimony, followed by an even more remarkable colloquy, between high level functionaries of the leading forces of American Academic communities (all with deep ties to elite functionaries among the leading forces of other critical governance communities in the United States),  and members of the U.S.  House of Representatives (Contextually Relevant Discourse: Text of Statements Delivered by the Presidents of Penn, MIT, and Harvard for the U.S. House of Representatives Hearing-- "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism").

What was most remarkable about those performances, was the exposition of a quite interesting discursive positioning advanced by the University Presidents. That positioning, which I call "contextually relevant discourse" appears to posit that words only matter when they matter to those functionaries presiding over structures of discursive expectations.  Those expectations of speech and speech acts, then, render words and other performative manifestations of meaning, a meaning that can be assumed to fall within what is expected, approved, tolerated, or embraced, by those with the power to control place, time, and manner rules for such discursive performances. 

Pix Credit here (one of the first renderings of Ouroboros)

Performing meaning, then, is quite contextually relevant. And in the context of inviting individuals to consider the value and positive qualities of engaging in the genocide of Jews, that context provides a way of taking the sting out of that invitation, rendering it merely an expression of something else. The clear semiotics of that journey from invitation to polite, if robust and "symbolic", discourse, is, in a way, quite breathtaking. And its possibilities in other contexts, when judged to be similar by those given the authority to render such judgments and impose such meaning, quite broad. But for the moment such possibilities remain semiotically (that is in their power to impose public or communal meaning) locked within their potentials--except for the centering of context as the key to unlocking and managing meaning at a communal level. Context, then, becomes the core around which meaning making is to be undertaken among those who mean to control its content. Context is the object (the facts around which meaning can be informed); the objectivity of context then is signified by the application of presumptions and modes of translating facts to objects within a rationalized system of understanding the world; and thus signified, context provides the means of investing its text and performance with collective meaning. And yet what also appears  is a power of belief to shape context shaping meaning, then reinforcing belief. That is the wheel that these functionaries (and their collectives) mean to strategically turn.

These dialectics were most visible since the testimony and colloquy before the House of Representatives.  It appears that the greater context of public (or at least well reported elite reaction) has produced a context in which the meaning conveyed during the testimony has evaporated in favor of another.

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Facing heavy criticism, the University of Pennsylvania’s president walked back some of her remarks given earlier this week at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, saying she should have gone further to condemn hate against Jewish students. . . .In a statement posted Wednesday by Harvard on X, formerly Twitter, Gay condemned calls for violence against Jewish students. “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account,” Gay wrote Wednesday. White House spokesman Andrew Bates issued a statement Wednesday criticizing Gay, Magill and Kornbluth’s responses for not going far enough to condemn antisemitism on campuses.(Under fire, Penn and Harvard’s presidents walk back their comments about antisemitism and genocide: ‘It’s evil, plain and simple’; see also here, and here). 

The President of MIT remains unmoved--or at least still silent--the MIT President's testimony and answers provided continue to speak for themselves; that is they remain contextually relevant discourse. The semiotic dynamism of this quite remarkable and swift shift suggests the continued power of context. At the same time, the power of context remains untouched.  What remains, then, for discourse, are the inevitable battles over context, and with it, the ways in which speech can be signified in ways that accord with the manner in which people are encouraged to see and manifest  that "sight" in the world whose meaning is contextually relevant. The dialectics of the expression of meaning and belief remain untouched at the level of social relations except through the openings that context provides for nudging through narrative. Context changes meaning; it does not change belief. But belief can change context; which can then change meaning. The wheel turns; and it is not quite done here.