Parallel Barking Podcast: "Three Ivy League Presidents Versus Congress on Antisemitism"

 

 Episode description: Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT were questioned about rising antisemitism on college campuses at a House committee hearing on Tuesday, December 5th. The
biggest backlash stems from the question that asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the university code of conduct. At Tuesday’s hearing Harvard president Claudine Gay said it depended on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.” (AP).  While much of the discussion has focused on what was said--its text--what has been missed is any engagement with the collective belief that this context based discussion tmade plausible. Context provides a rationalizing veil for the translation of belief into action; it is a fundamental belief about the innocuousness of statements about exterminating Jews (in this case, and any other group in a different context) based on a belief system about the target of this contextualization that then drives a construction of plausibility about the effective innocuousness of the invitation.

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. 

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. *   *    *  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.  (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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