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Reality is not given, not humanly existent, indepen- dent of language and towards which language stands as a pale refraction. Rather reality is brought into existence, is produced, by communication: that is, by the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms. , . . reality is not there to discover in any significant detail. (1975, p. 12)

The point to be made is this: the basic symbolist insight does require that we seek to explicate the symbolic meaning of political discourse, but it does not necessarily require that we abandon our insistence that, among other things, such discourse make transparent the material conditions to which it refers. Indeed, a major interest of the reificationist position is estimating how symbolic forms “relate to empirical facts” (although Hart does not specify the exact status of these “facts”). And, of course, the basic symbolist insight need not undermine the ethical commitments in which most evaluations are grounded, such as beliefs that political leaders should be responsible for (if not always the authors of) their public statements and should express worthwhile values. Thus, because of the divergence in symbolist conceptions, evaluative concerns offer no basis for either ac- cepting or rejecting the symbolist insight.

Hart’s well-argued essay may spark the sort of valuable controversy that prompts us to reflect upon our own work by problematizing that which we routinely take for granted. If this process is to be useful, i t is important that we accurately and clearly understand the issues involved. My com- ments have been directed toward that end.

REFERENCES

CAREY. J . W . A cultural approach to communication. Corn- minication, 1975. 2. 1-22.

CASSIRER. E. Essaj) on man. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.

COMBS, J.E. Dimensions of political drama. Santa Monica, Calif.: Goodyear, 1980.

EDELMAN. M. Politics as symbolic action. Chicago: Mar- kham, 1971.

GUNNELL, J.G. Political inquiry and the concept of action: A phenomenological analysis. In M. Natanson (Ed.), Phenornenology and the social sciences (vol. 2). Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

NIMMO. D. Political cornmunicarion and public opinion in America. Santa Monica, Calif.: Goodyear, 1978.

NIMMO, D., & SAVAGE, R.L. Candidates and heir images. Santa Monica, Calif.: Goodyear, 1976.

SWANSON, D.L. The role of theory in the studyof presiden- tial campaign communication. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Speech Communication Association, New York. 1980.

A Response to Hart’s Commentary

Dan Nimmo

We need not dwell on the matter, but as readers of the Hart essay have undoubtedly noted there is a gap between what the piece purports to discuss and its actual content. It is a much narrower “com- mentary on popular assumptions about political communication” than either the title or introduc- tion suggests. “Popular,” includes not those

Dan Nimmo (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, 1962) is professor in the Department of Political Science and College of Commu- nications, University of Tennessee. Knoxville, Tenn. 37996- 0410.

“who study contemporary political messages” in a systematic fashion, nor even a good portion of “the nation’s media.” Rather, the assumptions in question derive from a relatively small segment of popular journalism. “Political communication” translates to “political discourse,” a concept whose specification (Kaplan, 1946) is at best only partial. So characterized, i.e., “the public utter- ances of elected governmental leaders and the re- marks made about them by the nation’s media,” the ensuing discussion of political communication scarcely does justice to the diverse, multifaceted,

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and pluralist field that has evolved since the 1950s (Deutsch, 1963; Fagan, 1966; Edelstein, 1974; Chaffee, 1975; Kraus & Davis, 1976; Nimmo, 1978; Meadow, 1980; Nimmo & Sanders, 1981). Finally, without suggesting that yet another can of worms be opened, the “frankly phenomenologi- cal” philosophical perspective falls short of what many proponents of that viewpoint would expect.

So much for what the Hart commentary alleges to be but is not. What then is it? Basically it is a critique of selected assumptions (designated popular but just how popular one cannot say) about selected types of political discourse followed by selected propositions of an alternative perspective. This response to Hart consists of a disagreement with the general critique of assumptions, accep- tance of the “reificationist” perspective as a fait accompli, and resurrection of an alternative to an alternative.

SELECTED ASSUMPTIONS

Certainly the issue-image distinction that the Hart commentary excoriates misleads, over- simplifies, and obscures more than it clarifies. It is a distinction that long ago outlived its analytical convenience. That, however, is the point. Students of political communication, or even of political discourse, have recognized the “isomorphism of issue and image” for some time. They have also recognized that issues are embodied and that so characterized images serve voters just as well, even better, than the “issues” that early voting studies failed to discover. Perhaps such isomorph- ism was ignored in the variable analysis of the first generation of voting studies, but it is certainly taken seriously by contemporary constructivists (Swanson, 1981), small-sample researchers (Rarick, Duncan, Lee, & Porter, 1977; Cragan & Shields, 1981), and politicians and their handlers (Moore & Fraser, 1977; Wirthlin, Breglio, & Beal, 1980). However, since as Hart notes, “the issue is always the image,” this argues persuasively for precisely the efforts at content analysis of images in the news media currently undertaken (Robinson, 1981).

If the issue-image dichotomy is no longer as current in observations of political messages as the Hart commentary suggests, as much may also be said about the failure of observers (popular and not-so-popular scholarly) to account for politicians as public people. What is argued is not that politi- cians are public people but how a public person emerges through political discourse. To label the wedding of person and message in public discourse a “fiction” errs every bit as much as to assume the linkage is “fact.” If the writing of current scholars is to be examined totally, as indeed it must in any critique of presumed assumptions they make about political discourse, then the ‘‘suitably complex ways” of political utterances Hart urges the scholar to examine are being examined (cf. Rarick et al., 1977; Combs, 1980).

Political myths cut both ways-they may make life other than “hopelessly colorless, a conglomer- ation of failed ambitions and inarticulate goals” (Hart) or they may delude as well as satisfy, mes- merize as well as goad, enslave as well as liberate (Nimmo & Combs, 1980). A critique of Ellul’s viewpoint is pertinent. But Ellul’s view about the nature of political illusion (which is not necessarily the same phenomenon as political myth at all) is not the representative view, let alone the popular one, of the role of myth in politics. As Tudor’s ex- cellent account reveals (1972), there is a vast and rich tradition in the study of myths in politics that suggests, contrary to arguing that political com- munication should be dispensed with altogether, all communication should be examined for its po- tential political action and evaluated on its own merits, message by message.

But myths are conveyed in political language and “it is possible to reason that words are, after all, just words” (Hart). Have “literalists” gone overboard, i.e., have they made political talk, which is but one dimension of “communicative interchange,” the whole of the sphere of public affairs? One suspects not. To be sure, Murray Edelman has been a perceptive expositor of the view that political symbols are intricately interwo- ven in the building of mass arousal and quiescence. But two things need be noted. First, Edelman has

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always been careful to point out that language does not constitute the whole of politics; there is, he wrote in his seminal volume (1964, p. 21) an “interplay in politics among acts, actors, settings, language, and masses.” His subsequent efforts to explore how the meanings of politics emerge (in part) through language have been anything but literalist. Second, the writings of Edwin Newman or William Safire are simply not representative of what students of political language ‘‘assume” (cf. Arnold, 1935; Gusfield, 1966; Mueller, 1973; Grabex, 1976).

ALTERNATIVES

The final popular assumption receiving Hart’s critique is that political discourse fails to bridge gaps in social understanding. One can doubt that this assumption is any more widely shared than those regarding issue-image distinctions, private- public personae, myths, or talk. But stipulate that it is, more importantly, that Hart is correct that “ordinary notions of shared knowledge” no longer serve us well (which they obviously do not). Is the proposed reificationist perspective an acceptable alternative? If being “in-place” (to employ Rea- ganesque jargon) is a guiding standard, then the answer is affirmative. There is certainly much in the current study of political communication (Nimmo & Sanders, 1981) that parallels reificationist assumptions: political communication is probabilistic in a world of human images and perceptions; public acceptance is not always bad, indeed should be taken seriously; myth is impor- tant to politics and to explaining politics; political talk is more than the literal content of things; and political communication helps us sublimate pas- sions, even resorts to violence (Leiserson, 1958). In short, “by any other name” (which other names it has) the reificationist alternative is acceptable because it is.

But is what is all that acceptable? It is not. The reason lies in the fact that the study of political communication is beginning to go the way of many another subfield in the study of politics; i.e., a sub- stantive activity is becoming little more than an ad-

jective. Following the behavioral redefinition of political science in the 1940s and 1950s, a plethora of new subfields emerged-political behavior, po- litical sociology, political socialization, political psychology, etc. Political communication was yet another. This is no indictment against either the behavioral movement nor such diversification. But somewhere along the way we have lost sight of the fact that politics-not economics, socialization, the psyche, communication, or whatever-is the subject of study, not the adjectival modifer of some area of human conduct more fundamental, more basic, more “real.”

In a perceptive essay on Niccolo Machiavelli first written in 1958, Gennaro Sasso has written, “Politics is, beyond question, an autonomous re- ality, in the sense that nothing extraneous or con- trary to its logic can pretend to control it” (Sasso, 1977, pp. 206-216). If we take that remark seri- ously, a remark based obviously not upon the “darkly Machiavellian” Machiavelli but upon a close reading of Machiavelli the astute analyst of political communication as politics, then politics has an action, a character, a set of reasons, a “re- ality” of its own. To paraphrase Pascal, politics has reasons that reason cannot know. To under- stand politics, or more suitably political discourse, we must first come to grips with the autonomous, self-sustaining logic of politics. It is that logic which offers a standard-dher than popular (the politician’s, journalist’s, or public’s)-for analyzing political discourse.

One characterization of “logical” is the dictio- nary definition: “that in accordance with infer- ences reasonably drawn from events or cir- cumstances. ” Political logic derives from the dynamics of political life; i.e., from the conse- quences of saying and doing things in specific situ- ations and times. The test of “reasonable” is pragmatic (consequences) and phenomenal (the sense it makes to political actors involved). Politi- cal logic is a logic-in-use and not merely a recon- structed logic, a subject language and not merely an observation language.

This is not the place to attempt to spell out what the “logic of politics” entails. Nor is there any

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claim here that this is what Hart should have ac- complished. But i t does seem that this is at the core of much of the Hart commentary; i.e., that those who study political discourse are missing the point. There is a logic (usage, meaning, format, style, grammar, etc.) to political discourse that is more basic, more real to its users than yet realized by its observers. This is not to say that there is an essence to politics and political discourse that lies behind and determines political reality. Rather it is the shifting essentials that, day in and day out, add up to the logic of political action. Nor is this all but common sense, for it is the tested, pragmatic acts of political persons and not every person.

Obviously there is nothing new in this thought. It is consistent with the injunction by Dewey and Bentley (1949) that logic is not an abstract, blood- less exercise remote from the activities of real peo- ple. Rather logic is the intelligence used to cope in actual situations, specific to time and place, pro- viding critical procedures for appraisal by people engaged in the dynamics of action that may-if they pass the pragmatic test-be generalized to other times and places. In founding an alternative from which to understand public discourse, and more generally political communication, taking the autonomy of politics seriously may well be a good place to start. It is at least as worthy an assumption as the five that Hart so correctly implies should have been put to rest, as they have been. Until we do take politics seriously, however, we must resign ourselves to an alternative already too much with us. If that be the case, reificationists of all disci- plines unite; you have nothing to lose but your obscure synonyms!

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