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Monday, July 18, 2005

THE AGONY OF HYPOCOGNITION

Andrew Sullivan has some fun with the linguistic pretensions on view in the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s profile of George Lakoff and his ideas for the Democratic party about “framing” their message differently.

Lakoff tells the reporter that the party “suffers from ‘hypocognition,’ or a lack of ideas.” Sullivan calls hypocognition “my favorite new word,” and notes that it’s “coined by ‘framer’ ‘expert,’ George Lakoff. It means ‘lacking ideas.’ As bullshit goes, it’s pretty good.”



In a very quick Google study (UD can’t futz with jargon too long without getting jumpy), I find that the word means all sorts of different things. A guy writing about “corporate colonialism” says

Hypocognition results when a term is used to conjure up all-positive images to prevent us from understanding what is really going on. For example, hypocognition makes it hard for the public to believe there can be anything wrong with “globalism” or “free trade,” which sound like the apple pie and motherhood of the 21st century.


Anthropologists use it to mean something else again, as do dermatologists.




What strikes me most about the Lakoffian view of the world, as described in the article, is its utter rejection of the possibility that we might - to some modest extent - be rational autonomous agents, capable of forging and defending our own positions, and capable of independently changing our positions as well. The first thing the Democrats need to understand, according to Lakoff, is that they

have been wrong to assume that people are rational actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says, cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds, and if the facts don't fit the frame, our brains simply reject them. Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be "activated" by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown at us.


The combination here of pseudo-empiricism (Science has proved we’re all programmed! Activate the frames!) and contempt for the idea of intellectual agency is unlikely to generate models of discourse that your typical American will find appealing, as Marc Cooper points out in an article in The Nation, from which the New York Times writer quotes:

"Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, [Lakoff’s book,] Don't Think of an Elephant! is a feel-good, self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can't believe how their common-sense message has been misunderstood by eternally deceived masses," Cooper wrote. In Lakoff's view, he continued, American voters are "redneck, chain-smoking, baby-slapping Christers desperately in need of some gender-free nurturing and political counseling by organic-gardening enthusiasts from Berkeley."