The Poetic Dodge

 

The Artful Dodger

One of the most important skills for the leader of a movement to develop is what I call the poetic dodge.  Human natural languages, such as English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and so on, are profoundly, and perhaps ineluctably, polysemous.  That is to say, there are ambiguities.  There is something farcical about humans: even if we try to specify exactly what we mean, still people will find a way to misinterpret us.  And the reverse is true, as well: even if we try as hard as we can to understand each other, the closer we get to that which is signified, the more it will slip away.  Even when both the speaker and the listener, the author and the reader, are operating on purely good faith, the mystery persists.  Nor does this gap only appear between people: even when we are alone, the gap is there.  I do not fully understand myself.  Neither do you.

If you use everyday vocabulary, precisely because these words are used every day, by so many different people, in so many different ways, your words will carry all kinds of potential meanings and connotations that you didn't intend, and which quite likely never even occurred to you.  Every one of these words has a vast, rich history, many of them going back centuries or millennia, acquiring all kinds of conceptual flotsam and jetsam along the way, until they are so crusted over with layers of sedimented fossils of meaning that no one can ever untangle them.  

On the other hand, suppose, for that very reason, that you choose to create brand new vocabulary, a specialized jargon of your own invention, which you imagine will be free of all this unwanted baggage, a clean slate upon which you can invent your own clear, accurate ideas: a freshly minted, precise, technical jargon.  Now you will have a whole bunch of words that are understood only by you.  If you try to explain what these words mean to other people, you will have to define them, using those old familiar words with all of their undesirable attributes, so those old unwanted meanings may sneak back in through the semiotic back door.  Worse, even if you succeed in converting an audience to your new vocabulary, they will become a kind of priesthood of initiates, an inner circle, with the in-group/out-group dynamics that is all-too frequent in human history, including all the interests, desires, and power politics inherent in such social structures - the reasons for both conveying, and obscuring, that which is being communicated. 

Rather than letting this be a frustration and an impenetrable impasse, some may choose to ride this wave ("vague" literally means "wave") and find out where it takes you.  If you write, or speak, in such a rich style that infinite interpretation and reinterpretation is possible, this will give you a double-power.  First, no enemy will be able to definitively critique your ideas, because they will not be certain that they understand them.  Second, all of your followers will be able to read whatever they like into your utterances, and so you will become the representative of their dreams.  

Karl Marx was a master of the poetic dodge.  No one ever knew what the hell he was talking about, and they still don't.  Those who claim that they do, are themselves masters of the poetic dodge.