I love this, but by looking at it synchronically, aren't you (at the low end) just producing a kind of series of conceptual maps of the kind Turner and Fauconnier talk about when they talk about "double scope conceptual blending" and cognitive frames? A "social" conceptual map?

Libertarian A holds a conceptual field that believes that government more often intrudes into everyday life than not, that taxation is a burden because it imposes on financial life, that gun regulation is a burden on freedom to protect families, and that labor laws are a burden on freedom to control the value of their labor.

Libertarian A also holds a conceptual field that believes that nonwhite people are inferior.

Libertarian A maintains a double-scope conceptual field which reinforces, then, the belief that affirmative action is among the worst of burdens against freedom. (It's double-scope in that two unrelated domains are connected.) This is a gross oversimplification of Gilles Fauconnier, http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~faucon/)

Some of these conceptual fields (either the originary domains or the blended spaces) become systematized and shared -- what Lakoff called "frames" (discussed in Don't Think of an Elephant and Moral Politics) -- "Government is a tough-love daddy" and "Government is a nurturing mother."

A map of all of the double-scope conceptual blends would be infinitely large -- 6 billion people with a nearly limitless power to make some connections between any aspect of thought [A train station: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough"].

A map of the available contemporary frames would be a map of the semantic space (and perhaps of the political languages?).

Aberrant blended conceptual spaces -- shared but not systematized into a "frame" -- would become even more interesting: when the Israeli military required military recruits to tour Yad Vashem (in hopes of building a sense of the imperative for the military service) developed a conceptual blend, maybe, that was aberrant to the intent. They developed sympathy for the Palestinians. (The mandatory tours were discontinued.)

I keep feeling like I should be saying "and ideology," somewhere in here, but not in any way that makes sense to me as a read this.

Davi Johnson's piece on the meme (Mapping the Meme: A Geographical Approach to Materialist Rhetorical Criticism, CCCS, March 2007) looks to theorize how we might map a term spatially in this way. Combined with the ideograph's temporal depth, her spatial perspective provides an interesting way to construct a matrix of the ways a term has been used through time and over space. Her case study is metrosexuality, but combined with the ideograph it has a lot of possibility.

Dear All,

I talk about "political languages" a bit in Founding Fictions, but ultimately I reject the idea in favor of a more all encompassing notion, a "political fiction." Maybe this will be useful:

The idea of a "political language" reflects the "rhetorical turn" outside of rhetorical studies; Pocock and Skinner (who are aligned with others in the "conceptual change" tradition in philosophy and political theory) ask for political theorists to examine the intellectual tradition or "language" within which any political theorist operates; to understand the tradition/language one should seek out the political theorists who have influenced the theory under scrutiny because those theories "prefigure" (to use Hayden White's term) the theory itself. Now, I agree that we should examine this aspect of the context of any political theory, but I think that we should also recognize that political theory is performed in countless ways daily and not just in political theory or by political theorists. In other words, a political language--as theorized by Pocock and Skinner--is a way to understand the elite discourses of political theorists by searching out their intellectual history, but is not meant to understand the performance of political theory outside of that very narrow space.

The concept of "political fiction" recognizes that political theory is a blend of poetic, rhetoric, and dialectic and that it is performed and sustained through both the mundane actions of the entire citizenry and by political theorists.

And, Jim, I'm not following what you've got here at all--perhaps there are too many asides for me to make sense of it?--but, what do you mean by "semantic space"? It is an intriguing coupling of terms, I'd like a clarificationization please!

xoxo

jen

Pocock, Skinner, Political Languages:

"As noted, Cambridge School historical contextualism has come to enjoy a
dominant position within the study of the history of political thought... Skinner and Pocock remain the only two figures that have attempted to provide their historical practice with comprehensive statements of their (quite distinct) interpretive philosophies.6 What is usually thought to define the Cambridge School is a commitment to a form of linguistic contextualism: the belief that political texts can only be understood correctly by locating them within their intellectual context and, in turn, that this intellectual context can only be properly understood in terms of the language available to individual authors. The key to understanding a text thus lies in understanding the language within which an author makes a particular statement: language is here understood simultaneously as a structural constraint (one that limits the actions of a particular author) and a resource for agency (one that provides the author with various available opportunities for action).7 This location of language as the source of both structure and agency contrasts sharply with the other methodological traditions that the Cambridge School has successfully usurped... Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, defend quite distinct (and not necessarily logically compatible) methodological approaches, with the former focusing on synchronic ‘speech acts’ and the latter on diachronic ‘languages’. See Pocock (1985) for his account
of the difference." --"Quentin Skinner's revised historical contextualism: a critique," Lamb, History of the Human Sciences 2009; 22; 51

Less scholarly:
"Pocock's "political languages" is the indispensable keystone of this historical revision. Defined as "idioms, rhetorics, specialised vocabularies and grammars" considered as "a single though multiplex community of discourse",[6] languages are uncovered (or discovered) in texts by historians who subsequently "learn" them in due course. The resultant familiarity produces a knowledge of how political thought can be stated in historically discovered "linguistic universes", and in exactly what manner all or parts of a text can be expressed.[7] As examples, Pocock has cited the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political languages of the "common law", "civil jurisprudence" and "classical republicanism", through which political writers such as James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke reached their rhetorical goals." --Wikipedoa