Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

We propose an ‘Author Meets Critics’ panel on Nomi Claire Lazar’s new book Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time (Yale UP, 2019).

Lazar argues that the meaning of a political event is perceived not just through its substantive character, but also its position in a constructed grand temporal arc or ‘temporal rhetorical frame.’ Political leaders construct these frames by carefully selecting a sequence of past events, the shape of which creates a familiar narrative pattern. All knowledge of the future rests on the recognition of patterns, and the assumption that these will continue on in the same way. Drawing out a familiar temporal pattern that arcs back toward a (sometimes imagined) past, we instinctively look forward along the same arc, and make assumptions about what the future will hold. By constructing an event-sequence that draws out a ‘conception of the flow of time,’ whether progressive, eschatological, grand cyclic, etc, a political leader can tell - and sell - the future. Is this moment a crisis in a pattern of cyclical rise and fall? Is this an event that marks the way along an anyway-assured path of progress or decline? Is it the fulfillment of a promised station on the road to an imminent end and subsequent rebirth? Is it simply a reiteration, a continual repetition with the power to stall or stop time, the means to an eternal present?

Lazar argues that these practices of temporal-rhetorical framing are a tactic in the toolbox of dynamic strategies of political legitimation and delegitimation. This claim is supported by the frequent conjunction of temporal rhetoric with periods of innovation or upheaval: in speeches, constitutional texts, and even in practices of calendar reform which have historically and cross-culturally accompanied regime change with startling frequency. In the book, Lazar develops a ‘two-well theory of legitimacy that explains how this tactic works within general strategies of legitimation, delegitimation, and relegitimation.

Drawing on themes from the book, Lazar will open the panel with a short piece that postulates how temporal-rhetorical framing works in the rhetoric of populist leaders, such as Viktor Orban and Donald Trump. Populism thrives where the future seems uncertain and temporal-rhetorical framing can create that uncertainty, alongside the promise of new certainty. Since any appearance of future certainty relies on the recognition of patterns and the assumption that they will continue on in the same way, beliefs about the future can be created and disrupted by drawing attention away from a prevailing pattern toward an alternative temporal-rhetorical frame. Where the meaning of an event is dependent on its place in time, what seemed certain can be rendered uncertain, what seemed reasonable can be rendered mortally threatening, and what seems improbable can be made to seem inevitable. Populist leaders, Lazar will argue, use this rhetorical tactic to unsettle future expectations and replace them with charismatic narratives of heroic grand cyclic rise.

The panel, which will be chaired by Yale’s Steven Smith, will feature scholars such as NYU’s Rahul Sagar who study normativity in empirical politics, and are associated with the new realism or problem-based political theory. Participants will be invited to engage not only with the themes in the book itself, such as the theory of temporal-rhetorical framing and the ‘two-well theory of legitimacy’ generally, but with their application to questions of populism specifically.

If meaning depends not only on the substantive content of events, but on their sequential place in a familiar temporal pattern, then in temporal-rhetorical framing, leaders have a tactic for the creation of beliefs about the future, a tactic that serves dynamic strategies of legitimation across cultures and regime types.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Steven B. Smith Yale University

Presenters

• Rahul Sagar NYU Abu Dhabi

• Nomi Claire Lazar Yale-NUS College