Copyright © Nathan Light 1991, 1997.

Theories of Time in Folkloristic Social Analysis

(whence was born the shorter article "Pizza in 30 Minutes, or How to Order a War: A Study on the Political Institution of Time.")

ABSTRACT
     The demands for contextual interpretation of meaning and
face-to-face communication in field work problematize
folklorists' understanding of national politics.  This essay
explores political rhetoric and world view in the national
event of the Gulf War.  I relate Cornelius Castoriadis'
theory of the "imaginary institution of society" and its
"identitary time," to theories of diachronic change and
political power in performance, dialogue and ritual. 
Political rhetoric about time before, during, and after the
war is analyzed in the light of the concepts of temporality
and otherness that are central to Castoriadis' theory of
social-historical institution.  Connections are explored
between rhetoric and historical identity, continuity, and
tradition in society.


EPIGRAMS
     Behold, Thou hast made my days old, and they pass away, and
in what manner I know not.
                    -- St. Augustine, The Confessions, Book XI, Chapter XXII

          Le passé et le présent sont nos moyens; le seul avenir
est notre fin.  Ainsi nous ne vivons jamais, mais nous
espérons de vivre, et en nous disposant toujours  Itre
heureux il est inévitable que nous ne le soyons jamais.
                    -- Blaise Pascal, Pensées, No. 47

     The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are
creatures of  impulse are poetical and have about them an
unchangeable attribute--the poet has none; no identity.... 
                    -- John Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818

     Sages, who in their prescience would controul
     All accidents, and to the very road
     Which they have fashion'd would confine us down,
     Like engines....   
                    -- Wordsworth, Prelude, Book V, ll. 377-80

     Only connect.
                    E. M. Forster, epigram to Howard's End

     Whether that erasure [of the future] will be brought about
by the wrath of Yahweh or the wrath of the Pentagon is a
question of historical and cultural difference.     
                    -- Terry Eagleton (in Wood, ed. 1990:178).

     Prediction is an uncertain art, but I would venture the
suggestion that our century-long "linguistic turn" will be
followed by a spiraling return to time as the focus and
horizon of all our thought and experience.
                    -- David Wood (1989: xi)

INTRODUCTION
     In the following essay I attempt several different, yet I
hope fruitfully connected, projects.  By connecting different
issues and theories drawn from both the humanities and the social
sciences I seek to show the usefulness of interdisciplinary
dialogue about the socio-political construction of time.  I
intend my discussion to be neither comprehensive nor conclusive,
but comprehensible and suggestive, a challenge to theories of
society that seek comprehensive models.
     My purpose is to seek within the sphere of national
political rhetoric about the Gulf War an answer to the question:
why is it that a society and its self-concept are never
homogeneous and consistent within themselves, nor homologous one
to the other, yet everywhere they are represented thus?  I will
relate this answer specifically to issues of folklore suggested
by Roger Abrahams (1968, 1972), Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs
(1990), and Alan Dundes (1972, 1980): how can we generalize the
meanings of folklore performances despite their profound linkages
to specific contexts, or, to what extent are we justified in
extrapolating social meanings beyond their context?  How can we
interpret community process as part of society?  The writings of
Dundes and Abrahams suggest the questions: how are we, in the
current attention to contextually situated meaning, to derive
from social action, and especially discourse, an accurate
understanding of people's thought about their society?  Can
action demonstrate cognitive process, or are we confined to
showing how action and context co-vary and imply one another,
without seeking their correlative mental forms?  Extending this
to include the tranmission of ideas through media, we should ask,
how can the techniques of folklore contribute to analysis of
politics and culture beyond the face-to-face or small group
context?
     The question of meaning has been a central issue of
performance theory.  With the emphasis on discourse as social
action within a specific context, the major concern in the
interpretation of meaning has been in the indexical grounding of
performance through its use of form and function.  The question
of intentional meaning has often been separated from the
objective description of form and function of social actions. 
More recently, Bauman and Briggs (1990) have enunciated some
principles whereby performance can be understood in the context
of political action as the use of formal features to meaningfully
situate texts within contexts.  Their review of the literature on
the accomplishment of social meaning through performance shows
that communication, meaning, referentiality, and so on, are
subject to culturally and situationally relative definition: in
this regard, they cite McDowell's demonstration that the
suppression of reference increases the efficacy of ritual speech
(Bauman and Briggs 1990:63), and Paredes' argument that naive
ethnographers go to Mexico seeking language that refers without
insinuating and are consequently blind to their informants'
performance frames (Bauman and Briggs 1990:71-2).  However, by
reducing meaning to correct interpretation of the features that
frame the performance, and the poetics of its form and function,
"indexical grounding" or "translation" and its use, exchange and
referential values they seem to suggest that the problem of
meaning in larger contexts can be overcome, by replacing it with
specific local meanings and allowing for generalization only
through ethnography of the audience in the larger sphere of
interaction (76-7).  
     While Bauman and Briggs affirm the need for dialogue with
ethnographees in order to ground analysis in the "participants'
interpretive efforts," and to understand the effect of the
"ethnographic encounter" on meaning (70, 71),  nonetheless they
seem to avoid the problem of the "spliced ethnographic object"
posed by James Clifford.  Clifford challenges the idea that
representation and narrative are master frames which can
encompass "bounded, independent cultures" (1988:13-15, 23).  Like
Bauman and Briggs, Clifford draws on the idea that discourse is
always indexically grounded, but he further argues that the
ethnographer radically changes the meaning of dialogical
interaction by making it into monological texts organized around
a "single coherent intention."  Clifford feels that the
ethnographer's communication in the field differs from that
within the discipline.  The creation of texts from dialogue
modifies the field experience because "interpretation is not
interlocution" (39-40).  Meanings are contingent aspects of
continuing dialogue.  As with anyone in a society, the
ethnographer cannot know, only respond.
     I see the issue as one of responsibility to others. 
Dialogic ethnography cannot be simply the means to create fixed
understandings of what is going on in a society: the ethnographer
needs to recognize the other as an ongoing part of the
ethnographic process.  There is no point at which representation
and text can encompass others, either as they were or as they are
now.  Interpretation of events to fix the "how ... accomplished"
of dialogic play among entextualized words (Bauman and Briggs
1990:79) denies the ongoing process of interlocution which always
escapes any fixed frame and meaning.  Responsibility lies in the
commitment, care and trust involved in responsive dialogue with
people, while determinate interpretations are the power plays,
the authoritative speaking for, and speaking about, rather than
the speaking with others.  Unless the text's representation of
dialogue in fieldwork shows the "vulnerability" of the
fieldworker (Clifford 1988:43), the responsibility of all
participants in a dialogue for making sense, and the
impossibility of finished interpretation, the text unavoidably
addresses the discipline and delivers an objectified and static
version of the society which is referred to and interpreted. 
This hypostasizes the gap between the author's understanding and
that of anyone written about: there is no commitment to overcome
it through the continued interaction.  The project declares
itself complete and the ethnographer prepares to move on, alone.
     Although Bauman and Briggs suggest a dialogic conception of
texts which allows for continuity between the "poetics and
politics" of the discipline, and those of the communities which
we study, and thus suggest an alternative to the idea of the
completed ethnographic project, they only hint at the possibility
of a change to responsive interaction with those we study (80). 
They imply that a reified and fixed interpretation is possible,
while I would like to argue that interpretation of human action,
even when past and captured in some media, is never completed,
and that the ethnography which addresses the ethnographee as
partner and co-worker of interaction best fulfills the effort to
know others.  People represented without process lose their
ability to make themselves, and become products of the
ethnographer.  
     Perhaps the most extreme way to state the argument that I
will be offering in this paper is thus: the human reality that we
study is that of the mind, and it is the mind that makes the
world.  The world that the mind makes is not built solely of what
has come before: there is loss and destruction of meanings, and
there is novelty that comes of indeterminate processes.  I am not
denying that we can share a physical reality which obeys the law
of conservation of matter.  Rather, I am trying to show that any
physical reality can only become a social reality through
processes of interaction, and only thus does matter take on
meaning.  The physical world is the media for sharing through
interaction with others.  But the meaningful physical world is
discontinuous and subject to radical creation and destruction
through human interaction.  The problem of this essay is thus
that of interaction: if one accepts that some mode of interaction
is crucial to creating "continuities" between people or between
communities, how can I examine the discourse of politicians
within a context of meaning?  How am I to get a response?
     My answer is that the discontinuites and displacement
between a national politician and myself are the same as those
between myself and a member of any community, myself and any
human creation or representation: they are radical and profound,
and yet we share powerful ways of communicating across such gaps. 
Rather than seeking seamless continuity with the communities I
study, I will be following Yuri Lotman's suggestion and making
representations and texts speak with me (1990: 272, see below). 
But I speak with representations in the recognition that
continuity or comprehensive understanding of texts within history
must be an ongoing process.  Rather than believing there is a
continual progress towards truth, I propose that the responsive
understanding of others is the only form of truth, the only way
to cross the gaps between meanings in society.  Any later fixed
form of that responsiveness begins a loss of truth, unless the
text becomes part of further dialogue.  Truth is not the modeling
of the world through accurate representations; truth is rather
the process sharing understandings, of making always new
representations that fill communicative needs.  There are not
enduring meanings, so the ethnographer must continually make and
remake meanings in dialogue.  Members of society do this all the
time as part of social living, but only the ethnographer who
strives after conscious expression of meanings, a written
analysis of past action as embodying constant ideas, gets caught
up in the problem of translation of responsive process to
authoritative form.

THE IMAGINARY SOCIETY
     In the following, I will try to show how rather abstract
theories about the reality instituted through the creative mind
can illuminate current political discourse.  I do not seek to
show that such discourse is deceptive rhetoric, but to
demonstrate how it institutes a reality through symbolic
conceptions. Rather than arging that political rhetoric is part
of a conspiracy to hide a real world, I will draw on Cornelius
Castoriadis' work The Imaginary Institution of Society, to show
how any and all reality of which we can conceive depends on the
social imagination of a world.  This "social imaginary" is the
means through which social reality is made.  It is the source of
all change in society.  The imaginary is first and foremost the
site for the experience of temporality, in which the present
cannot be bound to the past, but instead ruptures any prior
orders.  True time is not succession, there is nothing about it
that holds constant; it has no essence or presence (1987:184). 
But the originating act in the imaginary institution of society
is the institution of "identitary" time in which society creates
itself as a knowable thing with a constant identity and presence.
     According to Castoriadis, nothing is the same until it is
instituted as such.  Instead we are awash in a "magma of
significations" because 

     man is an unconsciously philosophical animal, 
who has posed the questions of philosophy in actual fact long before
philosophy existed as explicit reflection; and is a poetic
animal, who has provided answers to these questions in the
imaginary.
These answers arise in the "doing of each collectivity" as
"embodied meaning[s]" (147, original emphasis).  Because
Castoriadis affirms the power of creative and poetic doing to
answer the philosophical questions of human being, he sets the
doings of daily life--our folklore and dialogue and work and play
--on the level of philosophy.  He denies the separation of
reflective philosophy from the "embodied" philosophy of everyday
living, and says that objectified and generalized understandings
of social doing are not meaningful: social doing "allows itself
to be understood only as a reply to the questions that it
implicitly poses itself" (147).  In this domain of the imaginary,
where fundamental philosophical questions find their answer,
translation cannot reformulate these answers in other terms. 
History and ethnography cannot attain total comprehension because
each social philosophy is grounded in a poetics and creativity
which cannot be compared with or translated into any other (162-3).
     Castoriadis agrees with Plato's theory of forms ('eidos'),
in affirming that the institution of society and self are pre-eminently 
enabled by mental constructs, but he critiques Plato's
concept of a fixed number of eternal and changeless forms that
exist outside of time and the mind.  Instead, Castoriadis
believes that forms are created by people and that it is only
through the creation of ideas that the social world can be made
and changed (187-89).  Even more importantly (and rather
paradoxically), this very ability to imagine realities enables
the constant re-creation of representations of an unchanging self
and society.
     Hence, Castoriadis offers an original way to reconceive the
structure and agency debate currently active in social theory:
rather than essential aspects of social action, structure and
agency are two principles through which we institute social
action within the scope of repetition and/or determinate action. 
Structure consists in the repetition of all the things that we
institute as our identity, while agency is conceived of as
determination of events through various combinations of willed
and causal action.  Structure and agency recreate historical
ideas about determinacy and repetition in social life that have
ranged from determination conceived as divine pre-destination,
scientific causality, or individual will, and repetition seen as
natural mechanisms, social reproduction, or socialization to
roles and norms.  However, the terms of these concepts remain
broadly similar: people can act, but they cannot intentionally
change the parameters of the social or transcendental world. 
Thus structure and agency are a way of determining the
possibilities of social reality.  But true change, the genesis of
other possibilities in the world, is indeterminate.  In
Castoriadis' terms, for A to be other than B there can be no
rules that specify how to derive A from B (160, 195-200, see also
Thompson 1984:21).  Following Castoriadis' emphasis on the
createdness of all worlds, I will argue that the structure and
agency debate, like any social science which denies
indeterminacy, is merely the representation of ourselves as
always within the same world: we demand repetition and continuous
identity and intention, but ironically are always creating new
and discontinuous ways of representing ourselves as living the
same. 
 
THE PLACE OF A THEORY OF INSTITUTION AND CHANGE
     These abstract ideas--that everything social finds its
foundation in the human imagination, and that all change is
paradoxically generated by us in the imagination, yet creatively
represented by us as forms of repetition of the same--are useful
for the social sciences concerned with human creativity and the
social construction of reality.  The idea that structure and
agency can be seen more clearly as a construction of the human
concern with continuity and identity, determinacy and will, i.e.,
with the reflexive creation of a self that is aware of and active
in its own determinations, is not unique to Castoriadis.  Similar
ideas have been presented by other social theorists, although few
have made as explicit an argument for the imaginary nature of
social reality as Castoriadis.  The following discussion is meant
to demonstrate the breadth of ideas that Castoriadis seems to
have clarified and made more vigorous (for me at least).

Slavic views of diachronic culture
     The concern with the diachronic change of semiotic systems
and cultural forms has a long history among Russian and Prague
School theoreticians.  By offering versions of how entire systems
of aesthetic values and of worldview have gone through radical
alteration, several authors have suggested ways to connect the
Saussurian notion of meaning residing in oppositions between
elements of a system, to the diachronic change of meanings. 
Bakhtin (1981), Mukarovsky (1964), Jakobson (1985, 1988, also see
Galan 1985:6-17), and Lotman (1990) show that change is not made
up of incremental modifications of aspects of culture or
language, but of changes and rearrangements of systems of values
as a whole, which thus become incommensurate with or
untranslatable into those of other times and places and
communities.  Although they make varying commitments to the
possibility of explanatory models of change, like Castoriadis,
these authors are concerned with the creative acts that change
systems of values, and to a certain extent with the difference
between the reality of practice and the representations of that
reality.
     In his article "The Esthetics of Language," Jan Mukarovsky
discusses the dynamics of French and Czech literary histories, in
which synchronic tensions and diachronic oscillations arise
between the classicist, norm- and langue-oriented "structured
aesthetic" of the harmonious text, and the unique, creative,
parole-oriented "unstructured aesthetic" of the utterance or
word.  He says that the development of poetry occurs through this
constant oscillation "between accident and law, between
uniqueness and unchanging general validity, between freedom from
norms and the norm" (1964:66).  This analysis of the change in
poetic aesthetics suggests that there is a gap between the actual
practice of cultural poetics, and the representation of the state
of that practice.  However, Mukarovsky does not see, as
Castoriadis does, that such a gap allows the conversion of
inexplicable change into representations of difference against a
ground plan of the same in history.
     Yuri Lotman believes that a diachronic history of semiotic
systems will allow the translation of meanings from one system to
the other.  However, he explains this somewhat positivist project
in emergent terms.  While cultural history may illuminate some
aspects of past values about cultural practices, they cannot be
simply translated into another period or language.  As in talking
to others, the work of communicating with the past consists in
making the texts speak with us.  As Lotman would have it,
cultural memory entails a dialogic connection of the present and
the image of the past created from texts.  This is a dialogue of
equal partners in which each affects the other.  As the past
"transforms the present, the past too changes its shape"
(1990:272).  Just as the texts of the past cannot be translated,
but must be responded to through dialogue, so the dialogue with
the past cannot be translated into a monologue: any communication
through texts entails not interpretation, but a similar
enlivening of the text so that it speaks with its own voice. 
     Although Lotman does not explicitly compare this sort of
historical research to ethnography, the issue of representation
seems similar:  the dialogue cannot be represented as a monologue
because there is no constant and identical place from which the
ethnographer can set forth the world.  The ethnographer (or
historian) is not a constant person having varying experiences
which can explained in reference to some fixed, synchronic model
of society, the self, and the world.  Rather, ethnographers
themselves change through their dialogic sharing with the other,
and hence their "identity" is mutable, their world changes.

The MacCannells
     In Dean and Juliet F. MacCannell's The Time of the Sign,
they compare Lotman and Uspensky's claim that change is always
hidden from cultural beings to Freud's formulation of the
compulsion to repeat and the allied death instinct (1982:25), and
say that culture is in a constant process of semiotic change
through elaboratory readings of itself, concluding that the
"essence of culture may reside in an interplay between its
mnemonic function (memory, recording, writing) and resistance to
such remembering" (27).  They go on to argue that culture
naturalizes itself as determinate and fixed despite the freedom
of the semiosis through which it creates itself.  The flexibility
of cultural semiosis allows people to create the unfreedom of
norms and a natural order, in order to satisfy the need for
stability and rightness.  But semiosis also offers the freedom
to alter the stability of norms by rearranging these orderings to
create new scales of value, or more precisely, new correlations
between new organizations of things along scales of value. 
Because of the arbitrary gap between signifier and signified,
there are no fixed meanings inherent to these systems until some
are naturalized (32-3).  Not only can values be rearranged, but
entirely new orders can be created during "acultural periods,"
where semiotic structures are radically upset, new meanings
created and old meanings lost.  The MacCannells find an instance
of such change in semiotic values when they interpret Wordsworth
as saying that creativity in Romantic poetry occurred through
changes in the langue rather than the parole, 
whereas creativity during more static cultural periods occurs at 
the level of novel uses of parole (34-35, 110-12).
     Like Mukarovsky's diachronic analysis of aesthetics in
poetry, the MacCannells' cultural semiotics oscillates between
poles of stability and change, order and disorder.  However, such
processual discussions of semiotic development do not allow for
the constant emergence of otherness into culture.  Instead, there
is a move towards a determination of social change as process
that does show how the institutions of poetics are a part of the
larger institution of society.  Poetics, like all of society,
undergo constant creative change into otherness, and periods of
order and disorder, culture and "aculture" are social
institutions that would control such creative genesis, and make
it a history of determinate events.

Derrida
     Like Castoriadis, Jacques Derrida also denies determinate
and meaningful sequences in history and in the genealogy of
thought, and he denies the possibility of accurate historical
representation through narrative (1972:67-82).  Whereas Derrida
founds his project in the materialism of the trace and in the
deconstruction of logocentric and idealist attempts to create a
metaphysics of the trace which can be determinately read (70),
Castoriadis founds his in the indeterminacy of the imaginary and
its auto-alteration of being (1987:190-193).  Despite his
apparent idealist philosophy, I argue that Castoriadis can also
be construed as a materialist philosopher, because I interpret
the action of the imaginary as the constant creativity of the
indeterminate matter of the mind.  The mind is organized--but not
mechanical--matter.  The physical processes that occur in the
mind cannot be determined, predicted, or explained, because the
many discrete information events do not follow specifiable rules. 
     Castoriadis distinguishes difference--the variation of co-present 
and comparable things in space--from alteration--the
emergence of otherness in time such that two things do not co-exist 
and do not relate in any determinable way (190-95). 
Although this appears to be a challenge to Derrida, it appears to
me that Derrida also denies--or comes close to denying--any
continuity of social things in time, arguing that there is always
irreducible generative multiplicity in the polysemy of the trace
(1972:62, see also Wood 1989).

CHANGE AND REVOLUTION
     If we accept Castoriadis' view that radically creative
change is always occurring, we can see how major shifts in
explicit cultural history occur at the level of the culture's
representation of itself as the same.  The radical imaginary
constantly makes us other to ourselves, but culture instituting
itself forms a secondary process through which the ever changing
is represented as the same.  Hence, the MacCannells' "acultural
periods" are better thought of as periods during which cultural
self-consciousness changes, or said another way, the unconscious
changes always occurring through the imaginary are given
conscious and reflexive representation during such periods. 
These are explicit changes of the social institution, because we
institute constancy and repetition of the reproduction of society
as natural and deny that change happens to us without our
awareness.  Castoriadis terms such explicit change a
"revolution:" the acknowledgement and definition of the meaning
of change in a society.  The society defines itself as in
revolution when it explicitly represents itself in a process of
change.  We must accommodate change, construct it as decay, as
progress, or as revolution, as an aspect of history's continuing
passage.  Just as we need to determine social action by causes
such as structure or agency, we also need to mourn or curse the
past, and fear or welcome the future.  We deny change that comes
before consciousness, change that we cannot identify or control,
change that arises within the very core of mental process, in the
imaginary.  When it does not make its change explicit, society
denies and obscures its constant auto-alteration in time through
institution of its identity (see discussion in Thompson 1984:22
and Joas 1989).
     Society institutes itself so that it occupies a definite
"there," a definite "then," which allow action to fit into its
frames of meaning:

     The social-historical is perpetual flux of self-alteration--and 
can only exist by providing itself with 'stable' figures
by which it makes itself visible ... in its impersonal
reflexivity..., the primordial 'stable' figure here is the
institution. (204)
In order to be able to speak and think of things, we must create
the thing as identical to itself: "the social-historical
institution alone brings identity into being .... 'full' identity
exists only if it is instituted" (205, original emphasis).

     For the forms with which folklore is concerned, despite the
institution of continuity and homogeneity of cultural practices
through such concepts as genre and tradition, the creative
imaginary is always active in artistic social communication
making new connections, combining forms, and overcoming the will
to repeat.  Cultural creativity always expresses new ideas, and
makes the same in new ways, despite the powerful tools of norm
and convention that allow us to represent it as fixed in form, or
in genre.  The theory of the imaginary affirms that humans create
their world, and are not created by it.  This is not to say that
they have intentional control of the world, for people cannot
determine how the imaginary, and hence history, change, but the
world has not imposed its form on them: rather they have
instituted themselves and constituted their societies through the
imaginary, and continue to alter themselves through it.  People
come together by instituting themselves into groups, by imagining
the idea of the collectivity.  They can share this and other
ideas through the powerfully creative imagination that makes
meaningful connections among signs, actions and objects, and thus
enables communication with, and response to, the ideas of others.

FOLKLORE AND CHANGE
     In a performance-oriented revision and critique of
functionalism, Roger Abrahams discusses the performance of myths
of origin as attempts to stabilize change and "provide some sense
of reunification in terms of cultural or social balance."  But he
argues that just as we cannot say that a myth is the "same" myth
each time it is performed, so, too, 

     to assume that this balance is any kind of real equilibrium
is to ignore the very reason why myths must be recited
periodically--because the group senses the presence of a
disequilibrating force. (1972:27)  

Since Abrahams is arguing for performance centered analysis of
rhetoric in its context, and criticizing the quest by
functionalist anthropologists for "ideal" versions of narratives
and the fixed functions they fulfill (25-6), he does not raise
the more general question of identity or ideal sameness as an
imaginary construction of society and social things.  However, he
is clearly aware of the difference between the society and its
cultural representation of itself, between the "sense" of
stability, unity and fixed membership, and the reality of
constant instability and change, in a way that functionalists are
not.
     Identity and repetition make society's self-representation
possible, whether it is when people represent themselves to an
ethnographer, or when the ethnographer constructs that people as
an ensemble.  A general understanding of the social construction
of continuity in the world and in society, and of the bounded
group, allows us to see issues such as nationalism, ethnicity,
political rhetoric, identity, and reflexivity as basic to social
existence, inherent in our very use of signs (according to
Castoriadis).  By recognizing the multiplicity of imaginary acts
among people, we can better understand how it is that despite
society's institution of itself as the same, any member of that
society is always creating new ideas and aesthetic forms, while
simultaneously affirming that these pieces of practice and
identity are more of the same (if only to the extent that their
innovations are of a kind that is seen as valuable).  The self-
representation is an image of homogeneity and order, but is
always secondary to the primary heterogeneity of the imaginary,
whether that of subgroups, individuals, or a single individual
changing through time.  There is no constancy, only the
institution of continuity.  Or, rather, there is continuity in
the world of objects, but in the world of experience and meaning,
which is as much imaginary as "real," the physical continuity of
things is replaced by the created continuity of representations
or understandings, which themselves are inherently discontinuous,
full of the gaps and leaps between signifiers and signifieds.  We
remain unaware of these gaps due to the threat they pose to our
identity and to our need for a sense of consistent meaningfulness
in our action and communication.
     Again, I am trying to suggest that understanding across time
and between people within the same society, or in different ones,
(or even the same person at different times), is always caught in
the gap between imaginaries.  I am not denying that communication
can occur, only that determinate knowledge can be attained. 
Communication between people is always possible, and not simply
despite the otherness of the imaginary institutions of reality,
but because the imaginary allows us to create other realities, to
communicate with others within a new shared reality, shared to
the extent that we will it to be the same, to join the other
within it.  The issue of ethnographic representation is not that
of accuracy or "realism" but responsibility to the other in
dialogue.  The best evidence for communication with the other
through commitment is in the socialization of children, and to
the extent that the ethnographer sustains a rational and self-consistent 
separate identity, the childish entry into the culture
cannot be attained.  (Castoriadis discusses socialization and the
desire for union (1987:273-339).)
     The essential question in all social knowledge is that of
determinism versus creativity.  Is there any way to make the sign
identical across use, across time, across cultures, and is there
any need to do this?  (This is the question that Humpty-Dumpty poses to 
Alice in Wonderland: who is to be boss?)  In intellectual history and
ethnography we are often forced to admit the possibility that
others cannot be absolutely understood, or that translation may
have limits, while in sociology and psychology we tend to believe
that there is a consistent and shared language for expressing
ideas, even though everyone does not have the same ideas.
     Castoriadis argues that with the use of signs and language
comes the constitution of the world through "identitary-ensemblist logic," 
which is one aspect of our imaginary institution, the one that 
enables representation.  Identitary-ensemblist logic makes possible 
"society thought of as ensemble
of distinct and well-defined elements, referring to one another
by means of well-determined relations" (177).  Not only do
things gain identities as bounded objects of signification, but
they are grouped into sets with other objects, just as their
component parts are grouped into a unit.  Processes among these
elements are defined and labelled.  This definition of the world
is enabled by and follows from the division of language itself
into such bounded units (217, 238-239).

GIDDENS' THEORY OF CHANGE
     Anthony Giddens offers a rather different theory of change
than the auto-alteration within society instituted as the same
proposed by Castoriadis.  Giddens is caught in an effort to set
forth general theoretical principles and methods which basically
rely on the idea that there can be no general principles.  He
argues that the search for a theory that refers to "a single set
of mechanisms" to explain social change "is a doomed one"
(1984:xxviii).  The "sorts of understanding or knowledge that
human beings have of their own 'history' is partly constitutive
of what that history is and of the influences that act to change
it" (ibid.).
     The problem with Giddens' otherwise remarkably perceptive
and wide-ranging analytical efforts comes in his continued
separation of his knowledge from that of the actors being studied
(e.g., a social scientific critique is a "practical intervention
in society" 1984:334-343).  There is no reason for Giddens to
divide society into the structures of classes, norms, resources,
ideologies, or of symbolic, political, economic, and legal
phenomena that he does (e.g., 1984:28-34) except that this is the
etic analytical method that has long been practiced in
functionalist sociology, and arises directly from our
intellectual institution and representation of Western society as
system.  Just as we have powerful means to enter into dialogic
sharing with others, we can also represent others as different, a
homogeneous group whose essence is largely in their difference
from all of "us."  Because interaction and dialogue do not offer
a method, but only the imagination's ability to respond to and
connect with meanings made by others, sociology must institute a
research method which locates differences between groups in
institutions seen as the "real" location of these differences. 
Because figuring out how any society works in a determinate way
is impossible, we analyze it into parts within a structure
already conceived of as the same, always already applied before
we look at social action.
     Castoriadis offers examples of such preconceptions in his
critique of Marx' and Engels' theory of the origins of class
societies.  Rather than the historical mechanism of control over
scarce resources that Marx and Engels proposed, Castoriadis
claims that the birth of class society could only be enabled by
the creation of the idea that people could be things, which led
to the possibility of impersonal I-it relations.  Castoriadis
says it is impossible to construct the logic or causes of such an
imaginary invention.  There is no way to observe, model, or
describe the genesis of a radically new proto-concept in the
imagination.  It simply appears and engenders social change.  We
are always already in the imaginary that includes the concept of
class structures, without access to that other world that did not
have them.  We cannot know the constituting events of this social
imaginary because there is no determinate mechanism, no way from
A to B (150-54).
     While Giddens critiques evolutionary versions of social
change, including Marxism (1984:227-243), he does not give up the
determinism of a non-evolutionary materialism.  For him, the past
provides the structures of rules and resources that go into
making the present, and these structures are remade in the
present, but since "all action exists in continuity with the
past, which provides the means for its initiation," Giddens a
priori de-limits the possibilities for creative imagination and
action (1979:70-1).  The past establishes determinate, if not
completely known, conditions for present action, which in turn
condition the future.  The future is unpredictable only because
of the "unforeseen consequences" of social action.  Castoriadis
says that in the imaginary all continuity is broken, and that the
past does not determinately condition present creative action. 
The figures of the imagination are otherness which shatter
determinacy through continual rupture of the present (193, 201). 
There is no possibility of a genealogy of actions and ideas
because (as I would put it) in the imaginary there is genesis
without genetics, generation without reproduction (cf.
Castoriadis 1987:196).
     By emphasizing intentional action based in practical and
discursive consciousness (1979:56-7, 63), and the ability of
agents to penetrate into "the social forms which oppress them"
(72), Giddens allows for much more consciousness on the part of
the agent than does Castoriadis.  Castoriadis denies the
possibility of consciousness both of the imaginary process which
creates the "magma" of social meanings, and of the institution of
some meanings as fixed, because he denies the possibility of
continuity in representations.  Where Giddens would suggest that
the researcher can arrive at knowledge of the "reality" behind
social representations, Castoriadis claims that we as researchers
can never understand the other except in terms of our own selves,
and as parts of our projects of consciously making our future
while reinterpreting our past.  The reality we find among others
actually is constructed in terms of the imaginary reality that we
have instituted for ourselves (163-64).  Where Giddens denies
that agents are "cultural dopes" in their structuration of
society based in use of the past conditions and future
anticipations to sustain consistent meaning (1979:84),
Castoriadis claims that, at the level of the imaginary
institution of society, everyone is inescapably a "cultural dope"
and no one can become conscious of their imaginary production of
themselves, including the researcher.
     This leaves me somewhat uneasy, since I prefer to think that
cognitive penetration into the social institution of myself and
others is possible, but I also like the idea that imagination
enables radical changes despite the deeply unconscious,
indeterminate and unintended nature of such poetic answers to
philosophical questions in the "magma of significations."  It
brings into question my project in the current paper: can
something so profoundly unknowable found a useful theory of
social creativity?  But this notion of the imaginary seems to be
the only alternative to theories of social creativity that see it
bound within norms, continuous within the possibilities of a
finite and gradually transforming set of Platonic forms.  Are we
to conceive of creativity as limited by the past, and determined
within material bounds, or can we accept creativity that
resembles quantum physics, in that the past does not determine
the events of the future, neither by setting limits of
possibility nor by determining meanings?  To limit in advance
what it is possible to find in social action, or the varieties of
social institution that we and others can create, is to trap
ourselves within the ground of the continuous and determinate,
within the death instinct, the compulsion to repeat, and the
anxiety about change that the MacCannells suggest (1982:25). 
This leaves me more uneasy than the idea that I may never know
exactly how I or anyone else have created and instituted
themselves.  I would rather accept ignorance of the reality
behind institutions, and affirm the possibility of understanding
through interaction, through creative being with others.
     Like Castoriadis, Giddens recognizes the vital importance of
time for social action.  Castoriadis says that true temporality
arises from the self-alteration of society in the imaginary, and
that it always escapes determinism.  Giddens believes that the
importance of time is in the agent's reproduction of the same
that occurs within it.  Giddens says that institutions are
structured to the extent that "forms of social conduct are
reproduced chronically across time and space" (1984:xxi).  Rather
than affirming radical creativity, Giddens says that agents have
the power to transform the given rules and resources to create
new ways of doing.  He recognizes that it is conscious attention
that divides up the continuities of social action and renders
them meaningful: "'Action' is not a combination of acts: 'acts'
are constituted only by a discursive moment of attention to the
durée of lived-through experience" (1984:3).  For Giddens the
"concern of structuration theory is with 'order' as the
transcending of time and space in human social relationships"
through routinization (1984:87), while Castoriadis is concerned
with the both the repetitions of the same that reproduce society
as instituted in identitary time, and the radical changes that
occur in the imaginary against which the rage for order
establishes society as repetition (209-10).  Castoriadis sees the
division into synchronic and diachronic orders as "but another
way of concealing the social-historical" of alteration (216).
     While Castoriadis and Giddens both accept the importance of
diachronic theory, Giddens wants it to explain culture as a
continuous reproduction of society.  Their differences are seen
when Castoriadis distinguishes time from space by arguing that
true time is not a continuum or succession (183-84), while
Giddens constructs time as quite similar to space in its nature
as a homogeneous continuum (1984:110-16).  I agree with
Castoriadis that time cannot be seen as homologous to space,
except when it is controlled through the institution of
identitary time.  I will argue below that it is because
identitary time is purely socially constructed that it makes such
a flexible rhetorical tool for politics.  We have instituted time
as that dimension within which events occur, so that we can
control events, situate them, group them together into classes,
and make them similar.  Events can be compared because they exist
within a single dimension, within time.  In time, anything can be
connected, and that connection made meaningful.  What people do
in different places, and at different times, can be made in some
sense co-existent through the duration and simultaneity made
possible by media (print, radio, television, etc.), and through
the idea that time holds these things within a single
"container."

THE IMAGINARY SHAPES OF TIME
     I hope that the preceding has suggested that the difficulty
with diachronic cultural semiotics arises from the lack of
theories that accommodate the radical change created through the
imaginary.  Where many theories of society have sought to explain
change through economic, political, or rational motivations and
determinate processes, Castoriadis paradoxically undermines any
unifying mechanistic explanation of change by the "explanation"
that the imaginary creates endlessly.  Castoriadis also extends
theories of social action that emphasize the creative individual
so as to include not just the poetics of various aspects of
entertainment, but the imaginative creation of the self, the
society and the world.  But, again, he denies explanative
analysis of this creation as a process by affirming the
indeterminacy of the imaginary.  Creativity happens in the
irreducible flux of change that is "true" time.
     Within the long history of thinking about time, many
arguments have been proposed about its essential nature.  It is
the variety and contradictoriness of these arguments that I feel
vindicates Castoriadis when he says that every society primarily
institutes itself as identity through the "institution of its own
temporality" (206).  Each society constructs its ideas of
identitary time out of its imaginary institution of time, and
generates the "feel" of its lived time (e.g., pregnant, brewing,
progressive, tortured) which "is the essential 'affect' of the
society considered" (211).  I will briefly cite some of these
theoretical descriptions in order to give the reader an idea of
their variety.
     In Plato's theory of mental forms and their debased
instantiation in the world as images, time was the image of
eternity moving through the world.  For Plato, time made all
things corrupt, and the very fact that forms were eternal, while
their physical images in the world underwent constant decay in
time, showed time's deficiency.  Time did not exist except as an
inadequate reflection of the truths of eternity.
     Saint Augustine of Hippo had a greater concern with plumbing
the depths of the human experience of time, and hence Husserl
(1964) adopts him as a forerunner of the phenomenological
approach to time.  In Book XI of The Confessions Augustine says
that as the source of all times, God existed before time began,
and will after it ends, although he acknowledges that this idea
makes little sense within our knowledge of time "for there was no
'then' when time was not" (1948:190).  For people, however, past
and future do not really exist except in the mind, or in the
experience of present objects that demonstrate the truth of the
past.  When we measure time, we compare the movement of one
object with that of another, and when we are aware of the
duration of a sensation such as a sound, we generate awareness by
organizing in the mind the impressions that remain as things pass
(195-200).  Hence all our knowledge of time is contained in the
present, in our memories and anticipations, and in our
comparisons between sensations.  St. Augustine's time is not
Plato's.  Time is not the image of eternity as the perfect form
only known by the mind; rather, time is the present awareness of
things of the present, the past and the future.  Time, for
humans, exists only through the mental construction of
continuity, while eternity only exists for God.
     An interesting debate over the experience of time arose
among William James, George Herbert Mead and Arthur O. Lovejoy. 
Both James and Lovejoy felt that time was discontinuous, and that
identity was in constant flux.  However, Lovejoy felt that this
flux was meaningful, and could support a notion of identity in
and of itself, while James denied that anything could have a
constant identity (Lovejoy 1936:326-333; Wilson 1980:66-83). 
Mead felt that change was also inherent to things, but that it
becomes subjectively organized as time.  Even more radically,
Mead did not feel that the past or future was fixed or
determinate, but that through present experience we learn about
the past and the future, and create them anew in attending to the
issues that press upon us (Mead 1938:347-48, 486, 616; Miller
1973:172-87).  Hence some of the pragmatists anticipated
Castoriadis' radical questioning of the idea of identity (see
especially James 1987:558-571, 731-767, 862)
     Husserl felt that as we move through time intentionally, our
experience and our memories interact, so that rather than having
a chain of experiences against a fixed background, both memory
and consciousness are in constant flux (1964:77-8).  Unlike Henri
Bergson (1960, 1988:206-7) (and of course Castoriadis), Husserl
felt there was an analogy between time and space.  He believed
that human experiences of time and space were both ordered by the
"classifying intentions."  Both were organized into the
experienced thing and its surroundings, and into foreground and
background (1964:78-79).
     Ernst Cassirer describes civilization as based on the
control of time and space by making them into abstract systems of
relations such as plans, schedules and maps (1953:67-78).  He
felt that it was through the creative power of making symbols
that time could be overcome as change: "Symbolic memory [such as
art and poetry] is the process by which man not only repeats his
past experience, but also reconstructs this experience"
(1953:74).

THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF TIME
     Recent work by various members of the International Society
for the Study of Time have described more culturally and
historically situated understandings of time, showing the
innumerable paradoxes presented by its fluid nature.  While I do
not have space (or time? or paper? or reader's patience?) here to
review much of the writings of the ISST members, their debates
demonstrate the difficulty and indeterminacy of any concept of
time, and its incredible slipperiness when one seeks a fixed idea
of it.  The general effort has been to show that time is a
concept that depends largely upon what one wishes to do with it,
and that such doings employ many different metaphors to represent
time.  N. Lawrence (1986) finds four basic metaphorical concepts
of time, and shows their occurrence in the history of philosophy.
     Suggestive discussions of time as a historically and
culturally variable concept are found in Corish (1986), Fraser
(1986), Haber (1986) and Macey (1978 and 1986).  Clark (1978),
Denbigh (1978), and Park's comments to Toda (1978), all stress
the relativity of any concept of time that contains past, present
and future, even within physics, to our personal experience of
the now, and construction of it through sharing with others. 
     In his discussion of the historical uses of time as a
concept in the sciences, N. Lawrence concisely expresses for
physics what Castoriadis says makes any law-governed concept of
society impossible:

     Speaking somewhat crudely, all the novelty that a system of
uniform laws can tolerate--but which it must have--is
relegated to the smoothly flowing independent time in which
any patch of time is different from its neighbors in terms
of its position, but like them as to its properties.
(1978:45)

Castoriadis argues that because time is created in the
imagination, it cannot be a continuity of identical patches. 
Castoriadis' theory of socially instituted identitary time also
finds an echo in M. Toda's comment that "for time to exist, at
least some part of the world must preserve its identity while the
attributes of the rest must undergo changes" (1978:380).
     Finally, when A.I. Rabin writes in his article "Future Time
Perspective and Ego Strength" that "[i]mpulsivity and lack of
ability to delay gratification are earmarks of ego-weakness"
while an "ability to anticipate and plan [and delay] are
characteristic of ego strength" he demonstrates exactly the sort
of unquestioned assuming upon which social institutions rest
(1978:299).  In this connection, Rabin is an excellent example of
the sort of worldview which Alan Dundes has interpreted in the
United States through the use of folklore items such as proverbs
in their relations to practices such as investment and
scholarship (1980).
     Which is the point of this somewhat dilatory attempt to
suggest that a concept as broad as time and a concept as diverse
as the social imaginary could be usefully brought together within
an interpretive framework as locally-contextualized as that of
folklore.  Until we can accept that the range of meaning to be
found in a piece of psychological or philosophical scholarship,
or political discourse, is no broader, nor more inherently
meaningful, nor freer from its context than is the performance of
a fairy tale--nor the fairy tale performance less important in
its context than the scholarly performance of a paper, or
political performance of a speech--we will not be able to make
the connection that Bauman and Briggs seek: the political spheres
of the discipline and that of the world are equally important to
the process of scholarship, but they can only cross the gap of
mutual otherness through dialogue.
     Elliot Oring has called for such an integrative dialogue
between the discipline's expressive forms and the forms that it
studies.  He proposes that we should apply the theory of legends
to newspaper articles, and argues that we should conceive of our
own articles in a similar way.  He says "the newspaper stands as
a distinct challenge to folklorists to examine their own ideology
and address their own program ... [because] the values of
folkloristics and the newspaper are one" (1990:172-73).  Dundes
already made some steps toward answering this call when he ended
his article with the demonstration that his interpretive method,
broad and sweeping though it may be, could be brought to bear
upon the interpretation of our own practice as scholars within
society (1980:83-85).
     When Rabin states that there is a direct connection between
the strength of the ego and the ability to defer, he expresses a
social institution, and when he does not address that concept to
the people that he studies, he can only come up with his
premises: his research will always confirm the image of the world
that has already been instituted, and this will make him and
those sharing this institution secure in the accurate modelling
of a true and consistent reality.  If research follows a coherent
method rather than affirming the creative ability to enter into a
shared institution of a new society, a new group, to create the
researcher and research subject as a group through interaction
and dialogue, it denies novelty in the world, denies the
possibility that there is more out there and in the imaginary
than we can know or guess at.  Creative understanding is
responsible research.
     Giddens also argues for an interactive dimension to the
social sciences, a double hermeneutic in which the knowledge and
theories that these sciences supply  "become thrust back into the
world they describe" (1984:354).  But he believes in the special
power of social science as critique.  After social scientists
have ethnographically arrived at mutual knowledge with the agents
that they study, they can show beliefs "to be invalid or
inadequately grounded" (338).  Once this sort of critique has
been accomplished "there is a non-contingent relation between
demonstrating a social belief to be false, and practicial
implications for the transformation of action linked to that
belief" (340).  Rather than a mutual dialogue in which the
participants are equals, Giddens gives the scientist a special
access to truth, logic and validity, although these may be
relative to the system under study.  When he argues for the
importance of social science in the history of ideas, Giddens
priviledges written ideas (353).  Ideas are important, but they
are not always consistent or written.  The "magma of
significations" includes the (often contradictory) ideas embodied
in all kinds of action including writing (on the logics of the
meaningful universe cf. Castoriadis 1987:146, 160-163, 236-38).
     As Oring points out, the discipline of folklore should
extend itself beyond the domain of the marginal, and apply its
powerful tools for analysis of the creative imagination to
political figures.  Although David Whisnant was writing in 1974,
it is just as valid now to say with him that in "these days of
national trauma, it is critically important to analyze and
understand how national political leaders view the world, ... and
what core assumptions guide their official decisions and actions"
(1974:379).  Probably no one would argue that the nation is a
rational creature guided by rational politicians.  Why, then, do
we leave the study of the nation to those disciplines best
equipped for reducing it to a mechanical mass of rational actors? 
Why not recognize the power of the imagination to create
something new at every moment, and thus release ourselves from
the idea that logical management by the best qualified personnel
will perfect our society, economy, and political "system."  In
the spirit of opening a dialogue about the national political
imaginary and its institution of time in this country, I offer
the following analysis.

POLITICAL TIME
     Politicians are deeply enmeshed in time.  This is due in
part to their role as ritual figures who institute the constant
repetitions of identitary time.  "By stating enduring and
underlying patterns ritual connects past, present, and future,
abrogating history and time" (Myerhoff 1984:152, cited by Kertzer
1988:10).   Kertzer says that politics is "the art of
understanding the symbols actually operative in society and
learning how to make them issue forth in action...." (1988:6
citing Novak 1974:23).  Ritual figures must organize the public
self-representations of the society to itself.  Politicians
command many of the events which are most important to our self-representation as a group
(neighborhood, town, state, or nation),
and thus they get the highest degree of media coverage for their
statements.
     The media are part of the ritual processes and the
repetitions of the same that set politicians firmly within
identitary time.  The media are the prime politician-to-people
conduit in the two-way interaction of electoral politics, and
media also institute the constant repetition of the same which is
an important part of ritual.  They repeat the frames for stories,
the style of reporting, the kinds of issues.  
     The newspaper has long shaped public time with its deadlines
and daily appearance, but with the advent of electronic
information systems, the daily event of the news has come to
shape all the events that come within its purview.  Senator
Hollings of N. Carolina put it well during the Congressional
debates before the Gulf War: 
     Why are we rushing to war?  The 1992 election, that's why. 
We have to get this over with right now.  We are on
controlled time.  We have to hurry up and vote today so we
can get to the Sunday morning TV programs.(Jan. 12, 1991,
S328)
As creatures of time and the media, politicians use time in their
rhetoric.  They are trying to accomplish acts through speech, to
make events through talk.  The dimension within which important
events have a common existence is shared social time, and thus
time itself must be controlled to control events.

PREPARATION FOR WAR
     The debate in the American political arena over the pros and
cons of war against Iraq was a quest for rhetorical power, for
control of the symbols that would establish this as a historical
event.  In the uncertainty about the war, about its effectiveness
when compared to sanctions, and about the consequences of such a
war for international relations, for the international and
national economy, for the perception of the United States by
Muslims, and for voters and hence political careers, politicians
sought control and security through symbolic models that captured
people's imagination.  Speculation about future times gave vast
range for the representation of the identity of American society,
of world society, of the President, and of Congress itself as a
group.
     In a book review in the Times Literary Supplement, Edward
Luttwak offers an excellent discussion of President Bush's quest
for a justification of the need for reconquest of Kuwait rather
than simply deterrence of further aggression by Iraq.  When his
argument for "the imperative of restoring the Al Sabah family
over its enterprise in Kuwait" failed, and then his framing of an
offensive position in the Persian Gulf as the defense of "oil
needs of the industrialized world" was shown to be specious by
the disinterest of Germany and Japan, Bush came up with the "new,
fully original justification" of "The New World Order" (Luttwak
1991:4).
     But President Bush's rhetoric and military preparations were
more a plea to the world and a threat to Iraq than an address to
Americans.  The Bush administration avoided open debate on the
issue at home while they actively sought international support
for a coalition backed by the United Nations.  When Bush did
discuss the war with Americans he used the rhetoric of enduring
principles that must be defended.  He did not discuss the
possible complexities of such a fight.  "Three simple reasons--
protecting freedom, protecting our future, protecting innocent
lives--any one is reason enough why Iraq's unprincipled,
unprovoked aggression must not go unchallenged" (Remarks to
Military Airlift Command in Dhahran on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 22,
1990, WCPD, p.1899).  Later the same day, Bush further
emphasized the simplicity of his position: "simply put, we are
here to guarantee that freedom is protected and the Iraq's
aggression will not be rewarded" (WCPD, p. 1901; similar comments
can be found on pp. 1902 and 1905).
     The real creation of a national frame and sentiment for war
came in the ritual of the Congressional Debates on January 11 and
12, 1991.  These were events marking the arrival of a deadline,
an ardent debate over whether or not January 15 should be the
date for the war to begin, ardent despite the foregone conclusion
that the Congressional vote would give President Bush the right
to declare war on Iraq.  
     Although the issue of the debate concerned the war event, it
was expressed as a time event.  Conditioned by the constraints of
media time and of time as a commodity whose economy was
controlled by the rules of debate and by exchanges among the
members of Congress, their talk had to fit not just the
situation, but it had to fit into the pieces of time for which
they could bargain.  During the debates on January 11,
speaking schedules were rearranged so that Congress people could
speak before the evening news in their home states.  The
beginning and end of each speech was marked by negotiations over
the time allotted for the speaker.  Following standard practice
in Congressional debates, time was alloted for a speaker in
advance, and additional time was negotiated for during the
speech.  At the end, unused time could be reserved for one's own
later use, or it could be given to someone else.  More time could
be claimed by senior Congress people.  Major speakers on both
sides of the issue made clear their claim to seniority, and
emphasized their longer sense of history, during their talks. 
Representative Bennett of Florida was the first to speak in
support of House Concurrent Resolution No. 32 (affirming that
only Congress had the power to declare war).  He said, "I am 80
years of age. I have been in this chamber 43 years.  Out of the
17,000 votes I have cast, the only one I really regret is the one
which I cast for the Bay of Tonkin resolution" (Jan. 12, 1991,
H390).  Senator Byrd of West Virginia said, "this is my 39th year
in Congress.  This is my 33rd year in the U.S. Senate.  I have
cast a total of 12,822 votes during these 39 years in Congress"
(Jan. 12, 1991, S357).  
     Talk about personal careers in Congress was widespread in
rhetoric about the importance of the coming decision.  Speakers
emphasized that the debate was a time of great moment for
Congress members, demanding heroic courage.  Representative
Bennett said,
     
We do not have to be reelected.... We were not elected to
stay here forever.... We were elected to take the
responsible position of Government when the opportunity
comes to take it.... That is the courage that we must show
today, and this is the place it has to be. (Jan. 12, 1991,
H390)
The context of such a momentous decision had to be shifted from
the Congressional community to Olympian heights of
disinterestedness.  Senator Byrd said, "We ought not to
personalize or politicize the looming conflict.  To do so would
cloud our judgement at a time in our lives and in our careers
that demands from us absolute lucidity" (Jan. 12, 1991, S358).
     More important than the sense of personal history and
responsibility as a politician was the sense that this was world
history in the making.  Representative Hyde established their
role as makers of history: 
   
     We can today, here, make this democracy's finest hour by
standing up to the awesome responsibility of world
leadership.  The consequences are immense.  Today the debate
will finish and the decision is here. (Jan. 12, 1991,
H392)   
The making of history demands action based upon some idea of what
the future should be and some model of how to make such a future. 
The uncertainty of the future allowed more invention than would
be possible once events had taken a certain course.  Debate
focused on connections between the present and the past, in the
search for models that would rhetorically validate arguments for
or against the war.
     The war against Iraq was framed within the history of the
endless war of civilized peoples against such savages as the
Eurasian nomads or the Native Americans.  According to
Representative Hyde this war would be against "the spiritual
descendants of Genghiz Khan [who] still stalk the earth in
Baghdad..." (Jan. 12, 1991, H392).  Senator Byrd tells us that he
will patriotically support the President 
   
     not just because the President seeks a vote ..., but because
there is that spirit of patriotism that runs in the veins of
the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples and those from southern
and eastern Europe who hewed the forests and fought the
savages and plowed the fields of West Virginia. (Jan. 12,
1991, S357)   
However, war against such savages was not the issue.  That was a
foregone conclusion.  Instead, the issue was when the war should
begin, and who could authorize it.  Senator Byrd sought to
convince the President that dealing with the Middle East calls
for "long-term commitment with resolve, patience, dedication, and
the will to succeed..." and that it would not hurt the United
States to continue the embargo against Iraq.  He supported his
arguments against hurrying to war by comparing the United States
to the Romans who lost when they hurried into battle against
Hannibal and against the Goths (Jan. 12, 1991, S358-59). 
     Criticisms were made of both political practice and its
justification through historical rhetoric.  Senator Kerrey of
Nebraska vehemently criticized President Bush for establishing an
offensive force without informing Congress or the citizens.  He
called the comparison of Saddam to Hitler made by the President
and others absurd.  There is no need to overcome world apathy to
the predations of Saddam as there was in the 1930s:
     If I hear one more Winston Churchil quote given as if they
had relevance in this situation, I may ask the Sergeant at
Arms to install motion sickness bags at our desks.  
          This is not Munich in 1938; it is 1991 and all of us
understand the difference. (Jan 12, 1991, S374)
Unlike debates over decisions about the ongoing government of the
country, on issues such as the budget or housing, this debate
would end with the initiation of a profound historical event, a
war.  The debate must end before the deadline for the war:
America's unity of intention over the war could not be brought
into question by too much temporalizing, or by on-going inter-faction
conflict.  Senator Hollings expressed a widely echoed
feeling when he declared, "When the order is given and the
shooting starts, the debate must stop.... Once we go, we are all
going together" (Jan. 12, 1991, S328).  This spirit is perhaps
best captured by the common feeling that this should not be
"another Vietnam."  Many ideas are contained in this rhetorical
symbol: there should be no complaints and divisions at home; the
war should be declared, in the open, and not against guerillas;
it should not be an incremental commitment.  That it was to be a
war of total commitment that would change historical pattern is
clear in the following anonymous quotation from "a senior Army
officer:"  "It'll be massive.  It'll be violent.  It'll be fast. 
It'll be everything you ever wanted in a war and never got"
(Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb. 17, 1991, p. 15A).
     Against the general willingness to use force in defense of a
"new world order," opponents to immediate war used rhetorically
developed historical precedents to counsel patience.  The
proponents of war used minimally developed images and argued from
principles based in a unique and original ideal.  They sought to
"kick ass" in pursuit of the simple goal of driving Iraq from
Kuwait, and reestablishing order in the world.  The complexities
and uncertainties of a real war were not addressed.  There was no
discussion of contingencies, just the single-minded intention to
fight for peace, law and order.  In order to take action, the
debate must cease.  Only those who wished to delay action, such
as Representative Hyde, could afford dilatory discourse and
elaborate comparisons.  Advocates of action had to transcend the
past's complexity with new vision.

THE EXECUTION OF THE WAR
     Once the war began and the united front of national
solidarity had been created in Congress (despite significant
protests against the war elsewhere), the President became the
central speaker on the meaning of the war in history.  In his
role as "chief symbol-maker of the land" (Novak 1974:23, cited in
Kertzer 1987:6), President Bush made his major national addresses
regarding the war only after it had begun.  The debate preceding
the war was about the many possible paths of history, about the
possible relations of the past to the future, but once the
decision had been made to commit the nation to a single path, the
President could speak for all and set the war within the
principles around which the nation conceived its historical self-image.
     In his "State of the Union" address President Bush defined
the great universal ideals and constant desires of his subjects
and of the whole world:
     What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big
idea--a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn
together in common cause to achieve the universal
aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the
rule of law.  Such is a world worthy of our struggle, and
worthy of our children's future. (NYT, A8, 1/30/1990)
These aspirations have not been the object of dedicated struggle
by everyone; Americans are somewhat better at this than others. 
Bush defines the unique path that America takes to uphold these
universal aspirations.
   
     For two centuries, America has served the world as an
inspiring example of freedom and democracy.  For
generations, America has led the struggle to preserve and
extend the blessings of liberty.  And today, in a rapidly
changing world, American leadership is indispensable.... We
are Americans; we have a unique responsibility to do the
hard work of freedom.  And when we do, freedom works.
(ibid.)   
Although they could not directly attack the war effort, the
Democrats did attempt to limit the popular success of the war
among the media and the people.  Facing the loss of a battle over
history, Democrats used the rhetoric of time and the progressive
nation in their attacks on President Bush and the conduct of the
war.  After Bush's "State of the Union" address, Speaker of the
House Tom Foley said, "the troops don't want to come home to a
country that isn't adequately prepared to look forward
economically" (NYT, A9, 1/30/91).  Other Democrats justified
their objection to the war, saying that "before the war began, we
debated openly, as democracy demands" and arguing that despite
the war the "other business of the nation won't wait" (NYT, A10,
1/30/91).  Tom Wicker warned that the war's popularity might be
only temporary; it "could fade" if the war became "long and
costly" (NYT, A15, 1/30/91).
     The strategy of war meant that little could be said about
the actual results: the enemy might use any information that was
released, so the media was reduced to isolated reports of
successes without any context.  The image of the war was a vague
process across the sands, with little human action and impact
revealed within it.  The aggressor, the United States, made the
war an unevenly matched but impersonal encounter between weapons,
until with victory approaching they could show soldiers
surrendering.  The Iraqis tried to play up the human impact
caused by these weapons, but neither they nor the Democrats could
control the media time sufficiently to change the American
national event that was being created.
     In the rhetoric at home the war was reduced to a series of
events, timed and progressing without a hitch.  Bush was "pleased
to report that we are on course.... Our investment, our training,
our planning--all are paying off.  Time will not be Saddam's
salvation" (NYT, A8, 1/30/1990).
     The war became a way to get back onto the path of national
progress, to get over the temporary interruption of "the largest
peacetime economic expansion in history."  Bush made the progress
and successes of the war a part of the preparation "for the next
American century."
   
          We are resolute and resourceful.  If we can selflessly
confront evil for the sake of good in a land so far away,
then surely we can make this land all that it should be.   
          If anyone tells you America's best days are behind her,
they're looking the wrong way. (ibid.)
Although America is making a poor showing against the economies
of other countries, "our economy is still over twice as large as
our closest competitor" and with a little determination, we can
be aggressive and competitive enough to own the next century
(ibid.) With our ideals and planning we can lead the world and
conquer time.

THE AFTERMATH
     It was in the post-war period that the real import of the
war for American and world history could be assessed.  Before the
war other historical events were used to overcome the uncertainty
of the looming future.  Opponents of immediate war used precedent
to control and hopefully delay the war, while advocates of war
set delay and patience into the frame of the apathy around
Hitler's invasions of the 1930s, and called on Americans to look
to their enduring principles, to not fear the uncertainties of
the future.  In addition, the novel goal of a "New World Order" 
was proposed.  During the war, these same determined principles
and new ideals were appealed to, but the course of American
history was made a little more specific, with the war as a well-planned 
and progressive sort of thing that the forward looking
leaders of the world should carry out.
     After the war ended, the uncertainties were laid to rest. 
President Bush could make it into an American victory over the
problems and uncertainties that had plagued their recent history. 
"The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert
sands of the Arabian Peninsula" (WCPD, 27:10, 245).  "The
stunning success of our troops was the result of superb training,
superb planning, superb execution..." (ibid.).  The victory was
due to "creativity, strategic thinking, and the skilled execution
of a bold plan" (WCPD, 27:11, 255).  
     President Bush summed up the experience of all Americans
when he announced the liberation of Kuwait and the cessation of
hostilities "exactly 100 hours since ground operations commenced
and 6 weeks since the start of Desert Storm" (WCPD, 27:9, 224). 
By encapsulating experience within time, there is nothing that
can differ.  This sort of identitary time makes all the same, a
totalized version of human reality.  Counting hours or weeks does
not refer to real events in the same way that counting casualties
or bombs, or describing individual experiences does.  Bush denies
the voices of individual soldiers, of Americans at home, or
people in Iraq.  The war is reduced to a period of time, an
accomplishment that defined the United States during its passage. 
The social institution of time creates the qualities that the
society experiences as time, the affect of its time: before the
war it was brewing and uncertain, during the war it was committed
and according to plan, and after the war it is the fixed
accomplishment which then stands for all that determination can
do for us (see Castoriadis 1987:211).
     In his great emphasis on the plans and determination that
made the war a success, President Bush tries to make it a parable
or object lesson for how good government and popular dedication
to hard work, community spirit, and the solving of economic and
social problems can set the country straight.
     In the war just ended, there were clearcut objectives--time
tables--and above all, an overriding imperative to achieve
results.  We must bring that same sense of self-discipline,
that same sense of urgency, to the way we meet challenges
here at home.... The fear and uncertainty caused by the Gulf
crisis were understandable.  But now ... Americans can move
forward to lend, spend, and invest in this the strongest
economy on earth.  (March 6, 1991 address to Congress, WCPD
27:10, 260)
Bush proposes that the hierarchical command structure of the
military, its ability to make plans and execute them with precise
timing, be taken as paradigms for action in the United States.       

So tonight I call on the Congress to move forward
aggressively on our domestic front.  Let's begin with two
initiatives we should be able to agree on quickly,
transportation and crime.... If our forces could win the
ground war in 100 hours, then surely the Congress can pass
this legislation in 100 days. (ibid.)
Bush reiterated his challenge to Congress a few days later (WCPD
27:11, 288).  
     And 100 days later Bush criticized Congress for failing him. 
He said "I wasn't asking Congress to deliver a hot pizza in less
than thirty minutes."  But back home, the timed and scheduled
political arena does not respond to the President alone.  Unlike
military time and hierarchical command, in civilian life in
America as in Iraq, everyone has their own time.  Bush's time
rhetoric was turned against him: Democratic Party Chair Ronald
Brown anticipated Bush's rhetoric in a statement released in the
morning before the President's Wednesday afternoon speech, saying
Bush "followed up the 100-hour ground war with 100 days of
ignoring the economic problems of America's middle class"
(Bloomington Herald-Telephone, 6/13/91, p. A4, from the
Associated Press).  The White House staff had a little difficulty
presenting Bush's speech.  On Monday it had been cited as the
venue for a major new policy initiative setting the stage for the
coming campaign, but later the staff "played down the news value
of the speech" and hence the major television networks decided
not to broadcast it.  The New York Times also ignored his "pizza
in less than thirty minutes" quip (6/13/91, A1 and A12).  Perhaps
the rhetoric of plans and timing was beginning to be felt a bit
arbitrary, not strong enough to kick off a reelection campaign. 
It certainly left the President open to rhetorical counter-attack.

RESPONSIBILITY
     Unfortunately, in the post-war uphoria, America discovered
that war was not so simple.  Before the war there was some
mention of the possible complexities and dangers of such an
involvement, but these hazards disappeared in the single-minded
concern for the fortunes of our effort during the war.  After the
war, the problems it created came to the fore.  Internal problems
in Iraq threatened the rationale for the war.  We could not help
those who were bent on doing what Americans had hoped for all
along: the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.  The refugee and
Kurdish problems threatened to overwhelm the soldiers who had to
change from wartime determination to eliminate obstacles with all
force necessary, to the peacetime interaction with men, women and
children, and management of their daily affairs.
     The soldiers no longer had a plan.  They had the strategy,
skills and training to use weapons, but not to deal with
civilians.  But the war was not over yet.  They had to fall back
on rationalizations that the Kurds and the Shiites and the Sunnis
had not been changed by the war.  One officer on the line
explained that he tells his men to "try to look at it
historically, these people have been fighting for two hundred
years."  The soldiers were thrown into interaction, rather
than just action following attack plans against dehumanized
targets.  They were out of the world of command and obeisance. 
They had to deal with the very human problems of disorganized
civilians, to enter into the chaos that they had created.  The
soldiers tried to convince themselves "it has always been this
way, so why fight it?"

CONCLUSIONS
     I have suggested how an understanding of the institution of
time can be achieved through analysis of discourse.  Following
Castoriadis, I have tried to show the usefulness of the
distinction between the known identitary time of a society, and
the inaccessible temporality of the imaginary, through which
nothing can be the same, can endure, can be fixed as a basis for
comparison.  Because of the irreducible and unrepresentable
nature of temporality, society institutes its own identitary time
so that it can exist and endure across time, overcome change.
     Like the imaginary, making the the world consists of actions
which are not consistent, are always changing into otherness, but
which we attempt to institute as parts of the same through
interpretation and representation.  "Society must make itself and
state itself in order to make or state anything.  Making itself
and stating itself are the work of the radical imaginary,
considered as society instituting itself" (Castoriadis 1987:269). 
Thus we must investigate the making of connections among ideas,
actions and experiences, the instituting of society through
connections of events in order to constitute them as meaningful,
distinct parts of our life.  
     In the discourse about the war it is made into an event that
is powerfully connected to our own history, a momentous and
extraordinary event, but nonetheless a proper part of our
history.  Despite the radical indeterminacy of an undertaking
such as war, we link it closely to our purpose and meaning in the
world.  We determine it through powerful connecting symbols. 
When President Bush says we stand up to our duty he acknowledges
the difficulty of assessing history, but controls even this
limitless uncertainty with the larger symbol of mankind's self-consciousness: "Any cost in lives is
beyond our power to measure. 
But the cost of closing our eyes to aggression is beyond
mankind's power to image (sic)" (NYT, 1/30/91, A8).
     Many authors have looked at the ways we overcome time with
symbols:  Levi-Strauss has called myths "machines for the
suppression of time" and George Gilder calls plans the mythology
of the secular state (1981:309).  Cassirer describes how we use
abstractions and theory to make systems of relations in time and
space (1953:67-68, 77-78).  For Castoriadis, we bind events
together into successions so that "time is simply a relation of
order that nothing permits us to distinguish intrinsically from
other relations of order" such as value or spatial arrangement. 
Succession is thus just a variation of co-existence, and thus an
inadequate concept of history (1987:183-4).  
     The identity of things across time, as binding of time,
depends on the power of the mind to recognize the same and to
call it such.  The creation of a system that encompasses
experience depends upon this naming and the extension of models
that cover more and more of experience.  The mind is always
looking for the way to repeat, to make all significance depend
only upon the difference from that which has come before.   It
gets the connection, makes the link, hears the echo, finds the
repetition that completes the meaning.  
     The power of performed rhetoric does not arise only from the
item which "draws attention to itself" and is memorable (Abrahams
1972:30), but from the item contextualized in performance, being
used to connect the world into a continuity of explicable and
determinate things, suggesting that rational actions are
available for us to continue making that world.  In my analysis
of the cognitive world that is connected through political
rhetoric, I have followed Michel Foucault's program for the study
of discourse.  He says that the analysis should not seek to 
  

   go from discourse towards its inner, hidden nucleus, towards
the heart of a thought or of a signification that manifests
itself in [the discourse]; but, starting from the discourse
itself, from its appearance and its regularity, [analysis
should] go towards its external conditions of possibility,
towards that which gives rise to the contingent series of
events and fixes their limits. (1971:55, my translation) 

Although the goals of the politicians may differ greatly,
President Bush and his opponents in Congress all use time in
their rhetoric.  They all construct themselves within history,
and argue from that history to control the future.  The
"conditions of possibility" for this sort of talk about the
future and the fortunes of the nation, and about which path of
action it should take, set the dimensions for their rhetoric. 
Certain assumptions about the nature of time operate within
political discourse.  There is a strong belief in the continuity
of past, present, and future, yet talk changes radically when
anticipating an uncertain future, defining the present, or
setting the past into a fixed historical meaning and using it as
an argument for future action.
     Foucault suggests that power is not an oppressive force
wielded from above, but a distributed system, internalized in
everyone, not homogeneously, but as a part of culture and
practice.  From this perspective we can analyze the talk of
politicians not just as the creative use of accepted ideas to
control the national agenda, and to promote their own projects,
but as the use of accepted ideas because those are the only ones
possible, the only ones that their audience will permit.  The
politician must institute the same, fulfill the expectations of
his or her listeners.
     From the political rhetoric addressed towards them we see an
American people who expect to be described as persisting in their
principles and consistently progressing in their historical
development.  Their politicians give them a way to institute
themselves as the same, to make the self and the society visible,
to show order and connection in the world.  They give people a
way to connect their past and future selves with the present.
     These connections are made through the assumptions upon
which we all base thought and action.  These are the elements of
what Dundes calls worldview, and says is clearly present in
folklore (1980: 70).  Similarly, Castoriadis says that our doing
creates the embodied meanings that answer our tacit philosophical
questioning, creates the "magma of social significations."  I
argue that both ritual which Kertzer says "helps us deal with the
chaos of human experience and put it in a coherent framework"
(8), and the "esthetic organization" which Abrahams says guides
and controls by objectifying a "troublesome situation" (1972:19),
occur through the connection of ourselves and the world and
history into an organized whole, a frame for interpretation, that
overcomes the insecurity of temporality and change.
     Kertzer has described the ritual use of symbols best: they
are objects and actions that condense meaning, that bring
together diverse ideas through their multivocality and the
variety of understandings that even a single person might have of
them, and they are ambiguous (1988:11, 69).  Thus symbols can
encompass a lot of conflict and bring people to a common ground
of social consensus about appropriateness, even when there is not
cultural consensus about meaning (68, here Kertzer draws on James
Fernandez' usage of the terms social and cultural consensus). 
Politicians present their arguments in a ritual context where
they can exploit some of the largest symbols for the nation
because "one of the crucial functions of ritual is to produce
solidarity in the absence of any commonality of beliefs" (Kertzer
66).  Politicians follow the social consensus about what symbols
are appropriate and use these symbols' ambiguity to make
arguments that fit their projects.  Public talk that establishes
the common ground of social consensus conforms to the "conditions
of possibility."
     It appears that because he can command broader media
attention, President Bush can use more expansive symbols in his
rituals.  He can speak for more of us because he is heard by more
of us, and as long as his talk fits the criteria of
appropriateness or conditions of possibility, we accept the
shared set of premises about what we are doing.  Even if we
disagree completely with his rationalizations, we do so on his
terms because those are the terms that are shared by everyone:
most of the criticisms of the war have been about the validity of
the arguments Bush has presented: "the oil needs of the
industrialized world," "the new world order," "fighting for
Kuwaiti princes," "fighting to defend freedom."  No one
questioned the rationality of creating a new world order through
massively destructive bombings rather than through more specific
targeting of the person or people responsible for the invasion of
Kuwait.  No one questioned the rationality of inflicting massive
casualties to Iraqi troops and civilians in order to practically
eliminate casualties on our side.  Although politicians all
claimed that their dispute was with Saddam and not the people of
Iraq, the latter were the ones targeted for destruction, and no
better way to go to war was imagined or suggested.
     To create versions of the world that satisfy their
audience's desire for meaningful institutions, politicians draw
on what I would call political aesthetics, a poetics of ideas
through which politicians try to show how the audience embody
their own values, and persuade them to express those values by
given actions.  Symbolic forms are used to persuade Americans
that they have an "indomitable spirit" that makes them "do the
hard work of freedom" and "face down a threat to decency and
humanity."  As Kertzer observes, "extending the meanings of a
symbol from one referent to another is a common method
politicians use to profit from ambiguity" (70).  This extension
of meanings becomes a way of instituting social-historical
continuity.  Like myths and plans, ritual symbols extend across
time, demonstrating the constant identity of the symbol users
through the continuity of symbol use.
     Similarly, Abrahams argues that tradition offers things that
are felt to be collective property, but which get put together
into aesthetic and memorable wholes which serve as rhetorical
arguments:
     Each item of expressive culture is an implement of argument,
a tool of persuasion.  A piece is enacted by a performer who
tries to use it to affect an audience in some way.  He
embodies his argument in traditional form, and this makes
his techniques of argument traditional as well--but argue he
does, even when he seems to be entertaining. (1968:146)
Hence, the performer creates a connection between his or her
social action and that of the whole, between the individual
expression and the continuity of the social-historical
institution, the tradition.  
     It is important to recognize the connection between
persuasion and entertainment.  Poetics satisfies the need for
order in the world while offering the potential for creating new
meaning, but political poetics is a special kind of poetics that
must build upon symbols that are already recognized as identical,
as representing the identity of the nation.  In politics the art
serves the effect to an extent, but the range of art and effect
is constrained by the range of ideas and forms that can be
accepted by the audience.  The politician must present a certain
course of action as repetition or reestablishment of the same. 
The action cannot be based in a new idea, except to the extent
that that new idea can be shown to be a part of that which we
have been doing all along, to be a revitalization of certain
potentials or a continued development of our best qualities.
     I extend the ideas of Abrahams and Kertzer on aesthetics and
symbols as powers of rhetoric, to a more general sense that
rhetoric builds within the realm of possibility, within the magma
of ideas and assumptions, a cognitive assonance. This is not the
fairly uninteresting logic of linear syllogism, but the complex
stitching together of images and ideas into artistic, symbolic,
enduring wholes.  These solve the problems of uncertain
existence, they relate many things that had not been seen as
connected, they argue for a consistency in the world.  To resolve
the world the connections must be rich and multifarious, and must
fit with already held ideas.  Solving the problems of the world
is not an objective accomplishment.  It is instead, an
institution of the problem as solved.  The war with Iraq solved
almost nothing: it got Iraq out of Kuwait, but it destroyed the
ability of Kuwait (and Iraq) to produce oil and to feed its
citizens.  The death and suffering among Shiite and Kurdish
rebels and refugees, as well as the death toll due to Allied
bombing, are not resolved.  For Americans, however, victory in
the Gulf meant that the "specter of Vietnam [was] buried forever
in the desert sands" and that we could come home and use our
planning and technological skills with new confidence to resolve
social problems back home.  The war is meaningful within our
self-representation of ourselves: the war meant both that "we are
resolute and resourceful" and have been "united in purpose and
principle for 200 years" (NYT, 1/30/91, A8), and that we could
therefore remake our old image of ourselves as perpetually
righteous world leader.  Thus we instituted ourselves as
overcoming a bad self-image, we made a revolution in Castoriadis'
sense.  After the war we used ritual talk to institute ourselves
once again as an identical ensemble, a group that shares
experience and history and understandings.  We all feel that we
have overcome "the specter of Vietnam."
     Cognitive assonance can be seen in terms of Paul Ricoeur's
argument that metaphor depends upon two principles, "that of
congruence and that of plenitude" (1987:587).  He suggests that
connecting the many possible meanings of a metaphor or a text
with its context is "making sense" (586).  In rhetoric, the
possible connections are made into sense by both the speaker and
the listener, and the politician cannot afford to leave them
indeterminate as a poet or entertainer might.  Hence, the
politician is constrained to accepted ideas of the shape of time
and the identity of the nation.  When President Bush proposes the
"new" idea of a "new world order" the innovation is minimal: even
the idea that war should be waged for the good of the world is
only slightly different from wars in the past.  But for such a
new idea to be persuasive it must be connected to the continuing
history of Americans: it must be shown that Americans will lead
the new world order as they always have led the world, that it is
the fruition of universal desires for peace, freedom and the rule
of law which America has always represented.  The "conditions of
possibility" for Bush's rhetoric determine what signs can be
connected.
     The danger of introducing new ideas and new rhetorical ploys
is that they become identified with their creator, and are no
longer seen as collective property.  Hence, when the Democrats
seek to attack Bush they use that rhetoric which he has made his
own: the 100 hours and the new world order.  And when Bush starts
getting carried away by innovation, the "conditions of
possibility" start to constrain him: his use of the rhetoric
about "hot pizza in less than 30 minutes" brings a backlash, a
reduction in the power of his language, and a loss of media time.
     In their rhetorical battle over the war, politicians sought
the best symbols to fill in with the content that they desired. 
Time and history were used repeatedly because they can contain so
much, they are the heart of society's representation of itself.
Time as Americans have instituted it has the inherent nature of
progress and success because we define it thus through symbols
such as our "indomitable spirit."  The symbols are expected, but
argument can fill them with many possibilities and get agreement
just because we share the symbols.  When Bush described the event
of the 100-hour ground war we could all agree because we accept
that all of us shared the 100 hours, regardless of what we did
during it.  As Kertzer says, "rhetoric follows certain culturally
prescribed forms whose built-in logic makes the course of the
argument predictable at the same time that it lends credence to
the thesis advanced" (1988:101).  These prescribed forms are
society's self-representation, and the built in logic is its
social-historical institution.  
     Although the creative imaginary makes new things under the
sun, the conditions of possibility established by the social-historical
institution restrict political discourse to more of the same.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ISST III (1978) = The study of Time III; Proceedings of the Third
Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time,
Alpbach-Austria (July 1-10, 1976).  J.T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, D.
Park, eds.  New York: Springer-Verlag, 1978.

ISST V (1986) = Time, science, and society in China and the West.
1986. J.T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, and F.C. Haber, eds. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press. Fifth conference of the
International Society for the Study of Time, held at the Castello
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