More Thoughts on the Speech

By Ben Trott

Florida International University law professor, Stanley Fish, in a post to the New York Times' website blog, 'Think Again', reflects on Obama's speech. He wrote, yesterday,

'It is as if the speech, rather than being a sustained performance with a cumulative power, was a framework on which a succession of verbal ornaments were hung, and we were being invited not to move forward but to stop and ponder significances only hinted at.

'And if you look at the text – spread out like a patient etherized on a table – that’s exactly what it’s like. There are few transitions and those there are – “for,” “nor,” “as for,” “so,” “and so” – seem just stuck in, providing a pause, not a marker of logical progression. Obama doesn’t deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate...

'There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”

'The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.

'Of course, no prose is all one or the other, but the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic... The power is in discrete moments rather than in a thesis proved by the marshaling of evidence...

'One day after the occasion, USA Today offered as an analysis of the speech a list of the words most frequently used, words like America, common, generation, nation, people, today, world. This is exactly the right kind of analysis to perform, for it identifies the location of the speech’s energy in the repetition of key words and the associations forged among them by virtue of that repetition.

'In the years to come what USA Today has begun will be expanded and elaborated in a thousand classrooms. Canonization has already arrived.'

I believe that the following photo, posted to Flickr, is in fact of the USA Today story mentioned by Fish. It resembles, of course the tag cloud image produced by ReadWriteWeb.com mentioned here a few days ago.