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The Uses of Ambiguity

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The usual response is to worry over any lack of clarity.  But it’s worth turning over this ordinary condition to see what the other side offers.

We often assume that language works best when it is stipulative: when words mean one thing and one thing only. This is the way mathematics functions. Ambiguity has been wrung out of most calculations and computer codes. In the not-so-distant past, the promise of mathematical precision was the firm hope of some linguists.  We usually have the same hope in mind when we attempt to “explain” a fact or attitude to another. We want to see our words as duplicates, more or less, of what is in our’s and others’ heads.

There is nothing wrong with this impulse.  An Alice-in-Wonderland world is not what most of us imagine as a functional environment.  We depend on predictable responses from others.  If a person says they are “feeling well,” we assume we know what they mean.

Slippery meanings have their functions.

Even so, meaning is almost never a matter of a one-to-one conversion.  We know this only too well when apparent certainties give way to the vicissitudes of real life. “I think she is coming,” “It’s not too spicy,” and “The computer glitch is fixed” are all statements from a very deep well of expressions that should come with a permanent asterisk of doubt. What we hear and what has been affirmed are almost never the same thing.

And yet, slippery meanings have many functions. Consider just a few of many:

A certain vagueness can trigger new insights. Breakthroughs in thinking sometimes happen by accident, or the near-accidents triggered by the use of analogies, poor word choice, metaphors, and on-the-fly comparisons.  These sideways glances into a problem can yield surprising new understandings.

Astrobiologist Caleb A. Scharf notes that “the simple truth is that scientists themselves constantly make use of analogies, metaphorical devices, and similes. Sometimes it’s the only way to build an intuition for a problem, by relating it to something else. Richard Feynman was perhaps one of the greatest players of this game, turning spinning plates into cutting-edge quantum physics and Nobel prizes.”  Notably, all of these rhetorical forms are significantly ambiguous.  Push them far enough and they break down into non-sequiturs.

A key advantage of ambiguity is perhaps what the poet John Keats meant in his often quoted letter to his brother in 1817. He said he admired Shakespeare for his “negative capability,” meaning that The Bard was “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  Literature and narratives open up to multiple perspectives, making them knowable only in the serendipitous ways they create rainbows of associations within us.

Ambiguity preserves options. We depend on a certain degree of verbal skill to protect ourselves and allow for generous reinterpretation. The calculated spaciousness of a statement gives us room to adjust as a situation requires. It’s an old joke that a politician’s favorite color is plaid. But we often exercise the same kind of linguistic sleight of hand.  The response “I’d love to come to the party if I can” preserves a range of options later on.  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean” uses a non-committal response to perhaps fend off an overt statement one disagrees with. It’s almost as good as “Maybe.”

Advertisements are strategically ambiguous about what they are selling.  An audience member often finds their own way to a message.  And a certain indirection can help.  A McDonald’s-France ad featuring a closeted gay youth sharing a meal with his dead ends with the tagline, “Come as you are.”  A second look suggests that the message is a bit hypocritical.  Why can’t the youth be out to the rest of his family? Perhaps a casual viewer only sees the ad’s pitch for inclusivity.

Ambiguity lets us in. Music, poetry, and unresolved third acts leave room for audiences to hear or see what they need. Music carries the possibilities of multiple meanings even further. What did Dmitri Shostakovich mean by the crude and blunt marches embedded in the First Movement of his Fifth Symphony? Just a modernist impulse?  A taunt to authorities who wanted a more “Soviet” style from him?  A garish state of his own bouts of despair?  Who knows?  Or try to identify the emotional thread in a A Chorus Line’s big anthem, “What I Did for Love.”  Is the Hamlisch/Kleban song a simple expression of commitment to the precarious life of a Broadway dancer?  A “no regrets” act of defiance over a committed relationship that failed?  Or a defiant affirmation of same sex love, when it carried a heavier social stigma?  We hear what we need to hear.

Music can be partly understood in terms of the mathematics of tonality. But the emotional results of it and all the arts take us in a totally different direction:  to myriad evocations of feeling made possible by their welcome ambiguities.

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American Dislocations

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Chicago, 1968                                                The Washington Post

The current President produces a jarring and familiar sense of dislocation:  behavior rife with violated norms, intimations of collusion with shady figures, and shameless cronyism.

Was it always so?

Using the foreshortened perspective that looking back in time allows, its easy to see the United States as a civil society that is nearly always peering into the abyss of political crisis. These varied downturns are not quite existential threats; there’s usually no fear for the survival of the republic.  But as they unfold in real time, they can still seem overwhelming.

Was it always so?

As young people, our parents or grandparents stared down the gunbarrel of international catastrophe.  Eventually, America’s participation in the Second World War became heroic.  But the threat of a Nazi Europe  and a rising Japan left few untouched.  Germany’s bid for hegemony clearly failed, yet the eventual petition of western Europe at the hands of our former Soviet allies triggered new waves of governmental overreach.  Congress was at the center of anti-communist hysteria that chained out in fantasies of internal subversion. Throughout the 1950s, those who traded in such dystopian speculations were certain that Americans were not safe as long as the likes of Leonard Bernstein or Dalton Trumbo were loose in the Republic.  What would eventually become McCarthyism pushed America into bouts of anti-intellectual fervor that equals the magical thinking that now dominates our news.

In different ways it would be no less for ‘boomers’ like myself growing up in the 1960s. The proliferating spread of television put us in a front row seat for a stormy decade that would rob the nation of 58,000 American lives in Vietnam, a popular President and his brother, and the nation’s leading civil rights leader.  Racial tensions flared into open mayhem in Detroit, Los Angeles and other American cities. And within a year of the worst riots, the nation shamed a discredited Lyndon Johnson into declining to serve a second presidential term. The new heir to the office in 1968 was a moody Republican whose own devolution would be complete in the first years of the next decade.  Richard Nixon eventually resigned, impeached and disgraced. That was only a few years after the hot summer of political violence that culminated in a “police riot” and bloodshed at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. As a high school student living through the 60s in the sheltered heights of a mountain town, I can still recall a sinking feeling that the meltdowns of the decade amounted to a kind of second Civil War.

It seems like American politics is much like North American weather: brutish, prone to jarring changes, and sometimes lethal. Even so, it is interesting that Canadians living under the same meteorological forces seem more willing to forgo the kinds of tribal battles that routinely drain Americans of the natural optimism. Issues that easily cripple and harden Americans—health care, regional sovereignty, “fair” taxation—seem to be resolved with more grace and less drama by our northern neighbors. Is the fact that the nation never suffered through a crushing civil war a factor? Canada’s lesson for us is that nations not on the brink offer fewer psychological rewards to those who would make virulent opposition a lifelong occupation.

The challenge of nurturing a successful civil society is not just our battle to wage. In smaller and different ways some of the same issues exist in important nations in Europe. But it feels like we have the dubious distinction of constructing crises of our own making, putting ourselves at a disadvantage to find pathways of communication that can take away the strangeness of our neighbors.