How Not To Do Things with the Word: Barack Obama on the Armenian Genocide

As opposed to Clinton and Bush's traditional rhetoric, Obama's post-modernist discourse takes into consideration not only what is expressed but more what is or might be implied. An interpreter is authorized to reconstruct allusions and explicate intertextual meanings and messages, which are implicitly incorporated in the text. This amalgam of the lexically articulated and con- (inter-)textually implied meanings provides an opportunity to be in line with the statements of his predecessors and avoid keeping his promises, at the same time declaring the opposite and referring to his previous records.

The hypertext created by Obama is based on its intertextual linkages. It is understandable only to himself as that “super-reader” who knows all contexts, subtexts, and references. However, all these sophisticated linguistic strategies are based on a primitive taboo. The taboo is a distorted form of semiosis when the link between the signifier and the signified is considered as an absolute. It is presumed that non-usage of the signifier affects the signified (existence/non-existence of some state of affairs). Taboos can be overcome only if one abandons the borders of political mythology. If interpreted in accordance with post-modernist principles, the text is not subject to conventional procedures of verification or falsification, so another hermeneutic approach appears to be the adequate instrument for its interpretation and the resulting deconstruction. Such an interpretive approach is consistent with the strategy used by Barack Obama for semantic and pragmatic structuring of his messages, so there are sufficient grounds to consider Obama's statements in entirety with these texts. Within this approach, the addressee of his messages is sanctioned to interpret them as recognition of the Armenian genocide. Ironically, this reminds one of Friedrich Schleiermacher's basic principle of hermeneutic interpretation: a possibility of understanding the author as well or even better than he understands himself.

References

genocide connotative description

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