Ed Weick wrote,
>I can't leave this one alone. In political language, sound must mean
>"noise" - i.e., sound as opposed light.
Exactly. When I was a kid we used to play a conversation game where you said
the same sentence over and over just changing where you put the emphasis.
Another game was to say one word over and over as fast as you could until
you couldn't tell what word it was. Both games relied on the fact that oral
language is based on arbitrary arrangements of phonemes (Saussure).
Of course, saying that language is based on phonemes is synonymous with
saying that sound is its foundation. Speaking of speaking, therefore, it is
self-evidently true that the fundamentals _are_ sounds.
What Clinton (or Paul Martin or Herbert Hoover, for that matter) must mean
is that economy is simply another name for talking. That is to say, they are
affirming that the basic elements of economic discourse are arbitrary
phonemes, not mathematically precise symbols as the econometricians would
have us believe. They are reminding us that economics is ultimately a social
relation between people and not simply an exchange relation between
commodities (Marx).
There is also something vaguely Cartesian about the expression. It is as if
what they are saying is "My mouth moves and air [hot, understood] rushes
over my tongue, therefore I speak." Cogito ergo sum: Phonito ergo dire?
Regards,
Tom Walker
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