Political statements need decoding of who speaks, not just surface reading
Evidence
If we were to read a sentence of this kind in the New-Critical fashion, overvalorizing the verbal surface and detaching the sentence from the system of enunciations and the series of political contexts in which it belongs, it would be perfectly possible to read into it the precise meaning that Said conveys in his sentence about the ‘Orient’, reborn as a Third World, asserting itself against the new configuration of two imperial powers. But who is this ‘we’ in Nehru’s sentence? This needs some decoding, because Nehru was undoubtedly the main luminary at the Conference, but before we make the mistake of having this ‘we’ represent the Conference as such, hence the generality of a ‘Third World’, it is best to recall that Zhou En Lai occupied almost an equal eminence and a statement of that kind (‘communist teachings … based on wrong principles’) simply could not have been made on his behalf. And, of course, Nehru had been the first to underline the fact that it was a conference of governments. Nehru’s sentence, in other words, is a governmental sentence. The ‘we’ is, in the first instance, the government of India. In this first instance, it presumes that it speaks on behalf of all of India; government, in other words, claims to be the nation. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 566
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the method of unpacking enunciative positions used in Discourse theory and against New Criticism; connects to Ahmad’s larger case against overvalorizing verbal surfaces. — connects to: Understanding speech requires projecting oneself toward the speaker’s possible ends. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1216; Language itself is a political battlefield when discourse is indoctrinated — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 713