I love this post. You show just how pervasive frame control is and how we are always and already caught up in it, regardless of conscious intent. You show how communication is already flooded with “secondary effects,” affecting the social context beneath our noses. Your thinking, as I see it, intersects with Austinian Speech Act Theory and Anscombe’s Intention. Like the speech act theorists, you show how communication is not merely an intentional transmission of abstract ideas or propositions between minds via the use of standardized symbols (a la the “descriptive fallacy”), but rather, a context-sensitive means of affecting the social context with words, such as instituting social norms (e.g. exercitives), creating and enforcing obligations (e.g., promises), positioning oneself as knowing better or wielding authority that retroactively frames others as subordinate or duty-bound to follow along (e.g., commands; invoking one’s expertise as justification to follow one’s lead), aligning or dissociating oneself with another or cause, instituting or making moves within a social context (e.g., “This meeting is adjourned” appropriately announced by someone with the authority to end the meeting.), constituting agents and roles within an ideological social world (e.g., interpellation—which might really blow your mind), and so on. Such an illuminating post.
I love this post. You show just how pervasive frame control is and how we are always and already caught up in it, regardless of conscious intent. You show how communication is already flooded with “secondary effects,” affecting the social context beneath our noses. Your thinking, as I see it, intersects with Austinian Speech Act Theory and Anscombe’s Intention. Like the speech act theorists, you show how communication is not merely an intentional transmission of abstract ideas or propositions between minds via the use of standardized symbols (a la the “descriptive fallacy”), but rather, a context-sensitive means of affecting the social context with words, such as instituting social norms (e.g. exercitives), creating and enforcing obligations (e.g., promises), positioning oneself as knowing better or wielding authority that retroactively frames others as subordinate or duty-bound to follow along (e.g., commands; invoking one’s expertise as justification to follow one’s lead), aligning or dissociating oneself with another or cause, instituting or making moves within a social context (e.g., “This meeting is adjourned” appropriately announced by someone with the authority to end the meeting.), constituting agents and roles within an ideological social world (e.g., interpellation—which might really blow your mind), and so on. Such an illuminating post.