Mraningless Political Babble: Communication at Scale

Much political speech is almost meaningless if treated as description. Its slogans are vague, its categories unstable, its promises underspecified and its arguments endlessly recycled. This is usually taken as evidence that political communication has failed. But description may not be its principal function. Political babble can instead be understood as one kind of binding communicative interface: a recurrent surface through which people inhabiting substantially different realities remain coupled strongly enough to affect one another.

A phrase such as “ordinary Australians,” “the elites,” “security,” “freedom” or “common sense” does not need to identify the same thing for everyone who uses it. Its usefulness may depend upon precisely the opposite. Different lives, memories and expectations can meet at the same linguistic surface while retaining different meanings behind it. Political language does something stranger than establish agreement: it gives disagreement a shared channel. Like gossip, it can be informationally unreliable while remaining relationally precise. People need not agree about the story, or even believe it, for its circulation to establish who attends to whom, test affiliations, distribute reputational pressure and make particular alignments increasingly legible.

The apparent emptiness is consequently functional. Precision excludes; ambiguity remains available to incompatible interpretations. Repetition then does more than circulate words. Elections, scandals, slogans, parliamentary rituals, polling and media cycles establish recurrent points of attention around which expectations, emotions and responses begin to converge and diverge. The significance of a political statement may consequently lie less in what it accurately describes than in who repeats it, who rejects it, when they respond and what their response makes likely next. Participation can be enough. Political communication coordinates heterogeneous populations without requiring semantic agreement.

This is the good, the bad and the ugly of political babble. Loose common forms allow incompatible experiences to remain communicatively connected, but the same forms can preserve obsolete categories, grievances and antagonisms because familiarity makes them easier to recognise and reproduce. At the limit lies bullshit: language sufficiently detached from external constraint that its capacity to provoke another cycle of response becomes more important than what it describes. Outrage produces commentary, commentary produces reaction, reaction produces further outrage. Political communication begins supplying the conditions to which political communication then responds.

That recursive quality makes politics particularly effective at sustaining itself. Repetition establishes rhythms; rhythms shape expectation; expectation changes the probability of response. A controversy arriving for the hundredth time does not enter an empty social space. People, institutions and media systems are already disposed toward familiar positions, timings and reactions. Even denunciation renews the common object around which attention is coordinated. No one needs to command the process. Recurrence progressively makes some responses easier, more intelligible and more immediately available than others. What appears to be endless repetition is also psychological and social entrainment.

The mechanism is not peculiar to politics, nor is gossip merely an analogy imported from elsewhere. Both expose something more general about communication. Any sufficiently complex communicative bundle must connect participants who do not share identical histories, information, meanings or temporal positions. It requires forms stable enough to be recognised across difference and loose enough to survive reinterpretation. Semantic underdetermination is consequently not simply a defect added to communication. It is among the conditions that allow communication to propagate across heterogeneous contexts. Politics makes this unusually visible because its recurrent forms are pervasive and attached to institutions capable of converting communicative alignment into collective action.

This helps explain why bad political situations can be extraordinarily difficult to escape. Persistent conflict can bind people as effectively as agreement. Opponents become mutually anticipatory; institutions settle around their antagonism; identities acquire definition through it; each recurrence prepares the conditions for another. The discomfort is real, but so is the connection. Escaping such an arrangement requires more than better arguments or different politicians. It requires other ways of carrying the relations, expectations and differences currently being carried by the conflict. Until those exist, some of the frictions everyone wants to escape may remain among the processes holding everyone together.