Concluding Comments

This essay has drawn upon numerous examples in explicating the concept of "going meta" (and the related concept of "meta-move"), and in providing a sense of the pushes and pulls on political actors in going meta in political confrontations. It should be evident why attacks such as these are so often the subject of repeated television replays and journalistic commentaries in campaign coverage (Jamieson, 1992:211).

The first part of this essay was devoted to conceptual matters: differentiating going meta from self-referential meta-communications, from non-strategic responses, from non-reflexive direct exchange, and from frame-maintaining messages. Worth recalling from this discussion is that communicators may go meta to other communicators or to their shared message context, and that they may do so both by discrete meta-moves, and by repeated patterns of response. Also worth noting is that the same meta-move may alter more than one frame simultaneously, as Judge Thomas did in both stepping outside the frame of direct exchange and supplying, by way of his "lynching" metaphor, a new way of viewing the hearings.

The Hill-Thomas hearings illustrated the centrality in political confrontations of rival claims to legitimacy. Here we proposed a view of legitimacy, not as a countable property of political actors, but as contextual and ultimately performative. The decision to go meta in political confrontations also impacts on legitimacy. It is a way of going "one-up" on one's opponents and thereby reaping significant rewards, but it may also be seen as evasive, intrusive, disruptive, or contentious -- hence, in some contexts, illegitimate. Ironically, political actors may be regarded as more genuine, and even as more heroic, the more going meta seems a gamble in a rhetorically dicey situation. But much depends in any case on how one goes meta, and on how one prepares the ground for going meta. Colonel Oliver North and his attorney never said explicitly that North had been victimized by North's interlocutors, but they so effectively prepared the ground for the "documents" debacle (with help from Nields) that words became unnecessary. On the other hand, attorney Arthur Liman was able to capitalize on North's by then habitual stance of injured party that he was able to use North's resistance against him in a stellar performance of rhetorical jujitsu. Bill Clinton also played the aggrieved victim in his confrontation with Donahue, but this time to mixed effect. The trouble was that he probably over-reached in threatening silence should Donahue persist in asking embarrassing questions. Clinton was unequivocally successful in debating the "patriotism" issue with Bush, in part because he refused to let Bush off the hook for Bush's seemingly excessive criticisms of him. In all these instances, and in others discussed in the essay, we see underscored the importance of appearing to stand on higher ground than one's opponents. This is consonant with Bateson's notion of meta-communication as not just about or beyond or outside, but above -- at a higher level than -- the message or message context that it frames reflexively. This sense of going meta as moving upwards in conceptual space is reflected in the number of ordinary language expressions corresponding to our sense of higher as better, or more sweeping, or more abstract, or more spiritual, or as transcendent -- all of which are potential sources of legitimacy.

This essay has broached a concept and explored some of its applications to the political arena. It remains to further develop the concept and to apply it in a variety of contexts. How is going meta used as an instrument of power in the boardroom, the classroom, and the bedroom? How can going meta be used cooperatively, as a form of intellectual play, or as a way of advancing consideration of a question? This essay has also focused most of its attention on the smallest unit of going meta, that of the individual meta-move in response to a single message or message context. But, as was suggested earlier, one can go meta to entire streams or patterns of discourse. It would be interesting in this connection to bring the concept of "going meta" to bear on the many discourses comprising the "political correctness" debate, including the charge that the very critique of "political correctness" conceals its own political agenda.

It would also be interesting in this wise to think back on the 1992 campaign of Ross Perot. Perot was very much the meta- candidate, not just in respect to particular utterances or stretches of campaign talk; his style of campaigning challenged the very institutions of talk. And he made it clear, if elected, that he would repair the institutions of governmental talk as well. Perot, the expert at organizational communication, would end gridlock in Washington, just as Perot, the rhetorical critic of campaigning as usual, had shown that there was an alternative to jumping around the country, offering up silly one-liners and photo opportunities at airport stops for the local news. Virtually every major campaign move of Perot's, beginning with his initial refusal to hire handlers, pollsters, and "cosmetologists" (his word), and culminating in his thirty minute, chart-in-hand infomercials, was an implicit repudiation of the campaign practices of his opponents.

Yet there was also a point during Perot's first incarnation as Presidential candidate at which the repeated challenging of reporters' questions began to wear thin. As the questions got tougher and Perot's responses got testier, his strategy of going meta seemed to backfire. Likewise, in the Presidential debates, one wished eventually for more substantive talk and less talk about talk. Too often, his stock of solutions seemed limited to plans for cutting back the deficit. Not always is going meta an appropriate substitute for direct exchange. As this essay has argued throughout, going meta is an art of rhetorical balance.