On January 9 2007, Steve Jobs — former CEO of Apple — presented a keynote at the Macworld event. In this presentation he revealed a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communicator. Not three devices, but one. It was the iPhone, which would reset the whole mobile phone market from that point on. Not only that, it changed the way we interact and move through public space fundamentally, staring down at our own devices. This has both social and physical effects on smartphone users, a ‘Text Neck’ is reported to be a growing problem. So it is safe to conclude that objects — at least in certain cases — can intervene with our behaviour and possibly also our thinking.

What happens when, without other changes in technology and subsistence, fragile building materials are replaced by concrete blocks and tin roofs? Certainly the structure of society will be weakened and perhaps transformed through the agency of building materials.”¹¹

Our perceptions of, and actions within, our surroundings are changed under the power of the implementation of objects. While this is true for the physical object, it is also to some extent applicable to language, the tool of politics. “Man is suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”¹²

In this essay I would like to research how Wilders designs his political rhetorics, and why he is — in this sense — a better designer than other politicians.

Boroditsky has for example examined the spatial influences of language on Aboriginal groups in Australia.

“The Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like ‘There’s an ant on your southeast leg’ or ‘Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.’ One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is ‘Where are you going?’ and the answer should be something like ‘Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.’ If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past ‘Hello’. The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers [...] Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities.”¹⁴

Another research conducted by a team of MIT, led by Edward Gibson, depicts an Indian tribe — the Pirahã — that does not use numbers in their lingual system as western languages do. The team found that the Pirahã only use three types of words to describe quantity, similar to how we would use one, two and many. They came to this conclusion by starting with one object to be counted, and adding one object at a time, up until 10. But when they worked the other way around, counting down, they found that the Pirahã used the term previously understood as two; now was used to signify six or five objects. And they used the term previously signifying one for four to one object(s). This led to Gibsons conclusion that “they’re signifying relative quantities”, and never absolute quantities. Meaning that the Pirahã are comparing amounts, rather than counting them.

Language does not only have similarities with the object, regarding influence in the way we act, it is also often referred to as being an actual object or device. This opens up new perspectives on its use, its power to create new realities and ability to be designed and shaped. Derek Bickerton for example states that “language is unique to humans, but it isn’t the only thing that sets us apart from other species — our cognitive powers are qualitatively different. So could there be two separate discontinuities between humans and the rest of nature? No, says Bickerton; he shows how the mere possession of symbolic units — words — automatically opened a new and different cognitive universe, one that yielded novel innovations ranging from barbed arrowheads to the Apollo spacecraft."¹⁶

Foucault introduces the term dispositif or apparatus referring to relational systems of institutions, discourses, measures, statements, architectural forms, morals et cetera. The said and the unsaid. The apparatus is an object that has the power to impose. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben builds on Foucaults definition of the apparatus. “Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and — why not — language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses — one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face."¹⁷

Nicole Boivin refers to a theory called niche construction in her paper Material Cultures, Material Minds. This is a process whereby humans, and other organisms, construct and modify their own and other niches. The change of one niche puts pressure on another, therefore altering the evolutionary dynamic. Boivin writes that “whether for earthworms, beaver, or humans, is the proposition that organisms construct ecological niches for themselves as part of their being-in-the-world, as a way of counteracting and buffering the vagaries of a hostile environment. This act of construction, which for humans incorporates their symbolic faculties, themselves an evolutionary product, covers the full range of material, organizational and phenotypic assets of our species.” And as Derek Bickerton wrote: “Human culture is just the human niche”. These niches respond to new objects of reality, wherein lingual objects are as ‘real’ as physical objects, this is what Bickerton referred to as “a new and different cognitive universe."¹⁸

While language has the ability to create new objects of reality, which can be referred to as priming, it has at the same time the possibility of altering existing realities, this is done by framing. The theory of priming is grounded in cognitive psychology and is focused on the associative network model of the human memory. An idea is conceived as a node, and is interconnected with other nodes (ideas).

A way to perceive the influence of language is to register neologisms, new terms that have added to the enormous array of existing ones. Let us take a look at the Word of the Year, between 2005 and 2015. An election of words that are deemed to be the most influential, significant or contemporary that year. The list presented is made up by words that got elected by Dutch institutions and organisations (Genootschap onze taal & van Dale), and therefore are mostly Dutch terms.

A large part of the elected words or terms have a political background, origin or even motif, suggesting a close relation between politics and language. Are these neologisms the result of politics being in the public sphere, responding to a new reality? Or are they deliberately put to use in order to create new realities?

Staying focussed on the Netherlands, it could be interesting to consider the lingual contributions of Geert Wilders, of the populist political party PVV. Although despised by many, Wilders also is very popular under large parts of the electorate. He, as no one else, shows how powerful framing can be within public debate. Journalist J. Kuitenbrouwer, in his book De woorden van Wilders en hoe ze werken, states the following: “If Islamisation exists or not, Wilders introduces it as a topic [...] and forces others to comment on it. Therefore it exists.” Professor Tjitske Akkerman, in her article Populism and Democracy: Challenge or Pathology? attributes the electoral succes of Wilders to the combination of preferences of society and marketing techniques with strong leadership and the taking of simple and clear positions. And the neologisms of Wilders help him achieve this, they are priming and framing political debate and therefore influencing the minds of the electorate. He is deliberately creating some sort of vernacular or bridge language between the politics and the people, handing the people tools, framing devices or reasoning devices in order to engage the political debate in their own way. And whether we despise or vote for Wilders, we all have to deal with the new realities he is shaping.