Redescription We Can Believe In

Obama framed his campaign using the mantra "Change we can believe in." That mantra was successful, in part, because of its vagueness; the expression is broad enough to encompass lots of different definitions of "change." Post-election, it is natural that some people who voted for Obama will be satisfied with his decisions, and others will be disappointed; this difference largely hinges upon one's interpretation of "change." Depending on which interpretation(s) are yours, Obama's Cabinet selections of the past week might either please you, disgust you, or not affect you one way or the other. Here are a few I've heard:

--A change from cronyism to competency.
--A change from Republican to Democrat.
--A change from old faces to new faces.
--A change from a government that listens to lobbyists to a government that listens to the people.
--A change from corruption to reform.
--A change from a system controlled by the rich to a system controlled by the middle-class.
--A change from de-regulation of the financial system to regulation.
--A change from capitalism to socialism.
--A change from war in Iraq to war in Afghanistan.
--A change from Washington insiders to Washington outsiders.
--A change from an arrogant, ethnocentric, bellicose, nationalistic worldview to an inclusive, multicultural, peace-promoting, global worldview.

Richard Rorty, the philosopher I find most interesting, wrote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) that change occurs not by way of grand discovery about how the world really works, but by way of redescription. Important thinkers like Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Nabokov, Derrida, and Orwell, he said, did not assume their importance because of groundbreaking discoveries they made, but because their redescriptions of the world and of their predecessors' works spoke to the contingencies of their particular times and places. Derrida redescribed Heidegger, who redescribed Nietzsche, who redescribed Marx, who redescribed Hegel. Rorty redescribed all of them. This all leads me to ask, how might Rorty, were he alive, have viewed the Obama transition process? I'm going to add one more interpretation of "change" to the list, on behalf of Richard Rorty:

--A change from one way of talking about the world to another. (Or as Rorty would have said it, "Replacing one final vocabulary with another.")

Of course, to Rorty this would not be as insignificant as it sounds; how we talk about the world has a great deal to do with how we act within it. I read the other day some article suggesting that the Obama administration may or may not continue to define the "war on terrorism" as a "war." I also recall Obama's terrific Independence Day speech from earlier this year in which he tried to redefine "patriotism" in terms he found more acceptable. Both of those, I think, are clear examples of a shifting vocabulary. Should be interesting to monitor this shift over the next few years, as the vocabulary of the Obama administration replaces that of the Bush.