ABSTRACT
Representation is always linguistic and is always value and interest laden. Representation is the essential concern of persuasion, and shared meaning is its goal. An “ideology” is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways, and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it. In short, the minds of the reading public are often filled with trash that eviscarates our political imaginations, while politically progressive books, such as this one, remain largely unread. The political right, however, is well aware of how rhetoric works, and has used it quite effectively to represent itself as the “natural-political position. People, however, and that is the goal of socialist/leftist politics, and an important prerogative for scholars of communication, people who probably best understand the workings and mechanisms of the mass media, as well as the rhetorical dimensions of logology.
