Sometimes when we talk about politics we communicate information: the tax rate, the retirement age, the size of the national debt. But sometimes we seem to be doing something else. We express ourselves through words, but what we’re really offering is a combination of purrs, growls, and waving flags: positive or negative sentiments and wishes of affiliation or disaffiliation with movements or individuals. In their new book The Politics of Language, Texas linguist David Beaver and Yale philosopher Jason Stanley (also a popular pundit and theorist of the alleged rise of fascism in America) claim that this aspect of our expressions, which they call resonance, is the essence not just of political language, but of all language — that “meaning” simply is a matter of resonance. Our words and sentences are not boxes that contain “contents” but tools we use to connect to others, to gain their support, or push them around, or hurt them. The Politics of Language is a truly impressive offering which synthesizes an enormous breadth of research to develop this ambitious new theory. And, in doing so, it preserves as though in amber a short, already-fading “vibe” of academic and cultural politics: the vibe of woke.

At over 500 pages, The Politics of Language is an almost heroic attempt to provide robust academic scaffolding for a strange cultural moment which seems to have already passed, the moment when “You’re using an offensive trope” or “That sort of argument has an unpleasant history” seemed like politically and intellectually important conversational moves. Though the writing is sometimes uneven, moving between technical, metaphorical, polemical, and pop-scientific modes, it also features some great phrases, such as “A dictionary clings to language by the tail.” Ambitious and thorough, it goes wrong in part because it goes right, accepting something that’s often denied: that this moment was indeed a radical departure from the normal way we think about politics, language, and human psychology.