Tense Times

How the syntax used in US political discourse creates the very crises it describes

American public culture is obsessed with crisis. Political polarization, economic collapse, moral decline—the worst seems always yet to come and already here. Tense Times argues that the ways we discuss these crises, especially through verb tenses, not only contribute to our perception and description of such crises but create them.

Past. Present. Future. These are the three principal verb tenses—the category of syntax that allows us to discuss time—that account for much of what is written about our crisis culture. Lee M. Pierce invites readers to expand their syntactic inventory beyond tense to include aspect (duration) and mood (attitude). Doing so opens new possibilities for understanding crisis discourse, as Pierce demonstrates with close readings of three syntaxes: the historical present, the past imperfective, and the retroactive subjunctive. Each mode produces a different experience of crisis and can help us understand our current political reality.

The book investigates a dozen widely circulated discourses from the past decade of US political culture, from Beyoncé’s controversial hit single “Formation” to the presidential campaign slogans of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, from the dueling rallies of Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart at the National Mall to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy and the 2007–2008 bailout. Taking a comparative approach that integrates theories of syntax from rhetorical, literary, affect, and cultural studies as well as linguistics, computer science, and Black studies, Tense Times suggests that the public’s conjuring of crisis is not inherently problematic. Rather, it is the openness of that crisis to contingency—the possibility that things could have been otherwise—that ought to concern anyone interested in language, politics, American culture, current events, or the direction this country is headed.