“Going meta”: Definition and political applications

Abstract

Among the most memorable encounters in recent history are those in which one political actor “went meta” to another during a high stakes, high visibility political confrontation. Maneuvers of this sort break with routines by making prior communications the subject of communication. They are thus reflexive reframings. While the potential gains from going meta may be enormous, they may also be quite risky, hence requiring a delicate sense of rhetorical balance. This essay first explicates a general conception of “going meta,” applicable to a wide variety of communicative interactions, and then brings it to bear exclusively upon political confrontations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 65 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.