Rhetoric Not So Much With the Revolution Thing
For some reason, dealing seriously with language ingrains in a scholar a certain skepticism when it comes to revolutionary change. Lacan, for instance, is at his most explicitly rhetorical when developing his theory of the Four Discourses. His famous and prescient retort to student revolutionaries during May '68, coincidentally the time he was developing the theory: "you demand a new master, and you will get it". Saul Alinsky - whose revolutionary credentials are quite beyond reproach - finds in rhetorical norms the need, the method, and the necessity for slow but deep revolutionary change:
This failure... to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elemenary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates with the experience of his audience - and gives full respect to the other's values - would have ruled out attacks on the American flag... if I were organizing in an orthodox Jewish community I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich, unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out
There's another post to be had about rhetoric's (and Alinsky's) preference for a particular kind of propriety-acknowledging communication - and the consequences of that for those who glibly assert that rhetoric will have no truck with conservative sensibilities. For this post: Alinksy finds himself emphasizing that communication is essential to the slow work of forming alliances and creating the conditions for broad social change, lest progressive social projects burn out. He's almost certainly being too generous: the most dramatic revolutions don't end up failing, they end up crashing and burning spectacularly, taking them and their organizers with them. After the jump: why this means that rhetoricians are right and people who work in departments to which we are unlikely to apply to are hopelessly misguided.
The difference between rhetorical and philosophical (metaphysical?) sensibilities is summed up in another context by Alinsky: "as an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would want it to be." It's not a neat trick to emulate a Nozick or a Rawls: take a world starting at Year 0 and build up from there. It's of course difficult to emulate the raw brain power or almost surreal rigor that Nozick or Rawls brought to the table, but that doesn't make the practicality of their trick any less tenuous. As a matter of brute facticity, society is not at Year 0. We've been rolling away from it for millennia, allowing material and discursive structures to calcify into entire social landscapes. That leaves ethicists with two options: tear everything down towards an always-deferred plan of rebuilding from a stable foundation, or theorize where we should go from where we are. The former seems to hold attraction for not a few philosophers, from Heidegger to the political philosophers of the French Revolution - that is, from the apologist for crematoria to the naive executioners eaten by their revolution.
The latter choice - with its emphasis on communication, its insistence on slow political change, and its refusal to demure on the morality of these sensibilities - is the legacy of most rhetorical theories and Rhetorics. It probably gets its disciplinary start in Aristotle (the Athenian rhetoricians of the Peloponnesian Wars not having been known for developing a deliberative tradition lending itself to circumspection - populism is super, unless you’re Melos). It gets picked up and reworked - particularly in the register of practicality - into one of the canonical books of contemporary Speech Comm. But nonetheless there are still seminars and conferences that play host to the thuggish strutting about “tearing the system down”, to the faux radicalism of “doing your own thing”, and to the costless but still silly suggestions that violent revolution may - always in the final analysis - be necessary. And that’s before we even get to undergrads who wear Che shirts.
Over and over we find: those who deal at the highest levels with what underlies human communication end up with a palatable distrust of revolution, while those who most seriously work to create deep change end up insisting upon the deep for slow, rhetorical labor.
References:
* Alinsky, Saul. Rules for Radicals. New York, NY: Vintage 1989.
* Farrell, Thomas B. Norms of Rhetorical Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Comments (1)
What would be some examples of social projects that have burned out? Or more accurately, how would you distinguish between social and governmental projects?
Posted by Moses | July 16, 2007 10:09 PM