Blogora Classic, Aune on Fascisms, 2006-08-11

Fascisms

Staying on message, both POTUS and Santorum used the term "Islamo-fascism" this week. I've posted on this before, but here again is a summary of Umberto Eco's classic essay on Ur-Fascism, for purposes of comparison:

1. Cult of tradition: there is some original wisdom (pre-philosophical) that we have lost:
a. Either "pure" (non-Jewish) Christianity or pre-Christian Indo-European mythology
b. Occult elements (hostility to science)

2. Rejection of modernity:
a. Rejection of science and technology (except as tools for warfare)
b. Suspicion of capitalism, especially big business, for destroying traditional communities
c. Rejection of liberty and equality as fundamental values (rejection of the Enlightenment)

3. Cult of Action for Action's Sake:
a. Hostility to intellectuals and intellectual life as subversive of traditional values AND as unconnected to the "real" world of toughness and action
b. Thinking is a form of emasculation

4. Dissent is betrayal: science proceeds by testing all hypotheses, liberal democracy by opening public issues to discussion and debate; no fascist can accept criticism.

5. Fear of difference (racial, cultural, ideological): everyone must think alike (or be eliminated from the community)

6. Springs from individual or social frustration: especially targets the frustrated middle class, envious of the rich but afraid of social pressure from below. The old "proletariat" or working class, having improved its lot in Europe and the U.S. post-WWII is now perhaps the greatest potential audience for a new Fascism, as it feels its economic gains slipping away.

7. Obsession with conspiracies: both outside the nation (xenophobia) and within (the perennial Jewish conspiracy from the inside).

8. Disciples must feel humiliated by the enemy's strength and power; paradoxically, the enemy is at once too strong and too weak.

9. Life is a permanent war; there must be a "last battle," "Armageddon," "final solution" after which an era of peace is created.

10. Scorn for the weak; "popular elitism": the people belong to the best people in the world, but there must be leaders, because the masses are like children, needing to be led.

11. Cult of death: the final reward for a heroic life.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Fascist transfers his will to power onto sexual questions. This is the origin of machismo: contempt for women plus an intolerant condemnation of nonconformist sexual habits, especially homosexuality.

13. Populism: the "people" are no longer represented by the courts, the executive, and the legislature. Politics-as-usual is rotten.

14. Use of Newspeak (George Orwell, 1984): use of language to prevent critical and complex reasoning. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

--

Part of the original essay, with references, is here:

http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Umberto_Eco_-_Eternal_Fascism.html

Blogora Classic: Aune on Method, 2006-08-19

Method

I'm finally getting down to work on my next project--on the Gastonia strike of 1929 and its fictional and scholarly representations. Here's a stab at describing my "method"; if anyone has a minute, please point out strengths and weaknesses:

A. Implicit rhetorical theory as recurring theme in my scholarship1. Political “languages” or ideologies address or imply

a. an ideal form of persuasion/communication, and
b. a model of how people change their minds.

2. Sometimes a rhetorical theory is explicit, as in Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, but in others (since the 18th century) it has to be reconstructed, usually by attention to these key moments in the text

a. representations of crowds and audiences,
b. representations of oratory and other persuasive messages, including the “repertoire” (Charles Tilly) of actors in contentious politics
c. signs of social anxieties about forms of communication (usually fear of the Mob or of deceptive elites)
d. representations of “sparks”—moments of popular mobilization or popular quiescence (e.g. Plato’s “beautiful lie,” or the neoconservative belief in the need of philosophers to lie to the democratic public)

3. Both fictional and philosophical texts can be studied this way.

4. Methodological influences:

a. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (especially the classic first chapter describing differing narrative strategies in Homer and in the book of Genesis).
b. Wayne Booth’s ethical criticism (The Company We Keep)
c. James Boyd White’s constitutive rhetoric (When Words Lose Their Meanings)
d Edwin Black on the “Third Persona”and Christine Oravec on the Whig and Jacksonian styles in antebellum American political discourse
e. Derridean deconstruction’s attention to moments of figural and conceptual instability in texts (or Althusser’s symptomatic reading—attention to the non-dit—the not-said—and moments of décalage—slippage).

5. For example, in Selling the Free Market (2001) I studied the fictional and political discourse of radical libertarians, demonstrating that libertarianism as an ideology has a distinctive, and highly limited, view of communication: communication and persuasion are reduced to information exchange and cost-benefit analysis, ignoring the “friction” created by social norms and emotions.

6. Rhetoric and Marxism (1994): Classical Marxism contained an internal inconsistency or décalage: why should anyone revolt if history follows a deterministic sequence of modes of production? An inability to theorize political persuasion itself led to efforts by later Marxists (especially the Western Marxists) to fill in the gap between “structure” and “struggle,” culminating in Habermas’ theory of communicative action.

B. Practice theory (getting from micro level of text to the macro structural level)1. Emphasize specific social practices, including rhetorical strategies and tactics (a la De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life—what kind of everyday “resistance” do the weak use?

2. Understand the “structure of the conjuncture”: structural changes occur through practice—the values learned in practice become the new structure. Social change often occurs through failed structural reproduction along traditional lines, in which new “meanings” become central to re-structuration.

3. Practices as efforts to resolve social, political, economic contradictions (Ortner on Sherpa monasteries in High Religion)

C. Big Theory questions:1. Is the Structure/Agency opposition a “constitutive” one? i.e., an ongoing debate within Western culture, because of its own inherent contradictions? (Bourdieu, in Pascalian Meditations, says rather cynically that the opposition persists because it’s part of the academic game to attain symbolic capital by locating oneself within a particular school of thought).

2. Explicit and implicit accounts of rhetorical action are especially fruitful to analyze in understanding Sahlins’ “structure of the conjuncture.”

a. Structure-oriented Marxists ignored issues of meaning and rhetoric—as Sewell writes, Marxist used to link “mere” and “rhetoric” the way they linked “rising” and “bourgeoisie.”
b. More action-oriented social historians have neglected the role of public rhetoric as an important nexus of the elite and the popular.

So, is rhetoric (discursive strategies and tactics) itself the primary site at which one can observe the structure/agency problem in social life?

Blogora Classic: July 06, 2005, Aune on Textbooks

Blogora Classic:  July 06, 2005, Aune on Textbooks
Is this still true?  Since the publication of Joshua Gunn's textbook, I hope not...  --David

Tomorrow morning I'm off to San Francisco as part of a junket (I feel just like Tom DeLay) sponsored by a textbook publisher. About 10 teachers of public speaking are going to meet for two days in a posh hotel to be a focus group for improving textbooks.

There are a number of really good rhetoric and composition textbooks out there, reflecting the seriousness with which our English comrades take pedagogy. There is not, to put it bluntly, a single public speaking text that is worth the price. When I teach Honors Public Speaking (the only version I get to teach these days) I usually put together a packet of readings or else use Karlyn Campbell's The Rhetorical Act. What I can't figure out is why publishers think that these texts need to be so visually stimulating. I wonder if a better alternative might not be some kind of computer software, an expanded and improved version of powerpoint, that included examples and exercises for audience analysis, outlining, evidence, reasoning, and delivery--the delivery part could work like foreign language cd-roms now, with audio files of correct pronunciation.

I guess one of the reasons why these texts are so bad is that a significant number of the teachers of the basic course are graduate students who themselves lack sufficient skills in oral performance to design a unique course adapted to their university. The texts thus need to be recipe-like in order to make it easier to lecture and do assignments.

Any thoughts?

Blogora Classic: July 02, 2005, Aune on Scholarly Pleasures

Blogora Classic: July 02, 2005, Aune on Scholarly Pleasures

I'm working on an essay on Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, so I've been plugging some holes in my knowledge of the culture and politics of the period (1848-1851). It's been nice to discover a scholar I hadn't been familiar with before--the Marxist art historian T.J. Clark, who is an absolute model of what the engaged critic should be in his two books: Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution and The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851. I also have been reading Balzac--first Pere Goriot, and starting on The Wild Asses' Skin. Great, enjoyable reading--vocation and avocation together, as Frost puts it in "Two Tramps in Mudtime":

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.