While I have some down-time in my travels (layover in Louisiana), I want to consider the poignant question Erin Workman raised in her recent performance paper. She asks: “at what point/under what conditions/in what contexts does unitary language become pernicious?” As was mentioned in class, Burke seemed to be analyzing Hitler’s writings with a similar kind of question in mind. Burke may have added to Erin’s insightful questioning the issue of what this pernicious unitary discourse looks like, sounds like and acts like. Before continuing in this vein, I would be remiss if I did not tip my hat to Sarah Marshall for her own answer to this quandary of unitary language. Sarah posits that:
the purely single voice is a powerful one that can lead to a greater clarity of thought and definition (as Locke seems to desire), and it can lead people to action, for good or for ill. The problem with it is that by denying or vilifying other voices, rhetoric becomes less of a knowledge making, consensus building activity wherein people can construct through argumentation a contingent understanding of the world, and instead becomes a means for manipulation, exploitation, deception and demagoguery. The problem is how to expand the positive effects of rhetoric, and minimize the negative. Perhaps a greater attention to and inclusion of heteroglossia in rhetoric is one way of addressing this problem, not by seeking to destroy creative unity, but by expanding it.
¡Bien dicho!
Turning to Burke
Burke’s reading of Hitler sets the unitary voice against “a babel of voices” (p. 200). For Hitler, parliament could not solve the Germanic woes because it was a cacophony of dissent and disagreement; always posturing but never getting things done, else Germany wouldn’t have been in such dire straights (201). “Here again is where Hitler’s corrupt use of religious patterns comes to the fore” (p. 201). Hitler forwards a “sinister secularized revision of Christian theology” that “puts the sense of dignity upon a fighting basis, requiring…conquest,” not diplomacy (p. 202). The very ideas of democracy, of polyvocality, of polysemous texts were considered effeminate “evils” conjured by Jews (p. 205). This conjurer’s trick dissipated the strength and purity of the Aryan, diminishing his inborn dignity (p. 202, 205).
What Burke keeps pointing to is Hitler’s innovative tactics. He makes use of existing structures (e.g. the Church, the mass media) and narratives (e.g. sacrifice yourself for the good of whole) to “reconstruct” a “persecution mania” that targets innocent Jews (p. 214). By using existing dogma and adding his own twist of projective identification, Hitler has a ready-made medicine to cure Germany’s ills. Through “the power of endless repetition,” Hitler (and Joseph Goebbles) were able to inculcate a population of people with distrust, hate and blood-lust. We see in this calculus the double-edged sword of unitary discourse. Its true strength rests in its ability to produce one unwavering message (no babel) that dominates the hearers and limits the possible alternatives.
Perhaps the perniciousness is always (potentially) there in every communicative act? There is something about language as the carrier of meaning that has a propensity to compel people think and act in particular ways—something like language embeds both the possibilities and limitations of a given group of speakers/writers. Scaffolding off of Nazism for a brief moment, it is not even plausibly true that women were absent from the philosophizing of previous time periods. The discourse was dominated by men and masculine language, which limited the possibility of a world-view that included women as equals. That is a glaring omission and look at its impacts! Add to that the destructive elements found in most incendiary rhetoric and you confront a different beast altogether. Most of the truly destructive periods in history came at times when a unitary voice called for the eradication of another, of the Other.
It certainly does not have to go that far to be destructive though. Look no further than our own current economic condition and how we still tend to follow the ensample of othering through demonization. The whole point of demo(s)cracy, as I see it, is to argue and find avenues of compromise. It is the uncompromising nature of humankind that prizes the unitary discourse over heteroglossia. After all, heteroglossia can be complicated, cacophonous and inefficient. As has been said for centuries though, “Sometimes the shortest way home is the longest way ‘round.” Life is not a simple mathematical problem. Parsimony is not king. I think democracy proves that point to some degree. We the people? A unitary voice that is comprised of heteroglossia? Maybe discourse becomes pernicious when it stops being like a novel?
