Rhetoric And Marxism

James Aune

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000310085
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is the first extended study about the relationship between Marxism and the rhetorical tradition. Aune suggests that the classical texts of Marx and Engels wavered incoherently between positivist and romantic views of language and communication–views made possible by the decline of the rhetorical tradition as a cultural force. Though Western Marxism attempted to resolve this incoherence, it lacked a satisfactory theory of its own. Aune argues that the liberating impulse of Marxist tradition, ultimately, would be better served if we paid closer attention to the rhetorical history of the labor movement and to the role of public discourse in arousing or quieting revolutionary consciousness.

1
“The Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing”

ON NOVEMBER 10, 1837, soon after becoming a student at the University of Berlin, Karl Marx wrote a letter to his father: The letter described the development of Marx’s two great loves: for Hegel’s philosophy and for his future wife, Jenny von Westphalen.

There are at least two items of interest in the letter for the student of rhetoric and communication. First, in the introduction, Marx deprecated the love poems he recently sent to Jenny: “All the poems of the first three volumes I sent to Jenny are marked by attacks on our times, diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts.”¹

Second, he described the writing of a twenty-four page dialogue, “Clean-thus, or the Starting Point of Philosophy,” where he attempted to unite art and science and was led to the acceptance of the Hegelian system. His philosophical endeavors left him in an agitated state. He sought relief by joining his landlord on a hunting expedition and, on his return, by immersing himself in what he called “positive studies.” These “positive studies” included the reading of works on the law of property, criminal law, canonical law, and a work on the mechanical instincts of animals, as well as Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Science. He then translated parts of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.²

It is unclear from the letter or other writings of Marx what parts of the Rhetoric he translated or what affect they had on his work. Nonetheless, this letter serves as a kind of representative anecdote for the reception of rhetoric in the Marxist tradition: if mentioned at all, rhetoric is consigned to the margins of serious discourse, is rigidly separated from both art and philosophy, and is considered, at best, to be a branch of “positive studies.”

The possibility that Marx knew something about the rhetorical tradition is at first sight an intriguing one, but the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from his writings is that the tradition had a negligible influence. To be sure, the historical writings, especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, display a nearly Ciceronian style, full of antitheses and copia, but the absence of classical notions of invention and audience is rather obvious.

The response of the reader who is interested in mass communication or cultural studies may at this point be, “So what?” Why is the influence or lack of influence by the classical rhetorical tradition significant in understanding Marx?

In the first place, any study of communication is informed by a set of assumptions about the nature, function, and scope of communicative practice. Understanding a phenomenon such as conversation requires some sort of prefiguring of the data to be studied. Is communication simply an exchange of information, one in which faulty decoding by one or both partners may prevent full understanding? Does conversation occur within a web of tacit linguistic conventions or rules whose identification is the chief goal of scholarly research? Is it best understood as a dialogue that opens up its participants to the indwelling of Being? Or does using the term “communication” unconsciously commit the user to a set of Lockean liberal assumptions about politics, in which, as John Durham Peters puts it, the individual, not the community, is “lord of the signifier”?³

Similarly, it makes a great deal of difference in the study of mass communication whether one adopts a view of mass communication (in terms of the transmission of information across time and space) as a collective ritual that helps define self and community or as a branch of a larger “science of signs.”⁴ Since research into communication is always already guided by a particular philosophical stance toward communication, it at least remains an interesting question whether the dominant theory of communication in the premodern West has anything to say to contemporary critical scholars.

But there is a more important reason to confront rhetoric and Marxism. Marxism as a discourse community emerged from the breakup of the classical tradition. Marxism shared with liberalism an impatience with rhetoric and with political deliberation. There may be some use in distinguishing Marxism as an intellectual system by its failure or refusal to engage the rhetorical issues that preoccupied early political and social philosophers. Classical theorists such as Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, and Cicero, as well as later figures such as Vico, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, and Edmund Burke, wrote about rhetoric or engaged in actual rhetorical practice. The father of capitalist political economy, Adam Smith, wrote a series of lectures on rhetoric. Two of the most important nineteenth-century rhetorical theorists, Thomas De Quincey and Richard Whately, wrote books defending free trade.⁵ Marx and Engels, however, never seriously engaged the role of rhetoric in social systems.

The purpose of this chapter is to locate Marx and Engels within the tradition of antirhetoric characteristic of modernity. Marx and Engels’s writings, despite shifts in vocabulary and political orientation, display a re markable continuity in their view of human communication. This view is linked inextricably with Marxism’s nuclear contradiction between structure and struggle. An analysis of Marx and Engels’s political careers and key writings illustrates how the structure of their arguments creates moments of contradiction and ambiguity that lead to later strategic problems for Marxist theorists and advocates.

The Rise of the Self-Defining Subject

A major trend in contemporary rhetorical scholarship has sought to develop broad theoretical explanations of our modern malaise based on the decline of rhetoric as a pedagogical and political practice. Chaim Perelman and Wayne Booth trace modern scientism and irrationalism back to Descartes’s emphasis on systematic doubt and self-evidence. Richard Weaver argues that the cultural cohesiveness of the West was dealt a fatal blow by the defeat of realism by nominalism in the fourteenth century. Richard McKeon blames the Church. Karl Wallace blames Peter Ramus and the logic of Port-Royal.⁶

The list could go on. All these writers share a sense that the modern era is characterized by a distinctive splitting of cultural visions: between a scientific and technological worldview reluctant to deal with problems of ethics and value and a romantic worldview in which the emphasis on individual self-expression seems to undercut the possibility of rational public speech. Political thinkers as diverse as Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Alas-dair MacIntyre tell a similar story.⁷ It is, as Terry Eagleton puts it, a story about a time when “the three great questions of philosophy—what can we know? what ought we to do? what do we find attractive?—were not as yet fully distinguishable from one another. A society, that is to say, where the three mighty regions of the cognitive, the ethico-political, and the libidinal-aesthetic were still to a large extent intermeshed.”⁸

The genius of Marxism, of course, was to recognize that this society declined not because of faulty ideas alone but because of the imperatives of capitalist development. Marxism also recognized the real achievements of capitalism, although it tended to define these in technological terms rather than political ones. Marxism, in many ways the legitimate heir of classical republicanism, inherited a conception of discourse that was finally inimical to the practice of citizenship. The heritage of classical rhetoric, at its best, asked its audiences to move from being subjects to citizens.

Rhetorical analysis begins with the question of audience. What is the audience targeted or imagined or even brought into being by a text or performance?⁹

Classical rhetorical theory constructed a vision of its audience as participating in the crafting of civic virtue under the guidance of the citizen-oraton Rhetorical theory was not so much a distinct form of intellectual inquiry as it was the practical part of political education. Politics in turn was conceived not as a separate “sphere” from the social or familial but as the place where the human telos was to be achieved. Audiences are constituted by the orator as citizens capable of judgment. As S. M. Halloran puts it:

The ideal orator was conceived as the person of such broad knowledge and general competency that he could apply the accumulated wisdom of the culture to any particular case in a sufficiently logical fashion to move his hearers’ minds (logos), and with enough emotional force to engage their passions (pathos). The name given to the third of the traditional modes of rhetorical appeal, ethos, underlines the importance of the orator’s mastery of the cultural heritage; through the power of his logical and emotional appeals, he became a kind of living embodiment of the cultural heritage, a voice of such apparent authority that the word spoken by this person was the word of communal wisdom, a word to be trusted for the weight of the person who spoke it and of the tradition he spoke for.¹⁰

The ideal orator stood in an ordered relationship with tradition and with the cosmos as a whole. The orator’s use of language embodied the wisdom of the community as a whole. The orator was not self-defining but was motivated by a kind of self-interest. The “problem of incentives” that would return with such a vengeance in twentieth-century Marxist states was solved by the appeal of public glory. Albert Hirschman notes that the classical notion of public service possessed a sort of “invisible hand” explanation of the quest for public glory: the community as a whole benefits from having a class of spirited men who seek enduring fame for their contributions to public life.¹¹

The classical vision of virtue-based politics, ethics, and rhetoric survived in uneven and contradictory ways down through the eighteenth century. Many of the political achievements of the eighteenth century were crafted through a republican political rhetoric. As Wood and Pocock note, “republicanism” is a political language or “paradigm” in which political debates are conducted, featuring such terms as “virtue,” “the public” or “common good,” and “corruption.” These terms are anchored in a few core beliefs: “that human beings are essentially political animals, that they can fulfill their natures only by participating in self-government, and that the most important aims of the political community should be to promote virtue among the citizenry and to advance the common good.”¹² Because republics require constant vigilance against the corruption of centralized power, republican orators frequently invoke memories of past republican glory and decay. Republican rhetoric is thus time-binding, insisting upon historical memory as the foundation for civic virtue. It is no accident, either, that rhetoric as a pedagogical practice and as a field of inquiry is essentially republican in its origins.

What displaced republicanism, largely because of capitalism itself, was the political language of liberalism. “Liberalism” insisted that individuals are the ultimate definers of moral value, that consensus on what would constitute civic virtue is not only impossible but dangerous, that politics is as much an arena for oppression of others as it is one of self-fulfillment, and that government must devise a system that recognizes and protects individual rights, especially, but not exclusively, property rights. Liberalism also had a characteristic stance toward communication. Eloquence, a veritable god-term in the language of classical republicanism, became suspect in liberalism, mainly because it seems to violate the sanctity of individual choice.¹³

In the realm of language and philosophy, especially the German philosophy that influenced Marx, the shift from the community to the individual was even more acute. Philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder redefined the ancient view of human nature within the context of the self-defining subject inherited from the Enlightenment. As Charles Taylor writes, “Man comes to know himself by expressing and hence clarifying what he is and recognizing himself in this expression. The specific property of human life is to culminate in self-awareness through expression.”¹⁴

If self-expression rather than clear communication or deliberation on public questions is the highest purpose of language, then rhetoric must yield to poetics as the chief focus of education: “the human center of gravity is on the point of shifting from logos to poiesis.”¹⁵ Art becomes a means of survival in an industrialized, disenchanted world. Literature becomes exclusively imaginative literature, which in turn is the expression of a “people’s” soul.¹⁶

Liberalism, scientism, and romantic expressionism share a theory of public discourse. Truth consists of perfect transparency, whether of scientific results, poetic vision, or the general will. Rhetoric, like the republican politics and virtue ethics that nurtured it, had to disappear.

But, of course, rhetoric as a human practice did not disappear, even if the practice became suspect and traditional theory became ignored. As I argued in the Introduction, the result of rejecting the rhetorical notions of Bildung, sensus communis, judgment, and taste was a universalizing culture of critical discourse. It was this universalizing culture of critical discourse in which Marxism conducted its public argument. It relied on elimination of past prejudice, an audience alienated from its culture, and the dominant trope of irony to do its argumentative work. Its very persuasiveness was bound up with its rejection of the claims of ethos, practical judgment, and audience identification.

Reading Rhetorically

Before I analyze key texts in classical Marxism directly, it would be useful to summarize the understanding of rhetoric used in this work. The development of rhetorical theory in this century has helped us ask questions about audience, figuration, narrative, and strategy as they interact in practical discourse.

Edwin Black has taught us to examine what he calls the “second persona” in analyzing public discourse: the “model of what the rhetor would have his real auditor become.”¹⁷ This model is revealed particularly in the figural choices made by the orator. The “first persona” is what the classical theorists called “ethos,” the embodiment of cultural values. The second persona, although present in classical accounts of audience, is now more easily seen as a rhetorical construction, given the seemingly infinite number of selves or “lifestyle choices” auditors possess with the rise of capitalism.

Despite this variety, it is possible to read rhetorical documents as constituting audiences in an essentially republican mode—as citizens capable of rational deliberation within a communal tradition—or in an essentially liberal mode—as individuals first. The latter sort of audience is not extended in time the way the republican audience is and is appealed to as a sort of universal audience able to transcend ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Spirit of 1989
• 1 “The Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing”
• 2 Marxism After Marx: The Problem of Mediation
• 3 Marcuse’s Disappearing Audience
• 4 Time, Place, and Cultural Studies: The Legacy of Raymond Williams
• 5 Rhetoric Between System and Lifeworld: A Reconstruction of Habermas’s Historical Materialism
• Conclusion: Toward a Red Rhetoric
• Notes
• About the Book and Author
• Index