On Rhetoric posted by Richard Seymour

'Rhetoric is like a branch ... of the science dealing with behaviour, which it is right to call political.' Aristotle's words (Rhetoric, 1356a) prefigure those researches of the last few decades aimed at demonstrating that rhetorical conventions exist in order to satisfy specifically social requirements. This Kenneth Burke in 1950: 'The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counter-pressure, the logomachy, the onus of ownership, the Wars of Nerves, the War ... Its ideal culminations are more often beset by strife as the condition of their organised expression, or material embodiment. Their very universality becomes transformed into a partisan weapon. For one need not scrutinise the concept of "identification" very sharply to see, implied in it at ever turn, its ironic counterpart: division. Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall. Its contribution to a "sociology of knowledge" must often carry us far into the lugubrious regions of malice and lie.' Thus also, to cite someone who is intellectually at the opposite pole from Burke, Giulio Preti in 1968: 'Rhetorical discourse is a discourse addressed to a particular (I prefer to call it a "determinate") audience ... In other words, rhetorical argument starts from presuppositions as well as from feelings, emotions, evaluations - in a word "opinions" (doxai) - which it supposes to be present and at work in its audience.' And further on, commenting on some passages from the Logique du Port-Royal: 'Two things stand out in particular here: the first is the emotional character indicated a little crudely by terms like "amour propre", "interest", "utility", "passion", but which is nonetheless quite definite ... The second is the typically social character of these forms of sophism: they are linked to man's relations to other men within the nation, the social group or institution. This social character is contrasted with the universality of rational conviction.'

Rhetoric has a social, emotive, partisan character, in short, an evaluative character. To persuade is the opposite of to convince. The aim is not to ascertain an intersubjective truth but to enlist support for a particular system of values. In the seventeenth century - which witnessed the first great flowering of empirical science, and at the same time the collapse of all social 'organicity' in the fight to the death between opposing faiths and interest - the perception of this contrast was extremely acute. (Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Form, 1983).

One doesn't, of course, feign innocence when dealing with rhetoric, and the point is not to introduce some ersatz academic disdain for, and equidistance between, rhetoricians as vulgarisers and debasers of Enlightened discourse. Rather, to recognise the social bases of such strategies, all the better to undermine the ideological foe. I mentioned elsewhere that Hitchens, who is if nothing else an adept rhetorician, relied a great deal on precisely the kind of bourgeois assumptions that it is safe to say he would have rejected some years ago. His speech and writing is often impressionistic, carefully compounding details and associations that arouse a sort of 'common sense'. The Iraqi resistance is therefore dealt with on the basis of media mythemes - they're head-choppers, sadists, depraved maniacs, psychopaths, lumpen religious medievalists, theocrats, fascists, etc etc. The Taliban was characterised as 'Islamofascist', with a list of regime traits that indeed bear a superficial resemblance to fascism, but which escape any analysis of fascism. The US army's patently murderous conduct in New Orleans is avoided with an appeal to straightforward militaristic patriotism: aren't you proud of how the army handled the situation? Let there be no mistake - the tactics have not altered, rather it is the specific social appeal that has changed. Irony, which Hitchens described in Letters to a Young Contrarian as a weapon of the weak is now in his hands a prop for entirely conventional assumptions. You mean to say you're not delighted that Iraqis can now read hundreds of newspapers and vote? Are you sure you want to tell people that you are swooning for theocrats?

Blair, a less adept but nonetheless quite successful rhetorician, simply proceeds as if the 'values' of propertied centre-right voters and reactionaries were universal. We will never give the Tories the middle ground again. We will not return to the failed ways of the past. I believe we should level up rather than level down. Rights and responsibilities, fairness not favours, tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. Blair's speeches, where they are not simply incoherent, often feel like a sequence of staccato non-sequiturs, punctuated by penumbral blurs. The reason, as Derren Brown knows, is that effective political speakers have a way of issuing a bewildering and often quite useless amount of information - statistics, anecdotes, examples, 'jokes' written by John O'Farrel - followed by an easily retained soundbite. The information will be useless, misleading drivel, but it is quite impossible to assess all of it while it is being conveyed, so audiences will be so relieved to have arrived at the satisfying and undemanding phrase or statement. Even where the audiences were not selected for suggestibility (Labour conference), Blair used to be quite facile with this hypnogogic trick. Audiences were often, if not convinced, persuaded that the neoliberal policy mix was good sense, common sense, actually intended for them, actually protecting them from unreasonable demands. There can be no doubt that in its social content, Blair's rhetoric is carefully judged advocacy on behalf of the ruling class and the right. His infamous 'memo' in which he worried about his image being insufficiently pro-family, tough-on-crime, anti-yobbo, pro-Defense-of-the-Realm etc (in other words, insufficiently upholding the 'values' of the bourgeoisie) exposed this with unanswerable clarity.

So the Leninist question is: cui bono? For whom is one so exquisitely didactic? Whose desire do you massage, and for what purpose?