Provocation: “Forcing” and “Consenting” Social Struggle: Reflections on Rhetoric and Jacobinism

Abstract

In this paper, after reviewing Enlightenment-inherited liberal of rhetoric and violence, I build on Aune's work to critically explore nexus of rhetoric/violence through Gramsci's political theory. Whereas Aune's (2011) reflections on symbolic violence and ideology provide a first needed problematization of subject, I claim that hegemony, compared to ideology, is more adequate to articulate tension inhabiting rhetoric/ violence relationship. That is indissoluble link of force and consent inherent in practice of social struggle. THE LIBERAL APORIA OF RHETORIC AND VIOLENCE According to a significant portion of liberal tradition, relationship between rhetoric and violence represents an ethical aporia (Foley, 2013, p. 191) that treats violence as failure of communication and modern civilization: while logos represents order, syntax and rationality, violence denotes chaos, rupture and contradictions. Logos, exemplifying dream of communication (Peters, 1999), delivers a promise of human sociability, understanding and pacification; conversely, violence appears as a negation of social life and almost promise of its disruption. The Enlightenment tradition and its cultural, social and political project epitomize modern embodiment of such beliefs. For instance, Kant (1983[1784]) described communicative reason as one major force of Enlightenment: people emancipate themselves by exiting the self-caused inability to speak (p. 41). As he clarifies in Perpetual Peace (1983(1795]), through critical discourse and public use of reason, people can peacefully coexist as a society. Kant, in effort of providing rational foundation for a political project concerned with freedom, collective good and pacification, considered rational and argumentative communication as fundamental. Despite two centuries separating us from Kant, Enlightenment tradition still provides a useful perspective to understand liberal conceptualization of rhetoric and violence. As Habermas has shown (1991), liberal rhetoric seems to be intimately associated to so called modernity project, according to which ratio of critical inquiry, of bourgeois public sphere, of marketplace, supersedes violent voluntas of feudal lord, monarch, dictator and monopoly. In other words, argumentative reasoning is consistently understood as a consensual means of political deliberation opposed to violence, which conversely stands as a repressive means of political coercion. In such a liberal conception an Enlightenment myth seems to be unfailingly reproduced: when ideas and commodities are placed into a public arena, freely competing with one another, truest and best will prevail. Thus, sublimation of violence into a structured system of social antagonism-such as democracy and marketplace--is considered to be liberal response to human quest for civility. In fact, in all mentioned cases, violence is assumed to be superseded by a self-adjusting social mechanism and by vita activa of politics and trading. Such a rationale crystallized into projects of social pacification: civil society and state (Keane, 1996). On one hand, behind concepts of civitas burgerliche and Gessellschaft resides goal of overcoming state of incivility, i.e. violence. In this sense, one of most important variants of civil society project is liberal proposal to create a marketplace in which resources could be distributed and exchange value of goods could be collectively and systematically determined. On other hand, one finds Hobbes' contractualist model of state, which was supposed to replace fierce natural state of Bellum omnium contra omnes. Indeed, State and civil society appear as modern monuments of liberal faith on rational and effective communication: state celebrates value of law that only when enunciated and fixated in written forms becomes a right (think at constitutions, bills of rights or Weberian rationality); civil society considers free market of goods and ideas as reflection of ideology of best argument. …