Rhetorical Unconsciousness and Political Psychoanalysis

M. Lane Bruner

Description

Case studies exploring the roots of persuasion and rhetorical unconsciousness

Rhetorical Unconsciousness and Political Psychoanalysis investigates unintentional forms of persuasion, their political consequences, and our ethical relation to the same. M. Lane Bruner argues that the unintentional ways we are persuaded are far more important than intentional persuasion; in fact all intentional persuasion is built on the foundations of rhetorical unconsciousness, whether we are persuaded through ignorance (the unsayable), unconscious symbolic processes (the unspoken), or productive repression (the unspeakable).

Bruner brings together a wide range of theoretical approaches to unintentional persuasion, establishing the locations of such persuasion and providing examples taken from the Western European transition from feudalism to capitalism. To be more specific, phenomena related to artificial personhood and the commodity self have led to transformations in material culture from architecture to theater, showing how rhetorical unconsciousness works to create symptoms. Bruner then examines ethical considerations, the relationships among language in use, unconsciousness, and the seemingly irrational aspects of cultural and political history.

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Cynicism (contemporary)
• Critique of Cynical Reason
• Obscenity
• Political criticism
• Political revolution
• Distrust
• Demagogy
• Legal fiction
• Usury
• False consciousness
• Holocaust denial
• Semantics
• Rhetoric
• Philosophical Investigations
• Psychoanalysis
• Political philosophy
• Despotism
• Critical philosophy
• Oppression
• Hypocrisy
• Critique
• Investigations philosophiques

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 04 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611179842
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Rhetorical Unconsciousness and Political Psychoanalysis
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
Rhetorical Unconsciousness and Political Psychoanalysis
M. LANE BRUNER
2019 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-983-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-984-2 (ebook)
Front cover illustration: Costume of the allegorical figure Rhetoric, 1585, by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
For Barbara Warnick
In us there are two principles: an unconscious dark principle, and a conscious principle. The process of self-cultivation consists in raising that unconscious being to consciousness, raising the innate darkness in us into the light, in a word, achieving clarity.
F. W. J. Schelling, quoted in S. J. McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit
Contents
Series Editor s Preface

An Introduction to Rhetorical Unconsciousness
CHAPTER 1.
Conscious and Unconscious Rhetoric
CHAPTER 2.
The Ontical Structure of Rhetorical Unconsciousness
CHAPTER 3.
Artificial Personhood
CHAPTER 4.
The Commodity Self
CHAPTER 5.
Secular Theology and Realization

Conclusion: Agency and Realization
Notes
References
Index
Series Editor s Preface
In Rhetorical Unconsciousness and Political Psychoanalysis , M. Lane Bruner offers a systematic exploration of the varieties of unconscious persuasion that are inevitably related to the best and worst of conscious, intentional persuasion. Rhetorical unconsciousness, Professor Bruner shows, is built into our shared, individual psychologies and into the fabrics of social relations that have come to be taken for granted as the structure of everyday human experience. Such unconscious persuasion operates through ignorance (the unsayable), unconscious symbolic processes (the unspoken), or productive repression (the unspeakable). That which is unconscious is not merely out there in another realm, though it may appear hidden from our view; rather, it finds its way into our conscious and intentional rhetoric in ways not fully understood. Bruner illuminates the structures of our irrationality and offers the hope of intervening in our own pathological confusions to redeem our intentional rhetorical prospects.
Thomas W. Benson
An Introduction to Rhetorical Unconsciousness
The term rhetoric , no doubt, is broadly misunderstood. Most are ignorant of the term, as classically conceived in ancient Greece and Rome, and those aware of the term tend to associate it with self-interested spin if not cynical deception: mere rhetoric. While a partially correct assumption, since many do deploy the arts of persuasion intentionally for unenlightened ends, this is an incomplete and improper understanding of the rhetorical. In fact whatever persuades us is rhetorical, and rhetoric, as historically conceived across the ages, is the art, for better and worse, of intentional persuasion. Persuasion obviously can be manipulative, leading to derealization and unwise policy, but persuasion can also contribute to realization and wise policy.
The term rhetoric , if known at all, is rarely associated with wisdom. It is not an overstatement to say if known at all, since ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of rhetoric have still not penetrated deeply into many parts of the globe, being primarily reascendant in the United States and Europe. 1 While this situation is changing under the influence of contemporary globalization, and the intentional rhetorical arts are increasingly studied and practiced in other parts of the world, if in a less widespread and systematic manner, there is still widespread illiteracy across broad swaths of the globe, and political conditions that stifle critical thought and hamper access to intellectual and physical resources. Because of these and other factors, the classically conceived arts of intentional persuasion, let alone the forms of unconscious persuasion discussed in the following pages, are simply out of mind, unsayable, for most of the world s population.
For people around the world familiar with the term, not only in neoliberal societies (e.g., those supporting free trade, minimal government interference in business, the maximization of market logics) 2 but also in other types of more obviously repressive regimes (e.g., those ruled by physical terror rather than economic cruelty), observing the widespread and ever-present fact of manipulative, self-interested, and decidedly unvirtuous persuasion, where people work to bend situations to their will, no matter the quality of that will, rhetoric has earned a well-deserved reputation as empty and misleading speech or speech cynically adapted to achieve unenlightened, merely factional or self-interested ends. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language , for example, first defines rhetoric as the undue use of exaggeration or display; bombast, followed by the art or science of specialized literary uses of language in prose or verse, including figures of speech, and only then, in third place, as the effective use of language. 3 The definition offered for rhetorical is even less promising, limiting the meanings to three: language concerned with mere style or effect, a tendency toward bombast, and having the nature of rhetoric, which we can infer means bombastic speech stylistically dressed up for a falsely impressive dramatic effect. 4
This dominant association of rhetoric with manipulation and bombastic style is unfortunate for several reasons. The most problematic consequence, in a larger setting where the term is unknown, is that it erases the broader connections between rhetoric and the arts of persuasion. A purely dismissive view obscures a plain yet inescapable fact: persuasion in all its varied forms is an ever-present aspect of human sociality, whether ethical or not, whether bombastic or noble, whether unconscious or conscious. Whether one is a realist or an idealist or anyone in between, one thing is certain: anyone choosing to engage actively in their taken-for-granted worlds would do well to master the intentional rhetorical arts, if for no other reason than self-protection. This may do little to impact the influence of the forms of unconscious persuasion explored in this book, but rhetoric is not simply something that others do falsely. Intentional persuasion is something we engage in all the time, ignorantly or not, unconsciously or not, artfully or not, ethically or not.
Part of the art of intentional persuasion, for example, is understanding the fundamentals of argumentation, learning to recognize fallacious arguments, to assess the quality and relevance of evidence, and to distinguish sound from unsound reasoning. Without this understanding, individuals and groups are susceptible to demagogic manipulation and cannot see and appreciate the brilliance of virtuous eloquence or recognize or do anything about a decline into derealization. It is for lack of this kind of rhetorical knowledge that persuasive arguments are often the most fully fallacious (i.e., filled with bad reasoning, poor evidence, and so on), while well-structured and well-supported arguments are often rejected for any number of reasons, conscious and unconscious.
As opposed to today s English dictionaries, and opposed as well to common opinion, the arts of rhetoric, as theorized and practiced over the course of more than two thousand years, have been consistently conceived as not only intentional but also meta-self-conscious. The arts of rhetoric, that is, are a means of gaining perspective on a situation in order to speak and act more artfully, reflectively. The merely self-conscious tend to see the world through their own taken-for-granted lenses, failing to gain a wider perspective on the situation, while meta-self-conscious rhetors can step back from their given positions to assess the persuasive terrain at a distance. We can speak, therefore, of primary repression, or our entrance into language, as a first aesthetic break into self-consciousness. This enables mere self-consciousness, which paradoxically is largely unconscious. We then experience a second aesthetic break with the emergence of the intentionally rhetorical, which requires stepping at least partially outside of our own position to survey everyone else s position and adapt accordingly. My claim is that we can also experience a third aesthetic break when we step outside of common sense altogether to survey rhetorical unconsciousness and its symptoms, a break that creates the subjective conditions for a truer form of agency more fully divorced from the automatic aspects of the subjective. 5 There are, then, three aesthetic breaks-the acquisition of language and mere self-consciousness ; the acquisition of rhetorical perspective and meta-self-consciousness ; and an awareness of subjectivity s unconscious dimensions and critical meta-self-consciousness -and these constitute a progressive range of subjective realization.
Regarding the stages of consciousness, I offer the labels nonconscious, bare sentience, conscious, self-conscious, meta-self-conscious, and critical meta-self-conscious to reflect the following trajectory: without life, self-moving but unaware, aware but unaware of being aware, being aware of being aware, stepping outside of one s subject position to gain perspective on given forms of self-awareness, and stepping outside all of that to understand better the unconscious persuasive forces that create the conditions of possibility for subjectivity in