Rhetoric, Social Change, and Emergent Democracies in Central/Eastern Europe and South
Africa: Toward Global Perspectives on Discourse and Social Change.
Cezar Ornatowski
San Diego State University
Let me begin with a bit of ethos.
I grew up in communist Poland, where I spent the first 24 years of my life. Since 1986, I have traveled to Poland regularly. For the past twelve years, I have been interested in the rhetorical aspects of the political transformation in Poland and elsewhere in Central/Eastern Europe. In 1999,
I was Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at the Culture Study Unit of the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since then, I have also been affiliated with the
Center for Studies of the Classical Tradition in Poland and Central/Eastern Europe at Warsaw
University. For the past six years, I have also been affiliated with the Center for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town as Fellow and honorary co-director. For the past three years, I have been part of a joint Polish-South African research project entitled “Public Deliberation and Strong
Democracy in Poland and South Africa: Two Rhetorical Models for Participatory Citizenship in
Post-Totalitarian Cultures,” carried on Polish and South African teams from, respectively, the
University of Warsaw and the University of Cape Town and funded from the National Research
Council of South Africa and the National Research Committee of the Republic of Poland. I am the only member of both teams and the only person from outside either Poland or South Africa, with institutional affiliations to both institutions. It is on the basis of this experience that I speak to you today.
INTRODUCTION
The intersecting problematics of collective identity and change are becoming increasingly salient in our globalizing and interconnected world. The process of decolonization that followed
World War 2 triggered a spate of attempts at state- and nation-building across the so-called Third
World, notably in Africa and Asia (Llobera; Walerstein; Kedourie; Geertz). The wave of democratic transformations and nation-building projects in Central/Eastern Europe and Eurasia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism, combined with the ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia and evidence of a resurgence of xenophobia and nationalism in many areas of the former Eastern Block, emphasized the interrelatedness of
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change, collective identity, and politics; as Noemi Marin has noted, in post-1989 Central/Eastern
Europe, discourses of “democracy” have to a large extent been coextensive with discourses of identity. The same may be said of the democratic transformation in South Africa (Salazar). The subsequent enlargement of the European Union, the debate over the new European Constitution, and the failure to ratify it (which revolved largely around the failure to articulate an acceptable collective “European” identity, and, even more recently, the phenomenon of “Islamic
Awakening” across the Moslem world and the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, combined with the rise of “international terrorism” and attempts at building “Islamic Republics” combined with appeals of the political consciousness of the umma (the global “community” of Moslem believers) help bring the problematic of collective identity, democracy, social and cultural change, and globalization together with increasing urgency.
Recent rhetoric and writing studies in the US have been dominated (for reasons that have as much to do with domestic pressures of immigration and cultural differentiation as with the global situation) by interest in “community” and “civic” discourse. Most recently, there is also growing interest in “transnationalism” (see the upcoming RSA workshop on rhetoric and transnationalism). Many rhetoric and writing programs (including the writing program at my own university) are attempting to think “globally” and to somehow combine the now wellestablished attention to argumentation, the public sphere, civic engagement, and commitment to
“social justice” with a more global purview. Much of this agenda, however, is dominated by the framework of post-colonial theory, and thus reflects specifically Western, primarily American, perspectives on the “other” as constructed through Western eyes, Western ideals, and specifically
Western academic agendas and theoretical frameworks.
A quick comparison of basic character of the “democratic” transformations in
South Africa and Central/Eastern Europe illustrates some complexities of an ideological and rhetorical nature implicit in trying to step outside of the usual frameworks.
Apartheid South Africa was a racist polity, based on a racial separation, but, paradoxically, it was also (please bear with me), within certain boundaries, a democratic system, with legal parliamentary opposition, relatively open elections, vigorous public opinion, and relatively independent judiciary. It was a parliamentary system based on the constitutional (and constitutive,
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in the rhetorical sense) principle of racial separation; thus, to the extent that non-white racial groups faced graduated (according to relative skin color) exclusion from many aspects of the political system and other aspects of social life, that system was not “democratic” (can “democracy” be relative?). By contrast, the states of Central/Eastern Europe were not democratic even in any limited sense (according to the accepted “procedural” definitions of democracy; they had no separation of powers, no independent judiciary, and no legal opposition), although they were neither racist nor sexist, at least not institutionally (ostensibly, in fact, they were just the opposite, and the regimes billed themselves as “progressive”). If you think I am relativizing and complicating the notion of
“democracy,” you are right. In order to deal with the complexities of the global situation and confront real “differences,” one needs to look at things comparatively, relatively, and less categorically.
There is another critical difference between the South African situation and that of
Central/Eastern Europe. Although both the South African transition and that in Poland and many other C/E European were “won at the negotiating table,” as the common expression goes,
Central/Eastern Europe is not "postmodern" in the sense in which Philippe Salazar refers to South
Africa as a “postmodern democracy”: a "unique example of a democracy that has issued from a regime which both magnified and predated European colonialism" (xix). The case of South Africa fits well into the post-colonial interpretive and ideological framework; it represents a site where post-colonial guilt and the West's own past and future appear to play out.
The intellectual location, so to say, of Central/Eastern Europe is in some ways just the opposite: unlike the crimes of apartheid--which have been loudly proclaimed and condemned by the civilized world--the crimes of communism remain (in the West especially) somewhat of a dirty secret, since many Western intellectuals were, and often continue to be, at least intellectually attracted to the vocabularies of the sort of utopias that have played themselves out on the
Central/Eastern European stage. The dark side of such utopias, to which Central/Eastern Europe bears witness, is thus also the dark, and unarticulated, side of Europe's own rationalist dreams of a
“perfect society” and a “revolution” that will make everything right for everybody. Unlike apartheid, for which it would be hard today to find rationalizing and legitimating language, the regimes of Central/Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union deployed the vocabulary of the highest ideals of the European Enlightenment combined with the framework of Marxist thought, a
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framework that, still, implicitly underlies much of our thinking (my own, in all honesty, included) about the relations between language, society, and power (for instance, in the emphasis on the notion of “class”)--a vocabulary that also, per force and also paradoxically, constituted the discourse of the political opposition and that underlies the language of democracy. The difficulties of untangling ideals and vocabularies from political practice, theory from reality, complicate discussions and evaluations of the Central/Eastern European transformations, compared to a relatively less complicated (in rhetorical terms, as well as in terms of intellectual cache) rejection of apartheid. For example, while the new South Africa left monuments, statues, and place names intact as a record of its history (the former prison at Robben Island is probably the most visited tourist site in South Africa), Poland has generally erased traces of its recent past, precisely because they could function as signs and reminders of the ambivalence at the heart of the new (and they did not have the tourist appeal and cache of Auschwitz or Robben Island). The uneasy, and always deeply controversial, attempts to partially or completely rewrite the inscriptions on some remaining monuments testify to their continuing and ambivalent power.
Underneath triumphalist talk about “democratization” lie ambivalencies and silences, both in the regions in question as well in the US. For instance, while many composition classes and readers include readings such as The Diary of Ann Frank, Things Fall Apart , or selections from
Nelson Mandela, I have yet to see one that includes anything about Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag
Archipelago, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Gustaw Heling-Grudzinski’s A World Apart , or selections from Vaclav Havel .
. How many American teachers or students know, or care to know, that while the Holcaust consumed 6 million human lives, Soviet-style communism cost 25 million over its 50-years lifespan in the Soviet Union and its imperial domain? How many teachers have ever referred to (or even heard about) the Black Book of Communism, or thought of including any of it in their curricula?
It seems to be an article of faith in American rhetorical studies and rhetorical education that, as Barry Brummett puts it, "rhetoric and democracy fit together naturally” (Brummett, Barry.
Rhetoric in Popular Culture . New York: St.Martin's, 1994, 42). However, all regimes, including totalitarian ones, use rhetoric, and have done so effectively enough to get ordinary people to annihilate millions of others. As Thomas Farrell has argued, “no culture or public life project can survive for long without some form of rhetorical practice, some coherent, symbolic manner of
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securing collaborative public action" (9). "[E]very culture requires some avenue for addressing and thereby explicating its identities, accomplishments, and needs--and hence some form of rhetorical practice" (9). Some of the vocabularies that annihilated millions and enslaved others were based on the highest ideals of Enlightenment rationalism.
I am thus asking you to keep your minds open. If rhetoric studies are indeed to move into the “global” context, we have to be ready to confront real difference of perception, interpretation, and meaning and challenge some established notions as we look at the complex relationships between discourses, identities, societies, ideologies (including our own), and change.
Rhetoric is always “situated,” as the expression goes; by that I mean now not only that every rhetorical act is located in its immediate rhetorical situation, but that it is also (and perhaps even more importantly) located in a broader socio-cultural, historical, and political context in which it is part of the on-going work of collective identity and, more importantly, collective reality construction. A Gerald Hauser has suggested (in the article some of you may have read),
“Society’s self-production is historically situated and intrinsically tied to its rhetoric. Although economic, historical, and institutional factors play important roles in the shape and direction that typify a given society, these elements are insufficient to determine a priori that society’s specific contours. Rather, social actors grapple with them as among those impulses that bear on transforming society and its institutions. The catalytic agency for such transformations is society’s discourse, and the resource most essential for discursively penetrating social consciousness of what is, what ought to be, and what might be is its symbols. We locate the possibilities for social action in and through our rhetoric.
It is the agency by which we make and remake our political and social relations through revisable agreements, which is to say that rhetoric is among the social practices by which society constitutes itself.” (Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular
Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia, SC: U of South
Carolina P, 1999, 114, emphasis added)
The recent political transformations in Central/Eastern Europe and South Africa provide cases of such “reconstitution” of societies, opportunities to examine how “imaginary communities”
(to use Benedict Anderson’s expression) reimagine themselves and how “rhetorical regimes” change. Studying these cases may help us not only better understand the role of discourse and rhetoric in the constitution and reconstitution of societies in contexts other than our own but also to better understand their practical consequences for people’s lives in a diversity of socio-historic contexts
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IMAGINING (CONSTUCTING) COMMUNITY
(Tell the anecdote about the children at Dulles airport)
It may be taken for granted today that communities are in some sense “imagined.” In his seminal Imagined Communities , Benedict Anderson has suggested that a “nation” is “an imagined political community” because “members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). Anderson built on Ernest Gellner’s claim that “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist”
(Gellner, Thought and Change 169, quoted in Anderson 6). In fact, Anderson claims that “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined” (6). “Communities,” he suggests, “are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6, my emphasis).
By “style” Anderson means that modern “national” communities (which he characterizes as horizontal-secular, transverse-time, inhering largely in a state of consciousness, a sense of
“horizontal comradeship,” a temporal simultaneity existing in and moving through history (7)) are qualitatively different from religious or dynastic communities, which rely on entirely different sorts of relationships and affiliations. The former are separated from the latter by “a fundamental change” in the “modes of apprehending the world” (22); this change was brought about by the popularization of such “forms of imagining” as the novel or the newspaper, mass literacy, the spread of administrative vernaculars, capitalist relations of production, technologies of communication, travel, the rise of an intellectual class, mass schooling, and textbooks (25).
The British anthropologist Anthony Cohen provides a complementary perspective that is helpful in examining the formation and transformation of communities (or “congregations,” in
Kenneth Burke’s terms). Following Wittgenstein, Cohen argues that “community” is a relational concept, defined by boundaries that are “called into being by the exigencies of social interaction”
(12). Such boundaries, for instance, separate the community from the others from which the community wishes to distinguish itself. While some boundaries may be physical or visible (a mountain range marking the traditional border, specific clothing, or a written code that regulates
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behavior or attitudes), most such boundaries exist “in the minds of their beholders” and may be perceived in different terms by people on the other side of the boundary, and even by different people on the same side (12). (Cohen’s view of community as “relational,” by the way, is similar to the model of “relational subjectivity” as advanced by McAffee.)
Communities are thus fluid and “symbolically constructed.” “Symbols,” Cohen suggests,
“do more than merely stand for or represent something else. . . . They also allow those who employ them to supply part of their meaning” (14). Thus, symbols “do not so much express meaning as give us the capacity to make meaning” (15). Concepts such as “justice,”
“patriotism,” “goodness,” and so on are almost impossible to define with any precision and any attempt to arrive at a definition leads to argument, since it turns out that the more one tries to pin them down the more people—even members of a seemingly homogenous “community”--may differ in their understandings of them. However, such concepts are expressible, and expressed, symbolically, due to the symbol’s capacity to accommodate a range of possible meanings that may be vested in it. It is around symbols (including around particular “languages”) that
“communities” cohere and symbols keep the “consciousness” of “community” alive in the minds of members (15). In fact, “community” itself is a symbol, since its specific meanings to its members may differ (as is amply demonstrated by the struggles over national identity in the newly democratic states of Central and Eastern Europe). “The quintessential referent of community, Cohen argues,
“is that its members make, or believe they make, a similar sense of things either generally or with respect to specific and significant interests, and, further, that they think that that sense may differ from one made elsewhere. The reality of community in people’s experience thus inheres in their attachment or commitment to a common body of symbols. . . . But it must again be emphasized that the sharing of symbol is not necessarily the same as the sharing of meaning” (16).
(Give the example of the convocation at Virginia Tech the day after the shootings as an example of the rhetorical re-constitution (in the sense of constitution “again,” after a potentially disruptive event) of “community” (a word used repeatedly by all speakers).)
TOPOI OF IDENTITY IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLAND
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By “transformation” I mean a longer time period than that of the “transition” itself. In principle, societies are always in flux, thus in some sense in “transition”; any time periods selected for examination are thus bound to be arbitrary. Communist Poland has been an unstable historical entity: since its “liberation” by the Soviet Army it went through a transformation from, very briefly, a market economy and parliamentary democracy to a Stalinist attempt (never completely successful) at creating a “total society,” through a brief “thaw” in the lat 1950s, to an increasingly rigid authoritarian “state socialism” in the 1960s, relative liberalization through the 1970s, a brief period of relative openness during the “Solidarity” revolution in 1980-81, imposition of martial law in
1981-83 and then the agony of the system and finally the rapid transition in 1989 (and it continues to change, although for now within the market-economy, parliamentary democratic model, although it is becoming increasingly less liberal).
In the political transformation of Poland, collective identity may be examined in terms of five complementary areas of symbolic (and rhetorical) practice: practices that construct membership (who “we” are, who belongs); practices that construct the “other” (who we are not, who does who or what is the “enemy”); practices that construct relationships among members as well as relationships with non-members (political relations, domestic and foreign); practices that construct collective history (a myth of origin and narrative of continuity); and practices of location (spatial, geographical, geopolitical, cultural). In rhetorical terms, these dimensions comprise what I call the “topoi of identity” (Ornatowski)
Lets look an articulation of collective identity that reflects these dimensions to see what they look like in actual social and rhetorical practice [Here, show the two samples from Polish constitutions]
The Preamble to the 1952 “Stalinist” constitution of the Polish People’s Republic (the name of the polity erased in the wake of the 1989 transformation) reads:
“The Polish People’s Republic is a republic of working folk. The Polish People’s
Republic harks back to the most progressive traditions of the Polish Nation and realizes the liberatory ideas of the Polish working masses. The Polish working folk, under the leadership of the heroic working class, basing on the workerpeasant alliance, has struggled for decades for liberation from national
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enslavement imposed by Prussian, Austrian, and Russian conquerors-colonizers, just as it has struggled for the abolition of the exploitation of Polish capitalists and landowners” (Preamble to the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic of July
22, 1952).
The Preamble articulates the symbolic foundations of the political community of the communist Polish People’s Republic. Membership in this community is limited to “working folk.” Even though the text refers to the “traditions of the Polish nation,” actual historical continuity is reserved only for certain “ideas” of a specific segment of the population. The text also establishes the basic social relationships in its emphasis on the “leadership of the heroic working class” and the concept of the “worker-peasant alliance.” Social structure and relations are also expressed in the articulation of society in terms of “classes” (we take the existence of
“classes” so much for granted that we forget that they constitute symbolic and “ideologized” categories). Finally, the text explicitly names its “others”: Prussian, Austrian, and Russian conquerors-colonizers and Polish capitalists and landowners. The only dimension that is not articulated in this text is that of location, although what amounts to geopolitical location (we must remember we are dealing with the world of symbols and interpretations here, not literal
“meanings”) was added in the constitutional amendment of 1972 that added “friendship with the
Soviet Union.”
A denizen of communist Poland experienced each these dimensions in daily life through an array of symbols, discourses, events, and actions, which in turn allowed for the construction of more specific, contextualized meanings. Thus, “membership” was symbolized through depictions of hardy proletarians, bucolic peasants, or professionals busily working at their respective work stations for the common good; holidays and events (such as the annual May Day parade, Harvest festival, Miner’s Day, Shipyard Worker’s Day, Mother’s Day, Women’s Day,
Steelworker’s Day) celebrating labor by selective attention on specific elements of the “laboring masses” constituting what was referred to as the “vanguard” of the working class; visits by state leaders to factories and “great construction sites of socialism,” which always occupied the front pages of newspapers; “achievements” in science and technology; official display of specific working class clothing and paraphernalia on appropriate occasions; and so on. Origin was symbolized through narratives, histories, and films that teleologically led to the establishment of state socialism as the inevitable expression of national aspirations; and portraits of the ubiquitous
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duo of Marx and Lenin in every classroom and public space. Internal relations were symbolized through portraits and statues of leaders; artwork depicting social transactions in which those in uniform or wearing red ties (indicating party or Young Pioneer membership) were shown in positions of authority or leadership; as well as films depicting the socialist way of life and of dealing with people and situations. The community’s “others” were depicted in films showing
West German or CIA spies, saboteurs, criminals (such as, for instance, possessors of western currencies), provocateurs, and other ideological enemies, clips of “prostitutes” or “black marketers” being rounded up by police; and images illustrating “imperialist aggression” in
Korea, Vietnam, and other places. On the other hand, relations of affiliation were articulated through myriad celebrations of Polish-Soviet friendship, as well as that with other socialist countries, statues and place names, pictures, and the largest symbol of them all: the Palace of
Culture—a sky-piercing monstrosity in the very center of Warsaw modeled on an identical structure in the center of Moscow, a gift from Stalin to the Polish people and a symbolic link between the Center of the communist world and the periphery. Relations of affiliation were also articulated through routine visits of Polish leaders, especially newly appointed ones, to Moscow.
Both the peregrinations of leaders around the country as well as abroad traced symbolic
“geographies” of location, affiliation, and identity, geographies that were etched, through monuments, plaques, and other features, onto the very landscape and space.
As Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwod note in their study of nationalist movements in
Latin America,
“while the nation-space may exist discursively as the overlapping of territory, culture, and population, it is also very much grounded in practices and materiality, and both narrative and material dimensions need to be conceptualized simultaneously. Everyday practices produce and reproduce national identities in a variety of sites, from the home and neighborhood to the workplace and public sphere. Rather than being merely narrations . . . , national identities and nations are embedded in the material and imaginative spatialities of collective and individual subjects. (23)
In a totalitarian state, however, such articulations and symbolizations are formalized, routinized, intensified (in terms of volume, size, ubiquity, and semiotic charge), and orchestrated to a very high degree, and penetrate virtually every aspect of social life, from loudspeakers on every street corner to posters, flags, slogans, pictures, and other signs virtually blanketing public
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space (we can see such proliferation in the shots of German streets in the heyday of Nazism).
They mark the routines and practices of ordinary life: the obligatory “social labor” on Sundays, roll calls in the school gym, ideological meetings in the workplace, and convocations accompanying and interpreting every important state occasion and any domestic and international event.
It is important to note that such these articulations and practices are also present in what we call “democratic” societies; the difference lies in degree: in their volume, intensification, and invasiveness, and, perhaps above all, in the univocality and singleness of message that characterizes a totalitarian or authoritarian context (as I will show below, the same qualities characterize totalitarian rhetoric). [In some sense, advertising may exhibit some of these qualities in our society; its saving grace, however, if one may put it that way, is that while loud, obnoxious, and increasingly invasive, it is not univocal and focused on a single message—it hawks a variety of competing and discordant products, attitudes, and identities (although within an overarching “ideology” of consumption and commodification)--and, although it ranges over the various dimensions and deploys symbols of identity, their primary function is commercial rather than political (except insofar as it promotes consumerist attitudes). However, perhaps in the future the omnipresence and invasiveness of advertising may indeed become cause for concern.]
Let us now take a historic leap forward and look at the Preamble to the Constitution of the Polish Republic of April 2, 1997 (the post-transitional constitution that replaced the 1952 one). The Preamble reads:
“ Out of concern for the existence and future of our Fatherland, having in the year 1989 regained the ability for sovereign and democratic decision-making as to
Her fate, we, the Polish Nation—all citizens of the Republic, both those who believe in God as the fount of truth, justice, goodnesss and beauty, as well as those who do not share this faith but derive these universal values from other sources, equal in rights and responsibilities in regard to the common good –
Poland, grateful to our forefathers for their labor, for their struggle for independence purchased with sacrifices, for the culture rooted in the Nation’s
Christian heritage and in universal human values, harking back to the best traditions of the First and Second Republic, obligated to transmit to future generations all that is precious from the more than thousand-year achievement, connected with ties of community to our countrymen scattered all over the world,
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conscious of the need for cooperation with all countries for the good of the
Human Family . . . (. . .) based on respect for freedom and justice, cooperation of branches of government, social dialog … We call on all who will use this
Constitution for the good of the Third Republic to do so while preserving the inherent dignity of the human being, his right to freedom and duty to solidarity with others, . . . “ (Preamble to the Constitution of the Polish Republic of April 2,
1997).
One can readily identify the dimensions of collective identity here. First dimension: membership. This community includes “all citizens of the Republic.” In addition, in what was intended as a deliberate contrast to the 1952 text, the Preamble opens with the plural pronoun
“we,” symbolizing the “authentic” voice of the political community (in contrast to the 1952 constitution, which was written in Moscow and, following a review in Warsaw, was hand-edited by Stalin and handed to the Polish parliament for endorsement). The community characterizes its members as both believers and non-believers (thus pointedly erasing the prior articulations of the social body in terms of class as well as the communist-era discrimination against religion, although now the former (believers) appear to be privileged by syntax (everything is meaningful and symbolic in the realm of constitutive articulations). Membership is also extended to Poles living elsewhere (who were considered traitors and enemies, thus among the “others,” under the previous dispensation). Second dimension: origin. The community traces its origins to the
Christian tradition and the thousand-year history of Poland (Poland was christened in 966, thus the articulation make Christianity coincident with the existence of Poland as a recognizable political entity). The text pointedly erases the communist republic from its antecedents. Third dimension: internal relations. The Preamble posits social and political relationships among members based on solidarity, social dialog, freedom, and justice, again in contrast to the classbased relations characterizing the community of real-socialism. Fourth dimension: external relations. The 1997 text refrains from naming its political “others” (although it may be read as implying moral “others,” those who do not share the universal human values). By explicitly calling for the “cooperation of all countries,” the text distances itself from the geo-political divisions that characterized the Cold War era and Poland’s prior location.
Each of these dimensions of collective identity is represented, inscribed, to use a fashionable term, in a variety of symbols, discourses, and practices (as was mentioned above).
From a symbolic/rhetorical perspective, the difference between the two texts marks out the space
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of “transformation,” understood as reinscription. In the case of Poland, this transformation consisted in a refiguring of collective identity along practically every dimension: from membership in the political/cultural community to the geo-political location. The dimensions represent arenas of symbolic and rhetorical action, as well as of “struggle.”
Let me offer one example of such struggle that illustrates Cohen’s point that “do not so much express meaning as give us the capacity to make meaning” (15).
The Polish national emblem is a crowned white eagle. The crown on its head was restored after a stormy parliamentary debate on Feb. 9, 1990, ten months after the watershed parliamentary elections and seven months after the installation of the first non-communist government. In the wake of the debate, the design of the eagle was changed, as was the design of the crown on its head.
Historically, the eagle had worn two types of crown: a “closed,” hat-like crown (like the royal crown of England worn by Elizabeth II on state occasions) with an cross on top, and the
“open” crown of the type represented, for example, in Burger King commercials. The Polish parliament was divided between proponents of the open design and proponents of closed design.
As one MP suggested, “the state emblem” is “a summation of history and a treasury of national tradition” (Stefan Bielinski, (stenographic record of the 21 st
sitting of the Sejm Feb. 9, 1990, 11-
12). At stake in the debate, then, was to achieve, in the MP’s words, a “graphic summary of
Poland’s historic glory, a visual connection between a . . . sovereign Poland and an array of emblems of Poland most outstanding kings” (Stefan Bielinski, stenographic record of the 21 st sitting of the Sejm Feb. 9, 1990, 12). We can thus see that the debate concerned the “origin and narrative of history” dimension of collective identity.
Proponents of the “open” design argued that the open design symbolizes the new democratic nation’s “openness to the diverse religions and nations present in the Republic” (Piotr
Nowina-Konopka, stenographic record of the 21 st
sitting of the Sejm Feb. 9, 1990, 8).
Proponents of the “closed” design, on the other hand, argued that it better represents Poland’s national, fundamentally Catholic tradition. They argued that Polish struggle against communism, like past struggles for sovereignty an freedom, were carried out under certain “constant motifs”:
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the crown (a closed crown as a symbol of complete sovereignty) and the cross on the crown (a symbol of “values, for which it is worth giving something in life, for which it is worth giving up one’s life,” as well as a “reminder, that over state power, over human power, there is a transcendent moral order”) (Marek Jurek, stenographic record of the 21 st
sitting of the Sejm Feb.
9, 1990, 14-15). They also argued that the state emblem should connect with the glorious sovereign past before communism as well as lead into the sovereign future under the aegis of traditional Polish values. In spite of one MP’s suggestion that “the national emblem should unite and not divide” (Marek Jurek, stenographic record of the 21 st sitting of the Sejm Feb. 9, 1990,
15), during the two-day debate the house continued to split over the meaning of minutest design details, which turned out, in the specific historical moment, to be enormously significant.
Consider one example of such a detail. The 1927 design for the Polish eagle, one of the historic designs under discussion, had two swirls within its wings that resembled five-pointed stars. These “stars” (in fact, decorative flourishes of feathers) became a major object of contention; some members saw in them a reflection of “Bolshevik stars” (even though they dated back to pre-communist Poland) and argued that the “stars” should be erased. Interestingly, the these “stars” appeared also on the communist-era eagle (which was otherwise quite different in general design and without a crown), perhaps precisely because they could be interpreted as
“stars.”
One of the arguments for the adoption of the 1927 design eagle was that it represented the pre-World War 2 design that the Polish diaspora, in the words of one deputy, “has continued to live under.” Keeping the design would thus built symbolic community with émigré Poles outside
Poland’s borders—émigrés who were considered traitors and enemies by the communist propaganda. Adoption of another, older design (the “closed” crown design), would thus, in the words of a state minister, introduce “another fracture” by presumably excluding these political
émigrés (post-World War 2 emigration represented escape from communism). “We have enough fractures. We must start to somehow fill them over,” he suggested. He thus asked the chamber to
“accept this eagle, this crown, this shield, this emblem, which will become a symbol of our national and state [that is, political] unity above divisions, above the borders that divide us”
(Piotr Nowina-Konopka, stenographic record of the 21 st
sitting of the Sejm Feb. 9, 1990, 16).
Clearly, what unites also inevitably divides, unites along some lines and divides along others,
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down to its smallest symbolically readable detail, and it does so along different lines and according to different interpretive frameworks in different historical moments and under different circumstances. As one of the conservative MPs expressed it during the debate, “the
[design of the] emblem of a free country is surely a matter of intellectual rationalism, [and] cold political calculation, but also a need of the heart” (Kazimierz Czerwinski, stenographic record of the 21 st
sitting of the Sejm Feb. 9, 1990, 13). That is why, he added (and I paraphrase), in the face of the severe problems and dire economic crisis facing the country parliament spent so much energy debating the design of the national emblem.
The example reveals the multiple, and potentially conflicting, potentials for meaning, investments, and functions of symbols normally taken for granted (that is, during periods of relative stability, “paradigmatic” periods, we could perhaps say, adapting the term from Thomas
Kuhn). During such periods, the meanings of symbols appear relatively fixed, “sedimented,” in
Ernesto Laclau’s terms. During periods of transformation, “revolutionary” periods (again using the term in Kuhn’s sense), these symbols and meanings come alive, open up; the smallest element, even accidental resemblance, has the potential to harbor powerful affective meanings and to be deployed in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes, often distant from their origin.
The “dimensions” of collective identity fit the Polish case remarkably well (and they appear to be useful in examining the transformation in South Africa), although I do not mean to imply that they are exhaustive or definitive. They represent, to paraphrase Radcliffe and
Westwood, “key sites,” variably embodied in an array of symbols and practices, including rhetorical practices, in which collective identities are generated, sustained, and transformed (7).
Together, they represent, or perhaps better, enable, a kind of rhetorical ecology of community .
They are thus useful in the way in which Kenneth Burke’s Pentad is useful for analyzing human actions and events: they form a suggestive framework for examining and perhaps comparing the processes of constitution and reconstitution of nations and other sorts of socio-cultural and political communities.
Rhetorically, they appear to have a topical character, if we take topics in the broad sense of constituting spaces for argument. For this reason, I called them elsewhere “topoi of identity.”
(the term “topoi” refers of course also to more specific but generalizable strategies of
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argumentation, as well as to generally-held assumptions that may serve as points of departure for arguments). As spaces for argumentation, these dimensions can be traced in their variable incarnations in virtually every official speech in Poland, from the ascendancy of communism to today. I do not have time to discuss specific examples. I will mention only one genre of political speech that has deployed all of these topics through the period in question: the prime minister’s expose. The expose is a programmatic speech in which the prime minister of an incoming cabinet outlines the new government’s view of the domestic and international situation and presents a political program. One telling way to trace the political transformation in rhetorical terms is to examine the gradual changes in the arrangement of the different, let’s call them general, “topoi of identity,” their specific articulations, their specific constitution, and the special topoi (in the sense now of specific assumptions and argumentative strategies). [It would be like watching the US president’s State of the Union Address evolve, in terms of the topoi through which the “United States” as a historic socio-political and cultural entity was conceived and adumbrated as the US transformed, for instance, into an Islamic Republic]
Let me just add that the perspective outlined here allows for a comparative examination of “styles” in which political communities are “imagined” and articulated beyond the distinctions proposed by Anderson (whose classification does not really distinguish within the category of
“modern,” “transverse time,” “imagined” national entities). Some communities, for instance, may articulate their identity through location rather than history, others through internal and external relationships rather than location (as in the case of “transnational” communities such as the Islamic umma ).
Rhetoric and Political Transformation
An essential factor in of this “style” in which a political community is “imagined,” specifically in the constitution of political relationships, is rhetoric. Let me show how this works using Polish regime rhetoric and its evolution as an example. The characteristics of Polish regime rhetoric in its most dominant form between the mid-1960s and late 1980s included impersonality (the lack of the personal pronoun “I” and of personal references to the speaker); the ubiquitous and ambiguous use of the plural pronoun “we,” that produced what I have elsewhere called “forced identification” (Ornatowski 2003) between the reified leadership and
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the equally reified “nation,” “society” or “the people”; formulaic character (things could be said only in ritualized ways and using set vocabularies, including highly formulaic references to subjects); and a wish-fulfilling “magic” that reduced a reified “nation” to ritualized roles and responses. Here is a small sample:
"On March 23, in universal elections, the Polish nation [which in Polish also means
“the people”] gave an emphatic expression of its patriotic unity, of its decisive support for the declaration of the Front of National Unity [the electoral slate of the ruling party and its affiliates], for the program of the 8th Congress of the Party, for the social goals and directions for the development of our socialist fatherland laid out
[by the Party congress]. It [the nation] gave another proof of its trust in the Party, in its leadership." (Expose of Prime Minister Edward Babiuch, April 3, 1980, quoted in
Ornatowski 2003, 93)
Emile Benveniste has argued that “[i]t is only through language that man constitutes himself as a subject
” (224). This constitution involves, according to Benveniste, the deployment of the first-person singular pronoun, as well as elements of deixis (space, time) that organize the relationships designated by the discourse around the co-presence of the speaker and listener. Of these, the most significant is time, which signals the discursive presence of the speaker through a reorganization of temporality around the speaker’s present, which constitutes the speaker’s (as subject’s) historical location. Another element is the deployment of performatives (“I swear,” “I promise”), which not only designate but in effect constitute ( qua performatives) individual acts of essentially social import and thus insert the speaker into society as an actor, an active agent.
Together, these elements constitute enunciation, the discursive process through which the subject enters and secures its presence in discourse, as well as locates him or herself within the matrix of social relations. “The establishment of subjectivity in language,” Benveniste argues, “creates the category of person—both in language and also, we believe outside of it as well” (227).
Enunciation represents the imprint in discourse of the historical specificity of the particular speech situation; its primary elements are the interlocutors, between whom the enunciation (through pronouns and elements of deixis) establishes a relationship in a particular space and time (Ducrot and Todorov). Through evaluative and emotive terms, as well as modal expressions that indicate attitude, this relationship extends to that between the interlocutors and their world, including their attitude toward the utterance itself. Enunciation may thus be said to
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represent a discursive expression of the relationships that constitute the subject’s historical “here and now.”
Enunciation is one of the constitutive components of any discourse, but particular configurations of its elements may vary, allowing for a typology of discourses, from those focused around the speaker to those centered on the listener or on other elements of the overall situation; from explicit (formal and autonomous) discourses to implicit, situational ones; and from those bearing few marks of the enunciative process to those richly endowed with them
(Ducrot and Todorov; Vachek). Benveniste assigns the former to the realm of history; he defines
“historical narration” as “the mode of utterance that excludes every ‘autobiographical’ linguistic form” (206) and conceives of a discourse as “history” to the extent that it is free of the marks of the process of its enunciation, hence liberated from the subjective, local, and temporary, thus from contingency. To the extent that it achieves such liberation, discourse becomes “mythic.”
The process of enunciation thus constitutes subjects in a fundamentally historical relationship, that of subjects in/of history (including their relationship toward history as it is constituted and as it unfolds in/through the discourse). In terms of enunciation, the “historical” discourse of the communist regime in its mature phase froze its ostensible subject (“the nation,”
“the working people of towns and villages,” “the proletariat”) into a historical artifact—like a fly in a piece of amber--even as it ostensibly proclaimed that subject’s historical ascendancy. The fly in amber may be a “historical” (in the sense of archeological) artifact, but it does not exist in history, in its own history, not as a fly, in any case, although it may lead historical existence as a different kind of object, a museum exhibit for instance.
While in South Africa the major issue was the exclusion of the black majority of the population from membership in the political community, in Poland the major issue was the de facto exclusion of “the people” from political decision-making. The major demand underlying the Polish transformation was thus “agentification” of society, of the people. The official discourse of “real socialism,” through its characteristic enunciation, excluded the individual and her experience; its ritualistic, rigid, slogan-ridden, and “magical” character represented a dominance of political myth over story (where by story I understand the individual articulation of particular lived experience). The experience of actual individuals was irrelevant and inadmissible
(except as caricatured and ideologized “types”: the “worker,” the “peasant,” the “bourgeois,” the
“activist,” the “student”). That is why communist officials never used the first-person singular.
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In this connection, especially telling are the reflections of Croatian dissident Slavenka
Drakulic. Drakulic recalls “hating” the plural pronoun “we” as she grew up in Communist
Yugoslavia because it erased her experience and very existence. “I grew up,” she recalls, “with
‘we’ and ‘us’: in the kindergarten, at school, in the pioneer and youth organizations, in the community, at work” (2). “Individuality, the first-person singular,” she points out, was “exiled from public and political life and exercised in private” (4). On the other hand, “[t]he consequences of using the first-person singular were often unpleasant. You stuck out; you risked being labeled an ‘anarchic element’ (not even a person), perhaps even a dissident” (3). Draculic points out that the plural pronoun continued to hold sway when the nationalist myth replaced the communist one and led to the ethnic wars. “Those who used ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ in their language,” she recalls, “had to escape. . . . As a consequence of this ‘us,’ no civic society developed” (3). The pronoun “we,” Draculic concludes, means “somebody else deciding your destiny. ‘I’ means giving individuality and democracy a chance” (4).
i
This discourse thus dehistoricized its ostensible subject, the ritually invoked but in political practice disempowered “nation” or “working people of towns and villages,” and transformed them into a “different kind of object” (an object of ideological manipulation) within a discourse and a “history” from which they were alienated.
In rhetorical terms, the Polish transformation over the 1980s thus consisted of, on the one hand, the return of “story” (and eventually its ascendancy over “myth”) and, on the other hand, the re-historicizing of the subject of/in discourse. The speech of Lech Walesa, which played a key role throughout the 1980s but especially in galvanizing popular support in the initial stages of transformation, provides an example of both: personal and idiosyncratic, prominently marked
(in contrast to official speech) by the dominance of the first-person pronoun and by “local” dialectical influences and grammatical infelicities, as well as highly anecdotal, rooted in “story,” in specific space and time and redolent of the “tokens” of his own and his hearers’ lived experience. As I have already suggested elsewhere, Walesa’s speech projected a personal world, in which “I” and “you” were the most important pronouns, in which the individual was a subject in a direct, active sense (Ornatowski 2005).
Toward the end of the 1980s, with the escalation of the economic and political crisis and as part of official efforts to initiate meaningful reforms and, in official phraseology, “activate the
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people” (Pol. “zaktywizowanie spoleczenstwa”), regime discourse also began to change. In his expose to parliament on October 13, 1988, eight months before the watershed transitional elections, the last communist prime minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski for the first time spoke officially to the nation using the first-person singular form, even referring to the communist party--typically heretofore spoken of exclusively as “the” party, implicitly the only party realistically possible--as “my party,” thus allowing, at least rhetorically, the possibility of the existence of other parties and other points of view that might represent a “you.” His speech, and his subsequent rhetoric as prime minister, contained significant changes in other enunciatory elements as well, changes that represented concessions to the subjectivity (and thus agency) of other potential political actors. Not incidentally, in granting rhetorical and political agency to other actors, Rakowski not only opened up the field of political contestation, but also repositioned himself and his political formation for survival in the dawning new era. These changes in official rhetoric in effect constituted a new “social contract,” which represented a reconstitution of the political community of Poland, another “style” of “imagining” collective identity. Elements of “style,” however, are not easily separable. The rhetorical style, if you will, of the communist regime was part and parcel of the overall character of the civic community; it both constituted and expressed that community, just as the subsequent rhetorical changes I described were part and parcel of the trans-formation of that community whose final stage, or, better, temporarily relatively steady, paradigmatic, state we saw articulated, in extremely condensed form, in the preamble to the 1997 democratic constitution.
This rhetorical “self-production” of society, of which Hauser speaks, includes thus, as we have seen, the rhetorical production of a variety of the potential historical subjects (ordinary people, selected groups within society [the ruling party], or the great leader of fuhrer), who become the subject-in-history and thus its agent.
I would thus suggest, based on my experience and studies, that one needs to look carefully at the rhetoric of discourses in which actual and would-be communities and ideals are
“imagined,” beyond the ostensible messages of these discourses. It is the “constitutive,” enunciatory aspects of discourses that need to be critically examined, always with the implicit question: what civic community in implied by, constituted through, this discourse, what is the imaginary identity, in terms of all its dimensions, lurking within it? [here, look at the declaration of the SA Communist
Party]
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Here, however, history gives us room for provocative speculation. In the Polish case, the workers in effect converted their status as “objects” of official discourse, the “untruth” of their ostensible historic ascendancy as a “class” in the abstract rhetoric of Marxism, into effective ascendancy as a rhetorical, and thus historic, force. As Sarah Meiklejohn Terry has suggested, the revolution of the Polish workers again, paradoxically, the ostensibly Marxist regime, was perhaps the first truly Marxist revolution in history. It is possible that “objects” of a discourse that ostensibly speaks in their name, while effectively refusing them agency, in the same gesture builds them up into “subjects,” thus agents, of history, creating the conditions for eventual transformation. That was exactly the path the Polish workers took: they claimed the subjectivity, thus agency, granted them theoretically but never in actual practice. Indeed, there may be a warning here for regimes that rest their ostensible legitimacy on claims that in practice remain empty.
SOME PROVOCATIVE OBSERVATIONS BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION
The process of change in Poland happened spontaneously and in stages, that is, there was no master plan either for the transition or its aftermath developed by either the government or the opposition. It was thus at each stage a local process, a process in which an event, statement, idea, or initiative could have, and had, far-reaching consequences on the further shaping of the process and on its outcome. It was a dynamic and fluid process of gradually unfolding and interlocked and mutually shaping interpretations, articulations, and actions.
Entirely new realities were created on the ground daily, both by spontaneous action
(including action of crowds and subsidiary groups) and by pronouncements of diverse groups trying to influence or respond to the course of events. During the strikes of 1980 and afterward, through the 1980s, propaganda and physical action (arrests, intimidation, troop movements, strikes, marches, and so on), worked in tandem on both sides of the conflict.
The “rhetoric” of the conflict, on the government side, took shape between the “doctrine” on the one side and “reality on the ground” on the other side. From a discussion at the Central
Committee on the Polish United Workers Party on the fifteenth day of the strike, two days before the final historic agreement that ended that phase of the conflict and caused Poles to “wake up in another country,” as one of the strike leaders had later put it:
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Comrade Edward Gierek: “The situation is increasingly grave, the strikes are spreading, demands escalating. I must confess, I do not know what we can do . . . . As to those free trade unions—more and more people are declaring themselves in favor. I am against. But the situation is what it is, we are faced with the danger of a general strike. Perhaps we should choose the lesser of the evils, and then try to get out of it somehow.”
Comrade Tadeusz Kruczek: “We must consider declaring a state of emergency, and try to defend our power.”
Comrade Jozef Pinkowski: “I discussed the possibility of retaking the ports with [the
Furst Secretaries of the Provincial Party Committees in Szczecin and Gdansk]. They both said that it would end in battle. . . . If we take the ports [in Szczecin and Gdansk] by force, they might well turn on the Provincial [Party] Committees with force.”
Comrade Wojciech Jaruzelski: “ What compromises can we accept? (. . .) As far as possible we should keep up talks, show our good will. The matter of the new structures should be discussed with our allies, because this is a matter of doctrine.” (As he spoke, according to orders issued that very day in Moscow, the Soviet fleet along with three armored divisions were being mobilized for a possible attack on Poland.) (quoted in Days of Solidarity 90)
In Politburo discussions on the day before signing the Accords, Edward Gierek told his comrades who were wondering how he was going to explain to the Party the decision to sign the agreements with striking workers: “You are living in a world of illusions, you’re not taking reality into account. And reality is that we have 700 thousand people on strike in this country today” (quoted in
Days of Solidarity 96).
History unfolds thus through dialectical transformations between discourses, symbols, interpretations, meanings, and forms of action in a chicken-and-egg relationship. It is such transformations that constitute society’s historical “self-production.”
This indicates that rhetoric is not necessarily separate from, or precludes, the use of force or other means of creating “facts on the ground.” Rhetoric is not necessarily, by nature, the
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opposite of force, but works in concert, in a dialectical relationship, with other means (this reminds us of von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that “war is diplomacy by other means”). The revolutions in Central-Eastern Europe and South Africa, in spite of the pious commonplaces about their primarily “negotiated” character, did not happen without violence, coercion, and frequent threat of it. These other means mark perhaps not the failure or the limit of rhetoric but constitute rhetoric by, precisely, other means; conversely, rhetoric constitutes (as anybody who ever wanted to say something in a meeting and knew that it would not be possible without some untoward consequence), in effect coercion by other means. [Interestingly, in The Praise of Folly,
Erasmus claimed that violence is the obverse of truth, not rhetoric]
This kind of relationship between rhetoric and coercion (or violence) in fact characterized the situation in Poland after World War 2. The socialist order rested, ultimately, on the fact of the military “liberation” of Poland by Soviet troops and, at least until 1956, on dominant Soviet military and political presence in the very structures of the state and, later, on their continuing proximity and political domination. All viable (“realistic” was the operative word) ideological constructions and articulations had to take this presence (the “geopolitical realities,” as they were invariably and euphemistically called in official discourse) into account as their (for a long time unspoken and later increasingly openly acknowledged) ultimate horizon and final “argument.”
Which leads us to a question: Is “violence” or constraint, or the threat of it, the ultimate
“horizon,” the “final argument” of all rhetorical orders? Isn’t it the final horizon of the US official rhetoric now, in the time of the “terrorist threat”? Wasn’t it so during the Cold War? And before that, wasn’t it defined by the looming threat of Nazism, Fascism, of Communism? Does there have to be an “ultimate horizon” to rhetorics, whether consisting of military, ideological, or natural threats (real or “imagined”--in a rhetorical sense), or millenarian religious visions (as in fundamentalist Islam)? Do such ultimate horizons represent perhaps the “constitutive other” of rhetoric (to adapt an expression used by Derrida in the context the relational nature of identity)?
Opposition between rhetoric and force has been a staple of rhetorical thinking since
Antiquity. In the real world of politics, even democratic politics, such a separation may be questionable. In the course of life, we rarely reflect on the interrelationships of the diverse elements that constitute the unfolding of history. It is difficult to see where one’s “civic” duty
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may lie or even what “civility” in a particular situation may consist of. It is only with historical hindsight that we can recognize the complex interrelationship of words, events, and actions.
During the Polish transition, “civic virtue” consisted primarily in action, action that was an essential part history-making, of “society’s self-pproduction.” Ewa Junczyk, a participant in the events of 1980 in Gdansk, recalls: “A visit to the shipyard was almost akin to a civic duty.” She recalls overhearing the following exchange at a suburban train station. A women in the crowd said to her husband: “We’re going to the Shipyard.” The husband answered: “I’m not going there. What’s the point of pushing through that crowd with a child?” “Have you taken a leave of your senses,” the women responded, “it is your duty to go to the Shipyard and stand there for a while” (Days of Solidarity 93). What the women and her husband could not have known at the time was that the permanent crowd of several thousand people surrounding the shipyard was precisely what prevented an armed attack on the shipyard by the authorities and in affect contributed in a fundamental way to the “negotiated” resolution of the conflict in the historic
“Gdansk Accords” of August 1980.
Most rhetorical histories (for instance, Tom Moriarty’s account of South Africa’s transition to democracy or Robert Oliver’s magisterial rhetorical history of Great Britain), even though they offer a narrative of events and rhetorical actions, ultimately isolate rhetorical actions from other kinds of action, esp. physical action, treating discourse as if it stood, was meaningful and persuasive, on its own. It could be that this separation between rhetoric and physical action, and thus the presumed contrast between rhetoric and “violence,” goes back to the origins of rhetoric in ancient Athens. Fifth century BC was one of the most peaceful and stable periods in
Athenian history, and the limited and circumscribed character of Athenian democracy favored such ideal separation between rhetoric as “civic” action from other, rougher, kinds of action. Yet, when one reads Hitler’s or Joseph Geobbel’s diary, one realized the intimate relationships, nay, strict interdependence, between physical and verbal action, the realization and deliberate, planned, exploitation of “symbolic” potentials in events and acts that could exert coercive, and thus “rhetorical” force and become in turn fodder for verbal action. In this sense one may perhaps venture that the attack on the world Trade Center was a “rhetorical” act; that it represented an act of “symbolic” (and for that no less real and terrible) violence. It certainly seems to have been treated as such in Osama bin Laden’s speeches; it also seems to have been
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‘aestheticized” and textualized for maximum rhetorical impact in, for instance, terrorist recruitment videos.
We must remember that rhetoric arises, as both theory and practice, in particular contexts.
We know that French “Theory” originated in the specific conditions the late 1960s and early
1970s, including radical new left terrorism [talk about that] and that upon its arrival in the US it’s been “depoliticized” in the US context. Similarly, rhetoric as we know it in the West, originated in the specific context of classical Athens. The US has not, during its history, been massively bombed or violated on its own territory, endured a foreign occupation, or been subject to prolonged, socially and economically devastating, totalitarian dictatorship. Had rhetorical theory arisen in places such as Poland, perhaps, the separation between “rhetoric” and action, including various forms of force, coercion, or even violence, might not have been so apparent.
If one can offer one more significant rhetorical generalization about the process of transformation in Poland, I would say that it consisted in the gradual undermining of official rhetoric by the discourse of individual experience. This undermining worked by exploiting, in each case, the gap between the promises implicit in the ideology and enshrined in its rhetoric and actual experience of ordinary people. In Poland, this gap became larger and more pronounced as time passed. Since the system and its rhetoric remained rigid, it eventually collapsed. The transformations in Central/Eastern Europe may be seen, ultimately, as reactions against attempts at “steering” and manipulation of “history,” no matter in the name of what abstract ideal. They thus constitute a warning that might apply to all idealisms or utopian illusions (including religiously motivated utopias, “war” on poverty or drugs, or “eradication” of hunger) that reify concepts, social phenomena, and human beings, whether in terms of “classes,” “masses,”
“proletarians,” “the poor,” or what have you.
In this sense, the lesson for democratic rhetoric is that democratic rhetoric is, or should be flexible, based on the actual experience of individuals and groups and open to the public articulation of that experience (no matter how uncomfortable that experience may be to hear or how contrary to dominant ideas and ideals) and the amelioration of that experience in public rhetoric. [Here, talk about the outburst of talk following the Round Table conference]
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To that extent, the danger of what is sometimes called “PC” is not what it happens to be about (its specific substantive content is not itself objectionable) but in its tendency to “harden” into slogans (acceptable as they may be in their ideological content) and to become resistant
(precisely because of the ostensible intellectual appeal of their content) to individual experience, which may, in specific cases, run counter to the most noble-sounding and well-meant sentiments or which may simply not be containable in such sentiments. A public discourse that begins to harden, to shut itself off from the vagaries and varieties of human experience and its heterogeneous and idiosyncratic interpretations is in danger of becoming “totalizing” and thus eventually of “cracking.”
Lesson for pedagogy: make room for individual experience, for a continual remaking of the (largely rhetorical) “bargain” that individuals continually make with the larger socio-political reality; it is on the constant revisions of that bargain that legitimacy of any system and any community, not to mention liberty, rests.
Perhaps what it comes down to in terms of rhetorical education is that we need to reconceive the contextuality, situatedness, what I would call the “historical location” of rhetoric in much broader and more dynamic terms than we typically do. This “location” cannot easily be captured in lists of “skills,” “questions for ‘critical’ thinking,” or pious references to
“community.”
In my recent review of Sarah Robbins and Mimi Dyer’s collection
Writing America:
Classroom Literacy and Public Engagement (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University and Berkeley, CA: National Writing Project, 2005) I noted the naivete of the avowedly “critical” and “democratic” pedagogy ostensibly espoused in the book. For example, one teacher describes asking her the students “to think critically what they could do to make their communal space in the world more tolerant and understanding of others’ differences,” while at the same time guiding the students’ inquiry and writing by posing the prompt: “What do you think can be done to create a more unified community?” (45). The longing for a “unified community” seemed to permeate the book. Notwithstanding the fact that the prompt already suggests one, and a rather narrow, avenue for thinking about the posed problem (thus blunting the injunction to think
“critically”), the prompt ignores the fact that creating a “unified community” has been precisely
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the goal of every modern dictatorship, from Nazi Germany to Soviet communism, as well as of every brand of racism and eugenics. Hitler’s
Mein Kampf was rife with calls for a unified community, as was every communist propaganda pamphlet and speech. The same essay also provides an example of a student’s response, which begins: “To unify ourselves, we need to open to new, fresh ideas such as joining youth group, participating in community service projects, and various other activities in the community. By joining in with a positive outlook . . .” (45). These
“new, fresh ideas” (apparently endorsed by the teacher, since she quotes them approvingly as an example of the sort of response the activity had led to), actually echo the rationale behind Hitler
Youth and the Soviet Young Pioneers. Growing up communist Poland, I was forced to join youth groups and participate in community service—as did everybody else--precisely as part of the regime’s program for creating what official propaganda referred to as the “moral-ideological unity of the people.” I am certain that this is not the kind of “unity” the teacher in
Writing
America had in mind; I merely wish to point out that one has to be careful and indeed historically and practically “critical,” even of one’s ideals and basic concepts, so that they do not, in political and social practice, end up potentially militating against one’s avowed aims. As Benjamin
Barber has astutely pointed out, “[t]he German experience reminds us that the siren call of community, though attuned to deep needs in the human spirit, can be answered in ways that violate both liberalism and democracy” (27).
A nation is a “project,” a socio-historical project that is constantly under construction.
The United States as a specific historical “project” arose at least in part in response to the impositions and perceived deprecations of the British imperial “center.” This project, like all such projects, remains unfinished and will never be finished, although there may come a time when it may hardly resemble what it was in 1776. Perhaps, in fact, it hardly resembles it today, except for continued adherence to a body of symbols whose interpretations, however, continue to evolve in response to new challenges and circumstances (refer to Daivd Hackett Fisher’s book on
Liberty and Freedom). In this sense, all communities and nations are historical projects in constant transformation, although the pace of this transformation may alternate between periods of relative stability and “transition,” as in the recent cases of Poland or South Africa.
The “nation-building” (or symbolic/rhetorical) view extends (and complements) the activity-theory project. If activity-theory sees writing in the context of theories of human action
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and its institutionalizations in the various domains of social life (work, education, civic life, and so on), the “nation-building” perspective views writing in all of these domains in the context of symbolic construction of community. The nation-building perspective, as theory, research agenda, and pedagogical approach, necessarily foregrounds cross-cultural and international as well as historical (hence broadly comparative) approaches, which most clearly reveal the symbolic/rhetorical mechanisms of community (and nation) construction. Such a perspective is especially timely in view of the problematics of globalization, transformation, and diversity that increasingly define the character of our world and the agendas of the human sciences.
Such a perspective may help broaden discussions in rhetoric and composition studies that in the U.S. have focused primarily—although for understandable reasons—on ethnicity and race.
Examining processes of transformation in countries such as Poland also provides a different lens on these issues than post-colonial studies and provides a balance to the latter’s often Marxist bias. Focus on issues of identity along symbolic and rhetorical lines may form a foundation for rhetorically based curricula that combine political discourse, community studies, and international relations (three “hot” areas today) and thus push beyond the traditional—and perhaps divisive--politics of race and ethnicity to look at the constitution of human political communities at all levels, from local communities to national, international, transnational, and global ones.
Let me end by suggesting that an increasingly urgent task today is to begin articulating, and arguing for, a new “global” human collective identity. How such an identity could be articulated and symbolized, in what forms, shapes, and materials, I cannot yet begin to imagine.
We do not even know whether such refiguration can be affected within the confines of the, at this present historical juncture apparently pretty universal, “topoi of identity” I identified here.
Increasingly, however, it is becoming apparent that what Samuel Huntington famously, and hauntingly, called (in reference Islamist terrorism) “the clash of civilizations” is, rhetorically, also a crisis of collective identities. For instance, “origin” is Islamic rhetoric for the Islamic community is divine and is enacted (figured forth) through the word of God as given in the
Quran. “Relations” within the community are vertical, and flow down the hierarchy of interpreters of the divine word, while the fundamental “inside-outside” boundary that defines membership in the community is that between believers and “infidels,” the “inside” world being
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that of peace-in-God (the word “Islam” is fact is related to “salaam” and means “peace”) [talk about the Hizbullah video]
References
Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History, no pagination. 3 rd
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University of California Press, 1984.
Courtois, Stéphane... [et al.]. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression .
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MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. SDSU HX44.L5913
Draculic, Slavenka. Cafe Europa: Life After Communism . New York: Norton, 1996.
Vaclav Havel, “Words on Words,”
Writings on the East: Selected Essays on Eastern Europe from the New York Review of Books (New York: The New York Review of Books, 1990):7-21
Farrell, Thomas B. Norms of Rhetorical Culture . New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.
Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia,
SC: U of South Carolina P, 1999.
McAfee, Noelle. “Relational Subjectivity.” In
Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship . Ithaca and
London: Cornell UP, 2000. 129-150.
Ornatowski, Cezar M. “Topoi of Identity: Rhetorical Practices in the Political Reconstruction of
Poland.” In David Zarefsky and Elizabeth A. Benacka, eds.
Sizing up Rhetoric.
Selected papers from the 12th biennial conference of the Rhetoric Society of America. Prospect
Heights, IL: Waveland, 2007, in press.
Radcliffe, Sarah and Sallie Westwood, eds. Remaking the Nation: Place, Identity, and Politics in
Latin America . London and New York: Routlege, 1996.
White, James Boyd. When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstructions of
Language, Character, and Community . Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1984.
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Rhetoric, Social Change, and Emergent Democracies in Central/Eastern Europe and South
Africa: Toward Global Perspectives on Discourse and Social Change.
Cezar M. Ornatowski
San Diego State University ornat@mail.sdsu.edu
From the Preamble to the 1952 “Stalinist” constitution of the Polish People’s Republic:
“The Polish People’s Republic is a republic of working folk. The Polish People’s
Republic harks back to the most progressive traditions of the Polish Nation and realizes the liberatory ideas of the Polish working masses. The Polish working folk, under the leadership of the heroic working class, basing on the workerpeasant alliance, has struggled for decades for liberation from national enslavement imposed by Prussian, Austrian, and Russian conquerors-colonizers, just as it has struggled for the abolition of the exploitation of Polish capitalists and landowners” (Preamble to the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic of July
22, 1952).
From the Preamble to the Constitution of the Polish Republic of 1997:
“Out of concern for the existence and future of our Fatherland , having in the year
1989 regained the ability for sovereign and democratic decisionmaking as to Her fate, we, the Polish Nation—all citizens of the Republic, both those who believe in God as the fount of truth, justice, goodnesss and beauty, as well as those who do not share this faith but derive these universal values from other sources, equal in rights and responsibilities in regard to the common good – Poland, grateful to our forefathers for their labor, for their struggle for independence purchased with sacrifices, for the culture rooted in the Nation’s Christian heritage and in universal human values, harking back to the best traditions of the First and Second
Republic, obligated to transmit to future generations all that is precious from the more than thousand-year achievement, connected with ties of community to our countrymen scattered all over the world, conscious of the need for cooperation with all countries for the good of the Human Family . . . . “ (Preamble to the
Constitution of the Polish Republic of April 2, 1997). (both translations by Cezar
Ornatowski)
“Topoi” of collective identity:
Membership
: who “we” are (who belongs and who does not)
Other(s)
: who “we” are not like (who are our “others”)
Origin
: where we come from, a narrative of our “history,” who or what are our antecedents or
“ancestors” (in an ideological as well as genealogical sense)
Internal relations : how our community is ordered, social structure, structures of power, lines of authority
External relations : relations with other communities, to other beings and nature, to gods and other powers
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Constitution of the Republic of South Africa: Preamble (1996)
We, the people of South Africa,
Recognise the injustices of our past;
Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land;
Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and
Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.
We therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic so as to
 Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights;
 Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;
 Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and
 Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.
May God protect our people.
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso.
God seën Suid-Afrika. God bless South Africa.
Mudzimu fhatutshedza Afurika. Hosi katekisa Afrika.
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Section 1: Founding Provisions
Sections
1.
Republic of South Africa
2.
Supremacy of the Constitution
3.
Citizenship
4.
National Anthem
5.
National Flag
6.
Languages
1. Republic of South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is one, sovereign, democratic state founded on the following values: a.
Human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms. b.
Non-racialism and non-sexism. c.
Supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law. d.
Universal adult suffrage, a national common voters roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness.
2. Supremacy of Constitution
This Constitution is the supreme law of the Republic; law or conduct inconsistent with it is invalid, and the obligations imposed by it must be fulfilled.
3. Citizenship
1.
There is a common South African citizenship.
2.
All citizens are a.
equally entitled to the rights, privileges and benefits of citizenship; and b.
equally subject to the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.
3.
National legislation must provide for the acquisition, loss and restoration of citizenship.
4. National anthem
The national anthem of the Republic is determined by the President by proclamation.
5. National flag
The national flag of the Republic is black, gold, green, white, red and blue, as described and sketched in Schedule 1.
6. Languages
1.
2.
Recognising the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages.
3.
The official languages of the Republic are Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati,
Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu. a.
The national government and provincial governments may use any particular official languages for the purposes of government, taking into account usage, practicality, expense, regional circumstances and the balance of the needs and preferences of the population as a whole or in the province concerned;
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4.
but the national government and each provincial government must use at least two official languages. b.
Municipalities must take into account the language usage and preferences of their residents.
The national government and provincial governments, by legislative and other measures, must regulate and monitor their use of official languages. Without detracting from the provisions of subsection (2), all official languages must enjoy parity of esteem and must be treated equitably.
5.
A Pan South African Language Board established by national legislation must a.
promote, and create conditions for, the development and use of i.
ii.
all official languages; the Khoi, Nama and San languages; and iii.
sign language ; and b.
promote and ensure respect for i.
all languages commonly used by communities in South Africa, including German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Portuguese, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu; and ii.
Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and other languages used for religious purposes in South Africa.
(http://www.info.gov.za/documents/constitution/1996/96cons1.htm#1, April 27, 2007)
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From the expose of Polish Prime Minister Edward Babiuch, April 3, 1980:
"On March 23, in universal elections, the Polish nation [which in Polish also means
“the people”] gave an emphatic expression of its patriotic unity, of its decisive support for the declaration of the Front of National Unity [the electoral slate of the ruling party and its affiliates], for the program of the 8th Congress of the Party, for the social goals and directions for the development of our socialist fatherland laid out [by the Party congress]. It [the nation] gave another proof of its trust in the
Party, in its leadership." (translated by Cezar Ornatowski)
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From Slavenka Draculic, Cafe Europa: Life After Communism (New York: Norton, 1996):
“I hate the first-person plural. . . . My resistance to it is almost physical, because more than anything else, to me it represents a physical experience. I can smell the scent of bodies pressed against me in the 1 May parade, or at the celebration of
Tito’s birthday on 25 May, the sweaty armpits of a man in front of me, my own perspiration; I can feel the crowd pushing me forward, all of us moving as one, a single body—a sort of automatic puppet-like motion because no one is capable of anything else. I can feel the nausea; there is no air to breathe and I want to get out of the crowd, but my movements are restricted to a step forward or backwards in a strange ballet choreographed from a podium up above. (…)
“I grew up with ‘we’ and ‘us’: in the kindergarten, at school, in the pioneer and youth organizations, in the community, at work. I grew up listening to the speeches of politicians saying, ‘Comrades, we must . . . “ and with these comrades we did what we were told, because we did not exist in any other grammatical form. Later on, I experienced the same phenomenon in journalism. It was the journalism of endless editorials, in which ‘we’ explained to ‘us’ what ‘we’ all needed to understand. It was hard to escape that plural, as if it were an iron mold, a shirt, a suit—a uniform. (…) Writing meant testing out the borders of both language and genres, pushing them away from editorials and first-person plural towards the first-person singular. The consequences of using the first-person singular were often unpleasant. You stuck out; you risked being labeled an
‘anarchic element” (not even a person), perhaps even a dissident. For that, you would be sacked, so you used it sparingly, and at your own risk. This was called self-censorship.” (2-3)
“The war in the Balkans is the product of this ‘us,’ of that huge, 20 million bodied mass swinging back and forth in waves, the following their leaders into mass hysteria. (…) The individual citizen had n chance to voice his protest or his opinion, not even his fear. (. . .) As a consequence of this ‘us’ no civil society developed.
How does a person who is a product of a totalitarian society learn responsibility, individuality, initiative? By saying ‘no.” But this begins with saying ‘I,” thinking ‘I’ and doing ‘I’—an in public as well as in private. ‘We’ means fear, resignation, submissiveness, a warm crowd and somebody else deciding your destiny. ‘I’ means giving individuality and democracy a chance.”
(3-4)
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Communist Cadres to the Front: Declaration of the South African Communist Party’s Special
National Congress, 10th April 2005, Ethekwini
The Special National Congress of the South African Communist Party convened in eThekwini ver the weekend 8th - 10th April 2005. We came together as 600 communist delegates, the great majority of us directly mandated by our Party branches from all nine provinces of our country.
We were joined in our discussions by the President and Deputy President of the ANC, the secretary general of the ANC, and the general secretary of COSATU, along with senior delegations from these allied formations.
Our Special National Congress was preceded by extensive debate within our Party of several discussion documents that sought to analyse the first decade of freedom, and to chart a strategic path forward for the second decade. The Congress endorsed the basic analysis of the main features of the first decade since the 1994 democratic breakthrough. There have been many important gains, notably the consolidation of non-racial democracy, the enshrinement of basic worker rights, and the transfer of significant resources to workers and the poor (including lowcost housing, water, electricity, health-care and social grants). The SACP takes pride in the role that we have played, with our alliance partners, in winning these achievements in and through ongoing struggle.
However, our society continues to be dominated by a brutal and inhumane capitalist accumulation regime. It is an accumulation path that has remained fundamentally untransformed, notwithstanding our democratic breakthrough. Indeed, this accumulation regime has seen a significant and ongoing growth in the relative share of GDP going to the bosses, and a declining share going to the working class. More than a million formal sector jobs have been lost. Some new jobs have been created in certain sectors, but as we meet, tens of thousands of jobs are being lost in the mining and clothing sectors. Hundreds of thousands of other workers are exploited in sweat-shops or in casualised insecurity. The impact of the capitalist accumulation regime has been devastating on the lives of millions of South Africans, particularly working class blacks and women. Capitalism daily reproduces gendered and racialised inequality. In the face of this working class crisis, our Congress has agreed to throw the full weight of the Party behind
COSATU's jobs campaign.
Our Congress has noted President Mbeki's invitation to the SACP to actively contribute a conceptual analysis of the situation in which we find ourselves. This is an invitation that the
Party will energetically pursue in an ongoing way. In a nutshell, the challenge of the second decade of freedom is to ensure that we use democratic state power and mobilised working class and popular power to transform the capitalist accumulation regime in our country, and indeed, to the extent that it is in our power, in our region and continent. The second decade of freedom must become the decade of the workers and the poor.
To achieve this strategic objective, there are three key sites of contestation and class struggle: the state, the point of production and our communities. We must ensure that working class aspirations, interests and power assume hegemony in all three sites. Our Congress debated the strategic options of the SACP in regard to these challenges, and has resolved that the Central
Committee must establish a Commission to take this work forward.
( http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?include=docs/conf/2005/congress5.html
, April 27, 2007)
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i Thanks to Noemi Marin for pointing me to Draculic’s work.
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