Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Rhetorical devices become instruments of social rationality, not mere decoration

Properties2
tagsja-picks, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, singleton, xref, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@laclau_populist_2005, loc. 42

2 min read

Rhetorical devices become instruments of social rationality, not mere decoration

Evidence

Let us concentrate on these distinctions, and on the intellectual strategies which ground them. ‘Ideology’ can be considered as distinct from the rhetoric involved in political action only if rhetoric is understood as a pure adornment of language which in no way affects the contents transmitted by it. This is the most classical conception of rhetoric, grounded in its differentiation from logic. The sociological equivalent of that to which rhetoric is opposed is a notion of social actors as constituted around well-defined interests and rationally negotiating with an external milieu. For such a vision of society, the image of social agents whose identities are constituted around diffuse populist symbols can only be an expression of irrationality. The ethical denigration that Minogue’s essay reflects is in fact shared by a great deal of the literature on populism. What happens, however, if the field of logic fails to constitute itself as a closed order, and rhetorical devices are necessary to bring about that closure? In that case, the rhetorical devices themselves – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, catachresis – become instruments of an expanded social rationality, and we are no longer able to dismiss an ideological interpellation as merely rhetorical. So the imprecision and emptiness of populist political symbols cannot be dismissed so easily: everything depends on the performative act that such an emptiness brings about. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 42

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Dichotomous simplification and imprecision are the very condition of political action — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 62; Ideological emptiness in populism is itself a performative act with social rationality — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 50; Communitarian moral rhetoric masks a project of disciplining individuals (+2 more)

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks