Strategies of Discourse

I have made an effort to take a step back from my micro-critiques of power (i.e. writing things about the ideology that sprouts from the head of orange hair – albeit not from its mind) in order to wrestle with more fundamental problems of discourse. So far this year the problems of discourse have arrived in the form of “fake news,” in the form of “the media,” in the form of a leader who really does not know heads from tails, and in the form of social media in general.

Keeping the words of Michel Foucault in the back of our minds, one must navigate discourse always with the notion that knowledge and power are correlative matters. That is, that discourses of knowledge disclose themselves as spaces of power, and, vice-versa, that spaces of power always have related discourses of knowledge tied to them. This is why in Discipline and Punish Foucault observes the presence of ultimate truth only within the domain of the public execution; and this is why in The History of Sexuality the notion of a biopower, and its knowledge of objectified life, is so disconcerting.

So the deployment of discourse is always strategic. This should not be surprising to us. I’ve been enjoying reading, as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, Cicero’s speeches against the corrupt Sicilian governor Verres. His strategy is incredibly concise, and every direction that Hortensius might turn to defend his client is removed, step-by-step, by Cicero’s rhetorical brilliance. The speeches of the In Verrem are rightly called those that made Cicero known throughout Rome as the empire’s master of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in the Ciceronian tradition, is always demonstrating some type of strategy to accomplish its ends. A piece of written work is always revealing not only its rhetorical style but also its power and purpose.

I bring Foucault and Cicero together here because I think it is worthwhile to observe the ways in which modern discourse functions, and I do this because I think that discourse functions in accordance with its internal rhetorical-strategy even in spite of its writer’s intentions. We like to think that our words function as we like them to; but the severe truth that any writer who is worth their weight knows is that words have more life than we can bridle, and that the skilled writer must recognize the living qualities of words, respect it, and “tame” it, if possible, in order to accomplish their ends. Cicero was the master of this (so was Petrarch; and the Apostle Paul, I must add). Yet most modern discussants are not Cicero.

Instead, we literary-hacks, we half-bred writers are throwing words out into space that have no relation with one another. In moments of brilliance or genius – but not of talent or skill – we finally communicate what it is we mean to communicate; but most of the time we miss entirely how to operate within our own discourses. Social media aggravates this, of course. Whereas in a blog post – like this one – or a journal article, the audience is some neutral, unengaged spectator whose responses, if they happen, occur in another medium – a journal article response, or a comment on Facebook – in social media, instead, the audience is a thoroughly engaged and absolutely non-neutral figure. Even moreso, the audience is no “faceless” mass; they are definitionally “faced.” They have some real presence on the discourse being presented, not as neutral discussants or interlocutors, but as people who disagree.

And as such, the strategies of discourse are dislocated and unbalanced. Rhetorical methods that have historically been tried and true do not fit this new space, and when they are attempted to be brought into it, they transform that space and provide it with some moral or intellectual character that is not intrinsic to it. This, too, further perpetuates the alienation that exists within the social media.

So words, maybe targeted and planned, come under different powers when planted in the worlds of social media. Somehow their rhetorical structures divide and are dismantled. Discourse that would have been effective as standard oratory (in Ciceronian ways) or as an essay becomes different, with different implications and underlying meanings, in the social media. To follow Foucault again, Power is at play here, in some manner.

Power, in the traditional discourses, is located in the speaker, or in the powers-that-be that allow the speaker space (e.g. editors, reviewers, publishers). But in these new discourses, power is located in the community at large. Power is distributed across many discourses, many specialties, and many voices. It is a little confusing and a little off-putting to be surrounded all at once by so many voices speaking all at the same time. They are all clamoring for Truth because there’s a way in which their Power could be held onto if they can manage to grasp Truth.

But Truth in the social media discourse, in the new discourses, is harder to hold on to. Maybe this is the more disconcerting undercurrent beneath all “fake news” / “post-truth” phenomena: not that we have become such relativists that Truth is up for debate, nor that we have created such untrustworthy powers that claim non-truths as Truth, nor that we have political engines that declaim what is and is not Truth, but instead that our very discourse has become a continual reaching-for and grasping-at Truth without ever actually holding it. It’s a game of hot potato.

It’s a game of Power, of course, too.