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

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