Speech-Politik

Any day of the week you can see them – college students slowly filling a lecture hall before the beginning of class.  In this case, the class is Public Speaking.  But what the content of the lecture imparts on the students is the necessary skillset to make speech.  This includes elements we all know well: eye-contact, pleasant vocal timbre, pace, rhythm, maintaining attention, etc.  Substance, of course, rounds off the bottom of the list.  Speech is not about substance, but that in itself doesn’t make it inherently dangerous.  What does is its use as a mechanism to manipulate an entire economy of political souls.  This mechanism, this exact controlling function, is Speech-Politik.

Instead of applying directly to reason, speech attempts to engage emotion.  It succeeds in this through the use of little, bite-sized bits of information coupled with catchphrases, keywords, and ambiguous yet powerful mottos.  As a form of persuasion, pathos dominates.  The listeners become docile political beings in the process, manipulated at the most direct level, and are then made to accept that something genuine has occurred; that some knowledge has been granted to them.  But precisely the opposite has happened.  The speech is not a Will to Knowledge from below, but a Will to Politik from above.  It serves to easily sequester raison d’etat.

The ingestible nature of speech-politik promotes its popularity among the circle of listeners.  This is the reason that, next to the various editions of the Bible, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong is the most widely distributed text in the world.  The collection of succinct phrases, mostly low on content and high on appeal, are designed to indoctrinate.  Mobilization – not knowledge – is the goal.  The Will to Politik serves as that mobilization; it affects the political socius, part of what Deleuze called the body without organs.  Thus, listeners are lulled into a state where anything is possible despite its relevance to reason.  This is exactly how the Little Red Book was able to organize the massive disturbances of the Red Guard, and likewise how the children of the Red Guard justified their violent, unreasonable actions – not through an active Will to Knowledge, but from an imparting of pathos from above.  “Chairman Mao is the red sun of our souls,” so the slogan goes.  Speech-Politik creates these characters, these idyllic figures who have no need to justify raison d’etat through rationality or knowledge.

If there is anything Occidental politicians learned from the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, it’s that activating the political will of the youth is amazingly effective.  Precisely because the young are so prone to emotional appeals, because they are both willing and accepting of this sort of engagement, they are the most docile of all.  Popular mobilizations of the political youth no longer come from the adoption of some particular thought-out discourse, but the reintroduction and proselytizing of the catchphrases, mottos, and keywords already mentioned.  An endless chain of empty words moves down the strata ensnaring all that it can.

Perhaps the greatest tool of speech is language manipulation.  It employs specific words for reintroduction through the pathos; it inorganically creates a language with no real definition or artificially redefines the common.  Consider the recently constructed islamofascism.  No single contemporary keyword is more obviously the creation of a speech-politik.  Fascism, as we know, is terribly controlling.  It is also a word that, since the time of actual Fascist regimes in the 30s and 40s, has become a colloquialism for ‘Authoritarian.’  In reality, Fascism is something much more specific.  But we are supposed to generalize it, to actively un-consider the meaning of the term, and to equate it simply with emotions – bad, evil, controlling.  Then it gets pasted onto islam(o), another generality, and the wicked portmanteau equates those negative emotions directly with the religion.

One crucial aspect to this sort of linguistic manipulation is its call to history.  The emotional justification relies on a sort of ‘history outside of time,’ a reconstructed and mythical history that serves as another faux-appeal towards reason.  When the wool is pulled from the eyes, we see that this is simply another pathetic (in pathos) manipulation.  With islamofascism the historical manipulation is fairly obvious, since Fascism is something specific to Italy and Germany, and eventually a chunk of Europe and North Africa, in the 1930s and 40s.  Thus it is impossible to have any relation to islam in any real historical sense.  But that is not the point.  Fascism is not only bad, evil, controlling, but it embodies the mythical historic hyper-enemy that was once defeated in the name of good, genuine, egalitarian.  Thus, emotionally and faux-historically, islam is the mythical evil enemy to be defeated in the name of these ‘good’ qualities.

Appeasement is another keyword that has recently popped up in the public ‘discourse.’  Another appeal to mythical history (again towards Europe in World War II), this instead indicates a redefinition of an accepted term.  Appeasement is something specifically involving the concession of territory to Fascist regimes years prior to the onset of war.  It’s use in present speech is perhaps even more interesting.  Whereas the real historical context involved the concession of actual, tangible, real land, the redefinition now scribbles a different meaning.  Appeasement becomes the concession of debate, the concession of diplomacy and discussion, the concession of discourse itself.  In other words, the reconstructed appeasement is a concession of the Will to Knowledge to some other entity.  And precisely because of it’s historic appeals to bad, evil, wrongly-compromising, it deems this as such.  So there it is, in plain sight – the Will to Knowledge is a bad because it is a type of appeasement, and speech’s system of protecting itself from reason is clearly established.  Speech-Politik self-justifies and The Will to Politik prevails.

The appeals to emotion of speech are not genuine, because the speech-giver, in most cases, does not speak from real personal emotion.  Keywords play a vital role again in determining this.  Behind the speech-giver, before the actual event of the speech, the keywords have not only been formulated, but researched, tested, and polled.  The listeners are eager political subjects and they are heavily monitored and categorized.  What will the effect of this catchphrase be on the listeners? This is of crucial importance to the speech-giver, because then he can readjust or improve his appeal to emotions in order to make them more effective.  The whole process involves both quantifying and qualifying the listeners; they are polled, tested, and the results are adjusted.  What will appeal to the listeners the most?

What is perhaps most interesting is that the acquisition of statistics concerning the listeners constitutes a Will to Knowledge from above.  In other words, the speech-giver must rely on reason to categorically formulate his unreasonable catchphrases, mottos, and keywords.  So the Will to Knowledge is silenced from below, at the listener level, but absolutely essential from above.

So what the speech-giver really says to the listeners is: I will use reason to formulate a method for mobilizing you towards my raison d’etat, but deny you the very reason I have used.  The speech-giver is not to be questioned on anything other than a pathetic (in pathos) level.

This is very pronounced in perhaps the most veiled form of speech-politik: the televised debate.  Debate, in a general sense, is two competing lectures, two competing discourses.  The goal is knowledge, and it is construed as a fight: “discourse is characterized as a battle and a point of confrontation…there is a battle and knowledge is the effect of that battle,” so says Foucault.  The televised debate is an entirely different creature.  The ‘show’ comprises not competing discourses, but competing appeals for emotion.  The televised debate is, in reality, two competing speeches.  A new figure, aside from the speech-giver(s), emerges in the form of the moderator.  This figure is supposed to represent the entire realm of listeners and to question elements of the speech(es).  But, as established earlier, in speech-politik schema the listeners have no authority to question reason or the Will to Knowledge.  They can only question the pathos, the appeal to emotion.  Consequently, the moderator can only pose questions to emotion, and thus serves as the self-justification of the speech-giver(s).  Why don’t you wear the American flag pin? is not a question of anything reasonable, but a question of patriotism (which is a peculiar type of pathos in its own right).  The moderator’s questions then become a sort of compliment to the speech(es); they enable the speech to continue under the guise that its very nature has been actively criticized, when it has simply re-enabled the mechanism.  Instead of being left with a Deleuzian body without organs, we are left with just the organs, spilled all over the stage in a horrific scene.

There is a common phrase in U.S. English: Don’t lecture me.  These are the words of the withered listeners; the words of the Politik-ed.  It is completely vital that we ask the complete opposite, that we demand to be lectured.  These are the two types of interaction possible with leaders, politicians, and other notable public figures.  The lecture represents a real discourse and permits the serious questioning and criticism that is possible (perhaps that is why the lecture is so long-winded as a form).  But speech is nothing less than a manipulative interaction, an active Governmentality of docile listeners.  To simply be a listener, in the speech sense, is to be not only complicit, but an active participant in the continuation and justification of an inaccessible raison d’etat.