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Reading the Revolution
This is an incredibly interesting time to be alive. Revolutionaries, like me, have been waiting for this moment for a very long time. People, in many locales all around the world, have mustered their courage and are now challenging corrupt elites and the various power structures that serve them. First, there were the anti-austerity protests in Europe and beyond, and then came “the Arab Spring.” Even America, land long thought to be the epicenter of political apathy, has gotten involved. The Occupy Movement has renewed my faith in the American masses.
I happen to be an American who lives in Egypt and teaches at The American University in Cairo (AUC). Thus, I have had the chance to observe, firsthand, revolutionary history in the making. I was in the capital city of this North African country when the uprising began, during the period leading up to Mubarak’s resignation, and in the tumultuous months that followed that momentous event. The fact that I teach rhetoric and critical thinking in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition makes me qualified to look at revolution as a kind of “text” that can be “read.”
Revolutions are made up of lots of little (and big) acts of civil disobedience. Each one of these actions is intended to send a message to the powers that be. At its very foundation, then, revolution is a form of communication and can therefore be analyzed as such.
I study discourse and look at its artfulness—at whether or not it takes certain conditions into account and therefore achieves its communicative goals. One of these conditions is “audience.” If audience is not accounted for, the message may turn out to be the wrong one delivered in the wrong way, and thus it may literally fall on deaf ears. It is never enough to simply protest—action, in and of itself, is not what matters. Acts of defiance must be enlightened if they are to be effective. Bottom line: Not all protests are worth doing.
I’ll give you an example of an unenlightened form of protest, one that is sure to be unnoticed and unheard. The students at AUC are planning to begin a general, open-ended strike on Saturday, February 11, 2012, the one-year anniversary of Mubarak’s departure. The goal is to pressure the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF)—the caretaker government—to immediately step down and call for presidential elections, thus ushering in a new era in Egyptian politics.
Now, let’s step back for a moment and do a bit of rhetorical analysis of the situation.
Those who are critical of SCAF believe the ruling body to be an unresponsive one. It’s thought, at the very least, to be out of touch with the wants and needs of the masses. At the very most, it’s seen to be conspiring with dark forces in Egypt to perpetuate tyranny, perhaps under a new guise. Now, that’s the audience. The speaker, in this case, is the AUC student body. If I understand their logic correctly, they hope to prick the conscience of SCAF. The ruling council will see classes being disrupted and will be prompted to feel guilty and then to respond in a way that serves the needs of the nation at large.
I hope I have demonstrated the illogic here. An audience that has been deemed to be callous and mostly motivated by self-interest is very unlikely to be moved by appeals to pity. In other words, a conscience can only be pricked if it exists. My feeling is that SCAF will not even be aware that a student strike is happening. If those in the Supreme Council do become aware of this protest action, I’m betting there will be virtually no persuasive impact. A governing body that has not been moved by riots and mass marches and emotional outpourings of all sorts is not likely to be influenced by a bunch of students refusing to attend classes.
There is value in the strike, though. The value is a cathartic one. When people are suffering, they can find real comfort in togetherness. It’s true that misery loves company.
There is an important lesson in this for all protest movements: Heartfelt actions are, by themselves, not enough to bring down heartless regimes. For revolution to work, it has to be enlightened and artful. Thus, revolutionaries have to be readers too, and good ones.
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8 Comments so far
Show All"There is an important lesson in this for all protest movements: Heartfelt actions are, by themselves, not enough to bring down heartless regimes. For revolution to work, it has to be enlightened and artful. Thus, revolutionaries have to be readers too, and good ones."
Please CD, allow a critical divulgence for a single moment:
""World bankers, by pulling a few simple levers that control the flow of money, can make or break entire economies. By controlling press releases of economic strategies that shape national trends, the power elite are able to not only tighten their stranglehold on this nation's economic structure, but can extend that control world wide. Those possessing such power would logically want to remain in the background, invisible to the average citizen." (Aldous Huxley)" http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22389
Troy Headrick writes: "Now, let’s step back for a moment and do a bit of rhetorical analysis of the situation.
Those who are critical of SCAF believe the ruling body to be an unresponsive one. It’s thought, at the very least, to be out of touch with the wants and needs of the masses. At the very most, it’s seen to be conspiring with dark forces in Egypt to perpetuate tyranny, perhaps under a new guise. Now, that’s the audience. The speaker, in this case, is the AUC student body. If I understand their logic correctly, they hope to prick the conscience of SCAF. The ruling council will see classes being disrupted and will be prompted to feel guilty and then to respond in a way that serves the needs of the nation at large.
I hope I have demonstrated the illogic here. An audience that has been deemed to be callous and mostly motivated by self-interest is very unlikely to be moved by appeals to pity. In other words, a conscience can only be pricked if it exists. My feeling is that SCAF will not even be aware that a student strike is happening. If those in the Supreme Council do become aware of this protest action, I’m betting there will be virtually no persuasive impact. A governing body that has not been moved by riots and mass marches and emotional outpourings of all sorts is not likely to be influenced by a bunch of students refusing to attend classes.
There is value in the strike, though. The value is a cathartic one. When people are suffering, they can find real comfort in togetherness. It’s true that misery loves company.
There is an important lesson in this for all protest movements: Heartfelt actions are, by themselves, not enough to bring down heartless regimes. For revolution to work, it has to be enlightened and artful. Thus, revolutionaries have to be readers too, and good ones."
This clearly applies to the U.S., now a brutal, heartless global Empire mass-murdering people and ravaging the planet. Our determined, informed opposition is all we have to try to present a better future for our children and grandchildren.
I'm glad the author of this bloodless, disengaged piece finds revolutions so "interesting."
Popular revolutions are horrible bloody things that are last resorts because life has gotten so bad.
I for one, don't find such situations "interesting."
"a conscience can only be pricked if it exists"
Merkan liberalism seems to teach us that pricking a conscience is all we can do. We can't get violent, so what else can we do? Revolutionary strategy may be the thing that is most sabotaged by liberal thought. There is actually plenty more we can do, besides getting violent and besides pricking the elite's non-existent conscience. We can very specifically isolate the elites, and their ideas, and thereby bring the people themselves, and their ideas, out into the sunlight. Liberals will try to turn this into a strawman, shrieking that we're fighting oppression with oppression. But this isn't a personal fight. We're not oppressing elites but suppressing elite ideas, values and behaviors, to enslave the many to the few. Suppressing this is not immoral. Don't let liberalism distract.
I'm looking forward to remote operated protester robots. We could call them rhetorical GRONES.
They could be put into action all over the world from underground rooms in Colorado Springs. The best ones would be programmed to be enlightened and artful. Spin to heading: 020. Advance 2.16 meters. Shout enlightened slogan at 97 decibels. Extend sign with text that is alliterative. =Make Mothers Masticate=. New heading: 290.
Trylon
Evidently, these protests lack no plan, being "spontaneous" and all. Some say this is good and refreshing as it demonstrates the purity of the "uprising." Youthful exuberance in the U.S. joined by now-elderly 60s radicals hoping for a Revival. Meanwhile, Obama and the Militarists and the banksters roll merrily along, ignoring the rabble. For my own part, I am waiting to see what may happen if the Congress fails to extend Unemployment Comp beyond this month and plunges a few million more people into often irreversible poverty. (I spent two decades climbing out of that hole...I would wish it on nobody.)
Recommended reading: Bob Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." Privilege "has its place."
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This rhetorical analysis of the planned student strike in protest of SCAF seems to lack a lot of specificity. It could easily be applied to almost any demonstration, anywhere: the IMF / World Bank / G-8 / G-20 / NATO / etc. don't and won't care, so why protest? If your model of protest-as-persuasion requires, by definition, an "audience" who is in a position of power over you, and who benefits from holding on to that power, but who is somehow just waiting to be persuaded to give up that power voluntarily... then you've got a fairly useless model, one that wouldn't have predicted the success of any previous political movements and that euthanizes any future action (since this audience is a phantom). The theory of "catharsis" that appears at the end of this piece is hardly much better.
An alternative theory might consider:
a.) Protests may not be best conceptualized on the model of speaker / audience; instead, for instance, they might be thought of as collective actions that both require and help produce new forms of identification (for instance, "We are the 99%").
b.) Insofar as protest involves communication, there may be multiple "audiences" for what is being communicated (e.g., even if the ostensible target is a person or entity in power, the message may really be aimed at the people who directly or indirectly produce and preserve that power -- workers, soldiers, functionaries, ordinary people in civil society...). It is important to remember that the power of those who rule is always the effect of cooperation, consensus, complicity -- and that when this is eroded, things which seemed all but unchangeable can change very, very quickly (as when sectors of the army / security forces fraternize with, then defend, then go over to the opposition -- something that seems to be happening in Syria right now).
c.) The most important kinds of communication that happen in the course of a movement may not be externally directed (toward a hostile or indifferent or even a sympathetic but cowed audience) but internally circulating: a protest, for instance, is a chance for lots of previously isolated people to come together to find out just how many have just how much in common, a chance to meet and talk and dream collectively and decide -- in a way that could hardly be done in advance of this "we" -- who we are and what we want. This is especially a lesson of the Tahrir Square and Occupy experiences, isn't it? What so many analysts on the sidelines sneered at -- namely, the absence of "clear demands" beyond a certain point -- would be a real drawback if the point was to persuade the audience in power of some specific thesis; instead, the most powerful agency of the protest was to produce a kind of new society in miniature, with its own embryonic institutions: to "build the new world within the shell of the old," as the Wobbly slogan has it. The term in circulation now is "prefiguration" (versus the politics of "recognition"): the protest doesn't have to plead with the audience in power to recognize the legitimacy of its claims (a lost cause if there ever was one), but to directly prefigure the sort of world the people involved would like to live in.
These are my two cents to offer, from a position far removed from Cairo and from the major centers of protest in the U.S., for what they're worth.
Thank you jessecohn for that Deconstruction. I find the expression, "audience in power" intriguing. Also, I notice that CD people are using the term, "agency," more than before.
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