Poetry and Power

Kenneth Burke gives this interesting insight in his Rhetoric of Motives:
"Man is moved to action for the sake of either real or apparent good; but desire depends on perception; perception in turn depends on the senses (which require images). Hence . . . we must admit that our actions depend greatly on the nature of this power" (80).

Think about that for a minute. What Kenneth Burke (paraphrasing Pico Della Mirandola) says is that we are moved to action not purely by abstract concepts of what is "good" but rather by beauty, by what we have experienced with our senses to be beautiful. We may have a sense that some idea, philosophy, religion, or ideology is better than another, but unless we can see beauty in it we will not be willing to sacrifice for it.

This is where poetry and power are related. Power can be seen as the ability to cause action or prevent action. Kenneth Burke defines poetry or the aesthetic as "literature designed for the express purpose of arousing emotions” (123), it is an articulation that works on the senses in a way that we perceive as beautiful. As such, it works as a foundation for what we perceive as good, which is the motivation for our actions. This is not to say that poets alone have this power. A day spent together as a family can be an aesthetic experience, as can holding the hand of a loved one, or seeing the trust and gratitude in the eyes of another human being. But poets (defined widely to include all producers of culture) have a power beyond the ordinary because, as John Dewey writes, “What is evoked is a substance so formed that it can enter into the experiences of others and enable them to have more intense and more fully rounded out experiences of their own” (113).

Thus, behind every mass movement involving power there also has to be a certain beauty which can motivate people to action. Along with the rhetorical arguments there has to be an aesthetic argument which justifies the actions of the movement. Observe for example this clip from Triumph of the Will where the artistic talents of Leni Riefenstahl, Richard Wagner, and the former artisans and architects of Nuremberg unite to make an aesthetic argument for Nazism.

Having lived in Nuremberg myself I look with admiration and nostalgia at the beautiful city that was all but destroyed by the Allied bombing raids at the end of WWII. The dawn breaks, and we see the flags waiving from beautiful buildings, remnants of German greatness with Nuremberg as the city of the Emperor, highlighted by scenes of the castle fortress and the cathedral. The score from Wagner's "The Mastersingers from Nuremberg" (which is still one of his most famous and most performed pieces) beautifully underlines the vision of a city (and implicity a nation) waking up from the darkness into a new bright day. It is beautiful, and reminds me of what they show on Norwegian television on the 17th of May, which is our national holiday. Yet it then moves to outside the city where Party members and Hitler Youth are getting ready for the day's events. Gradually, the optimism and beauty of the morning is linked with growing power, unity, strength, and the will to subdue the world. Frank Capra said of the film that it "fired no gun, dropped no bombs. But as a psychological weapon aimed at destroying the will to resist, it was just as lethal." Hitler praised the film as being an "incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement."

Triumph of the Will was not a documentary, as the one scene I showed above illustrates. It was a work of art, an aesthetic argument and justification for the National Socialist movement. It was filmed in 1934, right after Hitler and his party came to power, and Hitler personally asked Leni Riefenstahl to make it. It was a box office success in Germany, and it earned awards and nominations at large film festivals and showings in Berlin, Venice, and Paris, to name some. Frank Capra's Why We Fight was made explicitly as an American answer and counterstatement to it. Hardly any movie or moviemaker more clearly shows the ethical implications of works of art.

Yet it is not just overtly political movies that have this effect, and it is not all sinister that art works this way. I recently watched the movie version of Les Miserables, and I was left both emotionally touched and intellectually stimulated. Here, I realized, was an aesthetic argument for many facets that make up my world view. In the movie, it was made beautiful. The Christian compassion, grace, mercy, and redemption, added with courage and desires to change the world for the better, and the triumph of romantic and parental love against all odds, combined to create a powerful drama and a compelling "interpretation of life" as Kenneth Burke would put it. In a world that too often asks you to choose between the tyrannical and robotic justice of Javert and the relativistic lasciviousness, greed, and immorality of the Thènardiers, it showed that it is possible to be loving without indulging, and to have morals without being judgmental and narrow-minded. It is also a position that breaks down the binaries in American politics that have been set up by the extreme Left and extreme Right where justice and mercy, tolerance and morals are incompatible and at constant war.

Poets, as Percy Shelley wrote, are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." They have a lot of power in creating the foundations of sentiment and feeling which define what is worth fighting for. This power can be used for good or bad, but it is important to recognize that it is there. Although an artist may intend to create art for art's sake, there is no art for art's sake when we look at the consequences it has, the sentiments it instills, the identifications and exclusions it encourages and discourages. Les Miserables is beautiful, but it is important to realize that artistically there is not that great of a gap between it and Triumph of the Will, as I show in this video.

Be careful when a piece of art calls for sacrifice and the laying down of lives for a greater cause. Such an admonition should be very carefully considered before it is accepted, if it is accepted at all.

In conclusion then, poetry is always related to power. Making something good or beautiful at the same time gives an implicit directive to seek, value, or defend it. As Burke describes in Counter-Statement, “[The work of art] can, by its function as name and definition, give simplicity and order to an otherwise unclarified complexity. It provides a terminology of thoughts, actions, emotions, attitudes for codifying a pattern of experience” (154).

Victimage and the Rhetoric of Oppression

It seems like a paradox, but in rhetoric, there is no stronger position to have in a dispute on justice than the position of the weak and helpless.

According to the historical sources, rhetoric was invented by Corax and Tisias in Syracuse during its transition from tyranny to democracy. The tyrant had just been deposed, and rhetoric was brought in as a method to help mediate the property disputes that naturally followed with this transition. It got the reputation for "making the weaker case strong, and the stronger weak," a revolutionary turn of events for those days.

Part of the reason for this paradox is based on the idea of justice itself. There are many definitions for justice, but the main feeling we connect with it is that something has happened which disturbs the natural order and balance in nature or society. We feel "a disturbance in the force" if you will. An offence has been given, a wrong must be righted, a manifestation of hubris needs to bring the arrogant tyrant to his knees. Justice basically is our desire to see that balance restored. Since the restoration of balance will naturally favor the oppressed, the weak, or the injured party, it was quickly recognized that whoever could frame the debate in such a way as to situate themselves as victims would naturally have the upper hand in any dispute on justice.

Hitler was a master at this technique when he portrayed the plight of Germany to his own people. A lot of them believed, up until the very end, that the 2nd World War had been a defensive war, fought for the survival of Germany, not world dominion. Look at how he carefully draws the lines between the oppressors and the oppressed in his declaration of war against the United States before the Reichstag:

"Ever since my peace proposal of July 1940 was rejected, we have clearly realized that this struggle must be fought through to the end. We National Socialists are not at all surprised that the Anglo-American, Jewish, and capitalist world is united together with Bolshevism. In our own country we have always found them in the same community." See how the entire world is out to get Germany? Even racial groups that have had tensions and economic ideologies that are fundamentally opposed join forces against this poor, oppressed country.

"Allied with us are strong nations that have suffered the same misery and face the same enemies." This is presented as quite the emancipatory struggle against colonialists and world bullies. He even pulls in America's wealth to make this a class struggle: "The American President and his plutocrat clique have called us the 'have not' nations. That is correct! But the 'have nots' also want to live, and they will certainly make sure that what little they have to live on is not stolen from them by the 'haves.'" Rich America thinks its privileged position of economic power means that it can dictate to the weaker nations of the world to do its bidding, and now they even want to steal what little this poor nation has left. Sound familiar?

Even in as inconsequential contests as sports we naturally root for the underdog. This tendency becomes all the more dominant when real lives are at stake. There is nothing as rhetorically effective as showing the victimage of women and children. Why is that the case? Because they are already seen as the weaker parties in society, and therefore the power used against them seems ten times more oppressive, overbearing, and attrocious than violence against grown men. The weaker party in just about any conflict seizes our sympathies. This was the very argument made by so many statistics shared on Facebook and other social media during the last great confrontation between the Palestinians and Israelis.

The logic of this argument is not necessarily the most compelling. Just because more people die on one side doesn't make the other side right. Many more Germans died in WW2 than Americans, did that make them the right side? Would we feel the same way for the Israelis if the Palestinians were more successful in their efforts to kill Israelis? Logically, always favoring the weak would lead to an eternal war, where our sympathies would switch to the other side as soon as one side gets the upper hand. This kind of logic is brilliantly satirized by Monty Python in the character of the highwayman Dennis Moore.

Yet the persuasive appeal of the statistic above is undeniable. Like watching a small hometown team being beaten by the big city stars, it feels heavy-handed and almost screams of unfairness. To make matters worse, it shows the "advantage" in casualties increasingly going the way of the Israelis. Of course, one could make a similar statistic about the casualties of September 11th compared to Arabs, Afghans, or Iraqis killed since then in "retaliation" and make the same kind of argument. Or indeed, one could look at the casualties of just about every war America has participated in since its founding, and equate military success with them being the oppressors of every nation they won against in any war.

The rhetoric of the oppressed works in all facets of our society, since our sense of justice is manifest in every aspect of it. It is perhaps most clearly manifest in politics, where both Republicans and Democrats claim to be the defenders of the weak and the persecuted. It was a paradox commented on by many that the President was able to run against Romney as an underdog, despite his obvious advantage as an encumbent and holding the power of the presidency. Yet the single most effective email plea sent by the Obama campaign was titled "I will be outspent" (though he ended up with a considerable advantage in spending). Millions answered the call of the underdog president to give donations to the sum of over 46 million dollars in one single week. It is definitely active in the current Supreme Court case on same-sex marriage, where the proponents of same-sex marriage have painted their opponents into a corner by labelling them proponents of hate and bigotry and by very clearly seizing the position of the weak and oppressed who are the victims of hate and bigotry.

I am grateful for the rhetoric of oppression and its benefits. It is really a manifestation of the innate sense of justice and fairness that exists within human beings and should be manifest in every society. It is a safeguard of civil liberties, and gives the truly downtrodden and oppressed a voice and a certain amount of leverage which it can use against parties that may be more affluent, better connected, or in any way more powerful in any normal contest. But it is important to be aware that it is also a rhetorical strategy that can be used by anyone, as shown by the example of Hitler.

One of the effects of seeing yourself as the underdog is that it justifies using dirty tricks. If you see the game as already stacked against you, you may feel like bending the rules is justified. After all, who made the rules? The powerful, right? Such a logic has the potential to break down just about any rule of civility, law, or social contract that has ever been established. Hitler knew this. Right after describing Germany's desperate struggle for survival, he says, "During a time in which thousands of our best men, the fathers and sons of our people, have given their lives, anyone in the homeland who betrays the sacrifices on the front will forfeit his life." Pretty drastic, right? Yet, if seen from the perspective of someone in a desperate life and death struggle, not so much. It is the same logic that the hit show "Leverage" uses to justify its heroes in commiting all kinds of crimes in their service of the oppressed against the powerful. We applaud it, we love it when they take down the powerful, and we never imagine that the same tactics and justification could ever be used against us . . .

How to Become a Central Hub in a Network World

Communication technology is rapidly changing the way we interact as humans; affecting social, democratic and corporate cultures. The flow of information now increasingly happens through networks, which in many ways communicate faster and more effectively than so-called traditional hierarchies. Networks have become the new metaphor used to explain human interaction. As Newman, Barabasi, and Watts write in The Structure and Dynamics of Networks, “Networks are everywhere. From the Internet and its close cousin the World Wide Web to networks in economics, networks of disease transmission, and even terrorist networks, the imagery of the network pervades modern culture.” So what constraints does a network system put on a leader, and what does leadership mean in such a system? Network Leadership has two prominent features: attracting attention, and persuading cooperation through a transcendent vision.

In Thinking about Leadership, Nannerl Keohane (referencing Kenneth Janda) describes how leaders are selected in ‘on-going groups of long duration’ by “occupying a position in a formal structure or being given formal status by a legitimizing agent” (55), and that an individual thus selected only needs to “exercise that power base to demonstrate leadership” (55). This may work in a traditional hierarchical organization, but in a network it becomes more complicated. As Newman, Barabasi, and Watts point out, networks that arise naturally (such as social networks), evolve “in a manner that is typically unplanned and decentralized.” Rather than looking at questions of authority and power relations, leadership in a network can be analyzed through “centrality indices . . . and measures of social capital,” with a vocabulary of “actor centrality, path lengths, cliques, connected components” (Newman, Barabasi, and Watts), etc.  A great example is the analysis of our Economy which identifies the 50 best connected companies (and therefore most powerful) in the world economy (full article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html).

 Rather than leadership which depends upon formal hierarchical structures (which is the main focus of Keohane’s study), this is leadership that depends upon catching attention and creating interest; creating groups and communities out of a loosely connected web of individuals. Keohane compares situations like these to the desert island scenario in Lord of the Flies. There a leader may be chosen simply because she is more “articulate or attractive” (55), but the leader also has greater pressure to produce results since she cannot rely on the security commonly afforded by institutional (or traditional) legitimacy (55). What then must a person do to lead in such a society?

First of all, the leader must be able to attract attention. In “The Economics of Attention” Richard A Lanham makes the claim that leadership that depends more on rhetoric than institutional authority is the hallmark of the information age; where the scarce commodity that moves society is not land, labour, or capital, but attention. It is not surprising that the largest emerging companies in this new economy (like Apple, Google, and Facebook) are those who have been able to catch and keep human attention.  Quoting Peter Drucker, Lanham writes, “Value is now created by ‘productivity’ and ‘innovation,’ both applications of knowledge to work.” In an age that is drowning in information, it has become more valuable than ever to be able to catch the attention necessary to transform information into knowledge. Lanham writes how this happens through “rhetorical figuration” which can expand and compress attention. This is the same attention that is needed to transform a communicated message into the conviction and dedication a leader needs her followers to have.

In Counter-Statement, Kenneth Burke describes how attention can be caught and kept through literary form. He claims that literary form is achieved by awakening and fulfilling expectations in the audience: “Form in literature is an arousing and fulfilment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part” (124). Literary form comes natural to us as humans because it is part of our physical experience. It gives us the experience of a crescendo, which according to Burke “parallels certain psychic and physical processes which are at the roots of our experience” (45): “The accelerated motion of a falling body, the cycle of a storm, the procedure of the sexual act, the ripening of crops”(45), etc. In another description he says “It is the result of certain forces gathering to produce a certain result. It is the suspense of a rubber band which we see being tautened. We know that it will be snapped – there is thus no ignorance of the outcome; our satisfaction arises from our participation in the process” (145). This art of arousing desires is essential to create interest and the space for a potential leader to be able to attract followers. The leader may have the best plan or qualifications in the world, but unless she can attract the attention necessary to persuade her audience it will all be in vain. If she can arouse in her audience the desire to see her vision become reality, they will be personally engaged in the venture she has suggested. This desire will not be fulfilled until the dream has become reality, and the audience will be like the reader reading through the night to experience the completion of a plot. As Burke notes in Essays Toward A Symbolic of Motives, “an orator who is trying to persuade an audience to some decision or attitude must find ways of keeping his audience sufficiently amused so that they will continue to be an audience (though the purpose of his address is not to amuse them, but to enlist them in some ‘cause’)” (38). This indeed was the case in democratic Athens as described in Paul Woodruff’s First Democracy, where rhetors could “exert special influence without holding public office, simply in virtue of their speaking abilities” (33).  Through literary form a leader can gain the platform she needs to have the chance to enlist supporters in her cause.

In his essay “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”, Kenneth Burke writes, “Every movement that would recruit its followers from among discordant and divergent bands, must have some spot towards which all roads lead. Each man may get there in his own way, but it must be one unifying center of reference for all” (192). To create unity out of diversity, the audience has to believe that they do have a core of common interests to unite their efforts. Though they remain individuals with individual experience, they may “identify” with others to join a group if they are persuaded that they have common interests. This implies that in order to get people to follow him, a leader has to communicate a common interest with his audience. A leader may do this by appealing to base needs or and desires such as money, power, common prejudices, or shared cultural heritage. Woodruff explains how Cleocritus was able to unite followers of the tyrants and the democrats by appealing to their common interests and culture as Athenians (First Democracy 83).

However, identification does not always rely upon pre-existing ties of fellowship. Effective leaders are able to create common interests where none may naturally exist. One way to do this is by articulating a vision which, although not initially of interest to the audience, is made interesting by the way it is described and linked with pre-existing interests. In Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games Mitt Romney describes the task of leadership as “creating a vision of higher purpose and . . . offering challenges beyond normal expectations” (xix). He writes, “Our task was to identify a defining vision, communicate that in a compelling way, and provide the kind of focus that reinforces that vision as a living, breathing thing, not just lip service. And if we were to succeed, it would be because of the commitment to that vision by the entire team, and by the community” (xix). The Salt Lake City Olympic Games are an interesting example. Here highly qualified people had to be persuaded to give up higher paying jobs to do more for less pay and without any certainty of work after the Games were finished. They had to be committed to a vision of higher purpose than their individual interests.

What is meant by ‘higher’ purpose? In Plato’s Phaedrus, leadership is not simply exploiting base interests to gain power over people, “dispensing miserly benefits of a mortal kind” (38), but rather a transcending process which brings both leader and follower closer to the gods. This transcendence is at once altruistic and egoistic. One gets personal benefit not by satisfying base passions, but by summoning one’s abilities to reach a new, higher level. As Socrates says, “they become winged and light, and have won one of their three submissions in these, the true Olympic games, and neither human sanity nor divine madness has any greater good to offer a man than this” (37-38). The concept of transcendence described by Socrates takes on metaphysical qualities as the base passions of man are overcome by divine madness (i.e. true love) which brings both leader and follower beyond this world.

What can this representation teach us about creating a transcendent vision? A transcendent vision need not be religious, neither does it have to be ethical. What such a vision does is that it paints an alternate version of reality to which the group can subscribe and which demands that individuals to a certain extent mortify their selfish desires for “the greater good.” It has to be idealistic, even though the ideals may be false. This in turn can fulfill the yearning human beings have to experience a sense of purpose and unity. Burke claims, “The yearning for unity is so great that people are always willing to meet you halfway if you will give it to them by fiat, by flat statement, regardless of the facts” (“Hitler’s ‘Battle’” 205-206). A vision is an abstraction of life where people from different walks of life can experience unity and a higher purpose which is normally prevented by our separate experiences of life. An effective leader must be able to catch the attention of other human beings and tap into their desire for unity and purpose by creating a vision as a banner under which they can gather. At the start of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill raised that banner for Britain and the free world.

  

In “Art, and the First Rough Draft of Living” Burke mentions that Kant “held that we should treat the moral law ‘as if’ it were supernaturally sanctioned, whether or not we believe in dogmas that would ‘prove’ it so. And in living by such an ‘as if,’ men can make themselves a better world” (157). The effective leader creates an ‘as if’ worth living by.