The Plurality of Language and Its Effect in Hitler's Campaign

Being that this is a blog space, I will confess that upon first reading Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel”, I was nothing short of lost. Even after class discussion and several analyses by my peers, I still felt incapable of synthesizing Bakhtin and what he stood for. His essay seemed to bounce around all over the place. However, with gained confidence, and a 3^rd reading, I have finally come to discover what I believe to be a centrality among all of his assertions about language: plurality. I was able to identify the numerous roles and characteristics that Bakhtin argues of language, and ultimately I propose that they all revolve around a certain plurality. According to his “Discourse in the Novel”, in language there is a plurality in styles, a plurality in intentions and views, a plurality of agents, and last, a plurality in voices and dialogues. It is the plurality of each these aspects that Bakhtin argues will contribute to the creation of new styles, new views, new agents, new voices, and overall, new language, ideas that I will further unpack in “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”.

In his essay, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”, Kenneth Burke outlines Hitler’s use of some of these very principles of language in his piece Mein Kampf. We are able to first see a plurality in voices and dialogues as it is evident that the nature of Hitler’s appeals were a combination of the “three elements” (Schuster, 596) that Bakhtin sees in language. Bakhtin believes that the dialogue of speaker, listener, and influence all work together. Hitler involves a large audience in his campaign, one he chooses to favor, the Aryans, other non-Jew Germans, and Nazis, as well as the target audience of his loathing, the Jews. Burke emphasizes the extreme rhetorical essence of Hitler’s leadership through his language. He had the power to make the Nazis and Aryans hate the Jews, and sometimes even make the Jews hate themselves. He: the speaker, the rest of the world: the listeners, and the influence of each, all work together in dialogue to create a truth or knowledge. His influence through his language was abounding, and whether we like to admit it or not, Adolf Hitler was quite the rhetorician.

In fact, it is Hitler’s overall method and style of linguistic force that connects him with another one of Bakhtin’s principles of language, the idea that language has a multiplicity of intentions. Rather, Bakhtin notes, an author will “exaggerate, now strongly, now weakly, one or another aspect of the ‘common language’, sometimes abruptly exposing its inadequacy to its object, and sometimes, on the contrary, even directly forcing it to reverberate his own ‘truth’, which occurs when the author completely merges his own voice with the common view” (302). This very concept may be seen in Hitler’s anti-Semitic campaign as what he seems to be preaching to his followers is the “common view”, however, in speaking his truth he is also simultaneously creating the space for opponents. If “language is the blending of world views”, and further if languages “coexist in the consciousness of real people” (Bakhtin, 291-292) then certainly Hitler’s campaign served as the source of the creation of new consciousness among opponents, even though his aim was only to gain followers.

On this same note, just as language can determine our ways of thinking through its multi-faceted, ‘heteroglossic’ intentions, it also “represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present” (Bahktin, 291). Again, this plurality of language’s meaning allows for the marking of a certain time period and the acknowledgement of a new one. During Hitler’s reign, no one could predict when it would be over or what life would be like when it was over. What they knew through him and his language was the ‘socio-ideology’ that Jews needed to be condemned. Presently, reading back on Hitler now, we are able to identify such language and beliefs and know that others exist.

Last, as we have doted heavily on the idea of agents and agency in our study of rhetorical theory, Bakhtin introduces an idea about the agent that I had never considered before. In a simple definition, we’d define the agent of a text as the author, or the person in power. In Hitler’s discourse, it would make sense that Hitler is the agent. However, Bakhtin raises an interesting idea about the agent that would force Hitler’s power to be contingent upon his followers’ reactions. That “the relationship of the author to a language is not static, but always found in a state of movement” (302), suggests that the success of language relies not only on the author or speaker, but also the audience. In Hitler’s case, both himself and his followers could be considered agents because while Hitler leads through his speeches and orders, he is nothing without his followers’ obedience. The speaker relies on the listeners. Hitler relies on the Nazis. This proves the plurality of agents in language.

-Samantha Stamps