Hitler's Intention for Languge

During Tuesday’s class we focused on Bakhtin and his interpretation of what language can do. Through reading Bakhtin and unpacking it as a class one of the things I learned is that language can have different intentions (Bakhtin 289). Burke’s “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” provides an example of Bakhtin’s assertion by showing that language can be manipulative.

Hitler's Genius

After reading Burke's Rhetoric Of Hitler's "Battle", I have come to realize one thing...that Adolf hitler  was a rhetorical genius.

Burke and Hitler (and little bit of Locke) on Symbols and Symbolic Action

Burke's argument that Mein Kampf is a symbolic act is backed up by an abundance of symbols made within the text itself. In fact, the book is almost entirely based in symbols. Based on the Bedford Glossary definition of a symbol as "something that stands for or suggests something larger and more complex," and Burke's definition for symbolic action (which can be found in his 1966 work titled Language as Symbolic Action) as systems of communication that rely on symbols, it is undeniable that Mein Kampf is a symbolic act. I have explored many of the symbols Burke found within the book to back up this claim.

Bakhtin vs. Burke in the Rhetoric of Hitler

            Throughout our discussion with language and style in class, we constantly have questioned the power of language. Language can cause many movements to take place through analytical speaking. Bakhtin argues that style is language, "that to create a style is to create a language for oneself" (598).  Bakhtin then goes onto explain that "language both creates and is created by human intelligence" (598). These two quotes throughout the class discussion made us ponder modern examples of what Bakhtin exactly was talking about.  Bakhtin's  rhetorical triangle states that by invoking speaker, hero, listener (596)  it becomes  less clear who's the subject and  who's the object. When thinking about Bakhtin's rhetorical triangle, I noticed what he meant in Burke's, "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle." The evil man himself practiced rhetorical speaking in such a way that influenced  "the Aryans." "Hitler's 'Battle' is exasperating, even nauseating; yet the fact remains: if the reviewer but knocks off a few adverse attitudinizing and calls it a day, with a guaranty in advance that his article will have a favorable reception among the decent members of our population, he is contributing more to our gratification than to our enlightenment" ( Burke 191). 

The Good and the Bad of Language

Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel" was another difficult concept to understand shortly after reading Derrida's "Differance." Bakhtin covers a number of aspects throughout his essay, including the stylistic life of discourse in the novel, as well as the unities of the novelistic whole. Furthermore, Bakhtin discusses ideas like internal dialogization, stratification, and the fact that language is heteroglot. One of the most important ideas Bakhtin traces on is the idea of understanding and response through language and how they are dialectically merged.

Hitlers Symbolic Stand

 Burke's "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle", demonstrates a lot of different analyzations of Hitler as well as examples of Hitlers actions through symbolism. Reading this essay, truly shows how well Hitler managed to get away with what he believed for a very long time. He was creative and persuasive and also demonstrated a sense of agency through his speech and language. His audience was gaining by the second and he did enough research in order to figure out how to draw them in and obtain what he wanted.
  Burke managers to analyze Hitler pretty well in my opinion. On pages 193 and 194 Burke provides us with an excerpt from Hitlers book about concentrating on a single enemy. Burke realized that the common enemy is a symbol that unites two sides. As I was reading this, I couldn't agree more with what was being said. I would have never thought of this being a small symbolic action but it is a small step in the direction of which Hitler was trying to go. I think that symbolic actions can be small and large. What I mean by this is that I think what Burke meant by "Symbolic Action" was that humans ambition, is what drives the symbolic actions, which later lead up to a much larger symbolic action as a whole. The actions being taken by Hitler, are desired by him which makes him determined to create an even larger action, thus, making him a symbol of the Holocaust as well as a symbol for many other things in this era. Hitler connected with people and made them trust him so that all could be possible of him being a symbol later on in his time of being a leader. Burke also discusses how he thinks Hitler was not all there in his mind which I thought was interesting as well. Hitler showed areas of being "crazy" but he was also very very smart in order to gain what he wanted. I thought this was an interesting topic that Burke brought up but I also agreed with it after reading Burkes thoughts on this.

Sex Sells - Even Hitler Knew That

In class on Tuesday, we grappled with the idea of “what can language do? (other than signify)”. After analyzing Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel”, I know many things that language can do. It can “define a time period” (Bakhtin 291), “provide diversity in the novel” (Bakhtin 315), and “permit authorial intention” (Bakhtin 314). While what language can do is extremely important – and I will unpack what it can do for the purpose of understanding my central idea – after I read Kenneth Burke’s “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle”, I am more interested not in what language can do, but through what means or how language pulls those feats off.

Burke’s “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” is a great exemplification of how literary criticism can be used in a political context, in this case, Hitler’s persuasion to the Aryan race that the Jews were the scum of the earth. Hitler was more than just a terrifying great leader, but he was a rhetorician of sorts, because he mastered so many rhetorical skills. He understood that it was not just content, but also style that was crucial when persuading and attempting to connect with an audience. 

Beyond the Symbols

Jacques Derrida's work “Différance” is noteworthy because of his intended misspelling of the word difference. he claims to have done this as a form of process. To illustrate the insignificance of symbols; however upon seeing this I couldn't help but to question if his work does this successfully.

Originality and Derrida

As a class we’ve spent some time thinking about knowledge and if it can ever be fully original and organic. We’ve thought about how as an author you should be pulling from all kinds of different sources, but never settling for too long on one. That way your work is a collaboration, but in itself becomes a new piece that has a sense of originality. However, parts of Derrida’s essay made me question the idea of originality again. He speaks about trace saying that all ideas and thoughts bear the trace of other things. I began to think about what this meant for language, words, ideas and knowledge. It seems that he’s writing that no word, or idea, or thought can exist with out being shadowed by otherness. He believes that there is no substance in language, but instead all words are just a long string of different forms.

Why Can't We Communicate?

Every human being is unique. No matter if you are an identical twin with the same physical appearance as your sibling, for that is not what signifies your identity.  At your core, your soul, your inner being, you are different from every other person that has, is, and will exist in time. The way you see the world is distinct and altered from the person next to you. As a person lives their life and comes to interact in the world and gain experiences, they form distinct ideas about everything, thus creating their individualistic thought process. For John Locke, the nature of ideas begins by creating ideas through sensations and the things we experience (815). Therefore, the words we use to communicate and express ourselves are simply signs of our ideas. In the Book III excerpt from his book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke points out the extreme difficulty of communication between individuals based on the simple fact that every person is inherently diverse from the next. Since every person thinks and experiences the world differently, how can correctly communicate our ideas to others? In Locke’s philosophy, this question remains at the very core as the downfall of language.

Dear Agency,

Locke emphasizes how language affects our perception, therefore influencing our thoughts. In order to attain a specific thought, it is undeniable that a breakdown of a word must occur; once this action is achieved, those within a circuit are able to communicate effectively. Derrida understands this notion, yet it appears as though comprehension can only be met when these words are connected, as if they are within a system –language. With this in mind, I wonder if a universal agency can ever be derived from a specific word, rather than having a unique agency defined by a particular language. Can one utterance have universal agency, or does a relationship between various words, or language, need to be met in order to give means to a concept?

What I derived from Derrida....

Derrida, in Diffrance, makes the point that language is, in a sense, arbitrary. I have thought about this before, about how the English language could be made more efficient and easy-to-use through elimination of silent letters, and even elimination of entire letters, namely the letter C. (Using "K" in words like cannot and using "S" in words like essence.) I believe these observations are quite poignant because as English speakers, we don't think about the language nearly as much as we should. It is a system decided upon long, long ago and left unchanged (yet not left unaugmented) for the future generations not to alter due to the risk of looking like an illiterate erratic. Words do change, however, but the system of letters is one that takes a lot longer to change, spanning multiple generations.

In relation to Locke, I believe the two ideas can exist simultaneously. While Locke was right that clarity in language is the goal of the speaker, it doesn't look like the system is currently set up to provide the most clarity to the most amount of people. I have heard that the German language is a lot more logical and doesn't have the hidden landmines of false sounds and letters attributed to it like the English language. Yet, English is more widely spoken around the world. I wonder if there is something about the English language that made it that way or whether it is the distribution of English-speaking people that simply brought the English language along with them.

Derrida also goes into a context-heavy theory about language where his goal of clarity was somewhat a failure. In the sense of clarity, it's almost a given that the author writing a paper about the necessity of clarity in text would be more clear than an author writing about the arbitrary and fickle nature of language. A point about Derrida that I like is that a word's entire meaning can be changed simply through the alteration of one letter. One letter is all it takes for the word "bad" to be the word "bed", and one is a mode and the other is an object: two completely different things being pointed at by a slightly different signifier. Furthermore, I loved the example he makes with the words different meaning a binary opposition and difference meaning similar yet opposing in a singular thing. The human system of language is fascinating.

Challenging Structuralism

Jacques Derrida first challenged structuralism. He rejected the assumption of texts having self-referential systems and that meaning is both determinable and determinate. As a poststructuralist, he viewed the world through language. Like language, Derrida believed our thoughts, perceptions, and ideas are "generated by difference" (Derrida 278). What Derrida ultimately believes, which he attempts to explain through his theory of difference, is that nothing stands on its own. Everything is somehow related in one way or another, which he "traces." Derrida even uses the verb 'to differ' to make his point.  In doing so, the method of "deconstruction" appears. I enjoyed this reading because as Derrida views texts as intertexts, I too believe in a lack of originality and an emphasis on interrelatedness.

What Derrida's "Differance" Implies About Agency

John Locke and Jacques Derrida establish in their respective essays that the way in which we communicate and even the way in which we think is arbitrary. For Locke, words serve the purpose of recording our thoughts and communicating those thoughts, but this means that words naturally have no signification and are thus arbitrary. Language is therefore a system of arbitrary words and ideas. Derrida takes this a step further, saying that our ideas are also arbitrary, and that the only way ideas take substance is through their differences with other ideas. Derrida gives the term “differance” to define this system of differences.

Essentially, our daily lives are defined by “differance”, in our communication, knowledge, experiences, so on and so forth. What then does this say about agency and agents? Any time human beings engage in rhetoric about a subject, they engage in an exchange filled with “differance”. To have or share agency then is to be an active participant in mediating through differance, as agents try to interpret the communication and rhetoric of others.

Using the story of Sojourner Truth as an example, all agents involved in the interpretation of Truth’s speech are limited by the arbitrariness of language and ideas, according to Locke and Derrida. But, each participant in the agency of her speech is working to come to a closer understanding of Sojourner Truth’s meaning and her own ideas behind her speech. While it may be impossible to come to a complete understanding of Truth’s ideas because of “differance”, our attempt to do so makes us agents and gives us agency.

Differance therefore implies a limitation in our understanding, but it also implies that we constantly try to limit the differences between our understandings. Language, though it is flawed because words are only symbols, is our tool for doing so. This also gives a new perspective to agency. To have agency or share agency means to play a part in the attempt to synthesize complex ideas and come to a better understanding of other’s perception of the world around us.

Derrida + Locke: Language as Part & Whole

In Derrida's essay, he does not just break down language into its parts so that we may better understand the whole. Derrida goes even further with his method of 'deconstruction', which really is the best word for what this method accomplishes. Locke in his essay discusses the ways in which we use language and how most of time language manages to fall short for us. Locke begins by 'deconstructing' the concept of signs and symbols that represent words, and how words represent ideas. Derrida begins by discussing the letter 'a' of our alphabet, which shows from the beginning his thoroughness in discussing language in all of its parts.

The Power of Knowledge and Ideas

Earlier this week, I had the chance to analyze Locke's essay "From Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” For my analysis, I was tracing Locke’s theory and principle on ideas. Throughout the essay I was able to understand that Locke believes that ideas come first, before language, and language is later attached. While I understood this from his essay, there were also some conflicting viewpoints that made me question what he really thought. Derrida explains her essay her idea that knowledge is they key to all things- that it always comes first when referring to language. You cannot communicate fully unless you have a full understanding of the language and ideas that come with it.

“Who says ‘dog’ means dog?”

The idea of language and its origins and imperfections has been discussed for decades. Theorists like Locke and Derrida have committed entire essays to the concept of language. Both essays are thoughtful, complex, and frankly quite dense with information. I was struggling with grasping these concepts until I realized I already knew them. I had read about them in one of my favorite childhood books as a 4^th grader. The answers I needed were found in Frindle.

The Chicken or the Egg?

     What really came first? This question, so commonly asked of the chicken and the egg, is being subtly asked by both Derrida and Locke regarding to language and knowledge. Though they do not outright ask this question, their philosophies caused me to ask this question, to really sit and think which one comes first. Knowledge is gained by learning more and more language, more and more words; and by learning what the abstract and concrete ideas are pertaining to those words. But the older and more knowledgeable we become, the more language can make sense to us and the more language we will learn.

To know, to merely say, a word does not make one knowledgeable about that word and the ideas attached to it. But without first saying that word, one cannot become knowledgeable about its meaning. Oh the confusion!

Locke, Derrida, Johnson, Lakoff

Despite a nearly 300 year gap in their writings, by their very premises Lakoff and Johnson’s “Metaphors We Live By” (1980) and John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1690) address a very similar set of problems in our conception of language and understanding. One could easily argue that in trying to identify the origins understand the effects of human language on our knowledge of the external world, Locke lays the framework for the conversation by way of ‘modes,’ ‘substances,’ ‘relations’ and characteristics of effective communication, while Lakoff and Johnson expand this basis, fulfilling Locke’s attempts to dismantle doctrines of “received truth” and innate ideas by introducing the idea that the metaphor is more than an ornamental literary device, or simple characteristic of language. “Metaphors We Live By” makes the case that metaphors, like Locke’s modes, substances and relations, “govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details.” Both seem to be in agreement that our conceptual system is an internalized system of meanings that we more or less repress, or become numb to.

Locke + Derrida

Both Locke and Derrida wrote on language. Locke focused more on the imperfections, such as inconsistent use and words not attributed to specific ideas. According to Locke, there is no imperfection in talking to one’s self, as there is no confusion. “The imperfection of words is the doubtfulness or ambiguity of their signification, which is caused by the sort of ideas they stand for.” This quote is a central premise to Locke’s argument. This seems reminiscent of Derrida’s argument about the signification of words. The transient nature of words and ideas is core to both theorists. Locke sought to regulate the ways in which words are used, so as to deter this transience. Derrida does not identify this transience as explicitly problematic and does not seek to correct it. Instead he focuses his criticism on the nature of the thought processes that are used to apply definitions to words.

"Differance" as a tool for understanding experience

While I'm not quite positive that I fully understand Derrida's essay "Differance", I'm going to attempt to deconstruct his theory of language to try to make sense of it. The entire essay is about the title, the word "differance", as opposed to the word "difference". Derrida claims that differance with an a does not actually exist as a concept or a word. He is just using it to prove some kind of point. It is a metaphor for how we look at language.

Locke and "Key"

Okay, so I remember when Professor Graban mentioned in the first few classes that blogging is when we would start to feel smart, and with Locke I am starting to feel that. Why is that??

Well, not meaning to brag (or maybe I am; I'm just excited about this), Locke's arguments about language is something I've basically been writing about since Barthes!!! My other two posts I'm just going on and on about how there is an argument by the critics that language is seen as "imperfect" (well this is Locke's term now, he helped me see it that way) because to communicate is to used agreed upon, or universal, vocabulary though it may not exactly fit said person's emotions. HA! This is so exciting because I feel like I have been on the right track with my musings. And... I'll stop "bragging" now and talk about the essay...

Derrida's DifferAnce

Before reading Derrida’s essay Differance I went over Herrick’s background about Derrida and his essay. In this background there is one quote that basically sums up Derrida’s point that he is attempting to come across in his essay, which is, “The object of Derrida’s attention is language itself, especially written language. His principal goal ‘is to remain acutely sensitive to the deeply historical social and linguistic ‘constructedness’ of our beliefs and practices’” (Derrida, qtd. in Herrick 254). I think reading this background was extremely helpful in trying to understand Derrida’s overall idea. First, I think the most important term to go over before anything else is the term differance itself. Essentially it is the difference that shatters the cult of identity, meaning that there really is no origin. The writing of differance refers to itself because it breaks down the concepts that are signified and referent.

The Difference Between Derrida and Locke (and their similarities to Lakoff and Johnson)

Jacques Derrida strives to challenge traditional assumptions about language and meaning in his essay "Differance." He claims that substantive units of language are actually determined by outside forces and that our perception of reality works in a similar way. This is a very similar critique to the one made by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in "Metaphors We Live By" where they explore how the way we think and the way we speak is heavily reliant on metaphors we have created. Derrida's views of language and speech can also be applied to Locke's ideas in that they both stress that words are incapable of holding meaning on their own, however, Derrida takes his theory a step farther and explains how it is that words come to have meaning based on their differences to all other words and meanings.

The Hang-Up on Words

An organized system of verbal speech is what separates man from other primates and lesser species. Words create and shape our reality. They make or break us. Words are an imperfect reflection of their imperfect creators. Burke would say that because man is "rotten with perfection" he devotes his life (as Derrida and Locke do) in vain to criticizing imperfect systems and attempting to better them. Locke and Derrida are both hypercritical of our flawed system of language. In many ways they make similar arguments but in many ways I believe Locke would reject Derrida's creation of "differance."