Sorel on Rhetoric and Myth
Abstract: I provide a brief reading of Georges Sorel’s notion of rhetoric and political myth, and especially how it relates to his understanding of the syndacalist/revolutionary vanguard.
Sorel employs rhetoric as a mode of persuasion in the service of the revolutionary vanguard. Sorel’s concern with the elite-driven deliberations of the “parliamentary socialists” revolves around the distinction he draws between utopian visions and myths. The former, which is associated with Sorel’s critique of Marx’s own utopian vision, engenders the endless, cold deliberations of a parliamentary reformism that, in a manner reflecting Sorel’s appreciation of Marx, substitute political reform for human emancipation. The rationality and reason that characterized Socrates’ envisioned political world have transformed, for Sorel, into a system of deliberation unable to address real forms of domination. To this end, the problem with utopian visions is primarily their origin in reasoned argument. Because utopian visions are products of the intellect, they lend themselves to rational refutation.[i] It is precisely the deliberation caused by this refutation that limits utopian visions to narrow parliamentary politics.
Sorel thus finds in this “tyranny of reason,” which he locates in circular parliamentary discussions, the death of the revolutionary moment. To combat this, Sorel turns to revolutionary myth as a rhetorical alternative to the desiccation of parliamentary debate. Workers in late modernity have been so brainwashed by capitalistic modes of domination that the exercise of rationality acts as further enchainment, preventing the revolution from emerging within the proletariat conscience.[ii] Myth, in contrast to utopian vision, acts below the registrar of rationality. If Kant’s concern, according to Garsten, is in part that rhetoric operates prior to rational judgment, Sorel’s concern is that rational judgment leads revolutionary politics to the grave—it is only by rhetorically working on these pre-rational instincts that action is made feasible. Sorel thus looks precisely to that “pasturage of images of badness” in order to construct an alternative to the enervation of deliberation and fulfill the task of forming judgments prior to conscious reason. Where for Plato and Nietzsche rhetoric is a category of linguistic persuasion, for Sorel the myth is embedded in the visuality of the image. The myth is such an image; it is a form of persuasion and a type of rhetoric aimed not at “descriptions of things but expressions of a will to act.” (Ref. 28) It is the revolutionary myth-as-image that, drawing from and engaging the irrational depths of the psyche, signals the irrefutability of the myth and its potential to inspire real action. When addressed from the vantage point of reason, revolution seems an impossibility, and no amount of calculated deliberation can persuade practitioners to take up arms. The myth takes over where reason runs dry, motivating direct action in the place of endless conversation; it is the myth which organizes association toward revolution. Images strike at intuitional foundations, carving “deep and lasting impression on the souls of the rebels” in contrast to the fleeting and unmotivated obligations dictated through deliberative proceedings.[iii] For Sorel, like Nietzsche, the anxieties surrounding the classical binary between reason and rhetoric instituted by Socrates and represented by Kant is a false distinction. Rhetoric, as myth, does not undo reason, nor turn men away from their judgment: it is what corrects a lack of judgment entirely, breaking the hold of capitalist ideology on the minds of “reasoned” subjects whose (false) rationality forms the mortar of a self-made prison. For Sorel, rhetoric engenders actual group solidarity at the level of an existential affirmation of life’s most basic forces, producing in turn the spontaneous cohesion necessary for revolutionary politics.
[i] See Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 29: “it is possible to refute it [utopian vision] by showing that the economic system on which it has been made to rest is incompatible with the necessary conditions of modern production.”
[ii] Having said this, Sorel is rather slippery here: while the revolution may never spontaneously emerge through the rationalities of workers, Sorel must also deny a central “myth-making” authority or author, as this would reintroduce the forms of inequality and domination he wishes to do away with.
[iii] See Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 112-113; Sorel continues: “Ordinary language could not produce these results in any very certain manner, appeal must be made to collections of images which, taken together and through intuition alone, before any consider analyses are made, are capable of evoking the mass of sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society.”