Thursday 1 March 2012

Crisis, Transference, and Synecdoche

This is an outline of a paper I am planning to write, which grows out of the concluding section of a different paper I will present in Cambridge later this month. It will also a significant element of the argument in my DPhil thesis.

The American revolution and the circumstances of its aftermath represented a threat to the status and perhaps existence of American elites (whether tory or patriot). Most notable among these circumstances were the weakening of bonds of credit and the inflationary measures of democratic state governments. Democratic (or "populist") electoral choices also contributed. As I said, this represented a threat to elites. But not to the people themselves, or to their security and prosperity per se.

Yet elite leaders and publicists (such as the authors of the Federalist) were able to effect a strategy of transference. That is, they "convinced" the American people that they themselves were the ones under threat, in terms of their livelihoods, their independence, and their actual existence. The word "convinced" is used with a caveat here: it was not a logical argument but a psychological and rhetorical strategy. The post-revolutionary crisis, which was in reality a crisis of the patriarchal elite, thus became a "national" crisis.

This strategy of transference was also a strategy of synecdoche. It required that the elite come to metaphorically represent the people and nation, while also representing the state of the nation back to the people. Thus threat to the part became threat to the whole. The strategy also required the formation or entrenchment of a "national" subject: that is, the ordinary individual who is to be represented by the elite. To repurpose Crevecoeur, this is a new man: an American. Rhetorics of nationalism and national unity were thus integral to the Federalist programme, as method rather than motive.

By transferring the situation of crisis from themselves to the "nation", American elites created the conditions of stress necessary for the re-creation of institutions. Americans responded to the financial and existential threat by acquiescing to (even if they did not, as a majority, vote in favour of) the new constitution and the subsequent Federalist programme. In this way - through transference and synecdoche, the formation of a new American subject - the elite manufactured the necessary consent to restructure and maintain its hegemony.

No comments:

Post a Comment