It took me a second to see how Burke’s “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” fit in with the idea of signification. The part that threw me off was that “rhetoric” was used in the title. The way I think of rhetoric connects me to agent/cy. This in itself is signification. I see a word and I immediately have an association and a relationship with the word based on a certain teaching. Burke’s article had to break me of my association, just as Hitler’s battle was to break the masses of their preconceived notion of Jewish people.
One way that Hitler used signification in his rhetoric was to take a word that has a common definition like “devil” and associate it with “Jew” (194). The “prince of evil” is already a “common enemy”, so “once Hitler has thus essentialized his enemy, all ‘proof’ henceforth is automatic” (193-194). He makes an abstract idea of the devil become materialized or a reality through the very real Jews. In a sense Hitler is proving that the devil, which is a common enemy, exists. He is oversimplifying the Jews to make them seem less human, because humans each have their own set of complications. If he can generalize the Jewish race then he can create an abstract idea of them just as the devil is abstract.
Now the way I understand it is that signification is a tool rhetoric uses. An agent uses rhetoric as a tool to create a certain movement or agency in an audience.
1 comment:
I'm interested by your claims, but I wonder, do you think that Hitler was necessarily "breaking" the masses of their preconceived notions, or do you think he was simply monopolizing/building on already existing antisemitism? Yes, Hitler was a powerful writer/orator and a very influential man, but I have a hard time seeing this as his own developed signification strategy. I think maybe Burke didn't mean to imply that Hitler started this trend necessarily, but that he simply built on the idea using signification and his methods were proved effective. And when we really take a moment to think about it, do we truly believe Burke would suggest that Hitler materialized this hatred and antisemitic movement out of his own wit and influence? The idea is pretty far out there, seeing as Hitler is just as subject to the effects of signification and is influenced by agents just like everyone else. There is a historical context, a cultural laboratory, if you will, from which Hitler is drawing his terms and ideas. It's no secret that the Jews have long been a widely despised group of people for centuries. I think Hitler's genius, as Burke would call it, was building on pre-existing notions of Jews by making it relevant to the group of people he was addressing. So there's a large Jewish population in Germany? Lets make it about Germany's economic structure, the big "players" in the economy, and how the Jews are capitalizing on jobs rightfully belonging to native Germans (Burke 196). I'm pretty sure that would get the job done. And then, to top it off, how about we appeal to the religious and make the Jew and their (most likely held) belief system appear "devilish" and harmful to society (216)? Hitler basically used some powerful signification already floundering about and applied it to his own agenda.
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