Rhetorical Construction of National Identity

04.11.2016

Course 3

nationalism is a construct
nation is a discursive reality and therefore it is something produced by the
subjects and the state consists of institutions because of its territory
defining nation as opposed to other things and as a result the working
definition is the image of the collective self created in a relationship with
cultural other, a putative, reputed to be, image
that collection of images is based on ideological consciousness that creates
itself as a part of a historical vision, historical consciousness which has an
ideological background which makes it possible to be used as such
these are the things that differentiate nation from other mental constructs
regarding self-representation
nationalism is the process of constructing it through discourse
todays topic for discussion, its theme, Metahistorys Introduction by White
and chapter 4
you have a table that arranges these different approaches which
distinguishes between essentialism and constructivism
essentialism is something naturally given, your biological ancestry, an earlier
stage of nationalism, something metaphysical which God ordained, prescientific notion as it were for most of the people
constructivism is a sociological concept, as the result of a construct, which
comes out of peoples opinions and therefore it is not immutable or
intangible, and it can change over time like a persons opinion, but it is not
the literal truth
these theories coexist throughout history, but essentialism was more popular
until the 60 when constructivism was adopted broadly by the scientific
community
subjectivism vs. objectivism a certain subject vs. object so nationalism is
something that happens at a mental level, unlike objectivism which focuses
on territory, subjectivists places focus on subjective theories, that there you
have to look for the nation, how a nation appears
psychology is a subjectivist science, because it is not easily measured
we approach national identity from a subjectivist constructivist focus on
discourse
these discursive processes of sharing a self image that call themselves
nations
speech-act theory with performative language/acts linguistic acts that also
perform social actions, they change reality
Foucault discourse

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as opposed to constative in pragmatics, they take the view that most of the
time there is no constative act
a continuum between
discourse is language in action/as action to be more precise, referring to a
thought-speech-action continuum Premizele abordarii mele
by logos the Greeks meant thought and speech philologists as people who
love words, as well as logic, thought processes
there are certain monist theories of language that think about it as being
inseparable from thought, just two sides of the same coin
in recent times the monist theory appeared in the study of literature, new
criticism came up with the notion that in literature you can distinguish
speaking from thinking, the content and the form is inseparable, the notion of
the heresy of paraphrasing literature, Clint Brooks, Alan Tate
literature is the actual way of expressing things exactly as they appear on the
page monist theory of language
Orwell, Politics in the English Language says that the way people speak is
the way people think, therefore someone whose speech is muddled cannot
come up with complex thought, so thought and speech are both facets of the
same mental process
in view of that theory and what speech-act theorist propose, we add action
efficient action comes out of efficient thinking put into efficient speech
nations are the result of discourse, it all depends on how you think and how
you speak about the nation that it actually becomes possible and is put in
motion, translated into reality
one of the important things about nation is historical consciousness and
Metahistory talks about historical consciousness
history is a science that gives you the facts about the past, explaining them,
not just recording them
the story is what you talk about, and plot is how you talk about it
a plot is the way of organising the material of the story, so basically in order
to have a historical discourse you need to use these literary instruments
history has two different meanings, the actual facts and the account of those
facts, so the facts of the past and the very act or recording or giving an
account of those facts, the historiographic discourse
Hayden White focuses on historiographic discourse, and he doesnt think
there is such a thing as historical fact, therefore in his view we dont have
access to reality, when were looking at historical fact, you are looking at
what people tell you happened and have not experienced it first hand
White claims 4 paradigms on the different views on history , (a) different
emplotments, create different plots in the same manner taken from the
Anatomy of Criticism, Norton Frys types romance, tragedy, comedy and
satire(humans are not in control, there are higher forces working against
them baffling their actions, and that the negational quality, bad things
happening, the dissolution for instance of the world is not just a bad thing but

Rhetorical Construction of National Identity

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also a good thing because it ends a cycle but also opens a new cycle, so
everything is seen as a circular motion), (b) explanation by argument
formist, organicist, - the point is to understand that he is trying to come up
with a typology for historiographic discourse and that they have to do with
differences in philosophical concepts, and secondly at the level of ideology,
how you view and understand society, and social change, if you want to
improve society, how do you do it? The categories by which you do this are
ideologies anarchism, liberalism, conservatism etc. so every bit of
historical writing hides a philosophical type of argument, being partial to one,
an ideological mode that hides between the lines of historical discourse, a
mode of emplotment and a tropological structuring of the material which
means, the way he sees it from Kenneth Burke, a famous American literary
critic, a legendary figure even today, who calls them the master tropes,
archetypes, because they are tropes of a higher level and they integrate
other more insignificant ones prefigurative that means before you can even
imagine something these would be the principles of organising his discourse
and they are modes of thought, modes of representing things, it is a basical
priciple that organises your thoughts, they are structuring principles and as
such any figure of style, an epiteth, can be used to make that principle work,
so these would be lesser figures of style