In our increasingly connected social lives, it becomes very easy for viral fictions to take on lives of their own and when these fictions are spread carelessly, they can produce very real consequences. Thus far, I have looked at medieval, early modern and contemporary issues of inciting rhetoric with easily identifiable points of origins and causes. This week, I want to look at what we do when the source of violent or inflammatory rhetoric is more diffuse.

In early modernity, the most consistent image of rumor was drawn from the Greco-Roman tradition, the figure of Fama. Most famously pulled from Virgil, she (and Fama is almost always gendered feminine) was a feathered monster with multiple eyes, tongues and ears to represent the multiplicity of her voice and her ability to hear and see all. She was capricious, such as in Chaucer’s The House of Fame, where she arbitrarily assigned glory and ignominy to those who seek her. She was a figure always kept at a distance, allowing other allegorical personages such as the wind or the crowd to spread the news, both true and untrue, for her.

Later, her image would be invoked in works by early modern playwrights such as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, who saw rumor as a source of unease and anxiety, particularly in the climate of state repression that defined much of the Elizabethan political world. While I discussed earlier that Shakespeare and his contemporaries had few populist rhetoricians, they did use the figure of rumor to express a fear concerning what word and language could incite when the crowd was taken in by its sway.

I bring this up because the viral qualities of the internet, particularly its decentralized amplification of any and all voices, makes the image of Fama particularly relevant in our contemporary moment. On December 4th, 2016, a man carrying an assault rifle entered into a Washington, DC, pizzeria and fired shots, with the intent of freeing a number of children he believed to have been held captive in the restaurant. No such children existed, but a well-circulated conspiracy theory surrounding the restaurant alleged that it was at the center of child-trafficking/pedophilia ring/satanic cult tied to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta.

While the origins of the conspiracy theory, dubbed “Pizzagate,” are likely tied to a specific white-supremacist Twitter account, the virality of the conspiracy placed it within the aether of the internet, endlessly cycling through permutation after permutation, becoming increasingly convoluted with each passing version. While the theory has been extensively debunked, its presence lingers in a number of later conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Seth Rich, the figure of QAnon and others. Each of these share a common thread: an accusation of criminal behavior, leveled against a major public figure, to incense rage.

I bring this up in relation to the early-modern concept of rumor because, like rumor, these viral conspiracy theories and the rhetoric that informs them are characterized by lacking a central point of origin. Fama exists, in part, to give form to the idea of rumor and scandal, rather than allowing it to exist as a shadow in the crowd. While the early moderns didn’t deal with virality in the same way that we understand it, there is a present unease with the capacity of dangerous or harmful rhetoric to catch fire and spiral out of control without the need of a Marc Antony or even a Jack Cade. Likewise, it seems as if part of the strength of an alt-right conspiracy theory like Pizzegate lies in its diffuseness. Rather than originating from a single source, it becomes part of a “wisdom of the crowd” and it can be shaped and reshaped as the present moment demands and as we have seen, it can be retrofitted into other conspiracy theories to construct a grand narrative of truth.

What interests me about these theories from the perspective of someone who studies the political applications of rhetoric is the way that the incited violence reads as a wholly unintended side-effect. Marc Antony and Henry II had very specific targets in mind when they spoke to their followers and there is little doubt that they intended that violence be done. These conspiracy theories, on the other hand, seem more intent on using rhetoric to construct a sense of purpose, a feeling of justified rage against an evil political other rather than a call to specific action against a target. Even though the original Pizzagate theory notes a specific crime and location, the revelation that someone believed this enough to take direct action feels shocking in a way that we don’t read into the story of Henry II, whose intent to cause violence is taken as a given.

This is the danger posed by virality and its relationship to rhetoric, as Pizzagate seems to have been picked up not by individuals who legitimately believed the accusations, but those who understood its rhetorical usefulness as part of a massive disinformation campaign near the waning moments of an election. There was never a movement to free children from a Satanic cannibal cult, because those individuals who pushed the theory seemingly knew there were no children to be freed, but at least one person didn’t and that was all it took to create a near tragic standoff.

This is certainly not the vision of Fama that Virgil, Chaucer or Shakespeare would have imagined, but it is useful to think of the degree to which the underlying anxiety remains constant. Rhetoric can be a powerful tool to persuade when it is purposeful, it can be a powerful tool when it used carelessly, and it can be a powerful tool when it isn’t clearly being used for anything at all. While we as modern political subjects confront politically inflammatory rhetoric in a very different light than early modern audiences would have, many of the fears and anxieties persist. I hope that this series of posts has begun to shed light upon the echoes of contemporary political anxiety we can see in the narratives and fictions of the early modern world.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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Early modern English writers, though they are drawing a great deal of their thought on rhetoric from sources dating back to the Roman Republic, were writing under the watching eyes of an absolutist monarch, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I, as well as many contemporary European monarchs, were understood to be careful, well-trained students of political rhetoric, having been trained in the art of speaking as the embodiment of state power. This is part of why, with the possible exception of Jack Cade in The History of Henry VI Part 2, Shakespeare’s rhetoricians are all styled in the vein of Marc Antony, and their capacity to manipulate the public to violent action is viewed as the product of a careful project of rhetorical manipulation. In our contemporary moment, this sense of conscious rhetorical provocation is less stable and as a result, slightly more challenging to address.

These works, as well as the underlying fear that colors the narrative of Henry II’s turbulent priest, are all contingent on the assumption that the careful suggestions of violence from the political leaders to their followers are all purposefully enacted by those leaders. They know exactly what their words will do. Marc Antony displays a concrete set of goals that he wishes the crowd to enact for him. He does not care how the crowd brings vengeance down upon Brutus and Cassius, he simply cares that his enemies suffer.

However, what do we do when it is less clear that the provocative speech and the fanning of violent tensions has an end-goal in mind? A common point of political discussion in recent months has concerned the degree to which President Trump is aware of the implications of his speech and to what degree individuals acting upon this speech are simply “misreading” his intent. When he calls the press “enemies of the people,” there is a frequent suggestion raised that these statements are not meant to be interpreted as calls to action.

The argument questions whether President Trump is a carefully Machiavellian rhetorician who knows precisely what he is doing when he makes these veiled threats, or if he is a raging bull in a china shop who only cares about the adulation of a crowd that legitimately enjoys the things he has to say about journalists and democrats alike. While, to a degree, this debate is present in most everything the President does, it takes on a relevance to discussions of rhetorical incitement to violence since these arguments so frequently hinge on concerns of motive and intent. In the popular narrative, and in the leveraging of his story, Henry II was not an angry man venting to no one in particular, he was a focused participant in the death of Thomas Beckett who knew exactly how his words were going to be interpreted by his followers. This shifts the focal point of the question away from the danger of focused and carefully constructed rhetoric to the dangers of rhetoric wielded like a hammer.

This then raises a second question; does it matter? If the result is the death of Thomas Beckett, does it matter whether Henry II truly wanted his knights to venture to Canterbury to have him murdered? Similarly, if journalists’ lives are being placed at risk, does it matter if President Trump was only attacking the press because he knew it played well to his base? In our contemporary moment, we are not given a clear affirmation like Marc Antony’s carefully constructed plot against the conspirators. Rather, the question that arises is a concern of intent against effect and the relationship between the two.

Without the help of a useful set of soliloquies documenting exactly how aware an individual is of the ramifications of their violent rhetoric, our contemporary moment places an increased scrutiny on whether a rhetorician is actively attempting to compel action or not. Therefore, the Comey moment is fascinating, as it becomes centered on a question of “proper interpretation” of a suggestion, implying that if Comey were to have interpreted “incorrectly” that would absolve Trump of all wrong-doing. This is mirrored less directly in responses to the recent instance of bombs being sent to key members of the Democratic Party and other vocal critics of the President. Individuals wishing to distance the President’s words from the action have positioned the attacks as a “misreading” or “misunderstanding” of Trump’s anti-media, anti-Democrat rhetoric.

With Henry II, it is assumed that we were not approaching the relationship between violence and rhetoric as one of interpretation. Here, there is a greater sense that the public debate is concerned with parsing out the meaning behind the words, as the possibility of misinterpretation is put on the table as a defense of the President’s involvement in these acts. In our moment, fears surrounding rhetoric are framed around interpretative questions more so than in past moments. The crowd in Julius Caesar is not guilty of misreading Marc Antony, as his intent is clear. In our contemporary debates, the certainty of the proper interpretation of inflammatory rhetoric is positioned as being as terrifying as the rhetoric itself, if not more so.

Next week, in my final post, I am going to turn slightly, towards a different kind of rhetorical provocation that troubles our current moment. In a public discourse increasingly defined by internet connectivity, these types of rhetorical strategies are becoming increasingly diffuse and increasingly anonymized. Looking at a case study of internet conspiracy theories, my last post will examine what happens when there is no singular individual concerned with the actions of a singular troublesome priest, but there is instead a legion of nameless, faceless voices collectively descending upon an invented troublesome priest.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

The post “If Thou Consider Rightly of the Matter”: Intent, Interpretation, and the Fear of Rhetoric appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

This speech is the beginning of Antony’s revenge, the fulfillment of his promise that “Domestic fury and fierce civil strife/ Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;” and his chosen tool of revenge is a carefully constructed piece of public speaking.

The populous, reminded of their love of Caesar, takes to the streets of Rome to bring the conspirators to justice, beginning with a cry of “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!/Let not a traitor live!.” All the while, Marc Antony is careful to position himself against the crowd, claiming that he does not wish to “put a tongue/ In every wound of Caesar that should move/ The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny,” nor does he wish to “stir you up/ To such a sudden flood of mutiny.” All of this, is of course, an act, for as soon as the crowd is suitably out of his control, he muses “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,/Take thou what course thou wilt!”

This speech represents the most frequent kind of early modern anxiety surrounding the power of rhetoric, a fear that a masterful rhetorician might incite the crowd to violence or vice with simply the power of their words. When coupled with Marc Antony’s suggestion that the mischief that will follow take whatever course it will, audiences are left with a rhetorician who sets a crowd to violent action and is content to sit back and simply await the desired results, whatever the consequences may be.

In the confusion and chaos that follows, Shakespeare paints a bleak picture of what occurs in the chaos of the disordered Roman world. The mob runs into the poet Cinna on the way to capture Brutus and Cassius, and they confuse him with a conspirator of the same name, deciding to tear the man apart in the street. When they learn that this is not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet, the mob does not change course, instead simply deciding upon another reason to murder the poet (his verses are bad).

As they carry him off to end the scene, a fourth citizen answers Cinna’s claim to innocence by proclaiming, “It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his/name out of his heart, and turn him going.”* This is clearly not the result that Antony intended, that the poet Cinna should be killed, but it is of no matter to the rhetorician who has unleashed the rage of his supporters and followers upon those he wishes to see punished. In his criticism of the mob, Shakespeare also implicates the man who manipulated the mob into a violent fervor and the play centralizes the hypocrisy and falseness of Marc Antony’s claims that he had no desire to see the crowd turned to violence.

I’ve been returning to the concerns raised in this play a great deal in recent months, now more so than ever. While there is a lot left to discuss concerning the ways in which rhetoric and action become intertwined, moments such as these speak to a long, historical concern surrounding the ways that speech can be used to urge violence and the ways in which that violence becomes uncontrollable.

Now, Marc Antony is not a perfect parallel to our contemporary concerns, as we are able to see him consciously constructing his plan to set a crowd to violence, something we did not receive with Henry II and we do not receive within our contemporary moment, but he does offer a useful place to begin our examination.

This week, I hope to have demonstrated the degree to which the conversations that we are currently having about inciting speech and turbulent priests has a long-standing precedent in the world of literature. Next week, I plan to discuss the ways in which our contemporary political climate responds to the same questions that spurred Shakespeare to critique the masterful rhetoric of Marc Antony.

* In many ways, our contemporary moment is no stranger to acts such as these, as it is an all too common occurrence for Facebook pages and Twitter handles to be bombarded with death threats simply because their names are similar to those of the targets of an internet mob.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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As a scholar of early modern political theory, I’ve frequently found myself returning to questions of the power of speech, as the voice of the monarch and the weight of their words become central to fears and anxieties surrounding the twisting and serpentine nature of rhetoric. Drawing on a long history of rhetoric, understood to be carefully constructed persuasive speech, dating back to Roman antiquity, European audiences have long considered the possibility that certain kinds of speech might be dangerous, as speech is used to mask intentions or manipulate audiences.

This particular line, I think, has taken on a revived relevance in contemporary American discourse. In 2017, the phrase re-entered the sphere of American politics when former FBI Director James Comey cited it directly in testimony to a congressional committee, as he discussed his relationship to the investigation of Michael Flynn. When asked if he considered President Trump’s “hope” that the matter might be dropped to serve as a command, Comey responded, “Yes. It rings in my ears as kind of ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” The direct invocation of this line asked the country to reconsider a near nine century old question concerning the nature of rhetoric and its relationship to power.

This was a debate grounded in a question of what it means to “read between the lines” of a statement that does not include a direct address to action and whether or not powerful individuals bear responsibility for ways in which their rhetoric is interpreted. While Comey’s reference may have been little more than a historical curiosity, the scholar in me can’t help but consider the long tradition of discourses surrounding the power and dangers of rhetoric that are wrapped up in the invocation of this quote.

This question of the dangerous potential of rhetoric has sadly resurfaced once again under the Trump administration. In late October 2018, a series of explosive devices were mailed to key figures within the American Democratic party, as well as an additional bomb being found in the mailroom of CNN Center in Atlanta, GA. CNN, as a news network, had repeatedly been at the center of feuds with President Trump, who accused them repeatedly on the campaign trail of smearing his campaign and being a source of “fake news.” Between Trump and his supporters, there has been an ever-present distaste for the news media, whom he has referred to as the “enemy of the American people,” and whom he has suggested are “unpatriotic.” This has caught on with his supporters, who have on multiple occasions displayed hostility towards journalists, both directly and indirectly, as demonstrated in a repeated propensity to gleefully chant “CNN Sucks,” at rallies or events.

While there is clearly no direct incitement to violence in these accusations, these recent events have recentralized the debate concerning the degree to which this kind of abstracted, non-directed rhetorical anger is understood by at least some individuals as direct calls to action. Once again, we are tasked with asking ourselves exactly how aware the President is when he complains about the various turbulent priests that he sees as impediments to his desired agendas.

While these two cases are fairly distinct, they both speak to a worry concerning how the speech of those in a position of power, either used carefully or carelessly, might be taken as a call to action by those who support them. My series of posts this month will take up this question, both in its status as a historical and as a contemporary debate surrounding the nature of rhetoric. I will look towards literary attempts to think through this question within my own period of study and I will look towards contemporary reimaginings of this question, divorced from its context within the logic of a divinely inspired monarchy. Finally, I intend to look at the degree to which this issue is complicated by the decentralization of public speech via the internet.

The goal of this series of posts is not to resolve this question of the dangers of rhetoric, but it is instead to place it within a broader literary and historical context, ideally to demonstrate the long history of the debate concerning the true meaning and implication of Henry II’s “turbulent priest.”

* The modern version of the line, often framed as “troublesome,” or “meddlesome” priest is likely archetypal, as the few historical records of this command are quite different. The implications however, seem to be consistent across versions.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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