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Through the power of declaration, fascists change the relationship between words and reality [1]
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Date: 2022-07-29
Declarations are cases where you make something the case by just saying that it’s the case. “I christen,” “I bequeath,” “I adjourn [the meeting]”—all commence what is being proclaimed. It’s not mere description—it’s an enactment. These are ‘performatives’ as described by J. L. Austin. Austin, in discussing performatives in his influential How to Do Things with Words (a collection of lectures given in 1955), said, “In these instances, it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it.”
Searle utilizes a $5 bill as he illustrates for the audience exactly the strength of the declarative:
(cued to 27:12)
There are stunning philosophical claims made on this sheet of paper. It says, “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.” Now, we’re all epistemologists, and our natural inclination is to say, “How the hell do they know?” Has there been a study? Has there been a survey? They say arrogantly, “It’s legal tender for all debts public and private.” What’s the evidence that it’s legal tender? And the answer of course is, they don’t discover that it’s legal tender. They make it legal tender by declaring it to be legal tender. That’s a declaration. So the declaration there, “this note is legal tender,” looks like an ordinary statement of fact, but it’s not. It isn’t that they did a serious survey and discovered, “Yep, it really is legal tender.” No. They made it legal tender by declaration. Now this is a remarkable fact that human beings have the capacity to create a reality simply by declaring it to exist.
That’s a stunning statement, one that has implications for things like theism, but Searle goes on without much opportunity for contemplation of sidelong thought:
You can just make a statement and if it’s accepted as generally creating the reality that it describes, then you have successfully performed a declaration. … Now I want to make the strongest claim of the whole lecture, and that’s this: All of human institutional reality—money, property, government, marriage, universities, cocktail parties, summer vacations, and all the rest of it—that is created by, I have to put this carefully, representations that have the logical form of the speech act of declaration. It needn’t be explicit—you don’t have to come out and say explicitly, “You’re the boss!” or “We hereby make you the boss.” That would be an explicit declaration. But you can make somebody the boss just by treating her as the boss, by always referring to her as the boss. By representing her as being the boss, you can make the case that she is the boss. So what happens in all of these phenomena? The idea is that you create an institutional fact by representing that institutional fact as existing, and that has the logical form of the declaration. So the shorthand is simply to say, all of human institutional reality, and thus all of what is distinctive about human society, how we differ from other animal societies, is created by repeated applications of the same type of speech act, the declaration. Now, just to have a name for those, I want to tie that into what I said earlier about how we have the capacity to assign functions through collective intentionality, and some of these functions are status functions. And the thesis that I’m now advancing is this: All status functions are created by declaration. They’re all created by the same type of speech act. I have to qualify that and say, by representations that have the logical form of the declaration . . . .
For example, a municipality hires a mailman; the community is in that instance designating someone to carry out that function. This is an instance of “collective intentionality.” Searle is saying that every construct of civilization follows this form. And why is this so? Why do we do this?
Status functions are co-extensive with institutional facts and, as such, create power structures. More power is created in the speech act than its semantic power alone.
The entire video is delightful; please watch it.
In contrast to these large sections, I want to highlight just one operational portion of Finchelstein’s lecture “From Populism to Fascism.” Seeking to draw distinctions between the two overlapping political constructs, Finchelstein says this:
(cued to 11:43)
Never in the history of populism did they lie so much as the guerrillas and Hitler and Mussolini. You know, populists, like other political traditions, will—you know, politicians lie. That’s part of the deal. I mean, as Hannah Arendt said, this goes back to ancient Greece and we can find other examples of other regions. But they don’t believe in their lies, A. And B, they don’t want to change the world in order for the world to be like their lies. And this is a typical, major facet of fascism, not of populism.
Fascists and other totalitarians want to force reality to conform to their representation of it. This works only to the extent that the entire community accept the propositions as being true or reflective of reality. Of course, humans have an almost limitless ability not only to suspend disbelief but also to accord the benefit of the doubt to those in authority.
Totalitarianism is a manner—a mechanism, a method—of manufacturing the world to match the words. Whereas true/false assertions raise the curtain on reality, generally accepted declarations have the power to raze the curtains, and denature the stage as well.
It would seem that fascists change reality, insofar as that is their predilection and wont, by utilizing declarations so as to have the masses represent the declared reality in sufficient numbers that the description could be “generally accepted” (back to Searle’s terms) and thus fashion a world-to-word fit. This is the danger of letting fascists cement their attempts at manipulating reality by widespread enactment via the creation and adoption of laws. Once codified, the law has a particular strength and persistence as an institutional form, and it is through that form that a reality hologram can be forged in a willing-enough population.
In The Power of the Powerless (pp. 9-10, emphasis mine), Václav Havel describes post-totalitarianism (that is, totalitarianism in established corridors of power, a regime as opposed to a movement) this way:
[I]t commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion. It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the centre of power is identical with the centre of truth.
These materials are all very theoretical and thus will not be of much immediate use to the person going out and performing direct activism; this information is not immediately actionable. But I believe what’s presented here, as a whole, gives us tremendous insight as to the nature of how fascism and other forms of totalitarianism work, on a fundamental level. It’s fraud, but it’s a very specific type of fraud. And, as an intrinsic piece of the apparatus, the customers must be willing to be in on the pretense.
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