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Propaganda, rhetoric and repetition

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We're all well acquainted with the ideas of propaganda, repetition and the Big Lie as outlined by Josef Geobells, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda: basically any lie, repeated often enough, will be believed. A corollary is that you may has well make it a big lie.

Yesterday I read Tom Engelhardt's article The President, Cindy Sheehan, and How Words Die on AntiWar (originally on Tom Dispatch as A Worldview Repeated Once Too Often?): 'Sometimes, just that extra bit of repetition under less than perfect circumstances, and words that once struck fear or offered hope, that once explained well enough for most the nature of the world they faced, suddenly sound hollow. They begin to sound... well, repetitious, and so, false. Your message, which worked like a dream for so long, goes off-message, and then what do you do?

This is, I suspect, exactly what growing numbers of Americans are experiencing in relation to our President. It's a mysterious process really - like leaving a dream world or perhaps deprogramming from a cult. Once you step outside the bubble, statements that only yesterday seemed heartfelt or powerful or fearful or resolute truths suddenly look like themselves, threadbare and impoverished. In due course, because the repetitious worldview in the president's speeches is clearly a believed one (for him, if not all of his advisers) and because it increasingly reads like a bad movie script for a fictional planet, he himself is likely to look no less threadbare and impoverished, no less - to use a word not often associated with him - pathetic and out of touch with reality to some of those who not so long ago supported him or his policies.'

This took me back to my literary criticism studies and reminded me of some of the other rhetorical uses of repetition.

In essence: any act of repetition changes the context of a statement, and renders it susceptible to defamiliarisation - the statement will appear different due to the change of context. This is a common artistic tool - from Marcel Duchamp's elevated readymade 'Fountain' (a urinal signed R. Mutt 1917) through irony to the basest kind of sarcasm or satire.

In the early twentieth century the Russian formalists were particularly fond of this device; in the late twentieth century structuralism and deconstruction (and their many imitators and followers) appropriated it.

I think what Tom Engelhardt's article points to is that the Bush rhetoric, based as it is on the propaganda of the repeated lie, has fallen victim to these other possibilities of repetition.

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