Some forty years ago, stupid Indian academics started asking the question 'can the subaltern speak'? (the answer was yes. The basis of the administrative and justice system was the 'panchnama'- i.e. spoken testimony of five men of the vicinity. The working class may not be able to read and write. But they were required to speak and did speak.)
Apparently, Erich Auerbach had previously raised the question of whether the pleb could speak (same answer as above) and the cretin Edward Said had eagerly embraced the notion that they couldn't so as to have some credibility as the spokesperson of the Palestinian cause.
Andrew Parker, in an essay titled 'Impossible Speech Acts: Jacques Rancière’s Erich Auerbach', quotes a passage from Tacitus referring to the suppression of a minor mutiny after the death of Augustus by Drusus the Younger, who was considered to have an unseemly predilection for actors and the professional claques at the theatre. Tacitus attributes this minor mutiny not to the laxness of the commander (he had given his troops leave rather than employed them on erecting some suitable monument to the late Emperor) but to the demagoguery of a plebian who had formally been a leader of a theatrical faction. The story is unlikely and Tacitus's readers would have taken it as such. Still, that may have been the official view taken at that time. Drusus had written a letter to the Senate setting forth the grievances of the soldiers and thus the thing was a matter of record. A little later on, the Senate had taken steps to rectify what they saw as Drusus's partiality for the actors over his own soldiers. In other words, this was a more or less concocted story which fitted with the records of the period. Smart people don't need to be told that if you are commanding troops and there is a change in regime, then you need to keep your troops occupied. If nothing else, at least arrange for athletic competitions and religious rituals. Idle hands are the devil's workshop.
Tacitus contrasts this minor mutiny with a much more serious affair faced by Germanicus. The material is interesting because Tacitus's readers, even into the early Twentieth century, belonged by birth, education and sex, to a class likely to serve as Army officers under exigent circumstances. Such people would naturally be interested in reading of how a mutinous temper might spread amongst soldiers and what tactics might be used by a commander to re-establish order.
Auerbach wrote-
The grand style of historiography requires grandiloquent speeches,
it may do. It may not. Churchill's histories were grand enough. They don't feature grandiloquent speeches- not even those he himself delivered.
which as a rule are fictitious.
In other words, Tacitus's readers understood that there was no 'head of a theatrical faction' who stirred up soldiers. It was simply the case that respectable people in Rome had a higher regard for soldiers than actors because their safety depended on the former not the latter.
Their function is graphic dramatization (illustratio) of a given occurrence, or at times the presentation of great political or moral ideas; in either case they are intended as the rhetorical bravura pieces of the presentation.
No. These were forensic presentations rendered in a persuasive manner. They were modelled on speeches made in law courts or before the Senate not on Antigone's monologue or lamentations from the Medea.
The writer is permitted a certain sympathetic entering into the thoughts of the supposed speaker, and even a certain realism.
Auerbach was German. He probably thought that everything was forbidden save what was permitted and what was permitted was compulsory.
Essentially, however, such speeches are products of a specific stylistic tradition cultivated in the schools for rhetors.
Which is what gave them verisimilitude. When a bunch of guys have a grievance, it makes sense for them to choose a spokesman who can approximate the language of the 'logothete'.
The composition of speeches which one person or another might have delivered on one or another great historical occasion was a favorite exercise. Tacitus is a master of his craft, and his speeches are not sheer display; they are really imbued with the character and the situation of the persons supposed to have delivered them;
unless they aren't and his readers can readily suss what is really going on. The fact is, an army commander who doesn't keep his troops occupied during a change in regime is just asking for trouble even if he is the maternal uncle of Sejanus. Also, young patricians should never side with a theatrical faction against soldiers. Connect the fucking dots!
but they too are primarily rhetorical. Percennius does not speak in his own language; he speaks Tacitean, that is, he speaks with extreme terseness, as a matter of disposition, and highly rhetorically.
He may have existed. Tacitus says he, and another troublemaker were killed by Drusus and buried underneath his tent.
Undoubtedly his words—though given as indirect discourse—vibrate with the actual excitement of mutinous soldiers and their leader. Yet even if we assume that Percennius was a gifted demagogue, such brevity, incisiveness, and order are not possible in a rebellious propaganda speech, and of soldiers’ slang there is not the slightest trace.
So what? Tacitus sets the stage for the Army commander to come amidst the soldiers and offer his own breast to their swords and to make a melodramatic speech. The soldiers agree that the commander's son should be sent off with their demands. This is the useful bit in Tacitus. It shows how you can regain command of your troops by making an emotional appeal to them. Also, get your young son out of the place.
What other lesson do we learn? The answer is that only slaves, gladiators and German Praetorians could be relied on if the Roman soldier grew mutinous.
What helped was
1) their superstition- an eclipse of the moon demoralized them
2) they wanted money. Only the Emperor or the Senate could give it to them. Otherwise, they were welcome to loot the neighbourhood till fresh troops arrived to massacre them. Their own morale and esprit de corps would have broken down in any case because looting and raping demoralizes a soldier. When not drunk off his head, he is plotting on how to run away with his ill-gotten gains.
Drusus was no orator and had a cruel streak. In this instance it served him well. He killed the ringleaders and resistance collapsed soon thereafter. Tacitus hints that the mutiny in Germany could have succeeded if Germanicus had put himself at the head of it. His readers, don't need the hint. The thing is fucking obvious. If a Mutiny is about pay, then you have to have a leader who can become Emperor or at least get paid off very substantially.
Andrew Parker writes-
What Auerbach seems to be pondering here is nothing less than a question we have learned to pose in a rather different context: ‘‘Can the plebeian speak?’’
Even Auerbach wasn't that stupid. All humans can speak.
To which, for Rancière, the answer would be ‘‘no’’: ‘‘Percennius doesn’t speak; rather, Tacitus lends him his tongue.’
As he does to Blaesus or Drusus who, being human, could and did speak. By contrast, wolves and tigers can't speak even if Kipling is kind enough to lend them his tongue.
If we were expecting him to declaim in propria persona, we soon realize that ‘‘Percennius had no place to speak,’’ since, as a represented member of the poor, he has only ‘‘an essential relation with nontruth.’’
He came from a gens which was achieving Senatorial rank around the time Tacitus wrote this. In Roman law, the testimony of a plebian was admissible but that of a slave might not be.
The justifications for the revolt that are credited to Percennius are not refuted by or even commented on by Tacitus;
He justified continuing the revolt till specific grievances were redressed. But Drusus turned up with a whole bunch of foreign troops. Everyone understood that plenty more might suddenly appear. Was there any way they could get a bit of money? No. Sad.
the historian has no need to do either, since the argument Percennius provides can be neither true nor false:
Demands are not arguments. I suppose one could ask if the Roman legionary would have been better off if there were no fucking legions? The answer was obvious. They would either have been slaves or legionaries in a non-Roman army. Tactitus makes the point, in connection with the mutinies Germanicus had to face, that slaves who are drafted into the army are more likely to entertain fanciful ideas of what soldiers could achieve by killing their commanders. This was because they didn't understand that Rome itself had enemies and its defeat might mean their own extinction. An occupying army may kill off its own officers but it will swiftly be slaughtered by the natives because its fighting ability would have been gravely impaired.
My own book 'the Poor and the yet poorer philosopher' which, sadly, was not published in 1983 alongside Rancid-idiot's Le philosophe et ses pauvres, because I was too drunk to write it , centred on my struggles, as a poor clerk working in the City, to get my old chums, who were doing PhDs in Shite Subjects, to buy a fucking round of drinks once this fucking decade, mate. I should explain, my generation firmly believed, on the basis of Monty Python sketches, that only elderly Cockney housewives discussed Descartes and Kant in between scrubbing pots in the scullery. To study Philosophy, rather than Accountancy or Computer Science, was to doom oneself to teaching cretins for a pittance. Worse, it was to make yourself stupider than nature intended. Consider the following-
They (the plebs) have, fundamentally, no relation to the truth.
Nonsense! They had been sacrosanct tribunes and even Consuls for centuries. French Philosophers know less Roman history than an 11 year old English boy swotting for Common Entrance. Sadly, if he gets into a really pukka Public School, it is his anus which becomes the common entrance. I need hardly say, my skool wasn't 'Public'. It was 'Approved'.
Their illegitimacy is not due to their content but to the simple fact that Percennius is not in the position of legitimate speaker.
He is a mutineer. That's why he was put to death.
A man of his rank has no business thinking and expressing his thought.
He was a soldier who defied superior officers. Even in the French Army, this is not tolerated.
And his speech is ordinarily reproduced only in the ‘‘base’’ genres of satire and comedy.
Fuck off! Agrippa was a pleb. He married the only biological daughter of Augustus. He was the maternal grandfather of Caligula and great-grandfather of Nero.
It is ruled out that an essential conflict would be expressed through his mouth, ruled out that we would see in him, in a modern sense, the symptomatic representative of a historical movement that operates in the depths of a society. The speech of the man of the common people is by definition without depth
Thus Tacitus, as Rancière reads Auerbach, explains the revolt twice,
He explains it once. The message is clear. When there is a change in regime, or a new Emperor is crowned, make sure the troops have plenty to occupy them. Be pro-active in arresting and flogging malcontents. It is obvious that when one long-lived Emperor dies, some may say 'our oath was to that Emperor. We are free to quit military service. Moreover, he is bound to have left us lots of money in his will. Let us stand together and demand a big pay-out.'
The other point is that once soldiers have lost their teeth and their hair, dismiss them from service if you can't pension them off. An army with a lot of old codgers is neither efficient nor likely to have high morale. The youngsters are confronted every day with the spectacle of their own miserable fate- provided they escape the yet more miserable fate of death in battle.
doubly dispossessing Percennius by stripping him both of his justifications and his voice.
What the fellow really objected to was Drusus stripping him of his life and burying him under his tent. What can I say? Plebs are like that only.
According to Rancière, Auerbach here would be marking, ‘‘in his own way, the relation between a politics of knowledge and a poetics of narrative around the question of the politics of the other.’’
Auerbach had a Doctorate in law and had fought for 4 years in the Great War. He received the Iron Cross. His family was affluent. It simply isn't the case that he had any sympathy for Bolshevism.
But this other is not simply excluded by Tacitus, whose discourse nonetheless manages, precisely, to give a place ‘‘to what it declares to have no place.’’
Tacitus, like Auerbach, was trained in the law and spent time as a soldier. The speech of a mutineer has a specific space in military law. Both Tacitus and Auerbach served in Armies where soldiers guilty of making such speeches were executed. The thing had a place in the military archives.
While Auerbach left underemphasized the question of ‘‘the modality of the poem’s enunciation,’’ Rancière suggests that what makes Percennius’s speech not only fascinating but politically efficacious is its ‘‘indirect style,’’ the narrator’s ‘‘they’’ replacing the expected ‘‘you’’ in Percennius’s address to his audience.
Tacitus tells us that this mutiny, unlike the one faced by Germanicus, featured only a few 'ministers of sedition'. He writes- Postremo promptis iam et aliis seditionis ministris velut contionabundus interrogabat cur paucis centurionibus paucioribus tribunis in modum servorum oboedirent. quando ausuros exposcere remedia, nisi novum et nutantem adhuc principem precibus vel armis adirent? (Finally, as if he were speaking to the other ministers of sedition, he asked them why they obeyed the few centurions and the few tribunes in the manner of slaves? When would they dare to demand remedies, unless they approached the new and still wavering prince with prayers or arms?)
Tacitus is explaining the psychology of the ordinary soldier which would have been familiar enough to his readership. Percennius treats the soldiers as if they are already of one mind with the 'ministers of sedition' just as a commander speaks to the troops as if they have already studied the military situation and decided on the optimal strategy. It only remained to say 'why are we waiting? This is the moment to strike!'
The obvious problem was that the new 'Prince' might not be 'wavering' at all. The fucker might enjoy bathing in the blood of a mutinous legion so as strike terror into the rest of the Army.
What results from this substitution is much less a new synthesis than a torsion between two distinct pronominal points of view—both of which nonetheless inhere at once: ‘‘The indirect style, in practice disjoining meaning and truth,
There is no such disjoining in law. The witness may provide testimony either with direct quotations or with an indirect summary which gives the gist of what transpired.
in effect cancels the opposition between legitimate and illegitimate speakers.
It has no such power. If a corporal says 'Shoot the Colonel!' that is prima facie illegal unless he has been put in charge of a firing squad for that purpose. It may be legal for the Colonel to say 'shoot the Corporal!' if the fellow is endangering the mission.
The latter are just as much validated as suspected. The homogeneity of the narrative-discourse thereby constituted comes to contradict the heterogeneity of the subjects it represents, the unequal quality of the speakers to guarantee, by their status, the reference of their speech.
No. It confirms that armies in all ages are pretty much alike. Auerbach knew that mutineers were executed during the Great War. Rancid-idiot, being a cheese-eating surrender monkey, may not have understood this. Why should only Marshal Petain get to surrender to the Germans? Everybody should be allowed to do it. Capitalism is very contradictory in that it wipes its own bum but refuses to wipe the bum of Communism.
Although Percennius may well be the radical other, the one excluded from legitimate speech,
he was killed because he was a mutineer.
his discourse is included, in a specific suspension of the relations between meaning and truth.’’
There is no such suspension in Tacitus. The truth was the guy was a mutineer. This meant execution and an ignominious burial.
For Rancière, then, Tacitus records in his discourse a speech event impossible to imagine phenomenally as a historical utterance.
Yet, for 2000 years, every reader of Tacitus has been able to imagine it well enough.
Rancière stresses that this very impossibility is what opens a political future: ‘‘By invalidating the voice of Percennius, substituting his own speech for the soldier’s, Tacitus does more than give him a historical identity. He also creates a model of subversive eloquence for the orators and simple soldiers of the future.
Simple soldiers may read Tacitus. But they don't take Percennius as their model because the fucker was executed. There are times when a Mutiny can lead to soldiers getting a big pay-out. But that has to with the military situation. 'Subversive eloquence' just means getting killed by your own people rather than the enemy.
The latter henceforth will not repeat Percennius, whose voice has been lost, but Tacitus, who states the reasons of all those like Percennius better than they do.’’
No Mutineer has ever done so. It must be said, Trotsky was very good at putting down Mutinies though it was Stalin who went the extra mile in putting down potential mutineers. It is sad that the Commies didn't take over France and kill its numerous Rancid-Idiots.
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