Political Concepts and Prefiguration: A corpus-assisted enquiry into democracy, politics and community A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2019 Jan Buts School of Arts, Languages and Cultures TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... 4 ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... 6 DECLARATION ........................................................................................................................ 7 COPYRIGHT STATEMENT ........................................................................................................ 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................... 8 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 9 1.1 Incarnations of Prefiguration ........................................................................................... 9 1.1.1 Prophecy ................................................................................................................. 10 1.1.2 Salvation .................................................................................................................. 15 1.1.3 Mediation ................................................................................................................ 18 1.1.4 Revelation ............................................................................................................... 25 1.2 Research Questions ........................................................................................................ 27 1.3 Overview of the Thesis Structure ................................................................................... 29 2 THE LANGUAGE OF PREFIGURATIVE POLITICS ............................................................... 35 2.1 Dialectics ........................................................................................................................ 35 2.1.1 Means-Ends Equivalence ........................................................................................ 35 2.1.2 Heraclitus to Mao ................................................................................................... 40 2.1.3 Revolutionary Rhetoric ........................................................................................... 45 2.1.4 Surrealism, Situationism, and Soviet Cinema ......................................................... 48 2.1.5 Demands and Slogans ............................................................................................. 55 2.2 Political Correctness ....................................................................................................... 58 2.2.1 Prefiguration in Translation Studies ....................................................................... 60 2.2.2 Euphemism and Reclamation ................................................................................. 62 2.2.3 The Pronoun Controversy ....................................................................................... 66 2.2.4 Narratives and Performatives ................................................................................. 70 2.2.5 Logos ....................................................................................................................... 76 2.2.6 Contested Concepts ................................................................................................ 80 3 CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND THE GENEALOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ...................... 86 3.1 Genealogies of Knowledge ............................................................................................. 86 3.2 The Concordance Browser and its Plugins ..................................................................... 93 3.3 Patterning .................................................................................................................... 102 4 THE POST-MARX CORPUS .......................................................................................... 109 2 4.1 Democracy ................................................................................................................... 113 4.1.1 Western Liberal Democracy .................................................................................. 114 4.1.2 Democratization of Democracy ............................................................................ 119 4.1.3 Democracy to Come .............................................................................................. 126 4.2 Politics .......................................................................................................................... 133 4.2.1 Between Politics and the Police ............................................................................ 133 4.2.2 Attempt to Depoliticize ......................................................................................... 139 4.3 Community ................................................................................................................... 145 4.3.1 Within the Community ......................................................................................... 145 4.3.2 The Power of the Community ............................................................................... 150 4.3.3 Inoperative Community ........................................................................................ 153 4.4 Closing Remarks ........................................................................................................... 155 5 THE ROAR MAGAZINE CORPUS .................................................................................. 158 5.1 Community ................................................................................................................... 162 5.1.1 Imagined Community ............................................................................................ 162 5.1.2 Every Member of the Community ........................................................................ 170 5.2 Politics .......................................................................................................................... 174 5.2.1 Prefigurative Politics ............................................................................................. 174 5.2.2 A New Anti-Capitalist Politics ................................................................................ 181 5.3 Democracy ................................................................................................................... 191 5.3.1 Representative Democracy ................................................................................... 191 5.3.2 Real Democracy .................................................................................................... 198 5.4 Closing Remarks ........................................................................................................... 202 6 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 206 6.1 Past Poetics .................................................................................................................. 206 6.2 Another World is Imminent .......................................................................................... 216 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 224 APPENDICES ................................................................................................................. 246 Appendix I: contents of the post-Marx corpus ................................................................... 246 Appendix II: contents of the ROAR Magazine corpus ........................................................ 248 [word count: 77,860] 3 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3.1: Genealogies subcorpus selector (partial) .............................................................. 94 Figure 3.2: Genealogies concordance browser overview ........................................................ 95 Figure 3.3: We concordance (7/56) – sorted right N+1 ........................................................... 96 Figure 3.4: spectre|ghost concordance (full) – sorted by filename ........................................ 97 Figure 3.5: communism mosaic (frequency – no stopwords) and communist (collocation strength – global MI3) .............................................................................................................. 97 Figure 3.6: bourgeois metadata facet distribution ................................................................ 100 Figure 3.7: spectre|ghost|hobgoblin concordance (full) ...................................................... 101 Figure 4.1: democracy column frequency ............................................................................. 114 Figure 4.2: democracy collocation strength (local, MI3) ....................................................... 115 Figure 4.3: liberal+democracy collocation strength (local, MI3) ........................................... 117 Figure 4.4: certain+[5]Marx* concordance – Specters of Marx (11/55) ............................... 118 Figure 4.5: democratizing+democracy concordance (complete) .......................................... 120 Figure 4.6: democratization+of