Tropes in action: The rhetoric of protest and the Solidarity movement (1976--1989)

The importance of studying movements rhetorically comes from the recognition that movements mirror public moods and trends in culture. They are for the critic what elementary particles running through the accelerator are for the physicist. Under the critic's eye, the compressed dynamics of movements are studied to reveal the anatomy of change itself, the process that escapes one's observation when life goes on at a slower pace. Endorsing this perspective, as well as the suggestion that movements are primarily acts of the imagination, this study proposes a tropological model of movements (one by which to gain an understanding of how movements tend to evolve over time). It further applies this model to the analysis of Poland's dissident discourse and the Solidarity movement (1976--1989). Drawing on Giambattista Vico's and Kenneth Burke's concepts of tropes, as well as on Leland Griffin's organic model of movements, the study reads Solidarity's diachronic data (the corpus of texts produced by the movement over time) through the lens of tropes (viewed as modes of the conceptualization of reality). It ascribes the emergent similarities and dissimilarities in descriptions of reality to different tropes. Accordingly, it suggests that the evolution of Solidarity rhetoric went through three stages: the metaphor stage (when metaphorically grounded claims energized the early movement, 1976--1980), the metonymy-synecdoche stage (when mental schemes and cliches became characteristic of mature Solidarity, 1980--1986), and the irony stage (when an aging Solidarity was increasingly plagued by ambivalence, disparity, and incongruity, 1986--1989). Persuasively, the key stage in Solidarity's development was that of metonymy and synecdoche, since it equipped the movement with an unusual degree of unity---a uniformity which worked as political bulldozer. The study concludes that inasmuch as Solidarity (a highly ideological, radical, anti-system movement, one in line with other holistic, traditional the Cold War era movements) tailored the four master tropes to its own specific situation, other movements (those less monistic, and more issue-oriented, known as postindustrial, new social movements) are open to a variety of temporal and spatial tropological configurations. By placing this last suggestion within a broader framework that addresses the themes of change, permanence, and cyclicity in social life (with references to Burke and Pierre Bourdieu), the study calls for a new branch of rhetorical studies---a tropology of new social movements.