If readers missed the significance of this
synecdochical collapse, the article clarifies:
Because these perceptions were connected with shifting British attitudes to Russia as a whole, the story moves beyond the biographical to take on a
synecdochical meaning.
In the end, however, I tend to judge the effectiveness of my analytic work solely on the basis of how well it reflects my own understanding of the music, whether presented in a note-by-note or some
synecdochical form.
Consequently, the possibility of understanding the forces of history in a given society is aborted, simply because it is a
synecdochical configuration, whereby the parts (a social formation, or several) are taken for the whole (the totality of the social spectrum).
(16) In all these accounts, each ruler bears a
synecdochical relation to his empire: the demise of a ruler equals the demise of an empire.
This is a
synecdochical strategy which affirms the whole over its parts and is thereby a suitable instrument for suggesting the permanent, the harmonious, the appointed; hence the ordered, but also the deja vu; therefore the unchangeable, and consequently the inevitable -- in the end, phasing may serve to emphasize the inevitability of change, time, Fate itself.
In `The Romans in films', Roland Barthes shows that `Roman-ness' can be established by a few strong,
synecdochical signs: locks, drapery, classic profiles.(45) We exploit the sign in order to represent.
To state this thesis in traditional rhetorical language, the fundamentally
synecdochical and therefore integrative qualities of democratic culture are based on a part/whole symbiosis of people/government, yet this relationship - which is based on the entirely ambiguous yet all-important notion of the legitimacy of political representation - is not verifiable in any concrete, "objective" manner.
As previously noted, these tracts explicitly regard the Irish as belated exemplars of the heroic culture of the Celtic/Germanic peoples who, according to Spenser, "spread them selues into all countries in Christendome, of all which there is none but hath some mixture and sprincklinge, yf not through peopling of them."(34) Ireland, that is, provides a
synecdochical glimpse into the cultural origins shared by all northern European nations, including, of course, England.(35) Hence Spenser's account of Irish racial origins simply transposes Tacitus's remarks on the native population of Britain.(36)