Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 20:58:19 -0700
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-california.com>
Subject: Re: more rhetoric




> In many ways I agree that
> totalizing ways of thinking are often oppressive in some way. The
> trouble is, language seems inherently to operate like this in that
> assertions imply truth claims, and Truth implies universal
> applicability. 

I know what you mean, but I think this is a trap that our own language
training has taught us.  It is difficult for us to find language moves
that escape this trap, especially without being tedious. The last
sentence I wrote, for exaple, is totalizing in some sense-- and I
suspect that is what you meant.  

But, still, thre is a difference between my learning back in my
lawnchair and saying in a lazy voice, "Summers are so nice in this town"
(generalizing about summers) and saying, "It is always the case that
summers are nice in this town.  There are no summer days, ever, which
are not nice."  Contextual clues tell us if the speaker is being
totalizing more than the surface grammar of the passage.  But, as I was
saying to Judy, sometimes even a phrase like "always" can be used
without being totalizing.  If, as we're walking, I stumble and say,
"Ouch, I always stump my toe when I go on these walks," I don'tmean that
there is no exception.  I may have gone on a walk once or twice (or
more) without stumping my toe and still we would say "always."  (I see
this as the difference between what Wittgenstein calls surface grammar
and depth grammar.)

I think this is probably what you mean when you point to the
illocutorionary force of langauge which you are portraying as a kind of
rhetorical force. Is that right?  However, I thought you would have said
perlocutionary in this case. So, maybe I'm not following.


>       You talk about walking around self-reflexive traps as if they were
> simply obstacles. I'm not too confident this is as easy as you make out,
> nor how desireable it would be. Avoiding self-reflexion is another way
> of positing transcendence: it is to judge without acknowledging the
> contingency of the act of judgement, it is to speak as if one's words
> were transparent windows onto objectivity instead of opaque signifiers,
> it is to narrate and at the same time to supress both the temporality
> and materiality of that narration.

If I say, "From my point of view..." I am positing a transcendental
referent in a way I am not when I say "This is the way things are..." 
That's a stretch.

>       Permit me to do a little experiment on your own phrase here. You
> say: 'When everything is rhetoric and politics, there is a way in
> which nothing is'. An important question: do you think this phrase
> itself is utterly devoid of rhetoric? Can you sense your own attempts to
> persuade here? And can you recognise that attempt in the deliberately
> aphoristic mode in which it is delivered, in the way you pare the
> argument down to a neat binary between everything and nothing, the
> latter confronting the former as an attempted negation? A second
> important question: is this phrase, exactly in its appeal to
> nothingness, not itself totalizing? In asserting that 'nothing is' 

Are you dismissing my qualifier "there is a way in which" as
wortthless?  I was using it deliberately to show how things can be seen
this way, not to posit a transcendental truth.  One can work to create a
context of writing that avoids presenting things in totalizing ways,
although, as I said, for now at least, one must use creative forms at
times, at contextual clues, in order to break out of the box of
binaries.  But, at least to my ear, if someone says, 

"John is always does better than everyone else on his test, without
exception, absolutely."

this is significantly differerent from saying

"There are some ways of looking at John's tests so they are seen as the
best in his class."

does
> this not constitute a negative totality (this maps onto the Gorgias Note
> of 'The Differend'On Not-Being after No. 27 of 'The Differend' chapter).

I'll check on this later if you want me to after what I said just now.

>        Also, in trying to demonstrate the politically debilitating
> effects of my expanded notion of rhetoricity, you actually chose phrases
> from incommensurable genres. 'There is Milk in the fridge' is a
> descriptive that can be validated by adducing empirical proof, that is,
> by opening the fridge and revealing the milk. In contrast 'Give me
> freedom or death' is a performative declaritive, and as such cannot be
> validated by empirical proof. It is of the order of illocutionary force:
> it tries to make the world change through the performance of language.
> Clearly this is political.

Now, YOU are saying that every fragment of langauge is not equally
performative.  I like that. I may have lost the thread of what my point
was, but wasn't I trying to show that some language can be seen as more
rhetorical than others?  


>       Having said all this, there is indeed a problem of a flattening
> out, of a certain levelling, in this expanded idea of rhetoric. But the
> only thing that can rescue the depth-model of language would be the
> ascribing of a priviledged view point to a particular genre, as if it
> was above the subject over which it presided. 

I think that is a wrong move.  You are inclined, it seems to me, to want
to fix the langauge calculus rather than looking at meaning as use.

This, as you know, is what
> Lyotard argues against. It is the problem of the heremeneutic circle:
> how can we exclude the phrase that judges from what is judged?

Of course, and so does Wittgenstein argue against it.  

>       I think you are right to mention this flattening out as a big
> problem. I think, too, that it is there in Lyotard himself: his emphasis
> on the radical heterogeneity of phrases and the ethical importance of
> difference lead to an injunction against all modes of privilege (excpet
> the one that privileges this injunction). In fact, Tim Jordan has argued
> that Lyotard's commitment to difference leads him to political
> indifference ('The Philosophical Politics of Jean-Francois Lyotard', in
> 'Philosophy of the Social Sciences', vol 25 No. 3, September 1995). To
> me this is a serious allegation, although I am not convinced by it. I
> actually think that what I have been calling rhetoric might help to
> refute it, or at least aleviate it.

I think what you are calling rhetoric helps to refute Jordan's position,
too, but the argument you put forward here still needs better crafting,
to my ear -- for reasons I pointed out as I went through it.

Your ball.
..Lois