File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 102


From: colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 16:36:26 -0700
Subject: Re: more rhetoric


Lois Shawver wrote:
> 
> > 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

Lois,
      Thanks again for your comments. I cannot have made my position
clear. My claim was never that every utterance is equally as rhetorical
as any other. You demonstrate well that there are certain designaters
within propositional content that index various degrees of illocutionary
force. I agree completely: language can roar, but also whisper. I am
glad you said "Now, YOU are saying that every fragment of langauge is
not equally performative," because this is what I meant to say. What I
have claimed - which is not at all the same thing - is that every
utterence (with a sense) is at least to some extent enabled by a certain
moment of rhetoricity. I find this to be self-evidently at work in any
act of communication in that, between interlocuters the prerequisite of
dialgoue is a percieved agreement about what the referent is. When I
have been describing my position to you I have been trying to provide
you with the referent of my discourse. To do this, I must be persuasive.
In qualifying parts of it, you too have had to be persuasive. Surely
communication, the establishment and translation of referents, is
predicated upon the Idea of convincing the addressee? Clearly, as you
point out, the degree of persuasion needed varies according to the
nature of the referent. If I say 'I feel cold', the referent 'cold'
needs little rhetorical work since we think of it as being fairly
elemental, that is, common to human experience. But at the same time,
why did I make the phrase in the first place? Wouldn't I form this
phrase only in the hope that my discomfit is communicated to you, that I
can persuade you of it? This may or may not happen, but it is the
motivation for its utterance. In no.32 of 'The Differend' chapter,
Lyotard points this out:
     "Even if the verification proceedures are specified as they should
be, how does the addressor know that the addressee correctly understands
what he or she wants to say, and that, like the addressor, the addressee
desires that the truth about which they speak be established? - The
addressor presupposes it. He or she believes that it is so."
Plato lays similar conditions for his Socratic dialogues, and Habermas
is absolutely reliant on the rational basis of speech. But it is not as
passive as simply 'believing' that the addressee is operating with the
same presuppositions as the addressor, as Lyotard, in this partial
quote, implies. One clearly wants to MAKE it so, otherwise, why did one
speak in the first place?
      You also say: "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." If I was in fact trying to 'fix the language calculus'
you would be absolutely right, it would be a wrong move. But such fixity
requires the very privileged vantage point I was here denying. You offer
Wittgenstein's notion of meaning as use as a preferable model. I agree,
and to get back to rhetoric: if meaning is established by use (and I
believe it is), isn't the idea of 'using' here always already tied to an
intrumentality, a 'using' of language toward a particular goal, and
wouldn't this 'using' be precisely rhetorical? In language games,
language is used to make something happen, to attempt to realise the
mode of success which defines that genre.  
      I am arguing the case for rhetoric because I think it provides an
effective methodological strategy for postmodern theory which contains
an affirmative dimension that can be politicized. Self-reflexive
paradoxes abound in its dispirate texts: in the case of Lyotard, one
could claim that he narrates the decline of metanarratives in TPMC,
prescribes a prohibition against prescription in JG, attempts to
articulate the inarticulable in TD etc. These are obviously deeply
facile criticisims that miss the point by a million miles (while also
illustrating the point very aptly), but they still represent the major
critique of the postmodern position. Self-reflexive paradoxes are only
negative, however, when thought of solely under the rubric of
identitarian logic. I think Lyotard (and others) actively uses
contradiction and apparently self-refuting statements in a positive way,
by shifting the emphasis from truth-value to rhetorical or illocutionary
force. It does not matter, for example, that 'Everything is relative' is
a totalizing statement which therefore contradicts its propositional
content, as long as its rhetorical utterance has an effect, a force, a
power of displacement in the language game between relativists and
objectivists.
      An article which really covers the ground we have been touching on
here (and supports what i have been arguing) is: 'In Search of the
Lyotard Archipelago, or: How to Live with Paradox and Learn to Like It'
by William Rasch, in 'New German Critique', No. 61, Winter 1994 pp
55-75.
      To discern our respective stances, here's a few questions for you:
i) Do you think that there are utterances with meaning that are utterly
devoid of rhetoricity?
ii) Does Lyotard not suggest that meanings are established by discursive
pragmatics, and in this proceedure of establishment, is rhetoricity not
implicit? 
iii) The subtitle to 'The Differend' is 'Phrases in Dispute'. What tools
are available to us in this dispute? Certainly not those protocols of
litigation by which tribunals work - they are the source of the violence
done to expression itself, let alone allowing for contestation. Can we
dispute without rhetoric?
iv) To problematise my own insistence on rhetoric, does rhetoric
necessarilly imply a 'subject' to use it? This goes against a certain
strand of what Lyotard argues for in The Differend. In short, doesn't
rhetoric depend on some kind of a notion of agency? Where do you locate
this question of agency in Lyotard?
Hope this is enough to be going on with (although, again, do not feel
obliged to answer every point). I am very grateful to you Lois, for
engaging with me so closely on this question.
pitching that ball right back atcha,
Col

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005