From: "D. Diane Davis" <d-davis-AT-uiowa.edu>
Subject: RE: Rhetoric
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 05:26:48 -0500


Hi, Colin. Actually, I think you already have a good understanding both of
the possibilities of rhetoric as a nondisciplinary worldview or perspective
and of the limitations that appear when rhetoric is turned into a
*discipline.*  Lyotard reads Aristotle much the way he reads Kant: very very
generously. Aristotle's rhetoric is formalized-his conceptual starting
places (topoi), for instance, are still a focus in many rhetoric classrooms.
The problem with the topoi, though, is that nothing much that's new or
revolutionary can arise from "common grounds." Paralogy, specifically, would
be what the topoi would NOT invite. At any rate (don't get me started on
aristotle! >:>), there is always (particularly among rhetoricians) the urge
to formalize rhetoric b/c you can't claim to be an expert, a "master" of
something that you can't get to settle down, that you can't name and define,
etc. But rhetoric always exceeds the boundaries of its disciplinary
settings, and I think Lyotard, even as he libidinalizes Aristotle a bit
beyond belief, tries to point to the ways in which rhetoric overflows formal
"argument."

In _Libidinal Economy_, for example, Lyotard tries to ride a rhetoric that
will not be formalized. Of course, he ended up calling _LE_ his "evil book,"
an "honorable, sinful offering" (Peregrinations 13, 14), as it marked in
"scandalous" fashion his turn from militant Marxist to post-Marxist cum
postmodernist. "[S]candalous," he says, because "it's all rhetoric,"
belonging "more to the verbal arts than to philosophical writing"-it "works
entirely at the level of persuasion" without ever offering an argument (Just
Gaming 4). This is really important, I think. Argument would attempt to
control the flow of intensities and their effects, to make sense of them
according to pre-established criteria (as the Party had in its responses to
Algeria and the '68 protests). Lyotard instead attempts to present that
libidinal flow, to become not 'an author' but an "anonymous conducting
machine," allowing the infinite singularity, the singular "force [puissance]
of effects that travels through us" (LE 258) to spill out onto the page.
Announcing the futility of critique and analysis, he refuses to "produce a
theory of [Marx's] theory" (LE 103) and instead explores "what there is of
the libido in Marx" (LE 96), rereading Marxism as an effect of Marx's
desire, of elusive forces and intensities beyond his control. It seems to me
that in _LE_ Lyotard is explicitly offering a rhetorical performance and a
"rhetorical analysis" that would not be recognized as such among most of
those in the *discipline* of  rhetoric.

And/but there have always been these counter-traditionalist rhetoricians,
from ancient Greece (Heraclitus, Gorgias, Diogenes, etc.) up to the present
day, who operate on the notion that rhetoric cannot be pinned down
disciplinarily, who will not limit rhetoric to "philosophical rhetoric" but
instead attempt to rhetoricalize philosophy, to infuse it with the rowdy
libido of LANGUAGE.

I'm jabbering now. :) I'll stop. Interesting question, though.

best, ddd
______________________

     D. Diane Davis
     Rhetoric Department
     University of Iowa
     Iowa City, IA 52242
     319.335.0184

     d-davis-AT-uiowa.edu
     http://www.uiowa.edu/~ddrhet/



-----Original Message-----
From:	owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
[mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu] On Behalf Of
colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net
Sent:	Thursday, July 08, 1999 11:22 PM
To:	Lyotard discussion group
Subject:	Rhetoric

Diane,
      Sorry to have outed you so cruelly. I'm sure we're all
sympathetic: there's so much out there it's hard to keep one's head
above water.
      I'm afraid my comments about Lyotard and rhetoric have been spread
rather diffusely over a number of posts, none of which dealt with it
directly, so I wont resend my previous wafflings. Instead, I'll just
state my position very loosely.
      Lois and I were trying to determine how we both understood
paralogy. In the course of this, I quoted a little of Kant's 'Critique
of Pure Reason' where he is talking, negatively, of paralogy as a kind
of sophism (p 258 in my edition, the beginning of Book II of the
Transcendental Dialectic at any rate). I suggested that Lyotard takes
this Sophistic element and makes it positive: this is particularly
apparent when he talks about the ruse in 'Lessons in Paganism' (The
lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Banjamin, pp 122-155). He talks of pagans
being capable of seducing their own gods, by what appear to be
rhetorical conceits. And of course, there is a long notice to Gorgias in
The Differend. Also, throughout much of his oeuvre, Lyotard makes
references to Aristotle's 'Rhetoric'(which I haven't read). It seems to
me that Plato's critique of rhetoric (for being concerned with the means
of persuasion, not the ends) plays right into Lyotard's emphasis on
dispute and contestation over and above semantically secure normatives.
I also made the point to Lois that rhetoric is not enslaved by the
truth/falsity binary that Lyotard deconstructs - a point which was
rediscovered when Austin inaugurated speech act theory.
      I am no expert on rhetoric however, and would like to ask a few
questions. In its Greek form, rhetoric as I understand it was to do with
the art of persuasion. How formalised was this art? Was oratory skill
locatable in grammatical structures, diction, intonation, gesticulation,
or the choregoraphy of all of these? I sense that if rhetoric is
reducible to a formalism of this kind, this would displease Lyotard.
Rhetoric itself would be the empty application of predetermined
rule-structures, which would seem to drain some of Lyotard's
postulations of their ethical potential. Indeed, in 'The Sublime and The
Avant-Guarde' (Postmodernism: A reader, ed. Thomas Docherty, pp 244-256)
Lyotard problematizes rhetorical formalism by asserting the
irreducibility of the sublime to such a schema (he does this through a
discussion of Boileau's 'Du Sublime').
      Lyotard leaves me with a sense of the potential of rhetoric as a
figural or disruptive force capable of displacing ossified normative
structures, but also unsure as to where to locate this in terms of
rhetoricity, particularly if it can be formalised. I hope this is not
too muddled. Basically, if you wouldn't mind giving me an overview of
rhetoric and then explaining your own views on how this might relate to
Lyotard, I'd be very grateful.
Thanks,
Col