Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 21:12:59 -0700
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: more rhetoric


colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net wrote:
> 
> Lois Shawver wrote:
> >
> > Colin,
> >
> > It seems to me we have to learn to walk around the self-reflexive traps
> > that totalizing ways of thinking put things.  If EVERYTHING is rhetoric
> > and ONLY rhetoric-politics, then we are caught in the self-reflexive
> > paradox that  the statement itself is only rhetoric-politics. The way
> > around this trap that I find most inviting is to avoid (at least for the
> > moment) representational langauge about "everything" - portraying any
> > element in the world in totalizing language (everything, nothing,
> > always, etc.) and to use language to highlight and obscure aspects of
> > the landscape before us
> >
> > If language is used to highlight and obscure first this and then that
> > then we might say the sentence "There is milk in the fridge," might
> > have  less rhetorical or political significance than "Give me freedom or
> > give me death."  I realize that "There is milk in the fridge" can be
> > seen as having political implications if one chooses to assimilate this
> > expression to the political metaphor.  But for most of my own purposes,
> > this seems counterproductive.  I would prefer a rhetoric that allowed
> > the distinction to be made between the more or less inciting or
> > evocative language rather than to blur the distinction and thus diminish
> > the awareness of punch-power-provocativeness in some phrases as compared
> > to others. When everything is rhetoric and politics, there is a way in
> > which nothing is.
> >
> > ..Lois Shawver
> >
> >
> 
> Lois,
>       I didn't mean to flatten everything out by claiming that every
> communication implies a residual rhetoricity. 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. This stems from a formal property of the illocutionary
> mode of assertion. That it is formal or conventional rather than
> coterminus with 'intention' is infact the enabling structure of lying.
> Hence, Recanti can point out the following:
>       To assert that p is, by convention, to present oneself as
> believing
>       that p. Even a liar pretends to believe what he says, by the
> simple
>       fact of making an assertion. The link between belief and assertion
>       is therefore not a causal one, because it is preserved even when
>       the speaker does not believe what he asserts. Rather, it is a
>       conventional one...
>       (Rencanti (1987), Meaning and Force, p.9)
> This foregrounds the strategic preeminence of illocutionary force, or
> less specifically and in more archaic terms, rhetoric.
>       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.
>       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' 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).
>        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.
>       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. 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?
>       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.
> Cheers
> Col

-AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT-

Col,

A good start towards understanding the technical structure of spoken 
or written language which Lyotard spread through Le Differend but never
bothered to outline, integrate, diagram, or map in detail. 

Hugh