From: "maiantwo" <maiantwo-AT-spacestar.net>
Subject: Re: more rhetoric
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 20:27:12 -0500
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I just happened upon this exert from "The Inhuman", Obedience (tongue in cheek once again).
The Spirits which correspond to Hearing, or which constitute the province of the Ear, are those which are in simple Obedience: that is those which do not reason to see if a thing is thus, but which, because it is said to be thus by others, believe it is thus: whence they can be called Obediences. If these spirits are like this, this is because the relation of the hearing to language is like that of passive to active, as like the relation of him who hears speech and acquieces to him who speaks: whence too in common language, 'to listen to the voice' is to obey: for the most part drawn thier origin from Correspondence, for the reason that the human spirit is among the spirits which are in the other life, and it is there that it thinks; man is absolutely ignorant of this, and corpoereal man does not even want to know...." (P. 178)
-----Original Message-----
From: colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net <colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net>
To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu <lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Date: Sunday, July 11, 1999 6:57 PM
Subject: Re: more rhetoric
>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
>
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