Submitted by Jim Aune on July 6, 2009 - 9:10pm
If you're looking for a clear, efficient introduction to main themes of classical rhetorical theory as it was handed down through the Renaissance, please read the first half of Quentin Skinner's Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. The most important thing I have gotten out of this book is Skinner's insight that the figure of paradiastole was central to a rhetorical understanding of ethics and politics and also a source of the most trenchant philosophical critiques of rhetoric. Paradiastole is the art of rhetorical redescription, especially of virtues and vices. It's an inescapable feature of our moral lives that virtues and vices are closely related to each other--is he foolhardy or courageous? is she resolute or stubborn? Once you start looking for paradiastole in political rhetoric you start seeing it everywhere. Note, for example, the effort by conservative pundits like Douthat, Limbaugh, and Kristol to redescribe Palin's "resignation" as courageous and strategically brilliant. Here's a more extended example by Andrew Sullivan about Obama's virtues and vices: "The question buzzing around Washington’s chattering classes is the following: is the actual historical moment that Obama inherited — unforeseen in its scope and danger this time last year — the right moment for these instincts? Are his caution and delegation a liability in a period of a dysfunctional Congress, a near-psychotic Republican party and a potentially lethal global depression? After a period in which the American executive claimed vast powers and institutionalised torture and abuse of suspected terrorists, is it enough simply to forget and forgive the past and try to glue onto the existing system more checks and balances and decency? Is the conservatism we sought, in other words, adequate to the radicalism that may now be required? And is the president being too deferential to Congress in seizing the reins? This critique is echoed on both left and right. The right, in its dominant neoconservative vein, is frustrated with his disdain for classic American moralising and sabre-rattling at a moment such as Iran’s stymied green revolution. The left wishes he had been more radical in taking on Wall Street, insisting on a single-payer healthcare reform and a full-bore carbon tax. Harper’s Magazine has even labelled him Barack Hoover Obama: personally brilliant, humane and pragmatic but simply not daring enough for the moment he is facing."
Paradiastole induces a sense of rhetorical vertigo in some audiences--Orwell's "Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength" is the most extreme example, as well as the sense that the Right in the US does not exact in the same world of Fact as the rest of us. The strategy is a dangerous tool, but is inescapable in framing moral and political attributions. Since we can never know the long-term consequences of a given human action we rely on moral-ideological frameworks to make sense of intentions, virtues, and vices. Thus in addition to redescriptions/exploitations of the indefinable boundary between virtues and vices, ideologies require implicit views of human agency and responsibility--agency and responsibility that also carry with them a view of how communication and persuasion work.
In addition to rhetorical redescription, the other main vehicle of ideological work in persuasion is the use of "style," or specifically tropes and schemes that make concepts or things vivid and understandable. Tropes also are imperfect maps of reality--are we better off now that we view the human mind in terms of hardware (brain chemistry & networks) and software (say, depressive self-messages), or is the older psychoanalytic view of mind as archaeological dig still of use?
So, both rhetorical redescription and tropology induce a sense of anxiety about the nature of reality that ideological rhetoric in turn covers up.
Is this making any sense?
As far as I can tell, the argument that you are making is eerily similar to Lacan's take on the relationship between trope, anxiety, and the ideology of communication in seminars II and III. Instead of seeing the mind as the potential site of an "archaeological dig," Lacan argues that the unconscious is essentially external--an elaborate network of tropes with a contested relationship to the reality that they purport to describe--that subjects do not contain but uneasily inhabit. The fact that we require trope to make language work (to connect representations to a reality that they wave toward, an "imperfect map of reality" to use your words) induces a kind of anxiety, because we can never be quite sure that tropologically inflected language "describes" the world as much as it produces it (something like tropological vertigo).
How to deal with this anxiety? Well, one strategy is to pose the possibility of relatively transparent intersubjectively mediated "communication" as a suture for the anxieties of being a subject produced within and by the function of trope. The cost, of course, is that in asserting the primacy of an ideology of communication and intersubjectively mediated communicative effects, we pay less attention to the function of trope in producing the human and human meaning. One might even go so far as to say that communication in this instance works at cross purposes with _rhetoric_, read as the attention to the functioning of trope in discourse. Anyway, this is an argument I've been playing with for a bit now...
the common interest in anxiety is there, although for me anxiety is irremediably "social" (Durkheimian, if we want to stay in the French tradition) and has not that much do of interest in sticking with oedipal processes, the family, etc. It may once have, but the one essential insight of the original Frankfurt school was that the patriarchal family, of which psychoanalysis was the theory, disappeared under the onslaught of the Culture Industry. But, this is helpful.
is Hannah Dawson's Locke, Language, and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 2007). Dawson argues that Locke, like Hobbes, was disturbed by the instability of language (especially as it was celebrated in a standard quasi-classical rhetorical pedagogy that trained students in paradiastolic redescription, tropology, and disputation). Locke, according to Dawson, tested the early-modern trivium of things-thoughts-words in a long critique of and faltering effort to salvage a representational theory of language and a program for reforming how we use words in a tolerant, liberal, and sociable civil society. Of course, like Skinner, Dawson attributes the development of rhetorical theory and pedagogy to intellectual trends not to economic and political dynamics. It's hard for me to accept that Hobbes was drawn to a defining sovereign because he was disturbed by republicanism and rhetorical pedagogy just as it's hard for me to accept that Locke felt compelled to save a representational theory of language because he was disturbed by classical rhetoric yet committed to the early-modern view of the mind's reflection of the world (and words' reflection of the mind). Didn't the approaching English civil war compel Hobbes to adore a defining sovereign (someone who would simply declare the law for what it was without contest from meddling Puritans who insisted they could interpret for themselves)? Didn't the instability of England's dynamic financial sector and the movement of power away from the sovereign and towards the Commons in 1688 compel Locke to look for political (and linguistic stability) someplace else (in "reality" perhaps)?
As for Skinner's treatment of the paradiastole--this is one of the best efforts I've found to show that a repeated pedagogical exercise administered to foster habits in a students' mind coalesced with a political program not explicitly mentioned by the teacher but certainly necessary to understand the exercise's import. Makes me wonder about our own quotidian classroom practices and their broader implications. Do you think Luntz and Lakoff are reviving some version of this approach to morality, politics, and public debate? I do.
I'm very interested in what you're glossing here...but I want to make sure I'm getting it.
So, I want to take this idea to the redescriptions of Palin's resignation as "brave" or "shrewd." I am certainly experiencing some anxiety about reality with regard to such descriptions of Palin. Like many, I am thinking about what Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, and others would say if a Democrat had done the same thing. I am thinking that she is "quitting" and not "brave."
But are the redescriptions of Palin's actions by conservatives a way for Palin's supporters to make sense of their "anxiety about the nature of reality"? I don't think this is exactly how you would describe it...I think I lost myself.
I guess my larger question would be this: How does your explanation above work if redescription and tropology are ideological? I guess I'm wondering if we should necessarily be opposing ideology to redescriptions/tropology.
Now, is this making any sense?
Thanks for pushing me on this. What I'm tempted to say provisionally is that rhetorical practice proceeds--sometimes creatively, sometimes in a rote manner--through both the use of metaphor (Mark's point above) and also through more complex framing devices/strategies like paradiastole. Such actions are the building blocks of ideologies (which are larger schemata for selecting, reflecting, and deflecting reality--and thus never entirely false nor entirely true either). Now the question is where the anxiety comes from: some of it is surely social in basis (the lower middle class as the typical base for fascist/populist appeals, or the demographics of the Christian Right), but some anxiety must always be present to every thinking human being. You can either tie that anxiety to meaning as "only" difference with no fixed signified--a sort of ontological anxiety grounded in language itself--meaning is always deferred) or, as I would put in more classical/religious terms, given that we "see through a glass darkly" and are flawed, sinful human beings who never get a birds-eye vision of reality, we must ultimately live by some sort of faith. So, no, I'm not opposing redescription/tropology to ideology, but subsuming them under the larger rubric of ideology. Now, that's clearly not the way a post-structuralist wants to go, since I'm holding out the possibility that our ideologies do have an asymptotic relationship to the real.
Another thing that hit me today is that paradiastole as a rhetorical exercise fits perfectly within the rhetorical jurisprudence you see in Cicero, and then within the English and American traditions: zealous advocacy on both sides, with a judge or jury deliberating to reach a final outcome. Such as view of law makes us anxious as well: the tricky lawyer viciously cross-examining the sincere witness, the seeming abyss of interpretation that "loose construction" of a constitutional text creates--and the yearning for a formalism or fundamentalism to replace these. In less adversarial traditions, such as the civil law system of Europe, you have a different view of the judge as an independent investigator (one takes a special course to become a judge in most of Europe, it's not something one proceeds to after a trial career), and you have differing notions of presumption/burden of proof. Most of the evidence I've read suggests that the common law tradition provides better economic outcomes and also preserves liberty better, but what are the cultural consequences of the legal drama being at the heart of public life?