Composition, Literacy, and Culture

Ira Allen

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780822983422
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Despite its centrality to its field, there is no consensus regarding what rhetorical theory is and why it matters. The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory presents a critical examination of rhetorical theory throughout history, in order to develop a unifying vision for the field. Demonstrating that theorists have always been skeptical of, yet committed to "truth" (however fantastic), Ira Allen develops rigorous notions of truth and of a "troubled freedom" that spring from rhetoric's depths. In a sweeping analysis from the sophists Aristotle, and Cicero through Kenneth Burke, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyceta, and contemporary scholars in English, communication, and rhetoric's other disciplinary homes, Allen offers a novel definition of rhetorical theory: as the self-consciously ethical study of how humans and other symbolic animals negotiate constraints.

1

FANTASIES OF RHETORICAL THEORY

TROUBLE TELLING THE TRUTH (ABOUT RHETORICAL THEORY)

How should anyone say what rhetorical theory is, with centuries of competing presentations of it lying around? ? Is it desirable or even possible to press ahead through what Susan Miller terms, in Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric, “the ambiguity of naming ‘rhetorical theory’ of any sort, historically and now” (4)? And if naming rhetorical theory is marked by such great ambiguity, why—in what shapes up to be a tendentious task at best—my own retrograde insistence on “truth”? Even granting this book its donnée, that saying something foundational about rhetorical theory could be valuable, why not at least talk about what rhetorical theory does? Or about the contexts in which the term seems to gain social significance or produce social goods—wouldn’t that be more attuned to classical rhetorical virtues like kairos and phronēsis and to more recent emphases on social histories and cultural ecologies? Why set up the inevitable failure with which a presentation of what rhetorical theory is, its truth, must meet? These are commonsensical questions. In particular, given the wide-ranging and compelling critiques of truth and predication produced in the twentieth century,¹ the idea of treating truth as a contextual does rather than a becoming is seems eminently reasonable.

Or it would seem reasonable, were it not for two contentions on which this project rests and which I develop more fully as we go along: (1) does and is, like waves and particles, are not independent kinds of reality but rather entangled measurements of a reality in the process of becoming, a reality that is and does both is and does²; and (2) any “we” that might find itself addressed by the present discourse can’t not maintain some commitment, however unhappily, unconsciously, or even unwillingly, to something like “truth,” and especially to some version of “truth” that relates to predication, to the stipulating of what-is. In chapter 2, I trace out in some detail the latter of these contentions, constructing a notion of truth that should be serviceable to those persuaded—like most rhetorical theorists—of the value of various critiques levied against it. In this chapter, however, I restrict myself to the claims that (1) truth is fantastical and (2) the sorts of truths arrived at by rhetorical theory are poetic in nature. This paves the way for re-presentation of a small sampling of the vast array of presentations of rhetorical theory already extant. Here, then, I hope to offer a feel for both the poetic unity and the deep heterogeneity of rhetorical theory’s many presentations.

So, again: why consider rhetorical theory in terms of truth, especially coupled with the acknowledgment that this truth will be a fantasy? Because rhetorical theory helplessly and simultaneously calls into question and asserts its own ontological status, its character as a discourse oriented toward truth or being.³ Rhetorical theory, that is, disrupts and constructs fantasies of truth especially vigorously and simultaneously. We (rhetorical theorists) can’t not, consciously and/or unconsciously, both tell the truth and challenge truth’s truthiness. Within the scope of that construction and critique, to return to Wittgenstein’s dictum, something must be taught as a foundation; my argument here is that articulating what must thus be taught is at least as much a poetic as a historical endeavor. It is in the interest of developing a more rigorously poetic foundation that this rhetorical-theoretical investigation of rhetorical theory proceeds, aiming not at a new history of but at a transhistorical truth about the field. My aim is to tell the truth about rhetorical theory by rewording the world, which I take to be the basic poetic endeavor.

INTRODUCING FANTASY

Another fair challenge for a new presentation of rhetorical theory might be, “What’s wrong with the (rhetorical [theories of]) rhetorical theory we already have?” Such a question too readily assumes the grounding status of a rhetorical move: extension via critique of predecessors’ projects. In making a case for what rhetorical theory is, I’m not responding primarily to or from some disciplinary lack, but more to and from a fullness of presentation (which also can’t help but introduce lack, sure, but it’s about what’s present for us). The point isn’t that everyone else has gotten it wrong, or even that we don’t really have much in the way of texts that claim to define rhetorical theory broadly. (Though the latter is true, it’s likely because the task seems such a quixotic one.) Rather, it’s that rhetorical theory not only exceeds unifying metanarratives but actively discourages them for internally coherent reasons—and thus needs and produces them nonetheless. To ask, “What is rhetorical theory?” is to confront a nonhomogeneous plenitude of being.

More is rhetorical theory than can be articulated; I take this as an article of faith. Certainly, no faith is needed to see that more has already been articulated as rhetorical theory than can be assimilated into any one schema or definition. My aim is thus not to explain how and why previous instantiations of rhetorical theory have been wrong or misguided in this or that way in order to offer correctives. Indeed, one crucial aim is rather to evoke a sense of the overwhelming breadth and complexity of what is available under the heading “rhetorical theory.” Toward the end of this chapter, I invite the reader to join in a whirlwind tour of a small part of what has been presented as rhetorical theory, in order to feel together the difficulty—the real impossibility—of saying plausibly and truthfully that such-and-such is rhetorical theory. Because this book, after all, aims to do just that. More, and worse: this is a book that makes, examines, extends, and returns to a claim about the truth of rhetorical theory.

Such a metanarrative is poetic in orientation, aiming to reword the world. Because, of course, we already have a metanarrative about rhetorical theory’s truth: precisely that it is not One but is heterogeneous and exceeds metanarrative. This book rewords that story. Inasmuch as the presentations that close this chapter are all countable as instances of a thereby singular rhetorical theory, their very heterogeneity underscores rhetorical theory’s fantastical unity. That they can all be a rhetorical theory that is not One clarifies the need for a new presentation of rhetorical theory’s truth. Such a presentation, then, must be fantastical, poetic. In the face of a million reasons why nominating some “truth of rhetorical theory” is a bad idea, it is all the more necessary to feel the fantastical character of the is-saying enterprise. At the same time, though, please don’t let “fantasy” roll too dismissively off the tongue. It’s not “just” fantasy; it’s fantasy!

“Fantasy” is not, as we learn in the psychoanalytic literature that has accumulated since Freud, primarily a word for talking about what is certainly not real.⁴ Fantasy is not, as one says derogatorily, “convenient fiction.” Rather, it is primarily a word for talking about a desiring mode of perception, for that strange concatenation of wish and need that moves through every apprehension of how things are. Understood in this way, fantasy is a crucial element of all human experience. As I will argue, following Heinz Hartmann, fantasy is adaptive. Too, like rhetoric itself, fantasy is more frequently maligned than studied but is ubiquitous nonetheless. Without asking the reader to accept the full theoretical armature of psychoanalysis, I explore the term’s valences through lenses offered by ego psychology, Anna Freud and Hartmann’s redevelopment of the Freudian project, because this is one of few discourses to have taken the word seriously. And taking fantasy seriously means getting in touch with desire.

As Daniel Lagache puts it in “Fantasy, Reality, and Truth,” his contribution to the International Psychoanalytic Association’s 1963 Symposium on Fantasy, there is an “indissoluble link between fantasy and desire” (182). Further, “The unconscious fantasy is neither the desire nor the memory nor the affect; it is an isolated unconscious thought, the movement of which is continued by the movement of the preconscious and conscious fantasy. The end-products of the unconscious fantasy are the conscious fictions of thought and action” (183). Fiction, on this view, is a legible but untrue experience of ourselves, of the world, an experience that proceeds from fantasy. Fantasy is what we do with the world inside us because we need to, even when we’re not conscious of the need (or, depending on who you ask, even the fantasy). It is what we cannot help but make of the world for ourselves, from which we derive some satisfaction (primary and/or secondary) and on the basis of which we act in the world. Fantasy is not simply an internal and dispassionate representation of the world, nor is it a refusal of the world; it is a needful, desiring predication of the world, a way of making the world inside us before we know it, so to speak. That unconscious making leads to ways of consciously thinking and acting in a world that, therefore, we come to know.

Because of its fundamentally nominative character, fantasy offers a helpful way of thinking about truth, which is also nominative. By “nominative,” I mean that fantasy operates—like truth—by passionately symbolizing: it is an internal positing and hence wording of world that is not, cannot be, a world in its fullness. Fantasy selectively presents a world, condensing and distorting it in the process, not for judgment but for action. Fantasy thus structures perception, tendentiously stipulating the existence and parameters of a world in which its subject subsequently acts and experiences. Fantasy is in this sense like a crooked map, getting you places that weren’t entirely there before. Fantasy’s (as also truth’s) nomination frames future action and experience by suggesting that the world is such-and-such a way. As nominative, fantasy is a stabilizing experience of the world as internal to a subject. Such experience is necessarily both less and more than our judgments about a world that might be presumptively shared as “reality.”

I am hardly the first to see fantasy as a useful concept-about-conceptions, a helpful way of organizing our thinking about our thinking. In “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” for instance, Joshua Gunn describes communication in a similar way. Observing that “to retain communication as a central concept for rhetorical studies after the poststructural turn, one must identify immanent structures without an ‘outside’ or extradiscursive reality,” he suggests that “the best example of such a structure is that of fantasy” (4). Communication, for Gunn, is usefully understood in light of fantasy’s bracketing of the question of its own ontic status.

Fantasy, as a structure of experience, refuses to be submitted to the question of whether it is “real,” in some way correspondent to a reality external to the fantasy, even as it stipulates that the world is a certain way for the purpose of action. This should remind us that, while we may recognize or acknowledge to others (when we are conscious of fantasy at all) a given fantasy’s ontic nonreality, we not only continue to form fantasies in general but quite often continue to be shaped by the experiential reality of the fantasy we have just named as such. So, for instance, I (like Gunn) see the idea of communication as fantastical; and yet, I write here and trust you to connect in some way with what I have imagined I meant to say. Fantasy names what allows us to move about in a world that is less constraining than our most rigorously realistic judgments suggest it must be. As Lagache puts the basic point, “If there were no fantasy . . . man [sic] would remain trapped in the present and in things; there would be neither reality nor truth nor, incidentally, psycho-analysis” (187). It is fantasy that allows us to live in and with but also beyond our facticity, beyond the thrown-ness of our being. The link to truth—in this age of well-founded doubt, of skepticism toward metanarratives—should be clear: (a) truth is (a) fantasy. The poetic truth of rhetorical theory I hope to nominate here, then, is necessarily fantastical.

THE FANTASTICAL TRUTH OF POETRY AND THE POETRY OF RHETORICAL THEORY

Perhaps no form of experience has more consistently been presented as both true and fantastical than poetry. Closely allied with the fantastical and widely perceived as offering some sense of the truth of being, the poetic is, on the one hand, both more and less than the world and, on the other, a better, somehow more true nomination than our everyday uptake of being. Consider this, at least provisionally, in terms of literary genre. Describing the fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov links poetry to fantasy through the hesitating—and truth-provoking—attitude toward “reality” that both produce. In The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, he describes this genre as inaugurated by a particular sort of event: “In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know . . . there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world” (25). Something happens, and it happens within reality, but it does not accord with reality. Still, we know that the laws of our familiar world have changed before and may well again, and so we hesitate at the door of judgment. The fantastic is a genre “occup[ying] the duration of [an] uncertainty” in which “a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting a supernatural event,” hesitates, not yet resolved as to what shall be real and what not (25). For Todorov, fantastical tales are marked by the uncertainty about reality they produce—neither uncanny (and hence entirely “realistic” though disquieting) nor marvelous (and hence simply “unrealistic”), the fantastic places readers in the position of deciding and of feeling the impossibility of deciding adequately, whether a given event has been natural or supernatural, real or somehow more than real. The genre of the fantastic thus reaches out beyond the clear and skepticism-inducing constraints of a life oriented toward the laws of nature but does so in a manner that speaks to the fullest possible uptake of those very laws. After all, a radical empiricism, taken to its limit, cannot warrant us in believing any of our conclusions—including those about the laws of nature—to be anything other than contingent, temporary, uncertain.

To the extent that we are empiricists (and I think it may be said that most rhetorical theorists are, at least as a matter of implicit commitment), we ought frequently to grapple with existential uncertainty, doubt. And yet, much of the time, we do not. We walk through the world with a good deal of trust that our experiences are real enough, our concept-systems about as workable as they need to be. As a genre, the fantastic occurs at the boundaries of the very possibility of our implicit experiences of trust and relative certainty. The experience of uncertainty that comes with recognizing that a reality-oriented perspective may itself not grasp reality very tightly is for Todorov what aligns the fantastic with poetry, which “might often be judged fantastic, provided we required poetry to be representative” (32). Poetry’s link to the fantastic here is in the way each prompts audiences to feelingly hesitate over and even withdraw from judgments about the boundaries of “reality.” Todorov’s view of poetry as nonrepresentative is somewhat misleading, unfortunately, since the antimony of “representative” and “nonrepresentative” draws us away from the fundamentally nominative character of poetry and poetic truth. Poetry is a matter of rewording the world, and poetic literature (and other symbolic activity) in a broad sense is not poetic because it is nonrepresentative, while some other literature—such as fiction—is representative.⁵ Rather, the poetic can usefully be thought as a style or mode of rewording the world, a particular approach to nomination. It is in this regard that Todorov’s treatment of both poetry and the fantastic in terms of hesitation is instructive. The truth of poetry, the fantastical character of truth itself, is marked by its incomplete status, its processual character. As I suggest later, truth is not given; it arrives or develops. The poetic offers us a way of hesitating at its approach: poetry is presentational, and a part of what it presents is our own uncertainty regarding the limits of any presentation of the world.

To receive poetry as both true and fantastical, however, is to be ever interrupted by Greek ghosts. In the Republic, Plato would ban poets from his ideal state because “an imitative poet puts a bad constitution in the soul of each individual by making images that are far removed from the truth and by gratifying the irrational part [of the soul]” (605b). Poetry nominates the world badly on this view. And poems themselves are “at the third remove from that which is and are easily produced without knowledge of the truth” (598e); poetry is more fantastical than...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Presentation and Rhetorical Theory
• 1. Fantasies of Rhetorical Theory
• 2. Approaching Rhetorical Theory’s Truth
• 3. Three Points for Rhetorical Theory
• 4. Modern Rhetorical Theory, One and All
• 5. Modern Rhetorical Theory, Acting Symbolically
• 6. Ethically Approaching Troubled Freedom
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index