"The Daughter's Seduction; or, Writing with the Rhetors,"
forthcoming in PRE/TEXT 15: 3-4,
![[image of hands]](hands.jpg)
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The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View
with Lynda Haas, beginning July, 1997. The subject of the reinvw is/was her article "The Daughter's Seduction; or, Writing with the Rhetors," forthcoming in PRE/TEXT 15: 3-4, | |
PreFace
This article is/was about Fathers--composition fathers, classical fathers, those who laid the foundations of not only western philosophy, but my own. Last week, in the middle of revising, I visited the house of my mother. She hasn't changed much over the years, my mother--she is loving, sacrificial, a martyr even. . . . living within the boundaries drawn for her as she always has. Although I am now an adult, a mother myself, when with her, I am still her child. It is familiar and frustrating. "The relationship with the mother is a mad desire, because it is the 'dark continent' par excellence. It remains in the shadows of our culture; it is its night and its hell. . . . So what is a mother? Someone who makes the stereotypical gestures she is told to make, who has no personal language and who has no identity. (Irigaray, "Women-Mothers" 35, 50).
Mothers. We don't talk about them much in composition studies, except when we address teachers as care-givers. I have secretly craved professional, symbolic mothers--those who would shelter me, take me under their wings, direct me. . . . Patriarchal habits are hard to break. ("I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way.") Mothers, and the women within them, are trapped, materially and symbolically, in the role of she who satisfies need but has no access to desire. Irigaray insists that the "mother/daughter, daughter/mother relationship constitutes a highly explosive nucleus. Thinking it, and changing it, are equivalent to shaking the foundations of the patriarchal order" ("Women-Mothers" 50). But how can a daughter have a personal relationship with or construct a personal identity in relation to someone who is no more than a function?
Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. . . . A radical critique . . , feminist in its impulse, would have to work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves. . . . --Adrienne Rich
It may be time to move from the prisonhouse of language to the slaughterhouse of history. --Cornel West
In the twentieth century, the sophists have regained much of their lost influence, thanks to the work of scholars who have undertaken the task of entering the "slaughterhouse" of sophistic history in 5th century Greece. The sophists' legacy, as it has been envisioned in the past few years, has much to offer a theoretician who wishes to resist the hegemonic systematizing of rhetoric that is currently established on the works of Plato and Aristotle. Although, as Susan Miller cautions, "neoclassical histories of composition that insist on its intellectual continuity with ancient rhetoric create both a content and a form for composition history that should give us pause" ("Feminization" 49), many compositionists have become part of the project of legitimizing an historical link and thereby proving the necessity for "Rhetoric" and composition within the larger academic hierarchy.
As one of rhetoric and composition's cartographers, Sharon Crowley, in an article entitled "Let Me Get This Straight," analyzes the history of the historiographers. She notes that the conversation of how to rehistoricize the classical rhetors "is taking place among a small group of people, all of whom know each other's work (and each other)." Although "many of these people want their scholarship to reach beyond the people to whom they seem always to be talking," even to the point of wanting "to participate in bringing about an end to, or changes in, various oppressive cultural practices," Crowley concludes that they are "more or less mystified as to how this might work" (8). Crowley goes on to call for the creation of more "constructionist histories" (as opposed to essentialized histories) of rhetoric. Constructionist histories "do not assume that human nature has remained stable across time, nor do they assume that linguistic or cultural categories represent natural, transhistorical realities." Second, constructionist histories argue that any categories that have been created (like "rhetoric," for instance, or "woman"), because they are created by someone, are "tied to and are complicit with, the social practices and relations that produce them." Also, because constructionist histories assume that "human behavior is configured to some extent, by whatever cultural constructions are operative in a given historical period" the notion that history transcends itself is a moot point (10).
Irigaray offers the double-gesture of transforming the symbolic order of patriarchy at the "nexus between nature and culture" and also (re)constructing a "counter-valorization of the maternal-feminine as a negation/subversion of paternal hierarchies, a heuristic tool for reworking images and meanings, [and] above all, an enabling mythology" (Stanton 170). Both are rhetorical attempts (indeed, Spivak says one must read Irigaray rhetorically) to question how we have been led to imagine ourselves and to create a language of possibility for both men and women. The historical revision of the fathers is underway; I propose an accompanying search for the maternal . . . a project of critique and creation, right here in the house of rhetoric and composition studies.
The three primary texts discussed here operate from differing agendas that motivate how they recreate a continuing history between rhetoric and composition--agendas which all, I believe, need to be problematized in differing degrees by the critique of feminist theory. Although the sophists pre-date Plato, I choose to address the two texts that analyze the latter first, because how we interpret Plato is crucial to how we go about reconstructing the history of the sophists.
The Art of Wondering: Ambiguating the Fathers
William Covino begins his reinscription of rhetorical history in The Art of Wondering by summarizing how we have received the classical rhetoricians in textbooks: as "fossilized adages" that reduce Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to summaries of rules and principles. Covino's project is to replace this received tradition with an interpretation that values the playfulness and uncertainty that inform the philosophical rhetorics of antiquity.
Quite unlike Jasper Neel, who argues that writing must be "saved" from philosophy because it has been a slave to the philosophical search for truth ever since Plato wrote the Phaedrus, Covino wishes to replace the prevailing representation of rhetoric as "technical" with a renewed interest in rhetoric as "philosophical":
There are differences that distinguish the pedagogical use of classical rhetoric from age to age; however, a common emphasis prevails, upon rhetoric as technique. In the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, Plato opens the contest between philosophical and technical rhetoric, and technical rhetoric remains dominant through the centuries, so that the history of rhetoric is a continually stronger refutation of the suppleness of discourse, a progressive denial of the ambiguity of language and literature, a more and more powerful repression of contextual variables by textual authority. (8)
Covino's interpretation of the history of rhetoric's representation is confirmed by most current textbooks and handbooks on rhetoric: techniques, rules, and formulas prevail. To change this technical emphasis, Covino suggests that we reinterpret--even "reinvent"--Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero in such a way as to allow us to reconceive rhetoric as a philosophical "art of wondering" and, thus, learn to see "writing as a mode of avoiding rather than intending closure" (9).
As Covino analyzes classical rhetoric with a methodology that is something like a postmodern version of reader response criticism, he implicitly makes Barthes' point that the authors, the fathers, are dead, except for what we make of them as artifacts. (Barthes writes, "The birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author" [1133].) However, for Covino, "the birth of the reader" does not seem as important as a "rebirth" of the Authors (leaving inscribed that capital A). In other words, he wants to remove one representation of the Author in order to replace it with another, one which speaks his agenda; thus, he does not make the same gesture as Barthes, changing the terminology from "Author" to "scriptor" (See Barthes 1132). In the end, Covino's revision of classical rhetoric reifies a "god's eye view" of history, because his gaze still originates in the authority of Plato and Aristotle--even though the new authority he inscribes them with is multiplicitous and open-ended.
With repeated references to the "aimless wandering" of young children engaged in intuitive exploration, he notes that the absence of some predetermined goal or purpose makes possible "accidental solutions to unrealized problems" while the investigator pursues unsanctioned lines of research. (ArtM 124-25)
As my eyes refocus on Covino's words, his vision of a neuter "untutored reading" or the "absence of some predetermined goal or purpose," I see nothing but a blind spot (the same one in many postmodern agendas)--or as Lynn Worsham puts it, "an aesthetic cut off from political and ethical practice" ("Eating" 153). Although Covino ends his discussion of Feyerabend by agreeing that "Whatever we accept we should trust only tentatively, always remembering that we are in possession, at best, of partial truth (or rightness)" (Feyerabend 79, qtd. in Covino, Art 125), which is the recognition of a partial, not-neutral standpoint, his method for getting to this point is by way of an "untutored" reading of history that is absent of "some predetermined goal or purpose." By transforming the classical texts from rule books to an "anything goes" discussion, Covino does not account for the politics of discourse and the "language that keeps emperors in power." An ethical, material historiography would assume that even as we read, we are partial knowers, situated in culture and sexuality, and that nothing gets said that is not tutored in some way by the discourses of power.
Covino's agenda has changed somewhat since The Art of Wondering, as he notes in his recent "Alchemizing the History of Rhetoric":
I am not a historian anymore. Never was, really. I began writing about the history of rhetoric because of my concern, as a composition theorist, with invention; because of my antipathy toward assembly-line heuristics that were being urged in classes and textbooks in the names of Aristotle and Cicero. I constructed a history that would invalidate this pedagogy, by reinterpreting some hallowed texts and trying to hallow some others, eventually producing The Art of Wondering (1988). What I did and do--marshalling evidence in the service of a predisposition--is what we all do. (49)
Here, in confessional tones, Covino admits that his first book presented evidence rhetorically in order to serve an agenda. That agenda, ambiguating the fathers, is represented in his newer work with a new metaphor for rhetoric--"magic." In this newer work, Covino's writing looks postmodernly playful, as usual, on the surface--he offers 5 introductions, a "spell," and one final conclusion, and he prefers, always, non-closure and undecidability. His postmodernism still seems sapped of political, material concerns. As he laments his difficulty in finding scholars who will rally to his cause, he once again falls into some Cartesian vortex where anything that is practical, pragmatic, or political cannot possibly coexist with that which is abstract and theoretical (the old intellect/body split):
However, getting us thinking of rhetoric in terms of magic seems unlikely, because our theories and histories of rhetoric are so relentlessly pragmatic; they must point us toward utility, and any history of rhetoric that tries to lead college teachers to think of themselves as magicians teaching magic will be dismissed as spacey. (53)
And as he (convincingly) argues for the viability of "magic" as "rhetoric," he returns, again, to the habit of naming the father and eliding the feminine, telling another "origin" story--the birth of rhetoric at "the juncture of magic and writing in the person of Hermes Trismegistus, or Thoth, the Egyptian magician who 'invented' writing" ("Alchemizing 54).
Albeit from the perspective of a rebellious son, his-story is a patriarchal postmodern retelling of the fathers, not belabored by material concerns; Covino does mention, as one of "several areas" his new "history of rhetoric and/as magic might address," a space for reframing his magic/rhetoric materially:
The coincidence of the politics of magic and the politics of rhetoric. Both Peter Brown (1972) and John Ward (1988) have noticed that the dominant magic of a culture is the expression of articulate power, as set against the in articulate, marginalized power of the disenfranchised magician. ("Alchemizing" 54)
If the rhetorical magician is truly "disenfranchised" and "marginalized," I can only hope that his location will lead to further investigation of the "coincidence" between politics and rhetoric, and the language that keeps emperors in power.
Plato, Derrida, and Writing: Silencing the Father
Like Covino, Jasper Neel is interested in revisiting how we talk about the rhetorical fathers. His Plato, Derrida, and Writing, a book-length analysis of classical rhetoric from a poststructural frame, was one of the first books I read after becoming an R/C grad student. He begins by boldly asserting that Plato's criticism of writing needs to be silenced once and for all in order for R/C studies to be freed from philosophy's hegemonic search for truth. Largely written in a playful, Derridean style--but at some points stopping to define expressions in quite classical fashion--Neel offers a deconstruction of both Plato's Phaedrus and Derrida's reading of that text, concluding with a persuasive chapter on the use of sophistry for modern day writing instructors.
To J.N. from L.H.
Dear Jasper,
I read your book. "Your discourses...I've heard them. It cost me dearly, but I understand them. I have an answer to your arguments. But we cannot leave matters at that. . . . We have a leeway which is in excess of the system . . . we can play on that excess to beat the system. To reintroduce the values of desire, pain, joy, the body. Living values" (Irigaray "Women-Mothers," 51).
The seductive quality of rhetoric is not a topos for writing in rhetoric and composition studies; we are much too coy for such subjects. But your text, drenched in the flood of the sophists, is highly seductive, and I think you mean to be a Trickster (I often picture you flirting with your audience, winking as you write about such subjects as country ham and deconstruction, or, perhaps crossing your fingers behind your back as you make rhetorical gestures). I realize that reintroducing the values of desire, pain, joy, the body, as well as the oblique strategies I am about to undertake, could lead to misunderstandings (moreso than usual), especially given that this is not really a letter, but a part of a public essay (I wish we had not given up, long ago, Montaigne's definition of essay as "attempt"; our essays are now the showplace of logical clarity, coherence, closure. Especially in the stronghold of teaching writing in clear, concise, standard English sentences). But to write in wholly rational discourse, that bit I have often put in my mouth, would be to leave out a most important part. Like Irigaray, who also does not always write in this key, I hope to effectively push "against these forms of intelligibility" which result in a view of theory and method that "has always also led us away, led us astray, by fraud and artifice, from woman's path' to knowledge" (Burke, "Romancing" 227). So then,
In order to reopen woman's path, in particular in and through language, it was therefore necessary to note the way in which the method is never as simple as it purports to be, the way in which the teleological project [that] . . . the method takes on is always a project, conscious or not, of turning away, of deviation, and of reduction, in the artifice of sameness, of otherness. In other words, speaking at the greatest level of generality so far as philosophical methods are concerned: of the feminine. . . . To put it another way: the option left to me was to have a fling with the philosophers, which is easier said than done (Irigaray, This Sex 150).
I am writing to you this way because your tricky text is never as simple as it purports to be. Because what you offer comes so close to what I long for in composition studies, as I read you, I have always carried on a mental conversation with you. You encourage me to take a risk--to write openly, femininely. As you inherit and play along with Derrida, my text is also mimetic--a daughter dressing up like her mother. Unlike traditional academic writing, you offered a circle rather than a line; and so to you I send a "writing with" rather than a treatise, a critique, or an interruption--all such ugly, contestatory metaphors for responding to each other. This is, perhaps, no more than performance, though a different one than the woman who usually must perform that double-voiced combination of "authentic self" and scholarly male prose acceptable in our circles--still, it is my invitation, a bid to get your attention.
But if the woman does not wish to marry the philosopher, which means espousing his ideas about her, how is she to engage his attention? . . . Irigaray sets out to romance her philosophical partners in a "langage amoreux," an amorous language that begins with a seductive stance in order to move beyond it. . . . Irigaray initiates dialogue with her philosopher-lovers by weaving herself in and out of their arguments, thus insinuating the feminine into their systems. (Burke, "Romancing" 228)
Mainstream theory, whether philosophical or rhetorical or sophistical, seduces away from the feminine, silences the feminine. So what is left is insinuating myself into the system, writing with you, the genteel, astute representative of composition theory, and to suggest a fling--to search out the "corps-a-corps" (bodily encounter) of writing rather than the "tete-a-tete" (head to head). Let's leave behind the "discourses of mastery . . . [which] are in a way dead discourses, a dead grid imposed upon the living" and reintroduce life to rhetoric ("Women-Mothers" 51).
My dear Phaedrus, where is it you're going,
and where have you been?
There has been (is) a time in composition studies when we thought it necessary to locate our Fathers. Fledgling discipline that we were, someone's stepchild, we desired a family name. We have many family historians who continue to trace the family tree. Thus, some have been named as neo-Aristotelians or neo-Platonists, and more recently, others as social constructionists post-structuralists, sophists. In any case, firm fathers provide the roots. Rhetoric has been a prestigious father, a productive heritage.
I am often seduced by your sacred rhetoric, for I have always loved ritual. I think, too, about needing a father but cringe at another name taking; I have taken the names of men all my life. Between women, as an orphaned sister/daughter, I feel. . . . So although I'll pay homage to the patriarchs, I choose to walk outside their walls.
Renvoi
This is . . . the postface, the unglued outside of the inside to come, the fourth text. I will call it a "renvoi," a term that carries into English the following play of meaning: sending back, returning, sending away; adjournment; reflection of light; a copy editor's caret; reverberation of sound; counter-motion; even a rugby kickout from the twenty-five yard line; and (alas!) a rising in the stomach, a belch, some uncomfortable hot air.
Following your lead, and then adding to it, I call my writing with you a "renvoi"; I send back, and diffract, what you have reflected onto me. If Plato's writing is insemination, dissemination, ours will be, instead, optical allusions--"diffracting rays that compose interference patterns, not reflecting images" (Haraway, "Monsters" 299).
For Plato, the forms, the originals, Father-forth--inseminate--the copies. For Derrida, writing, dissemination, occurs against the backdrop of the (feminine) hymen, the blank screen--"It is the hymen that desire dreams of piercing"--which becomes an icon of undecidability: "the hymen only takes place when it doesn't take place" (Dissemination 231). Yet, who does the desiring? Woman is once again characterized as the mysterious/exotic object of desire. Whose desire pierces with stakes as the pen delineates what is and is not sacred? I fear your textual rhetoric, Jasper, so wed to JD's writing, is another masculinist self-birthing where the father is sacred but the feminine remains as a ghost, an entre (between)--or as Irigaray suggests, a speculum--a multi-faceted refractor of light.
Neither you nor I wish to purchase, in full, the wares of Plato or Derrida. The payments are too expensive. I think we begin in agreement; I hear you, I understand, your postface, your renvoi, your sending back. Instead of the subject/object relationship I know too well, it allows me to carry on this distraction.
You announce your agenda: to demonstrate and to justify five assumptions regarding writing and philosophy. How can I charm you into expanding those horizons? If Plato's statements about writing (and rhetoric too for that matter) have been taken seriously for too long, could it be that his soul/body dichotomy, too, needs re-reading? In your purely theoretical text, is there no place for the material? Not pedagogy--material difference. How far do your politics go? Or is saving writing an apolitical act? For whom, then, will you save it? Is your new place for writing theory big enough, muscular enough, to rethink the birth--to ponder what will happen to the feminine?
Before writing as a process can begin (has it not already been inaugurated?--or do you intend to begin it?), the most powerful voice of the West, the voice that defines itself in writing and then attempts to extract itself from writing by branding writing as trivial play, must be silenced. So you will inhabit the voices of others in the most friendly and supportive manner possible, then turn those voices against themselves to reveal their most secret inadequacies, and finally retain the voices while remembering the inadequacies?
I must remember never to make you my adversary. But perhaps you already are. Your method sounds very colonial to me, appropriative, too familiar; you say you are truly on the margins, outside the walls with me. Outsiders know much about silence. Or, since the voice will re-turn, is this silencing your play, your confessed sophistry?
Plato certainly had no problem with silencing voices. Though the dialogue may seem natural (as writing that mimics speaking), one speaks while the other listens. Plato has not revealed Reality; he has composed one for his readers. "Thus the possibility of the replica is set up. Unless, that is, the silent offer that possibility by taking the place of a reflecting screen" (Irigaray, Speculum 258). Phaedrus is that poor unfortunate soul--reflecting screen, an empty voice, a silence, an empty page, an echo. In your story, as he stands in for sophistry, he takes its deprivileged place, along with all its cognates--rhetoric, writing, the body, the dark horse, the left hand side, the hysteric, the woman. Did you wish to join us here? "Go ahead and make your choice. It won't cost much . . . just your voice."
It will be a long time before the backing behind this apparent "naturalness" begins to be questioned, before the problem is raised about the relationships between mimicry, representation and communication. But the hysteric--derived from hystera, as you might have expected--will deceptively, covertly, bring up the forgotten dilemma. (Irigaray Speculum, 258)
Perhaps your sophistry, your attempt to silence Plato by inhabiting him, is not so far from my own agenda. You do bring up the dilemma. But you wish to neutralize, and in the process, you neuter. Of course, this is unspoken; the male position is naturalized, the default setting. Just another god-trick, speaking from above, underestimating the importance of body language? As you argue for a new sort of writing, a rhetorical writing that quite self-consciously admits its own rhetoricity and carefully delineates the ethical ramifications of its operation at all times, I will argue alongside for a writing of difference, one that is not only aware of its rhetoricity, but is also, as Gorgias might have it, aware of its materiality, and as I might have it, aware of its sexuality.
So Plato has stolen writing. By using writing. This sounds familiar; I think he committed other crimes, too. Matricide, for instance. He achieved it in much the same way: he wrote a text about a cave (Plato's womb) that creates its own metaphors and its own history, he presented it as a completed structure without origins, and he claimed it free from the normal diseases and appetites of the body. So, along with your observation that since Plato, no one (man) wants to be like Lysias, might I suggest that no one (man) much wants to be wo(man) either, to give up his birthright and to become connected to the lower spheres of earth, appetites, and emotion.
I reflect upon this: Once an argument can be labeled "mere sophistry," it can be rejected out of hand; no further attack is necessary. Once an argument can be labeled "woman's scribbling," it can be rejected out of hand; no further attack is necessary. Dangerous as it may be to do so, I hereby admit that everything after this sentence is sophistry. Plato has had writing long enough.
Confessions are rhetorically tricky. Why do you begin this way? Do you expect your readers to find your pure sophistry shameful, shocking? Are you braving condemnation to tell us something really important? Or, like Augustine, do you seek redemption through confession? Who has the power to grant this--your readers, our discipline, our culture? (Since your book was successful, are you now redeemed? Did the risk pay off? What are the ethics of your risk-taking?) Still, the idea that you took a great risk makes me want to hear you out, guarantees my reading of your text in order to find out what is so important to you.
I have a confession, too. Perhaps it is an anti-confession; I don't think I want to be redeemed. Maybe this is impossible--I mean, to be heard but not judged by the same oppressive norms. Ah, well. . . . As dangerous as it may be to do so, I hereby admit that everything in my text is a woman writing with an announced agenda. Men have had writing long enough . . . or, perhaps, writing cannot be "had."
I want to raise the level of your stakes and bring up an ethical question; listen to your voice: deconstructing Plato encompasses what counts as thinking and who gets to speak. Who, indeed, gets to speak? There is nothing but a ghost of difference in your agenda--a discourse of the same that buys into Plato's mind/body split. Ironically, Plato built his cave, the womb of Western philosophy, while erasing the body, the female (and the male) body. Let's perform surgery: hysterectomy. Tearing out Plato's womb could be followed by the possibility of deconstruction's last gesture: rebuilding. Constructing the location from which women could hear and be heard, speak, write, find agency.
Plato's cave, the theater of representation, this womb of the west. In the way the mother is elided from the hystera, the lover is erased from the erotic in Phaedrus. The myth of the cave, for example, or as an example, is a good place to begin.
Read it this time as a metaphor of the inner space, of the den, the womb or hystera, sometimes of the earth--though we shall see that the text inscribes the metaphor as, strictly speaking, impossible. Here is an attempt at making metaphor, at trying out detours, which not only is a silent prescription for Western metaphysics but also, more explicitly, proclaims (itself as) everything publicly designated as metaphysics, its fulfillment, and its interpretation. (Irigaray Speculum, 243)
A voice from the wings yells: "Roll Cameras!"
1. OVER BLACK
VOICE-OVER
You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
FADE IN:
THE CAVE--INTERIOR--DAY
Panning a circle of men who sit facing a wall, dimly lit.
PLATO'S studio set--the story of the men in the cave, the womb shaped place, is an allegory for the creation of reality and representation; I think JASPER said what counts as thinking. PLATO implies that the womb--the place of reproduction--is a metaphor for his cave, rather than the other way around. Thus, the men mistake back wall for front, first for last, origin for end. And this reversal, this effacement of the mother's body, is the foundation for representation; although the cave's representation "is never susceptible of representation," it "produces, facilitates, permits all representations" (Irigaray, Speculum 245).
CUT TO:
3. OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF THE CAVE--EXTERIOR--DAY
Rolling thunder has built into a thunderclap at the cut. Rain beats down on the bare patch of ground we are looking at--by now just a patch of mud.
Faraway lightning flickers and we hear the rumble of more thunder approaching, then suddenly:
THWAK--a head pops up out of the mud. It is PLATO, the creator. His head is covered with mud, although the driving rain is already starting to wash it away.
We are beginning to track in an arc around PLATO'S head, who is now struggling, working to get his shoulders and arms up out of the mud. The end of the 180-degree arc and a flash of lightning reveal, way in the distance, three other figures outside the cave.
Bellowing, as if in some primal rage, PLATO pulls his muck-covered arms up and out of the earth and is now pushing down to haul up the rest of his body. It comes with much effort. . . .
CUT TO:
4. REVERSE ON THREE FIGURES--EXTERIOR--DAY
LUCE, JASPER, and LYNDA stand in a circle, in the middle of some discussion, talking in hushed tones.
LUCE
Here the "image" previously described is reframed as image. The summary, somewhat in the manner of a retort, gives support for belief in a "good" mimesis in language. And inscribes, furtively, surreptitiously, silently, through the indirection of a so-called fanciful reproduction, through the credibility of equivalence vested in that repeat, the place, the illusion of a place, the delusion of a place of transcendental significance. Working out of sight and, perhaps, out of speech, this place is claimed to dominate, exceed, and guarantee discourse. [That which is deprivileged] plays no further part; its guarantee is suspended; or rather has always already been staked elsewhere in the writing of the text that will neither be seen nor mimed, in truth. (Speculum 258)
CUT TO:
5. GOD'S EYE VIEW--EXTERIOR--DAY
PLATO walks over and joins the discussion. JASPER greets PLATO, smiling; LYNDA (holding a book) and LUCE look on, silent, hesitant.
JASPER (to PLATO) I read your books. If I can figure out how you want me to read you, should I do it? PLATO considers this, but does not answer.
CUT TO:
6. CLOSE ON JASPER--EXTERIOR--DAY
JASPER (Aside to LYNDA, winking)
Don't do it. Only if you wish to give your voice to PLATO, who will do to you exactly what he does to Lysias, Phaedrus, even Socrates--usurp your right to speak and take from you the only means you have of reestablishing your own voice: writing.
CUT TO:
7. LYNDA'S POV--EXTERIOR--DAY
LYNDA
I'm not sure how to establish my voice, Jasper. You suggest that in order to not suspend the guarantee--to be able to play a further part--I place the stakes elsewhere in writing? I am interested that you establish your agenda with a metaphor from the physical body: voice. You do not wish to grant PLATO control; no longer will you send your students on endless searches for truth; you will teach them how to master writing and themselves through sophistic theory. After silencing PLATO's voice and usurping control through writing and rhetoric, what happens materially? Ethically?
CUT TO:
8. CLOSE ON LUCE--EXTERIOR--DAY
LUCE smiles.
CUT TO:
9. CLOSE ON LYNDA--EXTERIOR--DAY
LYNDA (turning her head towards JASPER)
If I can figure out how you want me to read you, should I?
Should I grant you control--another god's eye view? Continue the guarantee? Or should I too seize it--teach my students to do likewise? Where does that leave us--democracy or anarchy? In order to deconstruct PLATO you first set him up as controller, and then you pull on the threads--show how his text loses control of itself. No matter how playful your style, in order to do this you had to control, reread, reinterpret the act of PLATO. I guess what I'm getting at is this: you didn't show me that you were aware of the power plays that would go on after your silencing. And your own writing demonstrates that there is no way to escape power plays, control, and thus ethics when we compose.
CUT TO:
10. LONG SHOT--EXTERIOR--DAY
Plato plays with the threads of his garment. JASPER and LYNDA continue their discussion as they sit--JASPER reclines in the form of Michelangelo's "Night" and LYNDA sits, indian-style. LUCE listens, staring off into the horizon.
JASPER
I want, ultimately, to show how the truth comes from the false, how philosophy finds its occasion in sophistry, how knowledge of the good requires nihilistic audience manipulation to know itself and how speaking comes from writing.
LYNDA
Well, then we may as well admit that we're still talking about mastery and origins. Since escaping mastery in writing is difficult, likely impossible given our language and culture (as you show, even Derrida cannot escape it), and given that our students quite often crave not truth but power, after all the deconstructing, may we at least offer an other origin for representation?
Time passes, in silence.
JASPER (looking up toward PLATO) Let me begin again. If I may, allow me to describe PLATO's strategy: PLATO quietly acquiesces.
Appropriate a medium belonging to others while pretending not to use it, and then use it to build your own position; once your own position is established, call attention to the medium as corrupt and inadequate and try to remove it from history, denying it to both the past and the future. PLATO uses writing as repetition in which the repetition attempts not to repeat what it imitates but to overthrow and negate it. PLATO stands stoically, looking down at his muddy clothes.
LYNDA
I must say, JASPER, your strategy against PLATO comes very close to what you say PLATO does: are you pretending not to use him? You certainly build up his position--his level of control over western metaphysics, call attention to his deceitfulness and inadequacy, and then attempt to silence PLATO once and for all. In the last chapters of your book, you create a repetition of PLATO that is not a copy at all, but a negation. An attempt to overthrow?
JASPER (nodding)
But it is so dazzling to watch PLATO'S genius at play.
PLATO bows. He uses writing to know and define truth; then he uses it to convey the knowledge of his definition. At the same time, he uses writing to say that truth is separable from and superior to its knower and that it cannot be found in writing. It is a brilliant rhetorical ploy: use a medium against itself so as to debase it and impede its use by all followers. That way, only you can have it in its pristine form.
LYNDA
Your description of how he uses writing against itself (as you use PLATO against himself, and you use Derrida against himself) reminds me of another play, one that needs to be re-membered: use the body to transcend the body--make up a metaphor based on woman's body, or on erotic love connected to the body, and then debase it to the superior intellect--the womb becomes his tool for self-birth and eros a subject of his dialectic intercourse.
The word "body" reverberates in the rain, as PLATO mumbles. . . .
DISSOLVE:
10. GOD'S EYE VIEW--EXTERIOR--DAY
PLATO
Any discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were.
CUT TO:
11. LYNDA'S POV--EXTERIOR--DAY
LYNDA
Funny how the metaphors keep re-turning on the physical: discourse needs a body; using the intellect needs a body; eros needs a body; yet the body and those who are immanently connected to it are debased. Can we refigure how we talk about this site?
LYNDA looks down at the book in her hands.
In "Structure of Origin, Origin of Structure," you find it odd that so many PLATO scholars argue over how the Phaedrus is structurally unified--its "body" paragraphs? You say "If we want to remove Phaedrus as a hallowed text in the history of writing and rhetoric theory (as I do), we must study it as an origin, not a structure." But, remember the bodily origin of Plato's intellectual origin.
CUT TO:
12. LONG SHOT--EXTERIOR--DAY
JASPER
Even if an incontrovertible case that Phaedrus is poorly structured could be made, the case itself would merely reconfirm Phaedrus as the authority by which case making is judged.
LYNDA (looking up from the book)
Perhaps we must leave the analysis of his structure and begin to contemplate the measure. The justification to sanction, organize, regulate, and arbitrate the relationships between men, in particular by means of theorizing--philosophy--making meaning. This standard is so in the polis as well as in the cave. Plato needs his ideal of abstract, transcendental (immaterial) truth to under-lie and legitimize the metaphors, the figures used to represent the role of women and the role of writing, the material that is yet without voice, without presence. (This is perhaps why he so hated the sophists and their denial of his truth.)
CUT TO:
13. CLOSE ON PLATO--EXTERIOR--DAY
PLATO grimaces at the mention of "sophists."
CUT TO:
14. REVERSE ON JASPER--EXTERIOR--DAY
JASPER (in a conclusive tone)
Well, the way to get rid of Phaedrus is not to demonstrate how it fails to conform to its own rules. The way to get rid of Phaedrus is to show what a deceitful text it is.
PLATO turns, looking as though he's had enough of this.
CUT TO:
15. LONG SHOT--EXTERIOR--DAY
LYNDA (somewhat dreamily)
One night I dreamt of PLATO'S descent. . .
PLATO walks away, reapproaching the hole in the ground.
JASPER (his eyes following PLATO)
. . . Probably that's just as well. I don't mean to sound superior, he's a swell guy, but..
PLATO starts his descent, his body disappearing in the earth.
LUCE Perhaps he could not survive outside of his cave.
FADE TO BLACK
A Voice from the wings yells: "Cut! Print it!"
But, Jasper, I'm sorry to repeat: what of the supplementarity of deceit and its cognates in the lower realm--writing, women, the dark horse, rhetoric? Showing the deceitfulness of Phaedrus only reinstates Plato as master. But then, perhaps you are willing to do this, to rebuild him again in your last chapter, in your writing (he was never really silent). I think I know another way to "get rid" of Phaedrus, and the universal measure it inaugurates.
Historically, [men] have chosen sex and language against or in spite of the body. . . . It would be necessary for women to be recognized as bodies with sexual attribute(s), desiring and uttering, and for men to rediscover the materiality of their bodies. There should no longer be this separation: sex/language on the one hand, body/matter on the other. Then, perhaps, another history would be possible. (Irigaray "Women's Exile," 76)
And then, perhaps, another writing too.
--Love, Lynda
ReReading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Reconsidered: ReNaming the Fathers
"Sophistic 'art' is like venomous spiders and scorpions and other wild beasts and evil things. . . . [It] involves charming and persuading the ears of juries, assemblies and other mobs" (Plato, Euthydemus 289E, 290A). It's hard to read Plato's condemnation without wondering what the sophists could have done to accrue such antipathy (And I think the animal imagery was no mistake.) But he saw the sophists and their eristic rhetoric as diametrically opposed to everything his protreptic discourse stood for. Beyond this central philosophical concern was a cultural one: some sophists, such as Gorgias and later, Isocrates, were competing with him as educators in his hometown Athens; it is even generally thought that Gorgias, an outsider, stole the student Isocrates from Plato (See Enos). (Actually, Plato's treatment of his rivals sounds quite like some contemporary critics who wish to stake their claim in academic discourse at the burial site of some older, established critic.)
The task Susan Jarratt undertakes in ReReading the Sophists is to put under erasure the negative history the sophists received at Plato's hands, thereby making an historical link between the sophists and current schools of thought in composition theory a generative project. Chapter Three specifically deals with how the sophists' rhetoric and their trajectory through history parallels that of Woman:
My attempt in this chapter will be to investigate the possibility that those two exclusions--of women and of sophists--may be related and to question the uses to which that relation could be pursued both for feminism and for studies in the history of rhetoric. (63)
My concern is to read Jarratt's project sympathetically and yet suggest ways to extend and expand upon both her methods and her conclusions about the older sophists and feminism.
A Borrowed Coat of Many Colors
Like Covino and Neel, Jarratt appropriates Derridean philosophy to reread classical rhetoric; her use of deconstruction, however, is less "loyal" to the father, since she does not maintain his poststructural viewpoint throughout the text, as does Neel and, to a lesser extent, Covino. She uses deconstructive principles in order to draw parallels between the sophists and Woman as discursive constructs of Western culture. She first presents a familiar feminist critique of Western philosophy by arguing that "control in discourse is hierarchial, gained by the displacement of a degraded 'other' in favor of a polar opposite" and that logo- and phallocentrism place "both sophistic rhetoric and woman at the negative pole against philosophy and man." Further, Plato displaced the sophists, "opinion," the materiality of the body, and writing in order to put in place himself and his philosophy, "truth," the soul, and oral discourse (64-65). Emphasizing "style" and Plato's many definitions of and gendered metaphors for sophistic style as cookery, seduction, enchantment, cosmetic arts, color, and dress, Jarratt concludes that "this cluster of terms coincides on many counts with the cultural stereotype of the 'feminine' operative in the West for centuries," and that these stereotypes have formed into systems of oppression that are "too well known, and too vast, to catalogue here" (65-66).
Irigaray insists on the importance of questioning "again the foundations of our symbolic order in mythology and in tragedy, because they deal with a landscape which installs itself in the imagination and then, all of a sudden, becomes law" (Baruch and Serrano 159). Jarratt's link between the symbolic place of sophists (who represent a kind of "mythology," even "tragedy," for our discipline) and the feminine gender is instructive and meaningful to the project of questioning again the symbolic foundations of our discipline. However, I would go elsewhere.
First, Jarratt's motivating gesture--that "control in discourse is hierarchial, gained by the displacement of a degraded 'other' in favor of a polar opposite"--undercuts itself by locating the sophists, known for nothing less than their own mastery at controlling discourse through language and emotive manipulation, at the place of the degraded other in this binary. Jarratt anticipates this problem by stating that "a notable difference [between the sophists and Woman] is the agonistic nature of the sophists as against the passivity attributed to women. But the number of similarities, I believe, suggests the possibility of tracing their parallel fates through history" (66). Juxtaposing the sophists here as agonistic to woman's passivity also reifies the very stereotypes she has set out to dislodge.
Since Beauvoir, many feminists have inherited her strategies: 1. Recognize woman as "the second sex" or "other" in the cultural imaginary; 2. Depend upon the split between sex/gender to argue that "one is not born a woman," thereby allowing for the possibility of change (one's gender is encoded, goes the argument, and can be reconstructed, whereas one's sex is biologically determined.) (From here the strategies diverge.. although the result of equality remains.) 3a. Argue that gender is learned and can be unlearned, that women can be as good as men, and go on to become enough like men to gain some semblance of equality. 3b. Eschew denigration based on gender and celebrate women's ways, separating the place of "Woman" and declaring her equal. 3c. Appropriate Derridean and Lacanian theory to argue that the othered place of woman is necessary to the primary place of man. Woman, as other, is the always already guarantor of male subjectivity. He must look into her mirror to find himself. She finds importance in that she is his guarantee. The general result of all these strategies is for feminists to gain inclusion, authorization, or equality.
Jarratt's feminist rhetoric seems to follow a similar path. 1. Connect the sophists to woman, recognizing both in the place of other. 2. Make that connection relying on gender and constructed identities; for woman, the gendering of dress, cookery, seduction, enchantment, cosmetic arts, color--and for the sophists, Plato's construction of them as superficial stylists. 3. Reverse that hierarchical binary by showing how the deprivileged member is always already a part of the privileged one; in fact, the symbolic place of the sophists/woman can be the lever of deconstruction. The payback for the strategy is an authorization of not only the sophists, but also their cognate, Woman (Jarratt compares the sophistic style to the writing of Cixous to again forge that symbolic link).
3. "Interpret and deny that sexual difference should return to exploitation, to subordination, but at the same time . . . affirm the positive character of difference" (Irigaray, Baruch and Serrano 154). Irigaray argues for the necessity of acting "in two ways . . . because we are at the same time inside and outside" (159) . . . or in Haraway's terms.. elsewhere. The goal then, is not inclusion, even though there is the necessity to work from inside when one can.
One of the important effects of Irigaray's project is to bring the body back into play, not as an essentialized monolith, but as a mobile site of differences (in ways that sometimes parallel Irigaray, both Judith Butler and Donna Haraway have begun to question the easy ascription of the body, or "sex" as essential, or determined). It is this effect that I have attempted to bring into play in the first two sections of this essay, and to which I now direct myself in Jarratt's text.
My interest in the sophists is that their discourse of the body predates Plato's burial of the body. When I think of the sophists, Protagoras's well known "Man is the measure of all things" often comes to mind--and the "man" was not even a universal at this point. I am ambivalent about disinheriting the old fathers, Plato and Aristotle, just to inherit a new name. Rather, I envision my relationship with the sophists like a wonderful cashmere coat that I borrowed from a friend to make a trip north. Whenever I wore that coat, I thought about Elizabeth, who owned it. The sophists' art is certainly more friendly/less corrosive to women than that of Plato or Aristotle, and they do offer a rich coat of many colors when we need to borrow it. But let's not forget "the measure of all things" who owns it.
The Naked and the NudeFor me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art. . . .The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye,
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.From "The Naked and the Nude"
--Robert Graves, 1957
In the exploration of the connotative distinctions between "naked" and "nude" in Graves' poem are buried some interesting oppositions that fit into discussions of Plato and the sophists. With each successive reading of this poem, I become more aware of the way Graves exalts a Platonic framework and yet uses sophistic methods to make his "art." The oppositions for naked/nude are: love/lies, truth/art, lover/traitor, medicine/showmanship, science/rhetoric, Goddess/mock-religion. So then, love and lovers, truth, medicine, science and the gods go together (reminiscent of Phaedrus), while on the other side are those sly showmen, rhetoricians, and traitors who use lies, art, and mock-religion. The sophists' "art of persuasion" takes on a decidedly deceptive tone in this reading. This description of deceptive, artistic rhetoricians (the negative connotations most of the public, most of our students, have for "rhetoric") needs to be further addressed, as does Jarratt's discussion of Nietzsche, Derrida, and women.
As she continues to create bonds between the exclusion of women and rhetoric, Jarratt writes:
For Nietzsche, Derrida observes, woman is the figure of falsehood; we see rhetoric holding the same place for Plato. Second, for Nietzsche, woman is a handler of truth, and as such still at a distance from truth. Rhetoric functions similarly in Bacon (146). Third, Nietzsche affirms woman in herself as a power for overthrowing philosophic, hierarchial Truth. In his own work on rhetoric, Nietzsche attributes to it the same capacity for overturning Truth (Blair 106-07). Has Derrida, then, in this reading of Nietzsche, "feminized" philosophy (Spivak, "Displacement" 184) in such a way as to undo the exclusions of woman and the sophistic earlier outlined? And does rhetoric line up with "woman" as the instrument of deconstruction? (66-67)
After posing these intriguing parallels and questions, Jarratt leaves them without an answer, moving on to how some feminists have "sought to move outside the realm of undecidability circumscribed by deconstruction" (67). More important than arguing with undecidablity here is to look closely at the very place "woman" holds in the Derridean (and Nietzscean) economy and at the nature of that "woman" as an abstract which has nothing to do with the material life of a "real" woman. For Derrida, "woman" is a metaphorization as "other-than," the "not-A" of a binary and the absent precondition for presence; this originary loss is necessary for the inauguration of the subject. As Jarratt notes, Derrida does "feminize" philosophy, choosing to write from this other position, this place without mastery, on the margins. His feminization, however, is a neutralization and not a sexualization of discourse. In fact, Derrida does not pay attention to the (im)possibility of women as subjects, and like Heidegger, asserts "that the subject is of neither one sex nor the other. In the beginning is the not-one, neither one nor two and certainly not zero: a neutrality which comes from the fact that Being is beyond sexuality" (Braidotti 104). This de-sexualized concept of "woman" as symbol, although beneficial to Derrida's philosophical project, is slippery ground for any feminism interested in material, cultural concerns, or for a writing theory that would recognize sexual difference.
Therefore, perhaps a better site of connection between women and the sophists is to be found in their phenomenology--the location of the body in their discourse. In Richard Enos' recent cultural-historical reading of the sophists' art, Ancient Rhetoric Before Aristotle, Enos concentrates on the life and texts of Gorgias as Plato's Sicilian rival. He begins by first discussing Gorgias' teacher, Empedocles, whose
views on sense-perception were grounded in the belief that knowledge can only be communicated through sense-awareness. Since man's senses are finite, and thus complete communication is unattainable, man's very existence necessitates a system of probability which is filtered through the "pores" of his senses (Untersteiner, 158-159; Theophrastus, De Sensu 7). (64)
Enos explains that from Empedocles' and Gorgias' perspective, there would be no division of reason from emotion such as is found in Plato's Phaedrus, where the horse of reason leads man to heaven and the dark horse of passion drags him down to earth. "Rather, for Empedocles, emotion and logic are inextricably bound (and limited) by sense-awareness" (64).
This emphasis on sense awareness goes back another generation to Empedocles' teacher, Parmenides, whom Plato attacked in the Phaedo and Timaeus, "arguing that 'irrational' sensation inhibits man's reasoning powers and his quest for truth" (58). This epistemological foundation in sense perception led Parmenides, and by heritage, Gorgias, to see language and communication as inherently deceptive, for one can never communicate through language the exact feelings created by the senses. Therefore, to Gorgias and his teachers, Plato's project of communicating absolute truths in language would be impossible; their philosophy was a way of knowing and communicating based on probability and opinion. Enos suggests that for Gorgias, the power of speech "is that it can so deceive the senses that words can stimulate reactions as though they were actual events" and that Gorgias seemed to find no ethical difficulty with "deception" in rhetoric, since deception is at the base of all communication (56; for further explication of this argument, see Covino):
His comments indicate a belief that speech has the power to recreate situations. It does not demonstrate an essence or truism but reveals through interpretation partial "knowledge" of real-world phenomena. Moreover, the power of speech extends beyond the discovery of existing conditions. Speech can also deceive the emotional and mental state of listeners by artificially stimulating sensory reactions through words; such action is, for Gorgias, the power of persuasion. (Enos 80)
Gorgias said, when "persuasion is conjoined with speech it can mold the soul in any way it desires" whether for destructive or beneficial purposes (D-K 13,14). In this way he was like Aristotle, for they both believed in the power of speech to change emotions and that the ethics of the user determined what would be done with the speech. This binding of the senses, emotion, and deception as a way of knowing and communicating is consistent with the history of Greek thought:
Unlike Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the sophists and pre-Socratics closely identified with their oral, poetic heritage and assimilated emotivism into their understanding of rhetoric rather than severing the connection (Kerferd, 24). [Compare, for instance, Gorgias' practice with Homer's Odyessus]. . . . While Empedocles embraced the nonrational processes of discourse, Plato and Aristotle drove a wedge between rational and emotional processes--idealizing the former and characterizing the latter as a necessary evil. (Enos 56)
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche connects deception, appearance and beauty (from the senses), and woman: "From the very first nothing is more foreign . . . to woman than truth . . . her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and beauty" (18). I believe it is this connection Jarratt is referencing, via Derrida's reading, when she connects Nietzsche's woman as the figure of falsehood and Plato's concept of rhetoric as holding the same place. To follow this poststructural reading, the next gesture would need to be the overthrowing of the idea that there is such a thing as "Truth," a "transcendental signifier" of presence, by showing that to exist at all, truth needs a supplement. In Marine Lover of Friedreich Nietzsche, Irigaray makes this second gesture. Falsehood, appearance, and beauty, are not foreign to truth, but rather, "They are proper to it, if not its accessories and its underside. And the opposite remains caught up in the same. . . . With a flip of the coin, it forms the basis for its representations" (77). In Gorgias' texts, also, is leverage for overthrowing the metaphysics of presence. In his three-part treatise in On Non-Reality, or On Nature, Gorgias makes a move similar in tone, but not agenda, to Irigaray's. Enos interprets Gorgias' first tenet, "nothing actually exists," as meaning that "no one entity or concept can be idealized into existence, suggesting that Gorgias is using the verb "to be" not "as a linking verb but in an intransitive manner to indicate existence itself" (81). Those who have taken Gorgias's statements literally (following the example of Isocrates), says Enos, have prompted the misinterpretation that Gorgias was little more than a nihilist (81):
Gorgias so strongly opposed the belief in essences that he based subsequent arguments on the notion that concepts of the mind have no "real existence" at all. Platonic notions of ontological "essences" (for example, the ideal rhetoric) were absurdities to Gorgias. He viewed humans as functioning in an ever-changing world and manufacturing ideas that lose the "existence" the instant they pass from the mind of the thinker. (82)
Irigaray would also argue that there is no ontological essence, no Platonic form or ideal. When asked the "essential" question, "What is a woman?" she responded:
I don't really see how I could answer, at least not "simply." In other words, I have no intention of proceeding here with some reversal of the pedagogic relation in which possessing a truth about women, a theory of woman, I might answer your questions, might sit before you and answer for woman. Thus, I shall not introduce any definitions into a challenged discourse. There is one question, however, that I would like to examine at the outset. Moreover, it is the first question and all the others lead back to it. It is this one: "Are you a woman?" A typical question. A man's question. I don't think that a woman--unless she has been assimilated into masculine, and more specifically phallic, models--would ask me that question. Because "I" am not "I." I am not, I am not one. As for woman, try and find out. . . . In any case, in this form, that of the concept and of denomination, certainly not. ("Questions" This Sex, 120) )
As she answers, Irigaray denies this interviewer even the possibility that she would attempt to "define" woman and speak for all women by doing so. She then turns the question into one of naming rather than defining--turning the importance of the question to the "real"--"are you a woman?" Although Irigaray pointedly turns the question to the material, her reversal is similar to Gayatri Spivak's, who when she was asked that same question, replied: "What is man that the itinery of his desire creates such a text?" ("Displacement" 186, qtd. in Jarratt 70). Jarratt interprets Spivak's gesture as moving from the object to the subject; in Irigaray's answer, that similar gesture is made, and then followed by another move on language. Irigaray says, "In any case, that of the concept and denomination, certainly not." What she begins to say here (and explains more fully in the following discussion) is that especially within the framework of the language of the patriarchal symbolic order--the language of concept and denomination--if there were "woman" (an "other of the other") it could not be communicated. Irigaray's gesture comes from her double distrust of language: it does not have the ability to communicate "truth" and it flows from patriarchal concepts, constructs, and the patriarchal imaginary, the necessary link to the material concerns of women. Although Gorgias' second tenet--"if anything actually did exist, it would be incomprehensible to man"--comes from a belief in the finite abilities of language because of his sensual epistemology, there is a parallel in how Irigaray and Gorgias see language. Enos interprets Gorgias' second tenet:
For something to be comprehended it must be understood through the human media of understanding--sense-perceptions (77-78). Man's finite sense limitations, however, restrict him to perceptions based upon the optimum capacity of his senses. In this respect, thoughts beyond positivistic experience have no referential existence beyond the imaginative extrapolations of the thinker. Platonic notions of an idealized rhetoric were, for Gorgias, nothing more than a myth, and they prompted him to maintain that even if they were to exist, their lack of physical referents, which are critical to human sense perceptions, would make them incomprehensible to man. (82)
Concerning physical referents, Gorgias and Irigaray might disagree: whereas Gorgias might argue that the lack of sense perceptions would make their referents incomprehensible to man, Irigaray would argue that woman is multiple ("I am not [denial of an essential self-aware subject], I am not one" [denial of the ability to define women's location in mono-phallocentric language]) and can therefore never be encoded in a monologic definition in patriarchal discourse. This subject position Irigaray creates, which refuses to become part of patriarchal discourse, is similar to other feminist subject positions--for example, Trinh T. Minh-Ha's "inappropriate/d other" and Donna Haraway's "cyborg subject position" (See Haraway, "The Promise of Monsters," 299-300). Like Minh-Ha and Haraway, Irigaray will not define, but she does attempt to construct feminine metaphors as part of her project of inventing a female imaginary. In Marine Lover, she uses the metaphor of the sea to describe the multiplicity of "woman":
The sea shines with myriad eyes. And none is given any privilege. Even here and now she undoes all perspective. Countless and shifting and merging her depths. And her allure is an icy shroud for the point of view. . . . But the loftiest gaze does not penetrate thus far into her depths and is still unable to unfold all the membranes she offers to bathe his contemplations. (47)
Irigaray implies that because of the sea's vastness, no one can fully know her. In this poetic key, Irigaray's philosophy once again parallels the epistemology of Gorgias, which would lead him to argue that because our sense perceptions are limited, we can never have anything but "partial" knowledge of any subject (Again, this recalls Haraway's project; see "Situated Knowledge"). Enos summarizes:
In short, total knowledge on any subject (including rhetoric) would be impossible and what would appear to be knowledge would be thoughts about observations that could only be partially understood through interpretations of our finite senses and cognitive preconceptions. (82) )
Because for him only partial knowledge is possible, Gorgias used rhetoric in such a way as to present resolutions of apparently incompatible choices "by formulating arguments relevant to the specific circumstances of each unique situation (kairos)." He adapted a "nonformal epistemology of rhetoric which allowed for the contingencies of interpretation and human nature that are inherent in any social circumstances, which inherently lack "ideal" or universally affirmed premises" (Enos 82).
Both Irigaray and Haraway see this "partial" epistemology as the only acceptable construction of knowledge. Irigaray speaks of the "ethics" of taking risks in a contingent reality, and Haraway (along with Sandra Harding) discusses how partial or "situated" knowledge can lead to a "strong objectivity" that could open discussion between people of different subject positions. Respect and acknowledgment of these standpoints or "genres" will be necessary before any real progress can be made toward what Haraway calls a "hope for a better world," one in which subjects talk to each other instead of subjects talking at the other.
Gorgias' third tenet, "that if anything were to be comprehended, it could not be articulated and communicated to others," lays the groundwork for Enos to argue that Gorgias' rhetoric was epistemological: "for something to be actually understood . . . it must be experienced. . . . Gorgias developed an epistemology of rhetoric which allowed him to present a practical theory of resolving apparently incompatible choices by formulating arguments relevant to the specific circumstances of each unique situation (kairos)" (Enos 82-83). Although Enos does not capitalize on this point, it is fair to say that if Gorgias' rhetoric is epistemological that it also grows from his bodily experiences. Thus, the sophists, like Irigaray (and Cixous), ground epistemology in the body (figured both symbolically and materially). In "A Chance for Life," Irigaray underlines the importance of the body and sense perception:
All this emotion, this private and public feeling . . . seems to move into the vacant place left by the forgotten body. That body relates much more to perception than to pathos. A body breathes, feels, tastes, sees, hears, touches, is touched. These bodily attributes have almost disappeared. But how do we live without our bodies? What can this extinction mean? . . . We can neither live nor think without the mediation of our senses. (198)
Many of Irigaray's metaphors come from female anatomy, in contradistinction to a culture that values only the body of the male. Her distrust of emotion, illustrated in the above inset, comes from a realization that feelings and emotions are often a construction of the other of the same--the drawn woman. Irigaray is quite clear in emphasizing that women have been cut off from their own bodies by the culture that saturates us, and that women-amongst-themselves must find ways to reconnect with bodily (and usually connected to this, maternal) experience. That Gorgias recognized "knowledge" to be experiential and referential--connected to the body--does not mean that his was the same agenda as Irigaray's, but it is a step toward men rediscovering the materiality of their bodies. A parallel project for Irigaray is "for women to be recognized as bodies with sexual attribute(s), desiring and uttering." Such a gesture by both sexes would deconstruct the soul/body split, and as Irigaray hopes, "Then, perhaps, another history would be possible" ("Women's Exile" 76).
Because ecriture feminine is often described as "writing the body," it would seem to be another link between sophistic rhetoric and radical feminism. Jarratt does make this link; however, her parallels are drawn on the stylistic similarities: "generic diversity, loose organization, a reliance on narrative, physical pleasure in language production and reception, a holistic psychology of communication, and an emphasis on the aural relation between speaker and listener" (72), and also on similar projects of (re)reading history: "the focus on nomos highlights the project of rewriting histories: a project central to both ecriture feminine and to the sophists" (75). Jarratt concludes that these parallels may be used as a theoretical lever to allow "not only for the identification of new works but also offers a way to reread hegemonic texts as well, tracing the itinery of male desire with a new critical perspective" (79). Perhaps extending the parallels to include how we must figure and (re)figure the masculine and feminine body in rhetoric would lead to an even greater awareness of how to renegotiate the feminine through rhetoric.
The Artifact of Victimhood
In a review of Jarratt's book, Jasper Neel writes:
She offers a devastating critique of rhetoric, showing that the absence of women from the canon prior to 1950 is not the fault of silent women, but rather is the fault of a contentious, quite male notion of rhetoric as verbal combat. (JAC 221)
Neel's summary of Jarratt's critique of rhetoric brings me back to my initial point of contention with her text. In the summary is inscribed the passive, silent, woman victim at the hands of noisy, contentious masculine masters. Jarratt, as well as many other historiographers of the sophists, places them in the position of victims (silent, too, in that we have much less work extant) of later history. By paralleling, then, women's trajectory to the sophists, this places women, too, in the position of victim. I question this characterization of history in terms of the binary master/victim as a habit of patriarchal writing.
The history of writing about slavery holds some revealing parallels to the history of writing about the sophists. Early historians of slavery, such as James Forbes Rhodes (A History of the U.S. from the Compromise, 1893) and Ulrich B. Phillips (American Negro Slavery, 1918), whether they agreed with the morality of the institution or not, considered the slaves to be inferior in intellect and morality (a similar judgment handed to both the sophists and women in other contexts). By the 1950s, historians were no longer debating on whether slavery was a moral institution; with Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956), the focus turned to the brutality of slave masters. In 1959, Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Intellectual Institutional Life argued that in contrast to other slave systems, the American institution was so brutal that it wiped away African culture, reducing slaves to dependence on masters; using the metaphor of a concentration camp, Elkins reconstructs the slaves in a discourse of victimology, depersonalization, impotence, and helplessness.
The discourse of victimology has surfaced in many contexts, not only in the reconstruction of slavery. Feminists of many persuasions have claimed to be victims of some component of patriarchy, and the sophists, as they come to us through revisionist histories, are almost always encoded as being victimized at the hands of the masters, Plato and Aristotle. As feminists of the 90s now know, crying "victim" doesn't get one too far; except for perhaps arousing liberal feelings of guilt, it is not a good platform from which to speak. It is a position easily appropriated by patriarchal agendas.
Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made highlights a distinct black culture and their consciousness of developing a separate black culture, a livable world in a barely livable space. Genovese analyzes processes of resistance by which slaves were able to create this world in work habits, male/female and parent/child relationships (see also Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1963) on slave family relationships), and the mediation of the master/slave relationship. Like Henry Louis Gates' metaphor of the "signifyin' monkey," Genovese argues that while the slaves often appeared agreeable on the surface, they created means of resistance, not becoming the passive recipients and victims of white culture.
Much like these re-revisionist historiographies of slavery, I suggest that making victims of the sophists (and, in Jarratt's case, by relationship, women) only serves to reify those in power and further, to cover up how the heavy machinery of dominant discourse works to include some, exclude others. If we reconstruct the artifactuality of the sophists as a place from which to extend theories about writing theory, that construction should not forget mimetic strategies, the resistant nature of the marginalized, and the ability to "make do" (bricolage) even though we sub-sist the dominant order.
Wish List
I wish we could get beyond rereading classical rhetoric in order to help legitimize current composition theory, and instead seek what underpins the foundations of rhetoric and rationality, looking for the covert power structures that created hierarchies. As Jeffrey Nealon suggests, "I would like to question the value of critical projects that aim at simply rereading the tradition from another point of view" (1268), or that promote an aestethics cut off from ethics and politics, and therefore, the body. I am uninterested in retooling the sophists for the sake of having new fathers. Should we resurrect their history because they had a similar trajectory as women? As marginalized rhetoric and composition professionals? If we do so, it must be while remembering that whatever we make of their texts and their lives is artifacutality, at the mercy of someone's agenda; and that by re-reading them, it is easy to fall into patriarchal habits of history writing. Perhaps the reconstruction of the sophists is a space for the "rhetors" to regain their voice in a discipline that seems more interested (at least by attendance at the CCC Convention) in Peter Elbow and freewriting than topoi and kairos. But the project hardly seems worth the time if we're just going to resurrect sophistic rhetoric to install yet another white male voice, or a voice of ambiguity and neutrality, which is the same thing.
In Crowley's "Let Me Get This Straight," where she offers a history of writing histories of rhetoric, she frequently adds Jarratt as the one who brings up gender issues. For instance, in recounting the CCCC panel, "The Politics of Historiography" in 1988, Crowley records:
Berlin charges Connors and Crowley with conservatism; Connors wonders if we're all not suffering from an "intellectual multiple-personality disorder," being unwilling on the one hand, to admit we believe in the truth and, on the other, taking "certain stands and writ[ing] as if we knew the truth"; Jarratt ponders the gendered aspects of the argument; Vitanza registers suspicion of Connor's utopian vision ("I write history to try to make my world a better place"). (5)
Later, she writes: "Jarratt's historiography is now straightforwardly feminist; she writes here 'as a woman' and asks 'how feminists writing histories of rhetoric can take up the challenge . . . to create histories aimed at a more just future'" (76). Jarratt's hope for a better world is spoken in such an off the cuff way that the whole "woman's voice" issue is here awfully close to a "special issue" mentality. There's Rhetoric and then there's some loud women out there who want to make it a woman's issue. For this reason, I question the usefulness of going back to dig up women who could have been contemporary rhetoricians. If we wish to jam the machinery of the patriarchy, celebrating women's ways is not enough. This agenda, as I've stated before, is merely inclusion, and plugs the feminist agenda back into the history of patriarchy. Worse yet, it breeds an attitude which forces women's studies into the ghettoized living spaces of the academy. More relevant at this juncture is Irigaray's two-fold agenda: critique and creation. We don't need newly-born fathers for this work. What we will need is open communication, women amongst themselves.
s women slate their agendas in the field of rhetoric and composition, I wish we would admit that rhetoric is the "sex organ" of the academy--and that we can put it on with a vengeance (never forgetting that we borrowed it).
If we ever forget whose language we must use, we buy into the system--the naturalization of domination and suppression--enmeshed in a power structure and an ideology of patriarchy which leads us to (re)produce discourse on the norm of the male--the one sex--the economy of the Same. We must see the theories of patriarchy as bricks for the bricoleur, and find a way to make do in a culture where we have no name.
So, what is a woman? Someone who makes the stereotypical gestures she is told to make, who has no personal language and who has no identity? We need to go back through the imaginary and symbolic relationship with the woman-mother to rediscover the "woman outside her social and material role as reproducer of children, as nurse, as reproducer of labour power" (Irigaray "Bodily Encounter," 35). The problem with mothers and daughters is that neither knows how to act toward the other, except for in the ways women have been trained to act since birth--and neither have been aware that there is yet another way.
With that, I say goodbye.
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Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill, 1975. Braidotti, Rosi. Patterns of Dissonance. New York: Routledge, 1991. Burke, Carolyn. "Romancing the Philosophers: Luce Irigaray." The Minnesota Review 29 (1987): 103-14. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Chanter, Tina. The Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York: Routledge, 1995. Covino, William. The Art ofWondering: A Revisionist Return to the History of Rhetoric. Portsmouth: Boynton, 1988. _____. Forms of Wondering: A Dialogue on Writing, For Writers. Portsmouth: Boynton, 1990. Crowley, Sharon. "Let Me Get ThisStraight." In Writing Histories of Rhetoric. Ed. Victor J. Vitanza. Carbondale:Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 1-19. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972. Enos, Richard Leo. Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland P, 1993. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. _____. "The Promise of Monsters." In Cultural Studies. Eds. Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 295-337. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1993. ______. "The Bodily Encounter with the Mother." In The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 43-46. ______. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. ______. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1985. ______. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Poerter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1985. ______. "Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order." In The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 47-52. ______. "Women's Exile." Ideology and Consciousness 1 (1977): 57-76. Jarratt, Suysan C. "Feminism and Composition: The Case for Conflict." In Contending With Words. Ed. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. New York: MLA, 1991. 105-25. ______. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Kerferd, G. B. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Miller, Susan. Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. ______. "The Feminization of Composition." In The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock and John Trimbur. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1991. 39-53. Nealon, Jeffrey T. "The Discipline of Deconstruction." PMLA 107.5 (1992): 1266-79. Neel, Jasper. Plato, Derrida, and Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. ______. Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing in America. Carbondale: Southrn Illnois UP, 1994. Plato. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Trans. Harold N. Fowlder. Loeb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982. Stanton, Domna. "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva." In The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Whitford, Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. New York:Routledge, 1992. Worsham, Lynn."Eating History, Purging Memory, Killing Rhetoric." In Writing Histories of Rhetoric. Ed. Victor J. Vitanza. Carbondale:Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 139-155.
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