PRETEXT, a Re/INter/VIEW with David Metzger

The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View with David Metzger about his book The Lost Cause of Rhetoric, beginning September, 1996.

(What follows is Chapter One of David Metzger's book The Lost Cause of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995. We would like to thank SIUP for permission to reprint this section of the book and remind our subscribers and others that this chapter is copyrighted by SIUP.)

THE LOST CAUSE OF RHETORIC

In the following chapters, I will examine how Lacan and Aristotle have established a relation between rhetoric and geometry in such a way that the geometrical helps to specify what a rhetoric is rather than what it is not. In fact, as we will see in my investigation of Descartes and Derrida in this chapter, the question of rhetoric's relation to geometry makes apparent two very powerful obstacles to the development of rhetoric as a method of inquiry: its conception as either mundane or esoteric.(1) The mundane, after all, does not need to be spoken about, and the esoteric might just as well not have been.

However, it is possible to use such notions as the "mundane" and the "esoteric" for the further examination of rhetoric. If rhetoric is so easily placed along the axes of the esoteric and the mundane, I would like to know why. What does this twin aspect of rhetoric's own rhetorical stance say about rhetoric? At this point, it need not be of concern that I have not defined what I mean by rhetoric because I do not intend to rename rhetoric by saying what it will be nor even to rename it by saying what it was. Of course, giving rhetoric its first and last names is important. But I am more interested in investigating rhetoric as the effects of the name philosophy has already given it. In fact, I will argue that the apparent ease with which rhetoric is mapped onto the axes of mundaneness and esotericism is a result of the philosophization of rhetoric. Furthermore, this philosophization consists of two general moves from which the logical structure of the philosophical is derived: the onomastic and the genealogical.

One of the challenges faced when speaking of some such thing as "a philosophical tradition" is to demonstrate that what might be said of three or four philosophers is somehow indicative of philosophy in general. With this in mind, I've chosen to use the work of Derrida and Descartes as examples of the philosophization of rhetoric. For now, I will be satisfied to suggest that if two philosophers of such different ilks as Derrida and Descartes make the same recourse to geometry with the same reduction of rhetoric to some silent place, then there must be something about philosophy itself as a genre of inquiry that (structurally speaking and thus not accounted for by what some would think to be the content of philosophy) precludes the formalization of rhetoric as a mode of inquiry-that is, makes rhetoric either mundane or esoteric.

The onomastic wishes rhetoric away by establishing the possibilitY for absolute clarity and expression of thought. Rhetoric is not necessary, in those terms, because language itself is capable of persuading and communicating if it is carefully constructed as a set of names (onoma) for a corresponding set of things. Rhetoric is a mere frivolity, an unnecessary and often mistaken codification of what is an effect of thought. It is a naming of naming, when one, such as Descartes, comes down to brass tacks. Rhetoric is a rarefied, esoteric object, in these terms.

The genealogical, on the other hand, wishes rhetoric away by establishing the impossibility for absolute clarity and expression of thought. Rhetoric is not necessary, in those terms, because language itself is incapable of persuading and communicating even if it is carefully constructed as a set of names for a corresponding set of things. There is no need to think of rhetoric as an obscure object here because it is only a metonymy for the impossibility of communication in general; rhetoric is the mundane object, in these terms. My later discussion of Derrida's work as an example of the genealogical move will be helpful in further specifying its characteristics, particularly since throughout his career Derrida has said that he works within a philosophical tradition.(2)

In this chapter, I will outline the three-part procedures of the onomastic and genealogical moves. In addition, I intend to show how geometry figures prominently in each of the two philosophical moves as an alternative to the rhetorical when, in fact, it is philosophy that is rhetoric's altern, not geometry. Rhetoric, I will observe in Lacan and Aristotle later, can be seen as a questioning of philosophical examinations of relationality, which lead, in turn, to a rhetorical formation of causality (as choice and time). This is not to say that relations are always known to philosophy or that philosophy cannot ask questions about relationality. However, in philosophical discourse, relationality takes the place of the known and causality takes the place of the unknown. That is, philosophy constructs problems by situating the object of its inquiry in a causal position within a particular context and then solves them by redescribing the object of its inquiry (cause) as a particular relationality within another context.

Another aspect of philosophical discourse that will become apparent in my investigation of Descartes and Derrida is its privileging of one kind of infinity over another. In Descartes, an infinity of the one, of metaphor, the infinity of laws and the possibility of their infinite application accompanies his dismissal of rhetoric. Likewise, in Derrida, an infinity of the many, of metonymy, the infinity of laws as their own (dis)placed applications replaces what I will later call an "infinity of the numerous and of the particular," an infinity that then keeps company with rhetoric in the trash can of philosophy.

I will now describe this maneuvering of causality, relationality, and infinity more specifically in terms of the onomastic and genealogical moves and demonstrate how philosophy's treatment of cause and relation effects the dismissal of rhetoric as either esoteric or mundane.

DESCARTES AND THE ONOMASTIC MOVE

a sketch of the onomastic: cause/effect; metaphor/ metonymy; rhetoric as esoteric; infinity

The onomastic move addresses the question, "Who Dunnit?" a question that immediately puts us within that murder mystery, philosophy, as Sophocles represented it so powerfully in his Oedipus Rex. "Who Dunnit's," unfortunately, are based on an error in categorization-a confusion of the causal, which is assumed to be unknown, and the relational, which is assumed to be known. Simply because of a particular contiguous relation with the murder victim (which would render an individual in relation to an event), an individual is treated as a cause and a metaphor (a suspect). The dimension of effect here is written as an act of predication. Effect is a list of adjectives representing the various possibilities of The Metaphoric One-being or substance.(3) This is not to say onomastic philosophies commit the fallacy of post-hoc-ergo-propter hoc. On the contrary, I would say the onomastic move treats effects as if they were logically prior to their causes and predicates as if they were logically prior to that which they predicate; in other words, not only is the onomastic primarily metaphoric, but it is also primarily deductive.(4) Unfortunately, this logical program can never provide a formalization of rhetoric because it hides our need for rhetoric in the acme of clarity, the transparent relation of one thing being as another: rhetoric is Y; time is Z; philosophy is B; and my love is a red, red rose.5 In those terms, rhetoric is said not to be a science because its cause(s) cannot be rendered as metaphors concealed as definitions or laws.(6) This is not to say people can't define rhetoric and specify its laws (people do it every day), but such would be a philosophical act and important in terms of some larger philosophical project, as we will see.

Metaphors, after all, must be grounded on some exception that proves their rule.(7) More particularly, in terms of onomastic philosophies, something has to be thrown out as a non-cause so that a cause might be established. And rhetoric is precisely that some/thing getting thrown out. I do not mean that to know some/thing (philosophy) one must know its opposite (rhetoric), though at times Plato seems only to be saying as much. What I am talking about is more in the manner of certain set theories where to recognize even the function of the null set in a counting system, there must be an a-prime (a) to precede it; nothing is not the same thing as nothingness.(8) Onomastic philosophy, in this light, is the use of rhetoric to try to speak the cause of philosophy lost to its own logic (a cause displaced by the a priori status of effect and predicate)- that cause of philosophy, rhetoric.

Of course, rhetoric cannot be left for long in this place of philosophy's lost cause else it should become philosophy and no longer useful, as a non-cause, for further philosophization. Rhetoric itself must be turned into a question (a non-cause, if you will), which is done easily enough: What, then, is rhetoric's cause? But isn't such a question also an invitation to some sort of infinite regress? Indeed, might the notion of a rhetorical question-which itself is not to be answered-be simply one way to avoid such a regress? By putting rhetoric in its place, the infinite, isn't philosophy then off the hook? Leaving rhetoricians with only a busy signal? Having addressed that question, I will then have specified the onomastic move and its treatment of rhetoric both in terms of its content and its methodology. I will use Descartes's cogito and his famous solution to the "Pappus-locus" problem as examples of the onomastic move and its particular use of knowable relations to discover unknown causes, since there can be no question that these two Cartesian projects are securely placed in the philosophical tradition.

DESCARTES AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE ONOMASTIC: HIS COGITO

Earlier, I suggested that the onomastic move has as one of its results the mundaneness of rhetoric. We will see the mechanism for such a conception of rhetoric in the cogito argument Descartes presents in his Meditations:

(1) It is true that no one can be certain that he is thinking or that he exists unless he knows what thought is and what existence is. But this does not require reflective knowledge, or the kind of knowledge that is acquired by means of demonstrations; still less does it require knowledge of reflective knowledge, i.e. knowing that we know, and knowing that we know that we know, and so on (I>ad infinitum. This kind of knowledge cannot possibly be obtained about anything.

(2) It is quite sufficient that we should know it by that internal awareness which always precedes reflective knowledge. This inner awareness of one's thought and existence is so innate in all men that, although we may pretend that we do not have it if we are overwhelmed by preconceived opinions and pay more attention to words than to their meanings, we cannot in fact fail to have it.

(3) Thus when anyone notices that he is thinking and that it follows from this that he exists, even though he may never before have asked what thought is or what existence is, he still cannot fail to have sufficient knowledge of them both to satisfy himself in this regard. (69)

For the purposes of this discussion it is not important to determine if Descartes' s argument is really an argument. It is sufficient, for us, to determine that Descartes's assumption of proof is a specification of causality in terms of relationality, using our supposed knowledge of the latter to offset our ignorance of the former. That is, after imagining the unknowable cause, "therefore," was knowable as a relation between "I think" and "I am," Descartes easily establishes the cogito as a knowable relation between itself and its unknowable cause that is, in turn, made knowable as a relation between itself as thinking and itself as being. I may seem to imply that the cogito is some elaborate bait and switch. I hope to demonstrate that the cogito is more an illustration of how metonymies can put on the clothing of a metaphor-as the three parts of the cogito will make apparent in terms of their manipulation of causality and relationality:

1. Introduction of the problem: Thinking as a Knowable Rela tion with Thinking. If I conceive of thinking as thinking of some thing, where or when can I stop thinking of thinking of thinking of . . . ? Such knowledge would not put us in a place from which to be in order to think such a thing.

2. Development of the problem: Thinking may be known in terms of a knowledge that precedes reflective thought. A person just has to think about what kind of knowledge might precede reflective thought. The cause is here established as the object of the philosopher's inquiry. That is, if Descartes could only find out what causes reflective thought, then he would know in what sense I think; therefore, I arn" is as true as he suspects it is.

3. Resolution of the problem: Having dispensed with relationality as something absolutely knowable as itself but not as knowledge, Descartes posits a before (or a cause) to relationality, which he called in (2) an "inner awareness." But, curiously enough, to make this inner awareness into something he might, in turn, have knowledge of, Descartes must render it as a relation that, with regard to Allan Bloom, might be called a person's "ontological literacy": anyone who can think the cogito has sufficient knowledge to understand what it means. But where is the cause in such an assertion? In (2), Descartes writes that he was going to find what preceded reflective thought. He discovers innate thought, which he easily translates into a predicate of thinking. Thus, what Descartes wanted to know as a cause in (2) is somehow known when it is expressed as a predicate relation in (3)-a metonymy (predicate) treated as a substitution metaphor (cause).

Furthermore, the name for this curious logical maneuvering is the cogito, hence the self-evident quality of the assertion. The second name for this knowable relational cause is "God." In that form, God can serve as the system within which such an imagining has a certain evidentiary force insofar as the causal is established as a function of the relational. "Who Dunnit?" one might ask. Replies Descartes, "God, you silly goose":

Moreover, in inquiring about what caused me I was not simply asking about myself as a thinking thing; principally and most importantly I was asking about myself in so far as I observe, amongst my other thoughts, that there is within me the idea of a supremely perfect being. The whole force of my proof depends on this one fact. For, firstly, this idea contains the essence of God, at least in so far as I am capable of understanding it; and according to the laws of true logic, we must never ask about the existence of anything until we first understand its essence. Secondly, it is this idea which provides me with the opportunity of inquiring whether I derive my existence from myself, or from another, and of recognizing my defects. And lastly, it is this same idea which shows me not just that I have a cause, but that this cause contains every perfection, and hence that it is God. (Meditations 88)

Descartes is particularly clever here. He takes the rather commonplace notion of God's omnipresence and constructs a theory of demonstration from it. Descartes's God is the set of the relations between relationality and causality. Or, if I might approach the nonsensical here, "God becomes relationality itself," for Descartes.(9) And The Golden Rule, in his hands, becomes an ontoepistemology, which is the goal of any onomastic move-to speak clearly, without the intervention of rhetoric or the need for rhetoric: "I esteemed Eloquence most highly and I was enamored of Poesy, but I thought that both were gifts of the mind rather than fruits of study. Those who have the strongest power of reasoning, and who most skillfully arrange their thoughts in order to render them clear and intelligible, have the best power of persuasion even if they can but speak the language of Lower Brittany and have never learned Rhetoric" (Discourse on Method 43).

DESCARTES AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE ONOMASTIC: THE PAPPUS-LOCUS PROBLEM

There is a similar constitution of causality and relationality in Descartes's solution to the Pappus-locus problem.(10) I would like to introduce Descartes's work on geometry at this point so that the similarities between it and his cogito might be underscored and rhetoric might be found, not under the walnut shell of geometry but between a philosopher's sheets. David Lachterman describes the challenge of the Pappus-locus problem as follows:

What challenged Descartes most deeply were two remarks by Pappus, first that when more than four lines are given in the problem the resulting loci "are not known up to the present time but are merely called 'lines' (grammai) or linear loci" (Descartes calls them "supersolid loci"). And second, when more than six lines are given, the figures contained by these-not being either plane figures or solids-are incomprehensible, since they would be of more than three dimensions. (Pappus then adds, prophetically, that these higher-order problems can be handled by means of "compounding" ratios.) (Lachterman 146)

Descartes's particular contribution to the Pappus-locus problem demonstrates his contribution to the geometrical method in general, as well as his particular debt to the onomastic. For his renaming of loci in terms of a relation between lines, circles, ellipses, and other geometric figures allows him to map unknowns in terms of a relationality taken for granted in the proportions specified by his "equations":

The rest of this story is generally familiar. Descartes shows us how to write "equations" for each of the unknown lines so that its length can be determined by the "roots" of these equations. Even more remarkable, Descartes discovers a strict correlation between the number of lines involved in the problem, the degree of the equation of the curve on which the points lie (where the degree of an equation is determined by the highest exponent that occurs in it), and the degree of the simplest curve that can be used in actually constructing the locus defined by the corresponding equation. (Lachterman 147)

Indeed, this diversion from infinite particularity is marked by the entrance of mathematics into the Cartesian system, as I had suspected earlier in my discussion of how rhetorical questions might be used to obturate a specific kind of infinity. One might say that the infinity proscribed by a well-defined set is knowable as a particular and knowable relation between the genus and species of its definition, and the other kind of infinity is not a relation in the place of the known and is not, therefore, knowable in terms of a philosophical discourse. It is an infinity that marks the entrance of rhetoric into language study, at least insofar as both rhetoric and that particular kind of infinity come out of the same philosophical trash can.

DERRIDA AND THE GENEALOGICAL MOVE

a sketch of the genealogical: infinity; causality; relationality; chance

The genealogical move, just like its philosophical counterpart- the onomastic, makes causes knowable by treating them as relations. And it substitutes the infinity (of the particular) for the infinity (of the set), again just as we have already observed in the onomastic. For this reason, the claims of the genealogical are no less extravagant although, perhaps, more familiar to us than the onomastic. We are often required to spend a great deal of our time recording what others think. We are, in this manner, encouraged to append our thinking, in the form of a codicil, to the will/Will of philosophy-leaving all philosophy's belongings to rhetoric if rhetoric were to die. This description of rhetoric as a philosophical accretion is not unlike that acquisition of signifiers some would call "learning." For this reason, the genealogical move has served many people rather well.

However, another aspect of this philosophical move is not so helpful. Exemplified best by Derrida's notion of "grafting," the genealogical attempts to close off interpretation by placing every utterance in quotation marks so that (I>words, sequestered from the abuses of desire yet metonymized as desire, might be spoken in and of themselves.(12) This is all to say, " 'Heads' and philosophy wins; 'Tails' rhetoric loses." A most curious logic! But it is, I believe, the form a logic must take when the question of rhetoric and geometry becomes (indeed, any rhetorical question becomes) simply a question not to be answered (mundane: something every body knows; esoteric: something only very few people can understand). Let me explain.

I used a coin toss to denote the logic of this genealogical move toward philosophization because a coin toss not only demon strates the binary aspect of such a logic but its dissolution of the "accidental" as well (not "the assumption of," which would constitute "rigor," theoretically speaking) in "systematic" philo sophical inquiry. Such philosophical dissolutions of accident are all around us. For example, in the United States, it is quite common to hear people talking about "having a fifty-fifty chance"; that is, by virtue of their "having" chance, people curiously take possession of something that by definition is beyond their ken. Having a chance also designates a particular relationship between being and having that structures contingency as a finitude of signifiers: a 13,456,924-to-1 chance, after all, is still countable as such. That is why the phrase "It is not by accident" is as common in Of Grammatology as the neologism difference. What would be at stake for those people if they were to say with equal confidence that chance, in some ways, has us all-that chance (really more in the sense of a chance/traumatic encounter, here) is, in some fashion, a cause, something that can effect change? What might we lose if causality, as such, is not uncertain but our relation to it is? What might we gain? Rhetoric, I would say.(13)

WHY IS THE GENEALOGICAL ANTI-RHETORICAL? RHETORIC AS MUNDANE

I would argue that rhetoric emerges or is formed by the question of relationality. I will go into this further when I, as a rhetorician, read Lacan in chapter 3. But, for now, let it suffice to say that we can begin to suspect rhetoric is a questioning of relationality qua relation (and not simply relationality as a knowable projection of some unknown cause) because we can observe a great deal of rhetoric (or better said, "a great deal of what constitutes the position of rhetoric") when the relations specified in a genealogy are put into question: "Who should succeed whom as a successor to the throne?" "Who should be the next president?" "Who should be the next Pope?" "Who, Mr. Tisias, should succeed in possession of the back forty since it was acquired during the reign of a tyrant who has just been overthrown?"

Rhetoric, in other words, is established when our social links are "knotted" into the form of a question: "Am I alive or dead?" "Am I a Man or a Woman?" These are the sorts of questions that I would term "rhetorical," questions that must be answered in spirit and bone, in body and action.(14) For this reason, rhetoric must be treated as a given (a lost cause, an exception that proves the rule, an itch to be scratched) if philosophy is to have a reason for being. This is not to say simply, as do some of Derrida's less ambitious exegetes, that "philosophy denies it is in some way literary"- though such, in part, is an effect of what I've said here. To say that everything is rhetoric or to say that rhetoric is the cause of everything is simply another way to wish rhetoric would disappear, insofar as such an assertion is easily translated into "everyone is a rhetorician, so how can we offer Ph.D.'s in it; rhetoric by its nature is not a specialized field of study." I don't mean to indicate that the dismissal of rhetoric as mundane is the necessary conclusion drawn from the assertion, "rhetoric is the cause of everything." Arguments for the interdisciplinary status of rhetorical studies are often rationalized by a similar admission.(l5) But notice how such a logic can lead one to be silent about rhetoric on account of the subject's mundaneness. If everyone is a rhetorician, if everything is rhetorical, then why bother telling someone something they already know?(16)

No, I'm not saying simply that philosophy defies its rhetoricity. Philosophy denies that it is philosophical; it defies us to make evident the genealogical (and the onomastic) structure of its method and object of inquiry. Isn't such an examination, in part, what deconstruction has shown? At least, Derrida has said as much. We must not assume, however, that a discourse' s making apparent the genealogical move is not itself a product of its philosophization. In fact, I can use Derrida's essays "The White Mythology" and "The Law of Genre" as examples of the genealogical move in philosophical discourse. The first essay establishes without question that the object of deconstructive inquiry is an unknown cause. The second essay provides us with a more specific rendering of the philosophical movement of deconstruction in terms of a three-part argumenUmethodology correlative to the threepart structure of the cogito wherein one type of infinity is substituted for another and geometry replaces rhetoric as a method for scientific (knowledgemaking) inquiry.

DERRIDA AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE GENEALOGICAL

Indeed, as Derrida himself describes it, the object of his work in "The White Mythology" is an unknown cause or origin: a "tropic and prephilosophical resource [which] could not have the archeological simplicity of a proper origin, the virginity of a history of beginnings" (Margins of Philosophy 229). What is more, as did Descartes, Derrida transforrns this object of his inquiry into a methodological problem whose solution is to be found in our understanding of relations, asking, "how are we to decipher figures of speech, and singularly metaphor, in the philosophic text?" given that "the exergue [is] effaced" (Margins of Philosophy 219). For this reason, it is not in the formalization of a rhetoric that Derrida believes he will find an answer: "Neither a rhetoric of philosophy nor a metaphilosophy appear pertinent here-such is the hypothesis. In the first place, why not rhetoric as such? Each time that a rhetoric defines metaphor, not only is a philosophy implied, but also a conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted" (Margins of Philosophy 230).

The genealogical move, as it appears here, is slightly different from the onomastic one-whereas Descartes would fault rhetoric because it is not philosophy, Derrida in his correlative, genealogical move faults rhetoric because it necessarily implies a philosophy. Derrida, then, believes we must look elsewhere than in rhetoric for this tropic source. But where? In his essay "The Law of Genre," he provides us with the methodology for such an investigation, borrowing heavily from catastrophe theory and set theory. Mathematics, it seems, has again come to a philosopher's rescue-at least in the form of an imaginary prosthetic.

For this reason, I will limit my discussion of Derrida's "The Law of Genre" to culling out the "graftings" of catastrophe theory and of set theory with which Derrida creates an intention statement of sorts:

Before going about putting a certain example to the test, I shall attempt to formulate, in a manner as elliptical, economical, and formal as possible, what I shall call the law of the law of genre. It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging-a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. The trait that marks membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless. (206, emphases mine)

Elliptical. Here, Derrida opens up the same question Descartes did in the first part of his cogito: What are the limits of reflective knowledge? If Derrida is interested in the law of the law of genre, why isn't he interested in, as well, the law of the law of the law of the law of. . . ? And what is it about a formal and elliptical "manner" that could obviate the infinite regress he defines? As a means to an answer, let's examine what "elliptical" might mean in this context-particularly, if there is an attempt to imagine "elliptical" as a spatial condition or economy of expression.(17) For one thing, an ellipse might be said to be "a plane curve such that the sums of the distances of each point in its periphery from two . . ." Yes, and then someone might try to draw a picture of it.

A mathematics dictionary might provide another interesting description: "a conic section formed by the intersection of a right circular cone by a plane that cuts obliquely the axis and the opposite sides of the cone" (Daintith and Nelson). There might also be an equation.

The first definition provided is a simple description answering the question, What does an ellipse look like? The second definition is in the form of a picture but a picture still caught in the flypaper of the page. Definition three, while still having the characteristic of a description, also has a noticeable how-to quality not found in the others: "An ellipse is a conic section formed" tells us what tools we need to do the job and how to do it. Definition three is, in essence, an embedded imperative of how to wrench the ellipse from the two-dimensional page and put it into at least three dimen sions, at least in terms of who might construct it and with what she might construct it. There is, also, another ellipse. An ellipse that has not been made present so far, and I mean "made present" : because this fourth ellipse exists only when we begin to classify those things that we think to be elliptical. Borrowing heavily from Plato, we might observe that the comparison of two or more ellipses would involve the creation (though Plato would call it the recogni tion) of yet another ellipse that would serve as the classifying principle for those things appearing elliptical. In other words, there must be an ellipse that, because of the nature of the classification process, does not belong to the set of ellipses but that participates in the set of all ellipses. Of course, when it is assumed that an ellipse represents itself and not something else, the ellipse sustaining such curious qualities is the ellipse that functions as the classifying principle of all other ellipses. And in this paradox, Derrida believes he can find a ground from which to form the law of the law of genre.

Set theories. Since Russell used the aforementioned properties of classification to create a formidable paradox in set theory, it is no surprise that Derrida will use Russell's paradox as a model for his discussion of the relation of a work's genre to that work, later transforming Russell's verbal model into his own two-dimensional construct of a catastrophic dynamic of genre-invagination.

Russell, in sum, imagines there are two kinds of classes: classes that do not contain themselves and classes that do. If, and only if, the class does not contain itself as a member, we can call that class "normal." Otherwise, the class will be considered to be "non-normal," indicating that the class is a category that is a part of itself. An example of a "normal class" would be the class of "people who are reading this essay." Obviously, the class itself is not a "person . . . ," so it is a normal class. On the other hand, the class of "all things that can be thought of' would be "nonnormal" because the class of "all things that can be thought of' is itself "a thing that can be thought of." Russell then imagines the properties of the set of all normal classes. If someone, for the sake of imagining, were to think that the set of all normal classes is itself a normal class, then that person would need to include the "set of all normal classes" as a member of itself, thereby making the "set of all normal classes" a "non-normal" set. Interestingly, the conclusion is that the "set of all normal classes" is itself normal when it is non-normal and it is non-normal when it is normal. The relation of the class to its member is not one of belonging but one of participation, or as Derrida says of the law of the law of genre, it is "a taking a part in without being part of, without having membership in a set."

In the second scene of his cogito, Descartes found "innate knowledge" and thereby directed his attention to the cause of reflective knowledge. Structurally speaking, Derrida's definition of the law of the law of genre is no different from Descartes's "innate knowledge." Derrida even writes that this "law" is a "taking a part" rather than "being a part." What is this but the establishment of an as yet unnamed pater familias for genre-a father who has a "great part" to play in reproducing and raising "his children" but who is not a part of them (as the mother is) and must, therefore, legislate his "partness" in the orders of law and incest? But unlike Descartes, Derrida will not call his law of the law, "God." Derrida's god is a trope-chiasmus.

Invagination. The "grammatologist" Greg Ulmer, and others, would have it that Derrida makes "the bold move," in his discussion of invagination, to map Russell's paradox onto a multidimensional model insofar as Derrida writes that the "trait that marks member ship inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination."(18) Because Derrida chooses to call this process by which a law becomes a form "invagination," Ulmer sees Derrida struggling with the limits of the page at this point-in much the same way as the "embedded imperative" of the third definition of ellipsis did above. The images he presents are clearly multidimensional constructs. It is, after all, difficult even to imagine an "internal pocket larger than the whole," which is two-dimensional. Biologists, however, have tried to present "invagination," as such: for them, invagination is the term for the movement of a blastula to a late gastula, in two dimensions. For this reason, Derrida's proponents have argued that his interest in invagination pushes us from the security of the page to the "bewildering wilds" of a multidimensional model (a model that can account for the creation of a body). (19)

Yet, for all his heroic struggle, doesn't Derrida eventually only come to save the page? Derrida has wrinen that the model of genre produced by invagination is the chiasmus, and it is only when mapped onto a page that a multidimensional model of invagination appears as a chiasmus; such is the graphic lesson catastrophe theorists teach (Thom, Mathematical Models of Morphogenesis 139-62).

Here, Derrida presents the chiasmus, which marks a particular topical relation in rhetoric, also a biological origin by virtue of its resemblance to the topological construction of cell's invagination. The uncertainty of an origin is reified as a knowable relation between his philosophical text and Thom's topological/biological one, just as the chiasmus of rhetoric and the chiasmus of philosophy can be identified (made knowable, at least for a moment) in the writing of their supplementary (est. et) relation-what is now a double invagination:

Each story is part of the other, makes the other a part (of itself), each "story" is at once larger and smaller than itself, includes itself without including (or comprehending itself), identifies itself with itself even as it remains utterly different from its homonym. Of course, at intervals ranging from two to forty paragraphs, this structure of crisscross double invagination . . . never ceases to over-employ itself in the meantime, and the description of this would be interminable. I must content myself for the moment with underscoring the supplementary aspect of this structure: the chiasma of this double invagination is always possible, because of what I have called elsewhere the iterability of the mark. ("The Law of Genre" 217)

Thus, one approaches the importance of writing about the relation of rhetoric and geometry: such a discussion touches on the question of the place of rhetoric and its relation to philosophy. Perhaps, such a question escapes the logic of the Whodunit by virtue of being itself a question and not a constative statement whose veracity is specified simply in terms of the presence or absence of presences," imagined and/or symbolic. One might say the veracity (if we can call "it" that) of a question is situated in the real; questions cannot be totalized (except as a symptom), even though their answers may have the appearance of closure. For that reason, we can speak of a question as a performance (a functio); it forces us to recognize what it does and what it says by doing. But just as the genealogical has the onomastic as its partner, so the interrogative has a corollary in the imperative. Asking someone a question is easily translated into a command: "Do you think it's hot in here?" might just as well be "Turn the air conditioner on."

What is more, the "multidimensionality" of a text comes in only when one considers the relation of questions and commands. For this reason, I would say, Derrida's notion of a double invagination ("Be fruitful and multiply; draw an ellipse") does not escape the confines of the page; it only considers the imperative dimension of language. It is true that some of us can know, just from the picture on the box, how a chocolate cake we're "whipping up" will turn out. But can we ever know exactly how our demands will be answered/ reified by an/other? Even though the investigation may take us off track for awhile, I would like to examine demands and questions for just a bit, since the relation of the two is one of the major structuring devices for chapters 2 and 3.

CONCERNING QUESTIONS AND COMMANDS

Greg Ulmer's "Handbook for a Theory Hobby" demonstrates quite nicely the limitations of studying language only at the level of demand. His "Handbook" is composed mostly of imperatives: "STEP ONE: Make a leaf rubbing." "STEP TWO: Write the word 'leaf' over the rubbing" (406). "STEP THREE: Look up the word 'feal' in an unabridged dictionary" (407). "STEP EIGHT: Reflect on crab grass as a model of a new logic" (415). And so on. Up to STEP TEN. Only at STEP TEN does Ulmer decide his readers "are ready to design some ACTION of [their] own, featuring trees, rubbings, and other related items, practices and information, addressing the problem of writing without paper" (422). The "Handbook" then ends with one final command: "Document the process and file the materials for later use in the theory you are making" (422).

But how does Ulmer decide when enough is enough-even though he apparently has some idea of what is enough? His list of imperatives could easily have continued on interminably but, like Scheherazade's story telling, it doesn't. I would argue Ulmer's words (his commands) remain glued to the page because they only evoke (what at this point I will call) "bodies" in the name of an action (a motion?) that Ulmer terms, throughout the essay, "writing without paper." Another way to express the point is to say that "Non-writing" does not exist within Ulmer' s "the(h)orizin ' . " Everything is writing. In this manner, Ulmer's tasks may move us away from a certain binarism exemplified by the opposition of writing to nonwriting. But the problem of infinite regression looms large in his text (the problem Descartes was able to avoid by making "rhetoric" a "mere ornament to thought"): When does one command not lead into another?

Addressing the relation of questions and time, Derrida' s study of the question in Heidegger's work seems to be a response to this difficulty. Yet, Derrida's investigation of the interrogative, without specifying its relation to the imperative, may have its own difficulties, as well.

In his study, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Derrida attributes the otherness of Being to the ex-centric status (the Weness) of the human subject exemplified by the possibility of a question:

Now who are we? Here, let us not forget, we are first and only determined from the opening to the question of Being. Even if Being must be given to us for that to be the case, we are only at this point, and know of "us" only this: the power or rather the possibility of questioning, the experience of questioning. (17)

We were speaking a moment ago of the question. Now precisely this entity which we are, this "we" which, at the beginning of the existential analytic, must have no name other than Da-sein, is chosen for the position of exemplary entity only from the experience of the question, the possibility of the Fragen, as it is inscribed in the network of Geragte (being), the Erfragte (the meaning of Being), of the Befragte der Seinsfrage. (17)

[The Truth of the Truth] belongs to the beyond and to the possibility of any question, to the unquestionable itself in any question. (9, emphasis mine)

Yet, curiously, Derrida does not seem to allow for an infinityone, infinity-two, infinity-three. Infinity is one (We); it is the beyond because to speak of "the beyond" is speaking "the beyond," not a speaking of the beyond. The beyond, then, does not return to the symbolic, for Derrida. It never left. The beyond isn't itself, except as a name-reinscribing, here, Russell' s paradox in set theory, just as Derrida's reliance on the law/demand of genre did. At one level, The Lost Cause is a response to a particular philosophical examination of questions and imperatives. And I have structured the chapters of the book accordingly. My argument is that the relation of questions and commands is seen more at the level of desire than at the level of demand and requires something other than a reading of metaphors and metonymies, nouns and sentences. The relation of questions and commands requires a reading of desire (what appears as a lack in the orders of the symbolic, imaginary, and real) constituting what I would call a "rhetorical reading of philosophy," a study of the choices and substitutions made within the onomastic and genealogical moves of philosophical discourse. The particular configuration of desire and the formation of truth within questions and commands will be explored more critically in chapters 2 and 3.

RHETORIC WITH GEOMETRY

Thus, when I write of "Lacan and the Question of Rhetoric" and "Aristotle's Imperative for Rhetoric," I would propose that a conflict between rhetoric and geometry might be expressed as something other than an answer, as something other than a historical narrative of the philosophical. In fact, "conflict" may not be the only way to name the relation of the two. A person might say, for instance, that the relation of rhetoric and geometry, at least here at the outset, presents us with a rhetorical problem-most definitely a rhetorical question: Why talk about the relation of rhetoric and geometry at all? One reason to study this relation is that the answer to this question seems to establish a place from which to speak about rhetoric-a place that is neither mundane nor esoteric and perhaps both. With this in mind, one can take the argument for rhetoric's mundaneness (everyone must have a place from which to speak) and the argument for its esotericism (rhetoric tries to formalize, in special uses of language, that which cannot be formalized) to present the following proposition: Insofar as geometry is a particular formalization of space and of the relationship of spaces to each other, it would have the potential to provide a formalization of the space(s) of discourse as well and, as a result, a way to talk about the awesome mundaneness of rhetoric. The place of rhetonc would then, in turn, be hollowed out, as an effect of this discourse concerning rhetoric's space.

However, this is not to geometricize rhetoric nor to rhetoricize geometry. I will argue that rhetoric is, in a very particular way, with geometry, that is, in the same place as geometry: the place of the residual, the place of those things that drop out of the symbolic order, the place of the real.(21) But from that place, geometry and rhetoric point in opposite directions at the same thing-the void. Geometry and rhetoric are, in this sense, like a glove that when turned inside out is the "same" glove only its "fingers" are pointing in the opposite direction at the same thing-the "that which" surrounds the glove. To specify from what place this "withness" of rhetoric and geometry might be observed is precisely my aim. And, as the metaphor of the glove might have suggested, my methodology will be structural, in as much as "withness," in English at any rate, manifests the structural relations (I might say the structurally syntactic relations, even) of accompaniment and instrumentality.

In chapter 2, "Aristotle's Imperative for Rhetoric," I will establish the conditions for Aristotle's particular difficulty in defining rhetoric as a thing that does, in fact, exist within his system. This will include an examination of Aristotle's use of the term dunamis in his Metaphysics, since a dunamis is precisely what Aristotle says rhetoric is. What is more, Aristotle's use of an imperative ("Let rhetoric be a dunamis," Aristotle writes, rather than the declarative, "rhetoric is a dunamis") commonly used in geometry texts of his time as the syntactic form of his famous definition of rhetoric can be explained in terms of Aristotle' s distinction between the passive and active faculties or dunameis.(22) Here, we will see that placing geometry with rhetoric means reading Aristotle against his psychologistic interpreters (George Kennedy and William Covino, to name only two) and recognizing the passive faculty as rhetoric's anchor in the realm of particularity, which Aristotle believed was outside of psychological conception or philosophical systematization. Rhetoric, in this way, becomes a response to the imperative of the particular; rhetoric is untotalized, yes, yet capable of formalization as an effect that has the structuration of a dunamis (faculty or possibility or potential).

Chapter 3, "Lacan and the Question of Rhetoric," is one possible response to the following question: If the province of rhetoric is the question, and the question is not mapped on the slope of ontology (in other words, rhetoric is an "unrealized"), how is one able to talk about what rhetoric is? In his "Agency [I'instance] of the Letter in the Unconscious," Lacan wonders whether a person can really think of rhetorical figures as simply figures of speech, since the figures themselves seem to be an active "participant" (what in Greek is called a dunamis?) in the analytic session. And it is for this reason that Shoshana Felman (a pupil first of Lacan, then of de Man) believes Lacan attempted to grammaticalize rhetoric and rhetoricize grammar in order to "speak" the unconscious by peeling tropes away from it. But, as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan has pointed out, Lacan's "dream of grammaticalizing or formalizing rhetoric became an impossibility when he realized that there is no privileged point of distance from language within language; no metalanguage; no Other of the Other" (Jacques Lacan and The Philosophy of Psychoanalysis 233). This is not to say, however, that rhetoric does not exist forLacan noreven that Lacan's contribution to rhetoric is peculiar to an early phase of his work. In fact, I would argue that rhetoric again becomes useful for Lacan and that Lacan does, indeed, provide a formalization of rhetoric even though he might have failed to "grammaticalize" it. In his structural period (the early 1970s), rhetoric is formalized as an adunamis by Lacan-an impossibility or impotence operating within the four discourse structures he adumbrates in Seminar XX and Seminar XVII. To do so, let me remark, is not to allegorize rhetoric nor even to make of it a positivizable negative. Rather, rhetoric becomes the trajectory (slope) of a very particular aim, a shot-if you will-across a gap, within being and knowing via the signifiers of language. Rhetoric is a shot whose lack of realization evokes, in its discontinuity, the unconscious in the form of a question left over from the closure of words and sentences, "What is it you want, really?"(23) The relation of rhetoric and geometry appears in the form of a type of vector analysis with which Lacan makes possible the specification of these rhetorical trajectories and as well the slopes of metaphor and metonymy that have as their counterparts the derivatives by which a Lacanian calculus can determine the "instance of the letter" on the slope of the signifier and on the objet a.

In sum, Aristotle provides us with a space for rhetoric, and Lacan provides us with its place. Aristotle, in his conception of rhetoric as a dunamis, understood that rhetoric was not psychology, philosophy, ethics, or any other science; rhetoric consists of what has dropped out of the symbolization of each of those genres of inquiry. And, what is even more insightful, Aristotle assigned a particular construction (a particular space) to rhetoric as an unrealized psychology, an unrealized ethics, an unrealized politics, that is, rhetoric as the space in which an imperative demands one get up in the morning and negotiate the active and passive principles of the world, at least as Aristotle conceived of it. Lacan, likewise, conceived of rhetoric as an unrealized, but as a question-or better yet the mark of a question-indicating the persistence of a gap between an utterance and its enunciation.

Such work as Aristotle's and Lacan's will be of use in the promotion of rhetorical and interdisciplinary work in the academy, since no matter what degree of insight might be attributed to their formalizations of rhetoric, Aristotle's and Lacan's work on rhetoric-it must be admitted-is an example of what might be termed, interdisciplinary study. More important, theirs is as well an interdisciplinary study with, nonetheless, very particular structural consistencies (the interrogative and the imperative) that the following chapters will have specified if only in terms of their own interdisciplinary examination of the spaces and places for rhetoric in the work of two of its greatest theorists.

(Feel free to link to this page, but do not publish otherwise in part or whole without prior written consent from copyright holder, SIU Press. You may also establish a link to the REINVW that follows in subsequent files.)

To REINVW Archives
To PRE/TEXT List