---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 04 Sep 1997 15:49:42 -0500
From: "h-rhetor, Linda Vavra"
To: sjmaillo@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu
Subject: REVIEW: _Negation, Subjectivity and The History of Rhetoric_
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-RHETOR@msu.edu (September 1997)
Victor Vitanza. _Negation, Subjectivity and The History of Rhetoric._ State
University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. xii, 428. Table of contents, notes,
works cited, and a general index. $21.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7914-3124-X.
Review by J.D.H. Amador, Ph.D., Santa Rosa Junior College, for H-Rhetor
It is, perhaps, a banal truism that a summary or review of a book or article
does violence to the subtlety of the original, but it is especially so in the
case of this work: This book should be read. Any review simply cannot do
justice to the complexity, depth, care and insight which Vitanza brings to
the nature and relation of negation to subjectivity in "The" History of
Rhetoric. Only a direct encounter with the text will do justice to the
obvious care and effort brought to this powerful work.
Vitanza's book is a sustained, subtle, irreverent and aggressive assault upon
the discursive traditions and philosophical foundations giving shape to The
History of Rhetoric. Springboarding from critiques of the recent works of
Edward Schiappa, John Poulakos and Susan Jarratt on the question of the
Sophists and their relationship to rhetorical history and tradition, Vitanza
takes us on a labyrinthine journey of modern, postmodern and classical
theorists in order to clear a space for alternative readings.
Among the numerous issues he raises, the most pressing he confronts is the
function of diaeresis, or species-genus analytics which inform not only these
approaches to The History of Rhetoric, but is the foundation of western
educational tradition and epistemology as a whole. Vitanza begins his work by
confronting and rejecting Schiappa's conclusion that the Sophists did not
exist, but were a fiction created by Plato for his own ends.(46) As Vitanza
correctly points out, this conclusion was reached through a divisive,
definitional caveat, a bifurcation predetermining the answer (Sophists -
oasis or mirage?). Schiappa's answer is predicated by the question he asks, a
question informed by an ideology of ontology. As Vitanza points out, "the
structure of the ontological question is violent...because it is
preconditioned to have us believe that it must be answered (that it is
irrepressible) and that it has a 'correct' (Platonic absolute or Aristotelian
actual) answer."(49)
Schiappa's divisionary tactics are related to species-genus analytics, to the
determination of the existence and "place" (species) of a subject according
to preconceived system (genus). It is this tactic and its effect and impact
upon subjectivity and historiography that Vitanza explores. For Vitanza, the
issue is: Who is excluded and silenced through disciplinary practices which
seek to control and limit, through 'proper' identification, those who are
constituted as subjects? What happens to those who, by definitional caveat,
are simply *not*, because they cannot be identified, because they do not fit
within the paradigm?
To answer these questions, he weaves an elaborate tapestry of critical
theoretics and analytics which simultaneously expose the power systems at
work within the foundations of his discipline, while offering alternative
means by which to envision a radically different Third Sophistic. To this
end, he develops a complex trajectory of multiple linkages from Kant (the
mathematical sublime), to Lyotard (heterogeneity of discourses), Bataille
(sovereignty and excesses of a general economy), Nietzsche (Dionysian
multiple subject positions), Foucault (nonpositive affirmation,
transgression), Deleuze/Guattari (desiring machines), Cixous (depays; wild,
savage writing). He works through to a position of "Dionysian" excess,
affirmation and desire, as compared to a foundational philosophical tradition
which sees negation and lack as fundamental to human expression, experience
and thought. He confronts the pervasive philosophical trope "out of the
impossible comes the possible" or "out of the negative (lack) comes the
positive (excess/desire)". It is from within his network of linkages that he
begins to imagine and fashion an alternative space, a pagan space, where the
exiled, silenced and rejected dwell and are given a place from which to
speak.
Through and from out of these linkages he turns to explore the relationship
of negation to fascism in education (historiography, political education,
even everyday political life) in a trajectory extending from Isocrates to
Heidegger: Isocrates' concept of the hegemonic and unifying force of the
civilizing (Greek) logos provides the eventual foundation for an imperialist
Panhellenism. Isocrates emphasizes the hegemonic capacity of reasoning
(logos) to unify and lead. Through a series of dexterous readings, rereadings
and stretchings, Vitanza traces a Greek-German connection as evidenced
through Jaeger's concept of paideia, culture, Geschlecht. Jaeger argues for a
similarity of spirit and culture between Germany on the one hand and the
great Greece-Roman cultural empire on the other, and it is Isocrates and his
concept of paideia/logos as civilizing force that provides the inspiration.
Interestingly, Heidegger himself turns to the concept of logos and its
relation to Being, but rather than seeing in it a unifying force, he looks to
the sophistic notion of doxa as in a perpetual act of appearance/glory. "In
other words, _logos_ speaks _doxa_ which is an unconcealment and
simultaneously a concealment of _some aspect_ of _episteme_/truth, which can
never be completely gathered, or unconcealed."(178) It is necessary,
therefore, to keep the question of Being from ever finding a definitive
answer. Nevertheless, it is this Abyss of Being which is, like Isocrates'
logos, to be our guide. And it is this Abyss, as a negative essentializing
moment, which becomes the object of nostalgia for Heidegger, a nostalgia that
leads him to stop questioning and embrace a Fuehrer principle of logos/Being
which ultimately leads him to National Socialism.
Vitanza's point is not to blame Heidegger, whose concept of logos is after
all, Greek and lies at the foundation of our western heritage. It is a logos
which negatively essentializes physis (the Abyss of Being), which controls a
perpetuates nomos (paideiaculture), which is at the heart of the will to
truth (imperialism). It is this negative essentializing that Vitanza wants to
critique, wants to avoid, in order to develop a nonpositive affirmative Third
Sophistic based upon a general, libidinalized economy of excess.
To avoid the difficulties of the Isocrates-Heidegger trajectory, Vitanza
turns to Gorgias and casuistically stretches him through Nietzsche to
(re)turn to a Third Sophistic. Rejecting Poulakos' turn to Heidegger as
problematic, Vitanza's reconfiguration of The History of Rhetoric to
(re)include the Sophists stretches Gorgias' concept of the logos through a
reading of excess: Where Plato unifies (one), and Isocrates divides (dissoi
logoi - two), Gorgias explodes (many more, multiple subjectivities). Vitanza
focuses in particular on Gorgias' concept of logos as kairotic. This concept
is explored in Gorgias' defense of Helen, a figure which Vitanza eventually
wants to turn to as an interpretive focal point for his Third Sophistic: Can
he approach Helen through an anti-Humanist interpretive strategy which
embraces a postmodern subjectivity-through-excess?
Setting aside Jarratt's Feminist Sophistic, which he sees as founded upon a
strategic negative essentializing approach ("only women can..." as the
obverse of patriarchy's "only men can..."), he stretches Judith Butler's
concept of gender identity as a performative activity. This allows him to
approach subjectivity through a "middle voice", a space between the
active/passive dichotomy indicating a self undergoing movement, a
multiplicity and excess of selves confronted by _kairotic_ moments dispersing
power. Here Vitanza finds the subjectivity he has been searching for: Helen,
deliberating the dilemma of the decision whether or not to go with Paris, is
confronted by the _kairos_, by the will to power through a _logos_ uncanny,
strange. Helen, read through Vitanza reading Gorgias, when confronted by the
_logos_, is face-to-face with sovereignty and the sublime. She does not act,
but is acted upon by a force that makes her subject to it, "not by virtue of
a passive voice, but by ill-virtue--against...what is fitting--of the middle
voice (Hence, a denegated subject!) It is a force that prefers--just as the
middle voice does--to place subjectivity into infinite dispersion, into a
'Dionysian world', into the middle voice...of 'endless desiring
metamorphosis'."(297) Vitanza rejects a Helen returned to agency as one most
like to be reactionary. Instead, he finds (reading her through Nietzsche) a
"sovereign, sublime subjectivity...leaving behind active/passive voices,
sadistic/masochistic voices by way of reaching for a middle voice."(303)
What promises would such a project, founded upon a new sublime, sovereign
subject, hold for histories of rhetoric? First, it would uncover the systems
of consolidation and modalities of power at work throughout The History (and
historiography) of Rhetoric as The History of Oppression. It would demand a
fundamental reconstitution of the project(s) of histories of rhetoric by
(re)turning to the excluded (middle) voices, (re)turning us to the "dark
side" of the pagus wherein dwell the antisocial, the criminal, the barbaric,
the schizophrenic. It would denegate the negative, favoring pastiche over
parody, overcoming the hegemony of onto-theological foundations. It would
call for an end to philosophical rhetoric in favor of a return to
poetic/schizophrenic speech. It would perpetually question the claim of
rhetoric to "democratic values". It would seek an excess of pessimistic joy,
healing and celebration. It would, essentially, "explode _The_ (speculative)
genre of history."(335)
There are so many questions that arise, and are addressed, when reading
through this difficult, thought-provoking work. But I want to raise just one
issue in light of the impassioned plea for/by/of the repressed (excluded,
suppressed, oppressed): How do we measure the success(es) of an anti-humanist
dispersion of power and subjectivities?
What do I mean? It has something to do about Helen, about Vitanza's reading
of Helen through a stretching of Gorgias. It has something to do with his
accounting of Helen. She confronts and becomes, through his reading, the
_kairotic_, schizophrenic moment. Yet, she is dispersed, neither powerless
nor powerful, neither subject nor object, but left in liminality, in/as a way
out.
There is something strange, almost dissatisfying about this. Perhaps it is
simply something so new as to be unfamiliar. Admittedly, my reaction stems
from an underdeveloped suspicion of mine that anti-humanist analytics of
power, as important corrections as they may be to the ideology of human
agency so prevalent in rhetorical theoretics, by advocating a theory of power
as a network of discursive formations ultimately render the subject powerless
in the face of overwhelming systems whose aims are precisely to eliminate
individuality and agency. "We conceal, un/namely, that we, human beings, are
not masters of this situation. Anthropos is not in charge here or
elsewhere." (292) The question I ponder, when reading Vitanza's rereading of
Helen, is: As an analytical critique, do we come to a better understanding of
systems of power through it? Or does he have something else in mind, also?
Perhaps, more importantly, he is looking for means and spaces of freedom that
disperse power rather than engage with it, in it?
Vitanza's book, difficult and brilliant, aggravating and enticing, elusive
and invigorating, promises a future-anterior of wild, new (re)beginnings. It
is a tour-de-force argument against the disciplinary rituals of power as
played out in The History of Rhetoric. Ultimately, it leaves one desiring to
see, if not also bring about, his and (Others') envisioned future histories
of rhetoric.
This book is a must-read for critical theorists, rhetorical theorists,
historians (not only of rhetoric), and hermeneuts--modernists and
postmodernists alike.
Copyright (c) 1997 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied
for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and
the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.
|
