The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory

By Ira Allen

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jul 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9780822983422

Book preview

PITTSBURGH SERIES IN COMPOSITION, LITERACY, AND CULTURE

DAVID BARTHOLOMAE AND JEAN FERGUSON CARR, EDITORS

THE ETHICAL FANTASY OF RHETORICAL THEORY

IRA J. ALLEN

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2018, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6536-7

Cover photo by the author

Cover design by Melissa Dias-Mandoly

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8342-2 (electronic)

Like rhetorical theory through the ages, this book is dedicated to the invention of useful truths—in service of something like freedom.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION. PRESENTATION AND RHETORICAL THEORY

1. FANTASIES OF RHETORICAL THEORY

2. APPROACHING RHETORICAL THEORY’S TRUTH

3. THREE POINTS FOR RHETORICAL THEORY

4. MODERN RHETORICAL THEORY, ONE AND ALL

5. MODERN RHETORICAL THEORY, ACTING SYMBOLICALLY

6. ETHICALLY APPROACHING TROUBLED FREEDOM

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PREFACE

We live, per the going story, in a post-truth, post-fact world. The forty-fifth U.S. president, after all, initially achieved political stature by performing relentless doubt—long after any possible cause for doubt had been satisfied—about the empirical reality of his predecessor’s birth certificate. The election of the post-truth president was greeted by a flurry of concern over the role of fake news in swaying voters, and he made fake news the rallying cry with which he denounced media outlets from the bully pulpit of Twitter thereafter. From fake news to fake news to real fake news and back again, the virtual and actual have become so selfsame as to make truth seem both hopelessly retrograde and absolutely essential, impossible to believe in and yet more necessary than ever. Rhetorical theory has always known such a world.

Another word that has lost some luster in recent years, even as its organizing force is more vital than ever, is freedom. After endless wars in which the United States and allies have spread freedom with bombs, and after the historic failure of the conceit that free markets would serve the interests of all, we have become weary, even suspicious, of the very word. At the same time, we know freedom cannot be quite what the white supremacists and antisemites of today’s fascistic free speech rallies mean it to be, and that what’s lost and threatened by those angry, torchlight marches matters. Rhetorical theory has always been suspicious of freedom, and yet freedom is its raison d’être.

Rhetorical theory believes in truth despite itself and relies on a nondeterministic world for its being. Rhetoric is only worth studying if human animals are capable of something like intentional change, and theories only worth making if something like truth is in play. This is a book about what rhetorical theory is, and so it is a book about truth and freedom. It is about a truth that is fantastical and a freedom that is constitutively troubled. It is a book about coming to terms with limits and constraints—and about the way such coming to terms makes better shared worlds possible.

The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory develops its (rhetorical) theory of rhetorical theory by naming a spirit animating what has been counted as rhetorical theory so far. That spirit, and the argument of this book, is that rhetorical theory is the self-consciously ethical study of troubled freedom. Rhetorical theory has itself in mind, and in seeking possibility’s limits in the lives of symbolic animals like humans, it worries about what it is up to, what it does to and for the animals that it studies. In so arguing, I commit to a form of humanism—a chastened, rhetorical humanism—that courses through the veins of the discourse itself, even when it wants badly to be posthuman. But humanism is for many today a dirty word. We are, we suppose, better than the Enlightenment legacy that marched us up to the gates of Auschwitz. We know now that the world is not for any of us, that the universe is large and we are small. The chastened humanism I advocate, however, is neither triumphalist nor self-rejecting. There is nothing clearly wonderful about the human animal, and yet only such an animal (the human or another symbolic animal) can be the audience of this or any book. The humanism of this book, and its corresponding reliance on a concept of fantasy, does not require or desire a positive concept of the human or a full metapsychology. These terms name limits, the can’t nots of our shared activity, and naming limits is what rhetorical theory does.

The motion of The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory is recursive, sometimes frustratingly so. It can be difficult to read, though I hope not entirely unlovely. Why should the harried rhetorician make her way through the whole thing? Why should the busy non-specialist read even a single chapter? Because the motion of the thought—which is rhetorical theory’s motion more than merely my own—is valuable in its own right. The book delivers core rhetorical-theoretical insights about truth, freedom, and fantasy. Equally, it is practice in a style of reading that makes the world more filled with possibility. Inventing a workably shared world requires hesitating self-reflection that nonetheless presses carefully forward. Such hesitating motion is a habit of reading and of thought. The aim of this book is to help readers better negotiate constraint in their own lives and in our shared world, to become more free together. The long-haul wager of rhetorical theory is that our capacity for freedom springs from habits of mind requiring disciplined, recursive attunement to both limits and possibility, to a world ever yet communally in the making.

Still, The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory is a large book, and not all of it will be of interest to all readers. I encourage rhetorical theorists both actual and potential to press through—since the definitional argument gains its force in the unfolding—but others may wish to dip in for only some arguments along the way. Allowing for disciplinary particularities at the outset, chapter 2 is liable to be of interest to political theorists, philosophers, and others curious about what rhetoric offers their fields. There, I develop a notion of rhetorical theory as an entangled discourse, of truth as a necessary fantasy, of the Hegelian spirit animating a Jamesian truth at which rhetorical theory overgrasps, and of a kind of troubled freedom that is rhetoric’s ultimate object of inquiry. Further discussions of truth as a poetic fantasy and of rhetorical theory’s self-consciously ethical way of studying troubled freedom are found in chapters 3 and 6, respectively. All these touch on the question of reality: how we arrive at what we think it is and what we ought to do about it. The notions of fantastical truth and troubled freedom pursued here are central to and often implicit in rhetorical theory, which has a constitutively ambivalent relationship with persuasion. The discourse’s long-standing investment in truth and freedom—in a world of symbolic inducements, for which truth and freedom are at once both ungraspable and necessary—makes it an important conversation partner for anyone interested in reality.

For those already working within rhetorical studies, The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory opens to multiple constituencies. As noted, it encourages a start-to-finish approach for people who identify in any way as rhetoricians. Anyone who focuses especially on the dual impossibility and necessity of telling unifying stories about our discourse should find the introduction and chapters 1 and 2 of particular utility. Those with an interest in Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s much-contested concept of a universal audience, or in what it means to be moderns in relation with the classical, may benefit from chapter 4, while readers of Kenneth Burke should find use in chapter 5’s discussion of pure persuasion and the roots of Burkean symbolicity in the pain of bodies. Chapter 3 offers treatments of invention and doxa and of the relations prevailing between classical terms of art in modern rhetorical theories.

This book ranges across rhetorical theory rather than aiming to enclose it and does not pretend to be an omnibus. The reader will find little that is immediately applicable to the practical, workaday teaching of written or oral communication. Nonetheless, teachers of composition and speech may find in chapters 2 and 6 solid food for thought about the stakes and aims of our shared activity. Offering a definition of rhetorical theory in ethical terms, this book has been written by the light of our discourse’s long-burning pedagogical torch. The reader dismissive of either rhetoric or theory, or of rhetorical theory’s strange entanglement, will remain unelucidated here as elsewhere. Finally, my friends of the posthumanist, object-oriented, and new materialist persuasions will find much with which to disagree—but perhaps also good grounds for agreement. The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory is ever grasping after something like agreement, though full agreement remains always only still anticipated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every book is marked by debts as much material as intellectual, obligations lightly outpacing acknowledgment in all directions. I acknowledge the many debts incurred in the making of this book with a gratitude that reaches out further still, beyond the structure of obligation.

I am grateful, and joyously so, to have been kneaded into the broad form of this book by rich conversations with an extraordinary collection of scholars. In loose chronological order, my thank you to those who shaped this text or themes that went particularly into it: John Schilb, Dana Anderson, Christine Farris, Jeffrey Isaac, Alexa Weik von Mossner, Diane Davis, Aurelian Craiutu, Chris Basgier, Laura Sparks, Lavinia Hirsu, MJ Lewis, Patricia Ingham, Byron Craig, Steve Rahko, Lydia Wilkes, Victor Vitanza, Werner Hamacher, Anita Chari, Colin Koopman, Rocío Zambrana, Chris Eckerman, Drew Burk, Fred Ulfers, Nicole McFarlane, Beth Flynn, Jeremy Engels, Joe Rhodes, Susan Jarratt, Davis Houck, Damien Pfister, Rosa Eberly, Thomas Rickert, Alain Badiou, Jennifer Nish, Joshua Gonsalves, Arianne Shahvisi, Neil Singh, Davide Panagia, Dan Kline, Meredith Powers, James Martel, Sherrin Frances, Ora Bukoshi, Timothy Oleksiak, Michele Kennerly, Jodie Nicotra, Grant Simpson, Odile Hobeika, Jason Barrett-Fox, Nicholas Tampio, Kasia Bartoszynska, and Edyta Zalewska. More generally, I am grateful to friends and colleagues at first the American University of Beirut and now Northern Arizona University for making with me so much of the conversation that has enlivened this book. And my thanks, too, to the graduate research assistants and students at AUB who pressed me forward in this project: Samia Rachid, Imane Kaissi, Ghada Seifeddine, Lara Mekkawi, and Fatima Zaraket in particular.

Sadly and happily, the present work is a product of more friendships than I can with justice name. In Lawrence, Bloomington, Ithaca, Paris, Saas-Fee, Eugene, Beirut, Flagstaff, and at countless conferences, I have had the great happiness of mixing thought, music, exceptional meals, soccer, hiking, and the good talk on just enough occasions to make it all hang together. Thank you, friends, for sustaining both me and this thinking; the litany of your names flashes long behind my eyes and swells my heart with gratitude.

To Michele Eodice and Jeffrey Isaac and Saul Allen and Matt Davis especially: thank you. We only talk about this book sometimes, but there would be no version of it if I weren’t talking with you. Equally, Jim Crosswhite and Steve Mailloux’s inspiring, generously critical readings of the manuscript shaped the present work and my thought alike, both immeasurably for the better. I am grateful to them and to Josh Shanholtzer at the University of Pittsburgh Press for his reassuring belief in the project and editorial acumen at every point. Likewise, I thank Sarah C. Smith for truly thoughtful copyediting. Too, my deep thanks to Jean and Jim Allen for consistent support at key stages of this project.

To Laura Noll, my friend, conversation partner, love: thank you for sharing with me in so many moments of this upswelling of being, for negotiating constraint both together and with and in the world. Likewise, my writing and living companions Sonny, Christmas, Millie, and Copa. This book would not exist without all of you. It is literally unthinkable, for me at least, what would.

Introduction

PRESENTATION AND RHETORICAL THEORY

Something must be taught as a foundation. . . .

The doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, ON CERTAINTY (§§449–50)

I would like to begin again bluntly. What is rhetorical theory? Or, from a complementary angle, what does rhetorical theory do? How could a person address this twinned question, at once both impossibly vast and crucial to determining what ought (and ought not) to be taught as rhetorical theory, other than via some object already presented as rhetorical theory? Rhetorical theory, after all, is no mere abstraction. For the present, then, a single instance: Attic philosopher-orator Isocrates’s late work Antidosis. A classical rhetorical theorist (as we see him today), Isocrates was in his moment a figure of some contention, and Antidosis was at once an attempt to clear his name and to persuade audiences—himself included—of the ethical and monetary value of the worldview he had spent his life advocating. Warning audiences that his was a mixed discourse, composed with an eye to all these subjects (12; 191), Isocrates explained that while some things in [this] discourse are appropriate to be spoken in a court-room, others are out of place amid such controversies, being frank discussions about philosophy and expositions of its power (10; 191).¹ If Isocrates was indeed a rhetorical theorist, as we are inclined today to think, what, if anything, unified and unifies the disparate elements of his mixed discourse? What is rhetorical theory, which would not only discuss philosophy directly but would also expose its power, all while preparing us for court?

This book articulates something that can be called the spirit of rhetorical theory, a spirit running through Antidosis as through Guiguzi,² animating as much Kenneth Burke’s Grammar of Motives as Barbara Cassin’s Sophistical Practice. But spirit is notoriously difficult to pin down. For a start, imagine all that has ever been presented as rhetorical theory appearing as thousands of lighted points on a graph, glittering with no single, clear pattern. Now, imagine a series of more or less agreed-upon curves that each move through or around a set of these points; each curve makes some sense of the whole but never offers an identical pattern to any other. None of these curves expresses quite the same function as its neighbors. These curves would be our histories of rhetorical theory. Histories, stories about the rhetorical tradition, are lines of best fit that roughly describe selections from the heterogeneous totality of rhetorical theory. Each leaves out many points.

Let us go a step further. If we say that the curves tracing these lines of best fit all participate in some larger shared sense of things, some spirit, then this shared sense of things or spirit can perhaps be brought into presentation in its own right. The spirit of rhetorical theory, its truth, can perhaps also be presented by some curve. Such a curve would take up in itself the dialectical opposition between an irreconcilable set of specific truths—the histories of rhetorical theory—and the sense that, though often at odds with one another, these specific truths participate in something larger, something having a fuller truth: rhetorical theory itself. That curve would be, like any curve, the expression of a function. That function, in turn, would articulate the spirit or truth of rhetorical theory. This book seeks to articulate rhetorical theory’s spirit as a function, a definitional arc through and behind a world of conflicting presentations.

Any search for the truth of rhetorical theory in a function clearly addresses itself to a fantasy, however. Who but a naïf can believe (among rhetoricians, especially) in capturing some object in its essential being, describing a thing (a discourse, worse still!) as what it really is? And yet, as rhetorical theory finds again and again, in some sense we can’t not try to speak the being of the world with reference to something like truth. Much as we might believe ourselves to know better, to be incredulous toward metanarrative, as Lyotard put it (and Gorgias long before him), rhetorical theorists find ourselves constantly formulating what we believe to really be the case in the realm of rhetoric. We need truth, a spirit whereby things hang together, whether such truth really exists or not. One way for a (rhetorical) theory of truth to acknowledge investment in both metanarrative and incredulity, then, is to know itself to be fantasy, a desiring sense of the world that withdraws from the chain of judgments comprising reality. Acknowledging that the stories of truth we work with—including this story about the spirit of rhetorical theory—are fantasies is not the same as saying they are untrue, false. Nor does it suggest that all fantasies are equivalent. A fantasy is a way of apprehending a world that refuses, temporarily, to submit to the question, Is it real or not? Fantasy, moreover, is about desire in a lay sense, about what we want or need. Some fantasies, I’ll argue in chapters 1 and 2, are preferable to others. Some ways of negotiating fantasy, I’ll suggest in chapter 6, are better than others. Still, there you have it. Rhetorical theorists fantasize truth.

In trying to tell the truth about rhetorical theory, I want to be clear up-front that any story I offer must be shot through with desires both personal and disciplinary. The story presented here will, at best, say something about rhetorical theory that lies between the case and not the case. And yet a good rhetorical theorist still wants to get it right, needs to say something true, even as she suspects or insists that no one can. Such is the fantasy of truth motivating the present study. As a discourse, rhetorical theory needs and is suspicious of truth. It is clearly a fantasy that rhetorical theory is unified, having a single spirit, and yet it remains sensical to say that rhetorical theory (as a unitary phenomenon) fantasizes a truth in which it cannot wholeheartedly believe. We believe in truth without knowing whether it is or not because we need to. Moreover, the spirit of rhetorical theory is oriented toward a further, ethical fantasy. The present text argues both that rhetorical theory’s truth involves a fantasy (a fantasy of ethically approaching troubled freedom) and that the discourse is itself a fantastical one (as in the new presentation of rhetorical theory made here). Approaching the function or spirit of rhetorical theory as a fantasy offers a way of investigating this thing that we cannot (and should not) quite believe is unitary and that, simultaneously, we need.

In this book, I present rhetorical theory as the self-consciously ethical study of how symbolic animals negotiate constraint. Rhetorical theory is a way of trying, deliberately, to come to terms with the helplessly persuasive or invitational character of human experience (though not only human experience). Accepting that symbolic animals are ever persuading and being persuaded, rhetorical theory asks what we ought to make of that fact. In making this argument, I demonstrate that rhetorical theory, as a discourse oriented toward the production of contingent foundations for action, revolves around questions of truth and freedom. Rhetorical theory works to understand the troubled freedom exercised by symbolic animals as they navigate a moderately stable world and is motivated in its production of fantastical truths by concern for what symbolic animals owe one another under conditions of negotiable constraint. Rhetorical theory, in other words, is an ethical fantasy. Ever aware of its own subjection to and action on the very conditions it studies, it is underwritten by the question of what it owes the symbolic animals whose rhetorical possibilities and constraints are its scholarly object. Such a rhetorical theory typically appears in the singular, though it equally often strikes rhetoricians as impossible to present as a single entity. At the very least, we can say that for a long time, and in a consistently skeptical, questioning spirit of obligation, rhetorical theory has been developing and redeveloping ideas of truth (a pragmatic sort of truth) and freedom (a troubled sort of freedom).

What is to be taught as rhetorical theory is, at bottom, at stake here. Working ecumenically from sources in English and writing studies, communication, classics, philosophy, and elsewhere, this book draws most from rhetorical theory’s primary institutional homes in the United States: English/composition, and speech/communication. At these addresses, there is little consensus on what rhetorical theory is, and still less consensus on where precisely it is or must be grounded. But foundations—be we ever so anti-foundationalist—are pedagogically unavoidable. Wittgenstein notes this midway through On Certainty, the tortuous meditations on doubt to which he devoted many of the last months of his life. He finds for a moment solid ground in pedagogy: Something must be taught as a foundation (§449). This must is charged with the force of logical necessity. There will be no teaching that has not taught something as a foundation, whether intending to do so or not. At the same time, the must is ethically interested. If teaching matters at all, it matters very much which something will end up having been taught as a foundation.

Rhetorical theory, at base, seeks something like wisdom: truth, but truth understood in a very particular way. As Isocrates writes in Antidosis, "I hold that man [sic] to be wise who is able by his powers of conjecture to arrive generally at the best course, and [it is] . . . a lover of wisdom who occupies himself with the studies from which he will most quickly gain that kind of insight" (335; 271). There is little agreement about which studies must be taught as rhetorical theory’s foundation, but whatever they are, truth will draw them together, generally, toward the best course of action. Justifying his discourse, Isocrates assures readers that you shall hear from me the whole truth, and urges them, In this spirit give me your attention (44; 211). Truth is that which must be taught as a foundation, but those who would teach it are in for some wrangling about what constitutes a must. Rhetorical theorists understand that truth always involves complex negotiations regarding ethics and pedagogy, even if it is supposed to ground both those arenas. Such negotiations are at the very heart of the rhetorical theory I am presenting, at the heart of what rhetorical theory is and does.

The general contention of this book, again, is that rhetorical theory is the self-consciously ethical study of how symbolic animals negotiate constraints. I term the negotiation of constraints that rhetorical theory approaches troubled freedom. I say troubled freedom and not trammeled or limited freedom or something of the sort because rhetorical theory steers well clear of a common but unhelpful distinction between positive and negative liberties, freedom-to and freedom-from. For rhetorical theory, freedom is not an abstract category of thought to be qualified but the unreachable limit of an impossibly full horizon. The freedom that rhetoric studies is always full, historically present, and yet it is not exhausted in action. Troubled freedom is not defined by the absence of constraints; nor does it find exhaustive expression in acts, in doing things. Rather, the freedom approached by rhetorical theory is a matter of functioning in relation with limits. Such freedom is troubled as a conscience can be troubled, or as waters can be troubled: they struggle to be unities, troubled consciences and waters, and the struggle is painful but fosters possibilities. So, like a conscience or a river, freedom is for rhetorical theory nothing at all without its internal troubledness. Freedom as the negotiation of constraint is painful, threatening, hopeful, utopian. Our freedom is filled, is always filled, with trouble. The mode in which rhetorical theory approaches troubled freedom, I argue over the course of this book, is that of self-consciously ethical study.

ON PRESENTING A NEW, STILL-CLASSICAL RHETORICAL THEORY

In presenting a new rhetorical theory, what am I doing? First and not least, I am moving the quotation marks around, presenting a new rhetorical theory. What should be taught as rhetorical theory’s foundation, what rhetorical theory is or ought to be, what lessons rhetorical theory offers the world at large: these are the subject of this book. But the question of presentation, of what it means to present something, is at once both logically prior to and inextricably bound up with these concerns. Accordingly, the reader may be helped by a thumbnail sketch of presentation itself, as English studies and communication have been concerned with presentation and re-presentation in a number of ways over time—most not coincident with my usage here. I use presentation in the sense Alain Badiou has developed, working especially with set theory, in Being and Event, The Concept of Model, and Number and Numbers. Weaving set theory together with a solid chunk of the corpus of Western philosophy, Badiou offers an understanding of presentation as one of the basic operations—internal, interpersonal, and ontological—of both being itself and any apprehension of being. Given the idiosyncrasy of Badiou’s development of the notion, however, it is useful to begin again by thinking of presentation in a sense with which rhetoricians are very comfortable: that of making-present-for-someone. We set off on firm ground with Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s discussion of making-present as the work of the rhetor.

In The New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca present presentation as the core activity of rhetorical practice. They suggest that one of the preoccupations of a speaker is to make present, by verbal magic alone, what is actually absent but what he considers important to his argument or, by making them more present, to enhance the value of some of the elements of which one has actually been made conscious (117). In this schema, presence is a sense or feeling of things as impinging on one’s own being, irrespective of the immediate materiality of those things. The rhetor seeks to create this sensation in an audience in order to better persuade it. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca put the matter in one of their strongest formulations, As far as possible, such an effort is directed to filling the whole field of consciousness with this presence so as to isolate it, as it were, from the hearer’s overall mentality (118). Presence, in this fullest sense of the word, involves the capture of an audience’s consciousness. Whether partial or full, presence is for Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca a phenomenon of consciousness and attentional focus; presentation is impingement on or capture of an audience’s attention on behalf of some selection from out of the vast welter of possible experience.

This formulation does not yet take account of the account-making that making-present itself involves, does not explain how the selectivity of Perelmanian presentation happens. That is, The New Rhetoric is not concerned with presenting presentation as a psychological or ontological phenomenon, to be understood as to its felt structure or its significance for being. Rather, appropriately enough, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca treat presentation as a rhetorical operation—an act accomplished by rhetors, with effects in and on audiences. As a result, however, presentation as such remains undefined in their text. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca more or less acknowledge this, reminding readers that they are interested only in the technical aspect of this notion, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that all argumentation is selective (119). Indeed, awareness of the helpless, and tendentious, selectivity of argument suffuses the living bedrock of their nouvelle rhétorique. All the same, for rhetorical theorists there is utility in articulating a fuller sense of presentation, what that word might be or make present for us over and above specifically audiential considerations.

Badiou, with ontology’s apparently antirhetorical emphasis on being-as-such, defines presentation in the short Dictionary at the close of Being and Event as a primitive word of metaontology (or of philosophy). Presentation is multiple-being such as it is effectively deployed. . . . The One is not presented, it results, thus making the multiple consist (519). Yanked out from its context, this may at first seem gobbledygook, untainted by even a hint of sense. Indeed, the impression is not wholly unjustified, since Badiou intends philosophy to endlessly circulate between the empty formalism of mathematics—a gobbledygook of sorts, where contents are irrelevant and logico-grammatical structure is the thing—the modern theory of the subject, and its (philosophy’s) own history (3). But there is something solid to be grasped here, something clarifying precisely how the selection Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca foreground would be possible, ontologically speaking. Moreover, understanding presentation from a Badiouian perspective helps establish what is at stake in the presentation of a new rhetorical theory and why—for rhetorical theorists—some such presentation is not only necessary but unavoidable.

In the first meditation of Being and Event, Badiou begins with an explanation of being as radically multiple: there are no things of which everything consists, no solid singletons from which being might, like a universe of Legos, be constructed. To the contrary, "what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one (23). The One results from the presentation of multiplicity. For us, then, there are only ways of taking being, which is an ever-unresolved dialectic between the thing and the presentation of the thing. Being-as-such is pure, insistent presentation. Something appears to be what it is, to be a one. But a one what? And how a one" if there is no one thing on which everything else might be built? To answer the first of these questions is the work of presentation, and a full answer to the latter requires the entirety of Being and Event. What appears in presentation is one X: one ship, one theory, one figure, one moment, one love. Something appears because it is counted as one by something else (for our purposes in rhetorical theory, usually but by no means exclusively, by some person or by a construct like discourse in general or language). Counting-as-one, with or without ontological freighting, is the structure of presentation—as much for us in rhetoric as for anyone else.

To count as one is simultaneously to select and to nominate being as reality. The presencing of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca relies implicitly on such counting-as-one: This, which should fill your consciousness, is one of these. This is an apple (or an outrage: in either event, not an assortment of molecules or a network of social forces, for this audience and in this moment); its being counted as an apple both relies upon and produces a further this: the set of all apples, which is a one constituted from all these apples. There is no intrinsic One, but only multiples of multiples and the appearing—the entry into presentation—of ones. But what could secure presentation itself on this view? What could make it possible to count as one, at the most primal or originary level? For Badiou, the ground of ontology is a subtraction from being: the One is not, and presentation solely exists as operation (24). Presentation, which is not a becoming (since that would imply a something that becomes) produces in a certain sense both a one (apple) and the set (all apples) of which that one is a member, to which it belongs. The multiple is, for the operation of counting (for the audience), a one. The operation itself, the One, does not, strictly speaking, exist. As Badiou sometimes puts it, presentation inexists: that is, it operates without first having been. His is an ontology of operation and the appearance of being, a universe of entering into presentation.

I offer this brief excursus primarily for background, since rhetoricians are most concerned with the operation of presentation as it occurs in lived interactions, rhetorical situations or ecologies. Being-counted-for-counters offers a way of thinking about what it means to be in presentation that might be most useful for us (though it is not precisely Badiou’s way of thinking). For rhetorical purposes, that which I count as an apple may very well exist for-itself, but in my calling it an apple, it exists for-me, and does so in its having-been-counted-as-one(-apple). I am the audience of the apple. This is not to say that the apple’s purpose (relative to whatever framework defines purpose) is to be for me, but rather that I see it, and will tend to see it, as a particular thing, a member of a class, and that my so seeing is nominative of reality. I count an apple, and, in being-for-me, that which is counted is an apple. An apple is now present. Whether I can so count in the presence of others—whether, to borrow a phrase from J. L. Austin, my counting will, as a speech act, prove felicitous—depends on my (rhetorical) situation. For we do present being in the company of others, both explicitly and implicitly, and in our counting present also our selves (the counters implied by that counting). The presentation of a new rhetorical theory (or any other human presentation) is an intrinsically social phenomenon. And if social, then also rhetorical: tendentious, persuasive, invitational, selective.

To put it a little differently, a thing enters into presentation, into a shared reality, by being counted as one by two or more, by a speaker and her audience (which may be herself). That coming into presentation, in turn, either inaugurates or contributes to a larger rhetorical ecology, what will have been a relatively stable system of presentations: not only is this an apple, but there must also be a category apple to which it belongs and a general sort of agreement among some we about what that category can include. Not just anything can be an apple. Anything that is in presentation is thus a constitutive part of a situation, which means that the possibilities of presentation (is this an apple?) are not limitless, though they may be endless (i.e., there can be any number of apples even as not just anything can count as an apple). Moreover, taken within the flow of lived experience, presentation itself occurs always within some rhetorical framework—its situation or ecology—some network of constraints and possibilities for persuasion.

What can plausibly be termed an apple depends on who’s doing the terming and how their audiences apprehend the world. Before 1976, for instance, an apple was generally a fruit, even when the A was capitalized. Today, Apple has presented us with new ways of counting-as apple. Even the presentation of a now-passé Macintosh calls more to mind a computer than a fruit. And on we go. Thinking about things as being presented or in presentation helps us to maintain awareness of the saying of that which has been said, its partiality. Such awareness allows us not only to reconfigure the said, but to ourselves say anew: to invent new situations. The invention of unitary situations with due regard for ecological multiplicity is how we negotiate constraint, how rhetorical theory teaches us to approach freedom. Importantly, presentation thus becomes a way of thinking rhetoricity and ontology together. The relation between presentation-as-rhetorical and presentation-as-ontological prefigures a kind of entanglement between rhetoric and theory that, I argue in chapter 2, characterizes rhetorical theory as such.

A SKETCH OF THE ARGUMENT

This book comprises seven chapters, including this brief introduction. Apart from chapter 6, which has a concluding function, each chapter treats one or more central dilemmas for the presentation of a new rhetorical theory. In attending to the troubles with such presentation, The Ethical Fantasy discovers something about rhetorical theory’s spirit that may be taught as a foundation. Engaging a variety of classical and modern rhetorical theories, chapters 1 and 2 deal with the epistemological stakes of rhetorical theory generally and of this book’s project in particular. I construct there the notion of a pragmatically (and poetically) fantastical truth, upon which chapters 3, 4, and 5 all build. Together, chapters 3, 4, and 5 lay out three points through which rhetorical theory’s curve passes, working thereby to more directly present the spirit of rhetorical theory. That spirit, rhetorical theory’s truth-function, approaches the troubled freedom that is central to rhetorical theories both old and new—so I conclude in the latter part of chapter 5. Chapter 6 further explores and re-emphasizes the ethical dimensions of rhetorical theory’s motion. Commenting on what can be taught as rhetorical theory’s foundation, it returns to the organizing contention of the book as a whole: that rhetorical theory is the self-consciously ethical study of how symbolic animals negotiate constraints.

There as throughout, I emphasize that rhetorical theory develops approaches to truth and freedom that are broadly useful, even crucial, for anyone looking for ways to live together with other symbolic animals. Rhetorical theory is a response to our being creatures always and at once both persuading and persuaded, subjects and cocreators of a shared world both real and fantastical, a world that must somehow be made viable for all. The central ethical insight of rhetorical theory is that we have to take responsibility for our own symbolicity—and that doing so places us always on a precipice. The doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt; something must be taught as a foundation. And no foundation can be suffered to stand for long, else it interrupts the possibility of freedom and the fantasy of a truth toward which, rhetorical theory has helplessly to bet, the arc of the moral universe bends.

Chapter 1, Fantasies of Rhetorical Theory, is about the unattainability of a single story of rhetorical theory’s truth. It presents in rich detail both what it might mean to tell the truth of or about rhetorical theory and the clear impossibility of doing so. Starting with a psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, it considers rhetorical theory’s truth-drive, its need—in the face of its own deeply skeptical origins—to say something about rhetoric that is more than merely plausible. "Why the truth of rhetorical theory?" Because something like truth is what any new presentation of rhetorical theory poetically nominates whether it means to or not. Presentation draws truth along behind it like a shadow. So chapter 1 has as its first charge to develop a provisional understanding of the truth to be presented in this book. Rhetorical theory’s truth is both pragmatically fantastical and poetic—this is a way of thinking truth that is both amenable to skepticism and antifoundationalism and also useful for acting in the world. The chapter’s subsequent intent is to focus readers’ affective attention on the heterogeneity of what rhetoricians have already presented as rhetorical theory. It is easy to talk about the difficulty of telling a unified story of rhetorical theory. It is harder to stay with the difficulty, to feel (once more) its disorienting affective charge. Chapter 1 thus begins with discussions of fantasy, truth, and poetry and culminates in re-presentation of rhetorical theory as a series of still open, uninterpenetrable questions. If we mean to integrate our understandings, intellectual awareness of the heterodoxy of what has been presented as rhetorical theory should feel difficult. Rather than simply beating once more down a well-trodden narrative trail, saying how heterogeneous rhetorical theory is, chapter 1 invites the reader to attune to the affective welter of that heterogeneity, to dwell a while with the multiplicity of rhetorical theory’s presentations.

Chapter 2, Approaching Rhetorical Theory’s Truth, develops a theory of truth for rhetorical theorists and other skeptics who accept the need for contingent foundations. This starts by addressing the problem of truth highlighted by the conflicting presentations of rhetorical theory with which chapter 1 closed. Those presentations, it should be noted, presuppose still some unicity, a truth of rhetorical theory. Beginning with the suggestion that rhetorical theory be thought of as an entanglement, the chapter further explores the idea, native to rhetorical theory, that truth itself is a pragmatic fantasy. I highlight especially here that truth is a category of experience with which we are unable to dispense—even (and especially) when convinced that we ought to. Chapter 2 confronts that trouble head-on, developing a theory of truth that draws Jamesian pragmatism together with Hegelian spirit to foreground the ethicality of any truth that could be satisfying to rhetorical theorists. My subsequent presentation of a new rhetorical theory, or investigation into the truth of rhetorical theory, is grounded in this understanding of pragmatically fantastical truth. The chapter closes with a gesture toward those to come, outlining the problematic of troubled freedom brought to light when we think of rhetorical theory as an entangled phenomenon. Troubled freedom, I argue, is what rhetoric and philosophy, hung together in dialectically suspended animation, study under the heading rhetorical theory. To examine how symbolic animals negotiate constraint at once both rhetorically and philosophically is to discover freedom’s troubles, to discover a notion of freedom at once rigorously skeptical and ethically useful.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5—respectively, Three Points for Rhetorical Theory, Modern Rhetorical Theory, One and All, and Modern Rhetorical Theory, Acting Symbolically—build on the discussions of rhetorical theory’s fantastical truth offered in chapters 1 and 2. Together, they comprise the heart of my argument about what rhetorical theory is. These chapters present rhetorical theory as, in spirit, an approach to troubled freedom (i.e., an approach to the negotiation of constraint) that passes through three definable points: (1) modern self-presentation of continuity with the classical; (2) circulation among a range of focalizers, from the