Somewhere or other Lacan remarks that the love of truth is the love of castration. By this, of course, Lacan is remarking that truth is the real or the bar characterizing the existence of the Other. Yet it could also be taken more literally to refer to the divide between rhetoric and truth. The commitment to truth seems to undermine rhetorical efficacy and thereby undermines political power. Effective rhetoric seems slavish by nature as it seems to require attending to one’s audience in a way that pays homage to their illusions so as to persuade them and gain their endorsement. Could we imagine, for example, an American politician who spoke the truth of American history and the American political situation? All too often, I think, I’ve conflated philosophy with rhetoric. That is, I’ve conflated the necessity of speaking efficaciously with the question of truth. I was horrified, for example, to find that it was Kucinich who brought articles of impeachment against Bush not because his claims were false but because he couldn’t possibly be an effective rhetor due to who he is and the lack of credibility he possesses.
In this reaction, I was willing to sacrifice truth for the sake of effective rhetoric. Someone like Kucinich couldn’t be an effective rhetor because he lacks credibility and would therefore make it more difficult to propagate the truth in the public sphere (his lack of credibility would infect, in viral fashion, the nature of his claims, imbuing these claims themselves with a lack of credibility). What was needed was another rhetor who had the credibility to speak the same claims. In short, my problem wasn’t with what Kucinich was charging, but with who was making these charges. If, as I reasoned, the speaker hadn’t achieved the status of a “Statesman” whose words therefore had power, the speaker couldn’t but undermine the credibility of the charges themselves. Kucinich, in my view, has done much to undermine his credibility as a speaker through his actions and therefore could only do a disservice to the credibility of these charges. Having Kucinich speak these charges couldn’t but be a strategic blunder, regardless of whether he thereby “got them on the record” (a rationalization and convenient consolation no matter how you cut it). I could not see how this particular speaker could use words in a way that was powerful enough to create congressional consensus or public consensus to accomplish anything through the truth of his speech, and felt that his speech could even work to the detriment of the truth of that speech (Incidentally, I think this is a common failing of the left: it trusts in truth and ignores the necessity of creating consensus. This tendency to ignore the rhetorical dimension except in its capacity as critique is logically entailed by the love of truth insofar as the rhetorical dimension often involves a great deal of untruth, irrationalism, and injustice). Those who defended Kucinich ignored how the claims were spoken and who spoke, treating these things as irrelevant and secondary, instead focusing entirely on what was spoken. This denigration of the “how” and the “who” seems to be a constant misstep in leftist politics, as if it believes that these dimensions have no material efficacy. But if truth if what is loved, the speaker and the manner of speech should be irrelevant to the claim. I’m ashamed of this gut reaction on my part.
It seems that it’s no mistake that the Greeks simultaneously discovered political theory, rhetorical theory, and philosophy. The divide between rhetoric and philosophy seems to speak to an originary split at the heart of language between language as reference and language as persuasion or addressed to the other. The rhetor recognizes that dimension of language that must speak to local customs, the credibility of the speaker, the poetic power of language, etc., in order to produce persuasion. The effective rhetor cannot ignore these dimensions of language if they are to be successful in their rhetorical act. The philosopher, by contrast, attends only to relations of entailment, inference, and reference within language, without regard for an addressee. Clearly the two dimensions can never be separated as speech always presupposes an addressee, yet also contains internal relations of entailment independent of any relation to an addressee. Perhaps philosophy is this very tension or gap between the two dimensions. Forever more the two dimensions of language find themselves in tension and at odds with one another. Perhaps the question would be whether there is a form of rhetorical practice that is not slavish, that does not betray the truth, but that simultaneously respects the other while striving to speak the truth.
June 18, 2008 at 5:38 am
i once had a vegan come talk to my college ethics class who claimed that people who wore furs “should be raped so badly that it scars them for life.” in essence, he was making an attempt to fight speciesism with more speciesism. in such a case, he became the laughing stock of the class, and all of his facts about how many animals “are senselessly slaughtered” didn’t mean a thing. unfortunately, i think the credibility of the person, as my philosophy professor would attack me for saying, is inextricably tied to the message.
June 18, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Been rereading George Herbert Mead to get comfortable with a couple of things I want to say about self, conversation and truth in the pragmatic tradition. Just briefly and no-doubt cryptically, I’ll say that this rigorous distinction of truth and rhetoric, how who and what, is a residual dualism. If we understand truths as the products of perspectives intersecting in time and space, i.e. situated and stratified, the distinction evaporates and there’s no need whatsoever to be embarrassed by the mismatch of the real and the ideal, except insofar as clinging to the one and dismissing the other is (literally) self-defeating.
June 19, 2008 at 4:03 pm
I think the question of who Kucinich isn’t so cut-and-dry. I think In this election cycle it has become all the more apparent how the news-media creates its candidates. So, on the one hand, sure, Kucinich was not speaking from a position of rhetorical power, as it were; on the other hand, I don’t think this emerges from his own inability to articulate forcefully and convincingly. When the very medium through which you get to speak to the most people is practically a living entity (television and its owners) whose interest it is to deny you rhetorical efficacy, to intervene on all sorts of levels and make you look bad if you appear at all, then we haven’t even gotten to who Kucinich is as a speaker.
June 19, 2008 at 4:30 pm
In other words, political candidates have to convince an entirely different set of people, those who own the means of the political production, of their intentions and abilities before effectively setting foot before The People. The internet is changing this, but I still think we’re an election behind a fully internet-driven election.
I won’t make anymore comments after this, but you also have to think of the electoral system itself. Our pluralist, first-past-the-pole elections ensure an electorate alienated from itself in terms of its political decisions. If democracy is, as you said , the one true form of politics, we aren’t quite their yet when our electoral system sustains forced-choices signified by “he can’t win” and “don’t throw away vote. This is one of the key material conditions of what appear to be our political choices.
June 19, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Hi Joe,
My view would be that the question of who someone is when considered within the framework of rhetoric is not something that belongs to the individual itself, but rather is a relationship between the individual and the community to which the individual speaks. It is the community that attributes credibility to a speaker, not the speaker who can demand credibility. In this regard, I’m not sure how pointing to how the media has portrayed Kucinich makes any difference. It is the job of an effective politician to discern strategies for navigating the media and the public. Kucinich just ain’t the guy for these sorts of battles.
I do think you’re absolutely right about the role of alternative media such as the internet in transforming the dynamics of political power. As I remarked in my previous post, I do not believe democracy has ever existed. The reason for this is that we see oligarchies everywhere that game the system in advance. The media is one of the ways in which the system is gamed.
I’m a little bothered and perplexed as to why you would say you won’t make any further comments after this. Hopefully I didn’t say something that offended you.
June 19, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I only said I wouldn’t make any more comments because in writing that second comment I caught myself in one of my bad-habits: realizing the second half of what I wish I said only after I hit the ’submit’ button.
I understand that the rhetorical framework in which Kucinich appears is a community that includes all those parties. My point is that being structured by capitalist ownership as it is, that community is at serious odds with itself, and it only wants to see candidates who affirm (even when they wax poetically about reaching across the isle) this antagonism. Who appears, who has power in this game we play with ourselves (pun intended), depends on a set of material conditions that include not just the media, but like I started to mention, our very electoral process.
I think I anticipated you saying that there hasn’t been democracy when I realized how our pluralist (one-vote to one-candidate) electoral system makes it easy, if not inevitable to avoid actually thinking about political choices. I have been an advocate for instant runoff voting, or some condorcet method, for a while now. The choice a person makes on that kind of ballot does not have to take its cues from someone else (be it your friend or the media) to count, to have efficacy.
June 20, 2008 at 12:16 am
>The philosopher, by contrast, attends only >to relations of entailment, inference, and >reference within language, without regard >for an addressee.
Of course, if we take Socrates as the model philosopher then this isn’t true at all…
June 20, 2008 at 3:42 am
Of course, Socrates isn’t the model philosopher at all, isn’t he?
June 20, 2008 at 5:49 am
Dunno.
June 20, 2008 at 7:09 pm
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